Camp Bucca: The US prison that became the birthplace of Isis

Nine members of the Islamic State’s top command did time at Bucca

US Army soldiers carry shot guns as they walk along a corridor separating what they deem to be the most extreme and dangerous detainees held inside the Camp Bucca detention center located near the Kuwait-Iraq border (DAVID FURST/AFP/Getty Images)

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.

“These men weren’t planting flowers in a garden,” police chief Saad Abbas Mahmoud told The Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid, estimating 90 percent of the freed prisoners would soon resume fighting. “They weren’t strolling down the street. This problem is both big and dangerous. And regrettably, the Iraqi government and the authorities don’t know how big the problem has become.”

Mahmoud’s assessment of Camp Bucca, which funneled 100,000 detainees through its barracks and closed months later, would prove prescient. The camp now represents an opening chapter in the history of Islamic State — many of its leaders, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were incarcerated and likely met there. According to former prison commanders, analysts and soldiers, Camp Bucca provided a unique setting for both prisoner radicalization and inmate collaboration — and was formative in the development today’s most potent jihadist force.

Iraqi detainees walk inside the Camp Bucca detention centre located near the Kuwait-Iraq border (DAVID FURST/AFP/Getty Images)

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 himself, 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, Soufan said. Though it’s likely the men were extremists when they entered Bucca, the group added, it’s certain they were when they left.

“Before their detention, Mr al-Baghdadi and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America,” wrote military veteran Andrew Thompson and academic Jeremi Suri 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.”

It’s a scenario that’s long confounded law enforcement: how do you crack down on extremism without creating more of it? From the radicalisation of white supremacists in U.S. prisons to the United Kingdom’s disastrous bid in the 1970s to incarcerate Irish Republican Army members, the problem is nothing new: prisons are pools of explosive extremism awaiting a spark.

That this subdued insurgency eventually caught fire isn’t much of a surprise. At the height of the Iraq surge in 2007, when the prison was glutted with 24,000 inmates, it seethed with extremism. Inhabitants were divided along sectarian lines to ameliorate tension, a military report said, and inmates settled their disputes with Islamic law. “Inside the wire at these compounds are Islamic extremists who will maim or kill fellow detainees for behavior they consider against Islam,” the military report said.

“Sharia courts enforce a lot of rules inside the compounds,” one soldier quoted in the report said. "Anyone who takes part in behavior which is seen as western is severely punished by the extremist elements of the compound. It’s quite appalling sometimes."

Prison commanders such as Gerrond observed the growing extremism: “There was a huge amount of collective pressure exerted on detainees to become more radical in their beliefs,” he told Mother Jones. “Detainees turned to each other for support. If there were radical elements within this support network, there was always the potential that detainees would become more radical.”

But 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.

© The Washington Post