INTRODUCTION
1. Deputy Assistant Secretary Brett McGurk, Statement for the Record before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hearing: Iraq at a Crossroads: Options for US Policy, 24 July 2014.
2. ‘How Mosul fell – An Iraqi general disputes Baghdad’s story’, Ned Parker, Isabel Coles and Raheem Salman, Reuters Special Report, 14 October 2014.
3. Patrick Cockburn gives the figure of 1,500. Reuters says 2,000. Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution, Verso, 2015.
4. There are various estimates. Cockburn gives the higher one. Cockburn, ibid., p. 9.
5. ‘Mosul falls to militants, Iraqi forces flee northern city’, Reuters, 10 June 2014.
6. ‘Islamic State Executions in Tikrit’, Human Rights Watch, 2 September 2014. Al-Sham is an Arabic word meaning, in this context, most of present-day Syria, plus much of Jordan, Israel, the occupied territories and Palestine. One possible translation is the Levant, which is arguably more accurate than ‘Syria’. However, the latter is most commonly employed and so is used here for the sake of simplicity.
7. Nobody actually knows how many, and estimates range from five to eight million.
8. ‘The New Jihadism: A Global Snapshot’, ICSR, 8 December 2014; ‘Jihadi attacks – the data behind November’s 5,000 deaths’, Michael Safi, Guardian, 11 December 2014. Sixty per cent of these deaths were caused by the militant groups Islamic State and Boko Haram but the death toll in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan also stretched into the hundreds. Just over half of those killed in November’s attacks were civilians – 1,653 were caused by bombings but 3,400-plus by shootings, ambushes and executions.
9. See Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars, Penguin, 2011, pp. 502–5.
10. Up to 99 per cent of the attacks by al-Qaeda and its affiliates in 2013 were against local targets in North Africa, the Middle East and other regions outside of the West. For a useful statistical analysis see ‘A Persistent Threat: The Evolution of al Qa’ida and Other Salafi Jihadists’, Seth Jones, RAND Corporation, 2014.
11. Remarks by the president at the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington DC, Office of the Press Secretary, White House, 23 May 2013. ‘Global armed conflicts becoming more deadly, major study finds’, Richard Norton Taylor, Guardian, 20 May 2015; ‘Clapper, Kerry appear at odds on terror threat’, Eric Bradner, CNN, 27 February 2015.
12. Obama has repeatedly made clear his view that to wage a ‘boundless global war on terror’ would be counterproductive and that carefully focused efforts involving a variety of tools – military, diplomatic and other – against specific extremist threats are much more effective. ‘We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us . . . Neither I, nor any President can promise the total defeat of terror . . . But what we can do – what we must do – is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold.’ The White House House, Office of the Press Secretary, Remarks by the President at the National Defense University, 23 May 2013.
13. ‘Lindsey Graham: We need troops to fight Islamic State “before we all get killed here at home”’, Philip Bump, Washington Post, 14 September 2014.
14. ‘Fox News apologises for terror pundit’s “Birmingham totally Muslim” comments’, Guardian/Press Association, 18 January 2015. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 220–1.
15. In July 2014, I had the bizarre experience of reporting from Gaza during the short war there, interviewing Hamas officials every day, and hearing Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, describe their organisation and IS as identical. One of his predecessors, Ariel Sharon, had made similar statements, as had a variety of other leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, all looking to exploit the tragedy in the US in different ways.
16. ‘“They will kill us all!” Critically assessing ISIS fear mongering by US politicians’, Brian Glyn Williams, Huffington Post, 19 November 2014. Hamas is an acronym for Harakut al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah (Union of Islamic Resistance).
17. ‘ISIS is not a terrorist group’, Audrey Kurth Cronin, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2015. Obama had earlier, infelicitously, described IS as the Junior Varsity squad of international terrorism to David Remnick of the New Yorker.
18. Home Secretary Theresa May on counter-terrorism, 24 November 2014, transcript of the speech at Royal United Services Institute, Whitehall, London.
19. According to one estimate, between 2010 and 2013, there had been a 58 per cent increase in the number of ‘Salafi-jihadist’ groups, and the number of individuals engaged in violence over the period had increased to between 44,000 and 105,000. Jones, ‘A Persistent Threat’.
20. These include David Cameron, Nick Clegg and John Kerry.
21. Afterword to Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, John Arquilla and David Ronfelt, RAND Corporation, 2001.
22. So, for example, terrorists started crowd-sourcing funds, or using digital media for propaganda, before most counter-terrorists had even begun understanding the capabilities the technological transformation of the late 1990s had brought. Similarly, terrorists started hijacking planes in the 1960s, and using explosives in the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER 1
1. Statistic from the South Asian Terrorism Portal, www.satp.org.
2. ‘Dynamic Stalemate: Surveying Syria’s Military Landscape’, Charles Lister, Brookings Institution, May 2014.
3. Various analysts have suggested different schema. In my first book I suggested three categories: hardcore, network and ideology. The Obama White House has described ‘affiliates’, ‘adherents’ and ‘inspired’, see the US Congressional Research Service’s report, ‘Al Qaeda-Affiliated Groups: Middle East and Africa’, 10 October 2014, pp. 5–6.
4. Claiming in typically melodramatic language on 17 April 2014 that ‘al-Qaeda is no longer a base of jihad [but] has become a hammer to break the project of an Islamic state [because its] leaders have deviated from the correct path’. See Dabiq, vol. 2, July 2014.
5. See the useful discussion in ‘The War Between ISIS and al-Qaeda for Supremacy of the Global Jihadist Movement’, Aaron Zelin, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 26 June 2014.
6. So, arguably, does Jabhat al-Nusra, depending on what importance is given to pre-existing Islamist networks in Syria in its formation.
7. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, p. 159.
8. Author interviews, London, June 2014.
9. Remarks by the president at the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony, the White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 28 May 2014.
10. Quoted in Patrick Cockburn, The Jihadis Return: Isil and the New Sunni Uprising, OR Books, 2014, p. 18.
11. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, Columbia University Press, 2006, pp. 83–4. Many would contest this definition, particularly of the Thugs.
12. See the excellent Carlos: Portrait of a Terrorist by Colin Smith, Penguin, 2012.
13. In Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1867, Hodong Kim, Stanford University Press, 2010.
14. ‘An Islamic alternative in Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood and Sadat’, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 1/2, Spring 1982, pp. 75–93; Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, Penguin, 2003, p. 151.
15. Mohamed Heikal, Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of President Sadat, Andre Deutsch, 1983, p. 211.
16. Ibid., p. 212.
17. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, ‘The changing face of Egypt’s Islamic activism’, in Egypt, Islam and Democracy: Critical Essays, American University in Cairo Press, 2002.
18. Ibid.
19. Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic, Penguin, 2013, pp. 73–5.
20. People in Saudi Arabia still remember this period with a mix of nostalgia and horror. A friend in Jeddah still regrets the bulldozing of old markets but smiles at the thought of the freewheeling, optimistic atmosphere of the time. For statistics and more analysis, see chapter 2 of Fred Halliday’s classic Arabia Without Sultans, Saqi Books, 2001. Also Tim Niblock with Monica Malik, The Political Economy of Saudi Arabia, Routledge, 2007, pp. 54–6. Abdulaziz M. Aldukheil, Saudi Government Revenues and Expenditures: A Financial Crisis in the Making, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 28–9. For an accessible, informed account of the period, try Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia, Penguin, 2010.
21. Fawaz Gerges notes that ‘The Neglected Obligation’ was the ‘operational manual for jihadis’ in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s.
22. An Indian Islamic State volunteer described reading Qutb in or near Raqqa to Indian police interrogators in late 2014. Author interview, Indian security official, Delhi, October 2014.
23. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, American Trust Publications, 1990, p. 49. Even closer is Maududi who said in 1926: ‘Islam is a revolutionary ideology and program which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its tenets and ideals,’ A.A. Maududi, Jihad in Islam, Holy Koran Publishing House, 1980, p. 5.
24. One of the reasons that Mohammed had been accepted in Medina when he fled there in 620 was that his teachings were far from unfamiliar, even among the Jews who lived in the city. Muslims believe Mohammed to be the last in a series of prophets that include Moses and Jesus. Certainly, the revelations he received, as well as his reported sayings and deeds, reveal the clear influence of both Judaism and Christianity. However, a variety of episodes from the life of Mohammed have also long fuelled anti-Semitism, particularly the massacre of a Jewish tribe by early Muslims and their helpers.
25. Qutb, Milestones, p. 6, cited in Burke, Al-Qaeda, p. 54.
26. Ibid.
27. The six men who killed Sadat were all in their mid-twenties. Farraj, aged twenty-seven in 1982, also rejected the requirement to gain the assent of one’s parents before participating in jihad. This, too, fitted perfectly with the general spirit of the times.
28. Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh, University of California Press, 2003, pp. 73–8, 87. Mustafa, who was in his early thirties, had left the Muslim Brotherhood after six years in prison and concentration camps where he had read Qutb and other key thinkers. He started his own group while behind bars and began to expand it steadily after his release in 1971, beginning with former associates from jail and close relatives, including his brother, then later roaming the villages around Asyut, the upper Egyptian city, impressing young men and some women. In a precursor to many later militant Islamic groups, recruits were sucked into a hermetically sealed world in which all their social needs were catered for. Mustafa physically and psychologically distanced his nascent community from temptation, idolatry and wrongdoing, and when camping in caves palled his followers were installed in furnished flats in poor Cairo neighbourhoods. Some were married according to the group’s own interpretation of religious rites, and this alone caused outrage.
29. Eleven died and twenty-seven were wounded in the attack. Al-Ahram, 20 April 1974; Montasser al-Zayat, The Road to al-Qaeda, pp. 36–7, quoting al-Zawahiri’s confession before Higher State Security Court, 1981.
30. Fawaz Gerges, The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 32.
31. A series of groups in the post-9/11 era, operating in Lebanon, Gaza, Sinai, Pakistan and elsewhere, have named themselves after Abdullah Azzam, the foreign fighters’ leader. One such group, formed in 2009, has been designated a terrorist entity by the US and has been a significant actor in Syria in recent years.
CHAPTER 2
1. Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, The Bodley Head, 2014, p. 166.
