Authors: Joby Warrick
Al-Kasasbeh’s December 24 flight had been just another routine bombing run in the service of this collective mission. The pilot was closing in on his target, and had just nosed his fighter downward, when his wingman spotted flames coming from the rear of his aircraft. At almost the same instant, his cockpit display warned of engine failure, and the jet began to yaw off course. He yanked on the ejection handle and was blasted from the cockpit as the F-16 plummeted toward the Euphrates River.
“I bailed out, and fell in the river,” he said in the videotaped interview.
There was no time for his fellow soldiers to attempt a rescue. Al-Kasasbeh was still struggling to free himself from the ejection seat when he was seized by a burly man with a black beard and knit cap. “I am now a prisoner of the mujahideen,” he said.
ISIS wasted little time in exploiting its good fortune. Within nine days of the crash—and around the time the haggling over a possible prisoner exchange was getting under way—the group’s media unit had roughed out a plan for the execution video they would make. They found a suitable location on the edge of Raqqa, a few hundred feet from the river, and they managed to secure a cage, a cube of thin metal bars with an open floor the size of a large blanket. The crew set up multiple cameras on tripods and parked a backhoe nearby with a load of sand and rock. By the morning of January 3, everything was ready.
The video was to be a professional production, far superior to the
jerky, homemade offerings from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi years earlier. The final version includes a long, slickly produced preamble with computer-generated graphics and a series of clips showing Jordan’s King Abdullah II giving speeches and shaking hands with Obama. A graphic animation depicts an F-16 jet breaking into pieces, which then magically reassemble themselves into the Arabic script for the video’s title, helpfully translated into awkward English:
Healing the Believer’s Chests
.
The core of the propaganda film is a montage of video images of the captured pilot juxtaposed with bodies of children and other presumed bombing victims. A camera follows al-Kasasbeh as he walks slowly along a row of masked ISIS fighters, his breath visible in the January air. Then, suddenly, he is inside the cage, his head bowed as though in prayer. The pilot’s orange tunic, dry in earlier scenes, is now soaked with fuel.
A masked soldier—a subtitle identifies him as the leader of an ISIS unit that had been bombed in one of the coalition’s air strikes—lights a long torch and touches it to a trail of powder leading through the metal bars. In seconds, al-Kasasbeh is engulfed in flames. He jumps and flails, but there is no escape. At last he clasps both arms around his face and sinks to his knees, all but obscured by the fire. Moments later, his darkened form topples over, just before the backhoe crushes the cage and pilot inside with a load of broken concrete and dirt.
As a final flourish, the camera zooms in on a blackened hand visible amid the rubble. Then, in the closing frames, where the film credits normally run, the video shows photographs and names of other Jordanian pilots and announces a bounty in gold coins for anyone who finds and kills one of them.
“So—good tidings,” the narrator says, “to whoever supports his religion and achieves a kill that will liberate him from hellfire.”
The grisly work was over by midmorning, except for the weeks of studio editing needed to prepare the video for public release. Later that day, and on nearly every day that followed, ISIS continued to dangle the possibility of al-Kasasbeh’s release, if only the Jordanians were willing to cut a deal.
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It was not the first time ISIS had attempted to shock the world with its savagery. Four months before al-Kasasbeh’s capture, the videotaped beheading of kidnapped photojournalist James Foley outraged Western governments and drove American support for a military response against the group. Foley’s murder was quickly followed by the killings of a
Time
magazine reporter, Steven Sotloff; a former U.S. Army Ranger, Peter Kassig; and the British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning. Dozens of others would share their fate, including captured Syrian and Lebanese soldiers, Kurdish women, Iraqi videographers, and Japanese nationals. Libyan jihadists who claimed allegiance to ISIS recorded the executions of Christians in groups of twenty or more at a time.
Yet it was the death of the young pilot that sparked a change among ordinary Arabs. From Jordan’s cosmopolitan capital to the conservative Wahabi villages of Saudi Arabia came howls of condemnation and rage. The beheading of prisoners, brutal though it was, was specifically countenanced by the Koran and regularly practiced by the Saudi government as an official means of execution. But with the burning of a human being—and, in this case, a practicing Sunni Muslim—the Islamic State had broken an ancient taboo.
