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The operative word is “innocents” and to a great extent, this is accurate. However, it should be noted that Muhammad himself, the founder of Islam, was a prolific killer. IS’s march throughout Iraq and Syria is arguably similar to Muhammad’s initial twenty-seven campaigns, and Islam’s breakout across Arabia under the subsequent Caliphs, where post-hostilities slaughters occurred, icons destroyed, booty taken, and women raped and parceled out, with their children, to the fighters. We may be seeing the president using a rhetorical device to objectify IS so that they can be legitimately, in the eyes of a larger audience, targeted.
Obama emphasized that the vast majority of IS’s victims were Muslims. But what he conveniently did not disclose was that the vast majority of the killings involved Shia Muslims, and that taking sides against IS in Iraq had effectively aligned the United States with Shia Muslims who are engaged in a bitter struggle with their Sunni coreligionists for dominance of the faith. Many blame the unthinking policy of siding with Iraqi Shias on Obama’s closest White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, who was believed to harbor greater sympathy for Shiite Muslims based on her affinity for Iran, where she was born and spent her early childhood.
Unlike its covert predecessor, the Islamic State terrorists proved to be aggressive insurgent fighters. “ISIL has proven to be an effective fighting force,” Matthew G. Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a speech in 2014, using one of two acronyms for the group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. “Its battlefield strategy is complex and adaptive, employing a mix of terrorist operations, hit-and-run tactics, and paramilitary assaults to enable the group’s rapid gains.”
But more important than its fighting capabilities, IS had become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the global jihadist movement. “It operates the most sophisticated propaganda machine of any extremist group,” Olsen said, noting:
ISIL disseminates timely, high-quality media content on multiple platforms, including on social media, designed to secure a widespread following for the group. We have seen ISIL use a range of media to tout its military capabilities, executions of captured soldiers, and consecutive battlefield victories. More recently, the group’s supporters have sustained this momentum on social media by encouraging attacks in the U.S. and against U.S. interests in retaliation for our airstrikes. ISIL has used this propaganda campaign to draw foreign fighters to the group, including many from Western countries. As a result, ISIL threatens to outpace al Qaeda as the dominant voice of influence in the global extremist movement. Today, ISIL has more than 10,000 fighters and controls much of the Tigris-Euphrates basin—the crossroads of the Middle East—an area similar in size to the UK. And its strategic goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate through armed conflict with governments it considers apostate—including Iraq, Syria, and the United States.
In his “My fellow Americans” speech to the nation that September, Obama promised for the first time to “counter [IS’s] warped ideology.” But his administration did nothing in the counter-ideology sphere. Once again, the president’s fear of creating a backlash against Muslims hindered the only real tool capable of defeating Islamic jihadism over the long term. One of the architects of the failure was Quintan Wiktorowicz, a behind-the-scenes counterterrorism strategist for the Obama administration. “While the government has tried to counter terrorist propaganda, it cannot directly address the warped religious interpretations of groups like ISIL because of the constitutional separation of church and state,” Wiktorowicz told me.
The statement was false and showed Wiktorowicz’s lack of understanding of the American system. The constitutional provision for the separation of church and state was added to prevent the creation of a state religion—not to prevent warfare or policies against the threat of terrorism.
Islamic advisers brought into the White House and other institutions of power in Washington also succeeded in preventing any U.S. government discussion of the Islamic roots of radical jihadism.
It was revealed in a New York Times Magazine article on White House senior adviser Ben Rhodes just how important these Islamic sympathies were for Obama, who grew up in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, as well as his key adviser Jarrett. As Jarrett told David Samuels, the author of the Times Magazine piece, their early upbringing overseas influenced both hers and the president’s policies toward all things Muslim. Jarrett, who has been dubbed Obama’s “work wife,” was asked about the “point of connection” between her and the president. She said that having lived abroad was a bond between them. During their first conversation over dinner, Obama and Jarrett shared “what it was like for both of us to live in countries that were predominantly Muslim countries at formative parts of our childhood,” Jarrett said, noting “I remember [Obama] asking me questions that I felt like no one else has ever asked me before, and he asked me from a perspective of someone who knew the same experience that I had. So it felt really good. I was like, ‘Oh, finally someone who gets it.’ ”
What their foreign experience did not give them, unfortunately, was an honest understanding of radical jihadism; such understanding is the ultimate key to defeating the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. By the fall of 2015, the Islamic State had become the most well-armed and well-funded terrorist organization in the world. Intelligence estimates put its holdings of cash at about $1 billion, and its raids in Iraq had netted the group an estimated $50 billion in captured weapons and equipment. “ISIL’s sophisticated military skill and brutality has been key to its success in Iraq and Syria,” stated an October 19, 2015, report by the State Department–led Overseas Security Advisory Council, a group that supports American businesses overseas. “However, its ability to generate cutting-edge propaganda to promote its ideology and gain sympathizers and members across the globe, added to its largely self-reliant, robust financial system, has contributed heavily to its success as well.”
