CONVERTS AND “FIVE-STAR JIHADISTS”
PROFILES OF ISIS FIGHTERS
For this book we conducted interviews with dozens of ISIS associates who operate inside Syria and Iraq in a range of sectors, including religious clerics, fighters, provincial emirs, security officials, and sympathizers, and we found that what draws people to ISIS could easily bring them to any number of cults or totalitarian movements, even those ideologically contradictory to Salafist Jihadism. Far from homogenous, the organization spans an array of backgrounds and belief systems, from godless opportunists to war profiteers to pragmatic tribesmen to committed takfiris.
THE POWER OF PERSUASION
In October 2014 ISIS’s security squad arrested Mothanna Abdulsattar, a well-spoken nineteen-year-old media activist working for the Free Syrian Army, around two months after it assumed control of his region in eastern Syria. He was taken for an interrogation at a nearby jihadist base amid threats to his life, the fate of which, he found out, could be determined by his professional affiliation. Working for the Syrian opposition or Saudi media arms meant death. “If you are working for Orient or Al-Arabiya, we’ll chop your head off,” Abdulsattar was told. Working for Qatar’s Al Jazeera, according to the conversation between Abdulsattar and the ISIS members, was evidently less of a problem. Abdulsattar told us that he was relieved when a smiling, respectful older jihadist stepped in to save him from an ISIS commissar’s line of questioning.
“Abu Hamza was quiet and respectful,” Abdulsattar remembered, referring to Abu Hamza al-Shami, a senior religious cleric in ISIS from the township of Minbij in eastern Aleppo. “Even his face makes you comfortable. He began by talking about the FSA, and why ISIS was fighting it. He said because they accept ungodly laws and receive funding from America, and God said: ‘Whoever aligns with them, he’s one of them.’ He then talked about al-Dawla. He asked me, ‘Why aren’t you pledging allegiance? The Prophet said that those who die without having bayat to someone—their death will be a jahiliyyah [un-Islamic] death.’ Honestly, when I heard that, I was shocked to my core. For the first time, I realized, the hadith is true.”
But Abdulsattar still wasn’t ready to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. So Abu Hamza smiled and asked him to take his time. A week or so later, Abdulsattar decided to commit.
He spoke with gusto about his journey into ISIS, downplaying the eight hours he spent in its custody as more of a rite of passage than a life-or-death grilling. Abdulsatter said that he was ultimately swayed by ISIS’s “intellectualism and the way it spreads religion and fights injustice.”
A great number of ISIS members who were interviewed for this book echoed similar sentiments—and hyperbolic appraisals—of the terror army, which has mastered how to break down the psyches of those it wishes to recruit, and then build them back up again in its own image. Abdulsattar’s reference to “intellectualism” may seem bizarre or even grotesque to a Western observer, but it refers to ISIS’s carefully elaborated ideological narrative, a potent blend of Islamic hermeneutics, history, and politics.
What he described was no different from the total moral and intellectual immersion explained by Communists who later abandoned their faith in Marxism-Leninism. “We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast,” Arthur Koestler’s Rubashov remembers in Darkness at Noon after facing his own interrogation by Party commissars. Minutes later, Rubashov is shot by the very dictatorship to which he had given his life for forty years.
“When you listen to the clerics of the al-Dawla,” Abdulsatter said, “you are shocked that most of our Islamic societies have deviated from the true religion. They follow a religion that was invented two decades ago, or less. Most of our societies that claim to be Muslim, their religion is full of impurities, 90 percent of it is bida’a [religious innovation]. Take shirk for example: we associate in our worship things other than God, and we don’t even realize it. Omens, for example. When we adjust our posture in front of other people inside a mosque, that is riya’ [ostentation].” ISIS offered Abdulsattar something he could not find under Assadism or the Free Syrian Army. It offered him “purified” Islam.
“When you meet a cleric or a foreigner with ISIS, and he sits with you for two hours, believe me you will be convinced,” he continued. “I don’t know, they have a strange way of persuading people. When they control an area, they enforce religion by force, you have to pray whether you like it or not. We were all oblivious to the most important obligation in Islam—jihad. They shed light on jihad. Every time you watch a video by them, you are going to have a strange feeling that pushes you toward jihad.”
