One cannot avoid wondering how an armed organization born from the ashes of the defeated jihadist insurgency in Iraq and the dismantled military and intelligence machine of Saddam Hussein succeeded in building a new nation. How has ISIS kept the strongest countries in the world in check while challenging the status quo in the Middle East and smashing a world order created by those most powerful Western nations? It appears they carefully applied the cardinal rule of war: know thy enemy.
Regardless of the name we call it by, or the brutality of its actions, the Caliphate has proven to be a formidable enemy. Well aware that in the digital era politics constantly requires consensus, ISIS has skillfully manipulated world public opinion using its own version of the politics of fear.
Soon after the declaration of the new state in the summer of 2014, the Caliphate began terrorizing the world using its own diplomacy. Its speaker was Jihadi John, the Caliphate’s executioner. He broadcasted its political messages before severing the heads of foreign hostages. An efficient propaganda machine packaged the gruesome images and the statements in different formats: one for the enemies, another for ISIS supporters, a third one for the potential followers—different narratives for different audiences.
Global media immediately took the bait and amplified the impact of those images and messages. In a consumer society anything that makes people consume is welcome, and people turned on the TV, flocked to media webpages, and rushed to newspaper stands to see Jihadi John cutting off the head of James Foley. For months the mantra of ISIS diplomacy, drenched in fear and terror, resonated around the world, reaching the privacy of our homes. This was a powerful global advertising campaign and it was free of charge!
In the space of two months, the Caliphate’s apocalyptic narrative turned an unknown armed organization into the number one enemy of the world. And the more fearsome the Islamic State became, the weaker its enemies appeared to be for the democratic electorate. ISIS diplomacy staged a terror campaign that succeeded in inflating the power of the Caliphate in the eyes of the world while at the same time undermining the international political leadership.
To a terrorized public opinion, world leaders began looking weak and helpless. Once this sense of vulnerability became cemented in the collective imagination, the Islamic State began sneaking into domestic politics, manipulating foreign policy decisions, in short forcing the enemy to take specific actions. For example, after resisting any type of involvement in Syria and Iraq, in August 2014 President Obama reversed his decision and gathered a grand coalition to start a bombing campaign in Iraq, which later on was extended to Syria. Under pressure after the beheading of American hostages, the White House simply gave in because public opinion demanded some concrete action. This was a victory for the Islamic State. It reinforced its anti-imperialist claim, and indeed the Caliphate could finally prove that the newly born nation was under attack from the modern version of the crusaders and from their Muslim allies, the corrupted Middle Eastern elites.
The best example of how ISIS diplomacy succeeded in influencing major decisions abroad came during the Japanese hostage crisis of January 2015. Until Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s speech in Egypt, when he pledged $200 million in non-military aid to countries fighting ISIS, Haruna Yukawa, who had been kidnapped in the summer of 2014, and Kenji Goto, captured in the fall of 2014, were simply hostages. Their value was monetary, measured by how much the Japanese government was willing to pay for their release.
Prime Minister Abe admitted that the government knew of Mr. Goto’s kidnapping as early as November 2014. According to Goto’s wife, in November she started receiving emails, appearing to be from ISIS, about her husband’s abduction. In late December, the kidnappers began talking about ransom, eventually demanding about two billion yen (or seventeen million dollars) to release him, a request in line with the initial ransom demands that the Islamic State had put forward to other Western governments. For this demand, as with many others, ISIS activated its own ad hoc channels to negotiate the ransom. The negotiations took place in secrecy, out of the reach of the media. But everything changed after Prime Minister Abe’s high-profile visit to the Middle East.
His speech offered the Islamic State a great opportunity to challenge the grand anti-ISIS coalition and to punish Japan for wanting to be an active part of it. Japan had long earned goodwill in the Middle East by discreetly working in the background rather than grandstanding. Since July 2014, however, the prime minister had initiated a campaign to change the interpretation of Japan’s pacifist constitution to allow the “exercise of the right of collective self-defense”128 abroad. The controversial reinterpretation of Article 9 of the Constitution had triggered strong opposition in Japan. Abe decided to use his visit to the Middle East to turn public opinion on this matter.