Foreign nationals sympathetic to the Islamist organization and encouraged by its early battlefield victories flooded into Syria and Iraq by the thousands beginning in 2015, many recruited by the estimated 46,000 Twitter accounts of members and sympathizers. “Halting the flow of foreign fighters is incredibly difficult,” the State Department report says, noting that travel bans imposed by Western countries were not effective at curbing foreign fighters from joining the group since they could easily enter Syria, mainly through Turkey.
Congress criticized the failure to attack the Islamic State ideology but appeared powerless to spur the Obama administration to take more effective action. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, accused the president of “self-delusion” in asserting that the U.S. strategy of limited bombing against Islamic State targets was producing results. “Since U.S. and coalition airstrikes began [in 2014], ISIL has continued to enjoy battlefield successes, including taking Ramadi and other key terrain in Iraq, holding over half the territory in Syria and controlling every border post between Iraq and Syria,” McCain said. “Our means and our current level of effort are not aligned with our ends. That suggests we are not winning, and when you’re not winning in war, you are losing.”
A covert U.S. intelligence program to train Syrian rebels at first failed miserably because of restrictions placed on the program by the president: the United States would train only Syrian rebels who would agree not to seek the overthrow of Syrian leader Bashar Assad, a condition most adamantly rejected. As a result, fewer than one hundred fighters were trained, despite planning to produce an opposition force of seven thousand Syrian rebels to fight only against the Islamic State. The failure also highlighted how the CIA’s covert action capability had been decimated. “The lack of coherent strategy has resulted in the spread of ISIL around the world to Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, and even to Afghanistan,” McCain said. “We have seen this movie before, and if we make the same mistakes, we should expect similarly tragic results.”
Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, the former CIA ope
rations officer and first director of its Counterterrorism Center, told me the administration’s Syrian training program was a waste of time. Instead, the Pentagon should have funded and organized a regional military force of Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, and troops from Persian Gulf militaries based on the Sunni Arab National Front for the Salvation of Iraq, also known as the Awakening Movement, which was developed in Iraq from 2008 to bring stability to the country. According to Clarridge a major shortcoming was the failure of the Obama administration to counter IS propaganda and recruitment efforts.
“Everyone says you can’t win this war militarily. But where is the psychological warfare effort? I have people monitoring this day in, day out, and there is none, zero,” he said. “There are people standing by with large capabilities, Muslims, ready to put their capabilities to work, if someone would organize it,” Clarridge said, noting that no radio broadcasting was being carried out in Iraq and Syria.
The bombing campaign against the Islamic State also proved to be feckless. One reason it was ineffective surfaced in an analysis of the scores of air strikes carried out in Iraq and Syria by the United States and allies. Details released on the strikes revealed that an extremely small percentage of the estimated sixty Islamic State training camps that were producing thousands of fighters each month had been targeted in the bombing campaign as of August 2015. According to the website of the U.S. Central Command, the military command in charge of counterterrorism operations, a total of 6,419 air strikes were carried out in the twelve months between August 2014 and 2015, including 3,991 in Iraq and 2,428 in Syria. But astoundingly, only 19 attacks, or .3 percent of the total air strikes, were carried out against terrorist training areas. The camps were spread throughout Islamic State–controlled areas of Iraq and Syria but were placed off-limits by Obama’s political appointees, who were concerned about causing collateral damage and killing civilians who were being used by the terrorists as shields. And U.S. intelligence agencies reported in classified channels that training within camps was so successful that it allowed the group to expand from Syria into Libya and Yemen. “If we know the location of these camps, and the president wants to destroy ISIS, why are the camps still functioning?” one intelligence official critical of the policy told me.
Defense Department officials lamented how information warfare efforts against the Islamic State had been stifled by the Obama policy of avoiding any mention of Islam, and by resistance within the government bureaucracy to countering the jihadist threat. Bureaucratic red tape within the military, especially at the Central Command, and at the Pentagon had prevented rapid responses to Islamic State propaganda and activities. The cumbersome approval process for taking information warfare action against IS all but ensured that efforts to counter the group would fail. Several layers of approvals and a lengthy chain of command are required for an information operation to be carried out. That resulted in delays of weeks for operations designed to counteract Islamic State propaganda and recruitment activities. As a result, terrorist recruitment and propaganda flourished and new fighters joined the group or were inspired to carry out deadly attacks. Fears of exposing a U.S. government hand in the counter–information warfare also hampered effective action; also, risk-averse bureaucrats—both military and civilian—opposed any counterattack on IS propaganda, because of fears they would trigger stepped-up IS information warfare and terrorist attacks. The command was able to address obvious lies propagated by IS, but the propagandists for the jihadist movement used information techniques that mixed truth with falsehoods as a way to avoid giving the Americans an easy way to disprove their open lies. Urgently needed aggressive online programs to dissuade would-be jihadists and expose IS propaganda programs and activities were blocked both at Central Command and the Pentagon.