Even those victimized or persecuted by ISIS attest to the group’s “power of persuasion.”
Abu Bilal al-Layli had been in charge of funding the FSA in his hometown, Albu Layl in Deir Ezzor. When ISIS arrived, he left for Turkey. The jihadists burned down his house and put him on its wanted list. He sees them as a band of illiterate thugs who hold a twisted understanding of religion, but he nonetheless admires their ability to persuade the young and the old, particularly those with little religious background. “ISIS used money and talk of justice and war against thieves to lure people. For some, it worked. In our areas, you see people longing for Islam and wanting someone to fight . . .haramiya [thieves]. They bought into the ‘Islamic State’ idea, thinking that the jihadists were honest. Those who joined Daesh hardly memorized a few Quranic verses. They had no religious base. They were simply lured by the power of persuasion.”
THE NOVICE
Hamza Mahmoud was a fifteen-year-old boy from a well-to-do family in Qamishli, in northern Syria. Hamza’s parents learned that he joined ISIS after he started to disappear from their home for long stretches in the summer of 2014. After many failed attempts to prevent him from returning to the group, one of his brothers said, Hamza’s father deliberately broke one of Hamza’s legs. Once it healed, he left his family home again and severed direct communication with his parents. According to his brother, Omar, Hamza refused to speak to his family lest his mother’s cries or his father’s admonitions influence his decision to remain with ISIS. He would only communicate with his brothers, who were outside the country.
During a Skype conversation organized for the authors, Omar haplessly tried to persuade Hamza to quit ISIS and return home. “Hamza, this is not right, you’re still young, this is a misguided group,” Omar told him. “Nothing in Islam calls for slaughter and violence.” Hamza responded, in mechanical but classical Arabic, by citing hadith and verses to validate acts carried out by his new masters. Also, he insisted, the common portrayal of ISIS was biased and wrong. “Don’t believe everything you hear in media,” Hamza said. “The brothers are true Muslims. They are doing nothing but the right thing. If you see what I see and hear what I hear, you will know.”
Omar then told Hamza that Syria has people from various sects and religions who have lived side by side for centuries. Hamza was particularly shocked when his brother added that among his friends who were living in the same residence were Alawites and Yazidis. “You have Yazidis next to you?” Hamza answered. “Kill them and get closer to God.”
THE KURD
The idea that a Kurd would join ISIS seems counterintuitive, given that the organization’s upper cadres are replete with former Saddamists from the Baathist regime that was responsible for a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. More recently, ISIS has targeted Kurdish villages and towns, such as Kobane, on the Syrian-Turkish border, and besieged Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, before having its advance halted by US air strikes in August 2014. Kurdish militias in Syria and Iraq, including the Iraqi peshmerga and the People’s Protection Units (YPG), are considered secularists and Marxists, respectively, and therefore marked for death. And whereas other Sunni insurgencies with strong Baathist composition—particularly al-Douri’s Naqshbandi Army—have tried and mostly failed to recruit Kurds, not only has ISIS succeeded, it has found remarkable success in the very site of Saddam’s genocide, the Iraqi city of Halabja.
ISIS’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, has justified the campaign against the largest stateless people of the Middle East in the following terms: “Our war with Kurds is a religious war. It is not a nationalistic war—we seek the refuge of Allah. We do not fight Kurds because they are Kurds. Rather, we fight the disbelievers amongst them, the allies of the crusaders and Jews in their war against the Muslims. . . .The Muslim Kurds in the ranks of the Islamic State are many. They are the toughest of fighters against the disbelievers amongst their people.” Emphasizing the point, and also driving the wedge among Kurds deeper, in October 2014, one of ISIS’s “Muslim Kurds,” Abu Khattab al-Kurdi, was reportedly leading the jihadists’ battle against the YPG in Kobane. He was joined by other Kurds from Hasaka, Aleppo, and northern Raqqa.
Why are Kurds joining ISIS? Hussain Jummo, the political editor at the Dubai-based Al Bayan newspaper, and a prominent analyst of Kurd politics, offers the most plausible explanation. After Saddam’s Halabja massacre, many families in the town were left impoverished as others built new homes and carried on with their lives as before. Charities that were started and meant to tend to the victims of the chemical attacks were mainly Salafist in orientation, and organized and funded by Gulf state sponsors, including Kuwait’s Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage, which has been accused by the United States of bankrolling al-Qaeda. So after decades of proselytization in the Kurdish regions of the Middle East, Halabja became the epicenter of Kurdish Islamism. (Recall, too, that al-Zarqawi’s first landing point in Iraq was via Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda affiliate, in the mountains of northern Kurdistan.)
