AL-DAWLA
THE ISLAMIC “STATE” SLEEPER CELLS
Abu Adnan came early to the meeting with us in a five-star hotel in Sanliurfa, also known as Urfa, in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border. Abu Adnan was in his late thirties and had been referred by a contact as someone who had inside knowledge about ISIS. He introduced himself as a doctor who worked in makeshift hospitals in ISIS-controlled territories. He initially seemed curious to know what we thought of the “state,” for which he provided medical services, and our appraisal of attitudes toward it in the Middle East and internationally. He listened attentively, as did a younger companion who sat next to him.
Then Abu Adnan came clean, revealing that he wasn’t just a doctor but also an amni, a security official for ISIS. He declined to answer specific questions about his job and dodged others, but he proudly explained that there are dozens of men like him working with ISIS outside of Syria, many in neighboring countries. “A believer does not get stung from the same hole twice,” Abu Adnan said, referring to a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which is more or less the Islamic equivalent of “Fool me once . . .”
“We cannot afford to wait for others to spy on us,” he said. “Information is the foundation and the pillar for everything. We need to know if there are activities outside the borders that might affect us in the future. We need to have a presence outside our territories. We need to do all that without compromising the state, so it is important to have reliable, efficient, and trusted people doing that.”
Amniyat, or security units, are one of the vital organs of ISIS intelligence and counterintelligence, developed thanks to the former Iraqi Mukhabarat officers in its ranks. Amniyat, in fact, is headed by Abu Ali al-Anbari, the former intelligence officer in Saddam’s regime. In ISIS territories these units are known to carry out raids to arrest wanted individuals and to probe security-related cases. However, little else is publicly known about the work of Amniyat. Even within a local ISIS structure, they have to operate separately from other sectors, such as the clerical authority, the military, and khidmat al-muslimeen (“Muslim Services”).
Another ISIS member, Abu Moawiya al-Sharii, who serves the organization as a sharii, or cleric, confirmed that walls of separation exist between and among local ISIS affiliates. “Each one has a speciality,” Abu Moawiya said. “I don’t know what the military commanders do or know, and they don’t know what an amni knows.”
Such separation of powers helps with ISIS’s pretense of statehood, reminiscent of the walled-off bureaucracies and departments in any government. But it also guards against infiltration and espionage—a particular obsession among ISIS’s upper cadres and no doubt also a holdover from their Baathist origins. Even though ISIS tends to be more flexible in its recruitment and membership requirements than Nusra, it has established an elaborate and layered internal security apparatus to insulate its core leadership from provincial officers, and vice versa. “Our enemies are clever and determined,” Abu Adnan said. “What we can do is to make sure the body of the state is strong, so that it can heal no matter how far they weaken it. So even if they destroy us in one area, you can be sure we’re still there. We don’t have to be exposed and visible.”
At the hotel in Sanliurfa, Abu Adnan gave no outward sign of belonging to a takfiri organization known for its bearded and black-clad militants just miles to the south. He was clean-shaven and dressed in modern attire—more Mohamed Atta than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Yet in the course of the interview he thumbed through his mobile phone photos to show himself mingling and posing with ISIS leaders in Raqqa, northern Hasaka, and Aleppo. He said that security officers, depending on the seniority of their position, have to learn a range of skills, from military training to political orientation to communication skills to clandestine activity. Abu Adnan claimed to have network of smugglers on the Syrian-Turkish border who would help potential fighters enter Syria to join ISIS. They operated in plain sight of the Turkish authorities and, like Abu Adnan, wouldn’t be conspicuously out of place in any Western city.
“ISIS moves with incredible speed,” Chris Harmer, the analyst at the Institute for the Study of War said, trying to explain how the terror army not only mobilizes forces but springs up in places where they previously had no discernible presence. “They have embedded, nested sleeper cells that start picking people off. We saw this in Mosul in June. Clearly, they had a list of people they were going to kill in the first seventy-two hours in the seizure of the city.”
Mayser Hussain, a paramedic from Sahl al-Ghab, Hama, explained how ISIS has outfoxed the FSA there. “We have a group of 580 fighters from Sahl al-Ghab and Mount Shahshabu; many of them have secretly pledged allegiance to ISIS, as a sleeper cell. They’re ready to fight. They haven’t made it public because the FSA group in the region, Suqour al-Ghab Brigades, is dominant. Suqour al-Ghab has around four thousand fighters, so they can’t fight it.”
Hussain said that the group that pledged allegiance to ISIS used to be known as al-Farouq; now it’s called Jabhat Sham. “I used to work with them when they were al-Farouq. Lately they offered me to join them as a paramedic. They told me that because I’ve been defending them in public and online, because I grew a beard and trimmed my mustache . . .‘We are ready, and we are preparing ourselves to take the whole region.’ ”
ISIS, Hussain said, has experience recruiting from FSA cadres and offers incentives for mainstream rebels to defect to its ranks. A current policy is that anyone who has fought with the FSA, Ahrar al-Sham, or al-Nusra against ISIS and leaves to join al-Baghdadi’s army is more likely to be promoted within its ranks. Abu Bilal, the FSA financier whose house was burned down by ISIS, told us the story of Obeida al-Hindawi, a former FSA fighter, who had worked for ISIS in secret for three to six months before declaring his affiliation. During that time, al-Hindawi received funding through local channels, all linked to external FSA donors. He was in regular communication with a Tunisian emir in al-Muhassan, where his mother’s family hails from and where, as we examined in a previous chapter, ISIS has recruited tribesmen.
