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What is the Islamic State?
Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Timespublished confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.
We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.
Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)
We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamed Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.
The author describes how he tracked down the world’s most influential recruiters for the Islamic State—and how they reacted after reading this story.
There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam.
To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)
But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.
I. Devotion
In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video tracing its origins to bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi, the brutal head of al‑Qaeda in Iraq from roughly 2003 until his killing in 2006, as a more immediate progenitor, followed sequentially by two other guerrilla leaders before Baghdadi, the caliph. Notably unmentioned: bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, the owlish Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads al‑Qaeda. Zawahiri has not pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, and he is increasingly hated by his fellow jihadists. His isolation is not helped by his lack of charisma; in videos he comes across as squinty and annoyed. But the split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the making, and begins to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust of the latter.
Zawahiri’s companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda’s intellectual architect and the most important jihadist unknown to the average American newspaper reader. On most matters of doctrine, Maqdisi and the Islamic State agree. Both are closely identified with the jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, the “pious forefathers.” These forefathers are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.
The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.
Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man’s advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi’s penchant for bloody spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred of other Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous. “If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ ” the Prophet said, “then one of them is right.” If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi heedlessly expanded the range of behavior that could make Muslims infidels.
Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution and “not issue sweeping proclamations of takfir” or “proclaim people to be apostates because of their sins.” The distinction between apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.
Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.
Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.
Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.
Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.
Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to Haykel. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.
According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”
All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammad’s earliest conquests were not tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in the narrations of the Prophet’s rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent and violent time. In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”
The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.
Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”
Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few centuries had attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model than the Wahhabis of 18th‑century Arabia. They conquered most of what is now Saudi Arabia, and their strict practices survive in a diluted version of Sharia there. Haykel sees an important distinction between the groups, though: “The Wahhabis were not wanton in their violence.” They were surrounded by Muslims, and they conquered lands that were already Islamic; this stayed their hand. “ISIS, by contrast, is really reliving the early period.” Early Muslims were surrounded by non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri tendencies, considers itself to be in the same situation.
If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”
In October, Dabiq, the magazine of the Islamic State, published “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” an article that took up the question of whether Yazidis (the members of an ancient Kurdish sect that borrows elements of Islam, and had come under attack from Islamic State forces in northern Iraq) are lapsed Muslims, and therefore marked for death, or merely pagans and therefore fair game for enslavement. A study group of Islamic State scholars had convened, on government orders, to resolve this issue. If they are pagans, the article’s anonymous author wrote,
Yazidi women and children [are to be] divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations [in northern Iraq] … Enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.
II. Territory
Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated to the Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many other places. Many have come to fight, and many intend to die.
Peter R. Neumann, a professor at King’s College London, told me that online voices have been essential to spreading propaganda and ensuring that newcomers know what to believe. Online recruitment has also widened the demographics of the jihadist community, by allowing conservative Muslim women—physically isolated in their homes—to reach out to recruiters, radicalize, and arrange passage to Syria. Through its appeals to both genders, the Islamic State hopes to build a complete society.
In November, I traveled to Australia to meet Musa Cerantonio, a 30-year-old man whom Neumann and other researchers had identified as one of the two most important “new spiritual authorities” guiding foreigners to join the Islamic State. For three years he was a televangelist on Iqraa TV in Cairo, but he left after the station objected to his frequent calls to establish a caliphate. Now he preaches on Facebook and Twitter.
Cerantonio—a big, friendly man with a bookish demeanor—told me he blanches at beheading videos. He hates seeing the violence, even though supporters of the Islamic State are required to endorse it. (He speaks out, controversially among jihadists, against suicide bombing, on the grounds that God forbids suicide; he differs from the Islamic State on a few other points as well.) He has the kind of unkempt facial hair one sees on certain overgrown fans of The Lord of the Rings, and his obsession with Islamic apocalypticism felt familiar. He seemed to be living out a drama that looks, from an outsider’s perspective, like a medieval fantasy novel, only with real blood.
Last June, Cerantonio and his wife tried to emigrate—he wouldn’t say to where (“It’s illegal to go to Syria,” he said cagily)—but they were caught en route, in the Philippines, and he was deported back to Australia for overstaying his visa. Australia has criminalized attempts to join or travel to the Islamic State, and has confiscated Cerantonio’s passport. He is stuck in Melbourne, where he is well known to the local constabulary. If Cerantonio were caught facilitating the movement of individuals to the Islamic State, he would be imprisoned. So far, though, he is free—a technically unaffiliated ideologue who nonetheless speaks with what other jihadists have taken to be a reliable voice on matters of the Islamic State’s doctrine.
We met for lunch in Footscray, a dense, multicultural Melbourne suburb that’s home to Lonely Planet, the travel-guide publisher. Cerantonio grew up there in a half-Irish, half-Calabrian family. On a typical street one can find African restaurants, Vietnamese shops, and young Arabs walking around in the Salafi uniform of scraggly beard, long shirt, and trousers ending halfway down the calves.
Cerantonio explained the joy he felt when Baghdadi was declared the caliph on June 29—and the sudden, magnetic attraction that Mesopotamia began to exert on him and his friends. “I was in a hotel [in the Philippines], and I saw the declaration on television,” he told me. “And I was just amazed, and I’m like, Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?”
The last caliphate was the Ottoman empire, which reached its peak in the 16th century and then experienced a long decline, until the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, euthanized it in 1924. But Cerantonio, like many supporters of the Islamic State, doesn’t acknowledge that caliphate as legitimate, because it didn’t fully enforce Islamic law, which requires stonings and slavery and amputations, and because its caliphs were not descended from the tribe of the Prophet, the Quraysh.
Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his Mosul sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the caliphate—which had not functioned except in name for about 1,000 years—was a communal obligation. He and his loyalists had “hastened to declare the caliphate and place an imam” at its head, he said. “This is a duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been lost for centuries … The Muslims sin by losing it, and they must always seek to establish it.” Like bin Laden before him, Baghdadi spoke floridly, with frequent scriptural allusion and command of classical rhetoric. Unlike bin Laden, and unlike those false caliphs of the Ottoman empire, he is Qurayshi.
The caliphate, Cerantonio told me, is not just a political entity but also a vehicle for salvation. Islamic State propaganda regularly reports the pledges of baya’a (allegiance) rolling in from jihadist groups across the Muslim world. Cerantonio quoted a Prophetic saying, that to die without pledging allegiance is to die jahil (ignorant) and therefore die a “death of disbelief.” Consider how Muslims (or, for that matter, Christians) imagine God deals with the souls of people who die without learning about the one true religion. They are neither obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Cerantonio said, the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent god and prays, but who dies without pledging himself to a valid caliph and incurring the obligations of that oath, has failed to live a fully Islamic life. I pointed out that this means the vast majority of Muslims in history, and all who passed away between 1924 and 2014, died a death of disbelief. Cerantonio nodded gravely. “I would go so far as to say that Islam has been reestablished” by the caliphate.
I asked him about his own baya’a, and he quickly corrected me: “I didn’t say that I’d pledged allegiance.” Under Australian law, he reminded me, giving baya’a to the Islamic State was illegal. “But I agree that [Baghdadi] fulfills the requirements,” he continued. “I’m just going to wink at you, and you take that to mean whatever you want.”
To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority. This last criterion, Cerantonio said, is the hardest to fulfill, and requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State achieved that long before June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert within the group’s ranks—Cerantonio described him as “something of a leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a caliphate. He and others spoke quietly to those in power and told them that further delay would be sinful.
Cerantonio said a faction arose that was prepared to make war on Baghdadi’s group if it delayed any further. They prepared a letter to various powerful members of ISIS, airing their displeasure at the failure to appoint a caliph, but were pacified by Adnani, the spokesman, who let them in on a secret—that a caliphate had already been declared, long before the public announcement. They had their legitimate caliph, and at that point there was only one option. “If he’s legitimate,” Cerantonio said, “you must give him the baya’a.”
After Baghdadi’s July sermon, a stream of jihadists began flowing daily into Syria with renewed motivation. Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German author and former politician who visited the Islamic State in December, reported the arrival of 100 fighters at one Turkish-border recruitment station in just two days. His report, among others, suggests a still-steady inflow of foreigners, ready to give up everything at home for a shot at paradise in the worst place on Earth.
In London, a week before my meal with Cerantonio, I met with three ex-members of a banned Islamist group called Al Muhajiroun (The Emigrants): Anjem Choudary, Abu Baraa, and Abdul Muhid. They all expressed desire to emigrate to the Islamic State, as many of their colleagues already had, but the authorities had confiscated their passports. Like Cerantonio, they regarded the caliphate as the only righteous government on Earth, though none would confess having pledged allegiance. Their principal goal in meeting me was to explain what the Islamic State stands for, and how its policies reflect God’s law.
