“WE’RE TALKING ABOUT EGYPT TODAY BUT IN A FEW MONTHS, everybody will be talking about Iraq. Trust me.”
It was mid-August 2013, and as we chatted in the green room of Fox News Channel’s Washington, D.C., bureau, a friend who is a decorated U.S. military veteran and had spent significant time in Iraq throughout that year was providing an ominous glimpse of things to come.
“Iraq is out of control right now and no one is even paying attention,” he lamented. “We left, but the jihadists didn’t.”
At the time of our conversation, the major story in the Middle East was the second Egyptian revolution and the demise of Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood regime. Iraq had largely disappeared from the headlines despite a horrific wave of violence that commenced practically from the moment U.S. forces withdrew in December 2011. Most of the bloodshed was carried out by an ultra-violent terror group called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria), otherwise known as ISIS, that would soon—through an unprecedented campaign of conquest and carnage—make Iraq the biggest story in the world once again, just as my friend was predicting.
ISIS, or the Islamic State, is more than just a terrorist organization. It is a fully fledged terrorist army boasting some thirty-five thousand battle-hardened jihadists1 and controlling roughly thirty-five thousand square miles of territory across vast swaths of Syria and Iraq, smack dab in the middle of the Middle East.2 To put it in perspective, that’s an area that’s been described as roughly the size of Jordan (or the state of Indiana). It is home to some 8 million unfortunate souls living under ISIS’s sadistic rule.3
ISIS and its followers are adherents of Jihadist-Salafism, the most extreme and violent interpretation of Islam—and the ideology of choice for Sunni Islamic terrorists. Salafi jihadists despise the West, modeling themselves after Islam’s prophet Mohammed and his earliest followers in the seventh-century Arabian desert. In the modern era, this worldview has translated into the merciless application of Islamic sharia law in all areas under ISIS control. As we’ll examine in chapter two, public beheadings, amputations, crucifixions, sexual slavery, and slave-trading are all normal features of life in the Islamic State caliphate. Religious minorities and women have particularly precarious positions in ISIS’s sharia society; they’re subjected to mass persecution and second-class-citizen status in places such as Raqqa, Syria—the de facto capital of the Islamic State.
To say that ISIS’s emergence has captured the attention of Islamists worldwide would be an understatement. The prospect of a reborn Islamic superpower dominating the world stage has loomed large in the imaginations of Muslim radicals for almost a century; ever since the last caliphate came to an end in 1924 after the collapse of the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire, Islamists great and small have pined for its return.
So, needless to say, when ISIS announced the reestablishment of the caliphate, or Islamic State, on June 29, 2014, the news sent shockwaves throughout the Muslim world. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared the caliph, or political and spiritual leader of all Muslims worldwide, and demanded their allegiance—a move that was met with disapproval in many Islamic corners (in many cases not out of opposition to a caliphate, but to ISIS’s presuming to declare and claiming to lead it) but embraced in others.
Al-Baghdadi had the audacity—and with ISIS’s military prowess and territorial gains, the means—to do what al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Iranian regime, and virtually every prominent radical Islamic entity has dreamed of doing for the past ninety years. Regardless of their tactical and even theological differences (Shia Iran, for instance, seeks more of an “Imamate,” with an Iranian ayatollah at the helm), all radical Islamist organizations share the ultimate goal of reestablishing a caliphate, or pan-Islamic super state, that will confront Israel and the West and return Islam to its former glory days. This grand, borderless coalition of Islamic nations governed by sharia law would ideally be united politically, economically, and militarily; control a large share of the world’s oil supply, and boast nuclear capability. A formidable foe, without question—and one with big shoes to fill, historically:
• Under the Umayyad Caliphate, the second of the four major caliphates after Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, the Muslim world empire reached its zenith. Between 661 and 750 AD, the Umayyads, whose capital was Damascus, ruled over 5 million square miles of contiguous land, including Spain and Portugal—rebranded “Al Andalus” by their Muslim conquerors—and drove into central France before being repelled by the armies of Frankish warrior Charles Martel. Despite the setback in France, the caliphate continued its advance elsewhere. The island of Sicily eventually came under Islamic control, and Muslim armies launched frequent raids into southern Italy, even plundering suburban Rome in 846 AD. These were only the beginnings of a long struggle between Europe and Islam that only intensified under the Ottomans and still goes on today, albeit in a different form, as we’ll see in chapters six and seven.
• The Ottoman Caliphate was established in 1571 and at its height encompassed most of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus, not to mention a large chunk of southeastern Europe, including Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, the former Yugoslavia, and parts of modern-day Hungary. The Ottoman Turks even reached the gates of Vienna twice before being turned back. Yet by the dawn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire had declined to the point that it was known as “the sick man of Europe.” Its caliphate gradually shrank in size and influence and was ultimately abolished by the secular Turkish ruler Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924.
• The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt four years later as a direct response to the dissolution of the caliphate, an event the Brothers and their founder, Hassan al-Banna, considered a catastrophe.
