CHAPTER TWO

HELL AWAITS: WELCOME TO THE ISLAMIC STATE

“WHAT REALLY TOOK A TOLL ON ME WAS HEARING WHAT THEY DID after they kidnapped Yazidi and Christian women. It was too much.”

As ISIS raped and pillaged its way through Iraq’s Nineveh province in the summer of 2014, Steven Nabil spent hours wide awake through the night, on the phone and on social media, listening as anguished Yazidi and Christian women told him the horrors inflicted upon their sisters and daughters by the invading jihadist hordes. Nabil, a twenty-six-year-old Iraqi-American activist with a network of contacts throughout Iraq, including in government and military circles, was even able to communicate with some of the prisoners directly to get firsthand accounts of the atrocities.

“I have never really dealt with that kind of emotional pain,” he told me as we talked by phone in September 2014. “A captured Yazidi girl told me how ISIS had just brought two more busloads of Yazidi women to the place where she was being held captive. She said she could hear them scream throughout the night as they were being raped. They had two choices. The ones who converted to Islam were married off to ISIS terrorists or given as gifts to [Iraqi] tribal leaders who had sworn allegiance to [ISIS]. The ones who didn’t convert were just raped.”1

Nabil described another occasion, when he received a phone call from a local Yazidi friend living in Phoenix. “It was a man, older than me,” Nabil said. “He was weeping. He said, ‘ISIS is moving toward Yazidi villages, people are fleeing to the mountains—Steven, you are the only one who can help me.’”

“That’s how my nights are,” Nabil sighed. “It all got me so down that I didn’t even go out for about two months.”

Despite the often gut-wrenching nature of his work, Nabil did not shy away. Instead, he became a go-to source for breaking information out of Iraq, receiving regular updates from his contacts in Mosul and elsewhere and posting them on Facebook and other social media sites in real time. As ISIS closed in on Mosul in early June 2014, Nabil, a native Arabic speaker, warned on social media about the impending invasion. And as ISIS began to inflict atrocities upon Iraqi civilians, Nabil received harrowing on-the-ground accounts and photos that he shared with his many followers online. In the meantime, he was still holding down a 9-to-5 day job.

“Iraqi intelligence started watching my postings to get updates,” he told me. “Even the Iraqi air force started to benefit from some of the information I was sharing.”

But his work isn’t limited to social media. On June 13, 2014, just three days after the fall of Mosul, Nabil, along with other Iraqi-Americans, helped organize what he calls the world’s first Iraqi-led protest against ISIS, in downtown Phoenix. Such activities have not gone unnoticed by the Islamic State.

“ISIS has threatened me on social media,” Nabil shared. “They’ve tried to hack into my Facebook page numerous amounts of times. They publicly attacked my page three times and they were finally able to disable it for a while.”

“I’ve paid out of my pocket, out of my time, out of my time off from work, to do this,” he continued. “I’m not benefiting financially. I’m just doing it to fight ISIS.”

I first met Nabil in 2011 when, despite his youth, he was already becoming a leading advocate for the persecuted Christians of the Middle East, holding several demonstrations in downtown Phoenix calling attention to their plight. For Nabil, it was personal: he was born and raised as an Assyrian Christian in northern Iraq before coming to the U.S. as a foreign exchange student.

After attending high school in Virginia, he graduated from Arizona State University and, in July 2013, started a daily online video journal that he used to communicate with young Iraqis. He quickly gained a large following of Iraqis from all religious backgrounds, and by the time ISIS roared into Mosul in June 2014 Nabil had built up an extensive network of friends and contacts eager to share their stories.

Their accounts of life under ISIS are frequently horrifying. For instance, Nabil has spoken to nurses in Mosul hospitals who have treated girls for internal bleeding caused by rape at the hands of ISIS terrorists.

“For Shias, Yazidis, or Christians inside the caliphate, there is death unless you convert,” Nabil told me. “There are beheadings every day and mass shootings. Crucifixions are very common—in Syria, there are lots of them. Also, if you’re caught with beer or cigarettes, you’re sentenced to eighty lashes.”

By summer 2014, the kind of brutality Nabil’s contacts were describing, combined with ISIS’s boundless ambition—both in the Middle East and among its fanatical Western supporters—had spurred calls for the Obama administration to take action against the Islamic State. Remember, the president had essentially shrugged off ISIS’s seizure of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in January 2014 as an isolated outburst by a group of al Qaeda castoffs—a mere blip on the national security radar screen, perpetrated by a terrorist “JV” team that posed no threat to the United States.

That position became considerably more difficult to sustain a few months later when ISIS conquered Mosul—a city of nearly two million people and Iraq’s second-largest—embarrassing the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army and preparing to advance on Baghdad. Then came Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration of a caliphate and the revelation that thousands of Western passport holders—including several Americans—were fighting for the fledgling Islamic State, raising the strong possibility that they would one day return home and continue their jihad on U.S. or European soil. The clear and present danger ISIS posed to the region and to the United States had now become undeniable.