Choudary, 48, is the group’s former leader. He frequently appears on cable news, as one of the few people producers can book who will defend the Islamic State vociferously, until his mike is cut. He has a reputation in the United Kingdom as a loathsome blowhard, but he and his disciples sincerely believe in the Islamic State and, on matters of doctrine, speak in its voice. Choudary and the others feature prominently in the Twitter feeds of Islamic State residents, and Abu Baraa maintains a YouTube channel to answer questions about Sharia.
Since September, authorities have been investigating the three men on suspicion of supporting terrorism. Because of this investigation, they had to meet me separately: communication among them would have violated the terms of their bail. But speaking with them felt like speaking with the same person wearing different masks. Choudary met me in a candy shop in the East London suburb of Ilford. He was dressed smartly, in a crisp blue tunic reaching nearly to his ankles, and sipped a Red Bull while we talked.
Before the caliphate, “maybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,” Choudary told me. “These laws are in abeyance until we have khilafa”—a caliphate—“and now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example, individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the territory where the caliph is applying these laws. One of Choudary’s prize students, a convert from Hinduism named Abu Rumaysah, evaded police to bring his family of five from London to Syria in November. On the day I met Choudary, Abu Rumaysah tweeted out a picture of himself with a Kalashnikov in one arm and his newborn son in the other. Hashtag: #GenerationKhilafah.
The caliph is required to implement Sharia. Any deviation will compel those who have pledged allegiance to inform the caliph in private of his error and, in extreme cases, to excommunicate and replace him if he persists. (“I have been plagued with this great matter, plagued with this responsibility, and it is a heavy responsibility,” Baghdadi said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph commands obedience—and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are considered apostates.
Choudary said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its incomplete application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead murderers and cut off thieves’ hands. “The problem,” he explained, “is that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.” That whole package, he said, would include free housing, food, and clothing for all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work could do so.
Abdul Muhid, 32, continued along these lines. He was dressed in mujahideen chic when I met him at a local restaurant: scruffy beard, Afghan cap, and a wallet outside of his clothes, attached with what looked like a shoulder holster. When we sat down, he was eager to discuss welfare. The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit. Health care, he said, is free. (“Isn’t it free in Britain, too?,” I asked. “Not really,” he said. “Some procedures aren’t covered, such as vision.”) This provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy choice of the Islamic State, but a policyobligation inherent in God’s law.
III. The Apocalypse
All Muslims acknowledge that God is the only one who knows the future. But they also agree that he has offered us a peek at it, in the Koran and in narrations of the Prophet. The Islamic State differs from nearly every other current jihadist movement in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character. It is in this casting that the Islamic State is most boldly distinctive from its predecessors, and clearest in the religious nature of its mission.
In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political movement, with worldly goals in sight at all times—the expulsion of non-Muslims from the Arabian peninsula, the abolishment of the state of Israel, the end of support for dictatorships in Muslim lands. The Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running), but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. Bin Laden rarely mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to presume that he would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine comeuppance finally arrived. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni families who look down on this kind of speculation and think it’s something the masses engage in,” says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who is writing a book about the Islamic State’s apocalyptic thought.
During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the world. McCants says a prominent Islamist in Iraq approached bin Laden in 2008 to warn him that the group was being led by millenarians who were “talking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions” based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive. “Al-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders] to say ‘Cut it out.’ ”
For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need. Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the world—might look. Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do not yet have the status of doctrine. But other parts are based on mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.
The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.
“Dabiq is basically all farmland,” one Islamic State supporter recently tweeted. “You could imagine large battles taking place there.” The Islamic State’s propagandists drool with anticipation of this event, and constantly imply that it will come soon. The state’s magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.” A recent propaganda video shows clips from Hollywood war movies set in medieval times—perhaps because many of the prophecies specify that the armies will be on horseback or carrying ancient weapons.
Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. “Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said a masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who’d been held captive for more than a year. During fighting in Iraq in December, after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.
The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the enemy as Rome. Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely.
After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth, but Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus. An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.
“Only God knows” whether the Islamic State’s armies are the ones foretold, Cerantonio said. But he is hopeful. “The Prophet said that one sign of the imminent arrival of the End of Days is that people will for a long while stop talking about the End of Days,” he said. “If you go to the mosques now, you’ll find the preachers are silent about this subject.” On this theory, even setbacks dealt to the Islamic State mean nothing, since God has preordained the near-destruction of his people anyway. The Islamic State has its best and worst days ahead of it.
IV. The Fight
The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group’s actions. Osama bin Laden was seldom predictable. He ended his first television interview cryptically. CNN’s Peter Arnett asked him, “What are your future plans?” Bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.” By contrast, the Islamic State boasts openly about its plans—not all of them, but enough so that by listening carefully, we can deduce how it intends to govern and expand.
In London, Choudary and his students provided detailed descriptions of how the Islamic State must conduct its foreign policy, now that it is a caliphate. It has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as “offensive jihad,” the forcible expansion into countries that are ruled by non-Muslims. “Hitherto, we were just defending ourselves,” Choudary said; without a caliphate, offensive jihad is an inapplicable concept. But the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential duty of the caliph.
Choudary took pains to present the laws of war under which the Islamic State operates as policies of mercy rather than of brutality. He told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies—a holy order to scare the shit out of them with beheadings and crucifixions and enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.
Choudary’s colleague Abu Baraa explained that Islamic law permits only temporary peace treaties, lasting no longer than a decade. Similarly, accepting any border is anathema, as stated by the Prophet and echoed in the Islamic State’s propaganda videos. If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year. He may not rest, or he will fall into a state of sin.
One comparison to the Islamic State is the Khmer Rouge, which killed about a third of the population of Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge occupied Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. “This is not permitted,” Abu Baraa said. “To send an ambassador to the UN is to recognize an authority other than God’s.” This form of diplomacy is shirk, or polytheism, he argued, and would be immediate cause to hereticize and replace Baghdadi. Even to hasten the arrival of a caliphate by democratic means—for example by voting for political candidates who favor a caliphate—is shirk.
It’s hard to overstate how hamstrung the Islamic State will be by its radicalism. The modern international system, born of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, relies on each state’s willingness to recognize borders, however grudgingly. For the Islamic State, that recognition is ideological suicide. Other Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, have succumbed to the blandishments of democracy and the potential for an invitation to the community of nations, complete with a UN seat. Negotiation and accommodation have worked, at times, for the Taliban as well. (Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan exchanged ambassadors with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, an act that invalidated the Taliban’s authority in the Islamic State’s eyes.) To the Islamic State these are not options, but acts of apostasy.
The United States and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State belatedly and in an apparent daze. The group’s ambitions and rough strategic blueprints were evident in its pronouncements and in social-media chatter as far back as 2011, when it was just one of many terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq and hadn’t yet committed mass atrocities. Adnani, the spokesman, told followers then that the group’s ambition was to “restore the Islamic caliphate,” and he evoked the apocalypse, saying, “There are but a few days left.” Baghdadi had already styled himself “commander of the faithful,” a title ordinarily reserved for caliphs, in 2011. In April 2013, Adnani declared the movement “ready to redraw the world upon the Prophetic methodology of the caliphate.” In August 2013, he said, “Our goal is to establish an Islamic state that doesn’t recognize borders, on the Prophetic methodology.” By then, the group had taken Raqqa, a Syrian provincial capital of perhaps 500,000 people, and was drawing in substantial numbers of foreign fighters who’d heard its message.
If we had identified the Islamic State’s intentions early, and realized that the vacuum in Syria and Iraq would give it ample space to carry them out, we might, at a minimum, have pushed Iraq to harden its border with Syria and preemptively make deals with its Sunnis. That would at least have avoided the electrifying propaganda effect created by the declaration of a caliphate just after the conquest of Iraq’s third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama told The New Yorker that he consideredISIS to be al-Qaeda’s weaker partner. “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” the president said.
Our failure to appreciate the split between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the essential differences between the two, has led to dangerous decisions. Last fall, to take one example, the U.S. government consented to a desperate plan to save Peter Kassig’s life. The plan facilitated—indeed, required—the interaction of some of the founding figures of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and could hardly have looked more hastily improvised.
