The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—“ISIS,” or “the caliphate of the Islamic State”—has become the single most dangerous threat to global security since al-Qaeda. It is more than just a threat to America and the West, because it also poses an existential threat to Islam: its goal is to coopt or enslave 1.8 billion Muslims.
I predicted in my 2007 book, The Terrorists of Iraq, that “the potential to create an Iraqi franchise of al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups of far more sophistication and with greater global reach than the Afghanistan-trained al-Qaeda under the Taliban is extremely high.” This has come to pass in the form of the terrorist monster created from three components: thirty thousand former Ba’athist intelligence officers—essentially commandoes and spies; al-Qaeda’s most ruthless branch; and a foreign legion of fresh young fighters numbering in the tens of thousands.
ISIS must be stopped at all costs, and the first step toward that goal is to identify who they are, where they are, and how they fight. In these pages I detail the strategy, tactics, internal organization, weapons, and techniques used by the most deadly terrorist group in the world. It begins with the historical development of terrorist actions and weapons over history, analyzes the structure of its subordinate “States” or wings to the terrorist organization, identifies the terrorists with individual profiles, and illuminates their various covert operating procedures in use throughout the world. It is equally important to clear up the many general misperceptions about ISIS and its tenuous relationship to Islam.
Having spent the past thirty-four years as an intelligence and combat veteran, with the majority of that time devoted to studying the Global Jihad, al-Qaeda, and now ISIS, I hope my insider’s view will shed light on how ISIS organizes, fights, and spreads its ideology. I’ve survived their suicide bomb attacks, I’ve seen their defeats. Here, I’ve set out to show how ISIS’s street-level tactics led to their rapid victories, as well as the strategies and tactics that will demonstrate how badly they can lose.