Part 7
By Ehsan
The Factors Behind Daesh’s Rise in Iraq and Syria
Iraq and Syria became the main centers of Daesh’s activity because of a complicated mix of political, social, economic, and security factors in both countries.
These factors surfaced at different stages, but in the end they came together and created the territory of Daesh’s self-proclaimed caliphate. Without understanding those factors, it is difficult to grasp the real reasons behind the group’s rise and expansion.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the subsequent occupation of Iraq by the U.S.-led coalition, the country was plunged into deep political change and widespread administrative and security disorder. One of the occupation authorities’ first decisions was to dissolve the Iraqi army entirely and carry out a broad purge of Ba’ath Party members from the government and public institutions. This policy, later known as de-Ba’athification, threw thousands of former military officers and government employees out of work overnight and created a crisis whose effects lasted for years.
According to some reports, nearly 100,000 former Ba’athist personnel, including Saddam’s Fedayeen, members of the Republican Guard, intelligence officers, and battle-hardened commanders, lost their positions because of this policy. These men, once considered the backbone of Iraq’s security establishment, suddenly found themselves stripped of their jobs, their income, and their social standing. Gradually, many of them joined armed groups fighting the government.
Among them, the best known was Haji Bakr. He had been a colonel in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service before joining Daesh, where he later became the chief architect of the group’s military operations. He played a major role in building Daesh’s organizational structure and planning its campaigns to seize territory.
Documents recovered later showed that he had drawn up a detailed plan for governing the so-called caliphate. Modeled on the Ba’ath Party’s intelligence and security apparatus, it included organizational charts, lists of officials, their responsibilities, and a step-by-step strategy for gradually taking control of a country. After Saddam’s fall, the Iraqi governments that came to power adopted discriminatory policies toward the Sunni population. That created a deep sense of injustice and marginalization across Sunni-majority areas.
Political power largely passed into the hands of Shiite and Kurdish factions, while provinces such as Anbar, Nineveh, Salah al-Din, and Kirkuk were left without many basic government services. Poverty, neglect, arbitrary arrests, and mass executions reached unprecedented levels among Iraq’s Sunni community.
The long-standing sectarian divide between Shiites and Sunnis only made matters worse and created fertile ground for extremist groups to grow. Many moderate Sunni leaders and nationalist figures, people who could have spoken for moderation and national unity, were killed either in terrorist attacks or during security operations. Their absence gave extremist organizations room to spread their influence across Iraq’s political and social landscape.
In Syria, the civil war began in March 2011 after popular protests erupted against the ruling government. It did not take long for those protests to turn into a large-scale humanitarian and security disaster. The most important factor behind Daesh’s rise there was the widespread uprising against the government and the gradual collapse of state authority across eastern and northern Syria.
As government control disappeared from those regions, various armed opposition groups took over at first, followed later by extremist organizations. Raqqa was eventually declared the capital of Daesh’s self-proclaimed caliphate. When sectarian tensions between the Alawite leadership and the Sunni population intensified, Daesh seized the opportunity to recruit thousands of people under the slogan of defending the Sunni community. Meanwhile, several countries in the region were providing financial and military support to armed opposition groups in an effort to overthrow the Syrian government. Much of that support eventually found its way into Daesh’s hands, strengthening the group’s military power on an unprecedented scale.
Facing heavy security pressure in Iraq, Daesh moved into Syria in 2013. It first seized the eastern parts of the country before taking Raqqa. Since neither the Syrian government nor the armed opposition groups were capable of stopping it, Daesh rapidly captured large areas of Syria and established a continuous land link between its territory in Iraq and Syria. By looting banks, state warehouses, and oil fields, Daesh acquired enormous financial resources and vast quantities of weapons. That turned it into the wealthiest and most destructive takfiri organization in the world.
In this way, both Iraq and Syria, each because of its own political, security, and social conditions, became fertile ground for Daesh’s growth. The crises in both countries came together and ultimately gave rise to the most dangerous takfiri organization of the modern era.
