The facility spread out below him, row after row of neatly aligned white aluminum roofs, looking like Chiclets set against the endless beige of the desert floor.
It was called Camp Bucca. To coalition forces in Iraq, it was the primary detention facility for enemy prisoners of war. To Mitchell Gray, then 48 and serving his country for the third time, it was simply the place where the US Army had decided his skills, which included a law degree and a fluency in Arabic, were needed most.
He and the rest of his unit, the 45th Infantry Brigade of the Oklahoma National Guard, were flying helicopters in from Kuwait. It was shortly after landing that he got a first glimpse at a few of the 26,000 detainees, staring at him from the other side of the concertina wire.
A soldier stands guard as detainees pray at a U.S. military detention facility Camp Bucca.
“You never see hatred on the faces of Americans like you saw on the faces of these detainees,” Gray remembers of his 2008 tour. “When I say they hated us, I mean they looked like they would have killed us in a heartbeat if given the chance. I turned to the warrant officer I was with and I said, ‘If they could, they would rip our heads off and drink our blood.’ ”
What Gray didn’t know — but might have expected — was that he was not merely looking at the United States’ former enemies, but its future ones as well. According to intelligence experts and Department of Defense records, the vast majority of the leadership of what is today known as ISIS, including its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, did time at Camp Bucca.
And not only did the US feed, clothe and house these jihadists, it also played a vital, if unwitting, role in facilitating their transformation into the most formidable terrorist force in modern history.
Camp Bucca started, as so many policy blunders do, with nothing but the best intentions. The Army simply needed a place to stick bad actors where they could not harm US troops.
The 800th Military Police Brigade, a reserve unit based on Long Island, were the ones who christened it Camp Bucca. It was fitting symbolism for a place designed to hold terrorists: Ronald Bucca was an FDNY marshall who died on 9/11.
For much of the war, Bucca might as well have been invisible to folks back home. The war correspondents focused their attention on Mosul or Fallujah, places where the bullets were flying and the blood was flowing. The only detention facility to gain real notice was Abu Ghraib, where abuses against Iraqi prisoners made headlines around the world.
Early in Bucca’s existence, the most extreme inmates were congregated in Compound 6. There were not enough Americans guards to safely enter the compound — and, in any event, the guards didn’t speak Arabic. So the detainees were left alone to preach to one another and share deadly vocational advice.
Adel Jasim Mohammed, a former detainee, once described the scene to Al Jazeera. “Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees,” Mohammed said. “I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers.”
They were also networking in ways that never would have been possible outside the wire. A few months back, The Guardian published an extraordinary interview with an ISIS leader it called Abu Ahmed, who described his years at Bucca in glowing terms.
This is the US prison where ISIS was born
“We had so much time to sit and plan,” Ahmed said. “It was the perfect environment. We all agreed to get together when we got out. The way to reconnect was easy. We wrote each other’s details on the elastic of our boxer shorts. When we got out, we called. Everyone who was important to me was written on white elastic. I had their phone numbers, their villages.”
“It really was that simple,” Ahmed said later during the interview. “Boxers helped us win the war.”
Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic state, spent 10 quiet months at Bucca. According to Pentagon records, he was released in December 2004. He was such a model inmate, a military review board deemed him not to be a significant threat.
Bucca also housed Haji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s air-defense force. Bakr was no religious zealot. He was just a guy who lost his job when the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi military and instituted de-Baathification, a policy of banning Saddam’s past supporters from government work.
According to documents recently obtained by German newspaper Der Spiegel, Bakr was the real mastermind behind ISIS’s organizational structure and also mapped out the strategies that fueled its early successes. Bakr, who died in fighting in 2014, was incarcerated at Bucca from 2006-’08, along with a dozen or more of ISIS’s top lieutenants.
The collusion at Bucca got so bad that when Marine Maj. Gen. Doug Stone was put in command of the camp in 2007, he became aware that some insurgents were allowing themselves to be caught so they could join their comrades.
“They showed up knowing about our intake process,” Stone said. “They would come in and say, ‘I believe this and such and therefore I’d like to get into Compound 34.’ These guys were using detention for their own purposes.”
Stone immediately set about breaking up the 1,000-man compounds into 10-man huts to limit inmate interaction. He released detainees who weren’t a threat, so they couldn’t be indoctrinated by the ones who were. He implemented an ideological re-education program, bringing in local imams to preach a moderate version of the Koran.
“It made a difference. And if we had done some of those things five or six years earlier, it might have made more of a difference,” Stone said. “At that point, it was probably too little too late.”
As the battle-weary US began scrambling for the exit in 2009, many former-and-future jihadists held at Bucca were simply let go. Others were released into the hands of Iraqi authorities, who proved inept at keeping them locked up.
One of the first priorities of the Islamic State when it began organizing and gaining strength in 2010 and 2011 was to spring its would-be compatriots, which it did through a combination of bribing corrupt Iraqi officials and staging coordinated attacks on the prisons.
“There were a number of detainees that when we left, we said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t let these guys out,’ ” Stone said. “But of course they all got free. There was a lot of talent and expertise there. They really broke out the Who’s Who in the Zoo.”
It is with sadness that Stone, Gray and other soldiers look at the chaos now in the region. They came to help an oppressed people build a new Iraq. The end result, as ISIS rewrites the rules of region, may be that Iraq is wiped off the map altogether.
“There were obviously mistakes made in how we handled Iraq,” said Greg, the ex-officer. “In retrospect, bringing every jihadi and insurgent into the same place and giving them all the time in the world to get to know one another may go down as our biggest mistake.”
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