“
Only God punishes by fire,” Salman al-Odah, the venerated Saudi scholar and curator of the popular Web site Islam Today, said in a Twitter posting. “Burning is an abominable crime rejected by Islamic law regardless of its causes.”
Abdul Aziz al-Shaykh, the Saudi grand mufti, the country’s top cleric and a jurist empowered to settle matters of law by religious fatwa, said simply that ISIS was not Muslim: “They are enemies of Islam.”
But the most striking repudiation of ISIS came from a man whose teachings were long considered to be part of the radical fringe. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the jihadist scholar who had been Zarqawi’s personal mentor when the two were in prison, had grown increasingly critical of Zarqawi’s offspring as they marauded across Syria and western Iraq. Maqdisi, still regarded by Islamists as one of the
movement’s founders and pioneering theorists, had broken with Zarqawi over the killing of Shiite innocents. Now he had begun lodging similar protests with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi over his butchering of aid workers such as Britain’s Alan Henning, killed while in Syria on a mission to ease suffering.
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Henning worked with a charitable organization led by Muslims,” Maqdisi noted in an open letter posted on his Web site. “Is it reasonable that his reward is to be kidnapped and slaughtered?”
Maqdisi had lived in Jordan continuously since he and Zarqawi parted ways after the prison amnesty in 1999. Though he had spent much of that time in the Mukhabarat’s detention center, he had continued to express his views on the issues of the day in open letters and Web postings. Some Islamists would question whether Maqdisi’s opinions were truly his own, or part of a script forced on him by the Mukhabarat. But on at least one point, Maqdisi was fully consistent, both in his writings and in private conversations with journalists and friends: the killing of ordinary Muslims, whether religious pilgrims or Sunni pilots captured in battle, was contrary to Islam.
Indeed, after al-Kasasbeh was captured, Maqdisi offered his services as an intermediary, seeking to facilitate the exchange of the pilot for Sajida al-Rishawi, the failed suicide bomber and death-row prisoner. At one point in early 2015, he exchanged messages with a man believed to be Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, Baghdadi’s personal spokesman.
“
I am concentrating now on trying to reach a deal that is of legitimate interest to you,” Maqdisi said to Adnani in one of the exchanges, later circulated on social-media accounts. If ISIS released the pilot, Maqdisi said to Adnani, they could save the life of a “jihadi sister” and prevent further damage to the group’s reputation among Arabs.
ISIS’s response was to release the video of the pilot’s execution, carried out a full month earlier. Maqdisi was furious.
“
They lied to me, and swore solemn oaths,” he told the Jordanian broadcaster Roya TV. “Then it became clear to me that they had already killed the pilot.”
The break was now complete. Maqdisi, in the interview, proceeded with a sweeping condemnation of the movement he had helped to
create. Alluding to his former pupil, Zarqawi, he denounced the errant strain that “began this tradition of slaughter.”
“They do not understand conquests and victories except with slaughtering and killing,” he said. “They slaughter many of their opponents and they display it in front of television screens, until the people are shocked and say, ‘Is this what Islam is?’ And we are forced to defend Islam and make clear that this is not from Islam.”
Maqdisi was at home in Amman when he uttered the words; Jordan’s government had released him from jail months earlier as part of an undeclared truce between the monarchy and the cleric who had once advocated the regime’s overthrow. On February 4, 2015, the same day on which Rishawi was executed at Swaqa Prison, Jordan’s state prosecutor formally dropped all pending charges against Maqdisi. For the first time since his arrest with Zarqawi more than two decades earlier, Maqdisi’s slate with the monarchy was clean.
Prominent Muslim clerics and scholars had condemned previous acts of terrorism, including the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. But the criticisms this time came with an explicit acknowledgment, at the highest levels of the Arab world’s political and religious institutions, that such statements were no longer enough.
