For almost a year Abu
Abdullah was the most wanted man in Baghdad. He was known among his bosses
inside Islamic State as “the planner” – the man responsible for dispatching suicide
bombers to attack mosques, universities, checkpoints and market places across
the Iraqi capital.
Now his home is a
cramped cell in a high-security prison on the city’s fringe, where he has spent
the 11 months since his capture.
From there Abdullah
outlined to the Guardian his role as the man who consigned more human bombs
across Baghdad than, perhaps, any other throughout the decade-long insurgency.
Abdullah is one of the
most sensitive of Iraq’s security prisoners and securing access to him took
three months of negotiations with intelligence officials. Once permission to meet
him was granted, he acknowledged that he had not chosen to be interviewed, but
claimed to be speaking freely.
In the wide-ranging,
90-minute discussion that followed he detailed his role as the architect of one
of Iraq’s most savage and remorseless terror campaigns.
Abdullah said he
readied 15 bombers before his arrest in July last year, praying with them in
their final hours before driving them to their targets and then watching from
nearby as they blew themselves up.
He estimated that more
than 100 people had died in the attacks he orchestrated – often members of the
security forces, but sometimes ordinary civilians, including women and
children.
“They used to come to
me in the workshop,” he said of the nondescript and now abandoned room behind
two sets of steel doors in Baghdad’s southern suburbs which for more than a
year was Isis’s main command centre in the Iraqi
capital.
“I met them at the
door, and first I would greet them and look at them to see if they were ready,”
he said. “Then we would sit down to pray and read the Qur’an.”
According to Abdullah,
not once did someone who was delivered lose their nerve before the mission. All
of them, he claimed, succeeded. “I would help them fix their suicide belt and I
would hide it so the checkpoints would never find it.
Sometimes we only did
that at the last moment.” During the interview, in which Abdullah remained handcuffed
and seated, his responses ranged greatly. He was
often candid, then
fleetingly reluctant until he was ordered to open up by a hovering guard.
Throughout the past
decade, Iraq’s prisons have been condemned by human rights groups as places
where torture is routinely used on security prisoners. Abdullah winced when the
guards approached him, and a block and chain sat in a plastic crate near the
cell door.
He bore no visible
physical scars, though, and appeared well nourished – a legacy of what a senior
officer said was an order from the government to keep all prisoners fed and in cells
with constant electricity and air conditioning.
“Can you imagine that,”
the officer sneered. “They have a better life than most people in Baghdad.”
When the guards left
the room Abdullah appeared far more at ease, quickly switching from submission
to defiance. “What is your message to the west?” he was asked. Abdullah paused briefly,
then looked towards the door to see if we were alone.
His eyes flashed:
“Islam is coming. What the Islamic State has achieved in the past year cannot
be undone. The caliphate is a reality.”
Abdullah, whose real
name is Ibrahim Ammar Ali al-Khazali, claimed to have been a member of Isis and
all of its earlier incarnations since 2004. His path to violent jihad was unorthodox:
he was born a Shia Muslim and practised the faith until the late 1990s, when he
converted to Sunni Islam and disavowed the teachings of the rival sect.
He said he had been
active in the organisation’s earlier years until 2007 when he was shot in the
head during a clash with Iraqi forces. Entry and exit scars were obvious near
his left ear and he moved slowly, even taking into account the shackles and
chains, as if he had lost some of his motor skills.
Whatever his injury,
his resolve appeared to harden in recent years. “It was after 2011 that I got
busy again,” he said. “I wanted to live in an Islamic state ruled by sharia. I
want everything that [Isis] wants. Their goals are my goals, there is no difference.”
Before his capture,
Abdullah had been the acting “wali”, or emir of Baghdad. He stepped into the
role shortly after the capture of his former boss, Abu Shaker, who, like him,
is held in a high-security prison in Baghdad. Interrogations of both have led
to the unravelling of much of the Isis network that had the city in its grip as
violence escalated between 2011 and 2013.
Since then, Isis
operatives have shown an ability to reorganise, but even during the Guardian’s
visit to the prison, an enormous haul of dirt-encrusted weaponry dug up from a farm
in south Baghdad was brought in by counter-terrorism police and laid in front
of their base in the same compound. In a hallway leading to the officers’
rooms, images of accused terrorists at the moment of their arrest were fixed to
a wall. A disabled suicide vest lay incongruously in a corner behind a
door. In the senior
officer’s wardrobe trouser belts that had been filled with explosives were
stored in plastic evidence bags after being seized from arrested Isis leaders.
Nearby, a blindfolded, bare-footed man leaned silently against a wall, his
hands cuffed in front of him.
Even now, with a death
sentence looming, Abdullah viewed the people he helped to kill as legitimate
targets whose deaths he could easily justify.
“Most of the people who
died were valid targets and those who were caught up in the attacks will be
accepted by God,” he said. “There was only one time that I had regrets. A
martyr I took to the market in Qadhimeya blew himself up near
women and children and
that troubled me, but the next day I was calm about it. I knew I had to be true
to my ideology and I just got on with the day.”
He said his operational
mission had ended with his capture and that he would use the time he had left
before his almost inevitable execution to speak openly about his beliefs.
Pressed on regrets, he
again became evasive. And, after another taunt from a guard, he said: “I did
everything according to my beliefs. I don’t want to talk about regrets, and I
don’t want to talk about my family.”
The officer responsible
for the detention of the prize captive, along with half a dozen other alleged
Isis leaders, said: “He’s an ideologue, but there are others here that are far
more ideological than him.
“He sang like a bird on
the first day. And after that, he tried to convince others to do the same. He went
to talk to a guy called Abu Takseen, who is more junior than him, but Abu Takseen
attacked him. That’s the people we have here.”
At the workshop, where
so much of Baghdad’s carnage was planned, a man who had been Abdullah’s
neighbour for more than a year said he suspected nothing about the quiet respectful
man who used to greet him several times a week.
“But nothing surprises
me in this city any more. Nothing,” he said. “For the rest of my life I could
not be shocked by anything. That’s what living in this country does to you.”
(Business insider)
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