Officials involved in the programs revealed that the military’s information warfare campaign was derailed not just over issues of restrictions on mentioning Islam but by a more banal cause: simple government bureaucratic opposition to conducting what are perceived to be distasteful propaganda activities that bureaucrats mistakenly associated with being contrary to American traditions of freedom, honesty, and openness. “What we’re finding is it’s very difficult to address these guys because of our own process,” one American counter-IS official told me. “Every time CENTCOM tries to address this directly, we get slapped down.”
One example of IS’s online information warfare agility is how the group uses Twitter. IS operatives and supporters use multiple Twitter accounts to disseminate well-crafted videos and propaganda materials. Usually, IS online jihadists open up to six Twitter accounts at a time and shift to successive accounts after one or more are shut down by the social media giant. The terror group also produced what have been described as very professional videos in multiple languages and aimed at various international audiences; the videos seek to recruit new fighters, including those willing to carry out the most deadly form of attack, suicide vehicle or body vest bombing. The group also has begun shifting from the use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to specialty apps like Telegram, which are well suited to disseminating material and communicating through mobile handheld devices, such as smartphones, and have security features including encryption for messages. Telegram, as mentioned earlier, is a Russian-origin messaging service that uses commercial-grade data encryption to prevent electronic interception. It is easily available to anyone with a smartphone. Another application used by terrorists is called Surespot, also downloadable to handheld devices. While the encryption is breakable, decoding intercepted messages from terrorists now requires the use of great computer power and lengthy periods of time that limit the ability to find actionable intelligence on pending attacks or operations.
IS jihadists are also using the Dark Web, the part of the Internet used by criminals, to share information and recruit members. Judging by its many video and online products, government analysts say IS appears to have learned information dissemination methods used by neo-Nazi political groups to communicate and spread their messages throughout the English-speaking world on the Dark Web.
Counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka believes it is urgent that the United States develop and employ a massive counter–information warfare program against terrorism. The information warfare campaign must be covert—not revealed as linked to the U.S. government—and provide support and backing for brave Muslim reformers around the world, as well as launch major programs of support for private sector initiatives that would be infinitely more efficient than government-run programs. “This is what we did against the USSR and this is what we have to do against the new totalitarian ideology of jihadism,” Gorka says.
Until early 2016, one of the most powerful information warfare tools of the U.S. government—the ability to conduct cyberattacks against Islamic State information systems—had been denied. That changed with the unusual announcement by the Pentagon in the spring that the U.S. Cyber Command, the military subcommand based at Fort Meade, Maryland, had begun using cyberattacks to disrupt Islamic State command-and-control and recruiting efforts. It was the first time the Pentagon had ever conducted cyberwarfare. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced the cyber operations, which he said were targeted at “disrupt[ing] ISIL’s command and control, to cause them to lose confidence in their networks, to overload their network so that they can’t function, and do all of these things that will interrupt their ability to command and control forces there, control the population and the economy.” Further details were not disclosed, but the use of cyber, while welcome, appeared to have had a limited impact on the Islamist enemy.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, explained that the operations aim to isolate the Islamic State both physically and virtually; to limit the group’s ability to command and control its forces and its captured territory; to disrupt communications; and generally to stifle the terrorist organization’s ability to conduct operations. In declining to provide further detail
s, Dunford said, “We don’t want them to have information that will allow them to adapt over time. We want them to be surprised when we conduct cyber operations, and frankly, they’re going to experience some friction that’s associated with us, and some friction that’s just associated with the normal course of events in dealing in the information age.”
It was the first use of what Cyber Command calls Cyber Mission Force teams, which are being deployed with military commands and other units around the world devoted to cyberattacks.
By mid-2016, the U.S. government had been loudly asserting that the conflict against the Islamic State was advancing. But the facts on the ground provided a different story. As the noose tightened around the group’s strongholds in Iraq and Syria, terrorists simply moved to safer ground. In Libya, the number of fighters grew from around one thousand in 2015 to four thousand by the spring of 2016. The group Boko Haram, based in northern Nigeria, renamed itself in early 2016 as the Islamic State West Africa Province.
U.S. Army general Joseph Votel, head of the Central Command, revealed that the strategy of targeting terrorist leaders was simply driving the problem out of Syria and Iraq and into other lands and ultimately toward Europe and the United States. “Certainly in both Iraq and Syria, in a lot of locations, we are continuing to target their leadership,” Votel said at a Pentagon briefing in 2016. The four-star general said that after gains against the group are made in those two locations, the Islamic State “will continue to adapt and we will continue to deal with the next evolution of ISIL, whether they become more of a terrorist organization and return to more of their terrorist-like roots.”
The commander’s comments reveal that the current U.S. counterterrorism strategy, based on targeting terror leaders and fighters on the ground without waging information warfare against Islamist ideology, is doomed to failure. Worse, this failed strategy continues to force America into waging an endless war—war that will result in victory only when the ideas behind the murderous terror group are attacked and defeated. This requires adapting the counter-ideology programs used to defeat Soviet communism to a comprehensive offensive against Islamic terror.