How did the Islamic State know so much about Japanese politics? As the Islamic State’s new citizens are truly cosmopolitan, coming from across the globe, the leadership keeps an eye on its enemies by asking its citizens to maintain ties to their native countries and act as interpreters to decipher these nations’ politics. It is not surprising, then, that the political elite of the Caliphate knew all too well what was happening in Japan and that it had a pretty good idea of how controversial the reinterpretation of Article 9 had proved.
Against this exceptional background, the Islamic State saw a unique opportunity to use the hostages to prevent Japan from entering Obama’s coalition and at the same time to reinforce ISIS’s claim to statehood.
The negotiations for the release of Mr. Yukawa and Mr. Goto suddenly became public, producing a social media frenzy. To emphasize the weakness of the enemy, the Islamic State ensured that none of the conditions put forward could realistically be fulfilled: $200 million in seventy-two hours to free both hostages; the exchange of a Jordanian prisoner, Sajida al Rishawi—an Arab woman who failed to detonate her suicide belt in the 2005 attack against the Radisson hotel in Amman—for Mr. Goto in little more than forty-eight hours. Not only was the time allowed for the negotiations deliberately too short, the ransom was far too high to be accepted, especially if compared with the $2 million and $6 million paid for other foreign hostages released by the Islamic State.
From hostages, Mr. Yukawa and Mr. Goto were transformed into political pawns in ISIS’s new jihadist diplomacy, a metamorphosis that Mr. Abe’s willingness to join Obama’s grand coalition had triggered. Hence the two Japanese hostages joined the likes of James Foley as Jihadi John used images of their severed heads to broadcast ISIS’s message to the world. It announced the arrival of the Caliphate as a new regional political power and marked the end of Western domination and influence over the region.
The manipulation of the hostage crisis was a great success for ISIS. It tipped Japanese public opinion toward keeping a low profile in the fight against Islamist terrorism. Indeed, the hostage videos and the changing conditions of their release were all aimed at increasing frustration and instilling fear in the Japanese population so as to convince them not to back the change to the Japanese Constitution. By its propaganda, then, ISIS created a dialogue directly with the Japanese people, engaging the government through its electorate.
Dragging Jordan into the negotiation simply reinforced the Japanese government’s impotence in the eyes of the world. The demand to exchange Mr. Goto, and not the captured Jordanian pilot, Moaz al Kasasbeh, with Sajida al Rishawi was also an open provocation to Jordan. ISIS knew that King Abdullah would never accept such conditions. Exchanging Sajida for Goto, leaving al Kasasbeh in the hands of the Islamic State, would have enraged the Jordanian population. So by skillfully manipulating the Japanese hostage crisis ISIS also undermined the Jordanian government.
Despite this complicated statesmanship, many analysts overlooked the sophisticated diplomacy of the Caliphate and remained focused on the messages of violence—gruesome, barbarous violence. Similarly, during 2015, they failed to miss another “diplomatic” victory for ISIS: the exposure of the weaknesses of Europe.
Sydney, Ottawa, Paris, Copenhagen, Beirut, San Bernardino, Brussels, Nice—there have been many terrorist attacks in the world carried out under the banner of ISIS since June 2014, far too many. Clearly, they confirm the success of the Islamic State’s radicalization campaign outside the Middle East. But it would be a mistake to believe that the Caliphate shares al Qaeda’s desire to physically destroy the far-away enemy, i.e., the West, which, until recently, remained an absurd and unreachable objective. The Islamic State is too pragmatic to make this mistake; it has had a much more sophisticated and realistic plan: use Western leaders’ politics of fear to expose their weaknesses to public opinion.