It entailed the enlistment of Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, the Zarqawi mentor and al-Qaeda grandee, to approach Turki al-Binali, the Islamic State’s chief ideologue and a former student of Maqdisi’s, even though the two men had fallen out due to Maqdisi’s criticism of the Islamic State. Maqdisi had already called for the state to extend mercy to Alan Henning, the British cabbie who had entered Syria to deliver aid to children. In December, The Guardian reported that the U.S. government, through an intermediary, had asked Maqdisi to intercede with the Islamic State on Kassig’s behalf.
Maqdisi was living freely in Jordan, but had been banned from communicating with terrorists abroad, and was being monitored closely. After Jordan granted the United States permission to reintroduce Maqdisi to Binali, Maqdisi bought a phone with American money and was allowed to correspond merrily with his former student for a few days, before the Jordanian government stopped the chats and used them as a pretext to jail Maqdisi. Kassig’s severed head appeared in the Dabiq video a few days later.
Maqdisi gets mocked roundly on Twitter by the Islamic State’s fans, and al‑Qaeda is held in great contempt for refusing to acknowledge the caliphate. Cole Bunzel, a scholar who studies Islamic State ideology, read Maqdisi’s opinion on Henning’s status and thought it would hasten his and other captives’ death. “If I were held captive by the Islamic State and Maqdisi said I shouldn’t be killed,” he told me, “I’d kiss my ass goodbye.”
Kassig’s death was a tragedy, but the plan’s success would have been a bigger one. A reconciliation between Maqdisi and Binali would have begun to heal the main rift between the world’s two largest jihadist organizations. It’s possible that the government wanted only to draw out Binali for intelligence purposes or assassination. (Multiple attempts to elicit comment from the FBI were unsuccessful.) Regardless, the decision to play matchmaker for America’s two main terrorist antagonists reveals astonishingly poor judgment.
Chastened by our earlier indifference, we are now meeting the Islamic State via Kurdish and Iraqi proxy on the battlefield, and with regular air assaults. Those strategies haven’t dislodged the Islamic State from any of its major territorial possessions, although they’ve kept it from directly assaulting Baghdad and Erbil and slaughtering Shia and Kurds there.
Some observers have called for escalation, including several predictable voices from the interventionist right (Max Boot, Frederick Kagan), who have urged the deployment of tens of thousands of American soldiers. These calls should not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly genocidal organization is on its potential victims’ front lawn, and it is committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls.
One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.
And yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment. Add the incompetence of our previous efforts as occupiers, and we have reason for reluctance. The rise of ISIS, after all, happened only because our previous occupation created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the consequences of another botched job?
Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.
The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest. Al-Qaeda’s core is rare among jihadist groups for its focus on the “far enemy” (the West); most jihadist groups’ main concerns lie closer to home. That’s especially true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its ideology. It sees enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the expansion to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much directly: in November he told his Saudi agents to “deal with the rafida [Shia] first … then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] … before the crusaders and their bases.”
The foreign fighters (and their wives and children) have been traveling to the caliphate on one-way tickets: they want to live under true Sharia, and many want martyrdom. Doctrine, recall, requires believers to reside in the caliphate if it is at all possible for them to do so. One of the Islamic State’s less bloody videos shows a group of jihadists burning their French, British, and Australian passports. This would be an eccentric act for someone intending to return to blow himself up in line at the Louvre or to hold another chocolate shop hostage in Sydney.
A few “lone wolf” supporters of the Islamic State have attacked Western targets, and more attacks will come. But most of the attackers have been frustrated amateurs, unable to immigrate to the caliphate because of confiscated passports or other problems. Even if the Islamic State cheers these attacks—and it does in its propaganda—it hasn’t yet planned and financed one. (The Charlie Hebdoattack in Paris in January was principally an al‑Qaeda operation.) During his visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees not as soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from the Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they review their religion.”
Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.
Even so, the death of the Islamic State is unlikely to be quick, and things could still go badly wrong: if the Islamic State obtained the allegiance of al‑Qaeda—increasing, in one swoop, the unity of its base—it could wax into a worse foe than we’ve yet seen. The rift between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda has, if anything, grown in the past few months; the December issue of Dabiq featured a long account of an al‑Qaeda defector who described his old group as corrupt and ineffectual, and Zawahiri as a distant and unfit leader. But we should watch carefully for a rapprochement.
Without a catastrophe such as this, however, or perhaps the threat of the Islamic State’s storming Erbil, a vast ground invasion would certainly make the situation worse.
V. Dissuasion
It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State “a problem with Islam.” The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.
Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.
The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: no question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.
Non-muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion properly. But Muslims have long since begun this debate within their own ranks. “You have to have standards,” Anjem Choudary told me. “Somebody could claim to be a Muslim, but if he believes in homosexuality or drinking alcohol, then he is not a Muslim. There is no such thing as a nonpracticing vegetarian.”
There is, however, another strand of Islam that offers a hard-line alternative to the Islamic State—just as uncompromising, but with opposite conclusions. This strand has proved appealing to many Muslims cursed or blessed with a psychological longing to see every jot and tittle of the holy texts implemented as they were in the earliest days of Islam. Islamic State supporters know how to react to Muslims who ignore parts of the Koran: with takfir and ridicule. But they also know that some other Muslims read the Koran as assiduously as they do, and pose a real ideological threat.
Baghdadi is Salafi. The term Salafi has been villainized, in part because authentic villains have ridden into battle waving the Salafi banner. But most Salafis are not jihadists, and most adhere to sects that reject the Islamic State. They are, as Haykel notes, committed to expanding Dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, even, perhaps, with the implementation of monstrous practices such as slavery and amputation—but at some future point. Their first priority is personal purification and religious observance, and they believe anything that thwarts those goals—such as causing war or unrest that would disrupt lives and prayer and scholarship—is forbidden.
They live among us. Last fall, I visited the Philadelphia mosque of Breton Pocius, 28, a Salafi imam who goes by the name Abdullah. His mosque is on the border between the crime-ridden Northern Liberties neighborhood and a gentrifying area that one might call Dar al-Hipster; his beard allows him to pass in the latter zone almost unnoticed.
Pocius converted 15 years ago after a Polish Catholic upbringing in Chicago. Like Cerantonio, he talks like an old soul, exhibiting deep familiarity with ancient texts, and a commitment to them motivated by curiosity and scholarship, and by a conviction that they are the only way to escape hellfire. When I met him at a local coffee shop, he carried a work of Koranic scholarship in Arabic and a book for teaching himself Japanese. He was preparing a sermon on the obligations of fatherhood for the 150 or so worshipers in his Friday congregation.
Pocius said his main goal is to encourage a halal life for worshipers in his mosque. But the rise of the Islamic State has forced him to consider political questions that are usually very far from the minds of Salafis. “Most of what they’ll say about how to pray and how to dress is exactly what I’ll say in mymasjid [mosque]. But when they get to questions about social upheaval, they sound like Che Guevara.”
When Baghdadi showed up, Pocius adopted the slogan “Not my khalifa.” “The times of the Prophet were a time of great bloodshed,” he told me, “and he knew that the worst possible condition for all people was chaos, especially within the umma [Muslim community].” Accordingly, Pocius said, the correct attitude for Salafis is not to sow discord by factionalizing and declaring fellow Muslims apostates.
Instead, Pocius—like a majority of Salafis—believes that Muslims should remove themselves from politics. These quietist Salafis, as they are known, agree with the Islamic State that God’s law is the only law, and they eschew practices like voting and the creation of political parties. But they interpret the Koran’s hatred of discord and chaos as requiring them to fall into line with just about any leader, including some manifestly sinful ones. “The Prophet said: as long as the ruler does not enter into clear kufr [disbelief], give him general obedience,” Pocius told me, and the classic “books of creed” all warn against causing social upheaval. Quietist Salafis are strictly forbidden from dividing Muslims from one another—for example, by mass excommunication. Living without baya’a, Pocius said, does indeed make one ignorant, or benighted. But baya’a need not mean direct allegiance to a caliph, and certainly not to Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi. It can mean, more broadly, allegiance to a religious social contract and commitment to a society of Muslims, whether ruled by a caliph or not.
Quietist Salafis believe that Muslims should direct their energies toward perfecting their personal life, including prayer, ritual, and hygiene. Much in the same way ultra-Orthodox Jews debate whether it’s kosher to tear off squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that count as “rending cloth”?), they spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that their trousers are not too long, that their beards are trimmed in some areas and shaggy in others. Through this fastidious observance, they believe, God will favor them with strength and numbers, and perhaps a caliphate will arise. At that moment, Muslims will take vengeance and, yes, achieve glorious victory at Dabiq. But Pocius cites a slew of modern Salafi theologians who argue that a caliphate cannot come into being in a righteous way except through the unmistakable will of God.