Yet all the while President Obama insisted that he would “not be sending US troops back into combat in Iraq.”2 After all, he said, it was “ultimately . . . up to the Iraqis, as a sovereign nation, to solve their problems.”³ That certainly is the goal, at some point. But Iraq’s army had just folded like a cheap suit as soon as the first ISIS flag showed up in Mosul. And the Iran-friendly, Shia-dominated government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had alienated Iraq’s Sunni minority (undoubtedly driving many into the arms of ISIS), had proven completely unequipped to confront Iraq’s many problems, let alone its biggest one: ISIS. Although al-Maliki would step down from his post as prime minister under heavy pressure in August 2014, the same daunting challenges remain.

Indeed, what was true as U.S. troops withdrew prematurely in December 2011 remained true as ISIS knocked on Baghdad’s doorstep in the summer of 2014: Iraq, although technically a sovereign nation—as President Obama pointed out continually while deflecting suggestions of U.S. military force against ISIS—was nowhere near the point of being able to provide for its own stability and security. The unpleasant reality of Iraq’s repeated defeats at the hands of a terrorist caliphate bent on attacking the United States meant that Mesopotamia’s problems were—once again—America’s problems.

ISIS’s takeover of the Mosul Dam in August 2014 was a prime example. The dam, described by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the most dangerous in the world, thanks mainly to its unstable foundation, is Iraq’s largest, “holding back 11 billion cubic meters of water and producing over 1,000 megawatts of electricity.” Seizing it gave ISIS control of “the water flowing into Baghdad and to the agrarian areas south of Baghdad,” putting the jihadists “in a position to impose a famine on the rest of Iraq” or to simply destroy the dam and flood areas as far south as Baghdad with a “60-ft. wave” that would leave hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in its wake and have far-reaching economic impacts (including skyrocketing oil and gas prices).4

Thankfully, Kurdish forces, backed by U.S. airstrikes, retook the dam later in August. But ISIS’s control of it, however brief, demonstrated the catastrophic potential of the Islamic State.

So did ISIS’s lightning advance into areas of northern Iraq that same month. ISIS conquered the town of Sinjar and surrounding villages, killing or capturing (and selling into slavery, as we’ll see shortly) thousands of members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority—an ancient sect that ISIS labels “devil worshippers.”⁵ At the same time, tens of thousands of survivors fled onto nearby Mount Sinjar, many with nothing but the clothes on their backs. ISIS surrounded the mountain with the intention of slaughtering the trapped Yazidis, who were stranded on the mountaintop in the sweltering summer heat with no food, water, or medical supplies. As dozens of elderly people and small children succumbed to exposure to the elements and died, the Yazidis were left with no options other than remain on the mountain and watch their family members die of thirst, or leave and meet a merciless fate at the hands of ISIS below.⁶

Meanwhile, ISIS routed outgunned Kurdish Peshmerga forces that had been defending Sinjar and moved closer to the city of Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq. The potential fall of Erbil—a prosperous hub of pro-American sentiment and home to a consulate where dozens of U.S. personnel are stationed—combined with the very real prospect of a wholesale ethnic cleansing of Yazidis on Mount Sinjar, finally compelled President Obama to act. He ordered limited U.S. airstrikes against ISIS forces around Sinjar and Erbil and authorized humanitarian airdrops for Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar. The airstrikes had an effect, as up to twenty thousand Yazidis were able to flee the mountain and make their way to Kurdistan.7

Although President Obama declared the ISIS siege of Mount Sinjar broken following those initial airstrikes, at least seven thousand Yazidis remained trapped on the mountain for over four more months, until they were finally freed thanks to an offensive by Kurdish forces in December 2014.⁸

On August 19, 2014, shortly after the Sinjar siege unfolded, ISIS released a graphic propaganda video featuring a black-clad, masked butcher dubbed “Jihadi John” hacking off the head of captured American photojournalist James Foley. Two weeks later, ISIS released a similar video showing Jihadi John beheading another captured American journalist, Steven Sotloff. ISIS blamed its executions of the two men on U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Iraq.⁹ As of this writing, ISIS has also released videos of Jihadi John decapitating American aid worker Peter Kassig and two British citizens, David Haines and Alan Henning.

President Obama has had a typically confounding response to ISIS’s onslaught of beheadings, rapes, and torture. He—along with Secretary of State John Kerry and British Prime Minister David Cameron—has declared that ISIS is “not Islamic.”¹⁰ In other words, the self-described “Islamic State”—whose leaders quote copiously from Islamic texts and frequently cite Islamic history to justify their actions—is just a gang of miscreants who have completely twisted Islamic teachings.

Take beheadings, for instance. Following the release of an ISIS video showcasing the severed head of Peter Kassig in November 2014, President Obama declared that ISIS’s rampant beheadings, “represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith.”¹¹ So Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, and Christians would all be more likely to behead someone than Muslims, who, in the president’s view, apparently, are the “least” likely of all religions to engage in that sort of violence. That’s right, you bigoted Islamophobes. Koran-and-hadith-compliant Muslims would never harm a hair on anyone’s head—because there is absolutely, positively nothing in Islamic texts that extols violence. Islam is an inherently peaceful religion that teaches only love and coexistence. Imam Obama hath spoken.

