THE HIGH COST OF PEACE:

Saddam Hussein created the Fedayeen Saddam in 1994 as a paramilitary Praetorian unit. The Fedayeen were initially charged with protecting the regime from a repeat of the revolts that followed Saddam's eviction from Kuwait by acting as a pre-emptive counter-insurgency force.

Over time this internal security mission became increasingly about enforcing Islamic law. Saddam had begun Islamizing his regime in the late 1980s, and intensified this in the early 1990s, attempting to create a synthesis of Ba'athism and Salafism to buttress his legitimacy. Saddam had begun Islamizing his foreign policy as early as 1982-83, making alliances with all manner of Islamist terrorists, thousands of whom came to Iraq for training in the 1990s, where they attended camps run by the Fedayeen. In the Fedayeen--connected to the global Islamist terrorist movement, combining elements of Ba'athism with an increasingly-stern Salafism--is a microcosm of the Saddam regime's mutation into the Islamic State (ISIS).

By the time the Fedayeen were created in October 1994, Saddam had already begun his mosque-building campaign and subsidizing religious teachers and imams, making them their communities' leaders, both policies laying the groundwork for the religiously-inspired post-Saddam insurgency. Gambling and public consumption of alcohol had already been banned, and zakat (the Islamic poor tax) and the Shari'a punishment for theft (amputation) had already been imposed. In August 1994, the regime made prostitution a capital crime.

A good example of the Fedayeen acting as a mutaween (religious police)--and not-incidentally foreshadowing ISIS--was the beheading of women accused of prostitution, with swords, in front of their own homes, before an assembled crowd, with their "heads...left on the front doorsteps...as a deterrent." Human rights groups say at least 200 women were beheaded in this way in the Saddam regime's final two years.

The Fedayeen produced gruesome propaganda videos showing barbarous acts--from eating live wolves to lurid forms of murder for "spies"--intended to further recruitment and to intimidate enemies. Military exploits by masked Fedayeen were also videoed and distributed. A focus was put on inculcating the "spirit" of the Fedayeen--believed by many senior Saddamists to be the "spirit" the regime needed to recover--in children, with camps set up where children were given guns and military training (again, on disseminated video). While corruption overtook the Saddam regime in the 1990s--even, in the compliment of vice to virtue, corruption within the regime's organized, sanctions-busting criminality--the reaction to corruption (financial and moral) in the Fedayeen was ferocious:

"Punishments ... included having one's hands amputated for theft, being tossed off a tower for sodomy, being whipped a hundred times for sexual harassment, having one's tongue cut out for lying, and being stoned for various other infractions. ... [m]ilitary failure also became punishable as a criminal offense."

There is more than an echo of ISIS in this.

When Saddam fell in April 2003, there were up to 95,000 "former regime elements" (FREs)--soldiers, militiamen, and intelligence officers and agents--still under arms, including 30,000 Fedayeen Saddam. When Saddam's Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, wrote to Saddam during the invasion that regime suicide bombers in civilian clothes should target the Americans to sow distrust and pre-emptively destabilize the occupation, it was almost certainly Fedayeen that Sabri had in mind for the job. The Fedayeen, often fighting in civilian garb, were almost the only force that did any fighting as the Coalition drove up to Baghdad.

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