The Islamic State, of course, would agree, and say that God has anointed Baghdadi. Pocius’s retort amounts to a call to humility. He cites Abdullah Ibn Abbas, one of the Prophet’s companions, who sat down with dissenters and asked them how they had the gall, as a minority, to tell the majority that it was wrong. Dissent itself, to the point of bloodshed or splitting the umma, was forbidden. Even the manner of the establishment of Baghdadi’s caliphate runs contrary to expectation, he said. “Thekhilafa is something that Allah is going to establish,” he told me, “and it will involve a consensus of scholars from Mecca and Medina. That is not what happened. ISIS came out of nowhere.”
The Islamic State loathes this talk, and its fanboys tweet derisively about quietist Salafis. They mock them as “Salafis of menstruation,” for their obscure judgments about when women are and aren’t clean, and other low-priority aspects of life. “What we need now is fatwa about how it’s haram [forbidden] to ride a bike on Jupiter,” one tweeted drily. “That’s what scholars should focus on. More pressing than state of Ummah.” Anjem Choudary, for his part, says that no sin merits more vigorous opposition than the usurpation of God’s law, and that extremism in defense of monotheism is no vice.
Pocius doesn’t court any kind of official support from the United States, as a counterweight to jihadism. Indeed, official support would tend to discredit him, and in any case he is bitter toward America for treating him, in his words, as “less than a citizen.” (He alleges that the government paid spies to infiltrate his mosque and harassed his mother at work with questions about his being a potential terrorist.)
Still, his quietist Salafism offers an Islamic antidote to Baghdadi-style jihadism. The people who arrive at the faith spoiling for a fight cannot all be stopped from jihadism, but those whose main motivation is to find an ultraconservative, uncompromising version of Islam have an alternative here. It is not moderate Islam; most Muslims would consider it extreme. It is, however, a form of Islam that the literal-minded would not instantly find hypocritical, or blasphemously purged of its inconveniences. Hypocrisy is not a sin that ideologically minded young men tolerate well.
Western officials would probably do best to refrain from weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate altogether. Barack Obama himself drifted into takfiri waters when he claimed that the Islamic State was “not Islamic”—the irony being that he, as the non-Muslim son of a Muslim, may himself be classified as an apostate, and yet is now practicing takfir against Muslims. Non-Muslims’ practicingtakfir elicits chuckles from jihadists (“Like a pig covered in feces giving hygiene advice to others,” one tweeted).
I suspect that most Muslims appreciated Obama’s sentiment: the president was standing with them against both Baghdadi and non-Muslim chauvinists trying to implicate them in crimes. But most Muslims aren’t susceptible to joining jihad. The ones who are susceptible will only have had their suspicions confirmed: the United States lies about religion to serve its purposes.
Within the narrow bounds of its theology, the Islamic State hums with energy, even creativity. Outside those bounds, it could hardly be more arid and silent: a vision of life as obedience, order, and destiny. Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary could mentally shift from contemplating mass death and eternal torture to discussing the virtues of Vietnamese coffee or treacly pastry, with apparent delight in each, yet to me it seemed that to embrace their views would be to see all the flavors of this world grow insipid compared with the vivid grotesqueries of the hereafter.
I could enjoy their company, as a guilty intellectual exercise, up to a point. In reviewing Mein Kampf in March 1940, George Orwell confessed that he had “never been able to dislike Hitler”; something about the man projected an underdog quality, even when his goals were cowardly or loathsome. “If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.” The Islamic State’s partisans have much the same allure. They believe that they are personally involved in struggles beyond their own lives, and that merely to be swept up in the drama, on the side of righteousness, is a privilege and a pleasure—especially when it is also a burden.
Fascism, Orwell continued, is
psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
Nor, in the case of the Islamic State, its religious or intellectual appeal. That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may convince some potential converts that the group’s message is false, and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn’t last until the end of time.
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1 public comment
The same debate of "being the tool of the apocalypse" versus "you cant force gods hand" plays out in jewish and evangelic circles, not quite as obviously but just as dangerously
IDLE, BRADFORD, UNITED KINGDOM
Signed in as mikenova
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ISIS Is Losing Its Greatest Weapon: Momentum
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/" rel="nofollow">www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/</a>...isis.../384261/ - The Atlantic
ISIS vs. the Kurds - The New Yorker
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/fight-lives" rel="nofollow">www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/fight-lives</a> - The New Yorker
Isis: the inside story | Martin Chulov
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/.../-sp-" rel="nofollow">www.theguardian.com/world/2014/.../-sp-</a>isis-the-inside-sto... - The Guardian
Searches related to ISIS
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Lyudmila Savchuk fights on the net for the Kremlin. Source: AFP
You’re in a crowded lift when it stalls. It’s a public holiday, the emergency number doesn’t work and you look around at your companions — a pallid Julian Assange, a puffed-up George Galloway, the hobgoblin Larry King, a crazed former stockbroker, a wad of blogging conspiracy theorists — and you wonder if there’s enough oxygen to go round.
That, in a nutshell, is the experience of watching Russia Today, the stuff of nightmares in which, according to the channel’s logo, we are challenged to “Question More” but receive mainly mendacious answers.
Lavishly funded at $US400 million ($523m) a year, broadcasting to 700 million households, RT is the Kremlin’s battering ram in the information war against the West. It’s a war that we are losing. A South American friend asks why the British are so closed to the Russian point of view. An Egyptian wonders why we don’t give Vladimir Putin a fair chance — as if the Kremlin leader were in some way bound by scruple.
These intelligent people are the target audience for a television station that is trying to convince the billions of non-aligned people who make up the BRIC countries that RT are truth-tellers in a world dominated by warped Western news values.
The foreign audience is offered competing narratives for any event that risks tarnishing the reputation of the Russian leadership. Compare Western coverage of the A320 disaster — the speed and plausibility of the analysis, the questions raised about the pilot — with the shooting down last summer of Malaysia Airlines MH17 over eastern Ukraine.
Since pro-Russian gunmen controlled access to the crash site, time was bought for the full panoply of Kremlin-steered media to obfuscate and camouflage. First version from lifenews.ru: a Ukrainian air force transport plane had been shot down in a legitimate act of war. By the time RT chipped in, it was a failed attempt to assassinate Putin by Ukraine’s Western backers.
The point of the Babel: to cover the tracks of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, now widely understood to have masterminded the rebel fighting in eastern Ukraine. It’s not just about RT, of course. Russia runs an army of internet trolls who are paid to flood forums with pro-Kremlin comments.
The bloodiest contribution to the global information war is surely being made by the tech-savvy jihadists of Islamic State who produce a steady stream of English-language videos, who started an Arabic-language Twitter app, who have piggybacked on hashtags related to the World Cup and who know how to celebrate themselves on YouTube.
The aim of Islamic State news warriors is to convince all Muslims that establishing a caliphate is a religious duty. We haven’t managed to interrupt or recast this message, relying too heavily on imams to set young Muslims straight. And we’re losing with Russia by failing to make any impact on Putin’s behaviour; we have not diminished his domestic support and we haven’t persuaded the internet community that Moscow’s snatch of Crimea is a real rupture.
In the US and Britain, the call has gone up for more public funding of television and radio stations, from Radio Free Europe to BBC World Service, to counter the surge in anti-Western propaganda. That response is too anchored in Cold War thinking.
Yes, trusted news outlets will eventually win out, but in the meantime there are arguments to be waged and won. Above all we have to persuade young people across the globe that invading countries, breaching frontiers and decapitating prisoners is not part of some spurious “success” story. That demands a fast, authoritative response.
In Russia there should be closer co-operation between the West and local activists who are, for example, monitoring the number of Russian soldiers brought home from Ukraine in body bags. It means publicising financial links between the Russian and disgraced Ukrainian elites, ties between the arms industries of the two countries.
As for Islamic State, if the West is to go on the news offensive then we must show that jihadists are unable to hold territory for long (no land = no caliphate), that their commanders are corrupt, that the fight is largely Muslims killing other Muslims. Young aspiring holy warriors in Britain and the rest of Europe are not getting this message.
There is a role for Western states in this information war. But chiefly, the impetus in standing up for a vibrant, self-confident West should come from private concerns.
The battles swirling around us are not so much about territory as about values. We are letting others win this argument by default.
THE TIMES
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According to Reuters and a federal agency report, the United States is losing an information waragainst Russia and ISIS terrorists, while government-run news operations fail to be effective among foreign audiences.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which spearheads US government foreign broadcasting of radio and television, warned that the firewall separating the semi-official news organizations from US national security agencies is “overblown.”