And it wasn’t his first fatwa. During his infamous Cairo speech in 2009, the president intoned that he considers it part of his “responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”12 The Founding Fathers must have forgotten to write that one into the job description. They certainly would have never envisioned an American president saying, as President Obama did before the UN General Assembly in 2012, that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”¹³

In the future, our Theologian in Chief may want to brush up on his Islamic history before playing armchair sheikh. As we learned in chapter one, previous Islamic caliphates were not established by jovial Muslim missionaries handing out tracts on street corners. Rather, Islam spread mainly by the sword, and its prophet, Mohammed, was not just a spiritual leader but also a military-political leader, conqueror, and warrior. This is all part of the historical record to which Muslims—moderate and extreme alike—will readily attest. Further, the Koran refers to the characteristically Islamic concept of jihad no less than 164 times (mostly in a violent context).¹⁴

Does every Muslim in the world subscribe to these unsavory teachings, and take them literally? Of course not. Most Muslims want no part of jihad or sharia and just want to get on with their daily lives. At the same time, it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims (or roughly 240 million) are indeed radicalized—and presumably take Koranic admonitions such as “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” quite literally.¹⁵ Further, they believe that any Muslim who disagrees with their viewpoint is really not a Muslim at all and should be killed—and that they have a compelling Koranic argument for their actions.

In ISIS’s literalist view, beheading is not only accepted in Islam—it is mandated. For instance, Surah 8, verses 9-13 of the Koran command Muslims to “smite [slice] . . . unbelievers . . . above their necks.” Additionally, Surah 47 of the Koran states: “When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely; then bind the prisoners tightly [emphasis added].”

In ISIS’s view, there isn’t much wiggle room there—particularly above the collar. As we’ll explore further in chapter four, throughout history Islamic conquerors have put the above-mentioned beheading verses into action, using head-chopping as a means of terrorizing their enemies. It is an unpleasant fact that may make inside-the-Beltway strategists and network news honchos squeamish—but it is a fact nonetheless (with apologies to Imam Obama).

Thankfully, the American people are catching on to the danger ISIS represents. A November 2014 CNN/ORC poll found that most Americans believe ISIS poses a serious threat to the United States.¹⁶ And according to an October 2014 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans believe that U.S. ground troops, and not just airstrikes, are needed to defeat the Islamic State.¹⁷ It’s likely that for some of those polled, the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff were their introduction to ISIS—and the sight of two U.S. citizens clad in prison-style jumpsuits crudely murdered in the middle of the desert by a trash-talking jihadist didn’t go over well.

The Foley and Sotloff murders shifted the national conversation from striking ISIS in Iraq to extending the U.S. bombing campaign to ISIS safe havens in Syria—such as the city of Raqqa, the unofficial capital of the Islamic State caliphate. If President Obama really wanted to defeat ISIS, as he had vowed to do,¹⁸ then northern and eastern Syria, which make up a large chunk of the caliphate, were an ideal place to start. Yet when pressed by reporters about possibly striking ISIS in Syria following the Foley beheading, the commander in chief admitted that his administration had not quite gotten that far—in fact, it had gotten nowhere:

          “We don’t have a strategy yet,” Mr. Obama said of his plans for defeating the Islamic State in Syria. “We need to make sure that we’ve got clear plans. As our strategy develops, we will consult with Congress.”

                . . . the president said he has ordered his military advisers to give him “a range of options.”

                But Mr. Obama tried to tamp down the suggestion that his decision was imminent, saying “folks are getting a little further ahead of where we’re at than we currently are.”

                “We need to make sure that we’ve got clear plans, that we’re developing them,” Mr. Obama said at a White House news conference. “There’s no point in me asking for action on the part of Congress before I know exactly what it is that is going to be required for us to get the job done.”19

By this time, it had been eight months since ISIS roared into Fallujah. In the ensuing months ISIS, using a bevy of Western recruits, had overrun large parts of Syria and Iraq, declared a caliphate, lopped off the head of an American citizen, and vowed to strike the United States. Yet, incredibly, President Obama still had not devised a strategy to counter the rapidly growing Islamic State. In his words, he had no “clear plans” and no idea of what was “required . . . to get the job done.” This was dereliction of duty, plain and simple. But it was not surprising.

Not only does President Obama have a stunning and potentially fatal misunderstanding of the Middle East (as we’ll see in chapter eight), he also has a profound lack of interest in national security issues, period. A damning report released by the Government Accountability Institute in September 2014 showed that the president had missed over half of his daily intelligence briefings during his second term in office.²⁰ Indeed, an Obama staffer admitted that the president hadn’t received regular in-person intel briefings since early 2009, preferring to get them in writing instead—an arrangement that, presumably, prevents him from picking the brains of his national security team and asking pointed questions as he would be able to do during an in-person meeting.21 One wonders if written briefings would be the norm if the topic of our national security were as near and dear to the president’s heart as, say, Obamacare.

