The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  THE COMMON TOUCH

  Pious and emotional, Zarqawi was committed to the well-being of his men. Their awareness that he was one of them who had come from a similar background won him a loyalty that rivaled that given to Osama bin Laden—whose status as a wealthy, aristocratic Saudi placed a distance between him and his rank-and-file jihadis that was never a problem for Zarqawi.

  Thus Zarqawi’s ascent to international fame began. He became infamous as a pioneer of the media jihad for which ISIS has now become feared and hated and was personally responsible for one of the first decapitation videos to be posted on the internet and capture the attention of the West—that of American hostage Nicholas Berg in May 2004.

  A few months later, Zarqawi’s group also filmed and distributed the beheadings of two other Americans, contractors Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley.9

  Zarqawi was morally responsible for many murders, but in the cases of Berg and Armstrong it appears that he actually wielded the murder weapon as well. According to the caption of the Nicholas Berg video and the Party of Monotheism and Jihad online announcement of Armstrong’s murder, Zarqawi himself is the masked figure who is seen sawing those victims’ heads off with a knife.10

  The Alliance with al-Qaeda

  On October 17, 2004, with his notoriety at its peak, Zarqawi pledged his loyalty and that of his organization to Osama bin Laden and renamed his group Tanzim Qai’dat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers. Soon it became popularly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  “Is it not time for you [Muslims] to take the path of jihad and carry the sword of the Prophet of prophets? . . . The Prophet, the most merciful, ordered [his army] to strike the necks of some prisoners in [the Battle of] Badr and to kill them. . . . And he set a good example for us.”

  –Zarqawi invoking Muhammad’s example in defense of the murder of Nicholas Berg11

  The Zarqawi group’s declaration of allegiance to al-Qaeda stressed the importance of Muslim unity, something that would also be a priority of the Islamic State. The declaration began with an epigraph from the Qur’an: “Hold fast to the rope of God and you shall not be divided” (3:103), and then added, “Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of worlds, and let there be no aggression except upon the oppressors”—that is, no aggression between Muslims.

  The statement boasted that the alliance was “undoubtedly an indication that victory is approaching, God willing, and that it represents a return to the glorious past. We shall, with great fury, instill fear in the enemies of Islam, who consider that through their war in Iraq they have nearly uprooted Islam from its recent stronghold. For this, we will turn [the war] into a hell for them.”

  MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY

  In October 2004 Zarqawi’s group vowed allegiance to Osama bin Laden: “By God, O sheikh of the mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey. If you forbade us something, we would abide by your wishes. For what a fine commander you are to the armies of Islam, against the inveterate infidels and apostates!”12

  Late in December of the same year, Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape, purportedly of Osama bin Laden, declaring, “The dear mujahed brother Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq, so we ask all our organization brethren to listen to him and obey him in his good deeds.”13

  By this time, Zarqawi’s unapologetic embrace of terror as a tactic of war had made him a virtual folk hero among jihadis worldwide; he rivaled his new chief as the world’s most renowned and reviled jihad terrorist. The U.S. considered Zarqawi so important that it placed a $25 million bounty on his head—the same amount as that offered for bin Laden.

  Ultimately, Zarqawi—but not his movement—was killed in a U.S. airstrike on June 7, 2006. No jihad group depends upon a charismatic leader—even one as fanatically devoted to his cause and able to galvanize others to join it as Zarqawi. Such organizations are rather, as we shall see, ideologically driven. Thus Zarqawi’s group survived him.

  On October 13, 2006, al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers reconstituted itself as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).14 It continued to harass American troops in Iraq, biding its time until the inevitable day when the Americans would leave. That day came on December 14, 2011, when Barack Obama, speaking at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to some of the last soldiers to come home from Iraq, boasted about ending the war and called the withdrawal of all American troops a “moment of success.”15

  But the jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq didn’t agree that the war was over. They weren’t walking away or folding up shop—in fact, they were expanding. They seized the opportunity that uprisings against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad provided to move into that neighboring country and on April 9, 2013, renamed their organization again as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS).16 They then took advantage of the successes of the Sunni rebels in Syria (for whom Obama had asked Congress to authorize military support in the summer of 2013) and the weakness of the Shi’ite regime in Baghdad to assert control over territory in both Syria and Iraq. Both Assad and the Iraqi government in Baghdad were too weak to stop them.

  WAIT, MAYBE YOU DON’T WIN WARS BY RETREATING?

  “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq with a representative government that was elected by its people. We’re building a new partnership between our nations and we are ending a war not with a final battle but with a final march toward home. This is an extraordinary achievement.”