• But the Brotherhood’s slow-and-steady incremental strategy for reviving the caliphate was insufficient for al Qaeda and other more impetuous Brotherhood offshoots that broke away from the “Brother-ship” with the goal of establishing a sprawling Islamic state—stretching from the Himalayas in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west—through violent jihad.
• Finally ISIS took the al Qaeda formula, added tens of thousands of foot soldiers and heavy weaponry, and ran with it, succeeding where AQ and the Brotherhood had failed and violently imposing an Islamic State across a large area of Iraq and Syria—the heartland of the caliphates of old.
Compared to the Umayyad and the Ottoman, the self-declared ISIS caliphate is tiny. But those previous caliphates weren’t built in a day, either. The ultimate long-term goal of ISIS, as of its predecessors, is to expand its current mini-empire to the four corners of the earth, imposing Islamic sharia law on all mankind and either slaughtering those who do not comply or forcing them to live a humiliating second-class existence as dhimmis. Of course, given ISIS’s track record of wholesale massacres in the areas that it has conquered thus far, there would likely be few people left to dhimmify.
Another important aspect of the Islamist vision is that all areas—including Israel and European nations such as Spain—that were ever part of the caliphate at some point in history are still considered Muslim land and must be brought back into the fold, through violent jihad if necessary. On that, there can be no compromise.
While global domination is the endgame, in the short term ISIS will settle for expanding the current borders of the Islamic State into the countries in its immediate backyard: Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the remaining areas of Iraq and Syria that it has not yet conquered, including the big prizes of Baghdad and Damascus. In ISIS’s vision, assaults on Israel and the hated Shia stronghold of Iran would also come at some point, followed by forays into North Africa and South Asia. Does that sound like an unlikely scenario? It may seem that way. But it’s not impossible in today’s wildly unstable Middle East.
As recently as November 2010, just before the first stirrings of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, few foresaw the toppling of secular Arab strongmen whose iron-fisted regimes had ruled for decades (much easier to predict, unfortunately, were the radical Islamic regimes that would follow them). Who would have predicted that two massive revolutions would engulf Egypt, the most populous and influential Arab Muslim nation, in the span of just two years? And what about ISIS’s lightning seizure of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June 2014, a geopolitical earthquake that apparently took the Obama administration, and much of the world, completely by surprise? The point is that events are unfolding so rapidly and unpredictably in today’s Middle East—and the West’s response is so weak, disjointed, and muddled—that nothing is beyond the realm of possibility in the region, including an ISIS caliphate stretching well beyond its current borders.
And as the Twin Cities terror pipeline shows, ISIS’s influence is felt far beyond the Middle East. While the bulk of ISIS’s soldiers hail from Syria and Iraq, at least a third of its ranks consist of foreign fighters who have flocked to the Islamic State caliphate from eighty countries around the world,4 including thousands from Europe and approximately 130 from the United States.5 Boasting fanatical adherents on six continents and flush with tons of cash, territory, and heavy weaponry, ISIS may very well go down as the most powerful and influential terrorist movement in history. It is already the richest, with an estimated overall worth of $2 billion.6
It is also the most brutal—“a group of marauders unparalleled in Mesopotamia since the time of the Mongols”7—crucifying, raping, pillaging, and beheading their way across Iraq and Syria and gleefully posting videos and pictures of the slaughter on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for their devoted followers worldwide to revel in. Old and young, male and female, Christians and Kurds, Yazidis and Shiites: none are immune to ISIS’s savagery.
Thanks to its sweeping gains in Iraq and Syria and its recruitment of some fifteen thousand foreign fighters from every corner of the globe, ISIS has overtaken al Qaeda—the group from which it was spawned—as the top jihadist organization on the planet. Think about it. Al Qaeda has branches around the world and remains an extremely dangerous beast, but it controls no territory and cannot field a standing army. The genocidal terror group Hamas has run the tiny Gaza Strip into the ground, creating a miserable mini–Islamic emirate with little influence beyond its immediate neighborhood, outside of fundraising. The Taliban ruled the war-ravaged wasteland of Afghanistan for just five years, but only took the country even deeper into the Stone Age.
While al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Taliban are all formidable in their own ways (particularly Hamas, with its large rocket arsenal that can now reach every corner of Israel), none of them can match ISIS’s lethal combination of funding, foot soldiers, territory, global reach, multimedia influence, and advanced weaponry. Further, all three of the above-named organizations have been around for years and absorbed heavy blows to their leadership and infrastructures. They have likely already hit their ceilings, whereas ISIS, in its current incarnation, only exploded (no pun intended) onto the world scene in 2013 yet has already risen to the top of the jihadi heap.
