ISIS

by Jessica Stern

  October 2013 ISIS creates its first official Twitter account.

  December 2013 Fighting widens between Syrian rebels and ISIS.

  January 2014 After serious fighting, ISIS claims complete control over Raqqa, and names it the capital of the ISIS emirate, a highly significant and symbolic move.

  January 2014 Islamist fighters infiltrate Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq. Iraqi forces recapture Ramadi, but ISIS forces are entrenched in Fallujah.

  February 2014 Al Qaeda Central, led by Ayman al Zawahiri, publicly severs ties with ISIS; ISIS responds by saying they represent the spirit of AQ founder Osama bin Laden and not AQ as led by his successor, Zawahiri.

  March 2014 ISIS supporters arrested in Switzerland for recruiting fighters and planning a terrorist attack.

  April 2014 ISIS launches a Twitter app capable of sending tens of thousands of tweets per day.

  May 2014 ISIS releases The Clanging of the Swords Part 4, possibly the most popular jihadist propaganda video of all time. The graphic video shows the execution of dozens of unarmed Iraqi soldiers.

  May 24, 2014 Returned ISIS fighter Mehdi Nemmouche shoots and kills four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium.

  June 2014 ISIS takes control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and border areas between Iraq and Syria, and claims the borders dating from the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1906 are void.

  June 2014 ISIS spams World Cup hashtags on Twitter with graphic images of executions. Twitter subsequently terminates the ISIS app, reducing the group’s ability to broadcast its message.

  June 30, 2014 ISIS announces the reestablishment of the caliphate and renames itself “the Islamic State.”

  July 2014 Abu Bakr al Baghdadi leads prayer at a mosque in Mosul, his first public appearance. He emphasizes the existence of the caliphate and renames himself Caliph Ibrahim.

  July 2014 ISIS releases the first issue of Dabiq, an English-language magazine.

  August 8, 2014 United States begins air strikes against the Islamic State outside the Kurdish city of Irbil in Iraq.

  August 2014 Despite U.S. air strikes and Iraqi, Kurdish, and Iranian forces, the Islamic State maintains control over large areas of Iraq and solidifies its positions in Syria.

  August 2014 Twitter bans all official ISIS accounts.

  August 25, 2014 The Islamic State releases a video showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley, who had been kidnapped by extremists in Syria in 2012.

  September 2, 2014 The Islamic State releases a video showing the beheading of a second American journalist, Steven Sotloff. Obama announces that the United States will take action to “degrade and destroy” ISIS.

  September 14, 2014 The Islamic State releases a video showing the beheading of British aid worker David Haines.

  September 17, 2014 Australian police break up alleged ISIS plot to behead random people on the streets.

  September 2014 Twitter suspends the accounts of hundreds of ISIS supporters.

  September 21, 2014 ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al Adnani calls on “lone wolves” to attack in the West using whatever tools are at hand, whether a gun, a knife, or even driving cars into pedestrians.

  September 23, 2014 United States and coalition forces begin air strikes in Syria.

  September 23, 2014 Australian ISIS supporter stabs two police officers.

  October 2014 The Islamic State solidifies its hold in Mosul and in areas of Syria and advances on the vital wheat fields of Kobani, Syria, near the Turkish border.

  October 3, 2014 The Islamic State releases the beheading video of Alan Henning, a British cabdriver turned aid worker. His execution causes a widespread campaign of Muslims condemning ISIS.

  October 20, 2014 Accused ISIS supporter in province of Quebec hits Canadian soldiers with car, killing one.

  October 22, 2014 ISIS supporter shoots and kills a Canadian soldier, then attacks the Parliament Building in Ottawa, where he is killed by police.

  November 13, 2014 ISIS announces it is establishing outposts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, and Algeria.

  November 16, 2014 ISIS releases a video confirming the beheading of Abdul-Rahman Kassig, an American aid worker.

  November 22, 2014 ISIS supporter shoots a Danish national working in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

  A NOTE ON SOURCING

  Most information described as being derived from jihadist online sources and social media was collected and archived from the primary source at the time of posting, using a variety of tools. The most frequently used tool is a proprietary software package designed by J. M. Berger and coded by Dan Sturtevant and Jonathan Morgan. The software was inspired by the 2012 paper “Who Matters Online,” by J. M. Berger and Bill Strathearn, commissioned by Google Ideas.

  Data collected using this software is described in endnotes as being “collected by J. M. Berger,” or simply as “data collected from Twitter.” This description may also be applied to a variety of third-party commercial and open-source tools used from time to time to supplement the software (for instance, to monitor accounts or read tweets). In instances where a third party supplied proprietary metrics, it is cited by name.

  Many of these sources are ephemeral, with reference to social media accounts that have already been, or are in constant danger of being, deleted by Internet service providers. Further, the purpose of this book is surely not to facilitate ISIS’s efforts to spread propaganda. In most instances, citations of social media accounts will point to secondary sources (when available) for ease of reference and permanence of record.

