ISIS’s bid to build a society didn’t stop at the recruitment of women, however. Foreigners were encouraged to bring their whole families to Iraq and Syria to “live under the shade of the caliphate.”
In November 2014, ISIS released a video introducing “some of our newest brothers from Kazakhstan,” who had “responded to the crusader aggression with their hijra and raced to prepare themselves and their children.” The video showed dozens of smiling boys, the sons of a unit of Kazakh fighters, clambering into a bus and going to a schoolroom described as “the ultimate base for raising tomorrow’s mujahideen.”43
“We spent our childhood far away from this blessing,” their Kazakh teacher explained. “We were raised on the methodology of atheism. . . . The kuffar (unbelievers) poisoned our minds. . . . Our children are happy. They’re living in the shade of the Quran and Sunnah.”
Another teacher was shown supervising a class of pre-teenage boys in uniforms.
“They’ve completed lessons in Quran, [proper recitation of the Quran], and the Arabic language,” he said. “They will move on to do physical and military training.”
The scene shifted to show a Kazakh boy of perhaps nine combat-stripping an assault rifle, then training with others in its use. The physical training included hand-to-hand combat and calisthenics. At the end of the day, a member of ISIS’s media team questioned one of the students.
“What will you be in the future, if God wills it?” the interviewer asked.
“I will be the one who slaughters you, oh kuffar,” the boy responded with a grin pointed at the camera. “I will be a mujahid, if God wills it.” One ten-year-old boy from the video was depicted in a subsequent release as executing two prisoners.
Such videos and images are far from rare. ISIS members on social media routinely post images on social media of children holding severed heads and playing on streets where dismembered bodies are splayed carelessly on the sidewalk. One image posted to Twitter showed a child playacting the beheading of American hostage James Foley using a doll.44
A UN report on war crimes in Syria pointed to the indoctrination of children as a “vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty” and creating a “cadre of fighters that will see violence as a way of life.” While children have often been victims of such manipulation in war zones, ISIS approached their “education” as it did almost everything else—systematically.
“This is not a marginal phenomenon. This is something that is being observed and seems to be part of the strategy of the group,” Leila Zerrougui, the UN special representative for children and armed conflict, told the Associated Press.45
For many families, of course, the reality of life under the Islamic State does not match the idyllic picture painted in ISIS propaganda. Some of the uncounted families who have moved to ISIS territory in Syria reported conditions deteriorating throughout 2014 as the organization came under increasing external pressure. In the most important cities under ISIS control, Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, electricity is reportedly limited, with garbage lying in the streets for days. In Mosul, a shortage of chlorine has rendered the water dangerously undrinkable, and ISIS has cut off most communications to the outside world in its effort to suppress news about the reality on the ground.46
LEFT BEHIND
The potent projection of ISIS’s “caliphate” exerted a gravitational pull on vulnerable people around the world, but not all of these individuals entered its orbit. Some were unable to travel to the Middle East, thwarted by personal circumstance, external obstacles, or lack of imagination. Denied participation in the ISIS project abroad, some chose to participate at home, through acts of violence.
ISIS had been born out of al Qaeda, a traditional terrorist group, transforming itself into a formidable insurgency with substantial territory under its control. But its apocalyptic plan had always included a confrontation with the West, and it had stretched its influence out both virtually and physically in preparation for a new phase of war.
The threat took a variety of forms. In some cases, individuals living in the West acted on their own initiative. In others, ISIS operatives guided their actions, either remotely over social media or in person, using returned foreign fighters and other operatives abroad.
By March 2014, when few in the West were even contemplating an intervention in Iraq or Syria, ISIS already had operatives working on mayhem. In Switzerland, authorities disrupted a terrorist cell, led by three ISIS recruiters, which was in the midst of plotting a terrorist attack using explosives and poison gas. The arrests were kept quiet for months as Swiss authorities searched for additional conspirators.47
In May, a French citizen of Algerian descent named Mehdi Nemmouche shot and killed four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium before fleeing the scene. When he was arrested, in a railway station in France days later, police found in his luggage a video featuring the ISIS flag and claiming responsibility for the attack. Further investigation revealed that Nemmouche was a returned foreign fighter. A French hostage who had been imprisoned with James Foley and Steven Sotloff subsequently identified Nemmouche as one of his jailers.48
In Malaysia, nineteen alleged ISIS supporters were arrested between April and June 2014, accused of planning to bomb places where alcohol was served or brewed.49
In June 2014, President Obama announced the United States would increase its troop presence in Iraq to protect U.S. personnel, and on August 7 he informed the world that he had ordered air strikes against ISIS targets to slow its military advances and protect the beleaguered Yazidi minority in Iraq, which faced an imminent genocide. The pace of ISIS’s “external operations”—terrorist plots and attacks—picked up significantly.