The only entity comparable to ISIS is Hezbollah. The two terror heavyweights have battled each other in Syria and Iraq over the past few years as part of the ongoing Sunni-Shia strife sweeping the region (more on that in chapter eight), with Hezbollah’s top leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah warning, “The capabilities, numbers and capacities available to ISIS are vast and large. This is what is worrying everyone and everyone should be worried. . . . This [ISIS] monster is growing and getting bigger.”8
Unlike the Islamic State, Hezbollah’s home base of southern Lebanon does not constitute a vast territory. But Hezbollah, essentially operating as a state within a state, does exert tremendous sway over the Lebanese government and also wields a global terror network that is active on six continents. Most important, Hezbollah is sponsored by the state of Iran, which has supplied it with tens of thousands of rockets and advanced missiles. Hezbollah also boasts a well-trained paramilitary force that has battled both the Israeli military and Syrian rebels in ground engagements.
Although (as we’ll see in later chapters) funds from Turkey, Qatar, and the Persian Gulf states have almost certainly fallen into its hands, ISIS, unlike Hezbollah, has no clear state sponsor behind it—but ISIS is a state sponsor of terrorism. The territory controlled by the Islamic State encompasses large chunks of northern and western Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, from the outskirts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad to the periphery of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. Clearly, ISIS possesses the geographical expanse of a “state.” And it is beginning to build up other trappings of statehood as well, developing a sophisticated bureaucracy, issuing annual progress reports, minting its own currency, and even reportedly issuing its own Islamic State passports.9
It’s also a good bet that, if left unchecked, the ISIS caliphate—like other state sponsors of terrorism—will export terror beyond its borders very soon, quite possibly to a neighborhood near you. In fact it has already exported terror, if only indirectly, in the form of Western sympathizers who have been inspired by ISIS to carry out solo “lone wolf” jihadi attacks in Canada, New York City, Australia, and Oklahoma.
As for rockets and missiles, ISIS could begin to close a wide gap with Hezbollah by, for starters, seizing some of the Syrian regime’s missiles and launching pads—a scenario that is certainly not outside the realm of possibility. ISIS actually showcased a captured Scud missile during a military parade in Raqqa in June 2014. It’s unclear whether the Scud was of Syrian or Iraqi origin, and experts believe it was inoperable.10
Nevertheless, ISIS more than makes up for its deficiencies in surface-to-surface missiles with the other spoils it has seized in its victories over the Syrian and Iraqi militaries. The vast ISIS arsenal reportedly includes:
• Dozens of Soviet-made tanks.
• American-made armored Humvees.
• Howitzers and other field artillery.
• Chinese-made field guns.
• Anti-aircraft guns.
• Shoulder-fired RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades).
• Anti-tank missiles.
• Untold bundles of machine guns and AK-47s.11
• ISIS may also have older-model Soviet MiG fighter jets in its possession—no match, obviously, for U.S. fighter jets, but enough to give ISIS the beginnings, at least, of an air force.12
• Perhaps most alarming for U.S. officials is ISIS’s reported use of advanced surface-to-air missiles, or MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defense System), which can be used to shoot down not only American fighter jets currently flying over Syria and Iraq but also civilian airliners. ISIS has even issued its foot soldiers a “how-to” guide on shooting down U.S. Apache helicopters using MANPADS.13
The bitter irony is that a sizable chunk of ISIS’s arsenal was made in the United States. According to an extensive study by the London-based group Conflict Armament Research, “Islamic State forces have captured significant quantities of US-manufactured small arms and have employed them on the battlefield.”14 Much of that haul was acquired when ISIS forces rolled into Mosul in June 2014.
ISIS’s conquest of Mosul—Iraq’s second-largest city, rich in history and culture and home to nearly two million inhabitants—was an unprecedented event in the modern era of Islamic terrorism. Not only did ISIS jihadists seize Mosul’s central bank and close to $500 million, but also, according to the Los Angeles Times,
[Iraqi] Government forces retreated en masse from the [ISIS] onslaught, leaving behind a military hardware bonanza, including the U.S.-made armored Humvees as well as trucks, rockets, artillery pieces, rifles, ammunition, even a helicopter. Some of the seized materiel was old or otherwise non-functioning; but a lot was promptly put to use on the battlefield.
Pictures of grinning Islamist warriors cruising in U.S. Humvees bedecked with white-on-black militant flags flooded the Internet and became the signature image of the ISIS rampage.15
So much for the years of training and equipment and $25 billion in aid that the U.S. has invested in the Iraqi military, whose brave warriors ran for the hills at the first sight of a jihadi-filled pickup truck, all but gift-wrapping loads of U.S. military hardware for ISIS. The effects of this shameful retreat were profound and quickly reverberated elsewhere in Iraq. One senior Kurdish official lamented that ISIS, “took the weapons stores of the 2nd and 3rd [Iraqi army] divisions in Mosul, the 4th division in Salah al Din, the 12th division in the areas near Kirkuk, and another division in Diyala. . . . We’re talking about armaments for 200,000 soldiers, all from the Americans.”16
ISIS’s seizure of a Saddam Hussein–era chemical weapons depot outside Baghdad in June 2014 may have given it access to rockets filled with sarin gas,17 Obama administration officials downplayed the incident and said that any chemical materials still stored at the facility were likely unusable.18 But then reports began flooding in about ISIS using chemical weapons—in the form of chlorine gas—against Iraqi security forces.19 Similarly, news that ISIS stole eighty-eight pounds of uranium from Mosul University, also in June, was essentially dismissed by the UN’s nuclear agency, which branded the materials “low-grade” and not “high risk”20 . . . until an alleged ISIS weapons maker referring to himself as Muslim al-Britani began boasting on Twitter that “A Radioactive Device has entered somewhere in Europe” and that ISIS was in possession of a dirty bomb thanks to uranium taken from—you guessed it—Mosul University in June 2014.21 The same uranium the UN dismissed as low risk.
