The Islamic State’s (IS) seizure of Mosul in June 2014 forced political leaders and analysts to explain how a “terrorist” group could easily rout the American-backed and trained Iraqi army, threaten Erbil and Baghdad to the east, and expand into Syria’s Aleppo and Palmyra in the west. To explain IS’s rapid rise and continuing effectiveness, media coverage has emphasized the role of former Baʿth regime military and intelligence officers who occupy leadership roles in the Islamic State. One narrative posits that Saddam Hussein's rule, specifically the transformation of his dictatorship into an "Islamist" regime during the 1990s, radicalized a critical mass of Baʿthists and laid the ideological groundwork for IS’s success. Other narratives stress the role of the 2003 war, which eliminated the Baʿth regime and elevated an increasingly sectarian Shi’i led-government to power, allowing space for groups like IS predecessor al-Qaeda in Iraq to prey on Sunni discontent. Did Saddam or Bush create IS? What are the historical links, if any, between the Baʿthist regime and IS? To what extent did Hussein’s greater emphasis on religion in the 1990s affect Iraqi politics and society after 2003? What was the Baʿth Party’s relationship to Islamist groups before its fall? Does IS use tactics and methods traceable to the Baʿthist era to combat its enemies and control its populations? This roundtable will bring together scholars who have studied the captured records of Saddam Hussein's regime, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and IS in Iraq and Syria. It will analyze the leading narratives connecting the Iraqi Baʿth regime to IS, along with those connecting the Syrian Baʿth regime to IS, exploring areas of continuity and change between the pre- and post-2003 periods.
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Dr. Craig Whiteside
The conventional wisdom from news reports and recently published books about the Salafi-militant group ISIS paint it as a resurrection of the Ba’ath Party and the offspring of Saddam Hussein. Proponents of this narrative take their cues from the presence of former regime members in the upper echelons of ISIS leadership. This paper takes issue with this interpretation of ISIS and proposes an alternative view based on research into captured documents from the Conflict Records Research Center and other ISIS documents collected since 2003, when the precursor of the group was established. ISIS is much better understood as a natural evolution of Salafi-militant organizational, doctrinal, and strategic thought that was synthesized in Afghani training camps during the 1990s and traveled first to Iraq and later Syria to exploit governance gaps. This understanding is crucial to policymakers interested in combating and defeating this ideology.
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Dr. Kevin Woods
Historian B.H. Liddel Hart once warned that “nothing can deceive like a document.” He was cautioning against official “hermit” historians who glossed over the tendency of senior leaders to document the history they desired over that which actually occurred. Hart went on to caution that even in the most detailed government document (and Iraq’s bureaucracy was nothing if not detailed) “the struggles that go on behind the scenes” are rarely recorded. Of course the implications of Hart’s pessimism does not bode well for scholars of the two groups being discussed at this roundtable. But does this general criticism of official records hold true in the case of captured records from the recent wars in the Middle East?
Recent arguments about the relationship between origins of ISIS and the decisions made by Saddam Hussein have grown largely from the interpretation of a narrow set of captured records. These are fundamental questions about two of the most consequential political entities of the last several decades. To what extent can the continued examination of captured records illuminate this issue?
The collapse of the Iraqi regime in 2003 resulted in a large collection of state records being made available to researchers. These records include hundreds of hours of audiotapes that preserve classified high-level cabinet and staff meetings of the Ba’ath regime. When it comes to captured state records does quantity have a quality all of its own? Can the availability of tens of thousands of records captured from multiple agencies, covering a period of several decades, most from the highest reaches of the Iraqi regime, overcome Hart’s warning?