2. Many deal with very specific points about the administration of a seventh-century Arab community – touching on such matters as taxation, inheritance arrangements, marital relations and sanitation. In fact the Koran mentions community – using a word that distinctly does not designate ethnic origin or ‘tribe’ – more than sixty times. This is significantly more mentions than ‘jihad’ as other words are generally used to refer to war or fighting. Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia, Orient Blackswan, 2008, pp. 7–8.
3. See Jalal, Partisans of Allah, p. 14, and interesting discussion in Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, Abacus, 2013.
4. In 2014, I travelled through an insurgency-ridden part of Kashmir with a local driver who listened on his car stereo almost exclusively to a series of sermons by a well-known extremist preacher entitled: ‘It is your responsibility, and only yours, to bring about the true Islamic society.’
5. Azzam’s exact words were: ‘Jihad under this condition becomes an individual obligation on the Muslims of the land which the unbelievers have attacked and upon the Muslims close by. If the Muslims of this land cannot expel the unbelievers because of lack of forces, because they slacken, are indolent or simply do not act, then the obligation spreads to the next nearest. If they too slacken or there is again a shortage of manpower, then it is upon the people behind them, and on the people behind them, to march forward. This process continues until it becomes [an obligation] upon the whole world.’
6. The term ‘Wahhabi’ is rejected by those to whom it is usually applied, who, if anything, prefer Muhawiddun, or unitarian.
7. One physical manifestation of this was the architecture of the new mosques which proliferated through villages, towns and cities across the Islamic world. Mosques had traditionally used local materials and incorporated local building styles, and thus reflected the pluralism of Islamic observance as it had evolved in different communities across the world. The new constructions were all identical boxy, whitewashed, charmless cement constructions resembling places of worship in poorer neighbourhoods in Gulf cities. There were none in northern Iraq or Pakistan in the early 1990s, when I travelled there. A decade later, they were ubiquitous.
8. Not all tribes converted. Mohammed is not thought to have demanded conversion to Islam as a condition of alliance.
9. As the Islamic State was destroying the shrine of Jonah near Mosul in the summer of 2014, clerics in Saudi Arabia even raised the possibility of razing the tomb of Mohammed himself in Medina.
10. Among the Palestinians, the sudden hope prompted by the peace process with Israel swung the initiative back to Yasser Arafat and the PLO and away from Hamas. An Islamist government in Turkey simply imploded. In Sudan, Islamists who had won huge influence following a military coup in 1989 were losing ground fast while in Pakistan the conservative Muslim League, close to Islamists, was forced to alternate in power with the progressive, more secular, pro-Western Pakistan People’s Party of Benazir Bhutto. See Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, I.B. Tauris, 2004, pp. 200–2, 356.
11. The ‘blind sheikh’, an Egyptian cleric called Omar Abdel Rahman, was incarcerated in a US prison on terrorist charges in 1993. Rahman, a key religious authority for militants in Egypt in the 1980s, had designated the US and the West as a priority target well before bin Laden did. Peter Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader, Simon & Schuster, 2006, pp. 204–5.
12. ‘Behind the curve: Globalization and international terrorism’, Audrey Kurth Cronin, International Security, vol. 27, issue 3, Winter 2002/03, pp. 30–58.
13. Quoted in Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p. 21.
14. Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers, HarperCollins, 2005, p. 228.
15. Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, pp. 58, 177–83.
16. An exception was Hezbollah, the Shia Lebanese-based organisation which launched its own channel in 1991.
17. Transcript of statement aired on Al Jazeera, 10 June 1999.
18. Author interview, al-Qaeda courier, Peshawar, 2001.
19. Author interviews, Islamabad, 2002, and Qatar, 2005.
20. Much later, shortly before his death, bin Laden would write to an associate outlining his irritation at this constant failure to get his message out. His associate, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote in 2001 of the ‘media siege’ imposed on Muslims by states in the Middle East and cautioned against ‘Muslim vanguards getting killed in silence’.
21. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, p. 24.
22. Bin Laden finally acknowledged that he had organised the attacks in 2004.
CHAPTER 3
1. His full name is Abu at-Tayyib Ahmad ibn al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi.
2. For a fuller description of Baghdad in the late 1990s, see Jason Burke, The Road to Kandahar, Penguin, 2006. Justin Marozzi, Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, Allen Lane, 2014, p. 33–4.
3. The pioneering activism of Shia extremists in the early 1980s has largely now been forgotten, but for several years in the early 1980s it was the Iraqi al-Dawa organisation that was making headlines. This Shia organisation, drawing its leadership from newly educated middle classes in the expanding cities of south and central Iraq, was responsible for what can be considered the first suicide bombings of the modern militant era, against US, French and Iraqi government targets in Kuwait and a bid to assassinate Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi vice president.
4. Among Iraqi Shias, it was also the failure of the revolts in the aftermath of the Gulf War which prompted a return to the fundamentals of faith.
5. Marozzi, Baghdad, p. 355.
6. ‘Saddam wields sword of Islam’, Jason Burke, Observer, 19 December 1999.
7. Indeed, it was probably because they were in a minority, and thus vulnerable, that they appeared such good local partners. That certainly was one of the tactics employed by British administrators elsewhere.
8. Iraq’s Kurds are predominantly Sunni. References in the text to Iraq’s Sunni community mean the Sunni Arab community of Iraq.
9. Author interview, Baghdad, July 2004.
10. For further background, see Burke, Al-Qaeda, pp. 273–5.
11. There are various explanations for al-Zarqawi’s turn to religion. Some report his mother sent him to classes at a mosque in Amman, the Jordanian capital; others mention the Tablighi Jamaat organisation as key to the process. It appears equally likely that he was drawn to Afghanistan, like so many others, for reasons that had little to do with faith and became more interested in radical strands of Islam there.
12. Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 243.
13. ‘The Group That Calls Itself a State’, Combating Terrorism Centre (CTC), December 2014, p. 10.
14. Al-Zarqawi was here in Kurdistan, not in Baghdad, when Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, cited him as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s links to Islamic militancy before the United Nations in his speech of February 2003 to rally support for the forthcoming US invasion. Nor had Saddam’s surgeons treated al-Zarqawi, as Powell claimed. Nor did al-Zarqawi have any connections to an alleged plot to spread home-made biological poisons on the London Underground.
15. Author interviews with returned veterans, Riyadh, 2008. See Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 168–72.
16. Kepel and Milelli, Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, p. 343.
17. Ibid., pp. 250–67.
18. Ibid., p. 251.
19. Saddam Hussein’s father had authored a Ba’athist tract called ‘Three whom God should not have created: Persians [i.e. Shia], Jews and Flies’. Marozzi, Baghdad, p. 341.
20. Al-Zawahiri letter to al-Zarqawi, Saturday, 2 Jumada al-Thani 1426/9 July 2005.
21. Even Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian radical cleric and perhaps the most important living extremist ideologue, weighed in. He was blunt in his criticism, even if he had known al-Zarqawi for a decade or more and had been a formative ideological influence on the younger man. ‘The pure hands of jihad fighters must not be stained by shedding inviolable blood. There is no point in vengeful acts that terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them. This is, by God, the biggest catastrophe,’ he wrote. Maqdisi’s real name is Isam Mohammad Tahir al-Barqawi. ‘The master plan’, Lawrence Wright, New Yorker, 11 September 2006.
22. For more on this, see Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 248–51. This was a practice which had caused great anger among locals in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s but was seen as being sanctioned by reference to the holy texts
23. ‘Widespread concerns about extremism in Muslim nations, and little support for it’, Pew Center, 5 February 2015. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, p. 253.
24. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, p. 256.
25. US intelligence gathering, surveillance and other operations in Iraq itself also played a significant role.
26. Its leaders made an interesting attempt to reconcile conflicting global and local agendas by appointing two leaders, one from Iraq who was focused on the internal campaign and one from Egypt dedicated to the worldwide battle against unbelief, Crusaders, Zionists, etc.
27. Al-Maliki had been part of al-Dawa, the Islamist Shia organisation which pioneered suicide bombing in the early 1980s.
28. The reference to poor communications with Iraqi groups is in the second batch of files released by US authorities in May 2015.
29. Pentagon news briefing, June 2010.
30. ‘Who is Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?’, Janine Di Giovanni, Newsweek, 8 December 2014.
31. ‘Is this the high school report card of the head of the Islamic State?’, Loveday Morris, Washington Post, 19 February 2015.
32. Author interviews, UK and former Iraqi security officials, London, 2014. Detractors claim he studied education. This document can be found here: https://archive.org/stream/TheBiographyOfSheikhAbuBakrAlBaghdadi/ The%20biography%2of%20Sheikh%20Abu%20Bakr%20Al-Baghdadi_ djvu.txt.
33. ‘How a talented footballer became world’s most wanted man, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’, Ruth Sherlock, Daily Telegraph, 11 November 2014.
34. Author interviews, UK and former Iraqi security officials, London, 2014.
35. Some have suggested it was because of his relative youth, others because he was seen as more malleable than alternative candidates by a key former Ba’athist officer now with ISI. ‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi emerges from shadows to rally Islamist followers’, Martin Chulov, Guardian, 7 July 2014. This was Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, better known as Haji Bakr. ‘The terror strategist: Secret files reveal the structure of Islamic State’, Christoph Reuter, Der Spiegel, 18 April 2015. See also ‘Military skill and terrorist technique fuel success of ISIS’, Ben Hubbard and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, 27 August 2014, and ‘Isis: the inside story’, Martin Chulov, Guardian, 11 December 2014.
36. ‘Isis: the inside story’, Chulov.
37. Al-Baghdadi had grown up among such men too. Samarra, though a mixed city, is close to the heartland of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist and tribal bases of support. There are unconfirmed reports that two of his close relatives may have worked for the security services of the Ba’ath Party. Al-Baghdadi appears to have avoided military service as well, something which, like his place at a prestigious university in the capital, would have needed contacts within the regime. See Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, Regan Arts, 2015, pp. 120–6, for a useful account of Al-Baghdadi’s relations with the Ba’athists.
38. Weiss and Hassan, ISIS, p. 206.
39. Author interview, Iraqi security official, London, July 2014. Lister, ‘Dynamic Stalemate’, p. 10. ‘A marriage of convenience: The many faces of Iraq’s Sunni insurgency’, Terrorism Monitor, vol. 12, issue 15, 25 July 2014.
40. ‘The terror strategist’, Reuter, Der Speigel.
41. The Islamists’ rule in Egypt was short-lived, ending when the army removed the moderate president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.
