Marc Jachym, 52, is an IT expert from Paris, France.
I read Martin Chulov’s long read Isis: the inside story in the 2015 edition of the Bedside Guardian, shortly after it had been published. I had taken the book on holiday with me, so had the luxury of time, and decided that I should use this time to learn something. I had no idea where Isis had come from, but they had risen to prominence in the news agenda in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and as a Guardian reader, a Parisian, and someone in tune with international politics, the topic immediately intrigued me.
The long read format lent itself brilliantly to this piece. It reads like a novel, to the point where I had to continually remind myself it was a piece of investigative journalism.
The article is written around an interview with a jihadist, Abu Ahmed, who had been a detainee in Camp Bucca, a US prison in Iraq. There he met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who later became the leader of Isis and is now frequently described as the world’s most wanted man. According to one analyst referenced in this piece, the Iraqi government estimates that 17 of the 25 most important Islamic State leaders running the war in Iraq and Syria spent time in US prisons between 2004 and 2011. At the time, the US military countered that its detention operations were valid, and that similar practices had been deployed by other forces against insurgencies. Abu Ahmed tells Chulov at the end of the interview: “I underestimated Baghdadi. And America underestimated the role it played in making him what he is.”
At the time of the interview, Abu Ahmed was a member of Isis and, despite having doubts about the doctrine, still regarded himself as a jihadi, so it was incredibly fascinating to read about the arc of his involvement with the terrorist group. He began as a young firebrand and progressed to become one of Iraq’s most formidable and connected militants. Chulov writes: “The brutality of Isis is increasingly at odds with his own views, which have mellowed with age as he has come to believe that the teachings of the Qur’an can be interpreted and not read literally … Throughout our discussions, he portrayed himself as a man reluctant to stay with the group, and yet unwilling to risk any attempt to leave.”
The extent to which Chulov was endangering himself in the course of this interview made it all the more chilling to read, but without the first-hand nature of the interaction, it wouldn’t have been as powerful, emotive or absorbing.
The origins and rise of Isis, seemingly out of thin air, had always been quite a mystery to me. I never imagined the seeds of the movement were planted as early as 2004. In the prison camps Chulov describes, Baghdadi was used as a peacemaker when conflicts arose among the inmates. But, as Abu Ahmed tells Chulov: “That was just part of his act.”
The way the prisoners in Camp Bucca organised themselves to stay connected after their release would be comically akin to something from a film if it wasn’t so tragic. They wrote each other’s details on the elastic of their boxer shorts and later bragged about how pants had helped them wage war. “I cut the fabric from my boxers and all the numbers were there. We reconnected. And we got to work. It really was that simple,” Abu Ahmed told Chulov.
Interwoven with these very simple, very human anecdotes, however, are descriptions of a number of chilling events. The article gave me an intimate insight into one example of the human behind the headlines, and how his reality was different to what we, reading our newspapers away from the fighting, might assume. We know the catastrophic consequences of Isis’s rise, but my biggest takeaway was that waging war with the aim of bringing about democracy and peace — whether with the harshest methods or with more gentle ones — is always bound to fail.