The incidents took a number of forms. In mid-August, a nineteen-year-old British citizen was arrested on a London street carrying a knife, a hammer, and the flag of ISIS. He was charged with preparing a terrorist act.50 In France, two teenage girls—ages fifteen and seventeen—were arrested for planning to bomb a synagogue in Lyon, part of a network of Islamic radicals online, although reports did not specify ISIS.51 In September, Australian police arrested fifteen people in a series of police raids to prevent a plot to randomly behead Australian citizens and wrap their bodies in the ISIS flag for public display. The plan was directed over the phone by an Australian ISIS recruiter based in Syria.52
On September 21, ISIS’s chief spokesman, Abu Muhammad al Adnani, called for supporters around the world to rise up and respond to Western-led air strikes by carrying out attacks against any citizen of a country that belonged to the coalition against ISIS.
Do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the [unbelievers]. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European—especially the spiteful and filthy French—or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be. Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling. Both of them are disbelievers. . . .
If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him. . . . If you are unable to do so, then burn his home, car, or business. Or destroy his crops. If you are unable to do so, then spit in his face.53
The same day that the speech was released, Algerian terror group Jund al Khilafah, which had split from AQIM and thrown its support behind ISIS months earlier, kidnapped a French hiker and immediately issued a video threatening to behead him if the French government cont
inued to support Western air strikes against ISIS. On September 24, it issued a second video, fulfilling its threat on camera.54
Short days later, an eighteen-year-old stabbed two Australian police officers he was scheduled to meet with after his passport had been suspended. The officers survived. The teen’s Facebook page was filled with ISIS material.55
On October 20, twenty-five-year-old Martin Couture-Rouleau drove a car into two Canadian soldiers in a parking lot in St.-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, then jumped out of the vehicle with a large knife. Police killed him before any more mayhem could occur. Couture-Rouleau had tried to leave Canada to go to Syria, but his passport was suspended because he had come to the attention of authorities. The Quebecois’s social network on Twitter was filled with French-speaking ISIS members and supporters.56
Two days later, thirty-two-year-old Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed a soldier at a war memorial in Ottawa, Ontario, adjacent to the Canadian Parliament, then stormed the legislature, making his way into the building before being shot and killed by police. He had made a video condemning Canada’s foreign policy. He had applied for a passport to travel to Syria, but his application was under investigation at the time of the attack. ISIS supporters online obtained a distributed image of the killer and celebrated the attack.57
And just one day after that, a thirty-two-year old American, Zale Thompson, attacked two New York City policemen on patrol with a hatchet. Thompson, who was killed by police, reportedly consumed jihadist content online, although other reports suggested a scattered fixation on a wider range of issues.58
It was a remarkable string of so-called lone wolf attacks.59 For years, al Qaeda had been encouraging such attacks with only rare successes, spread out over months and years. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was especially persistent in promoting such attacks in its English-language magazine, Inspire, widely distributed online, but it had racked up only a handful of debatable successes over its four years of publication, along with a somewhat larger number of failed attempts.60 In contrast, ISIS had inspired three successful attacks within a span of days. In November, ISIS later took credit for all three, as well as the earlier incident in Australia.
“All these attacks were the direct result of [Adnani’s] call to action, and they highlight what a deadly tinderbox is fizzing just beneath the surface of every western country, waiting to explode into violent action at any moment given the right conditions,” stated an article published under the name of a British prisoner of ISIS who had been co-opted into the role of spokesman (see Chapter 5).61 More attacks in the name of ISIS soon followed in December, including a hostage situation in Sydney, Australia.62
In addition to the “lone wolf” threat, the question of returning fighters loomed large in the minds of Western security services. Returning fighters, like Nemmouche, were arrested in countries from Norway to Luxembourg to Indonesia, with many being detected in Europe, and certainly more still who escaped detection.63
In 2015, the terror threat in Europe began to heat up. A series of lone-wolf attacks inspired by ISIS in France in December and January (including stabbings and hit-and-runs) had been capped by an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula assault on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. An ISIS supporter associated with the attackers also jumped in to attack police while they searched for the first team. More than a dozen people were killed, and European governments began a massive crackdown, rolling up returned ISIS fighters and other jihadists in a sweep that was ongoing as this book went to press.64
These cases broke down into two distinct challenges. First, there were unrepentant fighters who returned either of their own accord or at the direction of ISIS, presenting a very high risk that they would carry out terrorist attacks on behalf of the group. For intelligence and law enforcement agencies, it was imperative to detect and interdict such active operatives.
The second challenge was more confounding. As the conflict wore on, reports began to grow about foreign fighters who had become disenchanted with the conflict and wanted to return home.65 It was in the interest of Western governments to see radicals disengage with their extremist causes, but it was impossible to know for certain who was sincere and who presented a risk of future terrorism.