President Obama may blow off his intel briefings, but he makes sure never to miss a date on the golf links, no matter how dire the circumstances. On August 20, 2014, just minutes after giving a somber speech vowing that justice would be done in the wake of ISIS’s beheading of James Foley, the president, along with an entourage that included former NBA star Alonzo Mourning, headed right to the golf course, where he spent the next few hours “laughing, fist-bumping his friends and driving a golf cart with Mourning in the passenger seat.”²²

The president was roundly criticized afterward for his insensitivity—needless to say, yukking it up on the links immediately after addressing the brutal murder of an American citizen did not make for good optics, particularly in a mid-term election year. Despite the public relations disaster the golf outing created for the White House, at least we finally had a name for the president’s ISIS strategy.

Golf and Awe.

President Obama has vowed repeatedly that any U.S. military operations against ISIS “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”²³ As of this writing, however, the president had authorized the return of up to three thousand U.S. soldiers to Iraq, albeit in noncombat roles. For now, they are supposed to be “limited to advising local commanders and retraining elements of Iraq’s army” while “confined to military headquarters or training bases at four sites” around the country.24 How long that arrangement can last is uncertain. First, military experts across the board (and even former British Prime Minister Tony Blair)²⁵ have argued that ISIS cannot be defeated through airstrikes alone. Second, ISIS may eventually drag some of those three thousand U.S. advisors into, at the very least, limited ground engagements whether the Obama administration likes it or not.

In December 2014, for instance, a contingent of over three hundred U.S. troops stationed at a base in Anbar province came under fire from Islamic State jihadists, who “repeatedly hit the base with artillery and rocket fire.”²⁶ Thankfully, there were no American casualties in the attacks. But as more U.S. troops arrive in Iraq and are based in ISIS strongholds such as Anbar, they’ll become highly desirable targets. Imagine the propaganda value for the Islamic State if it were able to kill some American soldiers, or perhaps kidnap one to feature in a beheading video. All of a sudden, the Obama administration’s strict “no ground operations” policy would be nearly impossible to sustain.

For now, though, the strategy for Operation Inherent Resolve—as the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS is known—remains limited to airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria (yes, after much golfing, the president ultimately decided to extend the bombing campaign to the other half of the caliphate). The strikes, which have also targeted the “Khorasan Group,” a contingent of senior al Qaeda members inside Syria, are being conducted by a coalition that includes the U.S., France, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada, as well as a handful of Muslim nations that are petrified of the new caliphate next door.

While it’s nice that Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain have offered some assistance—ISIS is conquering territory in their backyard, after all—America, predictably, is doing the heavy lifting and carrying out the overwhelming majority of the airstrikes.²⁷ But as we’ll see in chapter eight, the Obama administration is eagerly seeking to enlist the help of none other than the terrorist regime in Iran to take some of the pressure off—and American military hardware is falling into the hands of Iraqi Shia militias loyal to Tehran.28

Although boots on the ground are needed to truly cripple ISIS, even limited Coalition airstrikes have unquestionably had an effect. As of December 2014, some 1,100 ISIS jihadists had reportedly been killed in Syria.²⁹ In Iraq, U.S. air cover had enabled Kurdish Peshmerga forces (who have begged for more American weaponry)³⁰ to mount a counter-offensive and retake some northern towns from ISIS.³¹ In addition, a months-long ISIS siege of the Syrian town of Kobane, strategically located along the Turkish border, had stalled thanks to a combination of fierce Kurdish resistance and Coalition airstrikes.³²

ISIS’s earlier successes in Mosul, Sinjar, and elsewhere can be attributed largely to its ability to surprise its opponents with lightning onslaughts and then continue to push forward relentlessly, pausing only briefly to consolidate its gains. If ISIS’s momentum is stunted in Iraq, look for it to potentially drive westward in an attempt to open up new fronts and keep some semblance of momentum going:

          •    As we saw in chapter one, Lebanon is clearly in the Islamic State’s crosshairs. In January 2014, the head of Lebanon’s main security apparatus said that “more than 1,000” ISIS fighters had already holed up inside the country near its border with Syria.³³

          •    Meanwhile, in December 2014, ISIS destroyed at least six Jordanian border control stations along that country’s boundary with Iraq.³⁴

          •    The following month, a group of ISIS jihadists (including one who detonated a suicide vest) killed three Saudi guards at Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia.³⁵ The Saudis are now building a six-hundred-foot wall along their northern border with Iraq to keep ISIS out. The wall will feature “a ditch and a triple-layered steel fence, with 40 watchtowers spread out along it.”36

          •    As we’ll see in chapter eight, ISIS is also beginning to inch closer to Syria’s border with Israel, thanks in part to Syrian rebel groups in the region that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

