What the Pen Reveals About the Sword: Rhetoric-Based Mapping of Insurgency Factional Structure in Iraq

What the Pen Reveals About the Sword: Rhetoric-Based Mapping of Insurgency Factional Structure in Iraq Michael Gabbay Information Systems Laboratories, Inc. 200 W. Mercer St., Ste 410 Seattle, WA 98119 [email protected] Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association March 28, 2008 Note: A condensed version of this paper appeared as \Mapping the Structure of the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq," CTC Sentinel, 1(4):10{12, March 2008 ISL What the Pen Reveals About the Sword M. Gabbay 1 Introduction The Iraq conflict is a complex fusion of a rebellion against foreign occu- pation and an internal civil war | a conflict that seems intent on explor- ing almost all axes of violence between its participants. Divisions within the Sunni insurgency in Iraq have critically influenced the evolution of the conflict and will no doubt bear critically upon its subsequent course and resolution. Major points of contention between nationalist-leaning insurgents and caliphate-minded, pan-Islamic jihadists have been, among others, Sunni participation in elections, the indiscriminate targeting of Shiite civilians, and the nature of the threat posed by United States-backed Sunni militias, known as \awakening councils." Understanding the divisions between insurgents at the level of speci¯c insurgent groups is key to devising e®ective counterinsurgency and conflict resolution strategies. In Iraq, this task is complicated by the proliferation of insurgent groups, most of whom claim an Islamist mantle, and the murky nature of their origins, composi- tion, and leadership. In this paper, we describe a quantitative methodology for constructing diagrams that characterize and clarify insurgency factional structure using insurgent rhetoric as data. These factional map diagrams can shed insight into insurgent factional dynamics involving cooperation, rivalries, decision making, and organizational cohesion. Our results suggest that the coarse-graining of the Sunni insurgency into a nationalist-leaning camp on one side and Al Qaida-inspired jihadists on the other needs to be further resolved to serve as a guide for US counterinsurgency policy, espe- cially in an era where security gains hinge on the cooperation of the Sunni awakening councils. The zeal and apparent dexterity with which contemporary Islamist insurgent and terrorist groups convey their messages over the internet and satellite television channels like Al-Jazirah has usually been cast as part of a public relations struggle with the US and the West more broadly over the hearts and minds of the Islamic masses. In Iraq, it is apparent however that these media also increasingly serve as forums in which insurgent groups compete with each other for the loyalties, not of a more-or-less neutral population-at-large, but rather of those who already support the insurgency, including insurgent ¯ghters themselves. Accordingly, an analysis of insurgent rhetoric can provide a window into the factional structure and dynamics within the insurgency. This window is all the more valuable given that much of the information on insurgent groups possessed by counterinsurgent forces is by necessity classi¯ed and even at that level there is likely little knowledge of the leadership deliberations within and between insurgent groups which 1 ISL What the Pen Reveals About the Sword M. Gabbay ultimately underlie their decisions and rhetoric. 2 Factional Mapping Methodology Our notion of factional structure involves the integration of measures of: (i) insurgent group ideological or strategic di®erences; (ii) cooperative relationships between groups; and (iii) the overall influence of each group. We describe these measures below for the Iraqi context but the methodology is broadly applicable to insurgencies in which multiple autonomous insurgent groups are present, as is true for most modern cases. Our methodology uses a fusion of concepts from spatial models of politics [1, 2] and social network analysis [3, 4]; the former for its mathematical framing of political competi- tion and voting behavior as occurring along a policy or ideology space, such as the familiar liberal-conservative dimension of US domestic politics, and the latter for its mathematical framing of group structure as a network of bilateral ties between actors and the associated analytical metrics for assess- ing actor influence and roles. The factional map's inclusion of an ideological axis assumes that interactions along this dimension are important. This is in accord with certain network-based models of group opinion change, in particular, Friedkin and Johnsen's \social influence network theory" [5] and our variant which emphasizes nonlinear dynamics [6]. The factional maps were originally developed as visualization tools for application of the political elite decision making model described in [7] to the leadership of the FARC insurgent group in Colombia [8] and Russian succession decision making under Putin [9]. Our previous work, however, derived