Perhaps al-Britani was lying. And perhaps the uranium does indeed pose no threat. Whatever the case, the fact that ISIS—an organization that regularly engages in mass executions and has already attempted genocide against Iraqi Christians and Yazidis—is actively working to procure weapons of mass destruction is anything but a low risk scenario.
Exhibit A: Syria. Although the Assad regime, under pressure from the United States, has supposedly destroyed all of its “declared” chemical arsenal, Western intelligence officials are concerned that Assad still has a secret stash of “undeclared” chemical weapons, not to mention a biological weapons program.22 The ISIS jihadists who are continuing their advance in Syria would no doubt love to get their hands on these chemical and biological agents and do horrible things with them.
In the meantime, ISIS has reportedly developed its own makeshift biological weapon in the form of “scorpion bombs.” According to the Daily Mail, “Militants fighting for the Islamic State in Iraq have unveiled . . . bombs containing hundreds of live scorpions designed to spread fear among their enemies. Canisters packed with poisonous varieties of scorpion are being blasted into towns and villages, which explode on impact—scattering the scorpions and causing panic among the innocent local population.”23
Whether through beheadings, torture, mass rape, or scorpions, ISIS seems prepared to make infidels’ worst nightmares come true—and to relish every minute of it.
So how did we get here? After all, a global movement that controls thirty-five thousand square miles of prime Middle Eastern real estate, rakes in up to $3 million per day in revenue (much of it in the illicit oil trade), draws thousands of Westerners to its ranks, beheads American citizens, and pulls the United States back into the world’s most tumultuous region couldn’t have just appeared overnight—although, if you were listening to the Obama administration from 2012 through the first half of 2014, you’d be forgiven for thinking so.
Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, President Obama continually trumpeted the death of Osama bin Laden while proclaiming that al Qaeda was “on the run,” and “on the path to defeat”—“decimated,” as the president asserted on the campaign trail, and “on its heels.”24 Even after al Qaeda–linked terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, killing four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Obama doggedly stuck to his narrative that al Qaeda was in its death throes.
While the president was busy scoring political points and willfully misleading the American people about the nature of the Islamic terror threat, al Qaeda was not contracting but expanding—to the point where AQ and its affiliates and allies cover more geographical ground today than they did on 9/11: from the tribal regions of Pakistan to Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya, Sinai, Europe, India, and the Sahara desert region covering northern Mali and southern Algeria. Yes, jihadist organizations like al Qaeda are “on the run” indeed—overrunning large areas of the Muslim world.
None more so than ISIS. When ISIS roared into the city of Fallujah, in western Iraq, in January 2014 and declared it part of an Islamic State, you’d think that would have been a massive wake-up call for the Obama administration. Not only does Fallujah lie just forty-five miles from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. In 2004 U.S. forces had reclaimed the city, which had become the nerve center of an al Qaeda–led insurgency, after two hellacious battles that were the bloodiest—and costliest—of the entire Iraq War. Over one hundred American troops were killed and hundreds more wounded in brutal building-to-building fighting against Sunni terrorists. One can only imagine the agony that veterans of the Fallujah campaigns must have felt as they watched ISIS raise its black banner above a city they had fought so valiantly to liberate just a few years earlier. Talk about a bitter pill to swallow. President Obama, however, seemed completely unfazed.
In an interview with the New Yorker magazine just a few days after ISIS had seized Fallujah in a jihadist takeover rife with strategic and symbolic significance, the president dismissed the growing strength of al Qaeda affiliates and offshoots such as, well, ISIS:
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.
“Let’s just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”25
Obamaspeak translation: The only jihadists that matter are al Qaeda’s core leaders in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Our war is against them and them only and we’re literally droning them to death. ISIS and its ilk are smalltime, provincial hacks—JV!—and tough break and all, but Fallujah was an Islamist hotbed that was bound to go over to the dark side anyway. Above all, none of this poses any threat to the United States. As I have told you all again and again, Osama bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is on the path to defeat. Period. You guys can trust me. Now let’s go play some golf.
The president had a vested interest in downplaying ISIS’s gains in Iraq. Throughout the 2008 campaign and during his first term in office, he had promised to end the unpopular war in Iraq and bring the troops home. It was a cornerstone of his foreign policy—indeed, during his 2012 reelection campaign, he trumpeted the fact that he had “ended” American involvement in Iraq (except, as we’ll see, al Qaeda apparently didn’t get the memo).
