The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  PUBLIC ENTERTAINMENT, ISIS-STYLE

  In May 2015, as part of an offensive that left them in control of more than half Syria’s territory, Islamic State forces took over the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO Heritage Site containing irreplaceable buildings from the Roman Empire.34 ISIS jihadis issued a video explaining that they would be destroying the “polytheistic” statues in Palmyra but leaving the buildings intact35—perhaps because they had found a use for them: they summoned the local population to the ancient Roman amphitheatre to watch the public executions of twenty men they said were supporters of the Syrian government.36

  The implications are clear. The Islamic State’s caliph has said that the destruction of the Sphinx and the Pyramids is a “religious duty.”37 If he thinks that way about the Sphinx and the Pyramids, it is not hard to guess his opinion of the Vatican, and the Louvre, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Even if the Islamic State never makes good on its threat to enter and conquer Europe, admirers of ISIS and its caliph among Muslims living in the West could menace the very patrimony of Western civilization and render the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci lost artifacts that are known only from old photographs in history books. There have already been incidents of Muslims destroying religious statues in Italy.

  TWO-ALARM OSTRICH ALERT

  “Although the Diocese condemned the act of sacrilege against the Madonna statue, it also followed the Pope’s lead by absolving Islam of any responsibility for what happened. In the words of Monsignor Paolo Giulietti, the auxiliary bishop of Città della Pieve, near Perugia: ‘For Islam, the figure of Mary is very important: she is the mother of the Prophet Jesus conceived in virginity, and the Blessed Virgin is the most holy woman. Muslims pray at the Marian shrines in the Middle East. We cannot see in this act of vandalism—which as I said is wrong in every way—an episode of religious hatred. It is important not to feed mutual suspicion, especially at this time.’”

  —Catholic officials respond to a January 2015 incident in which five Muslims smashed the statue of the Virgin Mary and then urinated on the pieces38

  “Mumbling phrases of the Koran in Arabic, a Moroccan threw to the ground and severely damaged five statues of artistic value and other furniture and religious objects in a church in Trentino. . . . The Moroccan is a longtime resident in Trentino, and since last summer has lived in Cles. According to the police, his actions are connected to mental problems, and not to religious fanaticism. The man has for several months shown signs of anxiety, and already last month disturbed a religious function in the same parish church of Cles.”

  —Italian police respond to a similar incident two weeks earlier39

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  As they destroyed the ancient Assyrian statues in the Nineveh Museum in Mosul, one of the jihadis explained that they were just imitating Muhammad: “The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him.”40

  Infidels Will Shoulder the Blame

  It is highly likely that in a few centuries (or sooner), Muslims in the areas where the Islamic State destroyed ancient artifacts in the early twenty-first century will be blaming non-Muslims for the damage, and this altered version will go into the history books. This is what has happened with the Sphinx’s nose, which was destroyed not by Napoleon’s troops in target practice (as goes the oft-repeated story), but by the Muslim precursors of the Islamic State.

  In a rare moment of candor, Russia Today noted in late March 2015:

  Attacks on the Sphinx date back centuries. Despite many legends surrounding the monument’s missing nose—with harm from Napoleon’s cannon being among the most popular myths—historians believe it was actually destroyed by Sufi Muslim Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr in the 14th century, after he learned that some peasants worshipped the Sphinx.41

  Many of the incidents of Muslim destruction of artifacts are ascribed to infidels, in keeping with the general tendency of Islamic supremacists to blame everyone but themselves for their own wrongdoing. In Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, Robert D. Kaplan repeats uncritically what he probably heard from local Muslims—or from Christians fearful of what might befall them if they said that Muslims were responsible: that the icons in the local churches had had their eyes scraped off because the superstitious local Christians had taken them to mix in health potions: “According to a peasant belief, the plaster and dye used to depict a saint’s eyes can cure blindness.”42

  It is, however, virtually inconceivable that Orthodox believers, even the most ignorant and superstitious, would desecrate their own icons in this way. It is much more likely that the icons had no eyes because Islamic authorities considered it obligatory that they deface the images in order to ruin them as representations of the human form.43 And that’s why the nose of the Sphinx was gone long before Napoleon’s troops ever had target practice.

  There are men who build, and there are destroyers. The Judeo-Christian West has always loved life and celebrated creativity. By contrast, these Muslims of the Islamic State, acting on principles of Islam, are the enemies of life and creativity; they love death and destruction. As many Islamic jihadists have boasted, “We will win because we love death more than you love life.”

  That they love death is obvious. We can all take heart, however, from the fact that their claim that destruction will ultimately triumph completely over creation and civilization is, at best, dubious.

  The Resistance: Enemies of the Islamic State

  Who hates the Islamic State? Short answer: everyone.

