THE ISLAMIC STATETHE ISLAMIC STATE
On 4 July 2014, the first Friday of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, worshippers gathered at the Grand Mosque of Nur al-Din in Mosul. They talked, waited, removed their shoes, and then filed into the 750-year-old building before arranging themselves in rough lines to pray. They waited some more. The minbar, the high pulpit, remained empty. Then there was movement outside. A convoy of pickup trucks pulled up. Armed men opened a way through the assembled congregation. There were shouts of Allahu Akbar, God is Great, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, dressed in flowing black robes and a black turban, walked to the front, climbed the short staircase of the minbar and began to address them.
He spoke for thirty-one minutes, of the importance of Ramadan, the duties of Muslims, of hellfire and salvation, and of the need to humiliate polytheism and the polytheists.1
‘Your mujahideen brothers have been rewarded by Allah with victory and He has enabled them to assume power after long years of patience and fighting His enemies,’ al-Baghdadi told the assembled men. ‘He has granted them success and they have rushed to achieve their goal and to declare the caliphate . . . lost for centuries.’
He then struck a marginally more humble note.
‘I have been tasked with this great burden, and this great responsibility. I was chosen to lead you, though I am not the best among you,’ he said. ‘If you see me as righteous, help me; if you see me straying from the straight path, correct me. Obey me as long as I obey Allah, and if I disobey Him, you should not obey me.’
The 43-year-old spoke calmly, carefully and with authority. The congregation listened attentively. This was not unsurprising. The incumbent cleric who had led prayers at the mosque until the militants had seized the city had been executed a week earlier, with a dozen other religious scholars who had refused to swear allegiance to their new rulers. At the end of his sermon, al-Baghdadi left as he had come, to shouts of Allahu Akbar, swept out by his bodyguards to the waiting convoy.
Since the 1960s and 70s, when this most recent wave of Islamic militancy began, strategists and thinkers within the movement have elaborated different visions of how the battle against the West, the Zionists and their local allies – and kufr, or ‘unbelief’, more generally – might play out. Some were technical, some apocalyptic, most were a mixture of both. One of the most influential of such texts, The Management of Savagery, was published online in 2004 and widely read by extremists. It is still referred to frequently and is reported to be part of the recommended reading for IS commanders.2 If the exact identity of its author is still unclear, its influence is not.
The Management of Savagery described three stages of a campaign.3 The first was ‘nikayah’, when irregular forces would wage an unconventional war involving terrorist tactics to compel local authorities or occupying forces to withdraw from a given area. The second was ‘tawahhush’, a mixture of unconventional and conventional tactics designed to foment civil conflict and exacerbate sectarian tension to destabilise the zone vacated by the authorities. Finally, there would be ‘tamkin’, when the militants themselves moved in to take control and, through bringing a rough-and-ready form of security to desperate communities, could establish their authority and eventually consolidate a more durable base – the ultimate goal of most militants most of the time.
Over the centuries, such projects have been common in the Islamic world. All have attempted to achieve two objectives: to reform their own societies, returning those Muslims who had departed in practice and belief to the true faith, and to battle outsiders, which from the late eighteenth century on usually meant non-believers, most often Europeans. Several Islamic states were declared between 1830 and 1930 in parts of northern and eastern Africa, in the Caucasus and in the north of what is now Pakistan. Their leaders took religious titles, such as the Amir-ul Momineen, the commander of the faithful, and often set up basic institutions.4 Minorities were oppressed and sins such as drinking or adultery were punished. None lasted very long, blown away by Western military superiority and undermined by a lack of local legitimacy.
The religious revival of the 1970s led to renewed attempts. In 1982, President Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar, ordered the Syrian Army to put down an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama, killing tens of thousands. In 1992, extremists in a poor suburb of Cairo declared it an Islamic state – and were crushed in their turn. In Afghanistan between 1994 and 2001, the Taliban made another, marginally more successful, attempt to create an Islamic state: television and instrumental music were banned, women were forced to wear burkas, girls ordered to stay at home if strict segregation in schools could not be assured, while public executions and amputations of thieves’ hands were commonplace. The campaign to ‘encourage virtue and prevent vice’ within the community and to defend against the threat from outside it were, the Taliban believed, intrinsically connected. As Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyyah, the conservative thinker so often cited by today’s militants, had made clear in the thirteenth century following the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols, it was Muslims’ own weakness and decadence which made them so vulnerable to foreign domination.
Quite where the Islamic state that so many militants dreamed of creating should actually be located had long been a matter of dispute. Most favoured their native lands. Before he joined al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri dismissed the ‘battles going on in the far-flung regions . . . such as Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Bosnia’ as ‘just the groundwork’ for those ‘in the heart of the Islamic world’. In 2005, he was more specific, writing that ‘the victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established . . . in the Levant, Egypt and the neighbouring states of the Peninsula and Iraq’.
This had been the goal of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi too, of course.
Yet the enclave all these men were working to establish, wherever it was situated, was only a way station to another, grander destination. Abdullah Azzam had spoken of liberating areas from southern Spain to the Far East. The Management of Savagery tells the mujahideen that if they captured Algeria, ‘they [should] begin to prepare for conquering Libya and Egypt the following morning’, while ‘if the mujahideen are given victory on the Arabian Peninsula, on the following day they must prepare immediately to begin conquering the smaller states which these paltry regimes in Jordan and the Gulf rule’.5 The militant community has long been hard-wired for expansion and looks to history to justify their territorial claims.