“During his secret allegiance, Obeida objected to our plan to join the fight against ISIS and he said that we should distance ourselves from it. He single-handedly recruited FSA members and convinced his former colleagues to join. Two of his brothers who led the brigade in the town were killed. He then became the commander of the brigade. Suddenly, he stopped fighting and said he no longer had any money or that his cars stopped working. It was all a ruse; he’d been with ISIS for a while at that point.”
The one group that knew al-Hindawi’s true affiliation was al-Nusra, which Abu Bilal said had better intelligence than anyone else in the area. “Nusra stormed Obeida’s house in April or May. Everyone was asking why. Nusra said he was an ISIS member who paid money to people to join. He’d fled and went to Raqqa. He announced his allegiance when he returned from Raqqa to al-Muhassan, as ISIS took Busaira, a town in Deir Ezzor, in June, and two days before they advanced into Nusra’s stronghold in the town of Shuhail. He raised the ISIS flag and built a checkpoint and activated all the sleeper cells.” Al-Hindawi was later involved in the execution of Shaitat tribesmen in nearby villages.
Zakaria Zakaria, a journalist from Hasaka, said that ISIS’s infiltration of al-Nusra was equally impressive. When many al-Nusra jihadists in Hasaka wanted to defect to ISIS in early 2012, ISIS told them to stay put for the time being. “When ISIS made it public later on, already half of the members were with them, and the rest either fled to Turkey or joined.”
OVERTAKING THE FSA
A mere twenty-six miles north of Aleppo, al-Bab had fallen to the FSA the previous summer and served as a fallback base for battalions laying siege to Aleppo, sections of which were being progressively peeled away from the regime.
One of the authors met Barry Abdul Lattif while reporting from al-Bab and the Bab al-Hadid quarter of Aleppo in late July 2012, in the midst of Ramadan. An early pro-revolution media activist, Lattif had earned a reputation among foreign correspondents for being a charismatic but unnerving adrenaline junkie. He loved to chase the regime’s Sukhoi fighter jets and attack helicopters as much as he loved to take queasy Western journalists (such as us) into the most forbidding war zones in Syria. A day before our visit, he had sustained a small shrapnel injury, the result, we were told, of sniper bullets ricocheting off the ground in Salaheddine, which was then the fiercely contested Stalingrad of Aleppo, a city laid waste by aerial bombardment and round-the-clock shelling.
The al-Bab of Ramadan 2012 had offered one of the most encouraging signs of the anti-Assad revolution. The FSA presence guarding the town was mostly financed by local merchants, not foreign donors, and perhaps because it was salaried by the community it protected, it exhibited none of the taints of corruption or venality that would come to characterize the larger rebel camp later. Fighters stationed in the downtown barracks of the al-Khatib Brigade (one of the many units so named for Hamza al-Khatib, a thirteen-year-old boy who was killed by al-Assad’s forces in 2011) would flash the peace sign or insist on posing for photographs.
But it was al-Bab’s civil society that seemed so pregnant with promise. The Assad regime had all but destroyed al-Bab’s city hospital and so, in order to tend to the wounded, local volunteers and professional doctors set up a makeshift field hospital in the basement of a mosque. They keep meticulous records of those they treated, which, they said, included civilians, FSA fighters, but also al-Assad’s soldiers and even some shabiha. By nightfall, the streets of a pastoral Levantine hamlet were transformed into ecstatic scenes of protest and municipal action. Because all government services were stopped after al-Bab fell to the opposition, the people of the town had to take care of themselves. So FSA fighters put down their Kalashnikovs and picked up brooms and garbage bags, joined by white-gloved volunteers who rode around on motorbikes that looked like large hair dryers.
“Where are the terrorists here?” Lattif had asked that summer, mocking the regime’s propaganda that everyone and anyone who stood up against it was al-Qaeda.
The terrorists arrived a year later.
Now living in Turkey and working for RMTeam, a Syrian research and humanitarian aid organization, Lattif recounted how ISIS moved into al-Bab and ultimately seized control of the entire town. “After they announced their ‘state’ and after they defected from al-Qaeda, they started to arrest activists around the liberated areas. For the first time, I saw it—it was August 2013, they came to al-Bab and they captured some bad FSA battalions.”
What made the battalions “bad”? “They were thieves. They kidnapped some civilians and asked for money to set them free,” Lattif said. “So Daesh arrested the battalions. In the early days, the civilians liked Daesh; they didn’t know that it had its own project and its own plans for al-Bab.”
The regime had never stopped bombarding al-Bab. According to Lattif, it had hit a school next to the hospital, which had by then been partially restored to working order. Twelve medics, Lattif said, were killed in that attack. Believing that the presence of takfiris would only invite further collective punishment on the town, the people began protesting against ISIS. “It lasted for three or four days. After that, some FSA brigades negotiated with Daesh for Daesh to leave the city. So they withdrew to the farmland around al-Bab. But they stayed there, just above the city, hovering, very close. And every day they captured new people, more FSA fighters from the bad battalions. They didn’t yet capture any activists, they just issued threats against them—for me, especially. Almost everybody in the city asked me every day on Facebook if I was still free. They warned me that I was in danger, that Daesh was coming for me.”
