ISIS

by Jessica Stern

  Internal motives stem from what an individual wants or needs for himself, in terms of the perceived benefits of membership in an extremist group, such as a feeling of belonging, escape into a new identity, adventure, or money. Foreign fighters have personal needs that are met by joining an organization, and those personal needs may become more important over time.

  “They want to find something meaningful for their life,” in the words of John Horgan. “Some are thrill-seeking, some are seeking redemption.”18

  According to Scott Atran, Western volunteers are often in transitional stages in their lives. They are often “immigrants, students, between jobs or girlfriends . . . looking for new families of friends and fellow travelers. For the most part they have no traditional religious education and are ‘born again’ into a radical religious vocation through the appeal of militant jihad.”19

  Social acceptance and reinforcement is also an important factor. Atran’s research found that three out of four foreign fighters in Syria traveled together with others, a figure consistent with previous studies on the subject.20

  Traditionally, jihadist fighters have found internal motivation in the promise of perceived religious rewards such as entry into heaven and the benefits that promise includes, such as the much-discussed seventy-two virgins (the role of religion is emphasized in Atran’s research).

  But for many, perhaps most, jihadists, religious motivations are necessary but not sufficient to explain the leap to violent action. Some mix of political sentiment, religious belief, and personal circumstance is required. Parsimonious explanations, which focus only on single external factors, whether religious or political, cannot explain why one sibling becomes a jihadist and another a doctor. Clearly, something happens that makes an individual willing to risk his or her life for a cause.

  During the course of the civil war in Syria, the balance of internal and external factors has shifted over time. At the start of the conflict, a diverse coalition of imported religious fighters and secular Syrian rebels united loosely around the goal of overthrowing the oppressive Assad regime. For the jihadists, a longer-term goal was the establishment of a state governed by Islamic law, but the initial focus for most combatants was on fighting the regime. In the wake of ISIS’s rise, according to research by Peter Neumann, Scott Atran, and others, that goal has shifted noticeably to establishing Shariah law and supporting the institution of the caliphate, regardless of the wishes of the local Syrian population.21

  With the emergence of large numbers of foreign fighters on social media, providing a conversational and continual commentary on the conflict, internal motivations soon came to the fore, and they went beyond the promise of heaven. While few would dispute the importance of religious allure in attracting fighters to the field, the conversation online frequently turned to the theme of fun and adventure.

  British fighters, for instance, often posted pictures and stories about their day-to-day experiences. One of them, twenty-three-year-old Ifthekar Jaman, coined the phrase “five-star jihad” to describe the fun he was having fighting in Syria, which caught on as a rallying cry to his countrymen, who showed up in ever-increasing numbers. (Jaman was killed in December 2013.)22

  A number of “celebrity” fighters upped the ante. One of the most popular was a former Dutch soldier named Yilmaz, who helped train mujahideen fighters with various factions in Syria. He documented his Syrian experience with a wealth of photographs, posted on Instagram under the name “chechclear,” a reference to a gruesome video of Chechen insurgents beheading a Russian soldier in the 1990s.

  As chechclear, he documented the war itself, posting pictures of battles and fighters, but also images of the people of Syria, including children, and seemingly incongruous snapshots of jihadists cuddling with cats, all of the photos enhanced by the photographic filters that helped make Instagram so popular.23

  Yilmaz and other fighters also took to sites such as Ask.fm, a social media platform oriented around answering questions from other users. Questioners often asked how to donate to fighting groups or how they could get to Syria themselves, which fighters answered with greater or lesser amounts of specificity.

  “I will personally assist you insha’Allah,” Ifthekar Jaman told one questioner on Ask.fm. “But know this, if you are a spy, when you are caught, your punishment will be with little or no mercy.”24

  Others asked what to expect if they joined, querying everything from food choices to bathroom facilities to what sort of gear they should pack.