American-led airstrikes may have helped slow ISIS’s momentum on the battlefield in certain areas of Iraq and Syria, but they have not been able to dampen enthusiasm for the Islamic State among radicalized Muslims around the world. According to one study, over six thousand new fighters have joined ISIS since the first American airstrikes began in August 2014.³⁷ As of late October 2014, some one thousand foreign fighters were reportedly flowing into Syria to join the group each month, the same rate as before the airstrikes.³⁸

As ISIS continues to draw fanatical young jihadists from six continents to its ranks, it has also gained the support of several regional jihadist organizations, stretching from South Asia to North Africa. These groups, some more significant than others, have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and its caliph, providing ISIS with satellites (or wilayats) beyond the borders of the Islamic State. Among the most prominent:

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (ABM): Based in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, ABM gives ISIS a strategic perch from which it can conduct attacks against both Israel and Egypt and coordinate with ISIS sympathizers in the nearby Gaza Strip. ABM is estimated to have anywhere between several hundred and a few thousand fighters that “have killed hundreds of members of Egypt’s security forces in a series of suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and assassinations” since July 2013 alone.³⁹ They’ve also carried out attacks in Cairo and against targets in southern Israel and—in true ISIS fashion—have shown a fondness for beheading their hostages.⁴⁰

ISIS in Derna, Libya: As Libya continues to spiral into terrorist chaos and civil war in the wake of the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi by NATO forces (an event hailed by the Obama administration as a great foreign policy victory), Derna has been overrun by jihadists who’ve pledged allegiance to ISIS and transformed this port city of eighty thousand people into “a colony of terror”:

          [Derna] is the first Islamic State enclave in North Africa. The conditions in Libya are perfect for the radical Islamists: a disintegrating state, a location that is strategically well situated and home to the largest oil reserves on the continent. Should Islamic State (IS) manage to establish control over a significant portion of Libya, it could trigger the destabilization of the entire Arab world.41

Incidentally, Libya’s next-door neighbor Tunisia has supplied more foreign fighters to ISIS (possibly as many as three thousand) than any other country.⁴²

Soldiers of the Caliphate: This small Algeria-based outfit made a gory splash in September 2014 when it pledged allegiance to ISIS and promptly kidnapped and beheaded a French tourist. Algerian Special Forces say they killed the group’s leader in December 2014. It’s unclear whether the “Soldiers” have staying power, but Algeria has long been a hotbed for Islamic militancy.⁴³

Pakistani Taliban (TTP) jihadists: In October 2014, the spokesman for the influential Pakistani Taliban, along with five of TTP’s commanders, gave their allegiance to the Islamic State. They were subsequently banished from the Pakistani Taliban for disloyalty.⁴⁴ The leader of Jamaatud-Dawa, another major South Asian terrorist organization that boasts approximately 150,000 members, has also reportedly expressed support for ISIS, albeit without offering any sort of official pledge of allegiance.⁴⁵

In supporting the Islamic State caliphate, these organizations and individuals have not only chosen to get behind a “strong horse.” They have given their seal of approval to one of the most depraved, violent, and barbaric societies in memory.

He played dead, and so he lived.

He was the only one.

When ISIS tore through the Iraqi city of Tikrit (Saddam Hussein’s hometown), about 150 miles south of Mosul, in June 2014, twenty-three-year-old Ali Hussein Kadhim was one of hundreds of Iraqi military recruits who were rounded up by the jihadists to be executed en masse.

Kadhim, a father of two small children, had joined the Iraqi military on June 1 in hopes of making a salary that could support his young family. Instead, not long after enlisting, he ended up staring into a freshly dug trench alongside hundreds of his fellow Shia Muslims, sentenced to death for apostasy by ISIS’s Sunni jihadists. Yet miraculously, Kadhim survived. He recounted his harrowing ordeal for the New York Times:

          As the firing squad shot the first man, blood spurted onto Mr. Kadhim’s face. He remembered seeing a video camera in the hands of another militant.

                “I saw my daughter in my mind, saying, ‘Father, father,’” he said.

                He felt a bullet pass by his head, and fell forward into the freshly dug trench.

                “I just pretended to be shot,” he said.

                A few moments later, Mr. Kadhim said, one of the killers walked among the bodies and saw that one man who had been shot was still breathing.

                “Just let him suffer,” another militant said. “He’s an infidel Shia. Let him suffer. Let him bleed.”46

Kadhim lay in the trench, playing dead, for “about four hours . . . until it was dark and there was only silence.” He spent the next three weeks traveling through “insurgent badlands,” making his way to safety in Kurdistan before finally returning home to his family in southern Iraq. ISIS claimed that it killed 1,700 people in the mass execution (Human Rights Watch put the number between 560 and 770 deaths).⁴⁷ Kadhim is the only known survivor. As you can see in his video interview with the Times, he could scarcely believe his good fortune. It’s not hard to see why: since first capturing territory in Syria in 2013, ISIS has proven to be a well-oiled, ruthless, killing machine with zero regard for the populations it has conquered—particularly if the vanquished are not Sunni Muslims. The Islamic State caliphate was founded upon the corpses of thousands of Shias, Yazidis, Christians, and any Sunni Muslims who dared to dissent from its barbarous vision.