In Syria the Kurdish turn to ISIS has been less common, although not unheard of. Syrian Kurds are predominately secular or Sufi from the Khaznawi order, named after the family that inaugurated it. However, we spoke with two Kurds from Aleppo and Hasaka who said they were driven to ISIS because of the organization’s pan-Sunni, rather than pan-Arab, philosophy. A Kurdish ISIS member from Hasaka relayed a conversation to the authors he had with an ISIS recruiter shortly before he joined. The recruiter told him that Jabhat al-Nusra, which had by then split from ISIS, was essentially an “Arab” organization, rather than an Islamic one. ISIS was actually blind to ethnicity, he said, and attended only to true faith.
In much the same vein, ISIS has also attracted large numbers from the Turkomen minority, which has suffered a large share of discrimination and repression under despotic Arab regimes. Turkomen ISIS members have been key to the rise of the organization in Mosul and the areas outlying it. Al-Baghdadi’s deputy, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, who was reportedly killed in December 2014, is Turkomen.
THE SEDNAYA ULTRAS
A particular breed of takfiris dominates ISIS’s mid- and upper echelons, subscribing to a narrow set of doctrinal tenets at odds with the more expansive and welcoming ideology described previously. Abu al-Athir al-Absi, the former Sednaya prisoner who was released under al-Assad’s general amnesty, is the perfect case study in this category.
Al-Absi formed a group, Usud al-Sunna (“Sunni Lions”), in Aleppo’s countryside soon after he was released; he then became instrumental in rallying support for ISIS after its split from Nusra in 2013. Al-Absi took a hard line against other Islamist and jihadist groups many months before ISIS was formed—a position that many say was an extension of the ideological conflict among jihadists at Sednaya prison (although that may also be linked to the fact that al-Absi holds many of the groups responsible for the death of his brother Firas).
According to Wael Essam, who met al-Absi after the Syrian uprising started, the jihadist has considered many of his fellow former inmates at Sednaya to be kuffar, including those who now lead rival Islamist brigades and battalions in Syria. Why? Because they refused to pronounce as nonbelievers the taghut (tyrannical or false) Muslim rulers in the Middle East and the majority of Muslims in the region. Also, al-Absi explained, these Islamists acceded to the surrender of Sednaya to the Syrian authorities after the bloody 2008 riot.
Al-Absi and his cohort were outliers among Salafists at Sednaya. Few of the inmates shared their ultraist ideology or joined them in defying the regime even after it had amassed soldiers from the 4th Armored Division outside their ward.
The tensions between ISIS and other jihadist and Islamist groups in the Syrian Civil War can be viewed as the resumption of an argument that took place behind bars in the preceding years. Abu Adnan, a security official in ISIS, told us that most of the rebel Islamist brigades and battalions were formed as insurgent reunions within the various prison wards. “They did not just come together,” he said. “These men all knew each other, and the factions that were formed later already had the personnel and ideological infrastructure in place. The personality conflicts and political differences continued.”
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi visited Syria in late 2012. Al-Absi was one of his staunchest defenders and one of the loudest proponents of the declaration of an Islamic caliphate, helping al-Baghdadi secure the allegiance of various al-Nusra fighters and other jihadists and militants then part of rival insurgencies in Syria.
THE FENCE-SITTERS
Another category of ISIS recruits consists of those who already held Islamist or jihadist views but had limited themselves to only orbiting takfiri ideology. The final gravitational pull, so to speak, differed depending on circumstance. Some joined for the simple reason that ISIS overran their territories and became the only Islamist faction available to join. Others were simply impressed with ISIS’s military prowess in campaigns against rival rebel factions. Still others fell out with their original insurgencies and found ISIS more organized, disciplined, and able-bodied.
For what might be called “extra-mile extremists,” the conversion experience is hardly as sweeping or comprehensive as it was for men like Abdulsatter. They have tended to trickle into ISIS from the rank and file of the Islamic Front and Islamist-leaning groups in Iraq and Syria as a result of leadership disputes, or the abortive Syrian Sahwa that erupted in late December 2013.
