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A year later, bin Laden wrote a letter to the people of Iraq in a communiqué aired on Al Jazeera, telling them to prepare for the occupation of an ancient Islamic capital and the installation of a puppet regime that would “pave the way for the establishment of Greater Israel.” Mesopotamia would be the epicenter for a Crusader-Jewish conspiracy that would engulf the entire Middle East. In opposition bin Laden advocated urban warfare and “martyrdom operations,” or suicide bombings, and he put out a global casting call for a mujahidin army ona scale not seen since the days of the Services Bureau. However, this appeal carried an intriguing postscript. The “socialist infidels” of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, bin Laden said, were worthy accomplices in any fight against the Americans. To hurt the “far enemy,” jihadistswere thus encouraged to collaborate with the remnants of a “near enemy” until the ultimate Islamic victory could be won. The consequences of this sanctioning of an Islamist-Baathist alliance would be lethal and long-lasting.

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    SHEIKH OF THE SLAUGHTERERS
    AL-ZARQAWI AND AL-QAEDA IN IRAQ
    “Corrupt regimes and terrorists keep each other in business,” Emma Sky, a British adviser to the US military in Iraq, says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.” Indeed, for all its posturing as an unbeatable fighting force, ISIS has relied more than it cares to admit on unlikely ideological allies and proxies. When the United States invaded Iraq, al-Zarqawi found some of his most enthusiastic champions in the remnants of one of the very “near enemies” he had declared himself in opposition to: the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Today, ISIS’s stunning advance across northern and central Iraq has benefited from much of the same convenient, proximate deal-making.
    SADDAM’S GHOST
    Bin Laden’s injunction was fully realized in the early months of the occupation of Iraq, when the US military painfully discerned the hybridized nature of the insurgency it was confronting. SaddamHussein had not anticipated an invasion of Baghdad. But he had very much prepared his regime for a different doomsday scenario: another domestic rebellion from either Iraq’s Shia majority or its minority Kurds. At the prompting of the United States, both of these sects had risen up at the end of the First Gulf War only to be brutally slaughtered (with US acquiescence). Determined not to witness any such revolutionary ferment again, Saddam in the intervening decade constructed an entire underground apparatus for counterrevolution and took precautions to strengthen his conventional military deterrents. He beefed up one of his praetorian divisions, the Fedayeen Saddam, and licensed the creation of a consortium of proxy militias. In their magisterial history of the Second Gulf War, Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor note that long before the first American solider arrived in Iraq, “networks of safe houses and arms caches for paramilitary forces, including materials for making improvised explosives, were also established throughout the country.  . . . It was, in effect, a counterinsurgency strategy to fend off what Saddam saw as the most serious threats to his rule.”
    The man who anatomized this strategy, and who understood that the post-invasion insurgency actually comprised holdover elements from the ancien regime — not the “pockets of dead-enders” as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had called them—was Colonel Derek Harvey, a military intelligence officer working for General Ricardo “Rick” Sanchez’s Combined Joint Task Force 7, the American headquarters in Iraq.
    Harvey estimated that between sixty-five and ninety-five thousand members of Saddam’s other praetorian division, the Special Republican Guard, the Mukhabarat (a catchall term encompassing Iraq’s intelligence directorates), the Fedayeen Saddam, and state-subsidized militiamen were all rendered unemployed with the stroke of a pen