  —President Barack Obama, December 14, 201117

  Rift between Islamic State and al-Qaeda Becomes Official, Western Leaders and Media Overjoyed

  Early in 2014, al-Qaeda attempted to reassert control over ISIS. Osama bin Laden had been killed in May of 2011, but the organization continued to operate under the leadership of his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a scholarly Egyptian eye surgeon who had served as bin Laden’s personal physician. Zawahiri demanded that ISIS stand down and leave the jihad in Syria to another al-Qaeda–allied group, Jabhat al-Nusra.18 When ISIS did not comply, al-Qaeda made the announcement on February 2, 2014: “ISIS is not a branch of the Qaidat al-Jihad group, we have no organizational relationship with it, and [our] group is not responsible for its actions.”19

  Now this formal break came long after the alliance had ceased to exist anywhere but on paper. ISIS hadn’t even used the name “al-Qaeda” in over seven years. Nonetheless, Western leaders and the mainstream media made all they could out of the split between ISIS and al-Qaeda.

  In the midst of its lengthy campaign to convince Americans that the Islamic State was not Islamic at all, the Obama administration (and its willing enablers in the mainstream media) welcomed the rift between the two terror organizations as proof for its theory that ISIS was distorting and hijacking the religion of peace. “They’re more extreme than al-Qaeda,” said Secretary of State John Kerry in June 2014. This became a recurring theme in the media coverage of the jihadi groups.22 MSNBC’s David Gregory said in August 2014 that ISIS was “cast off by al-Qaida because this group is considered too extreme.”23 The UK’s Guardian told readers that “The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) is so hardline that it was disavowed by al-Qaida’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.”24 The UK’s Daily Mail noted that “lying among a pile of papers at the hideout in Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden was shot dead was a carefully worded 21-page letter” written by one of Osama’s men in 2011. This letter found at bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound warned that ISIS “had such complete disregard for civilian life that it could damage the reputation of Al Qaeda,” listing as some of the acts that were beyond the pale “the use of chlorine gas as a chemical weapon, bombing mosques and a massacre in a Catholic church in Baghdad.”25

  FLUIDITY

  On April 16, 2015, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, a Muslim who lived in Columbus, Ohio, was indicted for plotting to carry out a jihad terror attack in the Uni
ted States—he had talked about attacking a military base and murdering American soldiers “execution style.”20

  Mohamud had returned to the United States from Syria, where he had received training from Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda group that Ayman al-Zawahiri had insisted that ISIS defer to in Syria—leading directly to the split between the two groups.

  Before he left for Syria, Mohamud posted on his Facebook page the black flag of jihad in the design that has become associated with the Islamic State, as well as another photograph also containing the Islamic State symbol. Authorities said that he went to Syria intending to join the Islamic State, but ended up in Jabhat al-Nusra instead.21 Exactly how and why this happened is unclear, but it does indicate that the gulf between the two groups is not so wide as to prevent jihadis from moving from one to the other. They share the same religious perspectives, ideology, and goals, and that’s good enough.

  The al-Qaeda letter did complain about some of the bloody tactics ISIS was using. But its putative author, al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn, better known as “Azzam the American,” seemed chiefly concerned with the PR fallout. The massacre of Catholics at the church in Baghdad, for example, had come at a particularly inopportune moment—just as the author of the letter was doing the preparatory research for an appeal to fast-secularizing Irish Catholics to embrace Islam. He had also been “thinking of preparing an Arabic message to the Christians of the Arab region, calling them to Islam, and to caution them from cooperating with invader enemies of Islam who oppose the Islamic State.”26 So the timing was terrible.

  GEE, I WONDER WHY CATHOLICS AREN’T RUSHING TO CONVERT TO ISLAM?

  “The Catholics are a fertile ground for call of God and to persuade them about the just case of the Mujahidin, particularly after the rage expanding against the mother church (Vatican) as a result of its scandals. . . . But the attacks on the Christians in Iraq, like the Baghdad attack and what took place earlier in Mosul and others, does not help us to convey the message. Even if the ones we are talking to have some grudge against the mother church, they will not grasp in general the targeting of their public, women, children and men in their church during Mass.”

  —from pages 6–7 of the twenty-one-page 2011 al-Qaeda letter detailing differences with ISIS

  The Obama administration and the media were taking a dispute primarily about timing and tactics and making it into something that it clearly wasn’t: a principled condemnation of the world’s most notorious terror group of the 2010s by the most notorious terror group of the 2000s on the grounds that it had transgressed the bounds of Islamic law.27

  OSTRICH ALERT

  “It is a corruption of the Islamic faith. It is a distortion of it. It does not represent the Muslim community or Islam.”

  —CIA Director John Brennan, explaining how ISIS is not Islamic28

  Steamrolling to the Caliphate

  The split with al-Qaeda did not slow ISIS down. On June 10, 2014, ISIS jihadis posted online photos of the bulldozing of the Syria-Iraq border, under the title “Smashing the Sykes-Picot border.”29 They were referring to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which had delineated the British and French spheres of influence in the post–World War I Middle East, with France getting Syria and northern Iraq and Britain, southern Iraq—and thus had ultimately demarcated the border between the nations of Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State did not recognize the Syria-Iraq border: they considered it to be an artificial construction of the West and saw it as a symbol of how the non-Muslim West had oppressed the Muslims of the world by, among other things, dividing them into artificial nation states and destroying the divinely ordained unity they had enjoyed under a single political leader, the caliph.