42. Radwan Mortada, Al-Akhbar, 10 January 2014. The defector, tweeting as @wikibaghdady, has remained unidentified but also suggests that the original impulse for setting up JAN was to avoid veteran operators from ISI and rank-and-file volunteers leaving the group to go and fight in Syria as the civil war there became more intense.
43. Author interviews, UK and former Iraqi security officials, London, July 2014; telephone interviews, international security officials, September 2014.
44. ‘Arab Tribes Split Between Kurds and Jihadists’, Carl Drott, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 15 May 2014. See also the excellent chapter on IS and the tribes in Weiss and Hassan, ISIS, p. 200–9
45. ‘The Islamic State and the Arab Tribes in Eastern Syria’, Haian Dukhan and Sinan Hawat, E-International Relations, 31 December 2014.
46. Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts in Islam will Shape the Future, Norton, 2006.
CHAPTER 4
1. ‘ISIS Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi first Friday sermon as so-called “Caliph”, transcript, Al Arabiya, 5 July 2014.
2. ‘Isis has reached new depths of depravity. But there is a brutal logic behind it’, Hassan Hassan, Observer, 8 February 2015.
3. Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery, translated by William McCants, 2006. See also discussion in Devin R. Springer, James L. Regens and David N. Edger, Islamic Radicalism and Global Jihad, Georgetown University Press, 2009, p. 79.
4. ‘The ancestors of Isis’, David Motadel, New York Times, 23 September 2014.
5. Quoted in Springer, Regens and Edger, Islamic Radicalism, p. 82.
6. Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Da Capo, 2007, p. 58.
7. Ibid., pp. 6, 367.
8. The collective memory of the Shia is very different from that of the Sunnis, and much more pessimistic. On this whole topic, see the fascinating discussion of Islamic, Jewish and Christian law in Adam Silverstein, Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction, OUP, 2010, pp. 135–6; Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests, p. 48.
9. Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, PublicAffairs, 2009.
10. King Hussein of the Hijaz claimed succession but was defeated in 1925.
11. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, press briefing notes on ISIL/Iraq and Death penalty in South-East Asia, 20 January 2015.
12. ‘Syrian extremists amputated a man’s hand and live-tweeted it’, Liz Sly and Ahmed Ramadan, Washington Post, 28 February 2014.
13. Isis members claim immolation, killing captives and throwing people off high buildings were either carried out, or approved, by the first Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr.
14. ‘Isis releases “abhorrent” sex slaves pamphlet with 27 tips for militants on taking, punishing and raping female captives’, Adam Withnall, Independent, 10 December 2014. See also Weiss and Hassan, ISIS, pp. x, xi.
15. ‘ISIS destroys Prophet Sheth shrine in Mosul’, Al Arabiya, 26 July 2014.
16. There were other clues too. Schools in Mosul, Raqqa and elsewhere had already been ordered to replace any reference to the republics of Iraq or Syria with ‘Islamic State’, while anthems and lyrics that encourage ‘love of country’ were decreed to be evidence of ‘polytheism and blasphemy’ and banned. When he had rejected al-Zawahiri’s 2014 edict that he keep to Iraq and let Jabhat al-Nusra operate in Syria, al-Baghdadi had argued that he would not be restricted by frontiers created by colonial powers in 1916. Ironically, the Sykes–Picot agreement was never fully implemented.
17. ‘A message to the Mujahideen and the Muslim Ummah in the month of Ramadan’, Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI), 1 July 2014.
18. ‘The terror strategist’, Reuter, Der Spiegel.
19. Two obvious exceptions are Hamas, in Gaza, and Hezbollah, in Lebanon, both of which are far more than simply a violent extremist group.
20. ‘You Can Still See Their Blood’, Human Rights Watch, 10 October 2013.
21. Especially Ahrar al-Sham. How that donations, as that from private donors, led to the ‘Islamisation’ of the opposition as commanders competed to prove their religious credentials to attract donations is an important factor that is often overlooked.
22. Author interview, MI6, London, July 2014.
23. Author telephone interviews, senior US and UN officials, May 2015. ‘The war in Syria: ISIS’s most successful investment yet’, Suhaib Anjarini, Al-Akhbar, 11 June 2014. Author interviews, Afghan and British officials, Kabul, June 2011. Of that sum around two-thirds actually reached the Taliban’s leadership. Reuters, Michelle Nichols, United Nations, 11 September 2012. ‘Drug cash turning Taliban into wealthy criminals’, UN report, Andrew North, BBC, 19 June 2014.
24. ‘Islamic State sets up “ministry of antiquities” to reap the profits of pillaging’, Louisa Loveluck, Daily Telegraph, 30 May 2015. ‘Islamic State group’s war chest is growing daily’, Ken Dilanian, 15 September 2014. ‘How an arrest in Iraq revealed Isis’s $2bn jihadist network’, Martin Chulov, Guardian, 15 June 2014.
25. Zakat varies in terms of percentage taken, depending on the activity, but generally is between 2.5 and 20 per cent.
26. Author telephone interviews, senior US and UN officials, May 2015.
27. ‘Insight – Islamic State’s financial independence poses quandary for its foes’, Raheem Salman and Yara Bayoumy, Reuters, 11 September 2014. ‘Profiling the Islamic State’, Charles Lister, Brookings Institution, 2014, p. 22. Also, McGurk testimony, see Introduction, n. 1.
28. ‘Islamic State’, Salman and Bayoumy. During the seizure of the city, the group were reported to have captured $435m from banks. ‘U.S. strikes cut into ISIS oil revenues, Treasury official says’, Julie Hirschfeld Davis, New York Times, 23 October 2014. ‘Cutting off IS cash flow’, Charles Lister, Brooking Institution blogpost, 24 October 2014. ‘Islamic State issues fake tax receipts to keep trade flowing’, Mitchell Prothero, McClatchy, 3 September 2014.
29. In Iraq, most of the poor have been fed through state-subsidised rations for decades, a relic of the UN sanctions regime introduced after the 1991 Gulf War and continued by the Iraqi government after the 2003 invasion.
30. ‘ISIS Governance in Syria’, Charles C. Caris and Samuel Reynolds, Institute for the Study of War, July 2014, p. 22.
31. If there were no complaints against the group’s members, IS would not have established a ‘Court of Grievances’. ‘ISIS Governance in Syria’, Caris and Reynolds, p. 19.
32. The central government still pay salaries worth $130m per month. ‘IS: the rentier caliphate with no new ideas’, Charles Tripp, Al Arabiya, 8 February 2015.
33. ‘Mosul residents describe “hell” of Isis occupation as Kurdish fighters close in’, Fazel Hawramy, Guardian, 22 January 2015
34. ‘Under Islamic State, life in Mosul, Iraq, turns grim’, Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times, 26 January 2015.
35. ‘Syria: Isis Tortured Kobani Child Hostages’, Human Rights Watch, 4 November 2014.
36. ‘U.S. official: 10,000-plus ISIS fighters killed in 9-month campaign’, Laura Smith-Spark and Noisette Martel, CNN, 4 June 2015.
37. ‘The Islamic State’, Richard Barrett, Soufan Group, 3 October 2014, p. 9. ‘Who Are the Soldiers of the Islamic State?’ Aron Lund, blogpost for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 24 October 2014. ‘The Motivations of Syrian Islamist Fighters’, Vera Mironova, Loubna Mrie and Sam Whitt, CTC, 31 October 2014.
38. ‘Arabian nightmare’, Rahul Tripathi, India Today, 9 February 2015. Author interview, senior police officials, Mumbai, November 2014.
39. ‘To Its Citizens, ISIS Also Shows a Softer Side’, Vocativ, 20 March 2015.
40. This cost the group nothing, other than the minor inconvenience of the occasional off-message Facebook post or ‘tweet’. ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the group’s spokesman, Mohammad al-Adnani, said only four accounts were authorised to speak on their behalf with any future messages. ‘ISIS leader warns unauthorized tweets don’t speak for caliphate’, Catherine Herridge, Fox News, 2 February 2015.
41. See useful account in Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror, HarperCollins, 2015, pp. 145–7.
42. ‘Crowdsourcing Terror: ISIS Asks for Ideas on Killing Jordanian Pilot’, Vocativ, 26 December 2014.
43. It is certainly not the first insurgent group to attempt to service the basic needs of a population while simultaneously employing terrorist tactics and committing horrific and systematic atrocities. According to one researcher, roughly a third of all insurgencies from 1945 to 2003 provided health care and education, with the total rising to nearly half among those which acquired territory. ‘What’s so new about the Islamic State’s governance?’, Megan A. Stewart, Washington Post, 7 October 2014.
44. ‘IS: the rentier caliphate’, Tripp, Al Arabiya. Also, on relations with tribes, see ‘The Islamic State identity and legacies of Baath rule in Syria’s northeast’, Kevin Mazur, Project on Middle Eastern Political Science, 16 March 2015. See too ‘How much of a state is the Islamic State?’, Quinn Mecham, Washington Post, 5 February 2015. Also, Weiss and Hassan, pp. 122–4, discussion on the sectarian agenda of IS and the legacy of Ba’athism.
CHAPTER 5
1. Bin Laden had been living with two loyal retainers, three wives, around a dozen children and a handful of grandchildren. Information obtained through so-called coercive techniques, or torture, may possibly have expedited the search, may have slowed it due to being inherently unreliable, but appears not to have been critical either way. Nor is there any reliable evidence proving that the Pakistani authorities knew of bin Laden’s location, though it remains entirely possible that at least some individuals were aware of his presence. The broad consensus among Western security services and many analysts, at least in the few years since the event, is that Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the country’s main intelligence service, was unaware as an institution, and so too were the key policymakers. See Peter Bergen’s Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad, Broadway Books, 2013, for the best account of the operation which led to bin Laden’s death. For an alternative view, see Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014, Houghton Mifflin, 2014.
2. Several of the senior militants preferred Saif al-Adel, another Egyptian veteran who had been appointed as interim leader following bin Laden’s death. There were other candidates too, such as Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a key Libyan who had been bin Laden’s chief of staff.
3. Knights under the banner of the Prophet, 2002, author collection. In ‘Join the Caravan’ Azzam explained that ‘the establishment of the umma on an area of land is a necessity, as vital as water or air’. For useful points see Gerges, The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda, pp. 44–50.
