Although ISIS methodically shaped and manipulated its social media networks, it also benefited from this sort of self-organization. Small blended groups of ISIS members and supporters would take jobs upon themselves, including translating communiqués and propaganda into multiple languages and crafting armies of Twitter “bots”—scraps of code that mindlessly distributed its content and amplified its reach. In some ways, it was the realization of al Suri’s leaderless jihad, except that activity that appeared spontaneous could often be traced back to the organization’s social media team, which in turn coordinated with its leadership.
Meanwhile, back on the ground, ISIS had routed Iraqi government forces and seized a significant swath of northern Iraq,55 and it pushed its message out on social media at the same time and with similar aggression.
By mid-2014, its messaging machine was well oiled and effective. The differentiation from al Qaeda was sharp. Despite the occasional dud, the overall storytelling and production quality of ISIS video was often incredible, the likes of which had been rarely seen in propaganda of any kind, and certainly leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor’s often-sophisticated attempts.
ISIS benefited from the constant, lethal pressure on al Qaeda Central, which was forced to abandon its more ambitious media efforts in favor of sporadic talking-head releases. Ayman al Zawahiri was not a particularly strong orator to start with. His charms were not enhanced by a format that boiled down to him lecturing tediously while staring straight at a fixed camera for forty-five minutes.
But the change in content was even more striking. ISIS was offering something novel, dispensing with religious argumentation and generalized exhortation and emphasizing two seemingly disparate themes—ultraviolence and civil society. They were unexpectedly potent when combined and alternated.56
The ultraviolence served multiple purposes. In addition to intimidating its enemies on the ground (Iraqi troops who fled before the IS advance had reportedly been terrified by footage of mass execution of prisoners),57 ultraviolence sold well with the target demographic for foreign fighters—angry, maladjusted young men whose blood stirred at images of grisly beheadings and the crucifixion of so-called apostates.
But the emphasis on civil society, in videos and print productions, provided a valuable counterpoint and validation of the violence, offsetting its repulsion. ISIS would not shy away from whatever needed to be done, but its goal was to create a Muslim society with all the trappings—food aplenty, industry, banks, schools, health care, social services, pothole repair—even a nursing home with the insurgents’ unmistakable black flag draped over the walls.58
The narrative tracks ultimately advanced the same message—come to the Islamic State and be part of something.
Throughout its long history, al Qaeda never put forward such an open invitation. Following the model of a secret society, al Qaeda had created significant obstacles for would-be members, from the difficulty of even finding it to months of religious training that preceded battle. The ISIS message was exactly the opposite—you have a place here, if you want it, and we’ll put you to work on this exciting project just as soon as you show up (although in reality, some less radical recruits were quietly subjected to indoctrination anyway).
It was yet another lesson from Abu Bakr al Naji’s The Management of Savagery. The media campaign’s “specific target is to (motivate) crowds drawn from the masses to fly to the regions which we manage,” Al Naji wrote, as well as to demotivate or create apathy and inertia among who might oppose the establishment of the self-styled Islamic State.59
The vanguard was dead. The idea of a popular revolution had begun.
In the end, al Qaeda’s failure was the ironic failure of all vanguard movements—an assumption that the masses, once awakened, will not require close supervision, specific guidance, and a vision that extends beyond fighting.
Al Qaeda’s vision is—often explicitly—nihilistic.60 ISIS, for all its barbarity, is both more pragmatic and more utopian. Hand in hand with its tremendous capacity for destruction, it also seeks to build.
Most vanguard extremist movements paradoxically believe that ordinary people are afflicted with deep ignorance, yet such movements also expect that once their eyes have been opened, the masses will instinctively know what to do next.
ISIS does not take the masses for granted; its chain of influence extends beyond the elite, beyond its strategists and loyal fighting force, out into the world. Its propaganda is not simply a call to arms, it is also a call for noncombatants, men and women alike, to build a nation-state alongside the warriors, with a role for engineers, doctors, filmmakers, sysadmins, and even traffic cops.
It’s the opening act on a brave new world. It’s too soon to know how the invitation to the masses will be received, or even if ISIS will last long enough to find out. But win or lose, extremism will likely never be the same again.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FOREIGN FIGHTERS
In August 2014, ISIS marked Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, with a twenty-minute, high-definition video offering its greetings to the Muslim world.1
Gauzy images of smiling worshippers embracing at a mosque cut to children passing out sweets to break the Ramadan fast. Scenes of laughing children on the streets were interspersed with scenes of the muhajireen (Arabic for “emigrants”)—British, Finnish, Indonesian, Moroccan, Belgian, American, and South African—each repeating a variation on the same message.
“I’m calling on all the Muslims living in the West, America, Europe, and everywhere else, to come, to make hijra with your families to the land of Khilafah,” said a Finnish fighter of Somali descent. “Here, you go for fighting and afterwards you come back to your families. And if you get killed, then . . . you’ll enter heaven, God willing, and Allah will take care of those you’ve left behind. So here, the caliphate will take care of you.”