  The destruction of the border was a manifestation of the belief that Muslims should be united in a single state under a single ruler. And once the Syria-Iraq border was no more, the next step was essentially inevitable. On June 29, 2014, ISIS declared the formation of a new caliphate and dropped the second half of its name, rebranding itself yet again—this time, as simply the Islamic State.30 That new name was a claim to the loyalty of the entire Ummah, the community of all Muslims worldwide. The Islamic State was laying claim to be the Islamic government in the world and demanding all Muslims’ allegiance. The revival of the caliphate was a return to the form of government of the glory days of Islam—from Muhammad’s death through Islam’s Golden Age up until the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I—when Muslims were ruled by a caliph, the successor to Muhammad as spiritual and political leader of Islam.

  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

  And who was that leader? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s leader since 2010 and its new Caliph Ibrahim, proclaimed as such in June 2014 with the declaration of the caliphate. He is a supremely shadowy figure, and virtually nothing that has been reported about him is known for certain; the material here has been widely reported, but none of it is unquestionable.

  The most noteworthy fact reported about Baghdadi is that he has a Ph.D. in Islamic law from the Islamic University in Baghdad and comes from a family of Muslim clerics.31

  Even before his rise to the leadership of the group that Zarqawi had founded, the future caliph was not entirely unknown to America. It seems that Baghdadi was actually arrested and imprisoned by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca under his given name Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a nom de guerre)—not as a known terrorist, however, but as a “civilian internee,” that is, someone who had been linked to jihad terrorists but not found to be engaging in terror activity himself.32 Nevertheless, it has been reported that before his arrest in 2004 the future caliph had played a role in founding “a militant group, Jeish Ahl al-Sunnah al-Jamaah, which had taken root in the restive Sunni communities around his home city.”33

  Camp Bucca was the model U.S. prison camp to which inmates from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison were transferred after the scandal there.34 Unfortunately, while the crimes at Abu Ghraib provided a huge propaganda coup for the jihadis, the relatively relaxed conditions at Camp Bucca seem to have provided networking opportunities that would be at least as valuable in advancing the cause of jihad. Apparently al-Baghdadi was a natural leader who seemed to his American guards like a model prisoner. “He was respected very much by the US army,” a man who claims to have been one of his prison associates and colleagues in ISIS has said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all.”35

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  “O ummah of Islam, indeed the world today has been divided into two camps and two trenches, with no third camp present: The camp of Islam and faith, and the camp of kufr (disbelief) and hypocrisy—the camp of the Muslims and the mujahidin everywhere, and the camp of the jews, the crusaders, their allies, and with them the rest of the nations and religions of kufr, all being led by America and Russia, and being mobilized by the jews.”

  —Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s Caliph Ibrahim, in his inaugural message upon being named caliph, “A Message to the Mujahedin and the Muslim Ummah in the Month of Ramadan,” July 1, 2014 (capitalization as in the original)

  According to some reports, which may or may not be more reliable than anything else reported about him, al-Bagdadi may have made an interesting remark in Bucca. As he left, he is said (although this could be legend born of his later notoriety) to have given a hint of what he had in mind for the future, telling his guards:

  “I’ll see you guys in New York.”36

  Cheering the Hearts of Jihadis Everywhere

  The new caliphate galvanized opinion worldwide. Jihadis took fresh energy from the declaration of the Islamic State. It seemed like a giant step forward toward the fulfillment of their dreams and plans. The reestablishment of the caliphate
had long been an aspiration dear to the hearts of many jihadi terrorists—including al-Qaeda.

  As bin Laden lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri had written to Zarqawi in a July 9, 2005, letter, “It has always been my belief that the victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in the heart of the Islamic world, specifically in the Levant, Egypt, and the neighboring states of the Peninsula and Iraq; however, the center would be in the Levant and Egypt.”37

  In that letter Zawahiri had heaped praise on Zarqawi for helping bring that state—the revived caliphate—closer to reality: “If our intended goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet and if we expect to establish its state predominantly—according to how it appears to us—in the heart of the Islamic world, then your efforts and sacrifices—God permitting—are a large step directly towards that goal.”

  Zawahiri then offered Zarqawi his “humble opinion that the Jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals,” the first of which was to “expel the Americans from Iraq.” The second stage, wrote Zarqawi, would be exactly what the Islamic State ended up doing nine years later:

  The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate—over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni areas, is in order to fill the void stemming from the departure of the Americans, immediately upon their exit and before un-Islamic forces attempt to fill this void, whether those whom the Americans will leave behind them, or those among the un-Islamic forces who will try to jump at taking power.