4. ‘Bin Laden wanted to change al-Qaida’s bloodied name’, Jason Burke, Guardian, 24 June 2011. See also ‘Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?’, CTC, May 2012.
5. ‘Zawahiri discusses infighting in Syria, opposition to Egyptian government’, Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal, 21 April 2014.
6. Some define the salaf as the first four generations, others the first six.
7. The price per barrel went from about $3.5 to $15 in eighteen months. Saudi Arabia’s revenues went from less than a million dollars before the Second World War to $56m in 1950, and from $2.7bn in 1972 to $25bn in 1975.
8. Al-Wuhayshi had fled from Afghanistan in late 2001 to Iran, then been extradited to Yemen, where he had been incarcerated. He had been among the score or so of capable senior militants who escaped from prison in 2006.
9. For details on the prison break and al-Wuhayshi’s refounding of AQAP, see Gregory D. Johnsen, The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia, Norton, 2014, pp. 192–5.
10. ‘Christmas Day bomber sentenced to life in prison’, David Ariosto and Deborah Feyerick, CNN, 17 February 2012. Johnsen, The Last Refuge, pp. 262–3.
11. Anwar al-Awlaki obituary, Jason Burke, Guardian, 2 October 2011.
12. Morten Storm, Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda and the CIA, Atlantic, 2014, p. 95.
13. One exception might arguably be bin Laden, who had relied on a rather different medium to communicate his message.
14. ‘Being Bin Laden: al-Qaida leader’s banal jihad business revealed’, Jason Burke, Guardian, 3 May 2012.
15. Johnsen, The Last Refuge, p. 271. ‘Bin Laden document trove reveals strain on al-Qaeda’, Greg Miller, Washington Post, 1 July 2011.
16. ‘AQAP’s Resilience in Yemen’, Andrew Michaels and Sakhr Ayyash, CTC Sentinel, vol. 6, issue 9, September 2013.
17. UNESCO data centre, http://www.uis.unesco.org/DataCentre/Pages/country-profile.aspx?code=YEM®ioncode=40525.
18. Storm, Agent Storm, pp. 280–3.
19. Gregory D. Johnsen, ‘How We Lost Yemen’, Foreign Policy, 6 August 2013.
20. ‘Conflict in Yemen: Abyan’s Darkest Hour’, Amnesty International, 3 December 2012.
21. ‘Yemen retakes ground in push on Islamist rebels’, Reuters, 11 June 2013.
22. ‘Yemen terror boss left blueprint for waging jihad’, Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press, 9 August 2013.
23. Author interviews, security officials, London, August 2014; telephone interviews, international officials, March, May 2015. ‘Al-Qaeda leaks II: Baghdadi loses his shadow’, Radwan Mortada, Al-Akhbar, 10 January 2014. ‘The jihad next door: The Syrian roots of Iraq’s newest civil war’, Rania Abouzeid, Politico, 24 June 2014. Al Jazeera interview with Abu Muhammad al-Golani, broadcast 19 December 2013. ‘Jabhat al-Nusra: a strategic briefing’, Quilliam Foundation, 8 January 2013.
24. Parts of which have been occupied by Israel since 1967.
25. Author interviews, security officials, Islamabad, June 2013, London, July 2014. See also ‘Al-Qaida’s membership declining and leadership damaged, but threat remains’, Jason Burke, Guardian, 5 August 2013.
26. ‘Profiling the Islamic State’, Lister. In particular, Jabhat al-Nusra had spearheaded the seizure of two major military facilities in northern Syria – the Hanano barracks in Aleppo in mid-September 2012 and the Taftanaz airbase in Idlib on 11 January 2013.
27. ‘Dynamic Stalemate’, Lister, p. 3.
28. ‘A gathering force’, Bourzou Daraghi, Financial Times, 12 February 2014.
29. ‘Al-Shabaab joining al Qaeda, monitor group says’, CNN, 10 February 2012.
30. ‘Pentagon confirms death of Somalia terror leader’, Associated Press, 5 September 2014.
31. See Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 417–18, for more detail.
32. Similarly, al-Shabaab had made tens of millions of dollars annually from the illicit and immensely profitable trade in charcoal.
33. In December 2012, Belmoktar, the disgruntled former commander, swore allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
34. ‘Jihadists Praise Paris Attacks’, Caleb Weiss, Long War Journal, 12 January 2015. ‘Seven U.N. peacekeepers wounded in Northern Mali attack’, Reuters, 9 January 2015.
35. In what was probably his last letter, bin Laden indicated that al-Qaeda was receiving funds from affiliates, rather than the reverse. ‘Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Laden Sidelined?’ CTC, 3 May 2012, p. 40.
36. In the words of a senior British security official. Author interview, London, August 2012.
37. See Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 293–4.
38. A new plot was uncovered in May 2012. ‘CIA thwarts new al-Qaida underwear bomb plot’, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press, 7 May 2012. ‘Foiled plot shows militants seek detection-proof bombs’, Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters, 8 May 2012.
39. Storm, Agent Storm, p. 251.
40. ‘Qaeda branches urge unity against US-led “war on Islam”, Agence France-Presse, 16 September 2014. See useful discussion in ‘The al Qaeda network: A new framework for defining the enemy’, Katherine Zimmerman, American Enterprise Institute, 10 September 2013.
41. Author interviews, Indian police officers, Mumbai, November 2014. ‘Al-Qaida’s shadowy new “emir” in south Asia handed tough job’, Reuters, 10 September 2014.
42. ‘Al-Qaida leader announces formation of Indian branch’, Jason Burke, Guardian, 4 September 2014. One IS video included footage from the cult video game Grand Theft Auto.
CHAPTER 6
1. Author interviews, Maldives, February 2014. ‘Saudi Arabia’s growing role in the Maldives’, Charles Haviland, BBC, 24 March 2014.
2. Ali Jaleel, a Maldivian, carried out a suicide attack with large, bomb-laden truck to penetrate the perimeter of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency in Lahore on 27 May 2009.
3. Author interviews, local security officials in Malé, UK officials in Sri Lanka, Indian officials in Delhi and Mumbai, November 2014 and February 2015.
4. ‘Footage leaked of museum vandals destroying pre-Islamic artifacts’, Ahmed Naish, Minivan News, 14 January 2013. ‘Maldives mob smashes Buddhist statues in national museum’, Agence France Presse, 8 February 2012.
5. Alongside a US citizen, a Syrian and a ‘Turkestani’. ‘Maldivian militant killed in Syrian suicide attack’, claims online jihadist group, Ahmed Rilwan, Minivan News, 25 May 2014.
6. ‘Jihadist media claims two more Maldivians killed in Syria’, Minivan News, 2 September 2014.
7. ‘Paradise jihadis: Maldives sees surge in young Muslims leaving for Syria’, Jason Burke, Guardian, 26 February 2015.
8. At least one was linked to the murder of the cleric in 2012.
9. As ever, prison was an important vector of extremism. There is no segregation of inmates in the Maldives’ overcrowded jails, allowing self-appointed preachers to run unofficial religious study groups for anyone who wants to attend, and the only permitted reading material in prison is religious texts, many of which are supplied by Gulf-based charities. ‘In prison you have nothing to do but think about your life and read these books,’ said one gang leader. Leaders and more junior members of the gangs all served repeated sentences. In the summer of 2014, around the time IS declared its caliphate, one particular leader was released and ordered the gang to cease trafficking in drugs and alcohol – key sources of income hitherto – because they were ‘haram’, forbidden.
10. Ibid.
11. ‘Terror threat to India rising again six years after Mumbai attacks’, Jason Burke, Guardian, 26 November 2014. Author interviews, security officials, Mumbai, Delhi, November 2014.
12. ‘IS recruiting thousands in Pakistan, govt warned in “secret” report’, Mubashir Zaidi, Dawn, 8 November 2014. ‘Capital’s Jamia Hafsa declares support for Islamic State’, Amir Mir, The News, 8 December 2014.
13. ‘Pakistan arrests local Islamic State commander – sources’, Reuters, 21 January 2015.
14. See ‘Foreign Fighters in Syria’, Richard Barrett, Soufan Group, 2 June 2014. ‘Foreign Fighters Trickle into the Syrian Rebellion’, Aaron Y. Zelin, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 11 June 2012. ‘The Saudi Foreign Fighter Presence in Syria’, Aaron Y. Zelin, CTC Sentinel, vol. 7, issue 4, April 2014. Author interview, UK officials, London 2014. Also see ‘Foreign fighter total in Syria/Iraq now exceeds 20,000; surpasses Afghanistan conflict in the 1980s’, ICSR blogpost, 26 January 2015. It gives the following totals: Tunisia 1,500–3,000, Jordan 1,500, Morocco 1,500, Russia 800–1,500, Saudi Arabia 1,500–2,500.
15. ‘Deciphering the Jihadist Presence in Syria: An Analysis of Martyrdom Notices’, Aaron Y. Zelin, CTC Sentinel, vol. 6, issue 2, February 2013.
16. One was identified as Maxime Hauchard, a Muslim convert from France. Others appeared to be from Western Europe, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central Asia and the Middle East. The exact number of victims or killers is unclear in the video but seems to be between sixteen and twenty-two. ‘ISIS’s brutal beheading video: Search for clues’, Atika Shubert, CNN, 8 December 2014.
17. According to one survey by the Pew Research Center in 2013, a median of 67 per cent in eleven ‘Muslim publics’ say they are somewhat or very concerned about Islamic extremism. ‘Muslim Publics Share Concerns About Extremist Groups’, Pew Research Center, 10 September 2013. ‘In many of the countries surveyed, clear majorities of Muslims oppose violence in the name of Islam. Indeed, about three-quarters or more in Pakistan (89%), Indonesia (81%), Nigeria (78%) and Tunisia (77%), say suicide bombings or other acts of violence that target civilians are never justified.’
18. ‘Which countries don’t like America and which do’, Bruce Stokes, Pew Research Center, 26 July 2014.
19. ‘The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society, Chapter 7: Religion, Science and Popular Culture’, Pew Research Center, 30 April 2013.
20. See ‘Muslim–Western Tensions Persist’, Pew Research Center, 21 July 2011.
21. ‘The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society’, Pew.
22. See Jean-Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam, University of California Press, 2012. Also, Stern and Berger, ISIS, pp. 219–31; ‘ISIS Fantasies of an Apocalyptic Showdown in Northern Syria’, William McCants, Brookings Institution, 3 October 2014.
23. Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shia Insurgency in Iraq, Faber and Faber, 2008, pp. 70–94.
24. ‘Islamic State: Where does jihadist group get its support?’, Michael Stephens, BBC, 1 September 2014. See also Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State, for a fuller discussion.
25. ‘The Challenge of Youth Inclusion in Morocco’, Arne Hoel, World Bank, 14 May 2012.
26. ‘New freedoms in Tunisia drive support for Isis’, David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, 21 October 2014.
27. See, for example, ‘In stark transformation Egyptian rights activist dies fighting for Islamic State’, Erin Cunningham, Washington Post, 5 November 2014.
28. ‘To Its Citizens, ISIS Also Shows a Softer Side’, Vocativ, 20 March 2015. Vocativ investigated over 570 videos between 21 January and 28 February.
29. ‘Tunisian Jihadists Fighting In Syria’, Nesrine Hamedi, Al-Monitor, 24 March 2013. ‘Syria: 132 Tunisian Insurgents Killed in Aleppo, Tunisia Developing into Salafist Hot-Bed’, nsnbc, 15 February 2015. ‘Courts kept busy as Jordan works to crush support for Isis’, Ian Black, Guardian, 27 November 2014. ‘The Geography of Discontent: Tunisia’s Syrian Fighter Dilemma’, Dario Cristiani, Jamestown Foundation, Terrorism Monitor, vol. 12, issue 20, 24 October 2014. ‘The Jihadi Factory’, Christine Petré, Foreign Policy, 20 March 2015. ‘ISIS draws a steady stream of recruits from Turkey’, Ceylan Yeginsu, New York Times, 15 September 2014.
30. Author interview, Saudi security official, London, July 2014, by telephone, March 2015. ‘ICG Red Alert in Jordan: Recurrent Unrest in Maan’, Middle East Briefing, no. 5, 19 February 2003
31. ‘Tunisia becomes breeding ground for Islamic State fighters’, Eileen Byrne, Guardian, 13 October 2014.
32. Author telephone interview, February, March 2015.
33. This may have encouraged the group to genuinely think about the controversial move of actually declaring a caliphate. There is evidence that IS floated the idea on social media to test the potential reaction among other extremists, and may have approached senior al-Qaeda commanders too. ‘The Islamic State’, Barrett, Soufan Group, p. 18. See also ‘Al-Qaeda leaks II’, Mortada, Al-Akhbar. A useful list can be found in ‘ISIS’s Global Messaging Strategy Fact Sheet’, Jessica Lewis McFate and Harleen Gambhir with Evan Sterling, Institute for Understanding War, December 2014.
34. ‘Islamic State franchising’, Rivka Azoulay, Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, April 2015, p. 10.
35. See ‘Jihadi discourse in the wake of the Arab spring’, Nelly Lahoud, CTC, 17 December 2013, pp. 82–4.
36. The first was in October 2004, when a series of car bomb blasts hit Sinai resorts, killing thirty-four. In July 2005, hotels and restaurants were attacked in Sharm El-Sheikh, the major Sinai tourist resort, killing and wounding two hundred people. A group calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades (AAB) claimed responsibility.
37. Israeli services estimate there are around a thousand militants in Sinai, broken down into fifteen to twenty cells with varying ideologies and affiliations, but admit that their knowledge is patchy. Author interviews, former intelligence officials, Jerusalem, July 2014.
38. ‘Sinai attackers were educated, not local Beduin’, Joanna Paraszczuk and Yaakov Lappin, Jerusalem Post, 3 October 2012.
39. According to a report by expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior ABM member travelled from the group’s base to Raqqa. The envoy spent around three months there and eventually swore allegiance to al-Baghdadi. ‘Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdis’s Oath of Allegiance to the Islamic State’, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Wikistrat, 2015. Others say envoys travelled from Raqqa to Sinai too. See Azoulay, Clingendael, pp. 25–6.
40. ‘31 Egyptian soldiers are killed as militants attack in Sinai’, David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, 24 October 2014.
41. ‘At least 32 killed in Egypt as militants attack army and police targets in Sinai’, Patrick Kingsley and Manu Abdo, Guardian, 30 January 2015.
42. See ‘Religious Revolts in Colonial North Africa’, Knut S. Vikor, in David Motadel, ed., Islam and the European Empires, OUP, 2014. As elsewhere, those networks were largely Sufi.
43. See Burke, The 9/11 Wars, p. 422.
44. Author interviews, security officials, Islambad, June 2013, by telephone, senior UN official, September 2013.
45. ‘Al-Qaeda in Libya: A Profile’, Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, August 2012, citing Atiyah Al-Libi ‘A-thawarat Al-Arabiyah Wa Mawsimu Al-Hasad’ (The Arab Revolutions and the Season of Harvest).
46. ‘A deadly mix in Benghazi’, David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, 28 December 2013.
47. In September a senior associate called Abu Nabil al-Anbari may have visited the city with the aim of organising existing support to allow a declaration of a new ‘wilayat’.
48. ‘Disenchanted militants in South Asia eye Islamic State with envy’, Jibran Ahmad and Mohammad Stanekzai, Reuters, 21 January 2015
49. A rivalry sparked by the death in a drone strike of the charismatic Hakimullah Mehsud a few months previously. ‘The Shadows of “Islamic State” in Afghanistan: What threat does it hold?’ Borhan Osman, Afghan Analysts Network, 12 February 2015.
50. Author interview, Delhi, March 2015.
51. Author interviews by telephone, Saudi officials, June 2015.
52. ‘Que sait-on du groupe qui a revendiqué l’assassinat d’un Français en Algérie?’, Le Monde, 23 September 2014. ‘Algeria’s Al-Qaeda defectors join IS group’, Al Jazeera, 14 September 2014. ‘Algérie: l’armée a tué l’assassin d’Hervé Gourdel’, Amir Akef, Le Monde, 24 December 2014.
53. ‘Pledging Bay’a: a benefit or burden to the Islamic State’, David Milton and Muhammed al-Ubaydi, CTC Sentinel, March 2015, p. 6.
54. Mike Smith, Boko Haram: Inside Nigeria’s Unholy War, I.B. Tauris, 2015, pp. 184–8. ‘“Now I’m scared of everyone”: fear and mistrust after Nigerian mass abduction’, Monica Mark, Guardian, 2 May 2014.
55. ‘Boko Haram Leader Abubakar Shekau’s Latest Speech’, Clement Ejiofor, Naij.com
56. ‘Nigerian president: kidnapping will mark beginning of the end of terror’, Monica Marks, Guardian, 8 May 2014.
57. The name Boko Haram is a pejorative one, given to the group first by local communities and then adopted by officials and finally the international community.
58. Particularly the Jamaat Izalat al-Bida wa Iqamat al-Sunnah (Society for the Eradication of Evil Innovations and the Re-establishment of the Sunna), better known as the Izala Movement.
59. There was also widespread sectarian violence elsewhere in the country, unconnected with Boko Haram. In 2008, religious clashes had left seven hundred dead.
60. ‘“Those Terrible Weeks in Their Camp”, Boko Haram Violence against Women and Girls in Northeast Nigeria’, Human Rights Watch, October 2014, p. 3.
61. ‘Boko Haram leader speaks on global jihadists in video’, Vanguard, 29 November 2012, http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/11/boko-haram-leader-speaks-on-global-jihadists-in-video/#sthash.nVKmlh5J.dpuf.
62. A January 2012 United Nations report stated that seven members of Boko Haram ‘were arrested while transiting through the Niger to Mali, in possession of documentation on manufacturing of explosives, propaganda leaflets and names and contact details of members of Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb [AQIM] they were allegedly planning to meet’. ‘Report of the assessment mission on the impact of the Libyan crisis on the Sahel region’, Security Council, S/2012/42, 18 January 2012, p. 12
63. ‘Boko Haram generates uncertainty with pledge of allegiance to Islamic State’, Rukmini Callimachi, New York Times, 7 March 2015
64. Almost the entire remainder of the 27-minute speech was devoted to a vicious tirade against the Shia, and their treacherous alliance with the Crusaders.
CHAPTER 7
1. ‘Aspects of all this were seen, as they were intended to be, by members of the public . . . in order to achieve maximum effect,’ a trial judge pointed out. R v. Michael Adebolajo & Michael Adebowale, 26 February 2014, sentencing remarks of Mr Justice Sweeney.
2. ‘Woolwich attack, the terrorist’s rant’, Daily Telegraph, 23 May 2013. Report on the intelligence relating to the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, 25 November 2014.
3. In 1951, there were an estimated 23,000 Muslims in Britain. Raffaello Pantucci, ‘We Love Death as You Love Life’: Britain’s Suburban Mujahedeen, Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 21.
4. Figures are notoriously difficult, and also obscure a huge variety of ways in which an individual can identify as a ‘Muslim’. Pantucci, ‘We Love Death’, p. 21. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 187, 556.
5. ‘I was of a generation that did not think of itself as Muslim or Hindi or Sikh or even as Asian but as black,’ remembered the British academic and journalist Kenan Malik, explaining that one reason for a growing disaffection with left-wing groups was their focus on the class struggle rather than discrimination. Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, Atlantic, 2009, p. 21.
6. In France in the same period, the rise was fivefold, from 136 to 766. Alison Pargeter, The New Frontiers of Jihad, I.B. Tauris, 2008, p. 19.
7. The conflict in Kashmir drew more than a thousand men from all over the country to fight with extremist, or sometimes less extremist, groups in the brutal, bloody war over the disputed state.
8. ‘British Muslims take path to jihad’, Jeevan Vasagar and Vikram Dodd, Guardian, 29 December 2000.
9. In 1998, a group of men set out from London to launch attacks on Western targets in Yemen.
10. ‘Five Britons killed in “jihad brigade”’, Paul Harris, Martin Bright and Burhan Wazir, Observer, 28 October 2001.
11. Others were simply seeking to escape ongoing crackdowns on Islamist activism in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Syria.
12. There he collaborated with then little-known Jordanian-born extremist scholar known as Abu Qutada, running propaganda operations for increasingly savage Algerian militant groups.
13. Al-Suri was horrified by the 9/11 attacks. Not through any sympathy for the victims – he argued that bin Laden should have used some kind of weapon of mass destruction that might have laid waste to much of New York and Washington – but because he thought that, by bringing about the end of Taliban rule, they were counter-productive.