Furthermore, the BBG report noted that outlets such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty do not always correspond with US foreign policy objectives. According to Jeff Trimble, the deputy director of the BBG’s International Broadcasting Bureau, Russia regularly blocks US government broadcasts abroad.
“Competitors with anti-US messaging are fomenting an information war – and winning – while US international broadcasting is challenged to keep pace with competitors and changes in the media landscape,” the report said. “US international communications strategy should be rebuilt from the ground up,” it recommended.
It was reported that Russia spends around $400-$500 million a year on its foreign propaganda, while the US provides its Russian-speaking news services with about $20 million.
“What the US is doing is just not enough,” Alexei Medvedev, CEO of AICP (‘Analytics, Information, Counter-Propaganda’) organization, told ValueWalk. “Look at the numbers that indicate Russia’s spending on its propaganda, and then compare it with the US’s numbers. What the US needs to do is strengthen its information defense-and-attack tactics. Look at the Baltics, they are eager to believe [Vladimir] Putin now. How ridiculous is that? Although if you look at the broadcasts distributed by the Kremlin in the Baltic states, you can clearly see why people of the region tend to believe Russia’s words; it looks very much believable, so we can’t really blame the Baltics.”
Last year the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania temporarily banned Russian broadcasters. The third Baltic state of Estonia is poised to launch its own general televised channel aimed at the Russian-speaking minority, which is the quarter of Estonia’s population.
“The US wants to remain the big dog on the block”
US wants to “remain the big dog on the block” in the competition against Russia and China, Dr. Conn Hallinan, a columnist at Foreign Policy In Focus, told Russia Today.
When asked if the BBG exaggerates Moscow by requesting some $15 million to “counter a revanchist Russia”, compared to its combined efforts against the Islamic State ISIS which amount to about $6.1 million, Dr. Conn Hallinan said that the word ‘exaggerates’ “would be a mild term.”
“If you read the document, it refers to “Russian aggression”, that’s a direct quote, “destabilizing Europe” and it uses the term “revanchist” now. That was the term the French used about Nazi Germany prior to WWII. So to suggest this is a little off the edge, it’s much more than an exaggeration,” he said.
Dr. Conn Hallinan pointed out that the US currently pays about 70% of NATO’s costs and want to bring that number down, while also trying to get the NATO members to increase their contributions up to 2% of their budgets.
“Very few countries have done that. Poland is one of the few countries that have done that. The British have already announced that they have no intention of doing that. So part of this is scare tactic is to get NATO countries to come up with some more money,” he noted.
He also reminded that US troops are training the Ukraine’s national guard, while Washington’s special forces are also stationed in Poland and the Baltics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia). “[Carl] von Clausewitz once said that the realm of war is uncertainly (“War is the realm of uncertainty”) and I see it moving in that direction and it’s a little scary.”
In Dr. Conn Hallinan’s opinion, it’s “quite amusing” that the BBG report believes in Fox news’ “fair and balanced reporting”.
“Now that’s the slogan of Fox news – “fair and balanced reporting”. And Fox News is probably the most editorial of all of the American outlets. So I find it interesting that in a Congressional document they are actually advertising Fox News, one of the most inaccurate sources of news that you could possibly have in the US,” he said.
“I don’t think the US considers the Islamic State a threat”
Commenting on the difference of BBG’s requested spending on countering Russia and ISIS, Dr. Conn Hallinan pointed out that “it’s almost three times as much money.” “Again I think the reason is that for all of the talk about the Islamic State I do not think the US considers the Islamic State a threat. I don’t think that they see them as a real threat to American security,” he added.
“I think they are [US] in competition with a number of countries in the world, Russia and China being the two most prominent. This is not about destabilizing Europe, the revanchism, Russian aggression any more than it is about the Chinese aggression in East Asia. What it’s about is the US wants to remain the big dog on the block and the competition for that right now is Russia and China,” he expressed his opinion.
Furthermore, he added that the US doesn’t like the fact that both Russia and China have established alternate global poles of power and finance such as Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS. “It [US] doesn’t like this new Chinese bank which is formed up, doesn’t like it the bank which the Russians have put together for Central Asia.”
However, in his opinion it’s all about the economic and political competition. “It’s not that we really think those countries represent a threat. The danger is if you talk in a certain way you may convince a number of people that that’s the way things really are, and that’s the danger of uncertainty and where mistakes can lead to some very bad things.”
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Iraqi families fleeing the violence in Tal Afar, west of Mosul, arrive at Shangal, a town in Ninevah province, June 17, 2014. (photo by REUTERS/ Ari Jala)
Author: Omar al-Jaffal Posted June 19, 2014
The Iraqi government has yet to tell its side of the story after the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) occupied the province of Ninevah on June 10, leaving the door open for interpretations and rumors. The central government in Baghdad shut down social media websites to prevent rumors about the fall of cities and the defeat of the army at the hands of ISIS from spreading.
Summary⎙ Print
A member of the Iraqi Baath Party claims that 14 different factions, including the Baathists, were involved in the takeover of Ninevah province on June 10.
At this point, what is certain is that ISIS did not enter Ninevah alone, but was accompanied by other armed factions that have been trying for a while to destabilize the security situation in Iraq.
A prominent member of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, whose rule was overturned in Iraq upon the US occupation of Baghdad in 2003, told Al-Monitor, “Fourteen factions have joined efforts to enter Ninevah.”
The party member, who was an officer in the army of the late leader Saddam Hussein, said on condition of anonymity, “The Baath Party was compelled to be involved in this battle since the successive Iraqi governments have shut all doors in its face.”
The armed organizations that occupied Ninevah removed all the road blocks to prove to citizens that they are better than the Iraqi government, knowing that the latter had excessively used road blocks during its control over the province. Eyewitnesses in Ninevah recounted how ISIS tried to make theresidents feel secure to gain their support for the imminent battles to be fought with the Iraqi army.
Um Ahmad, a housewife from Mosul, told Al-Monitor over the phone, “ISIS distributed flyers prohibiting smoking and imposing the veil on women. These lists will comprise more bans, everyone knows it.”
Um Ahmad, who was relying on the Iraqi and US air forces to take Mosul back after it suddenly fell under the control of militants, said, “The situation is calm. There are no clashes. We hear about bombardment, but it has yet to reach our region.”
ISIS is committing massacres against the residents of Ninevah. Reports are emerging that women have committed suicide after being raped by militants.
The Baath Party, which ruled Iraq from 1968 until 2003, was divided into several factions. The two most prominent — that of Izzat al-Douri, the second strongman after Saddam and the deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, and the faction of Brig. Gen. Mohammad Younes al-Ahmad, who assumed many positions in Saddam's government — had fallen into a fierce dispute in 2006.
The dispute became of paramount importance after Ahmad split from Douri and called for a review of Saddam’s era. The Baath Party member, however, affirms that both factions found their chance with ISIS entering Ninevah after they hit rock bottom.
The Syrian regime sponsored both factions in the years following the invasion of Iraq. It was also suspected of sheltering Ahmad. The party member, however, ruled out the possibility that Syria was involved in sponsoring the Baathist entry into Mosul. Yet, he affirmed, “Both factions have made up under vague circumstances, or else they would not have agreed on this operation.”
The source, whose relative was a minister in Saddam's government, said, “The arrogance of [Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki and his circle has prevented the reconciliation with the Baath [Party],” adding, “As long as [Baath members] are marginalized with no decent livelihood, they will remain an easy catch for ISIS and even worse organizations.”
The member split from Ahmad's faction in 2009 and founded a new party that negotiated with Izzat Shabandar, a parliamentarian who was close to Maliki, to enter the political process. He told Al-Monitor, “The army is taking back Mosul.”
The same source said, “The army was weak due to the corruption of the military instruction, which Maliki has made part of the sectarian quotas.”
Read More: <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/iraq-mosul-takeover-factions-isis-baath-party.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/iraq-mosul-takeover-factions-isis-baath-party.html</a>
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An extremist Al Qaeda offshoot is far from the only anti-government group sewing chaos in Iraq.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) wrested control of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, from the Iraqi government last week. ISIS, which was actually kicked out of Al Qaeda's global network in February, was quick to claim that their success against an overwhelmingly larger force was proof of God's favor.
In actuality, ISIS managed to achieve their blitz across Iraq by forming an unlikely coalition with upwards of 41 different armed Sunni groups throughout the country. Though ideologically diverse, the groups had all grown tired of Baghdad's preferential treatment of the Shia majority in the country.
Among the more noteworthy of the parties aligned with ISIS is the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order.