  “Cargo pants (combat trousers), 511 brand is good,” wrote Abu Turab, a twenty-five-year-old American who had drifted among fighting groups. “I have Old Navy, lol, but water-resistant stuff is the best. Don’t hesitate to buy expensive stuff, for you’re spending as [an act of worship]. Jackets and boots, try to buy GORE-TEX.”25

  The rise of violent infighting among jihadist factions in early 2013 and the subsequent disavowal of ISIS by al Qaeda put a significant damper on the five-star jihad. On social media, an explosion of discontent emerged as the focus of the conflict irrevocably shifted from fighting the Assad regime to a battle for supremacy among the mujahideen. Although combat with the regime continued, the infighting among the rebels racked the conscience of many participants.

  “Have you forgotten your enemies who have destroyed a part of the Ummah?” one fund-raiser tweeted. “They are the people [you’re] fighting, the KAFIRS [unbelievers], not MUSLIMS.”

  Others were alarmed at the effect this would have on potential recruits.

  “Many will avoid hijra because of what just happened,” one tweeted mournfully.

  An Indonesian fighter was at a loss to answer a potential recruit who privately messaged him to say he feared he would be killed by his fellow Muslims.

  “I don’t know how to answer this Muslim brother from Morocco who planned to join ISIS with me,” he tweeted plaintively.26

  But ISIS was already moving to provide a new answer to the question: “Why join?” With the rollout of its plans for a caliphate in mid-2014, the focus shifted to promoting a sense of inclusion, belonging, and purpose in its demented utopia.

  FOREIGNERS IN ISIS

  With the declaration of its “caliphate” in July 2014, ISIS began to enhance and amplify themes relating to the society it wanted to create.

  While these ideas had already been present in its propaganda, the declaration of the caliphate had a dimension that went beyond simply showing ISIS in its best light. The new focus reflected a mandate given by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in his first speech as putative caliph:

  “O Muslims everywhere, whoever is capable of performing hijrah (emigration) to the Islamic State, then let him do so, because hijrah to the land of Islam is obligatory,” Baghdadi said. “We make a special call to the scholars, [Islamic legal experts] and callers, especially the judges, as well as people with military, administrative, and service expertise, and medical doctors and engineers of all different specializations and fields.” For these professionals, as well as for fighters, emigration was a religious obligation, he said.

  In July 2014, ISIS’s Al Hayat Media Center released an eleven-minute video that drove this point home. Titled “The Chosen Few of Different Lands,” the video showed a Canadian fighter named Andre Poulin, a white convert known to his comrades as Abu Muslim. It was a masterpiece of extremist propaganda.27

  The video opened with stunning high-definition stock footage of Canada (or a reasonable facsimile) as Poulin described his life back home.

  “I was like your everyday regular Canadian before Islam,” he said. “I had money, I had family. I had good friends.”

  The barbaric nature of ISIS can lead observers to conclude its adherents are simplistic, violent, and stupid. “The Chosen Few” displayed a keen self-awareness of this perception and actively argued against it, with Poulin as its telegenic exemplar.

  “It wasn’t like I was some social outcast,” Poulin said. “It wasn’t like I was some anarchist, or somebody who just wa
nts to destroy the world and kill everybody. No, I was a very good person, and you know, mujahideen are regular people too. . . . We have lives, just like any other soldier in any other army. We have lives outside of our job.”

  Life had been good in Canada, Poulin said, but he realized he could not live in an infidel state, paying taxes that were used “to wage war on Islam.”

  In reality, Poulin was not quite the model of social integration that he portrayed on film. He developed an interest in explosives early and had dabbled in Communism and anarchism before settling on radical Islam as an outlet for his interests. He had been arrested at least twice for threatening violence against the husband of a man whose wife he was sleeping with. These facts were conveniently omitted from his hagiography.28

  In the video, Poulin said ISIS needed more than just fighters.

  “We need engineers, we need doctors, we need professionals,” he said. “We need volunteers, we need fund-raisers.” They needed people who could build houses and work with technology. “There is a role for everybody.”