The trend of defections to ISIS was most conspicuous in September 2014. It was that month that a dozen Islamist factions, including al-Nusra, issued a joint statement disavowing the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, the political arm of the opposition, and called for unity under “an Islamic framework.” In October seven Islamist groups then formed the Islamic Front and issued a statement rejecting democracy in favor of an Islamic shura-based system.
Over that period, ISIS made significant gains at the ideological level. Many Islamists struggled to reconcile warring against a fellow Salafist group—a position shared by many ordinary Syrians, who believed that any diversion from the main conflict against the al-Assad regime and its Iranian proxies amounted to treason. Younger members of the Islamic Front in particular held more religiously reactionary beliefs and subscribed more ardently to the jihadist discourse of establishing an Islamic state. Some Islamic Front commanders, in fact, provided protection to ISIS convoys or simply refused to turn their guns on them. The disunity only benefited ISIS.
Liwa Dawud, once the most powerful subfaction within the Islamic Front brigade known as Suqour al-Sham (Falcons of the Levant), saw around one thousand of its own jump ship to ISIS in July 2014.
Increasingly, fighters from the Islamic Front and al-Nusra have migrated to ISIS as the franchise has expanded farther into both Syria and Iraq.
ISIS benefits from the absence of a “Syrian” jihadist discourse to keep pace with the intensifying violence in a war-ravaged nation, which, by August 2014, had seen close to two hundred thousand killed. Established Syrian Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, have steered away from adopting such a discourse and have instead presented themselves as part of the mainstream pro-democracy movement, even though they financially and politically backed rebel Islamist factions. Even al-Nusra, to some extent, positioned itself as a “nationalist” outcropping without international ambitions. This hypocrisy meant that ISIS more or less had a monopoly on the global Salafist-Jihadist narrative, and its intoxicating vision of world conquest.
THE POLITICKERS
As it happens, the closer ISIS came to realizing its territorial ambitions, the less religion played a part in driving people to join the organization. Those who say they are adherents of ISIS as a strictly political project make up a weighty percentage of its lower cadres and support base.
For people in this category, ISIS is the only option on offer for Sunni Muslims who have been dealt a dismal hand in the past decade—first losing control of Iraq and now suffering nationwide atrocities, which many equate to genocide, in Syria. They view the struggle in the Middle East as one between Sunnis and an Iranian-led coalition, and they justify ultraviolence as a necessary tool to counterbalance or deter Shia hegemony. This category often includes the highly educated.
One example is Saleh al-Awad, a secular lawyer from Jarablous, Hasaka, who was a staunch critic of ISIS before deciding that it was the only bulwark against Kurdish expansionism in his region. Saleh took part in the peaceful protest movement against al-Assad and was an advocate of democratic change in Syria. “We’re tired, every day they [ISIS] cut off four or five heads in our town,” he told us before his conversion experience took place. A few months following that exchange—around the time that ISIS started besieging Kobane—Saleh said he joined the head-loppers.
A large number of Arabs in Hasaka share views similar to his own. One influential resident of the province said that “thousands” would join ISIS tomorrow if it invaded the city and provincial capital of Hasaka because of fears of what might happen to them under Kurdish domination.
A similar dynamic exists in mixed communities near Baghdad, such as Baqubah, and in Homs and Hama, where sectarian tensions shape people’s political orientations.
A dozen ISIS-affiliated Arabs who conform to this political category might even be described as secular or agnostic (many said they don’t pray or attend mosque) and expressed deep objections to us about the atrocities being committed by ISIS. Nevertheless, they see it as the only armed group capable of striking against the “anti-Sunni” regimes and militias in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. By way of justification, Salim told us that violence has always been part of Islamic history and always precedes the establishment of strong Islamic empires, including the Ummayads, Abbasids, and the second Ummayad kingdom in modern Spain.
This sense of dejection, or injustice, felt by many Sunnis who now identify as a persecuted and embattled community is known in Arabic as madhloumiya, a concept historically associated with the Shia, for whom suffering is integral to their religious discourse. Equally paradoxical is that even where Sunnis are in the majority, they have taken to behaving as an insecure minority. The Shia in these areas, by contrast, appear more decisive, confident, and well organized, no doubt thanks to Iranian patronage and the militia-ization of their communities by Qassem Suleimani’s Quds Force. Shia militants, as we’ve seen, are crossing national boundaries as much as their Sunni counterparts to participate in a holy war.