14. The preferred target was the G8 summit held in Gleneagles, Scotland, at the time but the bombers were put off by security arrangements. An alternative was the London Stock Exchange. This too was rejected.
15. Author interview, UK security official, London 2013. Address at the Lord Mayor’s Annual Defence and Security Lecture by the Director General of the Security Service, Jonathan Evans, Mansion House, City of London, 25 June 2012.
16. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, p. 43
17. Author interview, UK security official, London 2006.
18. James Smart Lecture by the Director General of the Security Service, Eliza Manningham-Buller, City of London Police Headquarters, 16 October 2003.
19. ‘Britain stops talk of “war on terror”’, Jason Burke, Observer, 10 December 2006.
20. Author interviews, UK security officials, India and Pakistan 2011. One notable exception was the escape from police custody of Rashid Rauf, a Briton suspected of running both 7/7 and 21/7 conspiracies in 2005. He was killed in 2008 by a drone.
21. Others had attended a camp run by another local group, Harkat ul-Mujahideen. ‘How “Just Do It” bomb plotters planned attacks as MI5 followed their every move’, Tom Whitehead, Daily Telegraph, 22 February 2013.
22. ‘UK trial reveals new al Qaeda strategy to hit West’, Paul Cruickshank, CNN, 21 February 2013. For a contrasting view of the contacts made by these bombers, see ‘British Islamic extremist terrorism: the declining significance of Al-Qaeda and Pakistan’, Lewis Herrington, Chatham House, January 2015.
23. Pantucci, ‘We Love Death’, p. 276.
24. ‘UK trial reveals new al Qaeda strategy to hit West’, Cruickshank.
25. Author interview, London, 2011.
26. It was associated particularly with the strategy of ‘leaderless resistance’ of Louis L. Beam, an American Vietnam veteran and right-wing extremist. The term ‘lone wolf’ was also used by Alex Curtis, another US right-wing extremist, detained in 2000. In the 1920s and 30s ‘lone wolf’ was a term for a criminal not associated with a gang. ‘The phrase “lone wolf” goes back centuries’, Ben Zimmer, Wall Street Journal, 19 December 2014.
27. ‘Suspect’s journey from schoolboy football to phone-jacking and jihad’, Peter Walker, Shiv Malik, Matthew Taylor, Sandra Laville, Vikram Dodd and Ben Quinn, Guardian, 24 May 2013.
28. ‘Lee Rigby: “E”grade Michael Adebolajo scraped into Greenwich University which was targeted by extremists’, Javier Espinoza, Daily Telegraph, 12 March 2015.
29. Al-Muhajiroun was proscribed under UK terrorist laws in 2010.
30. Adebolajo had also been arrested in 2007 under the Firearms Act (for carrying CS spray), and had previous arrests for assault.
31. Pantucci, ‘We Love Death’, p. 262.
32. Author interview, British security official, London 2009.
33. ‘Bristol man guilty of suicide bomb plot on shopping centre’, Guardian, Steven Morris, 17 July 2009.
34. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 473–7.
35. It was later revealed that Adebowale had called a Yemeni telephone associated with an individual believed to be in contact with AQAP. Report on the intelligence relating to the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, p. 94.
36. Author interviews, senior police officers, Scotland Yard, July 2014. ‘Woolwich: How did Michael Adebolajo become a killer?’, BBC, Dominic Casciani, 19 December 2013.
37. ‘Woolwich suspect was victim of frenzied knife attack aged 16’, Ben Ferguson, Vikram Dodd and Matthew Taylor, Guardian, 24 May 2013. ‘Faridon Alizada murderer gets life’, News Shopper, Erith, 22 December 2008.
38. ‘Report on the intelligence relating to the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby’, Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, p. 72, 25 November 2014.
39. ‘Special issue: Lone Mujahid Pocketbook’, Inspire, issue 10, Spring 2013.
40. ‘Facebook “could have prevented Lee Rigby murder”’, Peter Dominiczak, Tom Whitehead, Martin Evans and Gordon Rayner, Daily Telegraph, 26 November 2014.
41. All these statistics are drawn from the series of polls conducted by ICM Unlimited for the Guardian, the BBC and the Sunday Telegraph between 2002 and 2009. Available: http://www.icmunlimited.com/media-centre. Economic issues: ‘Muslims in Europe: Economic Worries Top Concerns About Religious and Cultural Identity’. Pew Research Center, July 2006.
42. ‘The Gallup Coexist Index 2009: A Global Study of Interfaith Relations’, May 2009. Author interview, Magali Rheault, Gallup researcher, July 2009.
43. And then handed over to their US counterparts and then passed on to the Syrians.
44. According to the national census.
45. For the reporting to the police, see ICM poll for the BBC, June 2009.
46. ‘Inside the mind of Lee Rigby’s killer Michael Adebolajo’, Guy Grandjean, Vikram Dodd and Mustafa Khalili, Guardian, 20 December 2013.
47. ‘Birmingham plot: leader of suicide gang used gyms and charity shop to recruit cell’, Duncan Gardham, Daily Telegraph, 22 February 2013.
48. Author interview, London, July 2014.
49. ‘Islamic rappers’ message of terror’, Antony Barnett, Observer, 8 February 2004.
50. ‘Terror videos “found at 21/7 homes”’, Adrian Shaw, Daily Mirror, 13 February 2007.
51. ‘9 disturbingly good jihadi raps’, J. Dana Stuster, Foreign Policy, 29 April 2013. Al-Hammami later died in internecine fighting within al-Shabaab.
52. ‘What Drives Europeans to Syria, and to IS? Insights from the Belgian Case’, Rik Coolsaet, Egmont Paper 75, March 2015.
53. This was particularly clear in some Scandinavian countries, where a clear nexus between gang violence and organised criminality among immigrant populations and extremism was increasingly evident. Often these involved converts. One fairly spectacular example was Morten Storm, a heavily tattooed former gang member with a history of violent crime who became a Muslim, though hardly a very rigorous one, and eventually both an agent for Western intelligence services and a trusted contact of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
54. Pantucci, ‘We Love Death’, p. 21. Report on the intelligence relating to the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, pp. 87–8.
55. ‘[They] are more accurately seen as “self-starting terrorists” rather than “lone actors”,’ the service told a parliamentary investigation.
CHAPTER 8
1. Jean-Louis Bruguière, the French anti-terrorist judge and unsuccessful politician, has given a figure of 1,100, which seems high.
2. ‘Interview exclusive d’Abdelghani Merah: “Mon frère se réjouissait de la mort de nos soldats”’, La Depeche, 14 November 2012. ‘Drame Toulouse. Le père de Mohamed Merah parle’, Adlène Meddi, Paris Match, 3 April 2012.
3. Abdelghani Merah, and Mohamed Sifaoui, Mon frère, ce terroriste, Calmann-Lévy, 2012, chap. 3.
4. The ‘peripherique’ actually lies on the old lines of the ancient walls that protected the city of Paris until the late nineteenth century.
5. ‘Neighborhood is torn over a killer’s legacy’, Scott Sayare, New York Times, 19 December 2012.
6. He did not, however, drink or touch drugs. Merah and Sifaoui, Mon frère, chaps 4, 6.
7. ‘Exactement je me suis converti le 18 février 2008, et depuis ce jour là j’ai toujours été assidu à mes prières.’ ‘Transcription des conversations entre Mohamed Merah et les négociateurs’, Libération, 17 July 2012. Merah and Sifaoui, Mon frère, chap. 7.
8. ‘Mohamed Merah. Un étrange touriste’, Delphine Byrka, Paris Match, 25 March 2013.
9. This was also the case in the 1990s, for young British volunteers hoping to fight with militant groups against Indian security forces in Kashmir, and in the following decade. Many of these groups were based in or around Lahore and recruited from parts of Punjab state, as well as the regions along the border with Afghanistan. Most were either Deobandi, the hard-line school associated with the Afghan Taliban, or ‘Wahhabi’, and their religious outlook contrasted dramatically with the more folksy, Sufi-influenced Islam of most Kashmiris. They were, however, funded, trained and often directed by Pakistan’s secret services which for decades had used irregular proxy forces to offset its conventional military disadvantage against its hostile neighbour India. The two nations had fought four wars since achieving their independence from Britain in 1947 and Pakistan had lost all of them.
10. This is the Red Mosque, where female students would later declare their support for ISIS. Officials at the mosque have denied seeing Merah, though admit that many foreigners do visit them; however, the young Frenchman repeatedly sent emails from a luxury hotel a few hundred yards from their establishment.
11. ‘Mohamed Merah, un loup pas si solitaire’, Yves Bordenave, Le Monde, 23 August 2012. ‘How did Mohammed Merah become a jihadist?’, Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, CNN, 26 March 2012. ‘Le tueur présumé de Toulouse aurait fait la guerre avec les Talibans’, Jacques Follorou, Le Monde, 21 March 2012. ‘Au Pakistan, Mohamed Merah à l’école du crime’, Patricia Tourancheau and Luc Mathieu, Libération, 6 April 2012.
12. Libération, transcript.
13. Libération, transcript.
14. ‘Merah. Les errements de la DGSE’, Delphine Byrka, Paris Match, 6 February 2013,
15. A first statement from the group was incoherent and full of odd inaccuracies. A second statement ten days after the death of Merah gave details of his training which matched those he had described to police negotiators, mentioned the gift of the camera, and displayed a knowledge of his personality and appearance. Author interview, French intelligence official, Paris, July 2014.
16. Libération, transcript.
17. ‘Souad Merah, “pilier de la famille” et cauchemar de l’antiterrorisme’, Doan Bui et Olivier Toscer, L’Obs, 2 November 2011. See Merah and Sifaoui, Mon frère.
18. Eric Pelletier and Jean-Marie Pontaut, Affaire Merah: l’enquete, Michel Lafon, 2012. ‘Les lectures glaçantes d’Abdelkadr Merah’, Le Parisien, 12 April 2013.
19. Merah and Sifaoui, Mon frère.
20. ‘Souad Merah’, Bui and Toscer, L’Obs.