  A narrator gave a brief account of Poulin’s life, with pictures, which concluded with an action sequence showing him taking part in an attack on a Syrian military air base in Minnigh. Shot in high definition, the footage was remarkable, depicting Poulin rushing toward the enemy, highlighted among his fellow combatants using sophisticated digital techniques. Poulin was clearly visible in action, running out in front of his comrades until he was struck down in a massive explosion. After, his dead body was shown sprawled on the ground and later being prepared for burial.

  “He answered the call of his Lord and surrendered his soul without hesitation, leaving the world behind him,” said a narrator in perfect, unaccented English. “Not out of despair and hopelessness, but rather with certainty of Allah’s promise.”

  At the end, Poulin spoke again, his visage filtered in a gauzy light.

  “Put Allah before everything,” he said.

  The “whole society” pitch had been presaged for some months. ISIS supporters on social media tweeted Photoshopped images of an “Islamic State” passport, for instance. Their enthusiasm for these tokens of future legitimacy was, at times, reminiscent of a child trying on his father’s shoes, pretending to be grown up.

  But as ISIS cemented its control of territory in Iraq and Syria, such images took on an increasingly material reality, albeit presented through carefully filtered glimpses. Each of ISIS’s provinces issued a steady stream of images showing the infrastructure of government taking form—police cars and uniforms emblazoned with the black flag, markets overflowing with food.

  ISIS selectively amplified its nation-building efforts, but it did not entirely fabricate them. While some of its outreach involved active image management, some parts were pragmatic, such as its offer of handsome salaries for engineers able to maintain the oil fields on which ISIS relies for black-market income.29

  In November 2014, ISIS announced it would mint its own currency in keeping with the “prophetic method,” posting images of the new coins to Twitter. ISIS military uniforms in Mosul sported black patches with white writing in Arabic citing its adherence to the “prophetic method.” As Will McCants of the Brookings Institution wrote, this “nightmarish bureaucracy” was intended to invoke echoes of Islamic prophecies related to the end times (see Chapter 10).30

  But all of this also provided important markers of stability and substance. The stark black flag, which had come to be emblematic of ISIS’s fighting force, was not just a symbol of war, the images argued wordlessly. It was the symbol of a society; no distant dream, but a living, breathing institution waiting to be populated by the believers.

  In an intelligence environment where credible estimates were unavailable on critical issues such as the size of ISIS’s fighting force, or even just that force’s foreign component, information on noncombatant emigration was sparser still. But one element of that campaign was sensational enough to grab the headlines—ISIS’s recruitment of women.

  THE WOMEN’S BRIGADES

  Many of ISIS’s most vocal and visible supporters online are women. Analysis of social networks linked to ISIS on Twitter found hundreds of users identifying themselves as women and actively spreading the organization’s message.31

  The leader of this online recruiting effort was a veteran of online agitation using variations on the online username “al Khansa’a.” The name corresponded to a female poet who was among the earliest converts to Islam in the days of the Prophet, known for ordering her sons into battle on behalf of Islam. All four died. “I feel proud to be the mother of martyrs,” she is famously reputed to have said.32

  Al Khansa’a had been active on al Qaeda–linked forums well before ISIS’s rise. Among members of the forum community, she was an early adopter of social media, opening a Twitter account under the handle @al_khansaa2 in September 2012, as well as establishing a presence on Facebook and other channels.

  She was not only an influential figure; she was also well-connected to other al Qaeda users, actively participating in networks connected to AQAP and al Shabab, with a special interest in connecting other female jihadist supporters to each other and to the broader al Qaeda network.33

  Al Khansa’a was also ahead of the curve with her allegiances, defecting to ISIS at the outbreak of the fitna (infighting) with al Qaeda. At first, she was heavily engaged in the heated battles that fired up between top jihadist forum members, but as the weeks passed, she transitioned into a new role—leading an online “brigade” that shared her name and was devoted to recruiting women to join ISIS.34

  Aqsa Mahmood is another of the many women now tirelessly working to recruit foreigners to join ISIS. As a teenager growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, she turned away from a typical, seemingly happy life spent consuming young adult novels and rock music and toward an increasingly militant outlook on the world and on her Muslim heritage, a sharp break from her family’s views.