Against the advice of his top commander on the ground, General Lloyd J. Austin III (who recommended keeping twenty-four thousand U.S. troops in Iraq), and other top military officials, President Obama had authorized the complete withdrawal of American troops from the country.26 In December 2011, as the last U.S. troops were departing Iraq, America’s commander in chief gave a speech at Fort Bragg declaring, “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We’re building a new partnership between our nations. And we are ending a war not with a final battle, but with a final march toward home.”27
Got that? Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq was over. El fin. Case closed. Not because the jihadists had conceded defeat in their quest to turn Iraq into an Islamic State, or had abandoned terrorism against U.S. and Iraqi interests. Far from it. No, the war in Iraq was ended because President Obama said so. Same with al Qaeda being “on the path to defeat”—we had the president’s word for it. In the president’s Middle East and national security playbook, if you repeat a mantra often enough and wish hard enough for it to become true, it does. Or not.
By the time ISIS was rampaging through Mosul in June 2014—five months after the president’s “JV” quip—it was clear that someone in the White House had some serious explaining to do. Although the president later laid the blame at the feet of the U.S. intelligence community—saying it had “underestimated what had been taking place in Syria” with ISIS prior to its foray into Mosul—ABC News reported that, in fact, “for nearly a year, senior officials in the U.S. government had been warning about the alarming rise of ISIS . . . and the inability of the Iraqi government to confront the threat.” More than once:
• In testimony before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in November 2013, Brett McGurk, deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, had stated bluntly, “There is no question that [ISIS] is growing roots in Syria and in Iraq.” McGurk “cited the group’s alarming campaign of suicide bombings, its growing financial resources and its expanding safe haven in Syria.”28
• Then in January 2014 the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Robert Beecroft, had called the situation in Iraq “very precarious” following ISIS’s seizure of Fallujah and part of the city of Ramadi, warning that, “a misstep anywhere could set off a larger conflict in the country.”29
• Perhaps most damning to the Obama administration’s strategy of feigning shock and then throwing the intel community under the bus in the wake of the Mosul debacle was testimony from the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, in February 2014. Flynn, quite presciently, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “[ISIS] probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group’s ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”30
• Interestingly enough, President Obama’s own handpicked CIA director, John Brennan, had made a similar assessment earlier that same month, testifying before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that al Qaeda camps in Syria and Iraq posed a threat to the United States.31 Not bad for a JV team.
The Obama White House was surely aware of Brennan’s assessments, Flynn’s testimony, and similar dire warnings by Beecroft, McGurk, and other top experts about the rise of ISIS in the months prior to the fall of Mosul. According to James Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012, the Obama administration, “not only was warned by everybody back in January [following ISIS’s invasion of Fallujah], it actually announced it was going to intensify its support against ISIS with the Iraqi armed forces. And it did almost nothing.”32
Jeffrey has said that he believed keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011 was “critical.”33 He, like other U.S. diplomatic and military officials who had spent significant time in Iraq and knew the dynamics of the country, realized that a complete U.S. withdrawal would leave a vacuum that would be filled by very bad actors. That much was clear as far back as 2003, after the American ouster of Saddam Hussein, as the organization that would one day become known as ISIS first began making its presence felt in Iraq—and the region—in a major way.
ISIS: THE GENESIS
With apologies to the Obama administration, ISIS did not appear out of thin air one balmy day in Mosul in June 2014. By then, the roots of the Islamic State already stretched back more than a decade. They were laid down by a former street thug and ex-con who has been described as “barely literate.”34 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi followed a long, twisted, and bloody road from petty criminal to founding father of the world’s most successful jihadist terror organization. By the time he was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in 2006, al-Zarqawi had become one of the world’s most wanted men and the face of the Sunni jihadist insurgency against Coalition forces. Unfortunately, his dark vision for the Middle East would outlive him and eventually change the face of the entire region. Al-Zarqawi is revered by ISIS’s leadership and in its official publications today. ISIS youth groups are nicknamed “al-Zarqawi’s [lion] cubs,” and an Islamic State training base in Raqqa is also named after the terror kingpin.35
In 1989, al-Zarqawi abandoned a shiftless life of petty crime, leaving his hometown of Zarqa, Jordan, and joining the jihad in Afghanistan. He returned to Jordan in 1993 as a battle-tested jihadist zealot and ended up serving six years in prison for plotting terror attacks on Jordanian soil. After being released from prison, al-Zarqawi eventually made his way back to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden provided him with seed money to set up a terrorist training camp in the city of Herat, near the Iranian border. Despite this early financial assistance, bin Laden and al-Zarqawi reportedly had a contentious relationship, with al-Zarqawi refusing several times to give bayat, or a vow of allegiance, to the al Qaeda mastermind.36
Following the 9/11 attacks, al-Zarqawi made his way into Iran and bounced between there and the Kurdish regions of Iraq, building up his terror network, before setting up shop in Iraq for good in 2003, a few months after the U.S. invasion, and quickly becoming a key figure in the burgeoning insurgency against Coalition forces.