A former ISIS fighter captured by Kurdish forces has explained, “Whenever ISIS goes into an area . . . the people there who don’t adhere to their Islamic law are apostates. . . . Everything has to follow ISIS’ way. Even women who don’t cover their faces . . . women would get their heads chopped off.” Another captured ISIS fighter told CNN, “. . . there are different kinds of death—they would torture you for sure, they might decapitate you, or cut off your hands. They will not simply shoot a bullet in your head.”⁴⁸

ISIS blazed an appalling trail of murder and mayhem across Iraq throughout 2014 in Mosul, Sinjar, Tikrit, and Anbar province. And according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, ISIS jihadists killed nearly two thousand people, mostly civilians, in Syria between June and December of that same year. ISIS also reportedly executed 120 of its own members, “most of them foreign fighters trying to return home.”⁴⁹ In the Hotel Killafornia that is the Islamic State, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

ISIS doesn’t just conquer towns—it utterly ravages them, slaughtering men and women, children and the elderly. Survivors of the months-long ISIS siege of Kobane, a town in northern Syria located near the Turkish border, described for the Daily Mail a stomach-churning orgy of bloodletting reminiscent of the Mongols’ devastation of the Middle East eight centuries earlier:

          According to those who escaped [Kobane], the jihadis’ savagery is more hideous than anyone feared.

                Headless corpses litter the streets of the besieged Syrian border town, they say, and some of the mainly Kurdish townsfolk have had their eyes gouged out.

                Refugees who made it to Suruc, just across the border in Turkey, tell of witnessing appalling horrors in hushed tones, as if they can barely believe it themselves.

                Father-of-four Amin Fajar, 38, said: “I have seen tens, maybe hundreds, of bodies with their heads cut off. Others with just their hands or legs missing. I have seen faces with their eyes or tongues cut out—I can never forget it for as long as I live. They put the heads on display to scare us all.”

                It worked. Mr Fajar, a floor fitter from Kobane, and his wife and children aged three to 12, ran for their lives.

                “The children saw the headless people. They saw them,” he said quietly, sitting cross-legged on a rug in his tent in a squalid refugee camp in Suruc.50

As of this writing, ISIS was on its heels in Kobane, beaten back by Kurdish ground forces supported by Coalition airstrikes. Many other towns in Syria and Iraq, however, have been successfully absorbed into the ISIS caliphate—and once they’re cleansed of non-Sunni Muslims (who are either killed or sold into slavery), their inhabitants are forced to live under sharia law. The disciplined ISIS bureaucracy, including several important councils that help the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, govern his territory and make decisions, dispatches religious police, called the “al-Hesbah” force, around the caliphate to ensure that sharia norms are followed—and to deal out harsh punishments if they find otherwise.

Interestingly enough, two former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani and Abu Ali al-Anbari, are al-Baghdadi’s top deputies, overseeing Iraq and Syria, respectively. According to a comprehensive report by the Soufan Group, a respected security and intelligence firm:

          Abu Bakr [al-Baghdadi] and his two senior advisors set the overall strategic objectives of the group, which are then passed down through the hierarchy with each lower rung having a degree of autonomy in their fulfillment. This is especially true in military operations where a local commander will know what he has to achieve, and even where to attack, but the exact timing and method may be left to his discretion. This system of devolved authority has enabled The Islamic State to operate on many fronts at more or less the same time, both administratively and militarily. . . .

                The Councils are responsible for the military and administrative organization of The Islamic State, providing advice to [al-Baghdadi] and overseeing strategic planning, military operations, and civilian administration. The Shura Council is the highest advisory body and theoretically must approve [al-Baghdadi’s] appointments and even the choice of who should succeed him as Caliph, which is decided by the Sharia Council. Theoretically, it also has the power to dismiss the Caliph if he fails to carry out his duties in accordance with the guiding (sharia) principles of the organization.51

The report notes that ISIS also maintains a Security and Intelligence Council “responsible for eliminating rivals to Abu Bakr [al-Baghdadi] and rooting out any incipient plots against him,” as well as Military, Finance, and Media Councils and a Provincial Council that “oversees the civilian administration of the State through its 18 provinces.”⁵² In addition, the red-bearded Abu Omar al-Shishani (real name: Tarkhan Batirashvili), an ethnic Chechen—one of many in ISIS’s ranks—who served as a sergeant in the Georgian army, has been described as ISIS’s top military commander, reportedly helping to engineer some of its most important conquests, including the takeover of Mosul.⁵³

At the end of 2014, ISIS bragged of a $250 million surplus, with plans to use the extra money left over from its $2 billion budget “to help fund [the Islamic State’s] war against the West and western allies.”⁵⁴ The Islamic State is financially independent and, while it does receive donations from wealthy donors based in Persian Gulf countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (longtime hotbeds of terrorism financing), is not beholden to any nation. ISIS controls several oil fields in western Iraq and eastern Syria and is driven, in large part, by oil money. ISIS was making as much as $3 million per day by selling oil in the Levant region’s black market (which thrives in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan)⁵⁵ until U.S. airstrikes reportedly put a dent in its revenue.⁵⁶

