Chapter Three

The Paradox of the New Rome

In June 2014, two days before the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, ISIS released a statement announcing the establishment of the Caliphate targeted at Muslim audiences around the world. “Shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace,” said its spokesman, and, in the words of journalist Jeremy Bowen, “a new caliphate will rise out of the chaos, confusion and despair of the modern Middle East.”57

The following day, the Islamic State uploaded a sleek video of a bearded fighter from Chile named Abu Safiyya presenting a newly demolished border post between Syria and Iraq. Titled “The End of Sykes-Picot,”58 the video announced the forthcoming obliteration at the hands of the Islamic State of two political entities created by the British and the French in 1916, i.e., Syria and Iraq. Starring a Chilean Muslim, the video projected to the Umma, the global community of Muslims, an image of the Islamic State as both cosmopolitan and real, with a global reach.

With the help of modern technology and through social media channels, therefore, the Islamic State attempts to present a contemporary political image of itself, a positive image in sharp contrast with decadent and malfunctioning Western democracies or “Western-inspired” Muslim regimes. “Look at Egypt. Look at the way it ended for Muslims who cast their vote for [deposed President] Mohammed Morsi and believed in your democracy, in your lies. Democracy doesn’t exist. Do you think you are free?” boasted a member of the Islamic State. “The West is ruled by banks, not by parliaments, and you know that. You know that you’re just a pawn, except you have no courage. You think of yourself, your job, your house . . . because you know you have no power. But fortunately, the jihad has started. Islam will get to you and bring you freedom.”59

In presenting a new Caliphate, the Islamic State attempts to offer a contemporary political image of itself analogous to that which the early Zionists projected, though the word democracy is not so valued by IS as it was by Israel’s founders. In the 1940s, Jews from different parts of the world joined in a struggle against the British to reconquer their ancient land, a “God-given” ancestral home where they could seek deliverance once again. Just as ancient Israel for the Jews has always been the Promised Land, the Caliphate represents for Muslims the ideal state, the perfect nation, wherein to receive deliverance after centuries of humiliation, racism, and defeat at the hands of the infidels, i.e., foreign powers, and their Muslim partners. As modern Jews built a contemporary version of ancient Israel for all the Jews of the world, the Islamic State is engaged in constructing a functional Islamic country for all Sunnis in the twenty-first century. At least this is what its propaganda tells us.

Although it may seem absurd and repulsive to compare the barbarous behavior of members of the Islamic State with the conduct of the founding fathers of Israel, this is how the struggle to build the Caliphate is perceived among its followers and sympathizers. And this message is particularly powerful today amid the wreckage of Middle Eastern politics. Indeed, the war in Iraq and Syria is acting as a catalyst, magnifying the belief that the solution to all Middle Eastern political problems rests in the contemporary rebirth of the Caliphate.

Regardless of the violence that the Islamic State uses to reconstruct this entity, and in spite of it, the cosmopolitan and transcendent nature of the contemporary Caliphate is as powerful to Sunnis as their collective memory of the original Caliphate. For decades, Islamists and Islamic scholars have insisted that the greatness and splendor of the Caliphate, that heaven on earth, will be recreated. “The restoration of the Caliphate has been a dream of Islamic revivalists since at least the 1950s, when Hizb ut Tahrir began calling for its restoration. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar went as far as claiming for himself one of the caliph’s traditional titles, Amir al Mu’minin, the ‘Commander of the Believers.’ The restoration of the Caliphate was often mentioned by Osama bin Laden as his ultimate goal.”60 But none of those men ever got close to its realization, and for them the Caliphate remained nothing more than a sweet, impossible dream.

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi is the first Islamic leader since the 31st Caliph, Abdülmecid II (1823–61), to claim this title, and to satisfy the nostalgia for a lost world, a society associated with the golden age of early Islam, when, under the leadership of the first four caliphs, successors of the Prophet, Islam expanded territorially and blossomed culturally.61

Against this background it is easy to understand why generations of Sunni radicals have dreamt of the moment when the twentieth-century Arabian borders drawn by European powers would be erased. And it is the Islamic State, not al Qaeda, that has brought this dream to fruition.

The Tool of Violence

The power of history, of past splendor, coupled with a destiny linked to a promised land, a territory chosen by God for His people, feeds a seductive nostalgia. We have seen it in the process of the formation of the state of Israel as well as in the revolution that Khomeini led in 1978 in the former Persia. On wings of violence, the Iranian Revolution brought the past into the present and projected it into a future hoped to be even more splendid.62

The repackaging of a timeless religious past into modern constitutions seems to be a recurrent feature of our present—take Israel and Iran, for example. Because the reclamation of past splendor takes place under the banner of violence—through revolutions, civil wars, terrorism, and wars of conquest—it is difficult to disassociate from the sheer brutality of the process until it has run its full course. This is true for the Zionist armed groups of the 1940s as well as for the Revolutionary Guards of Khomeini’s revolution. In other words, all we see is the violent means to remake the present using the blueprint of the past, so that often we miss the true goal of such endeavor.

