ISIS rejected this fundamentally defeatist model and saw an opportunity to implement the future now. The result was profoundly destabilizing to its progenitor. What message could al Qaeda craft to compete with ISIS’s continual declarations of victory? Zawahiri’s months of silence spoke volumes.
ISIS’s model had a potent attraction, and foreign fighters flocked in record numbers to join the movement. But its gravity also drew debris into its orbit. In the West, individual jihadists—the lone wolves—began to act out. But its messaging also resonated with people at risk of committing violence, whether or not those people were truly engaged with its goals and ideology.
Some resembled spree killers more than terrorists, such as Alton Nolen, a Muslim convert in Oklahoma who beheaded one coworker and stabbed a second at the food store from which he had recently been fired. Nolen’s social media accounts pointed to a confusing mix of sexual repression and radical Islam. The attack came soon after a spree of ISIS beheading videos; the connection to Nolen’s attack was unclear but fueled intense speculation both in the media and among jihadis.55
In November 2014, a man walked into a California mall and asked to have a hat embroidered with “We Love ISIS.” Store employees alerted police, who found assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition at his home. He was detained on a psychiatric hold after telling police he was a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.56
Others showed signs of being more deeply engaged with the ideas of ISIS, such as Zale Thompson, who attacked New York City police with an ax after spending months reading jihadist content online.57 In the province of Quebec, Martin Couture-Roleau drove his car into two soldiers before being killed by police. His social media accounts showed close associations with French-speaking ISIS supporters.58
While the spike in violence by individual actors was cause for concern, ISIS’s predilection for violence had also irrevocably changed the nature of the Syrian civil war, shifting the calculus of risk from foreign fighters.
In November 2013, the impulse to travel to Syria and get involved in the conflict was not necessarily extreme.
By November 2014, the landscape had changed radically. Jihadist groups were fighting each other and the moderate Syrian rebels. After being targeted by U.S. air strikes, Jabhat al Nusra went on the offensive against U.S.-backed rebel factions, driving them out of key strongholds.59
In the portions of Iraq and Syria where ISIS reigned, a charnel-house atmosphere mixed bizarrely with antiseptic images of nation building, weighted almost equally. Who would be attracted to this disturbing contradiction?
ISIS’s media push has moved the radicalization window far afield, eschewing the al Qaeda model of attracting fighters first and radicalizing them later. With its heady media mix of graphic violence and utopian idylls, ISIS sought recruits and supporters who are further down the path toward ideological radicalization or more inclined by personal disposition toward violence.
Once these pre-radicalized fighters and their families arrive in Iraq and Syria, they are exposed to an environment seething with traumatic stress, sexual violence, slavery, genocide, and death and dismemberment as public spectacles.
Among returning foreign fighters of previous generations, perhaps one in nine would eventually take up terrorism on returning to their homelands.60 The fighters of ISIS are a new and untested breed. If they and their families someday attempt to return to their home countries, they will be unimaginably different from their predecessors.
ISIS didn’t invent ultraviolent jihad. There have been many examples in the past, but they have led to consequences. In the horrific 1997 Luxor massacre in Egypt, sixty-two tourists (including women and children) were literally cut to pieces by dissident members of the Egyptian Islamic Group. The backlash led the group to moderate its overall approach.
The Abu Sayyaf Group has long beheaded hostages, sometimes on video, but its brutality and indiscriminate targeting have increasingly led to the perception that it is a criminal enterprise with expedient jihadist trappings.
But ISIS has crafted a novel formula for mixing brutal violence with the illusion of stability and dignity, and it has moved the bar for recruits.
Its combination of successful ground strategy, aggressive messaging, and an appeal to strength over weakness has proven uniquely powerful and energized at least tens of thousands of ardent supporters.
The challenge that lies ahead for the group is whether it can sustain all three elements over time and whether its extraordinary capacity for violence will eventually alienate even its core supporters.
And if it survives the first two challenges, it will be faced with a third—whether its deliberate cultivation of ultraviolence as a core element of its society will lead it ever further into darkness, into a pit of horror that cannot be escaped.
CHAPTER NINE
ISIS’S PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
Terrorism is psychological warfare. Its most immediate goals are to bolster the morale of its supporters and demoralize and frighten its victims and their sympathizers. For the audience, the radius of fear dwarfs that of injury and death. Terrorists also aim to make us overreact in fear. While they don’t always get what they want, terrorists often succeed at these two vital goals: spreading fear and provoking reactive policies.
Terror can make us strike back at the wrong enemy, for the wrong reasons, or both (as was the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq). We want to wage war, not just on terrorism, but also on terror, to banish the feeling of being unjustly attacked or unable to protect the blameless. We want to wage war on evil. Sometimes the effect of our reaction is precisely that which we aimed to thwart—more terrorists and more attacks, spread more broadly around the world. While some politicians wanted to see Iraq during the allied invasion as a roach motel, we see it more like a hornet’s nest—with allied bombs and bullets spreading the hornets ever further, throughout the region and beyond.
