Islamic State’s Deep, Poisonous Roots The group’s forerunner was Tawhid Wal Jihad, founded in 1999 by Abu Musab al Zarqawi.By Andrew Hosken

Posted By on January 2nd, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/islamic-states-deep-poisonous-roots-1451684170

The final planning for the terrorist attack in Paris last month might have taken place in the Molenbeek district of Brussels—but, like the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., weeks later, the inspiration came from a continent away, in the self-proclaimed caliphate of Islamic State, or ISIS. The difference: ISIS directly engineered the Paris slaughter, while the San Bernardino killers appear to have simply taken cues from the terror group.

Even so, ISIS propagandists have been promising for months to bring the full panoply of their horror to Europe and the U.S. They began the Twitter hashtag #WeWillBurnAmerica. An article this spring in the official ISIS magazine, Dabiq, promised an attack that would make “any past operation,” including 9/11, look like a mere “squirrel shoot.”

Many in the West view Islamic State’s barbaric crimes—its genocidal campaign against the region’s Christians and Yazidis; its lovingly choreographed beheadings of innocent journalists and aid workers—with horrified bafflement. They see ISIS as an aberration that appeared last year as if out of nowhere. They have a vague idea that it is related to, or grew out of, al Qaeda.

The roots of ISIS are more complex. The group’s forerunner, known by the name Tawhid Wal Jihad, was founded in 1999 by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who had already been planning world domination for much of the decade. Zarqawi, born in the Jordanian city of Zarqa, was a petty criminal who caught religion and replaced an aimless, poverty-stricken existence with jihad.

While in prison in 1996, Zarqawi and his mentor, Muhammad al Maqdisi, took into their confidence a Jordanian journalist named Fouad Hussein, who was held for a period in the same facility. In a 2005 Arabic-language book, Mr. Hussein outlined Zarqawi’s seven-step plan for establishing a caliphate, an explicitly Islamic empire that would claim authority over all Muslims and dominate the region. They envisaged unleashing chaos by toppling governments in the Middle East, which would create the vacuum that the caliphate needed to flourish.

By the time of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the group was already lying in wait. Zarqawi aimed to foment a civil war between the two major sects of Islam, his own Sunnis and the “apostate” Shiites. He was helped immeasurably by the coalition’s decision to wash away all vestiges of Saddam Hussein and his Baath party. The dictator and his acolytes were Sunnis who for decades had persecuted Iraq’s Shiite majority.

After the fall of Saddam, many Sunnis, suddenly out of power and fearing reprisals, turned to Zarqawi’s toxic strain of Islamist violence. Look closely at the leaders of ISIS and you will find among them some of Saddam’s army officers and secret policemen—such as Haji Bakr, Abu Muslim al Turkmani, and Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, all now believed dead.

In late 2004 Tawhid Wal Jihad became “al Qaeda in Iraq,” and Zarqawi had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Yet Zarqawi quarreled constantly with al Qaeda over tactics and targets.

That same year, for example, Ayman al Zawahiri—then a top al Qaeda official and now the group’s leader—wrote to Zarqawi asking him to stop beheading hostages and killing Shiites, which was alienating Muslims and harming the image of jihad. Zarqawi refused.

By 2006 Zarqawi’s group controlled large chunks of Iraq’s Anbar province, the huge Sunni region that makes up the western part of the country. In October of that year, months after Zarqawi was killed by an American airstrike, the group declared itself to be the Islamic State of Iraq. Its announcement months later of a new caliphate caused the real break with al Qaeda.

The precipitous withdrawal of American troops under President Obama brought the power vacuum to full force. Sunnis were left to the mercy of a Shiite government. As Islamic State gained strength, it captured arms and equipment that the U.S. had left with the hapless Iraqi military. As the civil war in neighboring Syria spun out of control, it moved in.

By the end of 2013, the group had secured control of Raqqa, Syria, which it claimed as its capital. ISIS then turned its attention to the rest of Iraq, capturing Fallujah in 2014 and later Mosul. At one point, the caliphate claimed territory stretching 415 miles from Raqqa to the town of Sulaiman Bek, a mere 60 miles from the Iranian border.

I’ve traveled to Iraq several times since Islamic State emerged and noticed the despair among ordinary Iraqis, whose government has been unable to counter this violent extremist menace over 13 years. “We all know that death can come at any time,” said one woman I met. But people outside the region—in London or New York—should be under no illusions: ISIS also has its sights set on them.

Mr. Hosken is a reporter for the BBC and the author of “Empire of Fear: Inside the Islamic State” (Oneworld Publications, 2015).

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