Iraq's new Civil War - Why Detention Matters.

Background

The past week has been interesting for me, sitting on the sideline and reading about detainees in Iraq.  The leader of the ISIS group that took over Mosul was released from Bucca in 2009.  The stories that are coming out about him now are primarily about how no one knows much about him.  The latest revelation is that he made a remark to the US soldiers releasing him to the effect that he would "See them in New York." That is a bit ominous given the stature of his group.  He is now the prime target of US forces. (See the following story for more background.)

My interest in this story comes from many sources. First, the news that Mosul had fallen deeply saddened me.  I was in Mosul from April to October 2003. I was stationed at the airfield there and worked as the leader of a Tactical Human Intelligence Team gathering information on threats to US forces and Iraqis in the area.  Mosul was very stable and pleasant during my time there. Mosul was the success that General Petraeus would capitalize on in his meteoric rise over the next decade.

Second, my next tour to Iraq in 2007-08 was to Camp Bucca.  Camp Bucca during the height of the surge was a contradiction.  It was an overcrowded mess (more than 25,000 detainees) of a camp that was simultaneously growing with the influx of detainees and working to reform the system to release them.  We hit a period of growth, and then the releases started.  The camp was run using doctrines from U.S. military incarceration, US Prisoner of War procedures, and a smattering of counterinsurgency.  The counterinsurgency aspects were taking root as we arrived.

Third, I have written on the subject of detention academically - and am one of the few political science scholars to do so. It is an area that has lacked attention in the past, but which now may become more obvious as a key aspect of conflict resolution, policy-making, and strategy.

Flawed System

One of the first papers I wrote as a graduate student dealt with the issue of releasing prisoners from detention centers.  The logic of the paper was simple. If detainees are properly classified using intelligence, the release of less dangerous detainees is sound policy.  However, the less certain we become about the classification of detainees, the more dangerous detainees will be released back into the fight.  This is a fairly obvious point, but it was made with my own personal experience in trying to classify detainees at Camp Bucca.  The fact is that we were not good at initially identifying dangerous detainees or updating our files through continued intelligence activities.

That is why I was unsurprised by the quotes of the commanding officer who was in charge of the facility when Baghdadi was released.  He says of the ISIS leader: 

"He didn't rack up to be one of the worst of the worst," said Col. Ken King, who oversaw Camp Bucca in 2008 and 2009. 

Baghdadi may have tried to manipulate other detainees or instigate reactions from the guards, but he knew the rules well enough not to get in serious trouble. 

"The best term I can give him is savvy," said King, who first spoke to the Daily Beast. 

The colonel recalled that when Baghdadi was turned over to the Iraqi authorities in 2009, he remarked, "I'll see you guys in New York," an apparent reference to the hometown of many of the guards. 

"But it wasn't menacing. It was like, 'I'll be out of custody in no time,'" King said.

The description of the detainee is one who knew that the Americans were easily manipulated by those who played lip service to the rules of the camp.  His probing and manipulation are skills that he certainly honed while in custody.  Camp Bucca was described at one point as a training ground for Jihadists.  The half-measures taken by US forces in 2007-08 were not enough to really identify the smartest of the hard-core jihadists.  We essentially created a Darwinian system where those with enough savvy to avoid detection could increase their skills.

The time to solve the crisis in Iraq has passed.  Bucca is closed, the US doesn't have troops on the ground. However, we do have the ability to patch some of these flaws before our exit in Afghanistan, and to learn from them for our next wars.

Naked Self Promotion

One place to start is by committing more intelligence resources to detention facilities. This needs to be coupled with a change in the way that we collect and analyze intelligence from such facilities. I made this recommendation in an article last year.

Willardson, Spencer. “Strategic Intelligence During Coin Detention Operations – Relational Data and Understanding Latent Terror Networks.” Defense & Security Analysis 29, no. 1 (2013): 42–53.

I also have a working paper about the Surge in Iraq that details why the process of detention was important in separating the Sunnis and Shiites and ending the first Civil war.  If you are interested in the latest version of this paper, please email me. 

Finally, I have a database with detainee stats from Iraq from early 2003 through the beginning of 2009. These data come from some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that I made.  A description of the data can be found on my website. LINK.