People often ask, how afraid should we be? Our answer is that it depends on who you are, where you live, and your role in society. If you are a national leader, ISIS should scare you a lot. This applies, firstly, to the leaders of Iraq and Syria as well as to the leaders of nearby countries. ISIS is already spreading ethnic and/or sectarian conflict into the Arabian Gulf as well as in Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, Turkey, and beyond. Unrest in Yemen will likely make it vulnerable to exploitation by ISIS, especially since the organization already enjoys wide support inside the ranks of the local al Qaeda branch.
As we have seen, an estimated 17,000 foreign fighters have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join jihadi groups.1 Jihadist organizations in the Gulf, North Africa, the Caucasus, and Southeast Asia which once looked to al Qaeda for leadership have officially declared their allegiance to ISIS. Individual supporters of ISIS are spread around the world, including the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.2
ISIS established new wilayat (provinces) in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Libya, and Algeria, noting that “while the eyes of the world were all blinded and spellbound by the sorcerous media ‘covering’ the battle for [Kobane], the eyes of the Islamic State were scanning East and West, preparing for the expansion that—by Allah’s permission—would put an end to the Jewish State, [the Saudi monarchy], and the rest of the apostate [tyrants], the allies of the cross.”3 And ISIS and its sympathizers will continue to strike out at the West.
There are three broad categories of likely perpetrators outside of Syria and Iraq (not only in the West, but around the world): recruits who return from the battlefields to bring their holy war back home; homegrown or self-recruited actors, inspired by ISIS and its ideology, perhaps over social networks, or commissioned by its money; and an ISIS-led attack, perpetrated by hardened terrorists emanating from its strongholds. So far, we have seen successful examples of the first two and aspirational examples of the third. Among them: A French national returned from Syria and killed four people at a Jewish museum in B
russels.4 A young teen claimed to have been paid by ISIS to commit an attack in Vienna.5 A lone actor in Ottawa, Canada, left a video recording of his ideological and political grievances before an attack on Parliament Hill, which left one soldier dead.6
Western returnees have been horrified by what they saw in the Islamic State and appear to have little interest in attacking their home countries, at least for now.7 (The infighting among jihadi groups sparked by ISIS also alienated and ultimately drove out some fighters on all sides.) But even if only a tiny percentage take up violence in their native lands, it will have a large effect on how people perceive their safety.
People willingly engage in dangerous activities, imagining, often wrongly, that they are in control of their fate. But they expect their government to protect them from organized violence. Thus governments may feel compelled to act in response even to low-level attacks. While there is no evidence in open sources that ISIS could mount an attack of the scale and complexity seen on September 11, it currently commands many times more money and men than al Qaeda did in 2000, and a large-scale attack cannot be ruled out. ISIS has demonstrated clearly that it has both the inclination and the practical capacity for bold, aggressive action. But spectacular terrorist attacks are rare. They require coordination and communication among operatives, rendering them vulnerable to penetration and interception by law-enforcement personnel. As such, the risk is difficult to predict.
More reliably predictable are small-scale attacks in the West (such as those discussed in Chapter 4), which have noticeably increased in tempo since ISIS began to advocate for them. This is likely to continue and may very well get worse. We may see random beheadings, or shoot-outs at shopping malls, or subway attacks. The prospect can be frightening, especially for law enforcement, intelligence agencies and political leaders, all of whom share a mission to protect citizens from violence.
But the likelihood that any given individual will be caught in such an attack is vanishingly small. You are significantly more likely to die in a car accident, especially if you fail to wear a seat belt, than to be attacked by ISIS. Wear your seat belt.
IT HAS LONG been observed that the things that frighten us most are often quite different from those most likely to harm us. Consider the risks you’re exposed to on an ordinary day. When you got up this morning, you exposed yourself to risks at nearly every stage of your progression from your bed to the office. Even lying in bed exposed you to hazards. One in four hundred people are injured doing nothing but lying in bed or sitting in a chair. The odds of dying by falling off a bed or other furniture are one in 4,283.8 Most people are far more frightened by a terrorist attack than by a swimming pool or the drive to work, even though the latter are far more likely to kill us.
Perception of risk is highly correlated with levels of news coverage.9 Inevitably and often inadvertently, the media tends to facilitate terrorists’ theatrical performances. Terrorists know this. As noted previously, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al Qaeda, once wrote that more than half the battle against the West and for “the hearts and minds of our Umma” is “taking place in the battlefield of the media.”10
In their technical assessments, experts focus on probabilities and outcomes, but the perception of risk depends on other variables. There is little correlation between objective risk and perception of danger.11 People tend to exaggerate the likelihood of “available” events that are easy to imagine or recall, when a visual or aural image seems taped to the brain.12 Terrorism is often “available” in the sense that risk analysts’ use the term, in large part because of media coverage.
Images matter. Most of us can’t get the images of September 11 out of our heads: the crash of the planes into the steel and glass tower, followed by the sight of tiny figures leaping, as if in a dream of flight, to murderously concrete ground. And now ISIS is taking the imagery one step further by using social media to broadcast images of deliberately brutal beheadings into our homes and minds.
