Lister wrote in November that ISIS was fielding approximately 25,000 fighters, including terrorist and insurgent divisions, as well as a force more resembling a traditional army’s infantry. According to Lister, ISIS controls territory from the Aleppo region of Syria to the Salah ad Din province in Iraq,82 an area larger than the United Kingdom.83
It rules using a structure of wilayat or “provinces,” each with its own governor, and local governments beneath them, as well as a series of administrative units, in many ways replicating a typical government bureaucracy. Its military force is primarily dominated by Iraqis, while many of its civil institutions are staffed by foreigners (see Chapter 4).84 The structure is designed to survive the death of Baghdadi, and while the symbolic impact of killing the so-called caliph could be destabilizing in a number of ways, it is by no means certain that removing ISIS’s leadership would cripple the organization.
ISIS’s strength on the ground is an important part of the story, but only a part. Through a media strategy as aggressive as its military tactics, ISIS seeks to extend its influence around the world.
It has set its sights on winning support from members of the global al Qaeda network and it has created remotely directed outposts, wilayat as far away as Algeria and Libya.
ISIS intends not just to “remain” in Iraq and Syria, but to “expand” around the world, in the words of Baghdadi and other top leaders. In order to achieve this goal, it has projected its influence to potential recruits and hoped-for allies around the world using methods unlike any other extremist group. To understand how this projection works is to open a window on ISIS’s goals, beliefs, and its ultimate fate.
CHAPTER THREE
FROM VANGUARD TO SMART MOB
It was 1988, and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was entering its final days. International agreements had been signed and sealed, and the enemy forces slowly but inexorably withdrew. For ordinary Afghans, this prospect must have been a relief, a hopeful moment. Perhaps the long and costly war might finally end and some semblance of ordinary life finally return.
For the interlopers, it was a hopeful moment as well, but their desires were different. Foreign fighters, subscribed to a jihadist ideology, had flocked to the country by the thousands. They believed, not without some merit, that they had defeated one of the world’s two superpowers. But for their leaders, the end of fighting provided no relief. Their passions and hopes were stoked by the prospect that this war would not only continue but expand to encompass the world.
For their plan to work, secrecy was required. Although thousands had come to fight the Soviets in the first stage, part two would be different. Through August and September, small meetings of two to fifteen leaders of the “Arab Afghans” were convened in Peshawar, Pakistan, to lay down plans for the next generation of violent jihad.1
The new organization would consist of two groups, one with limited scope and wide membership, and one with more ambitious scope and limited membership. The broad group would consist of would-be foreign fighters and Islamic radicals from around the world. These would be trained in insurgent and terrorist tactics in Afghanistan, then sent forth into the world to pursue their own agendas—always remembering the relationships they had forged.
From this large pool, which would eventually sprawl into the tens of thousands, the “best brothers” would be invited into a more exclusive circle and indoctrinated into the overarching conspiracy to change the path of history. These men would form a small and tightly cohesive organization of elites, which they referred to as the military base, and later simply as the base—in Arabic the word was al qaeda.
At its inception, al Qaeda numbered just over three hundred men, and while the ranks would fluctuate over time, they rarely exceeded several hundred. In addition to those few hundred, its employees and allies numbered in the thousands. Members of the core group had to swear complete obedience (bayah) to the emir (Arabic for “prince”) of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. One of the terror group’s founding memos listed four requirements for becoming an al Qaeda member, in bullet-point format—two of them were obedience. (The other two were a personal referral from a trusted member of the inner circle and “good manners.”)
Al Qaeda was exclusive, but not isolationist. With a substantial sum of money drawn from Osama bin Laden’s deep pockets, it began to send tendrils around the world, financing and providing technical support to everything from a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines to the first World Trade Center bombing to the full-on war in Bosnia. Key al Qaeda members moved in and out of these activities. They played a critical role but were rarely the prime drivers of events. Al Qaeda guided and it supported, but it did not claim credit and it did not advertise its name.
Instead, al Qaeda was a vanguard movement, a cabal that saw itself as the elite intellectual leaders of a global ideological revolution that it would assist and manipulate. Al Qaeda would set the stage for a global Muslim revolution by priming the pump.
It trained skilled fighters and terrorists using a network of training camps, some that it owned directly and others that it financed or supplied.2 It funded the spread of propaganda and ideology, often relying on the work of high-profile clerics and scholars who were not obviously cogs of the core organization, such as the late Abdullah Azzam and Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheikh.”3 It facilitated and eventually directly committed terrorist attacks in order to teach the global community of Muslims, known in Arabic as the ummah, that it could fight back.
But like many other terrorist organizations, al Qaeda imagined the revolution would be a spontaneous happening. The function of terrorism was to awaken the sleeping masses and point them in the right direction.4 The masses would then rise up and more or less take matters into their own hands.
