The US prison that gave birth to ISIS
In March 2009, in a wind-swept sliver of Iraq, a sense of uncertainty befell the southern town of Garma, home to one of the Iraq War's most notorious prisons. The sprawling detention center called Camp Bucca, which had detained some of the Iraq War's most radical jihadists along the Kuwait border, had just freed hundreds of inhabitants. Families rejoiced, anxiously awaiting their sons, brothers and fathers who had been lost to Bucca for years. But a local official fretted.
In all, nine members of the Islamic State's top command did time at Bucca, according to the terrorist analyst organization Soufan Group. Apart from Baghdadi, the ISIS caliph, who spent five years there, the leader's number two, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, as well as senior military leader Haji Bakr, (now deceased), and leader of foreign fighters Abu Qasim were incarcerated there. Though it's likely the men were extremists when they entered Bucca, it's certain they were when they left.
“Before their detention, al-Baghdadi and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America,” wrote military veteran Andrew Thompson and academic JeremiSuri in the New York Times this month. “Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities to broaden their following. The prisons became virtual terrorist universities: the hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian.”
Many of the inmates were guilty of attacking American soldiers. But many more were not; “simply being a 'suspicious looking' military-aged male in the vicinity of an attack was enough to land one behind bars,” according to the Times opinion piece. It was “an appalling miscarriage of justice,” he added.
That this subdued insurgency eventually caught fire isn't much of a surprise. The unique setting at Bucca, which thrust together Saddam Hussein's Baathist secularists and Islamic fundamentalists, set the stage for something perhaps worse: collaboration. At the prison, the two seemingly incongruous groups joined to form a union “more than a marriage of convenience”, Soufan reported.
Soufan found each group offered the other something it lacked. In the ex-Baathists, jihadists found organizational skills and military discipline. In the jihadists, ex-Baathists found purpose. “In Bucca, the math changed as ideologies adopted military and bureaucratic traits and as bureaucrats became violent extremists,” the Soufan report said.
From the ashes of what former inmates called an “al-Qaeda school,” rose the Islamic State. Indeed, when those inhabitants freed in 2009 returned to Baghdad, the Post reported, they spoke of two things: their conversion to radicalism — and revenge.
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