After the Prophet’s death, Islam spread rapidly. Some historians suggest it was the military superiority of the early Arab Muslim armies that was primarily responsible. The black flags under which contemporary extremists fight, use as idents on their videos and, in places like Raqqa, fly above offices deliberately recall what are imagined to be the battle banners of the earliest Muslim forces.6 These troops’ success may have been due to extremely capable battlefield leaders, the faith of the fighters, their ability to do without cumbersome supply trains, or flexible and innovative tactics. But the brutal reality of contemporary geopolitics may have been the most significant factor. Happily for the early Muslims, the faith had emerged at a time when the two superpowers of the era – Byzantine Rome and the Persians – had exhausted themselves in centuries of conflict. Riven with internal dissent, structural weakness and existential doubt, neither was in a position to defend marginal territories. This was a historic opportunity that the newly mobilised Muslim community readily seized. Armies and raiding parties surged out from the Arabian peninsula. Most headed westwards, across to the rich lands of what would be known to later conquerors as the Levant, on along the North Africa coast. Some headed north too, and into what is now Iran.
It is likely that without this expansion the new unity forged by Mohammed among Arabian tribes would have collapsed. The Prophet had stopped the tribes pursuing short-range raids on neighbours that had been a traditional part of their economic survival for centuries. If they were not to turn once more against each other, they needed new targets further afield. The expansion gathered momentum and, decade after decade, the advance of the faith never really slowed, with every military victory reinforcing their sense that Islam was indeed the project of God. Many crucial military encounters were won when opposing forces defected. Many cities just decided against resistance. Everywhere, the armies and raiding parties were preceded by preachers, mystics and traders. Huge swathes of territory were joined, nominally, to the new empire as local rulers simply sent messages pledging acceptance of their new sovereigns and often the new faith too.7
Whatever the reasons behind it, this extraordinary expansion meant that, from the beginning, Muslims’ collective memory had a rather different tone from that of either Jews or Christians. Mohammed did not merely outline a vision of a utopian community to be realised at an unspecified future date but actually built one during his own lifetime. More importantly, that community then transformed much of the known world, through diplomacy, trade, cultural exchange and, of course, through war. While for Jews the collective memory of the earliest experience of believers is repeated exile, and for Christians it is persecution, for Sunni Muslims it is one of the most successful military and political campaigns in history.8
Moreover, as its early expansion slowed and its great cities expanded and its traders prospered, the new Islamic empire developed into a hugely rich and powerful civilisation. The Umayyads, who ruled from 661 to 750 from Damascus, continued to acquire new territory, extending their rule as far as the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula to the west and the Indus valley in the east. They gave the new imperial entity a permanence in other ways too. Some of the most famous examples of Islamic architecture – the great mosques of Cordoba and Damascus, the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem – date from this period. The Umayyads also consolidated the Arabic language throughout their domains, and launched naval expeditions for the first time. The Abbasids, who overthrew the Umayyads in a revolt in 750, ruled from a series of cities including Baghdad, Raqqa and Samarra, and are credited with ushering in a golden age of Islamic civilisation. By the turn of the first millennium, the new empire had splintered into states run by competing dynasts, but brilliant cultural activity continued, and the various incursions of the Crusaders from the west were eventually repulsed and invasions from the east successfully resisted. Even the catastrophic sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 did not mean that the era of great Islamic rulers was over. Those who had destroyed the great city converted to Islam themselves. Within two hundred years, Constantinople would have fallen to the Ottoman Turks, who went on to conquer much of the Balkans and threaten central Europe. Even as late as the seventeenth century, no European state, with the arguable exception of Spain, came even close to rivalling the Ottoman Empire’s territorial extent, military capability, scientific knowledge and artistic achievement. From Delhi, the Mughals, an Islamic dynasty descended from Mongol converts, dominated South Asia. Their wealth and power was fabulous. Between these two superpowers, the Safavids built their Shia state in Persia. The contrast with the poor, backward, bickering, strife-torn nations of Europe is striking.
What today’s commentators in London and Washington often forget – and militants repeatedly remind themselves and anyone else prepared to listen – is that the supremacy of the West is a relatively new phenomenon in historical terms. Across much of the world, for two-thirds of the last 1,300 years, the power, the glory and the wealth was, broadly speaking, Islamic. The militants seek to return the world’s Muslim community to what they see as its rightful status: a global superpower. The story of the caliphate can only be understood within the context of this overarching narrative. And understanding this story – and its different versions – is essential if we are to understand the degree to which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his Islamic State followers have not simply revived this 1,400-year-old institution, but also re-imagined and reinvented it.
In his book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, the Afghan American writer Tamim Ansary suggests that the core religious allegory of Islam – analogous to the last supper, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, or exodus, bondage and the return to the promised land for the Jews – is not limited to the life of the Prophet but includes the rule of his four immediate successors as well.9 These were the wise, just and affable Abu Bakr, the immensely strong warrior ascetic Omar, who oversaw much of the most rapid expansion of the Arab Islamic empire, the melancholic, austere but hugely wealthy and nepotistic Othman and finally Ali, the upright, honest son-in-law of the Prophet. These men are known as the ‘rightly guided’ caliphs.
When Mohammed died in 632, as mentioned in chapter 3, he not only left no clear instructions as to who should succeed him, but also gave no indication of what sort of leadership the Muslim community should expect in his absence. Many questions were unanswered. What would a successor’s powers actually be? Would they have a spiritual role as well as a temporal one? Would there be a succession at all? When the elderly Abu Bakr was chosen to lead the Muslims after long debates among the close associates of the Prophet, he was designated the caliph, which simply means deputy. No formal decision on his powers was ever taken. The caliphate was thus, from the beginning, an ad hoc arrangement, not a specific designed institution, and this is one reason why no consensus has ever been reached on exactly what role the caliph plays.