  But some groups in the region hate it more than others, and are actually doing something about it. The Islamic State’s principal enemies:

  BARBARIANS AT WORK: PRICELESS ARTIFACTS AND MONUMENTS OF CIVILIZATION THAT THE ISLAMIC STATE HAS DAMAGED OR DESTROYED

  A partial list—and more are being added all the time

  Ancient Assyrian:

  1.Khorsabad: 2,700-year-old Assyrian city full of huge statues of winged bulls with human heads.44

  2.Assyrian gateway lion statues from the Arslan Tash archaeological site in northern Syria. At least one of the lion statues was 2,800 years old.45

  3.The winged bulls at Nineveh, near Mosul: 2,700 years old.46

  4.Nimrud: 3,300-year-old Assyrian city containing numerous Assyrian statues and other artifacts.47

  5.Mosul Museum: Iraq’s second-largest museum, containing numerous Assyrian artifacts.48

  6.Hatra: 2,300-year-old Assyrian city near Mosul, containing ancient temple artifacts and more.49

  7.Mari: 3,000-year-old city near the border of Syria and Iraq.50

  8.Tell Ajaja and Tell Brak: 3,000-year-old sites containing numerous Assyrian statues and other artifacts.51

  The Islamic State has also been busy destroying sacred places of Jews, Christians, and Muslims it considers deviant:

  Christian:

  1.The Church of the Immaculate Virgin in Mosul, one of the oldest Christian churches in the city.52

  2.The Church of the Virgin Mary in the al-Arabi area of Mosul.53

  3.The St. George Catholic Monastery, also known as the St. Markourkas Church in Mosul, dating from the tenth century.54

  4.The Armenian Genocide Memorial Church in Der Zor, Syria.55

  5.The Green Church in Tikrit, Iraq.56

  6.The Mar Benham Monastery south of Mosul, which dated to the fourth century.57

  7.St. Sargis Assyrian Church, Tel Tamar, Syria.58

  Muslim:

  1.The tomb of the prophet Jonah (Yunus) in Mosul: This 2,800-year-old site was said to house the remains of the Biblical prophet Jonah, and was converted into a mosque, honoring the Qur’an’s version of Jonah (Yunus), centuries ago.59 The tomb of the prophet Daniel was likewise destroyed.60

  2.The Prophet Jirjis Mosque in Mosul, dating from the fourteenth century.61

  3.The Khudr Mosque in Mosul, which dated from the twelfth century.62

  4.The tomb of Meqam Shiek
h Aqil al Manbaj and at least three other Sufi and Sunni shrines in Syria.63

  5.A Shi’ite mosque in Jalawla, Iraq, where ISIS also murdered the muezzin, and at least five other Shi’ite mosques.64

  6.The Shi’ite shrine of Fathi al-Ka’en and another Shi’ite shrine in the Iraqi villages of Sharikhan and al-Qubbah.65

  7.The Tomb of the Girl, a shrine near Mosul that, according to legend, honored a beautiful young girl who died of a broken heart.66

  8.The Al-Arbain Mosque in Tikrit, which was said to contain the tombs of warriors from the early days of Islam.67

  •The Kurds. Kurdistan lies within Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and the Kurds have been trying to establish an independent state since before World War I. Each of those countries has done whatever it could to prevent attainment of that goal, and now the Islamic State poses an additional obstacle. The Kurds today have fielded one of the most significant military forces (the Peshmerga, which means “those who face death”) arrayed against the Islamic State, and they successfully broke the ISIS siege of the Syrian town of Kobani in January 2015—despite the initial unwillingness of the Turks to provide the slightest assistance, due to their own animosity toward the Kurds.68 The Turks blockaded the city, which lies on the Syria/Turkey border, and wouldn’t allow Kurdish troops from elsewhere to cross Turkish territory to enter it—until finally they relented under heavy pressure from the United States.69

  •The Iranians. Iran now has a client regime in Baghdad and another in Damascus. It also controls the jihad terror group Hizballah, which is a major force in Lebanese politics, and funds the Sunni jihad group Hamas in Gaza. This gives Iran a significant sphere of influence all across the Middle East, and a claim to be the leader of the Islamic world, despite its allegiance to the Shia Islam shared by only a minority of Muslims. But in between its presence in Lebanon and Syria and its regime in Baghdad stands the Islamic State, vowing to subjugate the entire world under its caliphate and kill or convert the Shia to Sunni Islam. The Iranians have thus far undertaken only limited operations against the Islamic State, but if ISIS continues to grow and expand, that could easily change.

  •Shi’ites in Iraq. The Islamic State is a Sunni group that has made its contempt and hatred for Shi’ites abundantly clear. Because of the weak Shi’ite government in Baghdad, the Islamic State is able to target Shi’ite civilians as well as soldiers. An Islamic State spokesman explained in July 2014 that before ISIS attacks Israel, which it fully intends to do, it needs to take care of the Shi’ites and Muslims who prefer secular government (or any government other than their own): “The greatest answer to this question is in the Qur’an, where Allah speaks about the nearby enemy—those Muslims who have become infidels—as they are more dangerous than those which were already infidels.”70