from surveys which solicited area analysts' to make direct judgments on ideological/policy issues and actor relationships whereas our Iraq study is based directly on text data. 2.1 Data The data used to construct our Iraqi factional maps includes eleven Sunni insurgent groups listed in Table 1 and spans the time from mid-2003, when Islamist insurgent groups started emerging, through early 2007, just prior to a process of alliance formation among the nationalist-leaning groups. In order to look at changes in factional structure, we divide this time span into two periods: August 2003{July 2005 and August 2005{April 2007, which we refer to as the ¯rst and second data periods respectively. The data set consists of hundreds of translated insurgent statements from jihadist web- sites and interviews of insurgent group o±cials in print and broadcast media 2 ISL What the Pen Reveals About the Sword M. Gabbay Group Symbol Islamic Army in Iraq IAI 1920 Revolution Brigades 1920RB Mujahidin Army MA Rashidin Army RA Al Qaida in Iraq AQI Ansar al-Sunnah Group ASG Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi Brigades JAMI Fatihin Army FA Iraq's Jihadist Leagues IJL Shield of Islam Brigade SIB Just Punishment Brigades JPB Table 1: Insurgent groups included in analysis. Only the top 7 groups are included in the ¯rst data period. as provided by the US government's Open Source Center. Insurgents make speci¯c operational claims of attacks and issue broad \creed and methodology" statements of ideology and doctrine as well as more focused policy communiqu¶es. Figures 1 and 2 show the factional maps for the ¯rst and second data periods and we now describe the procedure used to generate these diagrams. 2.2 Targeting Policy For our measure of ideological and strategic di®erences between groups we consider the target classes | US troops, Iraqi security forces, Shiite militias, government o±cials, civilians, etc. | that are claimed by insurgent groups. In particular, we calculate the value of a targeting policy variable which scores each insurgent group by the average legitimacy of the target classes it claims operations against, where the legitimacy of each target class is the acceptability of attacking it within the set of insurgent groups as a whole, at least according to their public statements. The targeting policy is plotted along the horizontal axis of the factional maps where lower targeting policy scores indicate the presence of less acceptable, more controversial targeting claims. The motivation behind this choice is that disagreement over what types of targets are legitimate has often been the primary source of dissen- sion within Islamist insurgencies [10], and, moreover, the pronouncement of whom one has slain is perhaps the most signal form of political rhetoric, not simply \cheap talk." To calculate the targeting policy, we ¯rst assess the attitude that each group expresses regarding the acceptability of targeting a given class. Ta- 3 ISL What the Pen Reveals About the Sword M. Gabbay Attitude Meaning Value 2 Operational claims against class 1 Targeting class is legitimate but no operational claims 0 Ambivalent or no opinion expressed -1 General or mild condemnation against targeting class -2 Strong or speci¯c condemnation against targeting class Table 2: Attitude coding scheme for rating insurgent group position regarding targeting a given target class. ble 2 summarizes the coding scheme used to assign attitude scores and Ta- ble 3 shows the matrix containing the attitudes of each group for each class for the second data period. The attitude coding scheme is as follows: if a group speci¯cally claims attacks on a target class, then the class is assigned an attitude value of +2 for that group;1 if a group states a target is legitimate in an interview or policy statement but does not make speci¯c operational claims against that class, a +1 attitude value is assigned; a value of 0 is assigned if the group makes no claims and expresses no opinion or ambivalent opinions about a target class; if a group makes a general but weak condemnation of targeting a given class, an attitude of -1 is given; and a -2 attitude value is assigned if a group strongly condemns targeting a given class, by, for instance, condemning another group for targeting that class or taking speci¯c actions to not target it, such as issuing orders not to attack civilian voters during an election. A legitimacy score for each target class can now be calculated as the average of its attitude values for the whole ensemble of insurgent groups. In Table 3, the classes are sorted in descending order of legitimacy with the most controversial targets at bottom. The value of a group's targeting policy variable is then calculated as the average legitimacy of the target classes it claims, i.e., those classes for whom the group's entries are +2 (we only use claimed targets rather than the full matrix of entries because of the relatively large number of zeros for certain classes and the more ambiguous nature of scoring attitudes other than claims).

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