Sunnis feel under assault—from al-Assad, Khamenei, and, up until recently, al-Maliki—and devoid of any committed or credible political stewards. Their religious and political powerhouses, meanwhile, are perceived as complicit, politically emasculated, discredited, or silent: the Gulf Arab states, which either have Sunni majorities or Sunni-led governments, have been reduced to begging the United States for intervention.
ISIS has exploited this sense of sectarian grievance and vulnerability with devious aplomb. As al-Zarqawi could point to the Badr Corps in 2004, al-Baghdadi can now point to anti-Sunni atrocities being committed by the National Defense Force, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Lebanese Hezbollah, Kata’ib Hezbollah or, indeed, the Badr Corps in Syria and/or Iraq, and offer them up as proof that Sunnis have no hope but the caliphate.
PRAGMATISTS
In areas fully controlled by ISIS, pragmatists support the group because it is effective in terms of governance and delivery of basic services such as sanitation and food delivery (although this may be coming to an end). ISIS has established a semblance of order in these “governed” territories, and people view the alternatives—al-Assad, the Iraqi government, or other militias—as far worse. For those weary of years of civil war, the ability to live without crime and lawlessness trumps whatever draconian rules ISIS has put into place. Members of this category sometimes keep their distance from ISIS, to avoid trouble, while others actually seek out areas where ISIS is said not to be committing atrocities.
Abu Jasim, a cleric who joined ISIS after it overran his home in eastern Syria in the summer of 2014, said that he would deliberately avoid details of what ISIS did or didn’t do. “I see them leaving people alone if nobody messes with them,” Abu Jasim told us. “All I do is to teach people their religion, and I hope to get rewarded by God for what I do.”
THE OPPORTUNISTS
There are also those who were drawn to ISIS largely because of personal ambition. The opportunists tend to serve in the group’s rank and file as well as its low-level command structures. They join to undermine a rival group, to move up the chain of a dominant military and political force, or simply to preempt ISIS’s brutal justice for some past offense or crime they might have committed against the group.
Saddam al-Jamal, for example, was one of the most powerful FSA commanders in eastern Syria. After his prior rebel outfit, the Allahu Akbar Brigade, lost out to al-Nusra, which killed two of his brothers, al-Jamal pledged allegiance to ISIS. It apparently didn’t matter that he had a reputation as a drug dealer.
Aamer al-Rafdan joined ISIS after it broke from al-Nusra, owing mainly to a dispute he had with the latter over oil revenues—also, a continuing rivalry between his tribe and the tribe that had been dominated by al-Nusra in Deir Ezzor. Al-Rafdan was later accused by al-Jolani’s organization of stealing $5 million worth of cotton.
Outside Iraq and Syria, of course, the motivations for joining ISIS alter drastically and are almost always fed by serious misapprehensions of what is taking place in either country.
The radicalization expert Shiraz Maher has explained how digital apps or social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and, in the ex-Soviet context, VKontakte (Russia’s answer to Facebook) have revolutionized jihadist agitprop. Much of the online chatter among Western-born ISIS recruits sounds more like a satire of the group than an earnest commitment to it: “Does the Islamic State sell hair gel and Nutella in Raqqa?” “Should I bring an iPad to let Mom and Dad know that I arrived safely in caliphate?” “I was told there’d be Grand Theft Auto V.”
In an article for the New Statesman, Maher observed that, “During the Iraq War, sympathisers of al-Qaeda needed access to password-protected forums, where they could learn about events on the ground. These forums were not easy to find and access was harder to gain. Crucially, most of the conversations were in Arabic, a language alien to most British Muslims.” Now every British Muslim who goes off to fight in Syria or Iraq becomes a virtual wrangler or recruitment officer for more of his own kind. One example was Mehdi Hassan, a twenty-year-old from Portsmouth who went off to join ISIS and died fighting in the battle of Kobane in November 2014. Hasan had actually enlisted along with several friends from Portsmouth, all of whom were drawn to the dazzling images of ISIS’s martial triumphs and its whitewashed depiction of life under takfiri rule. They were known as the “Pompey lads,” and, as Maher wrote, “Of the men he travelled with, only one is still fighting: three are dead and another is in prison in the UK.”