It was after ISIS seized near-total control of Raqqa, Lattif said, that it returned to al-Bab in force, creating a “siege” around the city. It began clashing with the FSA battalions as well as Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra fighters. “There were not too many men from those two groups in al-Bab at this point,” Lattif said. The FSA was still the predominant insurgency, with around 1,500 fighters in al-Bab (many of them imported from neighboring areas, such as Minbij and Aleppo), followed distantly by Ahrar al-Sham, and then al-Nusra.
To force al-Bab into surrender, ISIS resorted to a favored tactic of the regime: starvation. It kept stealing the wheat from silos just outside the city, and the FSA was enlisted to stop the plunder lest the residents, already suffering, run out of bread. ISIS raided the main al-Bab headquarters for Liwa al-Tawhid, the largest brigade in Aleppo, killing around twenty-one men, Lattif said. Then the “regime bombarded the city with helicopters. It targeted only civilians in the center of the city. So Daesh took the advantage of that attack and came inside. It saw the opportunity created by the regime.”
Al-Assad, Lattif insisted, was very crafty. “He wanted to give the impression to the civilians that Daesh and the regime are one. His goal was to start a civil war with the FSA.”
By January 2014—the month that Syria’s minor sahwa began—ISIS had brought snipers to strategic locations throughout al-Bab. They began picking off civilians and rebels. “They shot everyone,” Lattif said. “I was in the al-Bab media office when Daesh took about a quarter of the city, in the southern district. Suddenly, everything went silent. There was no sound at all. All the fighting had stopped.
“We closed our office and went back to our homes. At about 11:00 at night, I went to take a look around the city to see what was happening. I saw Liwa al-Tawhid leave. There were no armed fighters left in al-Bab. I don’t know where they went.”
Ahrar al-Sham, he said, maintained a presence around the city but not inside it. “I stayed with them until morning. It was Friday night. I saw many Ahrar al-Sham fighters with cars with machine guns enter the city at around 4:00 a.m. Then, about an hour and a half later, three trucks, all filled with ammunition and rockets and all belonging to Ahrar al-Sham, drove out of al-Bab. There was an emir of Ahrar al-Sham who came over to us and asked the fighters I was with to leave our checkpoint because we were the last checkpoint in the city. Everyone had left for Aleppo, he told us.”
ISIS took sole control of al-Bab that morning.
The safe house where one of the authors had stayed belonged to a rebel fighter named Abu Ali, a personal friend of Lattif. “He left his wife and children with my family. ISIS took control of his house. Abu Ali’s family stayed for four, maybe five months. Now they’re with him in Aleppo.” Lattif’s family, however, are still in al-Bab.
At first, Lattif said, ISIS treated civilians “gently,” even assuming some of the civil administrative duties that had been handled by volunteers and the FSA. They fixed damaged roads, planted flowers in the street, cultivated gardens, and cleaned the local schools. But not long thereafter, Lattif said, ISIS instituted Sharia law, forcing women to wear what he called “the Daesh clothes”—the niqab or full head-and-face covering. “They banned hairdressing. Beard shaving is also forbidden. No woman can leave her house without a male escort now. There’s no smoking, no shisha [hookah], no playing cards. They’ve made everything bad for civilians now. They force the people to go [to] the mosque for prayers, to close their businesses. No one can walk in the street during prayers. They kidnapped almost everybody working in the relief centers. About a month ago [November 2014], they closed the school. If you want to study now, you have to go to the Daesh school in the mosque.”
Torture is common, too. ISIS has taken to arresting members of the FSA, whom they accuse of being agents of foreign intelligence services. Also sentences for various ISIS-designated crimes are carried out publicly in al-Bab’s town square. These range from dismemberments to beheadings, depending on the offense. “They cut off heads and hands in the square. Do you remember the hookah place?” Lattif was referring to a popular cafe in central al-Bab where, in 2012, he had outlined for his vision of a free and democratic Syria. “The beheadings are taking place now in front of there. They shut down the hookah place, of course.”
In the first months after ISIS seized control of al-Bab, the regime refrained from bombing the city. Then, in November 2014, the Syrian Air Force started up again, dropping barrel bombs—“flying IEDs,” which have proved some of the deadliest ordnance used by the regime in the war— that killed sixty-two civilians in one air strike. According to Lattif, the Air Force dropped a barrel bomb in the main street of al-Bab, nowhere near any ISIS location.
This followed ISIS’s eastern offensive against a series of regime military installations, such as the Tabqa air base in Deir Ezzor, the Division 17 base in Raqqa, and the Regiment 121 base in Hasaka—a noticeable uptick in the group’s anti-regime sorties that followed directly after its blitz into central and northern Iraq. “The regime wants al-Bab to stay under the control of Daesh,” Lattif said. “Assad has soldiers about fifteen kilometers west of al-Bab, but they never try to take the city back. Now, every time the regime sends its forces against the north areas of Aleppo, ISIS also attacks some places in the north. Both [the] regime and ISIS are attacking the FSA at the same time, but separately. The regime sees many benefits of ISIS’s control of al-Bab and Raqqa—without them, allied forces won’t strike Syria. The regime lost its authority in the beginning of the revolution. To get it back, it needs terrorists in Syria. Now there are many voices in the West saying that al-Assad is the only force against terrorists in the Middle East. Now the main players in Syria are the terrorists, Daesh, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the regime.”