Although it is an integral part of the remodeling of the past, violence is only a means to an end. It is a tactic designed to terrorize, to instill fear in the enemy in order to offset the asymmetry of a war fought against well-equipped armies, like the Persian army in 1978, or the British army in Palestine in the 1940s.

Contrary to what the Western media has reported, the Caliphate is no more violent and barbarous than any armed organization in recent memory. In Kosovo in the 1990s, similar atrocities were committed, including cutting off children’s heads to play football with them in front of their parents.63 What distinguishes the Islamic State is the technological use of such barbarities to promote its cause, linking them to world news. On the eve of the 2014 World Cup, for example, IS documented on Twitter a football match in which its members played soccer with the severed heads of their opponents.64

Today, technology offers contemporary armed organizations the possibility of taking the propaganda of violence to new, higher levels. For example, while the Serbs could not widely disseminate evidence of their atrocities, the video of the beheading of James Foley went viral in a few hours. The message of fear was limited to a global, not a local audience. The absence of social media, and broadcasters’ and advertisers’ preference for bloodless and sanitized wars, shielded us from the horrendous actions and crimes perpetrated in Kosovo. Today, the Islamic State’s atrocities reach us in real time on social media and are rebroadcast by a mainstream media constantly playing catch-up with Facebook, YouTube, and other sites. Even when censorship is attempted, as was the case in the video of Foley’s beheading, social media easily bypasses it.

Technology does not change nor inflate the nature of the violent messages that armed organizations broadcast. The propaganda remains to spread fear among enemies and proselytize among potential followers. “How did I feel when I saw those guys play football with the heads of Shiite Iraqi soldiers and policemen? I felt that finally justice was done,” a Sunni man I interviewed stated. About being driven from his home in Baghdad, he continued, “The Militia came to kick us out and the police were outside, laughing. We had to leave everything behind, our furniture, our clothes, the children’s toys. We were allowed to take only what we could carry.”65 For this man, witnessing IS’s unspeakable brutality to one Shiite was a form of reprisal against all Shia. Whether the acts are viewed on a screen or witnessed in the streets of Fallujah, as was the dragging of the bodies of the tortured Blackwater employees, the effect is the same.

Social media is not the only tool that IS uses to spread its message of fear and express the scope of its territorial power. The numbers also help tell the story. In al Naba (“The News”), the Islamic State’s annual business report, in 2013 the organization “claimed nearly 10,000 operations in Iraq: 1,000 assassinations, 4,000 improvised explosive devices planted and hundreds of radical prisoners freed.”66 Considered in light of the fact that in 2013 an approximate total of 7,800 people were killed in Iraq, IS’s claims are astounding.67 In the same report the Islamic State claims that in 2014 hundreds of “apostates” had been turned, confirming the powerful proselytizing force of violence at the hands of a victorious army. In a bloody sectarian war, a dehumanized and defeated opponent may seek protection by joining the winner.

The rising number of followers around the world, people seduced and lured into violence by the propaganda of the Islamic State, confirms the global appeal of its message: a message that the virtual world in which we now live can also produce new, irrational, and barbaric acts of violence. The failed attempt by a group of Australian Muslims to randomly kidnap and behead an individual, simply to post its execution online, shows us the potential degeneration of the Islamic State propaganda narrative in a virtual environment where everything is a video game, including real-life warfare. This mutation of the effects of the classic propaganda by the errant atrocities of armed organizations poses a completely novel threat to Western countries. Like the improvised suicide bombers of the early 2000s, the do-it-yourself Islamist decapitators of today are difficult to track down because they do not belong to any established groups for long enough, their radicalization having taken place in the space of a few mouse clicks.

While the Islamic State is terrifying to a global audience, as distinguished from the Taliban and al Qaeda, it is also a protector of the local population, in whose defense no form of revenge or punishment is too ruthless. The surprisingly sophisticated bureaucracy of the Islamic State typically includes an Islamic court system and a roving police force, which carries out its sentences publicly, in the streets or public squares. “In the Syrian town of Manbij, for example, IS officials cut off the hands of four robbers . . . [,] whipped individuals for insulting their neighbors, confiscated and destroyed counterfeit medicine, and on multiple occasions summarily executed and crucified individuals for apostasy or murder.”68

For Westerners these are not the acts of a modern state that seeks legitimacy through consensus, but of a brutal occupying military force, a sadistic army. However, this is not necessarily the view Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis take after decades of chaos, war, destruction, and corruption at the hands of civil servants, policemen, and politicians. “You look only at the executions,” explains an IS member. “But every war has its executions, its traitors, its spies. We set up soup kitchens, we rebuilt schools, hospitals, we restored water and electricity, we paid for food and fuel. While the UN wasn’t even able to deliver humanitarian aid, we were vaccinating children against polio. It’s just that some actions are more visible than others. For every thief we punish, you punish a hundred children with your indifference.”69

To understand the appeal that the political construction of the Islamic State holds to the local Sunni population, as well as the real challenge that the Caliphate poses to the world, one needs to step back in time and consider nation-building in the context of pre-modern tribal society.