  INTRODUCTION

  An American is dressed in an orange jumpsuit, apparently intended to echo the garb of al Qaeda insurgents captured and imprisoned by the United States. He kneels next to a man dressed all in black, his face masked, a knife in his hand.

  For many, this has become an enduring image of the terrorist and insurgent group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, or simply the Islamic State, as it now calls itself.

  In a video posted to the Internet on August 19, 2014, and widely distributed over social media, the American recites a speech, advising President Obama to cease air strikes against the Islamic State. His tormentor speaks, flaunting the British accent that is so central to his performance, warning President Barack Obama that attacks on ISIS would result in the spilling of American blood.

  He puts the knife to the American’s neck and the camera cuts away to show the victim’s severed head, displayed on the back of his lifeless body. Only the beginning of the grisly act is shown. But it is the fear in the American’s eyes that is hard to forget.

  The dead American was photojournalist James Foley. He was known as a “brave and tireless journalist” who was determined to describe the impact of war on ordinary people’s lives.1 Before he became a journalist, Foley had been a teacher and an aid worker. He had been abducted in November 2012, and had been beaten, starved, and waterboarded for nearly two years before he was finally beheaded.2 Now the story of this good man had come to a terrible end.

  For many people around the world, the methodical, sadistic cruelty of the video was shocking and unbearable, provoking an entirely human desire to avenge Foley’s death using any means necessary.

  In the Western world, in the twenty-first century, the idea of a beheading was something unreal, archaic, a vaguely understood and little-contemplated relic of a distant past. While there are important exceptions, we have grown used to a less barbaric world, so that when the media bring pictures of terrorists’ deliberate savagery to our attention, we recoil.

  Other jihadists had used beheadings for this purpose before. Chechen insurgents were known for brutally beheading prisoners. In Bosnia, jihadist fighters once videotaped themselves playing soccer with a decapitated head (Serbs and Palestinians reportedly did the same at different times). But al Qaeda in Iraq—the predecessor to ISIS—made the practice its trademark.

  The campaign of horror began with the 2004 beheading of American businessman Nic
holas Berg, who had been captured by al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). It was performed on camera by the group’s leader, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and attracted international attention. Unlike the Foley video, Zarqawi was depicted carrying out the entire beheading with a knife; the camera did not cut away. The act was not swift; it took unbearably long seconds to complete.

  The video’s impact ensured that more videos would follow, many of which were even more brutal and graphic. The victims included Americans and other foreigners, including British, Russian, Japanese, Bulgarian, Korean, and Filipino citizens.3

  IT IS DIFFICULT to properly convey the magnitude of the sadistic violence shown in these videos. Some featured multiple beheadings, men and women together, with the later victims forced to watch the first die. In one video, the insurgents drove out into the streets of Iraq cities, piled out of a vehicle, and beheaded a prisoner in full view of pedestrians, capturing the whole thing on video and then driving off scot-free.

  The videos were distributed physically on DVDs in Iraq, but they became an Internet phenomenon. Unlabeled online file repositories were linked to by members of jihadist message boards, and the videos were passed around the Web, violence porn with a mission to intimidate and enrage. They succeeded.

  It was the birth of a media model that has been transformed, expanded, and refined to a science over the course of years by the group that would eventually spring from the ashes of the American occupation—ISIS, a jihadist army so brutal and out of control that it was officially disavowed by al Qaeda.

  ISIS has made its name on the marketing of savagery, evolving its message to sell a strange but potent new blend of utopianism and appalling carnage to a worldwide audience, documenting a carefully manipulated version of its military campaigns, including its bloody 2014 rampage across much of Iraq and Syria. ISIS is using beheadings as a form of marketing, manipulation, and recruitment, determined to bring the public display of savagery into our lives, trying to instill in us a state of terror.

  Although some observers followed the rise of ISIS with alarm from late 2013, the Obama administration gave the problem short shrift. In an interview with the New Yorker in January 2014,4 the president himself dismissed concerns about the group and other jihadists fighting in neighboring Syria:

  The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant. I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.

  The administration continued to downplay the upstart jihadists for months. In June 2014, when ISIS seized control of a substantial chunk of Iraq, in an efficient military campaign marked by the retreat of apparently terrified, U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers, most within the administration were caught off guard, asking themselves why they hadn’t seen the “jayvee team” coming.

  Despite the military drama, which sent tremors through regional and Western security services, most Americans and other Westerners were disillusioned and exhausted by more than ten years of a costly War on Terror.

  Those who bothered to notice agreed ISIS was a problem. But maybe not our problem, they said. When President Obama authorized air strikes on ISIS positions, depriving them of a fraction of their stolen territory, he quickly moved on to discussions of the economy.

  But ISIS would not be ignored. It began by courting American anger specifically, at first with taunting tweets launched over social media, using established marketing and spam tactics to ensure that its invitation to war played not just in Washington, but all over the globe.