In 2004, al-Zarqawi finally pledged bayat to bin Laden and founded al Qaeda in Iraq (also known as al Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers)—the organization that would eventually become known as ISIS. Al-Zarqawi’s group went on to spearhead a wave of terror and extreme brutality throughout Iraq that included the same kind of tactics that are ISIS staples today: beheadings, suicide bombings, torture, executions, and the rabid targeting of Shiites, whom al-Zarqawi considered apostates and hated with a passion. In the process of inflicting unspeakable cruelty upon Iraqis of all backgrounds, al-Zarqawi angered al Qaeda’s core leadership (much as ISIS has done today, as we’ll see shortly) who realized that his frequent attacks against Shia Muslims and their mosques were turning Muslim opinion against al Qaeda.37
After al-Zarqawi’s death, al Qaeda in Iraq became part of an umbrella organization of Sunni terrorist groups called the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). They continued al-Zarqawi’s wave of terror, particularly in western Iraq’s Anbar province (an ISIS stronghold once again today), until the American military, working with local Sunni tribes, smashed ISI in a campaign that became known as “The Surge.” ISI was further weakened in 2010 when Iraqi security forces, aided by U.S. forces, killed two of its top leaders, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. Ironically enough, their deaths elevated the man who would go on to become the caliph of the Islamic State.
THE RISE OF ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI
Bookish. Quiet. Bespectacled. Pious. A fine soccer player. A family man.
Judging by the accounts of those who knew him before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the bloodthirsty fanatic who would one day declare himself leader of the world’s Muslims, become the most wanted jihadist on the planet, and direct the most powerful, vicious terrorist organization in memory was, in a word, unimpressive. Little is known of the background of ISIS leader—and self-declared caliph—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (a.k.a. “Abu Du’a”) but the scant information that is available about his early days does not suggest a budding terrorist mastermind.
Reportedly born in 1971 and raised just north of Baghdad in the town of Samarra in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, al-Baghdadi (real name: Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarra) was an introverted loner as a child. Described as “studious, pious and calm,” he was focused on Islam and soccer, where he excelled playing for a team sponsored by his local mosque.38 At the age of eighteen, al-Baghdadi moved to the Iraqi capital to study Islam, eventually earning a Ph.D. in sharia law from Baghdad’s Islamic University. For a decade, he lived among both Sunnis and Shias in the run-down neighborhood of Tobchi on the western edge of the city. He married, had children, and apparently showed no overt signs of rabid extremism, magnetic charisma, or bold leadership.39
Perhaps al-Baghdadi was, as one former acquaintance mused, “a quiet planner” who was merely waiting for the right moment to burst onto the world stage and implement a carefully crafted ideology that would enslave millions. He helped organize a jihadist group called “Jeish Ahl al-Sunnah al-Jamaah” following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an act that led to his detainment by American forces and imprisonment at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.40 Some believe he was “radicalised by jihadists” from al Qaeda while at Camp Bucca, although he seems already to have been well on his way down the jihadist path at the time of his arrest.41
Accounts of al-Baghdadi’s time at the U.S.-run prison—which was home to some twenty-four thousand inmates and has been likened to “a summer camp for ambitious terrorists”—vary. It’s not clear even which years he was imprisoned there.42 Some say he arrived at Camp Bucca in 2004, others say 2005. Was he released in late 2004? 2006? 2009? Like everything surrounding al-Baghdadi, it seems no one can say for certain. One associate, a man calling himself Abu Ahmed who met al-Baghdadi at Camp Bucca and later joined him in ISIS, has described the future caliph as “someone important” who had “a charisma,” but added that, “there were others who were more important. I honestly did not think [al-Baghdadi] would get this far.” Still, Abu Ahmed says, he “got a feeling from [al-Baghdadi] that he was hiding something inside, a darkness that he did not want to show other people. He was the opposite of other princes who were far easier to deal with. He was remote, far from us all.”43
Al-Baghdadi may have provided a chilling glimpse of his future plans when, deemed no longer a threat, he was released from Camp Bucca. Upon his departure, he told a group of U.S. troops, “I’ll see you in New York”:
“He knew we were from New York, and he knew he was going to get out,” said Col. Kenneth King, who oversaw the former detention facility near the Kuwaiti border.
King told Fox News Channel that he escorted al-Baghdadi on a flight to Baghdad, where the handover took place. Al-Baghdadi was ultimately released by Iraqi government officials.
“Their decision to let him go was personally disappointing,” King said. “But I have to respect the decisions of a sovereign government.”
In another interview with The Daily Beast, King said he took al-Baghdadi’s words as something of a joke—“like, ‘This is no big thing. I’ll see you on the block.’”
But al-Baghdadi didn’t seem like the type who’d end up leading an insurgency that threatens to topple Iraq’s government.