On January 1, 2015, a week after the Jordanian pilot’s capture, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stood before a gathering of Sunni Islam’s top religious authorities to call for an Islamic reformation—a “revolution” that would reclaim the ancient religion from fundamentalists and radicals who had perverted its central message. The violence committed by groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda were but symptoms of a larger crisis that Muslims themselves must address, he said.
“We must take a long, hard look at the situation we are in,” al-Sisi told the gathering at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the intellectual center of Sunni Islam for more than a thousand years and the institution that sets the standard for mainstream Muslims on questions of theology and religious practice. “It is inconceivable that the ideology we sanctify could make our entire nation a source of concern, danger, killing and destruction all over the world.”
The problem, al-Sisi said, was not with Islam’s core beliefs but with the “ideology—the body of ideas and texts that we have sanctified over the course of centuries, to the point that challenging them has become very difficult.”
The president drew applause from the room when he turned to address the university’s spiritual leader directly—al-Azhar’s grand imam, Ahmed el-Tayeb—calling on him to “revolutionize our religion.”
“You bear responsibility before Allah,” al-Sisi said. “The world in its entirety awaits your words. Because the Islamic nation is being torn apart, destroyed, and is heading to perdition. We ourselves are bringing it to perdition.”
Weeks later, after ISIS released the video of the pilot’s execution, the grand imam delivered one of the harshest condemnations by a prominent cleric. ISIS was not merely un-Islamic, he said; they were “Satanic.” Al-Azhar would later carry out its own crackdown on extremist clerics, removing imams who condoned violence.
Yet it was clear that the banishing of a few imams would not diminish the Islamic State’s allure. Among ISIS’s thousands of volunteers are young men whose motivation derives less from theology than from a desire to fight authoritarian Arab regimes such as al-Sisi’s. Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist and researcher who has chronicled the rise and fall of Islamist movements over four decades, noted that Zarqawi’s intense hatreds were shaped more by prison than by any sermon or religious treatise.
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The radicalization of many of the actors who created al-Qaeda and then ISIS happened in Arab jails,” Khouri said. “The combination of American jets and Arab jails was the critical fulcrum around which al-Qaeda and ISIS could germinate.”
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The king had left Washington vowing that he was “going to war,” and he did just that. Even before the royal plane landed in Amman, waves of coalition fighter jets crossed into Syria in what officials would later describe as the largest assault on ISIS positions since the campaign began. The planes struck training camps, barracks, and
weapons depots, killing more than fifty militants, an after-action assessment confirmed.
After touching down in Jordan, King Abdullah headed straight into a meeting of his national security staff to plan the next phase. TV cameras were allowed into the room to film the monarch, in a traditional checkered keffiyeh in addition to his tailored suit, vowing to exact revenge for the pilot’s death.
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We are waging this war to protect our faith, values and humanitarian principles,” he said. As for ISIS—“these criminals,” he called them—“they will be hit hard at the very center of their strongholds.”
Outside, he was greeted by an extraordinary sight: thousands of Jordanians lining the streets to cheer the king’s motorcade. These were young crowds, very different from the bands of middle-aged and older males who usually turn out for pro-government rallies, and many of them lingered on the streets late in the evening, lighting candles and carrying hand-lettered signs. Amman’s mosques and Christian churches convened prayer services in the pilot’s memory.
More planes left their bases that day, and Jordanians cheered them as well. As a small country that now faced a terrorist army on two of its borders, Jordan had often downplayed its role in the anti-ISIS coalition, hoping to avoid inciting an attack on the kingdom itself. Now formerly restricted military bases allowed photographers to film airmen painting messages on the munitions they were about to drop. “
Islam has nothing to do with ISIS,” read one note, scrawled on the side of one of the bombs the air force would use in the attack. The Defense Ministry itself, nearly always silent about military missions, publicly announced the new bombing campaign with a statement that bristled with defiance. With only a few planes, and despite a heavy reliance on outsiders for everything from ordnance to fuel, the entire country was banding together, “sacrificing everything to defend the true values of Islam,” the Jordanian Armed Forces said.
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This is the beginning,” the statement read. “You will know who the Jordanians are!”