by Meredith Tax
It has been important to many Daesh members that their practice be based on scriptural sources, however selectively these may be chosen. “The problem is that with such a huge corpus of Islamic literature and no central infallible authority like the Pope to regulate teachings, many of ISIS’ actions, seen as heinous in this day and age, can find a place within the vastness of Islamic tradition,” Al-Tamimi and fellow researcher Amarnath Amarasingam have noted. “We may dismiss such evidence by claiming that ISIS is only citing them in order to gain legitimacy and credibility among its followers, but that’s precisely the point: they feel reassured that they have a coherent theological basis in their actions.”25
In December 2015, under the heading “The ISIS Papers,” The Guardian published a Daesh internal document entitled “Principles in the Administration of the Islamic State.” The document, which was unearthed by Al-Tamimi, was written shortly after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the new caliphate and was directed largely towards answering administrative and economic questions about governance. In doing so, it laid out a historical and philosophical argument indicating that Daesh is principally focused on power and land acquisition.
The document states that the purpose of founding a caliphate was to regain what were seen as Sunni rights. These rights had been stolen by heretics, whom it was necessary to disperse and grind underfoot “to protect the power of the Sunnis,” and enable the rightful owners of the land and its wealth to get back their proper position in the world. While some theological justification is mixed into this argument, it is basically a statement of revolutionary power politics.
The analysis begins with the Sykes-Picot agreement—the secret treaty between England and France that divided what remained of the Ottoman Empire after World War I into separate states. This led to a situation, the author writes, where everybody got land except the Sunnis. The Sykes-Picot treaty is seen as a deliberate plot whose purpose was “depriving the Sunnis from those assets, as the mountains were granted to the Kurds, Druze and Alawites [Shia], while the sea was granted to the Rafidites and Nusayris [more Shia], while the river and what surrounds it is investment for the Jews and the agricultural lands under their administration.”26
This was all a plan, according to “The ISIS Papers,” to prevent the Sunnis from establishing a state ruled by the correct interpretation of holy law. “All that has not merely been a coincidence, but it was a dirty political decision in order to implement a tightening stranglehold on the Sunnis and make them the most remote people and strip them of all assets for advancement or thinking of a rightly-guided Islamic State.” The task, therefore, is to restructure the region and draw new boundaries that protect “the assets of the ummah . . . its wealth, the nature of its land, its inhabitants and its water.”
As for the usurpers, and anyone else who stands in the way of the Sunnis, “special teams can be deployed for fundamental change in the structuring of the regions that are subject to the rule of the Islamic State. And that was what the companions [of the Prophet Muhammad] and after them the caliphs pursued against every heretic community: that is, dispersing their groupings so there no longer remained any impeding opinion, strength or ability, and the Muslim alone remains the master of the state and decision-making and no one is in conflict with him.”27 In other words, kill them all or drive them away.
This is a political agenda that uses religious pleading as an argument that a particular group deserves more wealth and political power, based on an essentially paranoid and tribal perspective that says: “The world is against us so we will be against the world. We will take as much as we can and kill anybody who’s in the way and enslave their women.”
So, while Daesh draws on Islamic texts operationally, its philosophy is a kind of fascistic nihilism. If you substitute “religion” for “race” and substitute “Shia and infidels” for “Jews,” you come up with a view of the world very similar to that attributed to Hitler by European historian Timothy Snyder: “If you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggle against each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and take land. . . . I was struck that Hitler explicitly said that states are temporary, state borders will be washed away in the struggle for nature.”28
Daesh does not want to live peacefully alongside other kinds of Muslims any more than Hitler wanted to co-exist with the Jews. In fact, “The ISIS Papers” indict Saddam Hussein for fostering ideas of co-existence that led to stripping Sunnis of their identity. A tolerant, non-sectarian society is framed as a threat to Sunnis: “Discarding the difference with the disbelieving sects, and considering co-existence with them as the true societal bond that the ummah must operate in accordance with in order to preserve its goals, while in reality protection is implemented for the rights of all the communities of disbelief while oppressing the Sunnis and their principles.”29
If the analogy with Hitler’s view of the world is correct, the idea of dividing Syria and Iraq into new states—Shiastan, Sunnistan, Kurdistan—is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Daesh may have called itself a state but that doesn’t mean it would settle for boundaries. Snyder says of Hitler, “He’s quite consciously manipulating German national sentiment to get to power and then to start the war, which he thinks will transform the Germans, as it were, from a nation into a race. So he’s aware that German nationalism is a force in the world, but he’s just using it in order to create the world that he wants, which is this world of racial struggle.” As Hitler believed in the race, not the state, so Daesh has believed in its Takfiri version of Islam. It has used the idea of a state to transform the Sunnis into a warrior tribe, as Zarqawi hoped would happen when he bombed the al-Askari mosque in Iraq in 2006.