Hijra is an Arabic word meaning “emigration,” evoking the Prophet Muhammad’s historic escape from Mecca, where assassins were plotting to kill him, to Medina. Abdullah Azzam, the father of the modern jihadist movement, defined hijra as departing from a land of fear to a land of safety, a definition he later amplified to include the act of leaving one’s land and family to take up jihad in the name of establishing an Islamic state. For most Islamic extremists today, the concepts of hijra and jihad are intimately linked. (See the appendix for a fuller discussion.)2
As the video continued, an Islamic religious chant known as a nasheed played over and over again, its chanted lyrics emphasizing the video’s message.
Our state was established upon Islam,
and although it wages jihad against the enemies,
it governs the affairs of the people.
It looks after its flock with love and patience.
It does so carefully, and thereby does not receive any censure.
The Shariah of our Lord is light, by it we rise over the stars.
By it, we live without humiliation, a life of peace and security.
As the verse about peace and security played for the first of several times in the video, the camera focused on a child holding a realistic-looking submachine gun.3
A few months later, the Eid video’s sidelong references to fighting and jihad were placed in a much starker contrast, in a release that again focused on ISIS’s substantial foreign fighter contingent.
In a procession were a long line of foreign fighters, each guiding with his left hand a prisoner identified as a Syrian soldier. They walked up to a bin containing serrated daggers, each fighter taking one with his right hand. There were at least seventeen fighters and as many prisoners. Many of the fighters, emphasized by the camera angles, were white-skinned Europeans. Only one wore a mask, the British fighter known as “Jihadi John,” who had executed James Foley and other American and European hostages.
The camera lingered on the knives and the terrified prisoners for long, long seconds before the fighters began to hack through the necks of their victims. The video
was intensely graphic, showing parts of the executions in slow motion and lingering over each horrific detail.
After, the camera played over the faces of the executioners, ensuring that the foreign fighters were clearly visible and sparking a rush to identify them. Media reports identified the perpetrators as French, German, British, Danish, and Australian citizens, although some of these claims were tentative.4
The contrast between these two scenes could not be more stark, and it highlights the two most important elements of ISIS’s aggressive campaign to recruit fighters and supporters from around the world.
ISIS propaganda and messaging is disproportionately slanted toward foreign fighters, both in its content and its target audience. Important ISIS messages are commonly released simultaneously in English, French, and German, then later translated into other languages, such as Russian, Indonesian, and Urdu.
“Foreign fighters are overrepresented, it seems, among the perpetrators of the Islamic State’s worst acts,” said Thomas Hegghammer, a leading scholar of jihadist history, in an interview with BillMoyers.com. “So they help kind of radicalize the conflict—make it more brutal. They probably also make the conflict more intractable, because the people who come as foreign fighters are, on average, more ideological than the typical Syrian rebel.”5
Of course, Syrian and Iraqi allies of ISIS, often initially motivated by pragmatic local concerns, may be equally vulnerable to radicalization in such a volatile environment, and local participants are also represented in ISIS’s ultraviolent propaganda. But because of ISIS’s outsize emphasis on publicizing foreign fighters while restricting the flow of information from independent sources, clear evidence is less abundant.
HOW MANY FIGHTERS?
One of the most important questions about the threat presented by ISIS, and the conflict in Syria and Iraq in general, is numerical: How many foreign fighters are there, where do they come from, and what will they do after fighting?
Unfortunately, the question is nearly impossible to answer with any kind of specificity, due to the dangers that ISIS presents for journalists and intelligence operatives on the ground. It’s difficult enough to accurately assess the total size of ISIS’s fighting force, let alone break it down into demographic components.
In the open-source world, there are only estimates, and the situation does not appear to be much better in the world of secret intelligence. While anecdotal information on foreign fighters exists in abundance, no one claims to be able to see the whole picture.
In October 2013, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty published a compilation of data on all foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria, drawn from multiple sources.6 The data broke down according to country of origin, and included both high and low estimates from the various sources. The fighters counted came from all jihadi groups in the region, not just ISIS.
REF/RL found between 17,000 and 19,000 fighters, with about 32 percent originating in Europe (including Turkey). The majority of fighters identified in the data originated in the Middle East and North Africa, with the greatest numbers coming from Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. The remainder came in smaller numbers from other places around the world, including former Soviet republics, the Americas, and Australia.
The nature of the data set provides multiple challenges in creating a clear picture of the foreign fighter phenomenon. Three-quarters of the country estimates came from studies by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, based at King’s College London, without reference to when the estimates were compiled. The majority of the remaining country estimates were taken from a mix of journalistic reports and government estimates by source countries, involving different methodologies.
