In 2009, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was released from Camp Bucca, a US detention camp in Iraq named for FDNY Fire Marshal Ronald Bucca, who died on September 11, 2001, responding to the World Trade Centre attacks. Though it is not clear why al Baghdadi was granted amnesty along with thousands of other detainees, it is likely that the Iraqi government, lacking resources to maintain the prison, emptied Camp Bucca as US troops readied to depart Iraq in 2010.
As he was leaving the camp, al Baghdadi quipped to the Long Island reservists escorting him out, “See you in New York.”73 At the time few paid any attention to his vow. When in late spring 2014 al Baghdadi became Caliph of the Islamic State, Army Colonel Kenneth King, former commanding officer of Camp Bucca, recalled the statement, now a chilling warning.74
With al Baghdadi’s election as Caliph, King admitted his surprise that his former ward had become the world’s most wanted terrorist. In captivity, al Baghdadi had not been considered a virulently extremist Sunni. Indeed, until weeks before the declaration of the Caliphate, few in the media had paid him or his group any attention. Of course this would not be the first time the US overlooked, out of sheer ignorance and bad planning, a formidable enemy. It is nonetheless astonishing that the entire world could have missed al Baghdadi’s spectacular successes in Syria in 2012 and 2013, a time when the eyes of the world were trained precisely on that country.
It is equally disturbing that the future Caliph’s astonishing achievements were made possible by stepping into the shoes of his globally notorious predecessor, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, whose myth of the superterrorist was itself manufactured by the Bush administration. Even more shocking is the fact that al Baghdadi borrowed from the Americans the instruments and techniques of propaganda that they had employed to construct and globally disseminate the terrifying, false mythology surrounding the Jordanian jihadi leader. Ironically, as Bush and Blair had, al Baghdadi held in mind a very ambitious goal, bigger than many could envisage: the redrawing of the map of the Middle East—in al Baghdadi’s case the carving out of a new state, the Caliphate.
Contrary to what many believe, Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s stardom in the jihadist firmament and his role as arch-enemy of the US is a classic example of self-fulfilling prophecy. When Colin Powell singled out al Zarqawi as al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, the Jordanian became the new jihadist star almost overnight and sponsors started throwing money at him and his group. Not only there was no link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but also al Zarqawi was a very small fish in a large jihadist pond. Judging from the successes of the Islamic State, today this self-fulfilling prophecy has come back to haunt us.
The first time American authorities heard of al Zarqawi was toward the end of 2001, after 9/11, from the Kurdish secret services. The Kurds claimed that al Qaeda had funded a new base in Bajara, in Iraqi Kurdistan, which was run by a new jihadist organization, Ansar al Islam. In 2001, Jund al Islam, a group of Jordanians from the City of Salt who had met al Zarqawi while he was imprisoned in Jordan and had remained in touch with him, merged into Ansar al Islam.75 Without hard evidence, the Kurdish secret service used this alliance to link al Zarqawi to al Qaeda. Al Zarqawi was singled out as the go-between for both groups because of his personal contacts with the Jordanians and his Afghan camp in Herat, located on a popular jihadist route from northern Iraq to Afghanistan.
The Americans knew nothing about al Zarqawi, so they immediately contacted the Jordanian authorities to find out more. It was at this point that in Washington the idea of constructing a mythology around him as justification for the intervention in Iraq began taking shape.
Joint US and Jordanian investigations accused al Zarqawi of having masterminded a foiled al Qaeda plot in Jordan during the millennium celebrations, as well as the assassinations, in 2001, of an Israeli citizen, Yitzhak Snir, and, in 2002, of the American diplomat Lawrence Foley, for which an unknown armed organization, the Honorables of Jordan, had claimed responsibility. No hard evidence was produced to back such charges. Indeed, at the end of April 2004, after al Zarqawi was sentenced to death in absentia for both assassinations, the Honorables of Jordan released a statement denying any involvement by him. The message was accompanied by the shell casings of the bullets that had been fired at Foley and Snir.76
The Americans had much to gain from the creation of his myth. From September 11, 2001, to March 20, 2003, the United States built its case for attacking Iraq. Saddam’s regime was accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism. Without any proof of the existence of the former, Saddam’s support for terrorism was the only trump card the US administration held to convince the world that the Iraqi dictator had to be removed. To play it, the administration needed to demonstrate what was untrue: that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were connected. Their fictitious link was Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
The successful manufacturing of the myth of al Zarqawi rests on two factors: the power of the media, which spread across the globe a terrifying message delivered by Colin Powell to the UN Security Council, and the willingness of Western citizens to believe this dubious message in the aftermath of 9/11. Just over ten years later, the Islamic State has been using social media to spread a terrifying new and equally false set of myths. And, as it was a decade ago, the world seems well inclined to believe them.