In “The ISIS papers” special attention is paid to oil, “gold and antiquities,” and weapons. The trade in and ownership of these is to be reserved for the state. The state will also extract substantial revenue from taxes, fines, and the confiscation of the property of anyone who flees its rule. Like many other states in the Middle East, rather than trying to develop industry or agriculture, Daesh is dependent on oil, which makes it economically weaker and more vulnerable than states with a diverse economy.
The political scientist Charles Tripp described Daesh’s sources of wealth as “oil extracted in Syria and in Iraq and sold to areas controlled by the Assad government, across the Turkish border or through middlemen in the Kurdish region of Iraq. The wells that IS has seized produce only a fifth of their pre-war levels, but in September 2014 they were bringing in a reported $2m a day. These assets have been supplemented by the vast sums poured into the Syrian conflict by various donors from the Gulf since 2011. Especially in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia substantial ‘private’ donations seem to have had official blessing until recently. . . . An economy based on tribute and distribution prevails in the territories controlled by IS. Banks, military installations and other assets, both state and private, were looted and ‘protection levies’ imposed on businesses and on transport firms. The same applies to the smuggling of antiquities: direct sales and the sale of ‘licences’ to dig for antiquities provide a steady source of externally generated revenue.”30
These sources of income are vulnerable to attack. Protection money, fines, and taxes depend on the number of people controlled. If Daesh lost territory, this revenue would decrease. A number of oil depots and tankers were bombed after Daesh took them over, but, more importantly, the price of oil dropped drastically for several years. The US had turned to producing most of its own oil, which meant the Arab states had to find other markets. At the same time, Chinese markets started to contract because of economic problems, while more oil continued to be pumped, creating an oversupply. On top of that, OPEC—the oil producers’ cartel controlled by the Saudis and Gulf States—refused to fix the price, possibly to hurt the economy of its rival Iran, or to undercut US attempts to become a major oil exporter.31
In 2016, Daesh’
s annual income was an estimated $1.5 to $2 billion, which would be a lot for a jihadi group, but was not much for running a large state in the middle of a multifront war. In addition, Daesh did most of its business in cash; when US bombers started to target cash depots in Daesh-controlled areas, they destroyed tens of millions of dollars in currency. Rumors began circulating in 2016 that Daesh fighters were having to take a pay cut, which some believed might prompt those jihadis who were principally motivated by money to drift away.32
The Logic of Terror
While some of the Daesh soldiers may be filled with genuine religious zeal, however warped, is this also true of Daesh strategists and leaders? Abu Hamza, a Syrian commander who became disillusioned and escaped to Turkey, isn’t sure the leaders of Daesh are actually religious at all. “They pray and they fast and you can’t be an emir without praying, but inside I don’t think they believe it much. . . . The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam. They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back. They want to run Iraq.”33
Christoph Reuter of Der Spiegel takes a similar view: “If you see the statements and actions of Al-Qaeda, they were like the early left-wing terrorists in the 1970s in Europe. They always believed in the masses. ‘We do something and then the masses will rise,’ but the masses never rose. Not for Al-Qaeda, not for the Leftists. Daesh does not believe in the masses rising; Daesh believes in control: ‘oppress the masses and they will obey.’”34
Daesh’s rule by terror has been forced on a subject population by harsh laws, assassinations, and public beheadings. It has been projected at the world through videos and photos that present Daesh as a swarm of ski-masked, black-clad warriors jumping out of vehicles and shooting madly in all directions. Reuter notes that, we never see blurry images of Daesh, or pictures of fighters who are confused, tired, wounded or squinting at the camera. They are always in clear focus and perfect light. To Reuter, Daesh videos should be seen as theater:
“Strength is something relative, like when you had the early phase in 2013, and they would always be masked. And whenever something happens, immediately around 200 guys would appear. Bam! All masked. So the local people would not know how many they are, or who they are. During this period, for example, they were exaggerating their strength, but in general they tried to foment the image of the invincible warrior, with the mask you came like a ninja, you jump from the pick-up, you threaten everybody, you shout. . . . They create an image as a weapon where, for example, in Iraq they just needed to call ahead and say ‘we will arrive in half an hour,’ and the village would be empty. If it was an opposition village against Daesh, people would just run away.”35
This image of brutal invincibility was designed to attract recruits as well as terrify opponents. Those photos of hundreds of Iraqi or Syrian bodies, those carefully staged 2014 beheadings of Westerners in orange jumpsuits—James Foley, Alan Henning, Stephen Sotloff, David Haines, Peter Kassig—were advertising, meant to terrify the West and attract young men from all over the world who wanted to feel more powerful than they did at home. Recruitment was the reason for the heads mounted on spikes around the public square in Raqqa, for the publication of a price list for female slaves, for the smile on the face of the executioner and, of course, for the attacks on European cities.