Through the 1990s, al Qaeda grew into a corporation, with a payroll and benefits department, and operatives who traveled around the world inserting themselves into local conflicts, either to assist radical movements on the ground or profit from them, as when it laundered money through Bosnian relief charities or trained members of a jihadist cell in the United States that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and tried to bomb New York City landmarks just weeks later.5
During this phase, it increasingly devoted assets to committing its own terrorist attacks, instead of acting through proxies. Its simultaneous truck bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 represented its most important move into this arena. By the end of the 1990s, bin Laden’s deep pockets were starting to show the strain of all this activity (helped along by some catastrophic business developments), and the organization regrouped in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, where its resources turned more and more toward spectacular terrorist attacks, culminating in terrible fashion on September 11, 2001.
Throughout this, al Qaeda remained the vanguard, the elite. It laid plans but did not broadcast them. After the embassy bombings and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, it came out of the closet with a feature-length propaganda video that showcased many of its key leaders and its very basic message of armed resistance.6
But the video’s simple problem/solution formulation did not offer al Qaeda as a political force, only as a paramilitary force multiplier for the hypothetical Muslim silent majority waiting to be mobilized.
Al Qaeda was the spark. The existence of gasoline was assumed.
The hoped-for spontaneous Muslim revolution did not emerge in the days and weeks that followed 9/11, but the attack thrust al Qaeda into its own sort of revolution—it would no longer lurk in the shadows, pulling strings from a remote enclave in Afghanistan. The terrorist organization was now one side in a full-fledged war, and with war came the necessity of politics.
Al Qaeda was slow to adapt, and it never fully assimilated the implications of the change in its role. Weeks turned into months, and no claim of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks or taunting challenge was forthcoming7 (a partially completed but unreleased video was later found on an al Qaeda hard d
rive).8 It released only a smattering of uninformative and uncompelling press statements and video clips.
It was as if bin Laden believed al Qaeda could somehow continue to act as the hidden hand after killing thousands of Americans in a single unforgettable spectacle (although the invasion of Afghanistan may have derailed possible plans to claim the attack). It took years for al Qaeda to begin fully exploiting the media-ready elements of September 11, although the response from Western news outlets helped fill the void.
Between its failure to plan and a failure to anticipate the fury of America’s response, al Qaeda was so slow off the mark with its messaging that the CIA beat it to the punch, airing an intercepted video featuring bin Laden discussing the planning for the attack before al Qaeda could even attempt to claim it.9
As the full force of the U.S. military descended on al Qaeda in Afghanistan, its ability to keep operations centralized began to decay almost immediately.
Al Qaeda had previously maintained operatives under its core organization in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, who were subjected to a severe crackdown in the wake of 9/11.10 While the group was semi-independent and intermingled with other jihadist communities dating back to the Soviet days, few policy makers and analysts saw reason to delineate between the Yemeni and Saudi branches and their parent. Each branch fell under attack, and both suffered serious losses.11
Beyond the Gulf, the core al Qaeda had resources and loose alliances around the world, most of which came under greater or lesser amounts of pressure in the months that followed. Al Qaeda adapted to this new reality, but it did not assimilate its implications.
RISE OF THE AFFILIATES
American media and scholarship tend to treat the affiliate system as if it were a robust, well-defined structure, rooted in history. In fact, it is barely a decade old, with much of its activity weighted toward the second half of that span, and its history is one of fractiousness from the start.
When America turned its full attention to al Qaeda in the wake of September 11, the result was like a fist smashing down on a ball of clay.
The terrorist organization was flattened and thinned, bent out of shape, and spread out over a wider area, as key personnel fled the onslaught in Afghanistan for points abroad, and operatives who were already in the field found themselves increasingly isolated.
Tight lines of control became attenuated. Orders had to travel more slowly, over longer and more exposed routes, to get from the central command to those who carried out the kinetic work of terrorism. Secondary nodes sprang up to mitigate the dragging response times, in which directives from on high could take weeks or months to arrive via courier, thanks to al Qaeda’s elaborate security precautions.
After the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, an existing group of Jordanian-influenced jihadists led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, one of the terror organization’s informal allies, directly began fighting United States forces (as discussed in Chapter 1). In 2004, Zarqawi pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden and renamed the group al Qaeda in Iraq, the first formal AQ affiliate under the franchise model.12
In 2007, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat announced it was joining al Qaeda and would henceforth be known as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).13 Other affiliates soon followed. In 2009, the survivors of the Yemen and Saudi branches announced they were merging to form al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).14 And in 2012, after years of being rebuffed by Osama bin Laden, Somalia’s al Shabab was accepted into the fold by Zawahiri.15
In April 2013, Jabhat al Nusra split from the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq to become al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate,16 and in September 2014, Zawahiri announced a new affiliate, al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, whose membership is still unclear but whose domain extends over geographical territory once considered the stomping ground of the core al Qaeda. A flurry of terrorist attacks soon followed in the new affiliate’s name.17
FROM TERRORISM TO INSURGENCY
The affiliate structure immediately began to shift al Qaeda’s focus away from global terrorism toward local insurgencies.