Al Baghdadi and his followers understand the importance of virtual life and our tendency to act irrationally when dealing with mysterious, terrifying issues such as terrorism. Showing a clear understanding of sophisticated communications analysis, they have invested extraordinary energy in social media to spread frightening prophecies, in the knowledge that they will have self-fulfilling effect. They also seem perfectly conscious that in a world where the twenty-four-hour media cycle has turned journalists and readers into junkies of shocking and extraordinary events, the truth value of an account takes second place to its shock value.
As we have seen right from the beginning, when the first group of jihadists from the Islamic State in Iraq crossed over to Syria, the organization’s goal was to carve out its own territorial stronghold. This was an ambitious plan that it was believed could not be achieved without the spreading of a carefully crafted mythology to present al Baghdadi and his followers as a much stronger force than they were. A skillful, technologically savvy propaganda machine circulated false news of their exceptional strength through social media, a tactic that proved to be instrumental to their recruitment, fundraising, and military training programs. Indeed, as early as 2011 the organization attracted experienced fighters from Bosnia and Chechnya, people with outstanding military knowledge, who were not interested in joining any of the other jihadist groups in Syria.77 The smoke and mirrors that the propaganda created fooled everyone and hid the bleak reality that at the end of 2010 the Islamic State in Iraq was on the brink of extinction and the migration to Syria was its sole long shot at surviving.
Even today, inside and outside the Caliphate, the propaganda machine is constantly in motion, spreading myths among young people of an ever stronger and ever more successful army, both abroad and at home. In Raqqa, a Belgian jihadist and his young son traverse the city in a propaganda van answering questions about everything from social services to job hunting. The van is packed with CDs, music, videos, leaflets, photos, and literature.78 We are witnessing a phenomenon as old as our world that Plato brilliantly explained in the myth of the cave: those imprisoned within see nothing but the shadows cast on the walls before them, which they thus regard as the whole of reality.
Unlike the Taliban, who shunned anything technological, the Islamic State’s propaganda is a high-tech operation run by professionals, including some highly educated individuals from the West. When Twitter and Facebook took down the IS video of the beheading of James Foley, within a few hours the propaganda team had restored access through Diaspora-hosted sites.79 And the Islamic State propaganda has proven very seductive for potential jihadists, especially in the West. It bears asking what the NSA is really doing, then, with the transcripts of our phone calls and email, if they have been unable to intercept the numerous communications of Westerners bound for the Caliphate and arrest these would-be fighters. The recent discovery that as early as 2009 a close link existed between young Muslims from Minnesota (two of whom died fighting for the Caliphate) and the Islamic State,80 causes one to wonder how the NSA could have missed such a link.
This black hole in intelligence is particularly puzzling considering that the Islamic State employs plentiful electronic strategies to widely disseminate its message. Its use of the ad hoc app is illustrative. “One of ISIS’s more successful ventures is an Arabic-language Twitter app called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, or just Dawn. The app, an official ISIS product promoted by its top users, is advertised as a way to keep up on the latest news about the jihadi group.”81
As we have seen, IS is also very good at latching onto world events to proselytize. “During the 2014 World Cup it used hashtags such as #Brazil2014, #ENG, #France and #WC2014. This tactic allowed it to access millions of World Cup Twitter searches in the hope that some readers would click on links to its propaganda material, in particular a video showing British and Australian jihadists trying to persuade other Western Muslims to join their ranks.”82
A possible answer to this puzzle may be found in the nature of the Syrian conflict. As opposed to Libya or Iraq, the Islamic State in Syria presents the West with a diplomatic quandary. Would the West compromise its relationship with Russia or China, or its appeasement with Iran, for a country where Western interests are very limited or nonexistent? Until the summer of 2014 the answer was “no.” Aid workers, journalists, and refugees confirm that the flow of foreign fighters into Northern Syria kept rising as world events evolved. “They came in waves. After the coup in Egypt, those who had believed in the Muslim Brotherhood arrived at the conclusion that in the end the fate of Arab nations is decided in the US and the moderates had no more arguments to use to fight for democracy. Another wave came after the attack at Abu Ghraib in July 2013, [including] many of the prisoners who escaped, came to Syria, and joined the various groups. The last wave came after the chemical attack of the twenty-first of August, 2013,” explains Francesca Borri. Almost all the foreigners entered Northern Syria across the Turkish border, flying to the airport of Hatay. “At the border between Turkey and Syria there is carpet of airline tags from all over the world,” remembers Borri who flew to Hatay several times, a pilgrimage that for many was their last journey.