Many of the estimates that were available for the RFE/RL report are likely too low. For instance, the report cited “3,000 plus” for Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, the two largest contributors from the Middle East and North Africa. In an interview with Al Arabiya, a source based in the ISIS foreign-fighter stronghold of Raqqa said fighters from both countries received preferential treatment and leadership positions. Chechen fighters, renowned for their viciousness and military skills, were also highly valued.7
More problematic, numbers were unavailable for several countries known to have provided fighters, including Azerbaijan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Somalia.
In general, foreign fighter estimates from both government sources and news reports are often unclear as to whether fighters were affiliated with ISIS and whether the estimates pertain only to Syria or to Iraq and Syria.
Government-provided estimates are especially problematic, given the closed nature of intelligence reporting and the political considerations accompanying disclosure.
In October 2014, FBI director James Comey told CBS News’ 60 Minutes that an estimated “dozen or so” Americans had joined ISIS. In November 2014, a government official speaking off the record told us that more than one hundred Americans had traveled to Syria to fight over the entire course of the conflict, including those who had returned, matching a previous estimate that we believe to be considerably too low.
The day after that interview, Comey told reporters that 150 Americans had traveled to Syria “in recent months.” Earlier news reports citing unnamed government sources said there were “several hundred American passport holders running around with ISIS.”8 In earlier interviews, Comey also suggested that whatever number he provided was likely too low. These wild inconsistencies lead us to question the usefulness of any such official estimates.9
Based on both social network analysis and anecdotal observation of comments by foreign fighters on social media, we believe that as of this writing, a minimum of 30 to 40 Americans are currently affiliated with jihadists in Syria and Iraq, in both fighting and noncombat capacities, and we estimate that well over a dozen are currently affiliated with ISIS. This figure represents what we can confidently assess from open sources, meaning the real figure is certainly higher, possibly by a wide margin.10
For the United Kingdom, similar disclaimers apply, but the range of estimates is much higher, especially on a per capita basis. In August, the United Kingdom estimated to reporters that 500 British citizens were affiliated with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, with another 250 who may have returned. It is unclear whether the returnees are still affiliated with ISIS, but reports indicate it is difficult to simply leave the organization.11 Dramatically higher estimates began to circulate toward the end of 2014.12 British ISIS members were significantly more numerous and visible than Americans on social media platforms, in our observations.13
French- and German-speaking fighters have also been observed in large numbers on social media, and low-end estimates point to more than 550 fighters from Germany, and more than 1,000 from France. From the West, significant numbers of Canadian fighters also made their presence known on social media, although like Americans, many of them kept a lower profile.14
A typical jihadi foreign fighter is a male between 18 and 29 years old, according to a study by the Soufan Group, although there are many exceptions. Some are well over 30, and it is not uncommon to see fighters between 15 and 17.
Beyond age and gender, there are few consistent patterns and no reliable profile of who is likely to become a foreign fighter, but among Western recruits, a disproportionate number of converts can typically be found. (Converts are often especially vulnerable to fundamentalist ideas, often combining wild enthusiasm with a lack of knowledge about their new religion, making them susceptible to recruiters.) This approximate profile has endured for decades, through multiple jihadist conflicts.15
WHY JOIN?
Why do individuals travel abroad to take part in somebody else’s violent conflict, a markedly different behavior from taking part in a conflict that involves one’s home community?
There is no single pathway, no common socioeconomic background, not even a common religious upbringing among individuals attracted to foreign fighting in general or jihadist fighting in particular.
“Four decades of psychological research on who becomes a terrorist and why hasn’t yet produced any profile,” according to John Horgan, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who has studied the subject intensively. While efforts to generalize the problem have failed, he says, it is possible to understand some pathways for individuals.16
A variety of studies, using different frameworks and concepts, have approached the question of why people join violent extremist groups. Many of these boil down to a distinction between external and internal motives.
External motives have to do with an individual’s perception of large-scale events in the world. While many analysts and policy makers have pointed to factors such as weak states, education, and social and economic disadvantage as external motivating factors, among those who study extremism in depth there is little consensus and much dispute on the importance of these factors.
More often than not, the external factors cited by extremists themselves point toward the importance of much more specific situations, for instance, a military conflict or genocidal campaign, usually but not always involving victims from a potential recruit’s identity group.
Jihadist propaganda has often relied on exactly these flashpoints, such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the genocide in Bosnia, using them as a point of entry to leverage narratives about the event, characterizing participation as not only a reasonable choice, but an obvious moral obligation. Indeed, jihadi ideologues often focus on the obligation of individual jihad when some or all of the ummah, or the Muslim nation, is under threat.17
But these flashpoints do not necessarily provide adequate motivation on their own merits. They offer outlets, either for social pressures in a fighter’s native land or for his own internal struggles and dilemmas.
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