ISIS VS. ASSAD
Lattif’s story conforms not just to what the Syrian opposition has been saying for years—that al-Assad and ISIS are, at the very least, tacit allies in a common war against the FSA and Islamist rebels—but to what regime loyalists have begun to say lately as well. To sack Tabqa, Division 17, and Regiment 121, ISIS relied on weapons looted from fallen Iraqi Security Forces bases in Ninewah and Anbar. As we’ve seen, prior to June 2014, when Mosul fell to ISIS, al-Assad’s forces had largely refrained from fighting the takfiris in Syria while insisting in their propaganda that those were all they ever fought. After the fall of Mosul, however, the regime sensed a renewed opportunity to partner with the West as an agent of counterterrorism. So Syrian warplanes began bombing dozens of ISIS targets in Raqqa, or so they made a show of doing. “They did not bomb the [ISIS] headquarters until June, and even then only after it had been evacuated,” Masrour Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish intelligence head told the Guardian in late August 2014. “We are all paying the price now.”
After the takeover of Division 17, ISIS executed upward of fifty Syrian soldiers, beheading some and then photographing the lopped-off heads in Raqqa, according to Rami Abdel Rahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, who told Agence France-Presse: “There is a clear shift in the ISIS strategy. It has moved from consolidating its total control in areas under its grip. It is now spreading. For ISIS, fighting the regime is not about bringing down Assad. It is about expanding its control.”
This was all too much for many Assad loyalists. By the summer of 2014, after seeing how little resistance ISIS faced in its eastern offensive, many pro-regime activists began denouncing their own side. In a video posted online, they accused the regime of nothing short of treason at Tabqa air base, justifying their criticism by citing a statement once made by Hafez al-Assad: “I don’t want anyone to be silent about a mistake.” The video shows Syrian officers speaking confidently about their fight against ISIS, but the narrator explains that they were duped into believing that helicopters full of fifty tons of ammunition and supplies were on the way. In the event, the only helicopters that arrived carried no cargo to Tabqa but plenty of it away: namely, the head of the air base, Adel Issa, along with of three of his generals. This was eighteen hours before the base was stormed by ISIS militants. The video also accuses Syria’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, of covering up this treachery and then lying about its grisly aftermath. Assad’s own cousin, Douraid al-Assad, is quoted as saying: “I call for the expulsion of the defense minister, the chief of staff, the air force chief, the information minister, and everyone involved in the fall of the Tabqa military base and its consequences.” Finally, the video ends with statements such as: “Our bullets—nine of them are directed to the traitors and one to the enemy.”
Elia Samaan, a Syrian official with the Ministry of Reconciliation, had openly inquired as to the absence of the Syrian Air Force in the war against ISIS in June 2014, after al-Baghdadi’s men tore back into Syria from Iraq with renewed vigor and much stolen matériel. Though he discounted the allegation that the regime in any way colluded or cooperated with ISIS, Samaan admitted to the New York Times’s Anne Barnard that fighting the terrorist group was not a “first priority” for Damascus. Instead, al-Assad had been all too “happy to see ISIS killing” the FSA and Islamic Front instead of his own troops. When the Syrian Air Force finally escalated its air campaign against ISIS, it ended up killing, as per Lattif’s account, more innocents than militants. Khaled, an ISIS fighter, told Barnard, “Most of the air strikes have targeted civilians and not ISIS headquarters. Thank God.”
MINBIJ
Where ISIS may have thrived in part from the Assad regime’s malign neglect, it also benefited from savvy politicking against what Lattif called the “bad FSA battalions.”
Ayman al-Zawahiri had counseled al-Zarqawi, in the early years of AQI, not just about the folly of slaughtering Iraq’s Shia, but about the need for effective Islamic governance in the areas ruled by al-Qaeda in Iraq. “[I]t’s imperative that, in addition to force, there be an appeasement of Muslims and a sharing with them in governance,” al-Zawahiri wrote his field commander in 2005. What he had advocated was something akin to the steady application of jihadist soft power. While clearly shirking al-Zawahiri’s injunction about Shia, ISIS has more or less heeded his advice on creating popular incentives for Islamic governance. Minbij is a case in point.
A city of approximately two hundred thousand situated strategically between Aleppo, Raqqa, and the Turkish border, Minbij was abandoned by Syrian regime forces in November 2012, after which residents set up a municipal administration for self-rule. Soon, the city became an important but temporary symbol for the Syrian revolution that a post-Assad state needn’t be a Hobbesian nightmare at all. That idyll lasted for about a year.
Accusations that nationalistic or secular rebel groups were behaving like brigands or gangsters were rife throughout Syria, often making more hard-line Islamist factions, including al-Nusra, seem models of discipline and fairness by comparison. Fortified with nearly all of al-Nusra’s former foreign fighter contingent, ISIS established a base in the city in April 2013, operating side by side with several other armed factions, and continued to serve as a small but feared gendarmerie of about fifty men.
ISIS used its base to quietly reach out to the local population, inviting people to its madhafa (meeting place) to socialize and also to learn about al-Baghdadi’s broad Islamic project for the region. ISIS mediated disputes and responded to complaints from locals, acting as de facto mukhtars in a city devoid of any state authority. However, ISIS’s presence in Minbij grew steadily and quietly; rented houses were used as secret weapon and ammunition stockpiles, making the true extent of the jihadist presence publicly calculable. Also, its policy of arbitration grew less transparent and more severe. ISIS arrested FSA fighters without resorting to the Sharia commissions established by the rebels; it intimidated secular activists and controlled whatever resources it could lay its hands on to try and buy off the rest of the population through the dispensation of social services. It kept its fighters away from the front lines and instead struck tactical deals with FSA and other Islamist groups: in exchange for suicide bombers, who could be used to detonate VBIEDs at regime checkpoints or to blow up military installations with surplus matériel, the rebels who were fighting al-Assad’s forces would share their war booty with ISIS. By September 2013 ISIS’s heavy-handedness and its play for monopolistic control of the city’s services boiled over into outright confrontation with rival groups.