Under bin Laden, the terrorist group certainly had its hands in the insurgency business. For example, it had bankrolled, trained, and organized Muslim separatists in the Philippines into a fighting force that used terrorist tactics alongside open war in an effort to carve out an extreme Islamist political space in the island nation.18
Al Qaeda training camps had long focused on teaching military tactics, including many lifted from the U.S. Army. After training in Afghanistan, fighters might return to their home countries or be deployed to another conflict. In Bosnia, al Qaeda supported Egyptian radical networks in creating a division of foreign mujahideen to fight the Serbs, and it played a direct role in recruiting U.S. military veterans to serve both as trainers and soldiers.19
But these efforts, and others, were local conflicts with local combatants, and while al Qaeda’s role was important, it was also in some ways peripheral and in all cases covert. Mujahideen in Bosnia and the Caucasus and Kashmir and other hot spots did not fight under the name of al Qaeda, and if their leaders owed bin Laden great respect and deference, they did not owe him obedience. Al Qaeda was neither attributed as the cause of these conflicts, nor was it responsible for their outcomes.
Each new affiliate that joined al Qaeda after 9/11 was, to a greater or lesser extent, mounting an insurgency in its home region, and each was allocating far greater resources to such battles than to striking international targets with the elaborately planned terrorist plots that had become AQ’s trademark. When they ventured out with bombings and other civilian massacres, they often struck at geographic neighbors—the near enemy—rather than al Qaeda’s preferred symbolic targets in the West.
Of all the affiliates, AQAP was most directly controlled by al Qaeda Central, and it was the most active in plotting against the United States homeland. But while it quickly earned a reputation among policy makers and terrorism analysts as the “most dangerous” of the affiliates,20 perhaps even more than al Qaeda itself,21 the resources it allocated to terrorism were meager.
One would-be suicide bomber on a U.S.-bound plane succeeded in injuring only his private parts when his “underwear bomb” caught fire but did not detonate.22 An intercepted cargo plane bombing was done so cheaply—$4,200—that its frugality became the cover story in the branch’s English-language propaganda magazine, Inspire, rather than its lethality (casualties: zero).23
As the affiliate structure snapped into place, so too did an ideological current (bolstered by practical necessities) that further fractionalized the parent. Abu Musab al Suri, one of the most influential modern jihadist ideologues, outlined the case for decentralization in a 2005 book, A Call to a Global Islamic Resistance. One of the movement’s most important elites, he laid out a blueprint for al Qaeda’s obsolescence—leaderless resistance, in which the jihadi revolution would be carried forward by small cells who answered to no central authority.24
Leaderless resistance, essentially an optimistic idea that radicals would self-organize into independent cells and take violent action without direction, was not especially new. It was appealing to weak movements that faced significant external pressures without enjoying popular support. Leaderless resistance was urged on the white nationalist movement during the 1980s and 1990s by some of its most prominent ideologues, including Louis Beam and Tom Metzger,25 ultimately hastening that movement’s irrelevance as precious few volunteers stepped forward to risk prison without financial, technical, or even verbal support from a leadership figure.
For al Qaeda Central, this shift took the wind out of more than a decade of active, if selective, recruitment. Leaderless resistance is a tactic adopted when operational security concerns outweigh an organization’s desire for a steady influx of new blood and spectacular, highly sophisticated attacks.
While al Qaeda Central contracted under heavy pressure from drones, raids and military strikes, the affiliates grew, attracting new recruits to take part in
an increasingly militarized environment, one that al Qaeda was unsuited to lead. Supplying armies is very different from commanding them. Osama bin Laden had only minimal military experience; Ayman al Zawahiri had even less. As secure communication between the slow-moving core and its fast-moving satellites grew ever more difficult, centrifugal force began to degrade al Qaeda’s identity as a cohesive whole.
Al Qaeda was no longer a vanguard leadership movement, playing chess on the world stage with a variety of resources at its disposal. While still representing a radical fringe and a tiny minority of the world’s Muslims, the affiliates were gaining recruits and dragging al Qaeda, painfully, into the turbulent waters of populism.
THE AGE OF FITNA
With all these moving parts, it did not take long for the rumblings of fitna—an Arabic word referring to a period of internal dissent and infighting in Islamic history—to surface.
The new affiliate structure was inherently a field of land mines. Three of the affiliates—AQIM, al Shabab, and al Nusra—had their origins as splinter groups, the products of earlier waves of fitna, while AQAP was a merger between two badly damaged organizations. Although all four had some measure of al Qaeda influence in the DNA of their predecessor organizations (including shared personnel and Osama bin Laden’s money), their histories hardly recommended them as islands of stability.
ISIS Page 7