Rome, the Modern Troy

Together with its pre-modern dictatorship and barbarity, the Islamic State promotes its bid for statehood with an ancient message of home and hearth. It encourages its soldiers to marry and, during victory marches, it parades its fighters flanked by machine gun–bearing children. In Raqqa, the capital of the Caliphate, a propaganda van actively recruits young residents to enroll in training camps where they will learn how to use modern weapons. On warm summer evenings, residents are invited to attend Islamic summer festivals in public squares. There is music, laughter, and praise for the Caliphate and Caliph. Kids flock to these events, drawn by the music and the fascinating display of arms and assembled fighters, who encourage them to join them in the defense of their new state.70

Although the world that the Caliphate depicts on social media is always seen against the background of a war of conquest that recalls the Middle Ages—with severed heads and the bodies of the crucified displayed in public parks or squares, and women not to be seen—another aspect of the Caliphate does exist. Indeed, its social face shows traces of humanity, and it is this side to which the West must respond if it wishes to slow recruitment.

Unlike the Taliban, the Islamic State seeks legitimacy among the civilian population by luring men, women, and children into its Caliphate as citizens. Unlike the PLO, ETA, and the IRA, which each felt legitimated by only a segment of the population, the Islamic State pursues the approval of the Umma, the worldwide community of all believers, the soul of Islam. Accordingly, its ambitions go well beyond those of previous armed groups. Having proven with spectacular military successes that God is on their side, and that the heir of the Prophet, the Caliph, has come back, the Islamic State’s warriors must now win the support of the people of Allah and the love of his women to produce the next generation.

To find a similarly ambitious nation-building project springing from total violence, legitimized by supernatural power, and drenched in nostalgia for a lost golden age, one has to go back in time to pre-modern tribal societies and to the birth of ancient Rome.

Roman mythology traces a direct bloodline from the survivors of Troy to the founders of Rome. Romulus and Remus are presented as the descendants of the prince Aeneas, and his son, Ascanius, who miraculously escaped the destruction of Troy. Naturally, destiny plays a major role in the maintenance of this blood line, a sign that Troy could not die at the hands of men but was destined to relive its splendor through Rome. Yet Rome was not a mere replica, the new Troy. Rather, it was its modern incarnation. Likewise, in the words of its Caliph, the Islamic Caliphate will not be a mere replica. It will have its own identity in tune with modern times.

Against a mythological background that provided legitimacy to the newly founded city, Rome had to solve practical problems related to nation-building: to populate the enclave and transform it from a military campground of extremely violent men into a proper town. This transition required the formation of families. Hence the Romans sought women to populate their newly built city. In the violent style to which they were accustomed, they stole them from their neighbors, the Sabines.

Just as Rome needed women to continue its growth and ensure the expansion of the city, today the Caliphate needs women to grow socially. A report from the IS-controlled town of Baiji states that militants went door to door asking about the numbers of married and unmarried women in the houses, terrifying residents. “‘I told them that there were only two women in the house and both were married,’ said Abu Lahid. ‘They said that many of their mujahedin [fighters] were unmarried and wanted a wife. They insisted on coming into my house to look at the women’s ID cards [which in Iraq show marital status].’”71

Interestingly, the war spurred by the rape of the Sabine women came to a halt thanks to the very victims, the women, who convinced their male relatives to make peace with their abductor-husbands. Similarly, in Raqqa, before the town was taken over by the Islamic State, women offered themselves as human shields to protect the city from rebel forces.72 Raqqa was a peripheral city composed of tribes who initially supported Assad’s regime and subsequently switched loyalties to the Islamic State. It is the best example of how the Caliphate plans to run the new state by engaging with the local population. For example, it hopes to neutralize internal opposition by establishing blood relationships between the conquerors and the conquered, blood relations in the form of marriages between the Islamic State warriors and local Sunni women, which, in time, will cement consensus and provide legitimacy.

The Caliphate’s Ultimate Challenge

The modernity and pragmatism of the Islamic State springs from a mix of contemporary tactics, technological and communication skills, psychological propaganda, old-style warfare, and tribal customs, such as arranged marriages between the women of Sunni tribes and the jihadists. Against this background, it is clear that the Islamic State has dwarfed all previous or contemporary shell-states in nation-building and that it may succeed where all post-war armed organizations have failed: to create out of sheer violence a new type of state, big enough, strong enough, and strategically important enough to command the world’s attention. Indeed, it has already mobilized more nations than the G20 to fight it. The alternative to recognizing IS and the Caliphate, an outright war with foreign soldiers on the ground, would hurt more innocent civilians and completely destabilize the Middle East, while facing low odds of long-term success. Of course, in light of the announced US plan for a prolonged air strike campaign and of the formation of a grand coalition, such a war cannot be ruled out.