It declared war against Kurds in Minbij, vowing to “cleanse” the region of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whose Syrian branch, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of Kurdistan was the most powerful armed faction among Syria’s Kurdish minority.
In October rebel forces in Minbij seized the flour mills from ISIS and told the jihadists to refrain from bypassing military and Sharia councils in the city in the settlement of public disputes. When the rebels in Aleppo and Idlib declared war against ISIS in January 2014, local forces in Minbij overran the ISIS base and killed or captured all of its fighters.
However, according to several residents from Minbij who spoke to the authors, locals sympathized with ISIS and lamented its expulsion. “People did not see anything but good things from ISIS, even though they did not like its religious ideas,” said resident Shadi al-Hassan. “They also know that those who fought it were the worst people in the area.” ISIS’s retreat from Idlib and northern Aleppo helped it return to Minbij with a vengeance. It took control of the city after it sent reinforcements from Raqqa and northeastern Aleppo. Soon it established a full-fledged system of governance, impressing city denizens and displaced refugees alike. Hard as it may be to believe, given the luridness of ISIS’s atrocities, Syrians actually flocked in large number to join the jihadist group or work with it at the local level. ISIS members had different roles: some were dedicated to fighting, while others acted as security, administered medical services, operated bakeries, ran Sharia courts, and so on. For the local community, the difference was quickly felt: ISIS provided safety and security; its methods of justice were swift, and nobody was exempt from punishment, including its own fighters who deviated from the strict moral code it had laid down. Consequently, kidnappings, robberies, and acts of extortion all but disappeared.
Ayman al-Mit’ib, a Minbij resident who since November 2013 had been internally displaced in Minbij, said, “There is no absolute support for its acts but no absolute opposition to its acts either. The reason why people support the Islamic State is its honesty and practices compared to the corruption of most of the FSA groups. Some FSA groups joined it, too.”
The story of how ISIS grew in Minbij rings true in other areas under its control, particularly where FSA factions failed to rein in corruption or human rights abuses. A defector from the Syrian army, for instance, told the Guardian in November 2013 how ISIS operated like a virus in Syria by taking over other battalions and the territories they controlled. “What they do is attack the weaker units on the pretext that their commander is a bandit or a looter—they only fight one force at a time,” he said, adding that once ISIS was ensconced in a city, it spread outward, seizing towns and villages surrounding that urban hub.
Indeed, one of the first rebel leaders to be publicly executed by ISIS was Hassan Jazra of Ghuraba al-Sham. Jazra had been a watermelon merchant before the revolution, then a peaceful protestor against al-Assad, and finally a rebel who stole to finance his military activity. In an obituary for Jazra, journalist Orwa Moqdad wrote, “Aleppo knew Hassan Jazra as a thief. Yet he did not leave his post at the front for a year and a half in the face of regular army attacks. He was a son of the protest movement who was driven by deteriorating circumstances to become a military leader . . .that became increasingly typical over the course of the war.” ISIS executed him, along with six of his fighters, in November 2013. The execution was used by ISIS to prove a point: those who sought self-gain from the war, or who strayed from a pure revolutionary path, were as bad as the regime. Although in death Jazra’s reputation depended on whom you asked, for ISIS his execution was a necessary form of justice. Its popularity went up accordingly. After that, it began to assert itself even more in rebel-held areas.
Governance has been a winning strategy for ISIS. Its model of governance has driven many to join its ranks, work with it, or at least not to oppose its existence in their areas. Since this aspect is key to its existence and survivability, it is important to understand how the group set out to winning hearts and minds despite its pathological brutality.
When the Syrian rebels started to control areas across the country, lawlessness was somewhat tolerated by the local communities as a necessary price before the removal of the regime. Also, as it came to be exposed later, some FSA-affiliated groups engaged in theft and robbery and claimed the Assad forces were behind it. As time went by, however, lawlessness became more pronounced and a major source of grievance for the local communities. Some FSA factions opted to leave the front lines and busy themselves with moneymaking activities in their areas. Factionalism, profit-making, and incompetence started to alienate people.
Toward the end of 2012, independent Islamist factions started to gain a foothold as they proved to be more effective, in terms of governance and fighting, than the ragtag militias of the FSA. Across the country, Islamists began to hold sway in rebel-held areas. They established Sharia committees, regulated resources, and ran government facilitates. In some areas, al-Nusra worked with Islamists to strengthen the enforcement mechanism of the Sharia courts. But the model did not prove sustainable for several reasons.
Since most of Islamist insurgents received financial backing from a variety of donors who demanded a say in how the money would be spent, division was inevitable. Ideological differences also contributed to the inability to establish strong courts and security forces. Islamists were also more attuned to the local communities and could enforce Sharia law only through mediation and public consent, especially when the matter involved another armed group or a powerful family. Even al-Nusra, which was far more powerful and disciplined than other forces up until the rise of ISIS, had to retract some of its decisions to avoid clashes with local families. Al-Nusra, as well as Islamists, also shied away from enforcing their rules to avoid alienating the population.