Clearly, Turkish authorities knew what was happening on the border with Syria and, if they wanted, Western and Israeli intelligence could have monitored this phenomenon. But it was only when IS moved into Iraq that the West took an interest in the Syrian conflict and the Islamic State.
Even if IS presented a political hot potato, it is unclear why the Western intelligence community did not take more interest in al Baghdadi and his followers while the group was growing in Syria. It would have been very easy to penetrate their virtual community. Back in 2013, for example, ISIS members, sympathizers, and sponsors followed on social media the dispute between al Baghdadi and Jabhat al Nusra’s emir Abu Mohammed al Golani after the merger of their groups. When al Baghdadi and Ayman al Zawahiri clashed over the right to fight in Syria and the right to demand allegiance from factions of Arab, foreign, and local fighters, the global jihadist community was invited to express its opinion. “That fight required, in addition to a show of military capability on the ground, the ability to sell ISIS’s Sharia views by paying due attention to ideology when marketing the organization, as evidenced by the speeches and messages exchanged between Golani, Baghdadi, and Zawahiri. Those exchanges were discussed on jihadist forums and social media sites to assess Baghdadi’s legitimate right to lead.”83
Nor were these debates of interest to the numerous think-tanks that have proliferated since 9/11 to study radicalization and terrorism. One would think that Islamic State members’ extensive use of social media and the most up-to-date techniques and tools to proselytize and raise money would be a gift to these organizations. The Atlantic magazine, doing its own analysis of the Islamic State’s social media strategy, discovered that IS received seventy-two retweets for every tweet it sends by “using an Arabic language Twitter account, @ActiveHashtags, which advertises the most popular hashtags to get its own material on the feed.”84 The opportunities to study al Baghdadi’s group through its use of social media were plentiful, but no one in a position to alter policy was interested in taking them up.
Paradoxically, Western intelligence and mainstream media not only ignored the Islamic State’s development for a couple of years, but, when they finally did show some interest, they began listening to the wrong people. This confirms the absolute lack of proper information regarding the Syrian conflict and IS in Northern Syria. The first victims are the journalists. “Between April and May 2014, I was getting ready to go back into Aleppo from Turkey. Western intelligence briefed me about what was happening during the battle of Aleppo between the forces of Assad and the rebels. They told me that the rebels were winning and that the regime of Assad was falling, so it was safe to travel along the road from the border to Aleppo. I was the first foreign journalist to cross the border and my driver and myself ended up driving along fifteen kilometers of front line. I do not know how we survived but we did. When I got back I told Western intelligence that the rebels had all gone and the city was in the hands of Assad, but they did not believe me, nor did the international press want to publish my story. Both the intelligence and the media kept saying that what they saw in Facebook and YouTube was different. We get different news from the rebels via social media, they said, telling us and showing pictures of their victory. The only paper that published my story was Le Monde.”85
For us, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram are more real than the report of a freelance Italian woman willing to risk her life to find out the truth. And the Islamic State, as well as the rebels and other groups engaged in the bloody Syrian and Iraqi conflict know it.
In 2003, the mainstream media disseminated the government-sponsored myth of al Zarqawi as a superterrorist without checking its authenticity. Ten years later, social media achieved a similar result, contributing to the spread and internalization of a deliberately inflated image of the power of al Baghdadi and of his armed organization. Just as happened ten years ago, nobody bothered verifying these claims. But propaganda and media are not enough to mobilize people if the illusion they project does not coincide with some dream or nightmare formulated by the collective imagination. We know that in the aftermath of 9/11 the world was deeply traumatized, so we can understand why it was easy for Bush and Blair to move public opinion based on lies. What is harder to comprehend, however, is the appeal of the Islamic State to its social media followers. We are talking about a considerable number of people. The Islamic State has reportedly attracted 12,000 foreign fighters, of whom 2,200 are from Europe.86 These figures do not take into consideration supporters and sympathizers abroad. For example, while sixty Australians are estimated to be fighting in Syria and Iraq with the IS, the number of supporters at home is believed to be one hundred.87
What motivates young, professional Muslims born in the West to give up their lives and join a war of conquest in a land they do not even know, in a conflict reminiscent of those fought in the Middle Ages? What, in a word, is the final seduction of the Islamic State? These are the questions we should ask ourselves.