Surveys conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people evaluate choices with respect to the status quo. These findings have been repeatedly replicated: We overvalue losses relative to gains; we will pay more to avoid the loss of something we already have than we would to acquire it.
We also overestimate the likelihood of rare events, and underestimate the likelihood of more common ones.13 We are at risk of overreacting to relatively minor incidents because they represent a loss relative to the status quo and because of our tendency not to distinguish adequately between ten deaths and ten thousand.14
Risk analysis involves attempting to generate statistical, rather than emotional judgments. What is missing from risk analysts’ assessment is that terrorists’ determination to harm us, their malice and forethought, coupled with our lack of agency, strongly influence our perception of risk. The chair that breaks beneath us has no agency and harbors no malice, therefore we assess the importance of that risk differently.
Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for two extraordinarily elegant and influential papers he wrote with Tversky in the 1970s, revisited his earlier work in 2011, applying it directly to our topic, this time describing his emotional reaction and his struggle to maintain a “rational” approach.
He writes:
I visited Israel several times during a period in which suicide bombings in buses were relatively common—though of course quite rare in absolute terms. There were altogether 23 bombings between December 2001 and September 2004, which had caused 236 fatalities. The number of daily bus riders in Israel was approximately 1.3 million at that time. For any traveler, the risks were tiny, but that was not how the public felt about it. People avoided buses as much as they could, and many travelers spent their time on the bus anxiously scanning their neighbors for packages or bulky clothes that might hide a bomb.
I did not have much occasion to travel by bus, as I was driving a rented car, but I was chagrined to discover that my behavior was also affected. I found that I did not like to stop next to a bus at a red light, and I drove away more quickly than usual when the light changed. I was ashamed of myself, because of course I knew better. I knew that the risk was truly negligible, and that any effect at all on my actions would assign an inordinately high “decision weight” to a minuscule probability. In fact, I was more likely to be injured in a driving accident than by stopping near a bus. But my avoidance of buses was not motivated by a rational concern for survival. What drove me was the experience of the moment: being next to a bus made me think of bombs, and these thoughts were unpleasant. I avoided buses because I wanted to think of something else.
My experience illustrates how terrorism works and why it is so effective: it induces an availability cascade. An extremely vivid image of death and damage, constantly reinforced by media attention and frequent conversation, becomes highly accessible, especially if it’s associated with a specific situation such as the sight of a bus. The emotional arousal is associative, automatic, and uncontrolled, and it produces an impulse for protective action. We may “know” that the probability is low, but this knowledge does not eliminate the self-generated discomfort and the wish to avoid it.15
DREAD OF EVIL
Another factor, not yet studied by risk analysts such as Kahneman, is the impact of evil on our perception of dangers. Theologians, psychologists, and moral and political philosophers, among others, have various perspectives on what constitutes evil, its causes, and how to fight it. Philosophers traditionally identify three kinds of evil:
•Moral evil: Suffering caused by the deliberate imposition of pain on sentient beings.
•Natural evil: Suffering caused by natural processes such as disease or natural disaster.
•Metaphysical evil: Suffering caused by imperfections in the cosmos or by chance, such as a murderer going unpunished as a result of random imperfections in the court system.
The use of the word evil to describe such disparate phenomena is a remnant of pre-Enlightenment thinking, which viewed
suffering (natural and metaphysical evil) as punishment for sin (moral evil). Drowning is more likely to be the result of “natural evil,” than “moral evil,” while terrorism is an example of the latter. It is moral evil that most frightens us.
Before September 11, philosopher Susan Nieman wrote, we had grown used to complex villains, whose evil was less immediately apparent than bin Laden’s. We were in the habit of thinking about evil in Hannah Arendt’s terms—ordinary people contributing, like cogs in a wheel, to evil outcomes.16
And now we are faced with an enemy that seems psychopathic in its theatrical acts of violence, but extraordinarily clever in knowing what will most horrify and disgust us. Horror, William Miller tells us, is “fear-imbued” disgust for which “no distancing or evasive strategies exist that are not themselves utterly contaminating.”17 The horror we feel at the image of beheadings is hard to escape.
We have grown unused to visible displays of cruelty. In his monumental study of the decline of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker demonstrates that institutionalized cruelty began to decline in the West by the end of the eighteenth century. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, after the Thirty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia, Europeans gradually stopped killing people on the basis of their holding the “wrong” supernatural or religious belief.18 In the eighteenth century, the Humanitarian Revolution led to a growing respect for human lives. Pinker attributes this revolution to the growth of writing and literacy rates. When a person reads, she learns to empathize with individuals beyond her family or tribe or nation. It is a “technology for perspective-taking,” Pinker argues.19
Empathy is the antidote to human cruelty. In The Science of Evil, Simon Baron-Cohen defines empathy as consisting of two stages. The first involves the ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling; the second involves responding to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.20
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