Stalin is the godfather of Islamic State. The Soviet leader died 60 years before the brutal fundamentalist caliphate began to take shape in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. But just as Stalin created a spy-state founded on fear, so the architects of Islamic State set out to forge a new caliphate using precisely the same methods.
Stalin’s USSR and the self-proclaimed theocracy ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi both laid claim to ideological purity; but both, in reality, were predicated on the acquisition of power by means of a fearsome internal espionage network.
The KGB, the East German Stasi and Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency are the direct progenitors of the Islamic State security apparatus. The proof lies in a cache of documents uncovered after a shootout last year between Syrian rebels and an Iraqi intelligence officer now believed to be the strategic mastermind behind the Islamic State takeover of northern Syria.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who usually went by the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, was a colonel in Saddam’s military intelligence services who found himself jobless when the Baathist regime was dismantled and dismissed after the US invasion.
“Bitter and unemployed”, Bakr and other disgruntled Baathists began plotting a seizure of power: the roiling chaos in the rebel-held territories of northern Syria offered the perfect opportunity.
Bakr was shot dead by Syrian rebels in January 2014. Inside his house in the town of Tal Rifaat his killers discovered a bundle of documents describing how to build and enforce a police state. The documents, revealed by the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, amounted to nothing less than a “blueprint for a takeover ... not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’.”
Spies, not religious converts, were the foundation on which Islamic State was built. Bakr’s plans called for missionary offices to be opened in towns across rebel-held Syria, as cover for the recruitment of informants, usually young men in need of money, regime opponents at odds with the rebels, and former intelligence officers. These spies were deployed to amass information that might be useful to divide and control the local populations: power structures, armed groups, potential opponents and the religious complexion of individual imams.
The agents were also instructed to gather evidence on criminal or homosexual activity which might be used to blackmail individuals, and to infiltrate powerful clans by marrying into them.
A local commander would be appointed for each province to oversee kidnapping, murder and espionage. But at the same time, the security structure would itself be subject to surveillance by parallel departments. Everyone would spy on everyone else — a recipe for the systemic paranoia that is the hallmark of totalitarianism.
The underground spy network established by Bakr enabled Islamic State to rise to power with a speed and efficiency that stunned Western intelligence agencies. But his methods were hardly new.
Bakr was a product of the terror state created by Saddam, whose system of internal surveillance in turn owed a great deal to the Soviet model of repression and manipulation. Saddam’s Baathist regime was a Stalinist dictatorship in all but name, controlling every element of society through fear, uncertainty and an all-seeing security apparatus.
As a young man Saddam bragged that he would turn Iraq into a “Stalin state”. He collected numerous biographies of the Soviet leader.
His seizure of power came with a staged scene of terror, when about 60 “traitors” were exposed at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council in 1979 and then led away to be shot, while Saddam wept for the cameras. Saddam urged his intelligence officers to recruit “a shadow in every house”; the shadows themselves were spied upon.
Men such as Bakr learnt their trade among the shadows, and have now successfully applied these techniques to build Islamic State, a caliphate ostensibly dedicated to jihad but built on old-fashioned Stalinist fear. Its nearest parallel may be that of the Stasi, the security force of East Germany. Using thousands of citizen-informants to root out dissent, it was perhaps the most effective secret police agency in history.
The spy regimes of the USSR and East Germany were created to bolster communism; Saddam claimed to be defending Baathism; the army of spies deployed by Islamic State are in the service of the self-styled caliphate. But what all spy-based regimes have in common is a hunger for power.
Islamic State portrays itself as a pure religious revolution. It is seen in the West as a terrorist state, dedicated to wholesale destruction and looting. But the discovery that the world’s newest state is the work of Saddam’s former spooks suggests that what appears to be a new phenomenon may really be the application of tried and tested techniques of autocratic rule.
According to Der Spiegel, Baghdadi was selected by Bakr and his cabal of former Iraqi intelligence officers to give the organisation “a religious face”.
Islamic State, it seems, has two faces: one fanatical and fundamentalist, imposing religious conformity; the other secular and strategic, pursuing raw power. When they searched Bakr’s house, the rebels found ample evidence of a super-spy at work, but not a single copy of the Koran.
THE TIMES