The Naqshbandis, located primarily in Mosul, were formed in 2007 by former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's former deputy and the head of the Baath party following Saddam's execution in 2007, is in charge of the group.
Douri has been in hiding since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and he managed to evade capture despite a $10 million bounty for his capture or death. Douri was the king of spades in decks of playing cards distributed to U.S. soldiers during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Today, Douri is openly directing operations of the Naqshbandis in Mosul.
The Naqshbandis command broad influence both within Iraq and over ISIS. The order is estimated to have thousands of soldiers, many of whom were previously members of the Iraqi army before the U.S. invasion. In some cases, like during the ISIS capture of Tal Afar, the attacking force was actually comprised almost entirely of the former Baathists.
The Naqshbandis have also significantly shaped the inner workings of ISIS. A former Baathist colonel was reportedly behind the ascension of ISIS's current leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, to power after his predecessor was killed in 2010. The Naqshbandis have also held direct talks with ISIS that have given the group governing power over conquered territory for the time being.
This alliance between ISIS and the Naqshbandis is an one that seems to be purely out of convenience. It's unlikely to last, especially as the conflict in Iraq becomes more drawn out.
Hassan Hassan, a research associate with the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi, told The Daily Beast that there is a significant gulf between the two groups as “ISIS considers that Baathists follow an un-Islamic ideology.” Baathism is a nationalist philosophy that is diametrically opposed to ISIS's goal of creating a modern Islamic caliphate.
But for now, ISIS and the Naqshbandis are finding common ground. With Iraq's sectarian crisis escalating, these two very different Sunni groups are buying into the idea that the enemy of an enemy can be a very useful friend.
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Shia militias have helped fight Isis, but many worry they are pushing their own brand of sectarianism
Iraqi security forces in Tikrit after pushing Isis out of the city with help from Shiite militiamen
t was a trip he took often, a 90-minute drive from his mansion on the outskirts of Babel province to the capital. But something went wrong around the time he was stopped at one of many checkpoints in southern Baghdad. Exactly what transpired remains unclear, but the night ended with Qassem Jenabi, a prominent Sunni tribal leader, his son Mohamed and their five bodyguards dead, their bullet-riddled bodies dumped next to their car. Nearly $7,000 in cash was untouched, and Mr Jenabi’s nephew, a member of Iraq’s parliament, was let go, as if the killers did not want the international attention that would come with murdering an elected official.
“The militias did this,” said Salman Jumaili, Iraq’s minister of planning, who was among the thousands attending Jenabi’s February 16 funeral service, held amid tight security for fear Isis militants would dispatch a suicide bomber. “The Iraqi armed forces and volunteers are fighting Isis. The militias, the extremists, are fighting people like Sheikh Qassem.”
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With a combination of US-led air strikes, revamped uniformed security forces, Iranian-backed Shia militias and others joining the fight, Isis is slowly being pushed out of Iraq, most recently in Tikrit. But the dirty war against Isis is transforming this oil-rich country into something akin to a mirror image of Isis’s sectarian vision, in ways that could have an impact for decades.
Just as Isis attempts to cleanse Shia and Kurds from Sunni areas, the government-backed response is also further upending the sectarian topography of the country — an effort that Mr Jenabi was attempting to counter when he was murdered. The fight against Isis is elevating Iranian-backed Shia militias to positions of serious power in the country, each wooden coffin returning from the battlefront further strengthening the militia’s political strength. “There is no doubt that Isis will be defeated,” said a western diplomat in the capital. “The big question is, what next? It’s a matter of what Iraq ends up looking like at the end of this process. The Shia militias are the next big challenge.”
There are signs of competition between the militia groups for control of key installations, including military bases and roadways — though there is no evidence the militias are seeking to usurp the state’s authority over key oil installations.
“If we use the militias to liberate the occupied cities, once it is finished, what do we do?” asks Faeq al-Sheikh Ali, one of a small number of liberal lawmakers in Iraq’s parliament. “Dismiss them? Cut their salaries? Take away their guns? The answer is there’s nothing we can do. Because they will be a second power to the state.”
Shia occupation
“Daesh”, says the red spray paint scrawled on the walls of house after house along the road in northern Diyala province, about 100 miles northeast of the capital, using the Arabic acronym for Isis. After the months-long struggle to dislodge Isis from the province, militiamen accompanied by a local official drove along the route, identifying the houses of collaborators. “These people won’t be able to return to their homes,” says a soldier.
Back at the nearby base, General Ali Hossein Wazir al-Shammari describes how Shia militiamen worked hand-in-hand with his soldiers to dislodge Isis from the region. They now work together to prevent Isis from returning and to monitor the activities of locals he accused of collaborating with jihadis. “At the beginning, the people of the villages prepared bread for them,” he says. “They hung our soldiers by their feet. They beheaded civilians suspected of working with the soldiers.”
Some Iraqi politicians and western commentators equate the actions of Shia militias and Isis, but this underplays Isis’s brutality. Shia atrocities documented by human rights groups and journalists are nowhere near on the scale of Isis, which executed hundreds of captured Iraqi soldiers in a single day in Tikrit last year and bragged about it.
Isis foreign fighters film themselves beheading other foreigners and burning people alive, while Iranian commander General Qassem Soleimani — who advises and, some say, oversees military operations against Isis — posts photos of himself kissing Iraqi babies on social media. “In reality, you can compromise and have a dialogue with the militias,” said Sheikh Hekmat Suleiman, a Sunni politician and adviser to the government on Anbar province. “There is no dialogue with [Isis].”
But Iraq’s sectarian hostilities run deep. Saddam Hussein and his Sunni predecessors sought to dilute the power of Iraq’s Shia majority by encouraging Sunni to settle in a belt around Baghdad. Today, the Shia armed groups overseeing Sunni areas create an atmosphere of vindictive occupation.
Mr Jenabi, the murdered tribal leader, lived in an area south of Baghdad that had been targeted by what appeared to be a sectarian cleansing campaign that included mass arrests, home demolitions and the closing of irrigation canals. “The militias cut off the water,” Mr Jenabi told the Financial Times in September. “The militias took all of our weapons, and even the army does not dare challenge them.”
Spurts of violence aside, it is the gross imbalances of sectarian power within Iraq’s security system — and their amplification after Isis’s arrival last year — that will have the deepest and most lasting impact on Iraq.
“When they put their hands in their pockets, I’m afraid they’re going to pull out a grenade,” says Hamid el-Yasseri, the leader of a Shia fighting group, just moments after leaving a conversation with a group of older Sunni men. “All their sons are with the terrorists.”
The same comments could have been made by a US army officer during the American occupation that began 12 years ago.
A popular surge
Shia militiamen, many with training or funding from Iran, emerged as an important force in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion. But after peaking in the late 2000s, their influence began to wane, especially after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared a war to crush them in southern Iraq.
The rise of Isis and the subsequent edict by Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s highest-ranking Shia cleric, calling on all young men to volunteer to fight the group allowed them to re-enter Iraq’s security institutions.
Estimates of the total numbers of men fighting as part of the so-called popular mobilisation units vary from 50,000 to 100,000, as does the balance between numbers of militiamen and bona fide volunteers.
An official of the powerful Iranian-backed Badr Organisation militia, led by former transport minister Hadi Ameri, estimates that the number of recruits in Diyala province doubled to 12,000 in the 10 months after Isis’s June 10 takeover of Mosul. “The Shia volunteers who are organised based on Sistani’s call have played an important role at least to stop Isis,” said a high-ranking Iraqi official. “These are the genuine ones. There are other groups who are more organised militias who are also trying to make use of this. This is the problem.”
Shia miltiamen of the Badr Organisation in training at a camp in northeast Iraq
The militias have grown so powerful that they have begun to eclipse not only the armed forces and the army of genuine volunteers, but also the government itself. Despite entreaties by both the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and Ayatollah Sistani, who has issued multiple statements spelling out in detail how Iraqi soldiers and militiamen are to conduct themselves on the battlefield, allegations of abuses continue, ranging from unverified video footage showing Iraqi soldiers murdering civilians to well-documented reports by international human rights organisations.
“The people killing us are the militias,” Mr Jenabi said in the interview months before his death. “They say they are the government. But they won’t show themselves or announce themselves. I assure you if we go to where they are, they will kill us.”
Mr Yasseri, whose volunteer unit is manning the front against Isis in Sunni Anbar province, says he realised the power of the militias after criticising the role of Iran and the armed groups it supported during a meeting with Mr Abadi.
“‘Be careful — they will kill you,’” he claims the prime minister quietly warned him afterward.