ISIS’s model was high-risk. It was consistent and determined about enforcing its rules, often at the cost of turning more powerful local forces against it. Even at times when it seemed clear that ISIS had little future in Syria—around February 2014, for instance—it insisted on its ways. It would not tolerate any rivalry or recognize any Sharia commissions other than its own. It demanded uniformity at any cost. “If you’re an FSA commander and you have a civilian relative, [FSA and other rebels] would accept mediation,” said Hassan al-Salloum, a former rebel commander from Idlib residing in Antakya, Turkey, referring to the time when ISIS was still a marginal player in Syria. “But with ISIS, if I complain about an FSA member, they would go and bring him to interrogate him. They would not accept mediation. People started to go to complain to them. People made them intervene. A person comes to them and asks for help. FSA would not do it. ISIS gets you what you want, and then you start talking about it. If I hit one of my soldiers, he goes to ISIS. They give him weapons, salary, pocket money.”
Once ISIS controls an area, it establishes a semblance of order and shows zero tolerance for any rivalry or public display of weapons. It immediately disarms the local communities, primarily of heavy weapons. For Syrians who lived under the control of FSA militias, the change was welcome. “You can drive from Aleppo to Raqqa to Deir Ezzor and into Iraq, and nobody will bother you,” a resident of Deir Ezzor said. “Before, you’d have to be stopped at ad hoc checkpoints and you [would] have to bribe this and tolerate that.”
Lawlessness is even more irksome for those who work in transportation or trade or live in areas that have oil fields. Whole armed groups were formed to control oil fields, impose road taxes, escort oil traders, perpetrate smuggling, or to accumulate wealth in any way possible. Constant shooting, random killing, kidnapping, and extortion were common in most places. It was often the case that when a person with heavily armed relatives killed another person, the family of the victim despaired of justice, unless they had allies in a militia that could ask for justice through a Sharia commission. The situation changed 180 degrees when ISIS came. People seemed pleasantly surprised at first, sometimes to the extent that they would overplay their sense of relief. “We never felt this safe for twenty years,” said one old resident of Deir Ezzor. “We no longer hear shooting. We no longer hear so-and-so killed so-and-so. We can travel with no problems.” Later, the same people expressed satisfaction with the current situation but were less keen to praise ISIS’s rule.
One of the most cited praises for ISIS in its territories is that it gets the job done. Unlike the FSA and Islamist groups, ISIS will send a patrol to fetch someone if another person files a complaint about him. Even if the complaint in question dates back to the years before the uprising, said one resident who was involved in such a case, ISIS will settle the situation if the person has the appropriate documents. Rifaat al-Hassan, from Albu Kamal, told the story of an uncle who lost hundreds of thousands of Syrian pounds years before the uprising, in a fraud scheme by a local businessman. When ISIS controlled the city of Albu Kamal, the fraudulent man was arrested and forced by ISIS to return all money taken unlawfully.
More important, laws apply to ISIS members and commanders too; ISIS has executed scores of members and commanders for unlawfully profiteering or abusing power. In November 2014, ISIS executed one of its leaders in Deir Ezzor after it accused him of embezzlement and robbery. According to the group, the commander robbed residents after claiming they were apostates. Similar stories are commonly told by members of communities under ISIS control. Imad al-Rawi, from the Iraqi border town of Qa’im, who pledged allegiance to ISIS in August 2014, spoke of ten ISIS members who were executed because they sold tobacco they seized from smugglers. “When they raid shops that sell tobacco, they don’t burn the tobacco,” al-Rawi said. “When they raid a house, they also steal from it. The state executed them when it discovered them. None of those members smoked, they just sold the tobacco.”
With such tactics, ISIS established itself as a viable law enforcer and won credit from two important societal segments: those who were disillusioned with the Syrian revolution and started to reminisce about safety and security under the regime, and those who were alienated by the FSA and Islamist factions. For those categories, among others, ISIS served an acceptable temporary role. “The regime made mistakes and repeated them,” said Ghassan al-Juma, from Hasaka. “The FSA, too, made mistakes, and nobody could stop them. But when ISIS makes mistakes, it does not repeat them. You go and complain. If nobody responds to your complaint, you go to the perpetrator’s leader, and you always get what you want if you are right.”
In Iraq ISIS also sought to avoid the mistakes it had made in the years prior to the Awakening councils. Part of its strategy in the areas it controlled was to win hearts and minds and reach out to the local community leaders. After the takeover of Mosul, ISIS members avoided being heavily present in the streets. Residents of Mosul said that in the first weeks after the Iraqi Security Forces left the city, most of the fighters roaming the streets were from the neighborhoods.
In Mosul and elsewhere, ISIS allowed local forces to govern their own state of affairs, especially in areas where it felt relatively secure or lacked manpower. The reduced visibility of ISIS helped establish confidence in the new order, especially in the Iraqi cities. In Syrian areas, before it established control, ISIS had less leeway to do so given the dominance of hostile rebel groups. Instead, it benefited from sleeper cells and loyalists from within those communities to incrementally establish a foothold. The group’s notorious brutality helped it create a sense of calm in the first days before it started reaching out to people.
“People were terrified of ISIS because its reputation preceded it,” said al-Rawi from Qa’im. “At first, people avoided them, but once they started meeting people in mosques and engaging them, people became too comfortable with them. They liked their dedication and slowly started working with them even if they were still not with them. [ISIS] interfered when they had to. Local people were more present.”