Some fighters might be lured by an offer of a deal for cooperation, but these almost always involved significant prison time. And while a fighter might be disillusioned with the cause or the experience, he might still dislike Western policies and be disinclined to turn on his former friends. Denmark launched a deradicalization initiative for former fighters, and other countries were considering similar programs, but such efforts were plagued by broad, unanswered questions about their effectiveness and the risks that they incurred.66
Additionally, there was a difficult question of accountability. Justice demanded that there be consequences for crimes, particularly the horrific war crimes and atrocities carried out under the banner of the so-called Islamic State. To incentivize defections, was it necessary to allow some crimes to go unanswered? Western policy makers were paralyzed by the complexity of these issues and a dearth of research on disengagement and deradicalization.67
And even on topics where research was available, such as the risk of terrorism among former foreign fighters, it was unclear whether past trends would continue in light of the new dynamics of ISIS.
A 2013 study by Thomas Hegghammer found that relatively few Western jihadist fighters had taken up terrorism upon leaving the battlefield, over the history of the movement.68 But the percentages were still significant enough to make foreign fighting one of the few reliable indicators of future terrorism risk, at least compared to any other criteria. And, Hegghammer found, the presence of former fighters in a terrorist plot increased the chance a plot would be successful and significantly increased the lethality of a terrorist attack.
The percentages, combined with the soaring numbers of foreign fighters in Syria generally, and in ISIS specifically, pointed to an increased risk of terrorism that could linger for years.
Another important variable raised the question of whether historical jihadist conflicts such as the 1990s war in Bosnia could serve as a barometer of future events. The 2014 surge in the number of jihadist foreign fighters and inspired lone-wolf attacks was attributable, at least in part, to a revolution in the style and content of messaging that ISIS had deliberately pursued.
ISIS was rewriting the rules of jihadist extremism using sophisticated tactics of manipulation and distribution. It was not just a splinter from al Qaeda, it was an evolution. ISIS was reinventing al Qaeda’s model of terrorism and radicalization, and its new ideas were sending shock waves around the world.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MESSAGE
Jihadists have been making “slick” propaganda for decades, but for a long time, these productions catered to an exclusive audience of potential recruits, never making the evening news or creeping into the collective consciousness of the West.
Since the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s, jihadist organizations have used video and print media in sophisticated ways. From full-color magazines to audio lectures on cassette and TV-style talk shows, the genre is overstuffed with decades of material that flew under the radar of Western media.
In a crowded field, there are some standouts. The Martyrs of Bosnia is a sweeping feature-length video documentary released in English and Arabic versions that comprehensively describes the arc of the 1990s Balkans war from the perspective of the jihadist foreign fighters who took part.1
In 2001, al Qaeda released The State of the Ummah, nearly two hours of lavishly produced propaganda that came to define the group for footage-hungry Western media after September 11, providing now-ubiquitous images such as masked al Qaeda terrorists endlessly advancing along a set of monkey bars.
But The State of the Ummah was much more than simply B-roll for twenty-four-hour news networks. An ideological incitement, it served to
define al Qaeda to potential recruits and apologists in the Muslim world.2
The movie is broken into parts, which boil down to “The Problem” and “The Solution.” The problem, described at length, was the political weakness of Muslims and the corruption of Arab regimes, who were supported by the United States.
“This tape that you are viewing now are real-life scenes that portray, with blood and tears, the sorry state of the Muslim nation,” said an unidentified narrator.
“The wounds of the Muslims are deep, very deep, in every place,” Osama bin Laden reiterated a few minutes later.
The video continues in this vein for nearly forty-five minutes.
The solution was, of course, al Qaeda. Although the terrorist group is not named in the video, its chief leaders and ideologues are featured at length, discussing the need for Muslims to violently resist the conspiracies of the West and Israel.
“The Solution” was a carefully stage-managed affair. As the cameras rolled, often at interesting angles, a series of masked men went through a pantomime of military training in a desert backdrop identified as the al Farouq training camp, including running, jumping, diving, swimming, shooting, demolitions, motorcycle gymnastics, and, of course, monkey-barring.
The visuals were memorable and effective, yet they were notably contrived. The overall effect, likely intentional, made al Qaeda look like an adventure camp for young men.
“So it is incumbent on the Muslims, especially those in leadership positions from among the faithful scholars, honest businessmen, and heads of the tribes to migrate for the cause of Allah and find a place where they can raise the banner of jihad and revitalize the ummah to safeguard their religion and life,” bin Laden intoned professorially near the end of the video. “Otherwise they will lose everything.”
The State of the Ummah was the last major release by al Qaeda prior to September 11. After the United States invaded Afghanistan and rousted the organization from its fixed bases, it took time for the media arm to regroup. It began to recover in 2002 and 2003, with the help of Adam Gadahn, a California native, mentioned earlier, also known as Azzam the American.3
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