(deep warm tone)
>>This is the third installment to radical Islam.
And it centers on Abu Musab al-zarqawi.
He's born in 1966 in Jordan
and he dies 2006 in Iraq.
He is going to transform radical Islamism.
Once again, we saw how Qutb
the original philosopher of radical Islam
institutes jihad.
Bin Laden comes up with the idea of attacking the far enemy,
the United States.
Zarqawi is gonna come up with the idea
of building a caliphate here today
in Iraq and he is going to add a new element
which is a virulent anti-Shiite element
to Islamic fundamentalism.
Zarqawi believed that America's entrance
into the war in Iraq in 2003
was a great opportunity
because it would allow the Islamists
to drag the Americans into a fight on the ground
in which America would be weakened
and ultimately destroyed.
His big innovation
is a notion that you could build a caliphate today
and that we should go after the Shiites.
So he adds an element of anti-Shiism
that had never been so pronounced
in the Islamism of Bin Laden or Qutb.
Zarqawi was a regular street thug in Jordan.
He was arrested, put into jail, tortured
and he finds Islam in prison
as many Islamists do.
He's released at the end of the '80s from prison in Jordan
and he goes to Afghanistan
where he's hoping to join the fight with Bin Laden.
But Russia is in its last days.
The war in Afghanistan is winding down.
He tries to impress Bin Laden in Afghanistan
and eventually helped to run a paramilitary training camp.
But his hatred of Shiites
and his desire to kindle a fight against them
caused a lot of friction with Bin Laden.
And we have to remember that Bin Laden's mother
was Alawite, which is a Shiite off-shoot.
So he did not embrace this virulent anti-Shiism.
Zarqawi only became famous
after he traveled to Iraq in 2002
just before the United States
was to invade Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Now it's worth noting
that one of the main reasons that the United States
and George W. Bush used for invading Iraq
was the claim that Zarqawi, this member of al-Qaeda
that was in Iraq, in fact
he was in the Kurdish northern part of Iraq in 2002,
had links to Saddam Hussein.
So the United States made the argument
that not only was Saddam Hussein rekindling
his effort to build an atom bomb
but that he was in kohuts with al-Qaeda through Zarqawi.
This turned out to be completely false.
There were no links between Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein
who was a secularist.
But already the CIA had him in their cross hairs
in northern Iraq in 2002.
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003,
it's set about trying to destroy Saddam Hussein's government
and then rebuild it
with one that was more representative.
The Sunnis of Iraq are only 20 percent of the country.
Saddam Hussein was a Sunni-Arab muslim.
The ba'ath party, the single party in the state,
was also dominated by Sunni-Arabs at the top
so was the Iraqi army.
So the United States disbanded the army,
criminalized the ba'ath party
and hunted down Bin Laden and his closest 50 followers.
Once the Sunnis were thrown out of power,
the United States turn to the Shiites.
Shiite muslim Arabs are 60 percent of the Iraqi population
and sought them out as potential allies
who could build a new government.
They would represent the majority
and be more representative.
The Sunnis who were cast out of power
and cast down to the bottom of society
after being at the top were infuriated.
They felt that they were being marginalized
and would be discriminated against
and that a divine order,
and order in which the Arab world was not only Arab
but Sunni-Arab,
was being defiled
and that Shiites who are not good muslims
were being catapulted to the top.
That was the view of the radical Sunnis
like Zarqawi.
Zarqawi had a fine strategic mind.
He realized that in order to destroy the Americans
who had a superior military,
he had to start a civil war.
A war between the Sunni, a grieved muslims
and many of the military figures.
The 400,000 members of the Iraqi army
that had been thrown out of their jobs
that they could recruit amongst this large Sunni community
and get them to attack the Shiites.
And then if the Shiites counter-attacked,
it would create a you're either with us, against us.
It would split the Islamic world along sectarian lines.
And that Sunnis would win this battle.
Why?
Because 85% of the Islamic world are Sunnis.