It was perhaps inevitable that the office would become the subject of fierce competition and conflict. In addition to the split over the very first succession, which became that between the Shia and the Sunnis, three of the first four caliphs died violently at the hands of fellow believers. The Umayyad Caliphate was, and remains, deeply controversial. Its replacement by the Abbasids led to the creation of a rival caliphate in Andalusia. Another arose in Egypt. This chaos and competition continued over the centuries. The title eventually ended up with the Ottoman sultans, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. But by then these various conflicts had undermined the credibility of the entire institution. As the modern era dawned, there was little left of the original and undoubted awesome grandeur that the title had once evoked. The link to the men who had built the Islamic empire had long been broken. When Kemal Atatürk, the modernising ruler of Turkey, effectively abolished the caliphate in 1924, vesting its powers in his new state’s national assembly, there was uproar in many parts of the Islamic world but no effective resistance. Atatürk dispatched the last caliph into ignominious if comfortable exile in France, and the institution lapsed into an odd sort of redundancy.10 But within less than a decade of the caliphate’s abolition, activists within the Islamic world had begun to see its restoration as the panacea to all the ills of the umma. One of the first to do so was Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.
This complicated history means no one is very sure what would allow an individual to claim to be caliph today. Many, probably the vast majority of even practising Muslims, find the whole idea of someone appointing themselves, or even being appointed, to the office risible. Others have admitted the theoretical possibility of there being a new caliph but maintain that some kind of global consensus among clerics would be essential to any actual appointment. Some have said that the simple fact of ruling justly and wisely over a sufficient mass of population and extent of territory could be enough. One condition for leadership of the umma, some insist, is descent from the Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet, and contest al-Baghdadi’s claim to this lineage. Some base their opposition on other points of doctrine or law. In his speech at the mosque in Mosul, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi cited entire paragraphs taken from the acceptance speech – a reluctant one, according to most accounts – of his namesake 1,400 years earlier. That he should do so, and thus claim the legacy of a man who is revered by many Muslims, angered many. For almost everybody, al-Baghdadi’s extraordinarily hubristic announcement in June 2014 does not make him caliph at all, it simply makes him the latest of a long line of religious revivalist leaders, of all faiths, who have claimed the right to lead a given religious community to redemption.
But while his claim to the title of caliph may have been dismissed by all major Islamic religious authorities, and most minor ones too, none would dispute the subtext behind it: the resurrection not simply of a title but of the power, dignity, wealth and military renown of Muslim rulers from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries.
Within days of assuming his new office, al-Baghdadi, or Caliph Ibrahim as he now called himself, issued a series of orders which gave some idea of the form his reinvented caliphate would take. First came a list of regulations determining personal behaviour of the inhabitants of Mosul, the caliphate’s new capital. These were familiar from those already in force in Fallujah and Raqqa over the previous year. They also recalled those imposed on local communities in the west of Iraq during the days of al-Zarqawi’s rule, in Taliban Afghanistan, and in the various Islamic states that revivalists of various kinds had tried to construct over the previous decades and centuries. Smoking and drinking were forbidden, the former punishable by amputation, the latter by death; women were only to wear ‘Islamic garb’ and to remain in the home unless accompanied by a close relative or their husband. Schools were ordered to rigorously segregate their pupils and teachers by gender. Men were ordered to attend prayers five times a day punctually or face lashing. The newly established religious police which patrolled Mosul was an institution familiar to Raqqa, Fallujah, Taliban Afghanistan and, of course, contemporary Saudi Arabia.
Soon after came executions. Among the first to die in Mosul were the clerics who refused to pledge allegiance to IS. These killings continued in the city through the autumn and winter. In one month alone, January 2015, four doctors were killed, possibly after refusing to treat IS fighters, two alleged homosexuals were pushed off the top of a tower block in front of a crowd in the centre of the city, and at least one woman was stoned to death for adultery. Two militants from IS itself were crucified and then shot after being found guilty of extortion at checkpoints. The majority of the killings in Mosul in the immediate aftermath of the takeover were, however, of tribesmen who had ‘betrayed’ the Islamic State by collaborating with government forces.11
Again, as in Taliban Afghanistan or in Anbar a decade earlier, the aim of this very public and brutal violence was to enforce public order. Justice needed quite literally to be seen to be done. In 1998, I had watched a Taliban cleric hold aloft the severed hands of two thieves to show them to a crowd of several hundred, possibly thousands, in a stadium in Kabul. A few minutes later a woman convicted of murder by a local court was shot dead. The Taliban hoped the severity of such punishments would compensate for their failure to administer justice in any systematic way in the parts of the country they controlled. That such punishments were visible was thus essential. The same had been true for al-Zarqawi in Anbar, who had conducted executions in the street in front of crowds rounded up by his militants. When he had the means, the leader of ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ had circulated video clips of the torture of offending local residents by hand in cities like Fallujah. But neither al-Zarqawi nor the Taliban had anything like the communications technology available to IS. The amputation of the hand of one alleged thief in Syria’s Aleppo province in early 2014 was ‘live-tweeted’ by members of the group, in what was probably a fairly gruesome first.12 A clip of the two alleged homosexuals being hurled from a tower block was also uploaded to the Internet. Much of the coverage in the West focused on the effect such material might have on aspirant extremists in the UK, France or elsewhere. But these were not the primary audience. The availability of the Internet and affordable Internet-enabled devices such as laptops, smart-phones and tablets meant that they would be viewed locally too. The brutal justice still needed to be public, and spectacular, but would now be seen by far more people than ever before.
The violence was designed to speak to three critical audiences, with a different message for each. For those who opposed the Islamic State, the aim was to terrorise through deliberately excessive violence shocking in its cruelty. For those already committed to the cause, its aim was to mobilise: to rally them into action by demonstrating the group’s power and success. And for those who remained undecided, it was designed to polarise: to force the viewer into picking a side and deciding if they would condone the violence, remain silent and thus become complicit, or oppose it.