Nevertheless, the Islamic State continues to rake in the dough via a mixture of private donations, oil sales, smuggling, blackmail, ransoms (European nations have paid tens of millions of dollars to free citizens held by ISIS)⁵⁷ and taxation and extortion in the areas it has conquered.⁵⁸ ISIS pays its fighters about $400 per month, certainly not a princely sum but reportedly more than members of the various Syrian rebel groups and the Iraqi military earn.⁵⁹

For ISIS foot soldiers, the glory of jihad and the spoils of war more than make up for what they lack in salary. They are not driven by money but by a fanatical ideological commitment to expanding the caliphate and enforcing their totalitarian vision upon the Middle East and the world—beginning, of course, with Syria and Iraq.

THE CROSS IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Assyrian Christians in Iraq’s Nineveh province had a proud history stretching back two thousand years.

That history is now over.

After ISIS swept into Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, the city was literally emptied of its Christian population. In July 2014, ISIS handed out leaflets to Christian leaders in Mosul informing them that they had three options if they decided to stay: convert to Islam, pay the jizya (an exorbitant tax levied against non-Muslims under sharia law), or die. And they only had a few days to decide. Most of Mosul’s estimated three thousand Christians left the city by the deadline, quickly gathering their belongings and beginning new lives as refugees, joining some five hundred thousand others who had fled Mosul after ISIS’s arrival.60 Laying low and staying in Mosul was not a viable option: Islamic State jihadists had spray-painted the Arabic letter for “N” in red to mark homes and businesses that were owned by Christians. The N stood for “Nazarene,” indicating followers of Jesus of Nazareth.⁶¹ Reportedly, ISIS has even turned churches into torture chambers in Iraq and Syria—after looting them of invaluable artifacts and relics to sell on the black market—and in July 2014, used sledgehammers to destroy the tomb of the biblical prophet Jonah in Mosul.⁶²

ISIS’s blitzkrieg across the Christian areas of northern Iraq was the climax of a decade-plus wave of persecution that began after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when jihadists, led by ISIS’s predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, embarked on a campaign of church bombings and murders that have resulted in over a million Christians leaving Iraq. As of the summer of 2014, three hundred thousand still remain but if ISIS continues its rampage, they won’t be there for long.63

Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of St. George’s Church in Baghdad, the city’s last remaining Anglican church, visited CBN’s Jerusalem bureau in November 2014 and shared eyewitness accounts of the horrors ISIS is inflicting upon Iraqi Christians. White is a native of England whose ministry, the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, offers humanitarian and spiritual aid to Christians in Iraq and Syria who’ve seen their worlds turned upside down thanks to ISIS. In an interview with my CBN News colleague Chris Mitchell, he described the unfathomably hellish situation:

          In Iraq at the moment, it is impossible to describe how it really is. It is so awful. Most of our people originate from Nineveh, which is Mosul, and they come from there because that is really where our faith started. . . . Things were bad in Baghdad and there were bombs and shootings and our people were being killed, so so many of our people fled from Baghdad back to Nineveh—their traditional homes. It was safer. And then one day, ISIS . . . came in . . . and hounded all of them out. Not some, all of them. And they killed huge numbers. They chopped the children in half, they chopped their heads off. And they moved north. . . . they said to one man, an adult, they said “Either you say the words of converting to Islam or we kill all your children.” He was desperate. He said the words. And then he phoned me, “Abounah, Abounah [Father], I said the words. Does that mean Yeshua [Jesus] doesn’t love me anymore? I’ve always loved Yeshua, but I said those words because I couldn’t see my children being killed.” I said, “Elias, no, Jesus still loves you. He will always love you.” A few days later . . . ISIS turned up and they said to the children, “You say the words, that you will follow Mohammed.” And the children, all under fifteen, all of them, they said, “No, we love Yeshua, we have always loved Yeshua, we have always followed Yeshua. Yeshua has always been with us.” [ISIS] said, “Say the words.” They said, “No we can’t.” They chopped all their heads off. . . . That is what we are going through. Most of my staff are still in the north of Iraq trying to look after all the displaced people. [ISIS was] threatening to kill me, they were after me. They wanted that Abounah from England. . . .64

When children are being beheaded and cut in half, crucifixion is a logical next step in the savagery department. Sure enough, ISIS has taken to hanging bodies on crosses in Syria—and not just of Christians. The victims include one seventeen-year-old Muslim boy who allegedly took pictures of ISIS’s military headquarters in Raqqa. His body was hung on a cross for three days in the city’s central square, where he met an agonizing death. ISIS uses crucifixions and beheadings as a way to intimidate the local population—in Raqqa, severed heads hanging from street posts are a familiar sight.⁶⁵ Perhaps the Islamic State will include those details in its travel brochure.

MODERN-DAY SLAVERY

Even her father pelted her with stones.

At point blank range.