The art of killing
Every fighter at the Badr Organisation training camp is eager to pose for pictures, save the trainer speaking Lebanese-accented Arabic. “Point the camera away,” he demands.
Isis and the Shia militias are in no ways mirror images of each other, but
a curious symmetry is developing between the two camps. Just as Isis recruits foreign fighters from across the Middle East to bolster its ranks, so too have the militias brought aboard Iranians and possible Lebanese Hizbollah militiamen, though “as advisers not as fighters,” concedes Mr Ameri, the commander of the Badr, in an interview.
a curious symmetry is developing between the two camps. Just as Isis recruits foreign fighters from across the Middle East to bolster its ranks, so too have the militias brought aboard Iranians and possible Lebanese Hizbollah militiamen, though “as advisers not as fighters,” concedes Mr Ameri, the commander of the Badr, in an interview.
Faced with the ingenious brutality of Isis booby traps — improvised explosives set inside refrigerators stocked with food or attached to coveted weapons gripped by dead fighters — Mr Yasseri’s men near Falloujah have begun building their own deadly bombs.
In one scheme, they rig an oxygen tank to an explosive device and lure the Isis fighters towards it. “There were six or seven of them,” says Mr Yasseri, with relish. “When they were close we set it off.”
Just as Isis has been accused of massacres to terrorise civilian populations into submission or displacement, so too have the Shia militias been implicated in murders with sectarian overtones. Human Rights Watch alleged militiamen attached to several organisations embarked on sectarian cleansing sprees.
But while the jihadi group proudly publicises its massacres, Shia militias commit their atrocities under cover of darkness. Mr Ameri vowed to refer any wrongdoers within his ranks to the judiciary. “I have taken the decision to arrest anyone who kidnaps and commits assassinations,” he says.
Mr Jenabi’s killers have yet to be brought to justice. According to relatives and official accounts, his abductors somehow managed to snatch him in a heavily trafficked highway and make it past perhaps a dozen checkpoints, controlled by armed forces or militias, between southern and eastern Baghdad. “It was a political message to all the Sunni politicians that we militias are here so watch what you say,” a relative of Mr Jenabi says.
Mr Jenabi, who spent three years of his life in Basra’s notorious US-run Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca prisons as a suspected insurgent supporter, described himself as a businessman, agriculturalist and land developer. In the interview before his death, he railed against a government he described as “a multitude of gangs and mafias” unable to protect his people from either Isis militants or Shia militias.
“They want us to leave this area,” he said. “But we will never leave here, even if they cut us into pieces.”
| Intelligence: Cracking the code and learning Isis’s culture |
|---|
“Markazi, markazi,” crackles the voice on the radio, an Isis fighter in Falloujah calling into headquarters. A procession of seemingly nonsensical words follow. But since November, the Shia volunteer forces have figured out Isis’s codes. Y-14, for example, means an American jet is overhead.
Despite constant adjustments of code words and frequencies, the Shia fighters have blunted Isis’s battle plans and exploited attack opportunities. But they have also come to understand the culture of Isis in Anbar province, how it enforces discipline and rewards true believers.
Isis fighters have no access to telephone, television, radio or internet. Their only source of information is the walkie-talkie system, which occasionally issues news updates. “They do not even have watches,” says Hamid al-Yasseri, commander of a Shia volunteer unit. “They even ask about the time through the radio.”
Foreign accents pop up occasionally, especially those of Saudis and north Africans, but Mr Yasseri says he gleaned that most of the fighters served in either the old Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein or took part in the insurgency against the Americans. “If someone does something wrong they lose their leave,” Mr Yasseri says. “When they find someone with a mobile [telephone], they will announce his name on the radio.”
Sometimes the conversations give the men a laugh. The fighters often demand women for marriage, threatening to withdraw if they do not get brides. “The leaders promise them that women will be brought from Mosul,” Mr Yasseri says. “We hear them talking about it on the radio. We also hear the wedding schedule. Sawsaon marries X from 9am to 12pm and someone else marries Y from 1pm to 3pm and so on.”
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WASHINGTON — ISIS lacks sufficient military grade weaponry, but that doesn’t mean it has conceded defeat, according to new findings shared by experts Tuesday at the Stimson Center.
“We can say that the deployment and manufacture of IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices]… is being done on an industrial scale and in an unprecedented fashion” in Iraq and Syria, said Jonah Leff, Director of Operations at Conflict Armament Research.
“We’ve never ever seen anything like this.”
Conflict Armament Research (CAR) is a UK-based organization that has been in operation for a little more than a year, and is primarily funded by the European Union in order to track and map illicit weapons used in conflict zones.
They found that ISIS is clearly lacking when it comes to sufficient military-grade equipment, and that’s why they are becoming increasingly dependent on homemade and improvised explosives.
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As ISIS first blitzed across northern Iraq in June 2014, the militants seized large quantities of US arms and vehicles from the fleeing Iraqi forces.
Over the almost past year of fighting, however, ISIS has gone from fielding large quantities of US weapons to using a mixture of Iranian, Chinese, Russian, Soviet, and Sudanese ammunition.
According to a fact sheet from the Forum on Arms Trade, citing the Conflict Armament Research (CAR) and the Small Arms Survey, ISIS was largely able to acquire this ammunition from the constantly shifting battle lines of the Syrian civil war.
A large amount of the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese ammunition flooding the battle zones were likely looted by ISIS and other jihadists from Syrian military bases. Iran and Russia both directly provided arms to the Assad regime in 2014 as ISIS were attacking and looting Syrian military installations. It is also possible that the ammunition was supplied to the war zones in Syria and Iraq through third parties.
According to the fact sheet, multiple armed groups in both Iraq and Syria now are in possession of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS). These are highly mobile shoulder-mounted weapons that can be used to down aircraft. Generally, these MANPADS were designed by Chinese, Russia, or Soviet weapon makers and were likely supplied to the Assad regime.
The Armament Research Services has also noted that looted MANPADS from Libyan military bases were being sold through social media networks. In some occasions, these weapons have made their way into battlegrounds in Syria and Iraq.
Reuters
Despite the large quantity of foreign arms in ISIS's inventory, the group is reportedly increasingly dependent upon improvised munitions. CAR believes this could signal an overall decline in the "amount of military-grade equipment in their inventories."
To compensate for this decline in munitions, CAR notes that ISIS is "producing and deploying improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on an industrial scale."
This shift in weaponry and supplies could indicate a long-term trend in which ISIS becomes more similar to an insurgency rather than an actual battlefield force.
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BAGHDAD — The Iraqi Army and militia forces launched an attack against the Islamic State outside Ramadi on Wednesday, with some local officials claiming it was the beginning of a major offensive in western Anbar Province, though others said that was premature.
The attack came only a week after Iraqi officials declared victory over Islamic State extremists in Tikrit, where fighting to wipe out pockets of resistance was still continuing.
“Today we announce the beginning of the Anbar liberation operation, and we have started from Al Sajariya area east of Ramadi,” said Sabah Karhot, chairman of the Anbar Provincial Council. He said security forces were advancing on that area from the north and east.
That announcement seemed to come as a surprise to officials of the central government, however, even as Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, along with top commanders, flew to the Habbaniya air base, a government-held outpost between Ramadi and Falluja, to meet with American advisers there about the new offensive, according to officials in Anbar Province.
“This is not the big joint operation, we didn’t say anything about that,” said Gen. Saad Maan, the spokesman for Baghdad Operations Command. “Maybe he was in a hurry.”
Mr. Abadi has promised that Iraqi forces will soon turn their attention to Anbar Province, a largely desert area where the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, controls more than 60 percent of the territory, much of it taken as long ago as January 2014, six months before the fall of Mosul in the north.
But General Maan said the prime minister was meeting with senior officials to decide when the offensive would begin.
“Until now there is no official announcement, we didn’t say anything, it depends on the results of the prime minister’s visit,” he said. Mr. Abadi was accompanied by the general commanding his military’s ground forces; the commander of the elite Golden Brigade, which is expected to lead the Iraqi Army’s offensive in Anbar; and the federal police commander.
Hikmat Ayada, an adviser to the governor of Anbar, said the operation that began on Wednesday was a partial attack on an area east of Ramadi. The Islamic State holds areas around that city, the provincial capital, as well as all of cities including Falluja, Hit, Qaim, Rawa and parts of Haditha. “It’s a mistake, the council announced the whole operation but this is just a partial operation,” he said.
Mr. Karhot, the chairman of the provincial council, said that Wednesday’s attack was by a combined force of the Iraqi Army and popular mobilization forces, including some Shiite militia groups. Many local tribes oppose the inclusion of Shiite militias in Anbar, which is overwhelmingly Sunni.