21. Merah and Sifaoui, Mon frère, chap. 2.
22. ‘Souad Merah se dit “fière” de son frère’, Le Monde, 10 November 2012
23. Merah and Sifaoui, Mon frère, chap. 13. ‘Quel est le vrai visage de Souad Merah?’, Le Point, 14 November 2012.
24. It seems likely that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, though gravely wounded already, was actually killed by injuries sustained when hit by the car being driven by his brother as the latter fled. See the account in the (fairly cursory) report: ‘The road to Boston: Counterterrorism challenges and lessons from the Marathon Bombings’, House Homeland Security Committee Report, March 2014.
25. A possible exception might be a Lebanese immigrant who opened fire on a van carrying Orthodox Jewish students on Brooklyn Bridge in 1994, though he was not convicted of terrorism offences.
26. See Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 383, 387.
27. According to one study, most of the Islamic extremist terrorist plots uncovered since 11 September 2001 never moved beyond the discussion stage. Only ten had what could be described as an operational plan, and of these, six were FBI stings. Another analysis found that nearly three-quarters were entirely home-grown. Seth Jones, ‘Stray Dogs and Virtual Armies: Radicalization and Recruitment to Jihadist Terrorism in the United States Since 9/11’, Seth Jones, RAND Corporation, 2011.
28. A few appeared more authentically dangerous. Just a month before the Boston bombing, a convert was arrested after he attempted to detonate a (fake) bomb in an SUV outside a bank in California.
29. Masha Gessen, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, Riverhead Books, 2015.
30. The Caucasus is a region with a history of Islamic militancy dating back to the time when it was incorporated into the expanding Russian empire in the late nineteenth century. As so often, resistance to the invaders was mobilised under a religious flag and using religious networks, bringing disparate local forces together to fight occupiers. Islamic traditions remained moderate, closer to the pluralist, tolerant practices in much of South Asia at the time, then the rigour of the Gulf and the influences of the religious revival of the 1970s and 80s across the Islamic world were partly deflected by Soviet rule. When this ended, and Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan declared their respective independence in the early 1990s, the changes in the rest of the Muslim world began to have an impact, but the real radicalising force was wars fought by Moscow to retain authority over Chechnya and repel Islamic militants from Dagestan. These were atrociously violent and brutal struggles with widespread human rights abuses by both sides, high civilian casualties and tremendous destruction. But there is no real link between these conflicts and the eventual radicalisation of the Tsarnaevs, or if there is, it is very indirect.
31. Quite what prompted this is one of the many parts of their story which remains unclear. They claimed persecution as ethnic Chechens, but experts deem this improbable. Another possibility is that Anzor, who eked a living as a mechanic and by shifting semi-legal goods to and from Russia, had run foul of a gang of violent criminal smugglers who abducted and tortured him. A third is that they simply wanted a better life. See Gessen, The Brothers, for the best account. Also ‘Fall of the house of Tsarnaev’, Boston Globe, 15 December 2013.
32. ‘Jahar’s world’, Janet Reitman, Rolling Stone, 17 July 2013.
33. ‘Fall of the house of Tsarnaev’, Boston Globe.
34. ‘Family matters: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the women in his life’, Michele McPhee, Newsweek, 16 October 2014.
35. Zubeidat Tsarnaev’s refusal to work with men has been widely reported. Some have challenged it, however. See Gessen, The Brothers. ‘Fall of the house of Tsarnaev’, Boston Globe.
36. ‘Boy at home in U.S. swayed by one who wasn’t’, Erica Goode and Serge F. Kovaleski, New York Times, 19 April 2013.
37. ‘Fall of the house of Tsarnaev’, Boston Globe.
38. ‘Turn to religion split suspects’ home’, Alan Cullison, Paul Sonne, Anton Troianovski and David George-Cosh, Wall Street Journal, 22 April 2013.
39. These relied on leaks from Russian security services who had warned the FBI in 2011 that Tamerlan was a security risk after reportedly overhearing his mother mention her son’s readiness to die as a martyr. Shortly afterwards, the Russians told their counterparts, Zubeidat had urged her son to go to Palestine, though for what purpose is unclear, and they feared that having failed to fulfil one maternal order to join ‘the jihad’, Tamerlan would try to join another. He and his parents had then been interviewed. US agencies subsequently closed the investigation, having decided the Russian fears were baseless.
40. He did not, apparently, fit in very well there, seen as a showy and suspicious foreigner. ‘Dagestan Islamists were uneasy about Boston bombing suspect’, Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2013. Gessen, The Brothers. ‘Dagestan and the Tsarnaev brothers: The radicalisation risk’, Tim Franks, BBC, 24 June 2013. ‘Fall of the house of Tsarnaev’, Boston Globe. U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, ‘Homeland Security Committee Releases Report on Boston Marathon Bombings’, 26 March 2014.
41. ‘Jahar’s world’, Rolling Stone.
42. ‘Family matters’, Newsweek.
43. ‘Boston bombing suspect was steeped in conspiracies’, Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal, 6 August 2013. ‘A family terror: The Tsarnaevs and the Boston bombing’, Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2013.
44. United States of America v. Dzokhar A. Tsarnaev, indictment, US district court, district of Massachusetts.
45. https://twitter.com/Al_firdausiA.
46. https://twitter.com/J_tsar.
47. The Tsarnaevs may well have wanted to kill lots of people but practically speaking their bombs were of limited destructive power. This choice may have been forced upon them by circumstances but the attack on the Boston Marathon was of a different order from the attacks in Madrid in 2004 or London in 2005, or indeed planned by many other US attackers over the previous four or five years.
48. This quote comes from the excellent and entertaining Carlos the Jackal by Colin Smith, Penguin, 2012. Clearly not all Arabs are Muslim, but the point remains a valid one.
49. Statistics from the database of suicide attacks run by the University of Chicago project on security and terrorism. The surge in the first half of the decade was in part due to a massive wave of suicide bombing in Israel.
50. Libération, transcript.
51. Of course, common elements such as suicide bombings or executions were not always present in conspiracies or attacks. Despite the spread of these global tropes of violence, much remained locally specific. The vast majority of terrorist operations over the last decade or so have occurred within a couple of miles of the homes of the attackers, or within a short journey, and use local materials and follow local habits that are not necessarily exclusive to Islamic extremists. So, for example, the formal indictment of the Tsarnaevs refers to their bombs as improvised explosive devices, of which, official statistics show, 172 were built and used across the US in the six months before the Boston attacks, largely in pranks, acts of vandalism or other crime. Gordon Lubold, ‘IEDs hit the US more than you think’, Foreign Policy, 17 April 2013.
52. As bin Laden himself said in 2010, writing to a senior commander, ‘the wide-scale spread of jihadist ideology, especially on the Internet, and the tremendous number of young people who frequent the jihadist websites is a major achievement for jihad’. Harmony Document SOCOM-2012-0000019, pp. 9–10. ‘The Abbottabad Documents: The Quiet Ascent of Adam Gadahn’, CTC, 22 May 2012.
53. The nature of other attacks elsewhere in Europe reinforced the same conclusions. These included one in Hamburg and one in Stockholm. The attacker in the former had suffered periods of mental illness and was heavily influenced by Internet sites. The one in the latter had spent ten years in the UK, where he had been known to be involved with extremists in the city of Luton, and then, like Merah, had been trained somewhere overseas, probably in the Middle East. In both cases, the attacker had some links to a broader network, online in the case of the German, and less virtually for that in Stockholm.
54. ‘Who is Mehdi Nemmouche, and why did he want to kill Jews?’, Marc Weitzmann, Tablet, 15 July 2014. ‘Jewish museum shooting suspect “is Islamic State torturer”’, Kevin Rawlinson, Guardian, 6 September 2014.
55. ‘Foreign fighter total in Syria/Iraq’, ICSR blogpost.
56. The biggest contingent was French: various estimates of between 800 and 1,500 people living in France had joined the jihadi cause in Syria or Iraq or were planning to. About a hundred French citizens or residents had died in terrorist ranks in Syria and Iraq by May 2015. ‘Plus de 100 jihadistes partis de France tués en Syrie et en Irak’, Libération/AFP, 3 May 2015
57. ‘Muslim fundamentalist who was jailed in Britain for saying gays should be stoned to death kills eight in ISIS suicide attack’, Lucy Osborne and Paul Bentley, Daily Mail, 8 November 2014.
58. ‘Inside the mind of a British suicide bomber’, James Harkin, Newsweek, 12 November 2014.
59. Most were dead by October 2014.
60. ‘My brother, the suicide bomber: why British men go to Syria’, Randeep Ramesh, Guardian, 26 July 2014.
61. Dabiq, vol. 3, August 2014.
62. ‘Why the British jihadis fighting in Syria and Iraq are so vicious’, Shiraz Maher, Daily Mail, 21 August 2014.
63. ‘Emwazi and the London schoolmates who became militant jihadis’, Ian Cobain and Randeep Ramesh, Guardian, 27 February 2015. Emwazi has not given any clear indication either way in communications with his family.
64. Other rappers too, from other countries, notably Deso Dogg, a rapper from Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood.
65. ‘Parents of Muslim fanatic who died in Syria after bragging about his “5-star jihad” are released on bail after arrest on suspicion of Syria related terror offences’, Steph Cockroft, Mail Online, 15 October 2014
66. ‘Twin schoolgirls who ran away to Syria named as star pupils’, Miranda Prynne, Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2014.
67. ‘Enquête: comment Souad Merah a préparé son départ en Syrie’, Thibault Raisse, Le Parisien, 13 May 2015.
68. ‘Kabir Ahmed, the Derby jihadi, claimed he would “sacrifice my children 100 times”’, David Barrett and Lyndsey Telford, Daily Telegraph, 9 November 2014. ‘Briton Ifthekar Jaman “killed fighting in Syria”, family says’, BBC, 17 December 2013.
69. Actually Merah had only killed two, and badly injured a third, though he did not know it. Libération, transcript.
CHAPTER 9
1. ‘Reflections on terrorism’, Walter Laquer, Foreign Affairs, 1986.
2. Academics talk of the confusion of the normative and the technical meanings of the word. See Peter R. Neumann, Old & New Terrorism, Polity Press, 2009, for a useful discussion.
3. The total does not include the dead bombers in 2005.
4. Max Weber made the now famous argument about the formation of the modern state in a lecture entitled ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in 1918 in which, analysing a statement by Leon Trotsky that every state is founded on force, he suggested a state is a ‘human community that [successfully] claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’.