Indeed, back in June 2014, the message of the Caliph to the Muslim population was clear: This is your land—we need you, we want you, without your work we will not be able to succeed in building this new nation. However, if for any reason you cannot join us, then do whatever you can wherever you are. ISIS has not been interested in planning, plotting, or funding any replica of 9/11. It did not need to do that. There are plenty of people in the world eager to carry out very small-scale attacks against the West under the banner of the Caliphate. But although these attacks are tiny in comparison with 9/11, the politics of fear has amplified them, reawakening the nightmare of 9/11 in world public opinion each time we wake up to another terrorist attack news headline. This is particularly true of the 2016 attacks in Brussels and Nice and the 2015 attacks in Paris—the second-biggest European attack since 2004, when four jihadists blew themselves up inside the Atocha train station in Madrid.
As expected, the 2015 Bataclan attack in Paris and all other attacks carried out in France provoked the overwhelming response of François Hollande, the French president. Echoing George Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, Hollande publicly declared over and over again that France was at war. The subsequent shutdown of Brussels, the capital of the EU, for days as a massive manhunt was conducted to find the perpetrators of the Paris attack brought back to mind all the fears prompted by 9/11.
And yet the Paris commandos showed all the characteristics of amateur terrorists: of the three suicide bombers who allegedly planned to blow themselves up in the stadium while Hollande was watching the game, only one had purchased a ticket. When they could not get in, they decided to detonate their suicide belts without creating panic in the stadium.
One of the jihadists who fled threw his mobile phone away outside the stadium without destroying it. “This is ridiculous,” says a former member of the Red Brigades. “He should have smashed it and swallowed the SIM card.”129 These are textbook mistakes: never leave any trail, especially an electronic one. Indeed, that telephone led the police to the apartment where the second commando was hiding. Instead of moving to another hideout, a safe house, the second commando barricaded himself in the house, breaking one of the cardinal rules of those who live in hiding: after an attack you move.
Terrorist experts agree that the jihadist European network is very different from al Qaeda’s suicide bombers of 9/11. The former acts alone, it is independent and does not follow specific orders from ISIS leadership. The European network has a life of its own; it is the product of the Caliphate’s seductive propaganda, of the contradiction of European integration policies. The bombing campaign coupled with the restrictions imposed upon young people wanting to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the Caliphate have forced potential jihadists to act inside Europe to manifest their support for ISIS.
European public opinion senses this shift and fears a long season of terrorist attacks is in the pipeline. Above all people are confused about the politicians’ response to the present danger. The Brussels shutdown compounded the disturbing sense of weakness that Europeans have felt vis-à-vis their leaders for a very long time. Both in handling the refugee crisis and in dealing with the military intervention in Syria and Iraq, the European Union has failed to reassure its own citizens. The politics of fear, used to justify the bombing campaign against the Islamic State and the opening of the borders to the refugees, is backfiring, because it hides a shocking truth: Europe does not know how to handle Middle Eastern foreign policy.
A decade ago, Europe was equally divided about the military intervention in Iraq and therefore vulnerable. Spanish participation in the preventive strike in Iraq motivated the Madrid bombing in March 2004. The jihadists wanted revenge for the civilian casualties of the war in Iraq. The bombing prompted the election of the socialist leader Zapatero, who brought the troops home from Iraq.
In a terrifying déjà vu, in 2015 and 2016 the jihadists who carried out the European attacks sought to avenge the victims of the bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq, bringing the horror of the Syrian war to a European capital. But unlike Zapatero, François Hollande’s response was to intensify the bombing campaign. To do so he asked Western leaders to rally around his idea of strengthening the military commitment in Syria and Iraq. But the response has been lukewarm, as was the response to Zapatero’s refusal to participate in the Iraq war. European leaders seem unable to make up their minds about how to address the challenge of jihadist terrorism inside and outside their own borders.