  For months, ISIS had flooded the Internet with images of hundreds of unnamed Iraqis and Kurds being executed by gun and knife and crucifixion, their heads mounted and displayed on pikes. All of it seemed so far away to those few who even heard about the atrocities, which the media covered sporadically at best.

  Then ISIS upped the ante—deliberately re-creating the Nicholas Berg video for a new generation, with a new cast of characters, beginning with the murder of James Foley.

  It was perhaps the ending of the video that sealed the incident’s place in history. After graphic evidence of the murderous deed had been displayed, there was one final scene: the British jihadist yanked another American up on his knees, by the scruff of his orange jumpsuit—Steven Sotloff, another kidnapped journalist.

  “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision,” the killer said in a calm, matter-of-fact tone.

  This was not a one-off communiqué. It was a promise of more bloodshed to come.

  Extensive media coverage highlighted the case, as journalists publicly mourned one of their own, and ISIS spread images of the execution far and wide on social media, even prompting Twitter to intervene in ways it had long scorned, by suspending dozens of ISIS supporters’ accounts.

  By the time the second execution came, exactly as promised, followed by the addition of a third victim to the queue—this time a British citizen—a slow rumble was spreading through America and the world. ISIS expanded its targeted messaging to include “the allies of America,” with special attention to the United Kingdom, and threats to bordering countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

  In corner stores and restaurants, on television and radio broadcasts, over dinner tables and on social media, people began to ask: Why can’t the most powerful nations on earth stop these medieval-minded killers? The questions soon transformed into an anger not seen since the days after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

  “These guys need to be killed,” a middle-aged police officer with a friendly face was heard saying in an even tone to a store owner in Cambridge, Massachusetts—one of the most notoriously liberal cities in the United States—and the sentiment was repeated again and again, around the world, at greater or lesser length, and with greater or lesser intensity.

  Who are these men? Where did they come from? What do they want? How are they transforming the nature of terrorism and the war the international community is fighting against it?

  What can we do about ISIS? What should we do?

  These are the questions that fuel this book.

  If journalism is the first draft of history, a book such as this can only be the second draft, and certainly not the final word. It is written at a point in history when ISIS has fully emerged in the world, but before its ultimate fate has become clear.

  Regardless of that fate, what ISIS has accomplished so far will have long-term ramifications for jihadist and other extremist movements that may learn from its tactics. A hybrid of terrorism and insurgency, the former al Qaeda affiliate, booted out of that group in part due to its excessive brutality, is rewriting the playbook for extremism. It has inverted many of the dynamics that have applied to violent extremism for a century or longer and changed the rules of engagement on multiple fronts. It is a daring experiment in the power of horror, but also in the marketing of utopia. While most observers view ISIS’s “state” as a dystopia, ISIS claims to have formed as a refuge from an impure world, a place where believers can be secure in the knowledge that they are living in accordance with Islam, at least as interpreted by ISIS. And it has documented its attempts at governance with the same attention to detail as its well-publicized atrocities.

  There are many dimensions to the rise of ISIS. Some see the problem as explainable only with reference to competition among neighboring states for access to oil, natural gas, and pipelines.5 Some blame the problem on poor governance and lack of democratic institutions, accusing the U.S. government of evangelism in regard to spreading democracy6 while paying too little attention to the importance of civil and political rights.7

  Some view ISIS as a symptom of a kind of “untamed Wahhabism,”8 deliberately spread by Saudi Arabia and others,9 or as a prop in a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, among other states. Still others see i
t as the public face of the resurgent Ba’athist party, determined to take back what it lost (and more) immediately after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While researching the book, we heard many points of view.

  We are observers of violent extremism, with many years of experience speaking to terrorists, monitoring their messages, and studying their organizations and beliefs. Therefore our book is an effort to situate ISIS within the global jihadist movement, and within the field of extremism more broadly, so that its true implications can be better understood.

  This book is written in the midst of a fast-changing story; in the short period between the book’s completion and its publication, ISIS could conceivably double in size or be dealt a massive defeat. Although neither outcome seems probable, ISIS’s short history is a series of contradictions and surprises, and we believe that whatever its fate as an organization, it has instituted transformative changes in strategy, messaging, and recruitment that will linger long after its so-called caliphate has crumbled to dust.

  Within a short span, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and his fanatical followers have sketched out a new model for fringe movements to exploit changing social dynamics and new technologies, exerting an influence over world politics that is wildly disproportionate to its true size and strength.

  To cover this ground, we will examine the history of the organization, its innovative propaganda and unprecedented manipulation of social media, and its recruitment of foreign fighters. We also explore the stark contrast it has drawn to the terrorist organization from which it sprang, al Qaeda, as well as a multitude of other extreme ideologies. Finally, although ISIS’s evolution is ongoing, we believe some preliminary conclusions can be drawn about how to frame and approach the problem of countering this murderous movement.

  There are many other important elements to this phenomenon and the conflict surrounding it, and we look forward to future books that explore some of the issues we could not. Given the fluid nature of the story, updates on ISIS and especially those pertinent to the topics covered in this book will be available at Intelwire.com.