This was why there was no effort made to hide the mass killings of captured Syrian or Iraqi government troops or Kurdish fighters. The graphic images of the massacres undermined the morale of the poorly paid, poorly armed government forces and, to a lesser extent, their Kurdish counterparts. They also indicated the ruthlessness of IS to enemies further afield, such as the Iranians, the Israelis, the Saudis and the West. They proved to those who backed the group that they had made the right choice, and also sent a clear message to local tribes still sitting on the fence: either you are with us, or against us, and made the risks of being the latter abundantly clear.
The deliberately staged killing of foreign hostages was an extension of this logic of terror, mobilisation and polarisation. It also implied a policy of continuous escalation. Though more professionally produced, these appalling films owed a clear debt to those made by al-Zarqawi in 2004 and 2005 – in their use, for example, of the orange Guantánamo Bay-style jumpsuits worn by victims. One video, broadcast in November 2014, showed the remains of a decapitated former US Army ranger turned aid worker who had apparently been executed along with eighteen Syrian Air Force pilots. The latter were lined up, while a British IS fighter delivered a diatribe against the West and the US. They were then forced to lie down to allow eighteen militants, clearly selected to represent a variety of nations, to simultaneously hack off their heads. In January 2015, a downed Jordanian pilot was locked into a cage and then burned alive.13
The Islamic State also exceeded any other previous group in its violence against non-Muslim communities. Even in Taliban Afghanistan, some non-Muslim communities had been tolerated, though Shias had been persecuted. This was justified by reference to early Islamic law on so-called dhimmis, non-Muslims who were allowed to continue practising their religion on payment of a special tax, albeit as second-class citizens with limited legal protection. A token offer along these lines was made to Christian and other communities within the territories occupied by IS but it was accompanied by threatened and real violence and almost all non-Muslims fled. One terrible example was that of the Yazidi, seen either as pagans or as apostates by the Islamic State. Large numbers – certainly hundreds, possibly thousands – of Yazidi men were killed and women abducted when the group captured the areas where they had lived for centuries. Many women were given to IS fighters as ‘temporary wives’ and repeatedly raped. The IS magazine, Dabiq, boasted that a fifth of Yazidi women captured in the wave of expansion which followed the fall of Mosul were distributed to senior commanders, and the rest split among rank-and-file fighters. This was justified on the basis of selective quotations from the Koran and holy texts detailing the treatment of captives taken in war and slaves.14
Along with the careful and spectacular operation of violence on people, there was violence against objects associated with other beliefs too. The primary targets of these were shrines and religious buildings which were seen as contrary to tauheed, the strict unicity of God. Folksy, popular practices such as worshipping at the tombs of long-dead holy men, even decorating graves, were considered a danger to the common good and therefore to the survival of the new caliphate. Al-Baghdadi, in his sermon in Mosul, had called on Allah to ‘strengthen Islam and Muslims to wage war on polytheism and the polytheists’, and within days of taking control of Mosul IS moved to destroy local shrines to the prophets Younis, or Jonah, and Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve. The group would have reduced many more to ruins if they had not encountered some very brave local opposition.15 Any pre-Islamic archaeological site was a reminder of the era of jahiliyaa, or barbaric ignorance, and so also was a threat. In January 2015, remaining portions of the old walls of the city of Nineveh, near Mosul, were razed. Two months later, IS destroyed much of what remained of the 3,000-year-old city of Nimrud using bulldozers and explosives.
None of these measures was particularly exceptional, in anything other than the degree of rigour, brutality and violence with which they were applied. Many had been implemented before, in one form or another, by previous Islamic militant groups and, as we will see in the next chapter, in other countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria. But one order issued by al-Baghdadi was dramatically new. Among the very first edicts issued by the new caliph was an order that the frontier posts between Iraq and Syria be destroyed. Though previous groups such as the Taliban had carved out substantial territories, none had explicitly challenged international boundaries, even disputed ones, so directly. Nor had any such challenge been so central to their programme. Within days of Mosul’s fall, a film was released showing a bulldozer breaching the sandy berm through the desert which marked the border between the two states. Entitled the ‘End of the Sykes–Picot’, a reference to the secret agreement between Sir Mark Sykes and François-Georges Picot of Britain and France in 1916 on what were to become the borders of Iraq and Syria, it followed a pledge from al-Baghdadi himself to ‘break all the barriers of . . . all the countries’.16
Shortly after the seizure of Mosul, al-Baghdadi issued a message that summed up the world view not just of IS but of all Islamic militants in the early part of this century. First and foremost, the caliphate would allow Muslims to heal the damage done by centuries of Western dominance, through dismantling all the structures it had imposed. ‘The Muslims were defeated after the fall of their caliphate,’ al-Baghdadi wrote. ‘Then their state ceased to exist, so the unbelievers were able to weaken and humiliate the Muslims, dominate them in every region, plunder their wealth and resources, and rob them of their rights. They accomplished this by attacking and occupying their lands, placing their treacherous agents in power to rule the Muslims with an iron fist, and spreading dazzling and deceptive slogans such as: civilisation, peace, coexistence, freedom, democracy, secularism, Ba’athism, nationalism and patriotism, among other falsehoods.’17
Surveying the Islamic world, al-Baghdadi described sectarian clashes between Burmese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and between Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic, mentioning pretty much every conflict in between that might be described in religious terms: the ‘dismembering and disembowelling [of] Muslims in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Kashmir . . . the killing of Muslims in the Caucasus and expelling them from their lands . . . making mass graves for the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the slaughtering of their children’. He listed other alleged atrocities, including repression of Muslims in western China, the ban on the hijab in France, ‘the destruction of Muslims’ homes in Palestine, prisons everywhere full of Muslims, the seizing of Muslims’ lands, the violation and desecration of Muslims’ sanctuaries and families’ and the ‘propagation of adultery’, though quite where this final crime was occurring was left unclear. All this violence was attributed to the West and aggregated into a single global conflict between belief and unbelief, between the West and their proxies in the Islamic world and true Muslims. The solution, of course, was the caliphate.