  •The Sunni Muslims in and around the city of Ramadi. The Islamic State would count among those “Muslims who have become infidels” the Sunni Arabs of Anbar Province who held out against ISIS attempts to take the provincial capital of Ramadi from early 2014 to May of 2015, when the city finally fell to ISIS. Despite being Sunni, the residents of Ramadi appear to prefer the Shi’ite government of Baghdad to the Islamic State. Their resistance to ISIS represented the remnants of the 2006 “Anbar Awakening,” in which local Sunni tribes formed an alliance against the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) jihadis71 who had been terrorizing the local population with the rigorist adherence to Sharia and the atrocities for which they would later—under their new name of ISIS—become infamous worldwide. The stakes were high: Ramadi is less than seventy miles from Baghdad. In November 2014 Anbar Province governor Ahmed al-Dulaimi said, “If we lose Anbar, that means we will lose Iraq.”72 The Islamic State’s May 2015 conquest of Ramadi inspired more than forty thousand refugees to flee the city before the Baghdad government closed a key bridge—that’s on top of the one hundred thirty thousand who had already fled during the fighting in April.73 Apparently the local population has not forgotten life under AQI, and they don’t want to have to live under the rule of ISIS.

  •The Saudis. The Saudis spent billions to propagate their virulent, violent form of Islam around the world. They covered the earth with Islamic proselytizing material that declared that the only legitimate government on earth was an Islamic caliphate. Now a caliphate is on their doorstep, declaring that the House of Saud itself is as illegitimate as every other government on earth. They are reaping what they have so assiduously sown.

  •The Christians. The Islamic State has decimated ancient Christian communities across Iraq and Syria. When it captured northern Iraq, the Islamic State drove thirty thousand Christians from the Nineveh plain where they had lived since not long after the time of Christ.74 In August 2014, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, Amel Shimoun Nona, predicted that the same thing would eventually happen to Christians in the West: “Our sufferings today are the prelude of those you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future. I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead.” The archbishop explained that the West was making a grave error by assuming that Islam was a religion of peace that taught the equal dignity of all human beings:

  Please, try to understand us. Your liberal and democratic principles are worth nothing here. You must consider again our reality in the Middle East, because you are welcoming in your countries an ever growing number of Muslims. Also you are in danger. You must take strong and courageous decisions, even at the cost of contradicting your principles. You think all men are equal, but that is not true: Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.75

  In early 2015 the Christians of Iraq began to fight back, forming a Christian militia of four thousand men.76 And while Western governments contented themselves with cosmetic gestures, some individuals in the West took notice as well. A U.S. Army veteran named Sean Rowe founded an organization called Veterans Against ISIS, hoping to attract veterans to join active combat against the Islamic State.

  Others joined existing groups. Marine Corps vet Louis Park joined an Iraqi Christian militia, explaining: “I know that if [ISIS] is allowed to stay here, we will see violence in the United States as well. So I’m protecting my homeland too. I’m not being paid at all. I’m being fed and I’m being clothed and everything, but any gear that I need, I’m paying out of pocket. This is all money that I saved for this effort myself, because I believe in the cause a lot, so I’m willing to finance everything.”77 Brett Royales, an Army veteran who also joined the Iraqi Christians fighting against the Islamic State, invoked his Army training: “I’ve been given a skill set. I’ve honored it over the years. I can’t sit home and watch what’s going on here—the atrocities, crucifixions, rapes, sex slaves, people being driven out from their towns. It’s unacceptable to me, so I’m here to do what I can to get people back in their homes and protect their way of life.”78

  Chapter Five

  INSIDE THE ISLAMIC STATE

  Perhaps because of its destruction of ancient artifacts (not to mention its reign of terror), the Islamic State has not exactly become a thriving tourist hub. Even as Muslims from all over the world are traveling to join it, many who have found themselves within its domains through no choice of their own have fled, even if it meant leaving behind everything they owned and the only life they knew.

  Did you know?

  •ISIS condemns smoking as slow-motion suicide and has punished it with death

  •The Islamic State has opened a consumer protection office

  •ISIS has developed an elaborate secret service to control the population

  •Four hundred Syrian children have joined “Cubs of the Caliphate,” the Islamic State’s answer to the Hitler Youth

  A look at daily life in the Islamic State makes it abundantly clear why so many people have chosen to flee rather than to stay and
try to adapt to the new overlords—even in areas where Bashar Assad and Saddam Hussein had been notorious for their tyranny.

  Planning a Vacation to the Islamic State? Be Sure to Abide by the Rules

  Millions of people still live in the Islamic State, of course, as they do not have the wherewithal to flee even if they want to. Others are unwilling to leave their homeland no matter what regime comes into power—after all, regimes come and regimes go, and the next change may be for the better. Whatever may keep people there, the Islamic State has been very specific about how they must behave. After all, they consider themselves to be in the process of building the ideal Islamic polity, and that depends on an absolute adherence to Islamic law. Breaking the law in the Islamic State can get you lashed or even beheaded, so if you’re planning a relaxing vacation in the caliphate, be sure you abide by the local laws:

  •Women must cover their entire body except face and hands. (According to some reports, they must cover their faces as well.)1

  •Women may not wear makeup or sit in a chair.2

  •Women may not leave the house without a male accompanying them.3

  •Men may not cut their hair, put gel in it, or wear it in a “modern style.” Barber shops have been shut down (as have beauty salons for women).4

  •You may not refer to the ruling group as “Daesh.”5