That is still particularly the case in areas where ISIS is in need of manpower. After the takeover of Mosul, ISIS came up with a new system of membership for existing local forces that it still does not trust. It called them munasir (“supporter”)—to be distinguished from ansar, a term jihadists use to refer to local members of a group as opposed to muhajirin, or foreign fighters. A munasir has to pledge allegiance to ISIS without having access to its structure. These second-tier members receive salaries and mostly work to fill low-level municipality and police roles in their areas, tasks ISIS often refers to as khidmat al-muslimeen. This strategy helps ISIS be less visible and thus more capable of dodging responsibility, and increases rivalry within the local community over governance. ISIS can call on such forces to serve as reinforcement to its troops on the front lines, such as in Kobane, according to residents in Raqqa. Despite the leeway it allows for local forces, ISIS still has an overarching military, religious, and political control.
The combination of brute force and effective governance means that the local population has little motivation and a huge deterrent to rise up against ISIS, particularly in the absence of a viable and acceptable alternative. Such policies also make it much harder for any force from outside to retake these areas from ISIS, owing to the difficulty of filling the void and forming new alliances with the local communities.
While it tends to be minimally visible as a military force, ISIS also refrains from micromanaging a town as much as possible. Local forces and their relatives often run day-to-day administrative affairs. Typically when ISIS takes over a new town, the first facility it establishes is a so-called Hudud Square, to carry out Sharia punishments, such as crucifixions, beheadings, lashings, and hand-loppings. (This is the area in al-Bab that Barry Abdul Lattif referred to as the town square, just opposite the shuttered hookah cafe.) It then establishes a Sharia court, police force, and security operation station. The work of Sharia police, known as hisbah, is not restricted to the implementation of sharia, but also to the regulation of the marketplace, and these police forces are more active in urban centers. ISIS divides regions into wilayat (provinces, of which there are roughly sixteen in Iraq and Syria) and smaller qawati’ (townships). One military commander, one or more security commanders, and a general emir are appointed for each township. They all answer to a wali (governor).
Top leaders don’t live in the same province they rule. For example, the governors of Minbij, al-Bab, and the parts of Deir Ezzor ISIS designated as Wilayat al-Khair (from the city of Deir Ezzor to the borders of Albu Kamal) tend to live in Raqqa or in Shaddadi, in Hasaka. The governor of Wilayat al-Furat (Albu Kamal and Qa’im) lives in Iraq and rarely travels to Syria. The same applies to the governors of Iraqi provinces.
Raqqa and Mosul serve as ISIS’s de facto capitals, and envoys from its territories often meet in palaces occupied by the group. ISIS members are instructed to display very few of their weapons in public; as in Minbij, they hide arms in confiscated homes.
Checkpoints are also manned by a small number of fighters, in some cases by those who have recently joined ISIS and are still undergoing basic training.
When ISIS security units carry out an operation, foreign and local fighters from the town and nearby towns gather as reinforcements. The exaggerated show of force in cases of security operations is a hallmark of ISIS’s deterrent strategy. This everywhere-but-nowhere strategy serves at least two purposes for ISIS. First, it deters local forces from rebelling against it, because it allows flexibility for locals to run their own affairs, within limits. Second, it enlists ISIS as the paramount conflict resolver. It is very common for residents to voice their anger about one another rather than about ISIS as an organization, with some going so far as to claim that foreign fighters are more disciplined and better behaved than natural-born residents.
ISIS allows fighters from other groups to keep their arms after it overruns an area, so long as these fighters continue to fight exclusively on the front lines. Anyone who receives weapons, ammunition, and food from ISIS must report to an ISIS emir and serve a set number of hours per week. Leave of absences from the battlefield require the relinquishing of weapons. Members of other groups have to follow a similar pattern if they wish to govern in their areas. In Fallujah and newly captured areas in Syria, ISIS offers a stark choice: pledge allegiance or leave. “At first, ISIS sets harsh conditions to pressure them,” an FSA fighter from Deir Ezzor said of the jihadists’ administration of the province in the summer of 2013. “It tells them that if you don’t turn up at the [Deir Ezzor] airport regularly, you have to hand over your arms.”
Disarming the local communities is also key to residents accepting ISIS. During FSA rule, buying and carrying weapons became necessary protection for moving from place to place in the face of rampant lawlessness and theft. As one resident from Hasaka put it, “Everybody carried weapons, from children on up. If you didn’t have a gun, you’d walk into the market and be scared. If you got into a small fight, you were doomed.” ISIS thus caters to popular fears about the absence of law and order by offering itself as the only alternative to societal collapse. Like any government, it seeks to retain a monopoly on violence.
TAKFIRINOMICS
ISIS has married its authoritarian governance with a remarkably successful war economy. FSA and Islamist groups that controlled oil fields in eastern Syria, for example, did dedicate some of the revenue to run schools and supply electricity, telecommunications, water, food, and other services. Some villages and towns saw a decline in such services because ISIS distributed oil revenue to other towns under its control in Syria and Iraq, establishing its own pan-territorial patronage system. As a result, in oil-rich areas, warlordism—a side effect of strictly localized rebel governance—dropped steadily.
ISIS also forced municipality personnel to work, unlike previous groups that had allowed Syrian state employees to continue to receive their salaries (mostly from the regime) while they sat at home and did nothing, no doubt with attendant kickbacks. “The streets are cleaner now; 70 percent of the employees were not working, even though they received salaries,” said a former media activist with the FSA from Deir Ezzor. “They cancelled the customary day off on Saturday; they’re supposed to make Thursday the day off instead.”