An ideological link binds all terrorist attacks conducted under the banner of ISIS, as shown by the dynamic of the Brussels attacks. We know that a European network made them possible and that this web stretches all the way to the Middle East. Under attack from drones and forced to retrench inside the cities, ISIS has changed its message. Its European followers are no longer incited to migrate to Syria or Iraq, they are advised to commit terrorist acts at the heart of Europe. Why? Because a terrorist attack on European soil projects a strong propaganda message to the world, letting us believe that the Caliphate is still strong, that its long arm can reach us in our cities. While the media was obsessed with the Brussels attacks, ISIS was losing the battle of Ramadi, yet nobody paid attention to it; all eyes were focused on the blood it shed in Belgium. Equally, when in July 2016 a wave of terrorist attacks hit France, ISIS was under attack in Mosul.
But it would be misleading to believe that ISIS is losing control of the Caliphate, that it is on the verge of being defeated. As proven by its history, this is a phenomenon that changes, that has the ability to reinvent itself. Today we see its black flag in West and East Africa, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, even in southern Lebanon; there have been attacks in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and other Asian countries. Damascus has been hit by ISIS suicide missions, as well as Aleppo. The Caliphate does not need permanent physical boundaries; as a conceptual political entity it can assume any shape and size, which can vary geographically. As long as it can fill the front page of the world’s media the Caliphate is alive and strong in people’s minds. Clearly this is not an enemy who can be destroyed with traditional means, an enemy who can be obliterated with weapons. Military superiority will not dislodge from people’s minds the dream of a new, independent Muslim nation. What is needed is an understanding of the political chaos in which ISIS has been fostered.
Today, as a decade ago, Europe seems unable to follow this approach and continues to be deeply divided about the Middle East. Similar to how it was a decade ago, the root causes of these failures spring from the impossibility of understanding complex phenomena such as the rising power of the Caliphate and of leading in matters of foreign policy. The political structure of the European Union makes it impossible for its members to hum the same tune. As a result, Europe has no voice. Emasculated by a union that has strengthened the economic muscles of the continent while letting the military and foreign policy ones succumb to atrophy, Europe has delegated its national security to the NATO umbrella and its foreign policy to the US.
The “war on terror” was a product Made in the USA, as is the anti-ISIS grand coalition. Though it was embraced by Tony Blair, the preventive strike in Iraq was the brainchild of George Bush’s administration. President Obama, not the European leaders, assembled the grand coalition of sixty countries that has backed a relentless bombing campaign in Iraq—and, more recently, in Syria—since August 2014. As in 2003, not only does Europe not lead, it follows whatever is decided in Washington. And yet, since 9/11 most major terrorist attacks conducted in the West have taken place in Europe, and ISIS’s language of violence and revenge is primarily directed against Europe.
Why?
The Middle East is Europe’s backyard. It is economically and politically very important to Europeans. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Europe and the Nordic countries in particular opened their borders to the victims of the Iraqi conflict and, more recently, to the refugees of the Syrian civil war. We are neighbors—we help each other. Europe, and not the US, is therefore both geographically accessible and a fertile terrain for radicalization.
Hence, radicalization in Europe has been conducted among a growing Muslim population originating in the Middle East. The harshness of the economic crisis has made integration into European society more difficult. In many countries, Muslim unemployment is almost twice as high as non-Muslim unemployment. This is particularly true in France. How can we forget the riots in 2005 when young Muslims wrote on the walls of the French banlieues, “J’existe”? They demanded recognition from a state that they perceived to be indifferent to them.
And yet Europe has been unable to address all these issues.
In 2016, as in 2004, the jihadists wanted to open a new front in Europe in what clearly is an asymmetrical war that foreign powers have fought primarily in the Middle East. They also aimed to further fracture the European front. Though they did not achieve the first objective, they are close to fulfilling the second one.
Without a diplomatic solution there will be other terrorist attacks. Millions of people will migrate from the Middle East to Europe. ISIS will continue to seduce young minds and the destabilization of the Middle East will gain momentum. To avert this gloomy prediction Europe must lead; it must find its voice. If not, the current world disorder will become the new normal. Against this scenario, if the Caliphate plays its cards well, it will be able to celebrate several more anniversaries.