Read ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror for Free Online Page B

who were sent to the mosqueswere not deeply committed to Baathism by that point, and as they encountered Salafi teachings many became more loyal to Salafism than to Saddam.”
    Many graduates of the program, Rayburn notes, found that they had much to confess and atone for in their pasts and so turned against the very ideology the Faith Campaign was meant to inculcate, and against the regime itself. Some of these “Salafist-Baathists” even went on to hold positions in a new American-fostered Iraqi government while continuing to moonlight as anti-American terrorists. One such person was Khalaf al-Olayan, who had been a high-ranking official in Saddam’s army before becoming one of the top leaders of Tawafuq, a Sunni Islamist bloc in the post-Saddam Iraqi parliament. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani showed the folly of the Faith Campaign even before the American invasion: he became a full-fledged Salafist and was subsequently imprisoned for attacking the very regime responsible for the Faith Campaign. (Al-Mashhadani went on to serve as speaker of the Council of Representatives of Iraq in 2006, a year before both he and al-Olayan were implicated in a deadly suicide bombing—against Iraq’s parliament.)
    “The Faith Campaign wasn’t just about having people in the Baath party go to religious training one night a week and do their homework and such,” Harvey told us, more than a decade removed from his first analysis of who and what constituted Iraq’s insurgency. “It was about using the intelligence services to reach into the society of Islamic scholars and work with a range of religious leaders such as Harith al-Dari,” a prominent Sunni cleric from the Anbar province and the chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars. “Even Abdullah al-Janabi,” Harvey added, referring to the former head of the insurgent Mujahideen Shura Council in Fallujah, “was an Iraqi intelligence agent, although originally he wasn’t a Salafist as we portrayed him, but rather a Sufi linked to al-Douri and the Naqshbandi Order. We didn’t recognize al-Janabi’strue nature. He wasn’t a religious extremist at all; he was an Arab nationalist. The thing all these guys had in common was the desire for their tribe, their clan, and themselves. That’s a unifying principle. It was the Sunni Arab identity, this search for lost power and prestige, that motivated the Sunni insurgency. Many people miss that when they characterize it. If you talk to the Shiites, they understand it for what it is.”
    After the US invasion, al-Douri and much of his Baathist network fled to Syria, where they were harbored by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Despite his father Hafez’s decades-long enmity with Saddam, al-Assad viewed these fugitives as useful agents for mayhem, for terror-in-reserve, for disrupting Bush’s nation-building experiment next door. For his part, al-Douri had wanted to fuse the Iraqi and Syrian Baath parties into one transnational conglomerate, but al-Assad refused and for a time even tried to catalyze his own alternative Iraqi Baath party to rival al-Douri’s. (Syria, as we’ll examine later, became one of the leading state sponsors of both Baathist and al-Qaeda terrorism in Iraq.)
    What Saddam, al-Assad, al-Zarqawi, and bin Laden all understood, and what the United States had to discover at great cost in fortune and blood, was that the gravest threat posed to a democratic government in Baghdad was not necessarily jihadism or even disenfranchised Baathism; it was Sunni revanchism.
    Sunni Arabs constitute at most 20 percent of Iraq’s population, whereas Shia Arabs constitute as much as 65 percent. A plurality of Sunni Kurds (17 percent), plus smaller demographics of Christians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Sunni and Shia Turkomen make up the fabric of the rest of the country’s society. But Saddam had presided over decades of a sectarian patronage system that broadly favored the minority at the expense of a much-impoverished and restive majority. It