This new Islamic superpower would rival the US in political, military and cultural force and thus restore the rightful order of world affairs and the fallen honour and dignity of all Muslims. ‘Raise your head high, for today – by Allah’s grace – you have a state and caliphate, which will return your dignity, might, rights and leadership . . . rush O Muslims to your state. Yes, it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The earth is Allah’s.’
Finally, the new caliphate would mean that a Muslim who wanted to follow his faith would not have to choose between submission to the unbelievers or becoming a ‘terrorist’:
‘Those rulers continue striving to enslave the Muslims, pulling them away from their religion with those slogans. So either the Muslim pulls away from his religion . . . living despicably and disgracefully . . . or he lives persecuted, targeted and expelled, to end up being killed, imprisoned or terribly tortured, accused of terrorism. Because terrorism is to disbelieve in those slogans and to believe in Allah. Terrorism is to refer to Allah’s law for judgement. Terrorism is to worship Allah as He ordered you. Terrorism is to refuse humiliation, subjugation and subordination. Terrorism is for the Muslim to live as a Muslim, honourably with might and freedom. Terrorism is to insist upon your rights and not give them up.’
Nearly a decade before, when al-Zawahiri had written to al-Zarqawi in Iraq in his bid to moderate the younger extremist’s excesses, he had repeatedly stressed one point: the importance of maintaining support among local and regional communities if the project to build an Islamic state was to succeed.
‘If we look at the two short-term goals, which are removing the Americans and establishing an Islamic emirate in Iraq, or a caliphate if possible, then we will see that the strongest weapon which the mujahideen enjoy – after the help and granting of success by God – is popular support from the Muslim masses there, and the surrounding Muslim countries,’ he told the Jordanian.
He had succinctly summed up the dilemma that faced all militants, including al-Baghdadi and IS as summer turned to autumn in 2014.
‘We must maintain this support as best we can, and we should strive to increase it, on the condition that striving for that support does not lead to any concession in the laws of the sharia,’ the al-Qaeda deputy leader said.
This tension, between application of the rigorous law the militants believe is necessary for the internal reform and thus the external strength of the community versus the desire of the people they rule to be able to decide for themselves how to live their lives has never been resolved. It is one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Islamic militant project. In the long run, it may well be what makes that project unworkable in all but the most specific conditions. Any vision dedicated to eradicating difference and diversity is always going to find the reality of human society something of a challenge.
In any given community, there might be a ‘raw nerve’ who finds the extremists’ ideology attractive. Others might see potential for personal advantage in the rule of the militants. But actual ‘popular support from the Muslim masses’ depends on a community’s conviction that the extremists are the only people who can protect its economic, social and cultural well-being.
This was made much easier if communities believed they were facing an existential threat which the militants were uniquely qualified to counter. In the Sunni-dominated areas of Syria and Iraq, this threat, of course, was Shia hegemony. But to maintain support was harder, as al-Zarqawi had found out when the tribes began to turn against him in Anbar province in 2005. One option would be to replicate the vast network of informers, surveillance and terror of the brutal authoritarian regimes that had ruled Iraq and Syria for the last four decades. In April 2015, Spiegel magazine published a cache of documents revealing the extensive system of repression IS set up across Syria, even in zones it did not actually control. It was bureaucratic, systematic and apparently effective. Unsurprisingly, the man who had designed it was a former senior intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein’s air defence force.18
Reporting of IS has focused, justifiably, on the horrific and systematic human rights abuses the group commits, as well as on its military capabilities. What has received less attention is the model of governance IS seems to be developing. If one aim of the project is, as al-Baghdadi has clearly indicated, to show Muslims and the world in general that the revolution it is implementing is a universal panacea to all man’s ills, it has to be effective as well as righteous, respected as well as feared. The new Islamic state needs to do what states in the region have so often failed to do: it must provide, in some measure, for its citizens.