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Cole Bunzel
The view that the Islamic State (ISIS) represents a kind of residual Ba'thism dressed in Islamic garb is one that ISIS has sought to combat almost since the time of its founding in 2006. This presentation will look at how ISIS itself has dealt with the accusation that it is a Ba'thist holdover, addressing also how its leaders and ideologues have portrayed Ba'thism in particular and the history of Iraq before 2003 more broadly. In its earlier propaganda, ISIS showed itself keen on winning over former Ba'thists to its side, but this always came with the stipulation that these men repent and renounce their former affiliation. The group was also careful to highlight that these reformed Ba'thists were some of its most ideologically committed members. In addition to presenting ISIS's own statements in this regard, I consider what evidence is available that could cast doubt on the sincerity of the conversions of these Ba'thists-turned-jihadists in question. The evidence here is minimal. I argue that ISIS is best understood as a highly ideological project in which certain opportunistic, disenfranchised Sunni Arab Iraqis have played a part but not a leading role.
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Aaron Faust
While the historical origins of ISIS do not lie in the Ba'th Party or Saddam Hussein's "Faith Campaign," the organization contains a significant number of Ba'thists in its hierarchy, many of whom occupy key leadership or technocratic positions. How does the existence of so many Ba'thists affect ISIS's behavior? To what extent, if at all, does ISIS employ Ba'thist methods and tactics to fight, control territory, indoctrinate populations, produce propaganda, and engender loyalty in its followers, local communities, and individuals under its authority? Why, or why not, is this significant? My participation will compare ISIS and Ba'thist behavior, administrative practices, and the use of carrots and sticks to cement its authority and establish its legitimacy.
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Dr. Ibrahim Al Marashi
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is a complex, hybrid organization that is challenging to conceptualize as a political unit on the national, regional and international levels. Most media attention, and work in the policy literature examine ISIS as an organization with a transnational constituency, including foreign fighters from the Muslim world and the West, that can conduct terrorist attacks beyond the Middle East, in a metropolis like Paris or a suburban town like San Bernardino. Second, ISIS is seen as an institutional culmination of a violent Salafi trend within Islam, with anti-Shiism at its core. However this presentation examines how ISIS emerged due to a confluence of events on a national level in Iraq after 2003. While ISIS is not a neo-Ba’athist organization, it has become as an organizational shell for former Iraqi Baathists and career military and intelligence officers under Saddam Hussein, as well as large swaths of the Iraqi Arab Sunni population who lost their jobs and prospects for the future after Iraq’s armed forces were disbanded by the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 or denied employment due to de-Baathification policies. While the Ba’athist background of ISIS is not explicit and opaque, its organizational structure and tactics fit into how the Ba’athists operated as an underground party in the sixties. Second, for disenfranchised former Ba’athists, the Salafism of ISIS served as the only ideological means for Arab Sunnis from the Anbar and Mosul provinces in Iraq to mobilize fighters in order for them to reassert a territorial presence in the national Iraqi setting.
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The fall of Mosul in June 2014 to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the historic collapse on the part of the Iraqi military that accompanied it understandably made even the most casual observers grasp for explanations. The renewed intensive American media coverage and public interest in Iraq, which had dwindled well before the last American soldiers left the country in 2011, produced a demand for narratives connecting events over the past several years. This presentation will discuss two related narratives that have gained traction during the past year. Both narratives agree that former Ba’thist military and intelligence officers in the ranks of ISIS are central to the group’s territorial expansion and resilience in the face of the campaign waged against it by the U.S.-led coalition. However, they differ dramatically in that one narrative sees the use of ISIS’s Islamic veneer as a cynical Ba’thist ploy to regain power, whereas the other posits that these officers were in fact previously radicalized as a result of the “faith campaign” during the final decade of Saddam Hussein’s rule. In considering both narratives, it is necessary to examine the sources on which they are based in light of the previous documentary evidence from the Iraqi Ba’th regime, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Islamic State in Iraq. Lastly, in discussing these two narratives and their limitations, it is important to note that the Iraqi government’s longstanding rhetoric and practice of labeling opponents as “Ba’thists” since 2003, which I argue has converged with and perhaps contributed to many recently published news accounts and books discussing the Ba’thist origins of the ISIS.