They could call for jihad,
get foreign fighters to come pouring in to Iraq,
the same way they had in Afghanistan
and that they would take on America
in this foreign land that didn't belong to them.
And they would win the war for hearts and minds,
they would recruit and mobilized Sunnis,
and they would destroy the Shiites.
In late 2004,
he officially set up an al-Qaeda branch
and pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden.
His group became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI.
And Zarqawi was given the al-Qaeda title emir, or prince,
of al-Qaeda in the country of the two rivers.
Two rivers, that means Iraq.
Mesopotamia, the land of the two rivers,
Tigris and Euphrates.
For all of his militancy,
he gained a nickname as sheik of the slaughterers.
He carried out the bombing of the UN headquarters
in Baghdad, right at the beginning of the US occupation.
He killed 22 people,
as well as the head of the UN mission in Iraq
and this had the effect
of scaring the entire international community.
All the NGOs that had flocked to Baghdad,
thinking that they were gonna rebuild Iraq all left.
And most foreigners left.
This led the United States to build up a small unclaif
they had called the Green Zone inside Baghdad
that was behind big high walls.
So the Americans became captives in the center of Baghdad,
fearful of this ongoing insurgency.
In 2005,
he launched his war against the Shiites.
The bombing of the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra in 2006
lead to a terrible tit for tat war
between Sunnis and Shiites.
Shiites immediately began to attack Sunnis,
attack their mosques and infuriate Sunnis.
Sunnis attack back and it became this cyclical war
that the United States could not dampen.
The US saw all of its attempts to build understanding
between the different communities
to develop power sharing government
completely collapsed.
And this is the beginning
of what has been called the surge in Iraq
where the United States sent in
tens of thousands more troops
and began to recruit Sunni tribes to fight agaisnt al-Qaeda.
Through the surge,
the United States was eventually able to
largely defeat Zarqawi and al-Qaeda.
Zarqawi himself was killed in 2006,
other leaders sprung up,
but by the time President Obama
decided to pull troops out of Iraq, 2010,
al-Qaeda was only a shadow in its former self.
It had largely gone underground.
A new Shiite dominated government led by Al Maliki
was in power.
And the United States believed it was safe to leave Iraq.
And the Shiites, it must be said,
did not want the United States in Iraq.
They made it almost impossible to keep troops there
by not renewing the contracts
under which they were allowed to operate in Iraq.
Obama pulls out American troops,
but a year later, 2011,
what happens?
The Arabs spring and this is gonna turn
the entire situation back on its head.
Because Syria, the state next door to Iraq,
falls into civil war.
The minoritarian Shiite government lead by Bashar al-Assad
an Alawite, is beset by an uprising
largely led by Sunni muslim Arabs
who are the majority in Syria.
Assad has to pull his army out of the east of Syria,
that's the entire area along the Iraq border
and these al-Qaeda members are able to slip into Syria
and rebuild in eastern Syria.
By this time, 2010,
al-Qaeda has a new leader called Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
He renames the organization,
the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria, ISIS.
In arabic that's al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq mu Sham,
Syria's name, Sham
and that means a greater Syria, the Levant really.
So this leads to it being sometimes interpreted as
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,
or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
It doesn't really matter which one you use,
they both mean the same thing.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is going to rise up
and rejuvenate this organization
that spread rapidly in Syria
and in 2014 is able to sweep back into Iraq,
conquer almost all the Sunni-Arab parts of Iraq
and this launches a new war
with the United States being sucked back into Iraq
and into Syria
in order to destroy this new incarnation
of a more lethal, more potent, more centralized al-Qaeda
in Iraq and Syria.
So to conclude,
these three men,
Sayyid Qutb,
Bin Laden, and Zarqawi
each take radical Islamism that starts in the 1960s
into different phases.
From Egypt to Afghanistan
to Iraq and Syria.
Caliph Baghdadi
establishes a caliphate,
something that Zarqawi was trying to do.
He builds a centralized army
and he builds a state.
(deep tone)