5. For the Assad regime to roll back IS, one essential element would obviously have to be present: the desire to do so.
6. Interrogation report of Areeb Majeed, Mumbai, author collection. ‘Dynamic Stalemate’, Lister, p. 17.
7. Rana Abou Zeid, The Jihad Next Door: The Syrian Roots of Iraq’s Newest Civil War, Politico, 2014. The second caliph, Omar, was known as ‘al-Farouq’, the just.
8. ‘Homeward bound?’, Daniel Byman and Jeremy Shapiro, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2014.
9. United Nations Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee report on foreign fighters, May 2015. ‘Should I stay or should I go? Explaining variation in Western jihadists’ choice between domestic and foreign fighting’, Thomas Hegghammer, American Political Science Review, vol. 107, No. 1, February 2013. Author interviews with United Nations, British, French, US and Canadian security officials, in London, Paris, Delhi and by telephone, 2014, 2015. The wording of a report by Europol 2014 made it clear quite how difficult judging the threat posed by such men was. ‘In the wake of the Syrian conflict, the threat to the EU is likely to increase exponentially,’ it said, making clear the danger was only a probability, but still far from certain. ‘European fighters who travel to conflict zones . . . may seek to set up logistical, financial or recruitment cells, and may act as role models to individuals within extremist communities. In addition, their resolve is likely to have strengthened in the conflict zones, and they may have gained the skills and contacts to carry out attacks in the EU.’ Excerpt from ‘Europol TE-SAT Report 2014’, European Police Office (Europol, The Hague), pp. 10–11. (author’s italics)
10. ‘Syria-related terror arrests up sixfold in UK, police say’, Press Association, 23 January 2015.
11. Dozens according to the FBI, and no more than two hundred according to other internal US estimates. ‘FBI Director: Number of Americans traveling to fight in Syria increasing’, Sari Horwitz and Adam Goldman, Washington Post, 2 May 2014. ‘U.S. intelligence officials say global threats persist from Russia, terrorists’, Damian Paletta, Wall Street Journal, 26 February 2015.
12. In 2009, a network of former LeT militants plotted to attack staff of the Danish newspaper which had printed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005
13. ‘American al-Qaeda spokesman urges attacks in US’, Al Arabiya, 23 October 2010.
14. Shortly after planes from the US-led coalition began bombing IS positions in Iraq in 2014. ‘Isis urges more attacks on Western “disbelievers”’, Yaya Bayoumy, Independent, 22 September 2014.
15. ‘ISIS claims responsibility for Muhammad cartoon “contest” shooting’, Kevin McSpadden, Time, 5 May 2015.
16. Burke, The 9/11 Wars, p. 290
17. Author interview, London, 2006.
18. ‘Revealed: how secret papers led to ricin raid’, Jason Burke, Observer, 17 April 2005.
19. ‘Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war’, Martin Chulov, Guardian, 15 February 2015.
20. Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, pp.118–23.
21. Though the group took control of a dump of rotting decades-old chemical munitions in the aftermath of the seizure of Mosul, there was no indication that the stockpile had been tampered with when Iraq forces recaptured the site. ‘ISIS seizes former chemical weapons plant in Iraq’, Associated Press, 9 July 2014; ‘ISIS and Assad wage psychological warfare with further threat of chemical weapons’, Katarina Montgomery, Syria Deeply, 23 January 2015.
22. ‘Iraqi Kurds say Islamic State used chlorine gas against them’, Isabel Coles, Reuters, 14 March 2015.
23. The article included advice such as ‘to fill buckets with uranium and swing them through the air “as fast as possible” to become a human centrifuge’. ‘U.S. says it halted Qaeda plot to use radioactive bomb’, James Risen and Philip Shenon, New York Times, 10 June 2002. ‘The CIA claimed its interrogation policy foiled a “dirty bomb” plot. But it was too stupid to work’, Adam Taylor, Washington Post, 9 December 2014
24. ‘British ISIS fanatics have built a dirty bomb and boast of the damage it could inflict on London’, Nick Dorman and Neil Doyle, Daily Mirror, 29 November 2014.
25. ‘Isis’s dirty bomb: Jihadists have seized “enough radioactive material to build their first WMD”’, Adam Withnall, Independent, 10 June 2015.
26. As indeed President Obama recognised in February 2015. The group, and other Islamic extremist terrorist organisations, can do harm, but they are not ‘an existential threat to the United States or the world order’, he said. His view was supported by Lt Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, who said in February 2015 that the greatest potential danger to the United States comes from Russia and China, not terrorist groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda which ‘can pose us harm’, but ‘don’t pose an existential threat’. David Cameron differs. In May 2013, he spoke of the UK facing ‘a large and existential terrorist threat’. ‘David Cameron puts Algeria and Mali crises ahead of EU speech’, Patrick Wintour, Guardian, 18 January 2013.
27. The war in Iraq, a consequence of the 9/11 attacks, led to the deaths of between 150,000 and 200,000 people. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost Britain alone £30bn, according to one estimate. ‘“Costly failures”: Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost UK taxpayers £30bn’, Oliver Wright, Independent, 27 May 2014. ‘Iraq war costs U.S. more than $2 trillion: study’, Daniel Trotta, Reuters, 14 March 2013.
28. ‘US spending on Islamic State fight totals $2.7bn’, BBC, 12 June 2015.
29. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/about-us/who-we-are/funding.html, https://www.sis.gov.uk/about-us/legislation-and-accountability/funding-and-financial-controls.html.
30. The survey did not include the Muslim population of India, which may have influenced the result significantly, as Indian Muslims are both extremely numerous, and generally more pro-West than their counterparts in the Middle East. Nor were Muslims in the West included. ‘What the Muslim world believes, on everything from alcohol to honor killings, in 8 maps, 5 charts’, Max Fisher, Washington Post, 2 May 2013. ‘The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society’, Pew, http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf.
31. With one exception: in Jordan 2 per cent of people said they felt favourably towards Jews, up from 1 per cent.
32. ‘Muslim Publics Share Concerns about Extremist Groups’, Pew Research Center, 10 September 2013. ‘Negative Opinions of al Qaeda Prevail’, Pew Research Center, 30 June 2014. ‘Muslim–Western Tensions Persist’, Pew Research Center, 21 July 2011. ‘The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other’, Pew Research Center, 22 June 2006. In another Pew survey of Americans, a sample of more than 3,000 was asked to rate different faiths on a ‘feeling thermometer’ ranging from 0 to 100 – where 0 reflects the coldest, most negative possible rating and 100 the warmest, most positive rating. Muslims averaged 40, the lowest average by a significant margin and one below atheists. http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups/.
33. ‘American Attitudes Toward Arabs and Muslims’, Arab American Institute, poll conducted on 27–29 June 2014, accessible at http://www.aaiusa.org/reports/american-attitudes-toward-arabs-and-muslims-2014. ‘13 years after 9/11, anti-Muslim bigotry is worse than ever’, Dean Obeidallah, Daily Beast. ‘Americans’ attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs are getting worse, poll finds’, Sabrina Siddiqui, Huffington Post, 29 July 2014.
34. Dabiq, vol. 7, February 2015, pp. 55–6.
35. ‘Un ticket pour le jihad’, Patricia Tourancheau, Libération, 21 February 2005. ‘C’est écrit que c’est bien de mourir en martyr’, Patricia Tourancheau, Libération, 8 January 2015. Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares, eds, The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s Death, Columbia University Press, 2014. Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam.
36. ‘Les frères Kouachi, Boumeddiene, Coulibaly . . . Comment ils ont basculé’, Journal du Dimanche, 12 January 2015.
37. ‘Inside Europe’s largest prison’, Danny Shaw, BBC, 18 March 2008.
38. ‘Coulibaly, un voyou devenu jihadiste’, Sylvain Mouillard and Willy Le Devin, Libération, 27 January 2015; ‘Charlie Hedbo attackers: born, raised and radicalised in Paris’, Angelique Chrisafis, Guardian, 12 January 2015.
39. ‘La sanglante dérive de la bande islamiste des Buttes-Chaumont’, Le Figaro, 20 January 2015.
40. ‘La dérive sanglante d’un couple djihadiste’, François Labrouillère and Aurélie Raya, Alfred de Montesquiou, Frédéric Loore and Nathalie Hadj, Paris Match, 21 January 2015.
41. ‘En 2005, les délires antisémites de la bande du XIXe’, Angélique Négroni, Le Figaro, 20 January 2015.
42. ‘Chérif Kouachi, de la prison de Meaux-Chauconin à l’attentat de Charlie Hebdo’, La Marne, 20 January 2015.
43. Including at least one to Yemen to study in a well-known Islamic school in 2009 and 2010. With hindsight, this was a mistake as it is almost certain that the contacts established in Yemen on these earlier journeys facilitated the later connection with AQAP.
44. ‘La longue dérive de Saïd et Chérif Kouachi’, Christel De Taddeo and Antoine Malo, Journal du Dimanche, 12 January 2015.
45. ‘“On ne tue pas pour un dessin”: le témoignage des femmes Kouachi’, Le Figaro, 20 February 2015.
46. See Burke, The 9/11 Wars, pp. 229–34.
47. His name was Ahmed Merabet, and he was a Muslim.
48. ‘Amedy Coulibaly: un arsenal découvert à Gentilly’, Le Parisien, 11 January 2015.
49. The Kouachis also had a loaded rocket-propelled grenade launcher, though probably not the knowledge necessary to use it effectively.
50. Most were killed by single shots to the head, officials said.
51. ‘Attentats: ce que les terroristes ont dit à BFMTV’, BMFTV, 9 January 2015.
52. Poll of 1,000 Muslims in Britain for BBC Radio 4 Today, ComRes, 25 February 2015.
53. ‘Paris shootings: investigation launched into where gunmen got GoPro cameras’, Jason Burke, Guardian, 12 January 2015. ‘Amedy Coulibaly avait une caméra GoPro pendant la prise d’otages’, Le Monde, 11 January 2015.
54. ‘Charlie Hebdo killings condemned by Arab states – but hailed online by extremists’, Ian Black, Guardian, 7 January 2015.
55. ‘Saudi Arabia deplores Charlie Hebdo continued “mocking of Islam”’, Agence France-Presse, 22 January 2015.
56. ‘Islamophobic attacks rocket by 500% since Charlie Hebdo murders’, Chris Harris with Agence France-Presse, Euronews, 16 April 2015. Cambridge-YouGov Survey, March 2015 was online.