Foreign fighters have been central to Daesh strategy. Locals might have conflicting loyalties to family or old friends, but foreigners would have no such ties, and since they had no roots in Syria or Iraq and no local networks, they would be less likely to be able to desert and run away. They came in, were met at the border, brought to a training camp, and reshaped into members of an army whose loyalties were only to Daesh.36
Daesh media carefully targeted such recruits. Important messages were released not only in Arabic, but also in English, French, and German, and rapidly translated into Indonesian, Russian, and Urdu.37 Special outreach via social media was targeted at young girls in the West who could be persuaded to leave their families and go to Syria. Some of the recruits were pious. Many were recent converts who know little about Islamic traditions.
In a brilliant analysis of of jihadi recruits, Olivier Roy, a scholar of Islam, wrote that one quarter of the jihadis arrested in France were converts, while a full 40 percent of those arrested in the US in 2011 were, showing the errors of “the (culturalist) idea that individual radicalisation reflects a radicalisation of a frustrated Muslim community.” Some actually arrived in Syria carrying copies of Islam for Dummies.38
Some of these foreign fighters were probably psychopaths or sadists turned on by violence. Many were just bored young men looking for adventure, money, sex, a meaningful life, martyrdom, or all of the above. Roy described them as 21st century “rebels without a cause,” the equivalent of US lone shooters: “Jihad is the only cause on the global market. If you kill in silence, it will be reported in the local newspaper; if you kill yelling ‘Allahuakhbar,’ you are sure to make the national headlines.” He emphasized the importance of videogames and pop superhero narratives to the self-image of these young men, and the fact that they were usually recruited through peer networks. Internet recruitment was apparently mainly successful only with girls, at least in Europe.
In 2005, journalist Hind Fraihi interviewed disaffected young men in the Belgian city of Molenbeek, a hotbed of Islamism, later famous for its role in providing suicide bombers for the Paris and Brussels attacks of 2015 and 2016.39 After the Paris attacks, The Washington Post reported that the young men told Fraihi they had quit school and “passed much of their time sleeping. Or they would hang around at the metro exits and snatch people’s bags. They called it jihad because they would pick out Westerners. Fraihi told them that sounded like racism. They called it gangster Islam. They were ripe for picking by international recruiters. ‘These young people don’t have a job or a future, so they are very easy to indoctrinate if you give them a big story,’ she said, ‘a big collective story, a story of our society, a dream, an aspiration, an idealism.’”40
Religion is not the motivation behind the attraction of such young men to jihad. Many, like the Paris bombers, became interested in religion shortly before they acted. Researcher Lydia Wilson, who interviewed Iraqi jihadis imprisoned in Kirkuk, said, “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad and the caliphate . . .” They were motivated by alienation and anger, not religion, she said. “They are children of the [US] occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family and tribe.”41
Young women also turned to Daesh, although not nearly in the same numbers as their male counterparts. Recruiting foreign women to bear “young lions” for the cause took on increasing emphasis in Daesh over the years. Though teenage girls who ran away to join Daesh probably had the same mix of motives as boys—the hope of adventure, an idealistic wish for a meaningful life, the desire to be part of a holy utopia, or a craving for power, plus the age-old teenage dream of getting away from one’s parents—the version of the dream sold to girls emphasized romance with a dashing warrior. Once these girls made their way to Turkey, they were met by a fixer and taken over the border to Raqqa, where they were paraded before fighters looking for a wife. Men were allowed to see the women’s faces just that one time. Then the girls were immediately married off.42
After Daesh made Raqqa its capital, foreign fighters came in droves and a dual economy developed in which many locals became impoverished while foreigners had money to burn and freedom to do whatever they liked, including forcibly marry local women and take over people’s houses. They received subsidized gas and could cut to the front of the bread queues.
They swaggered around the streets wearing suicide belts and scaring people.43
A resident who fled to Turkey said “locals were constantly subjected to harassment and interrogation by groups of foreign fighters, who, mistrustful of the more ‘moderate’ Syrians, operate pervasive brigades and religious police to enforce religious law and report violations under the threat of violence. ‘They come into internet cafes and demand to see who you are talking to. They will confiscate your phone in the street and inspect your contacts.’”44
People must be made afraid to resist. They must be prevented from defecting by checkpoints that make it impossible to get out. The locals must be afraid of the foreign fighters; the foreign fighters must be afraid of their commanders; and the commanders must be afraid of the secret police.
In Haji Bakr’s blueprint, one of the first things Daesh had to do once it was established in a town was to set up a council with an emir in charge of “murders, abductions, snipers, communication, and encryption.” A separate council would be appointed to check up on the other emirs to make sure they were sufficiently pious and doing their jobs. The result would be a parallel state structure, like that of the East German Stasi or Iraq under Saddam Hussein: Public officials would rule the town by fear and a separate security state would spy on them.45