Mr. Ayada said that while there were some Shiite militiamen fighting in Ramadi, they were there only as individuals, not in groups, and were under the command of the Iraqi military. There were also Sunni militiamen and tribal fighters involved, he said.
“We got promises from the prime minister, the head of Parliament and many others that there will be no extension of popular mobilization from southern provinces in Anbar,” he said.
In Tikrit, the government has announced that the city fell to its forces on March 31, but fighting has continued, particularly in the Qadisiyah neighborhood, as recently as Wednesday, according to local Iraqi military officials. So far, residents have not been able to return to their homes and businesses there.
General Maan said that it was not correct to characterize that as continued fighting in Tikrit. “There are thousands of houses in Tikrit, and you can find some groups here and there inside this and that house,” he said. “But this is not a fight. They are just trying to escape and engage our forces when they do.”
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As they say, what goes around comes around.
The ISIS terrorist group that controls much of Syria and Iraq didn’t emerge out of thin air. A report this week is saying much of ISIS’s senior leadership is dominated by former Baath Party members who served in Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army before his regime fell.
In recent days, ISIS made advances in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and are now only three miles from President Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power, but it’s unlikely that many of the group’s fighters on the ground know that highly secretive Iraqis are actually calling the shots behind the scenes.
The self-described caliph of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is said to have appointed a number of regional commanders who were officers in the Baathist army before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, reported The Washington Post. Many ex-Baath party officials either joined regional terrorist groups like ISIS or the insurgency against U.S. forces that began 2006.
“All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans,” a former Syrian rebel, who used the fake name Abu Hamza, told the paper. “But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines.”
Hamza indicated that he “found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria,” according to the Post. He described one of these men as a “masked Iraqi man” who only sat silently through the proceedings of his arrest after he disagreed with following ISIS commanders at a meeting last year. Hamza never caught the name of the man, but he apparently worked as an intelligence officer under Saddam’s regime.
In 2003, a law to dismantle the Baath Party implemented by L. Paul Bremer, the temporary American ruler of Iraq, prevented to more than 400,000 members of the Iraqi army from seeking government employment and denied them pensions, but they were allowed to retain ownership of their guns.
A U.S. marine watches a statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in downtown Bagdhad Wednesday April 9, 2003. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
When Baghdadi took power, “the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy,” the Post writes, citing former officers and analysts.
To give an idea, former Iraqi army colonel Haji Bakr was Baghdadi’s closest advisor before he was killed in 2014, and former Iraqi major general Abu Ali al Anbari currently serves Baghdadi’s deputy for ISIS in Syria.
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The Islamic State (ISIS) upped the ante last month, conducting a series of attacks in a number of Arab countries. While the operations in Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen pursue the organization’s goal of destabilizing the region, the ISIS escalation also means to display its strength for its supporters.
It aims to demonstrate that despite the losses in Iraq, its caliphate is still capable of expanding. These attacks suggest that the organization’s priorities remain focused on the Middle East.
The creation of a caliphate in Syria and Iraq has given the terror organization unequaled leverage, allowing it to recruit internationally and build strong credibility within its supporters’ rank and file. Continual expansion of this caliphate is an essential part of the ISIS narrative.
However, in recent months the organization has seen several losses. More than 1,000 of its fighters were killed in its offensive on Kobani, Syria, launched in September last year. Brett McGurk, deputy special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, speaking at this month’s Sulaimani Forum organized by the American University in Iraq, noted that ISIS (sometimes called ISIL) lost an estimated 25 percent of its territory in Iraq and Syria.
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In Mosul, Iraq, interviewed Iraqi activists say that support for the organization—while still strong—has nonetheless waned. Kurdish peshmerga forces repelled the ISIS offensive in Kirkuk and advanced in disputed areas, taking control of Qadisia, Yarmook and Shahid, along with 10 other villages. Coalition strikes totaling 2,320 in March have also hindered the ISIS expansion.
Ari Harsin, a Kurdish member of parliament engaged in the war against ISIS, acknowledged in an interview that the organization’s military capability appears “to have diminished,” citing militant casualties and defections among some of its cadres as contributing factors.
The erosion of ISIS’s military capability has tarnished the organization’s victorious narrative. To offset its losses, ISIS militants have launched a two-pronged offensive in western Syria in the rural areas east of Homs and Hama.
ISIS has also bolstered its presence in regions that it considers its natural sphere of influence, including other countries across the Middle East and North Africa. As a result, ISIS forces in Libya have increasingly clashed with the Libya Dawn force: ISIS rocket attacks recently killed five militiamen in Sirte, and the organization claimed responsibility for a double-suicide car bombing that killed at least seven soldiers in Benghazi. ISIS also conducted two suicide bombings targeting Houthi mosques in Yemen and claimed responsibility for the Bardo Museum terrorist attack in Tunisia.
The expansion of ISIS in Libya has been defended by prominent ISIS supporter Abu Arhim al-Libim, who uploaded a short essay, translated by the Quilliam Foundation, titled “Libya: The Strategic Gateway for the Islamic State.” It states that the organization sees an opportunity in a country fragmented by the ongoing power struggle. In recent months, media reports indicate theestablishment of a training camp situated just 27.9 miles from the Tunisian border and an increase of 5,000 fighters into Libya.
ISIS’s philosophy has so far centered on the management of savagery, stated in an eponymous book by Abu Bakr Naji, which recommends extending terrorist organizations’ control in areas where chaos prevails by providing good governance in order to achieve tamekeen (consolidation).
Similar to its approach in Syria and Iraq, ISIS hopes to establish another “fortified house” (diyar al-tamkeen) in Libya, a fortress from which it can expand its activities into other countries. This preoccupation has been underlined by al-Libim, who mentions the “strategic geographic” location of Libya. He adds, “Libya, by the will of God, is the key to Egypt, the key to Tunisia, Sudan, Mali, Algeria and Niger too. It is the anchor from which Africa and the Islamic Maghreb can be reached.”
However, ISIS’s strategy in Tunisia and Yemen has been more like that of Al-Qaeda’s classical jihad al-nikaya, which relies on the use of local cells conducting terrorist operations across the country to undermine stability. Tunisia holds the largest foreign ISIS contingent, with about 3,000 militants fighting alongside the organization in Iraq and Syria, of which 500 are believed to have returned home.
In Yemen, the organization seems to have adhered to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s strategy of sectarian-centered bombings, aimed at polarizing a country that has witnessed rising religious and regional tensions between Shia Houthis and the central government of Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
Besides increased activity in Arab countries, ISIS’s remarks directed at the West have also escalated. In February, an ISIS video threatened “the nation signed with the blood of the cross” (Italy) and warned that the group, in Libya, was just “south of Rome.” This proximity of the organization to the West was also noted in al-Libim’s document; he remarked that Libya’s coastline “looks upon the southern Crusader states, which can be reached with ease by even a rudimentary boat.”
This comes four months after the ISIS propaganda magazine Dabiq ran a cover photo of the militant group’s flag flying above the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican with the headline "The failed crusade.” In March, the organization called on its “brothers in America” to murder U.S. military personnel.
While the possibility of lone wolf operations by ISIS in Western countries certainly poses a growing threat, the organization does not seem interested in or capable of conducting operations there. Amedy Coulibaly, a perpetrator of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, had no formal ties with ISIS, as was apparent in the interview with his wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, that appeared in an ISIS publication.
Other attacks, such as the ones conducted by Michael Zehaf Bibeau in Ottawa and the hostage taking of Haron Monis in Australia, have also been lone wolf operations. In the absence of established networks in Western countries, the primary mission of ISIS in the so-called “far abroad” regions will remain for now the work of “munassirin [supporters] who do not formally adhere to the organization,” says Jordanian Salafi jihadist leader Abu Sayyaf.
ISIS remains highly dynamic, constantly shifting to adapt to highly fluid realities across the Middle East, but still somewhat limited—whether by chance or design—to the volatile region. So long as ISIS can grow and gain momentum, it will focus its resources on countries where it can consolidate power and territory—namely, Syria, Iraq and possibly Libya.
However, the more pressure is placed on the organization’s Levant home base, the more it will revert to cell-based terrorist operations in Arab countries. ISIS might attempt a global terrorist campaign if the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition drives the organization’s leadership and its foreign fighters out of Iraq and Syria.
Mona Alami is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center. A French-Lebanese journalist, she is based in Beirut. This article is based on research recently conducted in Iraq and Jordan. It first appeared on the Atlantic Council website.
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