In part it is the opportunity to vindicate fellow Muslims in the Middle East from humiliation, but this was the case also for many Western suicide bombers after coalition forces invaded Iraq. Perhaps there is something more that motivates young Muslims to join this jihad. The opportunity to be part of the construction of a new political order in the Middle East, a modern state without racism or sectarian tension (after some ethnic cleansing, of course), presented an unparalleled opportunity. Could it be that followers of IS look forward to the Caliphate as an uncorrupted and incorruptible nation with a profound sense of brotherhood, a society without the challenge that Western and Westernized Muslim women pose to men, a nation ruled by honor, a contemporary society perfectly in harmony with al Tawhid, the mandate of God? Indeed, this idealistic nation not only promises Muslims deliverance from centuries of humiliation, it also represents a twenty-first-century Sunni political utopia, a powerful philosophical construct that for centuries scholars have tried to deliver, to no avail. This, indeed, is the modern political force that the West and the rest of world have chosen to ignore until the summer of 2014.
If this analysis is correct, the ultimate appeal of the Islamic State rests upon its ability to convince young Western professionals to embrace this utopia and the belief that the Caliphate has the power to implement it, as the Zionist movement in the 1940s rallied the global Jewish community around the utopia of a Jewish state and instilled in them the certainty that it could turn the dream of a modern Israel into a reality.
Unlike the early state of Israel, however, the Syrian and Iraqi populations do not welcome the presence of foreigners. “In the fall of 2012 the first foreigners started to arrive in Syria to participate in the civil war. The Syrians let them in because they needed all the help they could get but they were not happy about it and kept saying that as soon as the Assad regime would fall the foreigners would go back. But everybody knew that they would stay,” recounts Francesca Borri.88 “There is a lot of tension between the locals and the foreign fighters, who are the most brutal and violent. Because they have not experienced dictatorship and war like the locals, they mistrust journalists and harass them. I never had any problems with the Syrians, but I was threatened by a New Zealander who came into Syria working for a Western NGO infiltrated by the Islamic State.”
Not all the fighters are motivated by the utopian dream of a new Muslim state. For many young Westerners, joining the jihad or the rebels is an adventure, a kind of military summer camp. These are the most dangerous, because they show no compassion for the local population and no understanding of the suffering endured by them.
In Syria, as well as in Iraq, the proficiency of al Baghdadi and his group at making Sunnis believe they might succeed where all others had failed is a feat remarkable for its modernity. In the past, no jihadist group had even been equipped to run a real state. They had no idea how to manage water supply, sewage, or road building, nor did they know how to exploit the virtual world to recruit and fundraise across the globe. They were further ignorant of how to build consensus within communities. These failures, which we have seen in Afghanistan with the Caliphate of Mullah Omar, rest on the pre-modern vision of society that radical Salafism has projected.
Though the dream of the jihadist movement has always been to recreate the Caliphate, this was nothing more than a vague, romantic idea, entirely inapplicable in modern times, as Salafism rejected the construction of the modern state. Radical Salafism, rather, had frozen the concept of the ideal society in its manifestation in seventh-century Arabia. All subsequent events are superfluous and dangerous, from the infrastructure of the modern state to modern technology, as evidenced by the Taliban’s ban on music, radio, and TV.
Against this background, what al Baghdadi has done, carving the Islamic State in Iraq’s own enclaves in Syria and running these communities as a political authority with all the instruments of the modern state, is truly exceptional. He has “fuse[d] the political Islamists’ aim of seizing state power with the neo-traditionalists’ more global vision to create a recognizable, if rough-edged, state that is simultaneously supposed to be a launch-pad for greater expansion. This unprecedented combination is a powerful one,” writes Jason Burke, a veteran of the study of the jihad.89
The manufacturing of the myth of al Zarqawi proved successful because after 9/11 there was a desperate need to put more than one face to the atrocities committed by al Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein, a much-hated dictator, fit the profile. At the same time, Bush and Blair succeeded in lying to the world and to their own governments, who thought the possibility that they were being actively deceived inconceivable. World public opinion still clings to the absurd belief that in the modern nation state the daily battle of politics is between good and evil only. Those who had not fallen victim to this fantasy, however, knew that no link existed between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and that invading Iraq would eventually destabilize the entire region.
Today these same people are denouncing the manufacturing of another absurd myth, not in the West but in the Muslim world: that of the Caliphate and its leader, al Baghdadi; they are also witnessing the unfolding of another self-fulfilling prophesy through the power of social media. After decades of war and destruction at the hands of the local elite, backed by Western powers, Sunni Arabs and Muslims desperately want to believe that finally, from the ashes of a world long gone, a magnificent phoenix has risen. That is, a state and a leader who will bring them their long-awaited deliverance from the hellish present. Is al Baghdadi that man, and is the Caliphate that state? The West and the world strongly believe that they are not, but only the people of the Middle East can deliver, in time, the correct answer.