“I’m not surprised that it was someone who spent time in Bucca, but I’m a little surprised it was him,” King said. “He was a bad dude, but he wasn’t the worst of the worst.”44
Al-Baghdadi, true to form, appears to have been intentionally inconspicuous during his time at Camp Bucca. Today, although he is arguably the world’s most infamous terrorist, he continues to shroud himself in mystery like a jihadi Keyser Söze. Before he emerged in a Mosul mosque on July 5, 2014, clad in black turban and black robes, and declared himself caliph, there were only two grainy photographs of him known to exist. Dubbed “the invisible sheikh,” he almost never appears on video. During meetings with ISIS commanders, he reportedly wears a mask.45 One Raqqa man who was present at a mosque where al-Baghdadi made a rare public appearance described the scene:
“The minute he entered, the mobile coverage disappeared,” says a 29-year-old resident of Raqqa in Syria—who asked to be identified only as Abu Ali—recalling the flawless security on one occasion when al-Baghdadi entered a mosque. “Armed guards closed the area. The women were sent upstairs to the women’s section to pray. Everyone was warned not to take photos or videos. It was the most nerve-racking atmosphere.
“What made it [more nerve-racking] is that when Baghdadi finally showed up, wearing black, head to toe, the guards started shouting, ‘Allah akbar! Allah akbar!’ [God is great.] This made us even more scared,” says Ali. “The guards then forced us to swear allegiance to him. Even after Baghdadi left, none of us were allowed to leave the mosque for another 30 minutes.”46
The U.S. State Department has placed a $10 million bounty on al-Baghdadi’s head. Not surprisingly, he moves around often—likely between Raqqa and Mosul.47 In early November 2014, Iraqi officials claimed that al-Baghdadi had been injured in an airstrike in Iraq, but a few days later, he released an audiotape mocking the United States, calling for attacks on Saudi Arabia, and encouraging ISIS’s supporters to “Erupt volcanoes of jihad everywhere” and “Light the Earth with fire.”48 It appeared the caliph was very much alive and kicking, to the delight of his followers worldwide. It is unclear whether ISIS has a suitably charismatic successor in the wings capable of galvanizing support should al-Baghdadi be killed. Adding to al-Baghdadi’s mystique is his claim to be a direct descendant of Islam’s prophet Mohammed (a claim made, no doubt, to bolster his credentials as caliph).
Al-Baghdadi’s meteoric rise began in 2010, after his stint at Camp Bucca, when he assumed leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq and proceeded to revive an organization—the former al Qaeda in Iraq—that had been pulverized by the U.S. military. Al-Baghdadi’s moment had finally arrived, and he would soon give new meaning to the term “silent but deadly.” When the last U.S. troops departed Iraq in December 2011, the path was cleared—as the Obama administration had been warned it would be—for al-Baghdadi to “rebuild [ISI] and gather strength to renew its terrorist campaign against the Shi’ite population and the central Iraqi government.”49 In an ominous sign of things to come, some 434 people, mostly Shiites, were killed in terror attacks across Iraq in the first month after U.S. forces withdrew.50 Things would only get worse:
• Under al-Baghdadi’s direction, ISI embarked on a wave of suicide bombings throughout Iraq in 2012 and 2013. The effects were immediately apparent: three thousand people were killed in suicide bombings between September and December of 2013 alone; altogether there were ninety-eight suicide bombings that year.51
• In the meantime, ISI initiated a year-long campaign called “Breaking the Walls” that saw it carry out a number of jailbreaks, freeing countless hardened al Qaeda operatives who would replenish ISI’s ranks—including five hundred inmates from Abu Ghraib prison in July 2013.52
• The prison breaks coincided with yet another coordinated campaign engineered by al-Baghdadi, dubbed “Soldiers’ Harvest,” in which ISI targeted members of the Iraqi security forces for assassination. According to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, “In addition to demolitions of soldiers’ homes, the first six months of ‘Soldiers Harvest’ witnessed a sharp 150% increase in the number of sophisticated close quarters assassinations of troops manning checkpoints and effective under-vehicle improvised explosive device (IED) attacks on key leaders.”53
The stunning resurgence of the Islamic State of Iraq, meticulously mapped out by al-Baghdadi (who has gained a reputation as a skilled military tactician) and the ISI brain trust (which included former high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime intimately familiar with every corner of Iraq), was in full swing. At the same time, al-Baghdadi’s rapidly growing organization was also becoming much better acquainted with Iraq’s next-door neighbor. Soon, ISI’s foray into Syria would not only dramatically expand ISI; it would also transform the organization into a transnational movement with a new name that would become synonymous with terrorist mayhem: the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria), better known as ISIS.
THE CALIPHATE COMETH
Even by the gruesome standards of the Middle East, the numbers are staggering.