Where IS differs dramatically from any previous project to create a new, extremist Islamic state is in the scale of its operations, the size of the territory it administers and the resources it has at its disposal. This means a much greater ability to order and structure the lives of the several million people living under its authority than any previous group has ever had. It also means more money to spend on what could be called its ‘soft power’ and ‘outreach’ efforts, or propaganda. (Of course, it also means it has much higher expenses than most of the other militant organisations existing over the last two to three decades.19)
IS gets its money from a number of sources. Historically, private donors elsewhere in the Islamic world have provided significant financial assistance. Typically, these will be tapped for funds for a particular operation. This is not unlike a major charity in the West launching an appeal during a particular disaster or for a special cause. In 2013, IS, JAN and other opposition factions launched an offensive near Latakia on the Mediterranean coast. One cleric in Kuwait provided hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding while others in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar also appear to have contributed to the multimillion-dollar cost of the push. The short campaign saw, among other atrocities, the killing of 190 civilians, including fifty-seven women and at least eighteen children and fourteen elderly men, in a single day.20
The flow of funds to IS from the Gulf has prompted repeated speculation that it has been directly funded by one or more states, particularly Qatar or Kuwait. Such suspicions are understandable given that both states are known to have generously backed other factions in Syria and elsewhere, but remain unfounded.21 Nor has any firm proof emerged that the authorities in such states have given their tacit approval to private donations by residents to al-Baghdadi’s organisation. In recent years, Western intelligence officials believe, such donations have dropped away and private giving now provides a negligible proportion of the group’s income.22
For as IS has expanded territorially, it has carefully prioritised the acquisition of lucrative resources. The most obvious has been oil, and the majority of the oilfields of eastern Syria are currently under its nominal control as well as some in Iraq. Most is used for internal consumption, but some is sold through long-established smuggling routes, mainly through Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and into Turkey, though also into regime-controlled zones. Despite fetching a price which is only around a fifth of market values, these sales may have brought in more than $40 million every month in the summer of 2014, according to the United Nations. In comparison, the personal wealth of Osama bin Laden was estimated at between $5 million and $30 million, with the reality almost certainly at the bottom end of this scale. The revenue of the Taliban, derived from the vast Afghan drug trade as well as donations, protection rackets and levies on activities ranging from marble mining to human trafficking, may have reached around $400 million in 2011. It seems probable that the revenue IS earned from oil declined substantially by the middle of 2015 as the US bombing campaign and other measures took effect, though it still may earn the group several million dollars every month.23
This may not matter. Hydrocarbons are far from the only resource to be exploited. Large sums are also made from trafficking wheat, seized cotton and antiquities smuggled by criminal gangs who buy a ‘licence’ to excavate and traffic from IS authorities.24 Ransoms for hostages have brought in, it is thought, tens of millions of dollars, though as these are sold, killed or otherwise freed, this flow of cash will dry up. As IS has advanced it has seized very large quantities of arms and ammunition, vehicles, generators, industrial plant and construction equipment. Some of this too is sold, raising further large sums, as has much of the private property that has been ‘requisitioned’, particularly from members of religious minorities. This resource is rapidly exhausted, however, and only renewed through expansion.
But most important in terms of income generation are the ‘taxes’ levied on businesses and individuals. Some are traditional, such as the customary levy for charitable works, which at 2.5 per cent or thereabouts of revenue is often less onerous than many of those raised by the Syrian or Iraqi regimes when they were in power.25 Government employees – some still paid by national exchequers in Damascus and Baghdad – are taxed on their salaries. Together these may bring in a million or so dollars every day, though reliable figures are difficult to come by.26 Other taxes are less systematic, but still involve very significant sums. These are a form of protection racket, accompanied by explicit threats of extreme violence if they are not paid but also on the understanding that IS will ensure the security of businesses or individuals from bandits, thieves or other extortionists if the money is handed over. Well before the fall of Mosul, the city’s inhabitants were paying between $8 million and $12 million each month to IS, US officials and others estimated. Reuters news agency reported that a standard payment – described as ‘support to the Mujahideen’ by IS on the receipts they scrupulously issued – was around $100 per month for a shopkeeper. Bigger businessmen paid much, much more of course.27
Such fees are also levied on trucks and private cars travelling through Syria and Iraq. The transport business across the zone that is now under the nominal control of IS has long been run by Sunni tribes for whom illegally moving fridges, microwaves, air-conditioning units, livestock, petrol, foodstuffs, shampoo, people, drugs and lots more besides across the desert to Baghdad is a primary source of revenue. A decade ago, al-Zarqawi and his extremists alienated local tribal sheikhs in western Iraq by brusquely appropriating many of their smuggling networks. Charles Lister, of the Brookings Institution in Qatar, points out that IS has been more careful, forgoing revenue by demanding relatively light payments for passage and thus not only guaranteeing the tribes’ security for their business but allowing them to make more money than when they had to deal with corrupt regime officials in either Syria or Iraq. IS may earn less this way, but gain a priceless collaborative relationship with local communities and, particularly, with local Sunni powerbrokers.28
What then does IS do with this immense flow of cash? The answer, predictably, is that it does what many rudimentary states with a revolutionary agenda do: funds an administration, social services and a military as well as a variety of cultural or educational initiatives designed to shape the values, norms and world view of the people it governs.
The administration relies on co-opted or coerced local officials who have been unable or unwilling to leave, reinforced by volunteers, both local and foreign, and all overseen by IS ‘cadres’. Courts are of course Islamic, with religious judges. These provide a rapid adjudication of often long-standing disputes and do not demand bribes. In the population centres they command, IS officials have moved rapidly to gain almost total dominance over the supply of daily necessities, particularly bread, cooking oil and fuel. This monopoly of distribution and production of the basics for everyday existence is a powerful tool of social as well as economic control, as many other regimes in the region have long recognised.29 IS appears to prefer subsidies to outright handouts, however, though it nonetheless apparently tries to make sure that no one goes hungry. Bread produced in the bakeries run by the group is usually sold relatively cheaply. In some towns, IS has offered low-cost food for families, including cut-price meat for the ‘poor and needy’.30 When functioning smoothly, such programmes are an effective way of building community support, and allow any opposition to be punished by the denial of basic means of sustenance. But if such schemes break down, the credibility of IS as administrators, such as it is, risks significant damage.
Yet even before the invasion of 2003 and the chaos that has followed, basic services in urban and rural areas of Syria and Iraq were already grossly inadequate, in part due to a drastic shortage of trained and competent administrators. IS also lacks the personnel needed. In July 2014, al-Baghdadi appealed to ‘judges, as well as people with military, administrative and service expertise, and medical doctors and engineers of all different specialisations and fields’ to migrate to the caliphate from overseas.31 Few came. The maintenance of the infrastructure alone in the areas ruled by IS in Iraq was estimated to cost around $200 million per month.32 The implacable laws of the market still functioned too, even in a revolutionary religious proto-state. So, for example, air strikes on oil production infrastructure had pushed up the price of fuel in IS-controlled zones by spring 2015. In Mosul, locals reported, IS was forced to introduce price caps on gas and petrol.33 Electricity supply everywhere was intermittent, hospitals were short of basic medical equipment and rubbish collection systems, always a weak point for municipal authorities in even stable middle-income countries in the developing world, had broken down. Clean water was rare due to a lack of chlorine and available from the tap for only a few hours per week. ‘We use the river water for washing, but it’s very dirty. Children . . . are getting sick of [from] it,’ one resident said.34
Such problems make IS’s other areas of expenditure all the more important. One is religious proselytisation and education: after all, the righteous-minded can reasonably be expected to accept a certain amount of privation if they believe it necessary for the creation of the perfect religious community. These are often the first initiatives introduced in any given area identified by the group for a subsequent takeover. At their most basic they comprise very simple events of faith-based outreach, involving public Koranic recitation and sermons explaining the project and beliefs of IS, with participants offered refreshments and a break in the tedium of the day. Such proselytisation is often mixed with more innocuous activities, such as a tug of war or some kind of sporting competition, and usually aimed at young men and boys. More elaborate efforts involve the establishing of camps where a select group might be educated over a period of days.