Regulations and price control are another area in which ISIS’s governance proved successful. It banned fishermen from using dynamite and electricity to catch fish. It also prohibited residents in the Jazira from using the chaos of war to stake new land claims, principally in the Syrian desert, where they had tried to build new homes or establish businesses, much to the chagrin of their neighbors. ISIS also limited the profit margins on oil by-products, ice, flour, and other essential commodities. Before ISIS controlled eastern Syria, an oil well produced around thirty thousand barrels per day, and each barrel sold for two thousand Syrian pounds—eleven dollars at the current exchange rate. Local families that worked in refineries would make two hundred liras (a little more than one dollar) on each barrel they refined primitively. After ISIS took over, a barrel of oil became cheaper because it fixed the price of a liter of oil at fifty pounds (thirty cents).
ISIS also banned families from setting up refineries close to residences under the threat of confiscation, a policy that led some families to quit the oil business altogether. Collectively, price control and regulations balanced the decline in resources and services.
Subsidies from Gulf countries, where many of those who live in ISIS-controlled areas work, also helped some families afford electricity-generating engines and oil by-products. “Those in the Gulf who used to send once a month now send twice a month because they understand the situation,” said the former FSA media activist. “Also, there is no big difference in value. In 2010 a kilo of chicken was 190 pounds [$1] and is now 470 [$2.60].”
Oil was a major revenue generator for ISIS until the coalition air strikes began. Before that, ISIS was thought to have earned millions of dollars a month from oil in Syria and Iraq—$1 to 2 million a day. The revenue dropped significantly after the air strikes. But oil smuggling to neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan, and to other areas in Syria and Iraq, still makes significant revenue for ISIS. The sharp decline in oil production affected civilians more than it affected ISIS, which could still generate wealth from other sources, but it hampered ISIS’s ability to provide for the local communities, especially much-coveted materials such as gas cylinders. “I estimate that the impact of air strikes was 5 percent,” said the media activist, who still lives in Deir Ezzor. “They affected oil primarily. Food is plenty, and most of it comes from Turkey or Iraq. Borders are open; if you don’t like prices here, you go to Anbar. I see the situation as normal.”
ISIS’s oil market savvy has impressed and shocked many observers, although Derek Harvey isn’t one of them. “I know for a fact that the Saddamists who were smuggling the oil in the ’90s, to evade UN sanctions, are now doing so for ISIS,” he said. “People are saying that they’re selling it for thirty-five dollars a barrel. What we bombed recently is some of the local refineries. If you’re selling it at that price, it’s fifty to fifty-five dollars off the current market price. But here’s what happens: these middlemen are selling it, and there’s a kickback coming back in to ISIS’s senior leaders. They’re getting another twenty, twenty-five dollars a barrel in kickbacks, but that’s not on the books or being factored in by everybody. It’s going back into the kitty of financiers at the top of the pyramid. The ISIS fighters in Deir Ezzor would not be aware of that.”
Locals in eastern Syria had learned to survive on remittances from the Gulf and local economies even before the uprising. High oil prices led many to rely less on agricultural products since the energy had to be spent pumping water from the Euphrates or Tigress rivers to their farmlands many miles away. After the war started, cheaper oil revived the Syrian agribusiness—smuggling and livestock trade markets began booming again. When ISIS seized control of the Jazira, people were already buying their own oil for irrigation and electricity and didn’t need to rely on subsidized services.
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichten–dienst (BND), has cautioned against “overblown” speculation about ISIS’s high oil revenue because there is a tendency to discount the massive overhead and spending inside its territories. But, as per Harvey, ISIS pockets most of this revenue, as it sometimes taxes residents for services supplied by the regime, such as electricity and telecommunication. Unlike Islamist groups that operated regime-established facilities for the local communities gratis, ISIS has developed a surcharge economy to replenish its own coffers.
ISIS also makes millions from zakat (different forms of Islamic alms payable to the state). Zakat is extracted from annual savings or capital assets (2.5 percent), gold (on values exceeding $4,500), livestock (two heads out of 100 heads owned by a farmer), dates, crops (10 percent if irrigated by rain or a nearby stream or river, and 5 percent if irrigation costs money), and profits (2.5 percent).
ISIS also imposes annual taxes on non-Muslims living in its territories, especially Christians (4.25 grams of gold for the rich and half of that for moderate-income individuals). It makes money by stealing dressed up as civil penalties: it confiscates the properties of displaced or wanted individuals or as punishment for fighting ISIS. This includes, of course, enormous stocks of weapons and ammunition as part of its community disarmament policies.
While donations from foreign sponsors constitute a meager percentage of its treasury, deep-pocked individuals, whether foreign donors or members who have joined the group, still contribute to the group.
More significantly, ghanima (war spoils, which in ISIS’s definition encompasses robbery and theft) is one of the group’s largest and most valuable sources of income. ISIS seized millions of dollars worth of American and foreign military equipment after it forced three Iraqi divisions to flee in June 2014, and it has also seized large stockpiles of weapons as well as equipment, facilities, and cash from Syria’s regime and rebel groups. Artifacts are also lucrative for ISIS—one man interviewed in Turkey said trade in artifacts grew during ISIS rule, with one of his cousins smuggling into Turkey golden statues and coins found in Mari ancient ruins, eleven kilometers away from Albu Kamal.