As of January 2015, the Syrian Civil War had already claimed the lives of over two hundred thousand people in under four years. The dead included some sixty-three thousand civilians, including more than ten thousand children, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.54 At the same time, millions of Syrian refugees have fled the fighting, flooding into Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq and creating a massive humanitarian crisis. In short, the Syrian conflict is a hellish, unmitigated disaster on every level, with no end in sight. And ISIS could not be happier.
When the uprising against the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad erupted in March 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, continuing his reboot of the Islamic State of Iraq, saw an opportunity. Late that year, he sent a contingent of his soldiers across the border into Syria to join the fight against Assad’s forces. Led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani, these ISI jihadis established a group called the “al-Nusra Front” that quickly gained battlefield success and followers “from both inside and outside” Syria.55
As the Syrian Civil War became the go-to destination for battle-hungry jihadists worldwide, the al-Nusra Front became increasingly independent and drifted from its parent organization, ISI, prompting al-Baghdadi to declare “the unification of the two organizations under his leadership” in April 2013.56
Al-Baghdadi, seeking to reassert absolute control, christened the merger of the two organizations, The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. Yet things did not go according to plan and an “As the Jihad Turns”–like sequence of events followed:
• Al-Golani rejected the merger and instead pledged his allegiance to al Qaeda’s top overall leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
• Al-Zawahiri supported al-Golani and weighed in against the merger. He ordered al-Baghdadi (at the time still technically his subordinate) to limit his operations to Iraq and cede Syria to al-Golani’s al-Nusra Front.
• Al-Baghdadi refused.
• Al-Zawahiri formally disowned ISIS and kicked it out of the al Qaeda network in February 2014. The al-Nusra Front was now the sole representative of al Qaeda in Syria.
Much as his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had done nearly a decade before, al-Baghdadi had alienated (and threatened) al Qaeda’s core leadership through a combination of hubris, ruthless ambition, and wanton violence that targeted “apostate” Muslims every bit as much as non-Muslims.
Booted from al Qaeda, ISIS was now officially an independent actor, and al-Baghdadi wasted no time outmaneuvering the rival al-Nusra Front in pursuit of his boundless vision: “Abu Bakr [al-Baghdadi] . . . set about establishing himself in Syria, drawing away a great many of al Nusra’s foreign members. ISIS quickly became a dominant force in Syria and as well as attracting recruits from al Nusra and other rebel groups, it also received donations and support from outside the area, both as a successful salafist/takfiri group, and as an opponent to the regime of Bashar al Assad.”57
Although the al-Nusra Front continues to be a formidable fighting force today, crushing competing rebel groups and controlling large areas of northwestern and western Syria (including along the border with Israel, near the Golan Heights) with possible designs on declaring an emirate of its own, ISIS has clearly eclipsed it in virtually every way. The two organizations’ bitter rivalry has, at times, spilled over into open battle in Syria, but recently there have been signs of a thaw.
Jihadists from ISIS and the al-Nusra Front crossed from Syria into Lebanon in August 2014, attacking the Lebanese town of Arsal. The combined jihadi force killed and wounded dozens of Lebanese soldiers and kidnapped twenty-nine others, beheading some of them. At the time of this writing, reports persist that the Arsal incursion was a “dry run,” and that the two jihadi organizations were preparing to open a new front in Lebanon.58 Such a move would certainly fit with ISIS’s vision of an expanded caliphate.
In November 2014, improbable as it would have seemed not so long ago, leaders of ISIS and the al-Nusra Front reportedly met outside Aleppo to discuss a merger—the same kind of arrangement al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani had rejected just a year and a half before. It’s funny how the establishment of a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East can change the equation.
Serious differences between the two organizations remain, but as ISIS continues to steamroll its way across the region, gaining fresh recruits and (as we’ll see in chapter two) new affiliates, the al-Nusra Front and other jihadi groups may soon be forced to come to a realization.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
In 2005, a Lebanese journalist named Fouad Hussein published details of an al Qaeda “twenty-year plan” that had been leaked to him by AQ members. The plan had seven phases, culminating in “Definitive Victory” in the year 2020.
Interestingly enough, the fifth phase of the plan, which al Qaeda projected would unfold between 2013 and 2016, was “to establish an Islamic state, or caliphate.” In 2014, ISIS—an al Qaeda offshoot—did exactly that. “The Plan,” it seems, is right on course. We now appear to be moving toward the sixth—and next to last—phase: “Total Confrontation,” in which “al-Qaida anticipated an all-out war with the unbelievers” between the years 2016 and 2020.59
In 2014, that war began to take shape, not only in the Middle East—where ISIS is actively pursuing genocide against any group that does not share its bleak vision—but also in the West, where homegrown ISIS supporters are laying the groundwork for a virtual guerrilla war in American and European cities. How the war will end depends largely on Western leaders, who, at the moment, seem absolutely flummoxed as to how to confront the Islamist threat, both at home and abroad. As we’ll see throughout this book, the results of their impotence and ignorance have already been disastrous.
The caliphate has returned—and in its short, ugly existence, has already heaped untold misery upon millions of people.
And there’s much worse in store.