More broadly, education is seen as part of a campaign not just to win ‘hearts and minds’ but to ‘reform’ them. Some government schools continue to function, with their original staff, but with strict segregation of teachers and students and a curriculum purged of more or less anything but study of the Koran, the deeds and sayings of the Prophet and Islamic law. Foreign languages, mathematics, social sciences and references to nation states have all been banned from lessons. The long-term aim is the quintessence of totalitarianism: to eliminate all possibility of alternative viewpoints, particularly among the young, and to raise a new generation of utterly loyal, unquestioning ‘citizens’ of the caliphate. Naturally, force, or the threat of force, is used to achieve this aim. In one incident in May 2014, ISIS abducted more than 150 schoolchildren aged between thirteen and sixteen in Manbij, in the north-west of Syria, and held them for weeks. The boys were beaten, forced to pray five times a day and to spend hours learning the Koran, and made to watch videos of ISIS beheadings and attacks.35 Even young children are involved in horrific violence, including executions. There are very few examples of ‘brainwashing’, a much-misused word, in Islamic militancy but this kind of effort must come close to qualifying as one.
One aim of this propaganda is simply to encourage recruits. IS casualties are difficult to estimate but even top-end estimates of up to 10,000 being killed in fighting between September 2014 and June 2015, for example, are still unlikely to mean a shortage of manpower given the number of unemployed, angry young Sunni men in Syria and Iraq.36
Another aim is the sustaining and spreading of a culture of martyrdom and suicide attacks. Suicide bombing is neither a cheap weapon, as often said, nor the spontaneous, organic expression of the inchoate rage of a people. It is a tactic, adopted for specific strategic reasons by terrorists, and which involves the commitment of significant resources if it is going to be successful. The extremist organisations that pioneered the use of the tactic – such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers – rapidly learned that few communities naturally accept the voluntary death of their teenagers. The individual who becomes a human bomb may cost an organisation less than a missile but any militant hoping to deploy suicide attackers needs to invest heavily and systematically in propaganda designed to build and then maintain a ‘cult of the martyr’ if they are to avoid a backlash from relatives, friends and their wider circle. It is not natural for a mother or a father to celebrate the death of a child, and the idea that young men, or increasingly women, should kill themselves in order to kill others, often civilians, has to be normalised. In interviews with dozens of bereaved parents of suicide bombers over the last fifteen years, I have heard the identical response: ‘I am sad that my son has gone but I am happy because of his sacrifice.’ This has to be learned, and the victims need to be turned from other human beings into a faceless, dehumanised enemy. In practical terms, meanwhile, the families of ‘martyrs’ need to be looked after; funerals organised and paid for; valedictory films produced and broadcast; a dedicated infrastructure to find, isolate and condition ‘martyrs’ set up and run. This effort must be constant and places a considerable strain on a group’s resources. Many Islamic extremist organisations, including IS, make disproportionate use of foreign volunteers as suicide attackers. One reason may well be to make a powerful statement about the extent of their support around the globe. But another may simply be that the foreigners are cheaper.
For the biggest expenditure of IS is, inevitably, war. Estimates of the number of fighters IS could deploy at any one time vary from a few thousand to tens of thousands. In September 2014, the CIA reportedly suggested a figure of between 20,000 and 31,500. Most are paid somewhere between $200 and $600 every month, meaning a maximum total wage bill of somewhere between $4 million and $21 million, with allowances for food and lodging adding a further financial burden. But many fighters do not receive a salary in the conventional sense. There is a hard core of ideologically motivated full-timers but many of those deployed either to the front lines or used to perform more mundane duties in the rear are auxiliaries mobilised through tribal networks, by other groups who happen to be currently aligned with IS or simply by individual villages for use in a local operation. Such fighters are rewarded materially, usually by their own patrons and leaders, but do not necessarily receive cash from the central treasury.
What is clear is that the majority are Syrians and Iraqis, despite the international media’s focus on volunteers from overseas. This is not to minimise the importance of the phenomenon of ‘foreign fighters’ within IS but simply to emphasise that for most participants the conflict remains a local one. It might have been framed as part of a broader sectarian struggle, or one against unbelievers or tyrants, but the actual factors which lead individuals and communities to be mobilised are often more immediate.
One study of Syrian fighters joining militant groups including IS found that they did so ‘primarily for instrumental purposes’ – meaning with a specific aim in mind rather than out of a general ideological motivation. One reason for this is that Islamic militant groups were perceived as better equipped, led and organised. They were therefore seen as more capable of defeating the Assad regime, which remained the priority of most Syrian rebels. Richard Barrett, a former head of counter-terrorism at MI6 and author of the study, described how ‘fighters’ individual motivation for joining has more to do with the dynamics of a social network that provides direction, identity, purpose, belonging, empowerment and excitement, than it does with religious understanding’.37 This is also the case for every other militant volunteer, group, network and cell described in this book.