ISIS had accused the unnamed Syrian woman of committing adultery. The sentence for her alleged crime was stoning. And in accordance with sharia law, ISIS carried out “justice” in grisly fashion, stoning the woman (whose face was covered) to death and then posting a video of the deed online. Her father refused to forgive her despite her pleas and chose instead to participate in the execution, hurling stone after stone at his own daughter’s head as ISIS jihadists encouraged him.66

That’s just a small sampling of what life is like for women in the Islamic State. But while Muslim women are subjected to stonings, repression, and second-class status, non-Muslim women are treated worse than animals. Simply put, captured Christian and Yazidi women are being subjected to mass rape by Islamic State jihadists, who have created a thriving sex slavery trade. Thousands of Yazidi women, in particular, have been rounded up “like cattle” by ISIS, which places price tags on them at markets in cities like Mosul and Raqqa.⁶⁷ In many cases, their family members have already been executed by ISIS. The women are all alone, destined to live a life of inhuman servitude in the power of “sex jihadists.” According to an op-ed by two former CIA analysts in Foreign Policy: “The Islamic State’s (IS) fighters are committing horrific sexual violence on a seemingly industrial scale: For example, the United Nations . . . estimated that IS has forced some 1,500 women, teenage girls, and boys into sexual slavery. Amnesty International released a blistering document noting that IS abducts whole families in northern Iraq for sexual assault and worse. Even in the first few days following the fall of Mosul . . . women’s rights activists reported multiple incidents of IS fighters going door to door, kidnapping and raping Mosul’s women.”⁶⁸

In September 2014, the Telegraph recounted how an Italian newspaper was able to get in touch with a seventeen-year-old-Yazidi girl, who, along with some forty other Yazidi women, was being kept as a sex slave by ISIS “in a building with barred windows and guarded by men with weapons”:

          The woman said her captors had initially confiscated her mobile and those of all the other women, but had then “changed strategy”, returning the phones so that the women and girls could recount to the outside world the full horror of what was happening to them.

                “To hurt us even more, they told us to describe in detail to our parents what they are doing. They laugh at us because they think they are invincible. They consider themselves are [sic] supermen. But they are people without a heart.

                “Our torturers do not even spare the women who have small children with them. Nor do they spare the girls—some of our group are not even 13 years old. Some of them will no longer say a word.” The woman, given the false name Mayat by La Repubblica, said the women were raped on the top floor of the building, in three rooms. The girls and women were abused up to three times a day by different groups of men.

                “They treat us as if we are their slaves. The men hit us and threaten us when we try to resist. Often I wish that they would beat me so severely that I would die.

                . . . If one day this torture ever ends, my life will always be marked by what I have suffered in these weeks. Even if I survive, I don’t know how I’m going to cancel from my mind this horror.

                “We’ve asked our jailers to shoot us dead, to kill us, but we are too valuable for them. They keep telling us that we are unbelievers because we are non-Muslims and that we are their property, like war booty. They say we are like goats bought at a market.”69

If you think this type of medieval barbarism is due solely to a backwards Middle Eastern culture, think again. ISIS jihadists of French and British origin have openly bragged on social media of using Yazidi women as sex slaves.⁷⁰ And as we’ll see in chapter six, British women who have migrated to the Islamic State actually run brothels where they provide sex slaves for ISIS fighters.

An ISIS handbook released in December 2014 entitled “Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves” justifies these atrocities, stating, “It is permissible to have sexual intercourse with the female captive. Allah the almighty said: ‘[Successful are the believers] who guard their chastity, except from their wives or [the captives and slaves] that their right hands possess, for then they are free from blame’ [Koran 23:5-6].”

The handbook also goes on to condone sexual intercourse “with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however if she is not fit for intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse.”71

Inside the Islamic State, such directives are taken quite literally. According to some reports, girls as young as nine years old have been raped by ISIS fighters.⁷² Indeed, the exploitation of children is a way of life inside the caliphate and is not limited to the horrors of sexual molestation:

          •    In Raqqa, children under fifteen are “forcibly” conscripted and placed in ISIS training camps where they’re taught to behead infidels, using dolls with blonde hair and blue eyes for practice.⁷³

          •    They’re also taught how to handle automatic weapons and shown videos of beheadings, stonings, and crucifixions.⁷⁴

          •    Supplementing the daily brainwashing at the training camps, ISIS provides a handbook for mothers that encourages them to train their children in all forms of physical fitness (including martial arts) “from the time they are babies” in order to prepare them to one day assume the mantle of jihad for the Islamic State.⁷⁵

To the average Westerner, all of it is unthinkable: the mass rapes, the slave markets, the crucifixions, beheadings, stonings, and child soldiers. Yet growing numbers of American and European citizens not only agree with these Islamic State “values”—they wish to see them enforced on Western soil.

From Paris to Ottawa to New York City, they’ve proven ready and willing to maim, murder, and menace their fellow citizens.

If they can’t live inside the caliphate, they’ll do the next best thing.

Bring the caliphate home.