In December 2013 Maher’s ICSR calculated that the number of foreign fighters enjoined with the Syrian opposition was “up to 11,000 . . .from 74 nations.” Most of them signed up with ISIS or other jihadist groups, with few going to join mainstream FSA factions. Western Europe, the study found, accounted for 18 percent of the total, with France leading among nations as the number one donor country for jihadists, followed closely by Britain. That number only grew, particularly in light of the US coalition war against ISIS; by September 2014 the CIA calculated fifteen thousand foreign fighters in Syria, two thousand of whom were Westerners. However, the predominant emigration trend has always been from the Middle East and North Africa, with Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia being the highest feeder countries of foreign Sunni militants.
Missionary jihadists who were driven by civilian suffering, according to Maher, constituted a plurality of Britons who joined ISIS. They saw jihad as an obligation to defend women and children as the war dragged on in Syria, Maher told us.
Inside Syria, a similar trend—of fighters drifting to extremist groups—existed since mid-2012, when reports of civilians being slaughtered by pro-Assad militias became international news.
The impact of those massacres on the psyche of anti-regime Syrians was also immense. Those conscious of their own radicalization typically point to the Houla and al-Bayda and similar massacres as the reason for their turn to Islamist and jihadist rebel factions closer to the end of 2012. However, native Syrians tended to enlist with homegrown extremist factions rather than the more foreigner-friendly ISIS. Even still, ISIS benefited from the Assadist massacres in another respect: for one, the gruesome manner in which they were carried out helped create some level of tolerance for beheadings, which was accepted by many Syrians as retribution against the regime and its Iranian-built militias.
The most notorious regime massacres typically occurred in areas where Alawite, Sunni, and Ismaili (another Shia offshoot) villages and hamlets adjoined one another, the better to encourage sectarian reprisal bloodlettings. They also followed a pattern of assault: a village would be shelled overnight by the Syrian Arab Army, and the next morning, militiamen from nearby would storm it. Armed with knives and light weapons, they would go on killing sprees, slaughtering men, women, and children. The killing was portrayed as systematic and driven by sectarian vigilantism. Videos of torture also showed shabiha or popular committees, the precursors to the National Defense Force, taunting Sunni symbols and forcing victims to affirm al-Assad’s divinity and make other sacrilegious statements.
Maher notes a second category of foreign fighters: martyrdom-seekers, who want nothing more than to carry out a suicide operation and thus be lionized in the annals of jihadism. For many foreign fighters from the Gulf states, the glorification of suicide bombers has been a constant on jihadist chat forums and websites since AQI got started. Saudi nationals often point to the fact that many Saudis carry out these self-immolations to argue that ISIS leaders discriminate against their compatriots by sending them to their deaths, whereas Iraqis hoard all the leadership positions in the organization for themselves.
The final factor leading foreign fighters to ISIS, according to Maher, is pure adventurism. Adrenaline junkies tend to be nonpracticing Muslims and are often drug users or addicts, or involved in criminality and gang violence back home—much as al-Zarqawi himself was in Jordan before discovering the mosque. Going off to fight in Syria represents just another rush for these types.
AFTER MOSUL
Many interviewees from other Arab countries admitted they had not been following developments in Iraq and Syria closely before they started supporting ISIS. That changed after the fall of Mosul. One Egyptian Islamist, for instance, told us that he was not sure which factions in Syria or Iraq were good or bad, but after ISIS stormed through Ninewah, he began conducting “research” and found that the establishment of the caliphate was “consistent with” stories foretold by Prophet Muhammad. Scott Atran, the anthropologist at the University of Michigan, relayed a similar anecdote. “I remember talking with an imam in Spain who said, ‘We always rejected violence, but Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi put us on the map. The caliphate doesn’t have to be violent. It can be just like the European Union!’ ”
Detachment from the mundane realities of ISIS has made many Arabs susceptible to its self-aggrandizing portrayal as a God-anointed Sunni resistance movement inspired by early Islamic history and fundamentals. In order to control this self-presentation, ISIS has resorted to a sophisticated tool kit of propaganda and disinformation.