  Mahmood documented her transformation with all the enthusiasm a teenager can bring to bear on her Tumblr blog, describing a swift transition from a mainly secular lifestyle into radicalism, noting her family’s disapproval along the way and sometimes laughing it off.

  “My parents genuinely think I’m extremist,” she wrote.

  Instead, she wrote in March 2013, her online friends—steeped in Salafist interpretations of Islam and the horror of the emerging Syrian civil war—were “the new family.”35 She immersed herself in ever-more radical content from YouTube, Tumblr, and other online sources, citing al Qaeda–linked clerics such as Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi and Abu Yahya al Libi as “my men of haqq (truth).”36

  “I just want to make hijrah ok,” she typed.37

  Throughout 2013, her content turned more and more to openly jihadist ruminations and the growing obligation she felt to be involved in the struggle in Syria. In November, now nineteen, she abruptly bid her horrified family farewell.

  “I will see you on the day of judgment. I will take you to heaven, I will hold your hand,” her father recounted her saying. “I want to become a martyr.”

  She traveled to Turkey and from there to Syria, where she joined ISIS and married a Tunisian fighter.38 From Aleppo, she kept up her online activities, using Twitter and Tumblr to encourage others to follow her example.

  “And to those who are able and can still make your way, please [fear Allah] and don’t delay anymore, hasten hasten hasten to our lands and live in [honor],” she tweeted.39

  Uncounted other young women like Mahmood were lured to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, including hundreds of Westerners and many more from Arabic-speaking countries.

  “Most foreign girls will be married off to foreign fighters upon their arrival,” wrote Mia Bloom, a leading expert in the role of women in jihadist movements. “In fact, many are offered up as a form of compensation to the men fighting for al Baghdadi.”40

  Two teenage girls from Vienna, Austria, ages fifteen and sixteen, discovered this reality immediately after
they left home to travel to Raqqa, Syria, where they were promptly married off to Chechen fighters. They reportedly became pregnant almost immediately and wrote to their families to say they wanted to come home, but there was no escape for them. Austrian police sources quoted in a British tabloid said the girls’ social media accounts were taken over by other ISIS members, who sent a stream of happy messages encouraging others like them to make hijra.41

  For some, on their arrival in Syria, the virtual al Khansa’a Brigade transformed into a physical reality. The bricks-and-mortar al Khansa’a Brigade was a grim counterpoint to the illusion that its namesake sold online, according to one Syrian woman who defected from ISIS. In an interview with CNN, she described joining the brigade in Raqqa, Syria, where many ISIS foreign fighters were concentrated.

  The defector, referred to as Khadija to protect her identity, told a jarring story of a women’s squad of morality police, who whipped women seen on the streets wearing anything that did not measure up to ISIS’s rigid ideal of female modesty.

  The punishments were meted out by a woman Khadija knew as Umm Hamza (umm is Arabic for “mother of,” and is used as a kunya, a form of alias, by female jihadists in a manner similar to how abu, Arabic for “father of,” is used by males).

  “She’s not a normal female. She’s huge, she has an AK, a pistol, a whip, a dagger and she wears the niqab,” Khadija told CNN.42

  Khadija was initially seduced by the power of her position, but over time the grinding horror of life under ISIS’s rule began to take a toll. She witnessed crucifixions and brutal beheadings. As the commander of her brigade tried to push her toward marriage, she was increasingly alarmed by the domestic and sexual violence she saw ISIS wives endure.

  “I started to get scared, scared of my situation,” she said. “I even started to be afraid of myself.” She was smuggled to Turkey before she could be given to a husband.