Is it possible that one day European heads of state will shake hands with al Baghdadi? However repugnant this thought is today, the story of the rape of the Sabine women should remind us that anything is possible, providing there is sufficient consensus.

At the time of this writing, negotiating with the Islamic State is out of the question. But if Iraq is partitioned and IS manages to establish its own state in the Sunni areas in both Syria and Iraq, and from this stronghold move into Jordan, Lebanon, or other strategic areas of the region, things will look very different. Could the West, and indeed the world, permit a rogue state to exist at the gates of Europe and even closer to Israel? And is it possible that this shell-state, constructed through barbarous violence, will ever achieve the necessary legitimacy though internal consensus to transition into a modern state? If so, wouldn’t it be better to bring such a state into the international community, thereby forcing it to respect international law, before it entirely redraws the map of the Middle East at our own disadvantage? The fear that the Gulf States show vis-à-vis the advancement of the Caliphate near their borders seems to point out the potential revolutionary force of IS in these countries.

It would not be the first time that a rogue state and rogue rulers have undergone such transition. Gadhafi, for example, was recognized in Libya. It would, however, be the first time in modern history that a state is born out of pure terrorism through a pre-modern war of conquest.

These are the exceptional challenges we face today. Regardless of how we approach them, the birth of the Caliphate reminds us that what politicians mistook for a new breed of terrorism may well turn out to be a new model of terrorism. That is, the Islamic State may break the mold and solve the dilemma of terrorism by succeeding in nation-building, granting members of an armed organization the status of enemies and civilian populations the status of citizens. Even without diplomatic recognition, the simple fact of the Caliphate’s existence would change the way the international community looks at terrorism.

How likely is this scenario? Is it any more so than it might have been for any other modern armed organization at any other time? The Islamic State has assimilated some of the characteristics of the modern state, such as domestic legitimacy gained by a rough social contract, and learned how to apply its politics of manipulation to the advantage of its leadership. Ironically and paradoxically, to justify its claim to statehood, the Islamic State has created its own mythology from the ashes of the very one the US manufactured to de-legitimize the regime of Saddam Hussein: the myth of al Zarqawi.

Footnotes:

57 Jeremy Bowen, “Iraq Crisis: Fighting in Tikrit After ‘Caliphate’ Declared,” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28092840.

58 Frank Gardner, “ISIS Rebels Declare ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28082962.

59 Francesca Borri, “Behind the Black Flag: Current, Former ISIL Fighters Speak,” http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/06/25/behind-the-black-flag
-current-former-isil-fighters-speak
.

60 William Dalrymple, “The ISIS Demand for a Caliphate Is About Power, Not Religion,” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/13/isis-caliphate-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-jihadi-islam.

61 Dr. Zachariah Matthews, “The Golden Age of Islam,” http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_401_450/golden_age_of_islam.htm.

62 It would be a mistake, however, to include the Taliban regime in this category for several reasons, among them the importation of a foreign creed and political model into Afghanistan, a territory into which the caliphate had not originally reached.

63 Interview with an Albanian translator who worked for the US army in Kosovo, July 25, 2014.

64 Ludovica Iaccino, “ISIS Insurgents Tweet Picture of Beheaded Man: This is our ball. It’s made of skin #WorldCup.” http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/isis-insurgents-tweet-picture-beheaded-man-this-our-ball-its-made-skin-worldcup-1452643

65 Interview, Loretta Napoleoni.

66 Roula Khalaf, Sam Jones, “Selling Terror: How ISIS Details its Brutality,” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/69e70954-f639-11e3-a038-00144feabdc0.html.

67 BBC News, “Iraq’s Annual Death Toll Highest in Five Years,” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25568687.

68 Aaron Zelin, “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Has a Consumer Protection Office,” http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/the-islamic-state-of-iraq-and-syria-has-a-consumer-protection-office/372769/.

69 Francesca Borri, “Behind the Black Flag: Current, Former ISIL Fighters Speak,” http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/06/25/behind-the-black-flag-current-former-isil-fighters-speak.

70 Deborah Amos, “Islamic State Rule: Municipal Services and Public Beheadings,” http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/09/12/347748371/islamic-state-rule-municipal-services-and-public-beheadings.

71 BBC News, “Battle for Iraq and Syria in Maps,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27838034.

72 Interview with Francesca Borri, September 15, 2014; see also Francesca Borri, La Guerra Dentro (Torino: Einaudi, 2014).