As well as soldiers, war requires weapons. These IS appears to have in astonishing abundance. No previous Islamic militant group has had such reserves of armoured vehicles and possessed such sophisticated weapons systems, even if IS appears unable to use many of them. Reports from interrogated militants who have returned to Europe do not mention any problems obtaining ammunition, something that has crippled many such organisations’ military efforts previously. Some reveal a surplus that would be the envy of many conventional forces. Nor does there appear to be any shortage of light arms, needed in vast numbers for the kind of tactics IS favours and the type of force it habitually deploys. One Indian former IS militant told police he had been sent to attack Kurdish peshmerga positions armed with an AK-47 assault rifle with three hundred rounds, four hand grenades, a Glock handgun with fifty cartridges and a knife. Others in his small assault group were equipped similarly but also carried a sniper rifle, a light machine gun with a thousand rounds, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and ammunitions. This small armoury was not intended to be reused – the volunteers were told to fight to the last bullet and then their deaths – and was worth many thousands of dollars.38
Then, of course, there is the Islamic State’s media department, responsible for the videos that have been so instrumental in establishing the image of IS overseas, and particularly among the young Muslim men, and some women, who travel to Syria to be part of the new caliphate. Though these films have attracted much international attention, most of the media department’s output is directed at local viewers and varies according to the degree of control IS has over a given area. The degree of violence shown is carefully calibrated. Productions promoted in, for example, Raqqa, where IS is firmly in control, have highlighted governance, aiming to mobilise support. In Kirkuk and Diyala provinces in Iraq, on the other hand, both of which are frontier zones where control is fiercely contested, the emphasis has been very different, with graphic images of the execution of alleged criminals and spies being used to terrify the local population into submission.39
This propaganda is produced in multiple languages and disseminated by thousands of sympathisers across social media.40 The Islamic State has even developed its own Arabic-language app – Dawn of Glad Tidings – allowing a user to automatically retweet its communications using specified hashtags.41 Despite its centralising, totalitarian culture, IS appears to allow, if not actively encourage, a constant stream of material about it to be uploaded onto social media by foreign volunteers who have joined it – for example onto the social media pages of specific units within the group – which turn them into powerful recruiting tools in distant lands. The tolerance extended by the otherwise obsessively authoritarian IS to this kind of effort may simply be pragmatic. Beyond confiscating the phones and tablets of all recruits, there would seem to be little the group could otherwise do.
Another and important use of social media is to allow followers and potential sympathisers around the world to engage with, and thus become complicit in, the Islamic State’s atrocities. One example was the ‘crowd-sourcing’ of the means of executing the Jordanian pilot captured in January 2015. The degree to which IS itself was responsible for the hashtag ‘Suggest ways to kill Jordanian pig’ is unclear, but responses ranged from impaling to execution with an axe.42
This then is the proto-state which has emerged, chaotic and opaque but nonetheless clearly recognisable, in the area formerly known as eastern Syria and western Iraq. It is of a type and ambition and capability that has simply never existed before. The nearest equivalents – such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the Islamic Courts Union which seized power in much of Somalia in 2006 – were less organised, ambitious and aggressive. They were also much poorer and much more isolated. They certainly never had either the conventional or non-conventional military strength of IS. Both, crucially, were confined to relatively marginal areas of the globe and had limited capability to project influence or power beyond the frontiers of the remote locations which they controlled.
But, despite its many innovations, the Islamic State may be considerably less revolutionary than it likes to pretend and observers often claim. In many respects its emerging form does not recall the community in the earliest decades of the faith, or that ruled by the four ‘rightly guided’ successors of Mohammed, or the state constructed by the magnificent potentates of the Umayyads or the Abbasids, as its leaders clearly imagine.43 Nor, as the author and academic Charles Tripp has pointed out, does it present as radical an alternative to modern nation states in terms of governance or administration as may seem the case at first sight. IS rules a frightened, fragmented populace through a mix of blackmail, bribes, paternalism and terror. It seeks to bind inhabitants together with an ideology based on a selective reading of specific texts, a hate-filled sectarian agenda, paranoia about the designs of external actors and deep-rooted anti-Western sentiment fused with anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Capital punishment, sometimes in public, is common. Violence is systematically employed to intimidate and terrorise entire communities. It develops and sustains a cult of martyrdom and suicide attacking, jealously controls the basic means of subsistence for millions of people, runs a semi-command economy with widespread use of price-capping, subsidies and other measures which interfere with the functioning of the free market. Its tax system is extractive, predatory and often arbitrary. Divisions between traditional communities such as tribes are exacerbated and exploited. Prominent families are co-opted or coerced. Dissent of any form is savagely punished, religious minorities are systematically persecuted, while education and information are seen only as means to reinforce its leaders’ own position through the eradication of any ways of thinking that might allow a cowed population to imagine alternatives to their continued rule. It is economically fragile, lacks skilled workers, has problems providing basic services to its population, and suffers both from massive underinvestment in infrastructure and a prodigiously unequal distribution of wealth. Despite huge expenditure on security forces, law and order is in reality patchy and it is detested and feared by all its neighbours. None of these problems are exactly unfamiliar in the region. Indeed, they could even be said to characterise many nations within it.
In this sense, IS is, despite its own rhetoric, an entirely contemporary phenomenon, its emergence and its form determined by a specific environment at a very specific time.44
This undoubtedly helps explain its spectacular local success. Yet it begs an obvious question: can that success be exported? Can a group establish networks and affiliations overseas? Can a group ‘go global’? In the next chapters, al-Qaeda’s and the Islamic State’s efforts to build bases, capacity and influence around the Muslim world are examined. Here, we will learn that what bring militants success ‘at home’ does not always guarantee it abroad.