The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (26 page)

The Islamic State is attempting to make that transition now. Whether or not it will succeed remains to be seen, but it has already gotten farther along
the way than any other jihad terror group in modern times, aside from the Palestinians.

How Was the Islamic State Able to Gain Control over a Nation-Sized Expanse of Land?

The Islamic State’s foremost achievement, what sets it apart from other jihad terror groups, is that it has managed to conquer and hold territory. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), an al-Qaeda–linked group, declared an independent state of Azawad in Malian territory in April 2012, but this “state” soon collapsed into infighting, and in February 2013, the MNLA withdrew its declaration of independence. The Islamic State isn’t likely either to succumb to infighting or give up its pretensions anytime soon; nor does there appear to be a power on hand with the will to take decisive action to destroy it.

In seizing control of large areas of Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State was following in the footsteps of the first great Arab conquests, and its attainments are similar to those of the early Arab conquerors.

Early in the seventh century, the two great powers of the day, the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Persian Empire, fought a series of bloody and costly wars. In 611, the Persians under the Emperor Khosrau (called Chosroes by the Byzantines) began a remarkably successful offensive, routing Byzantine forces in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, and elsewhere. In 613 the Persians took Chalcedon, right across the Bosporus from the Byzantine capital of Constantinople.

The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius sued for peace and paid huge sums in tribute to the Persians, while quietly rebuilding his army. In the early 620s he began an enormously successful counteroffensive against the Persians, defeating them almost everywhere his armies had been defeated a decade before and in 628 taking the war to the gates of Ctesiphon, the Persian capital.

Heraclius was thus able to restore the glory of the Byzantine Empire and send the Persian one into a spiral of decline. This victory, however, came at an enormous cost. By the early 630s, the Byzantines didn’t have troops in sufficient numbers to properly man their garrisons in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Their control over these areas was more a matter of political convention and history than present-day reality; they were ripe for conquest by any group with the will and means to take them. The Persians had the will, but no longer the means, and in previous decades, that would have been enough to secure Byzantine control over these regions until the Christian empire was able to reassert a more active presence. At this point, however, the newly united and energized Arabs were ready to exploit the Byzantines’ weakness. They moved quickly to take advantage of the power vacuum to embark upon their own series of conquests, laying the foundation for what has been known ever since as the heart of the Islamic world.

The parallels with the rise of the Islamic State are striking. The Iraq war that saw the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and the installation of a weak Shi’ite regime in Baghdad left much of Iraq in chaos. The Baghdad regime was essentially a client of Shi’ite Iran, but much of the Sunni areas of the country was never in its control, and significant numbers of Sunnis deeply resented the Shia-dominated regime.

Meanwhile, the “Arab Spring” uprisings heralded pro-Sharia revolts against relatively secular regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and ultimately Syria; while the Western mainstream media celebrated these as pro-Western, pro-democracy popular uprisings, the only regard many of the protesters had for democracy was as a means to an end: to install Islamist governments all over the region with the blessing of the United States.

When Assad stood much firmer than his counterparts Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt had, Syria was engulfed in a great civil war, with Iran backing its client Alawite regime in Damascus while Sunnis all over the rest of the country aligned with various jihad groups that were
determined to remove Assad and install an Islamic regime in Syria. Barack Obama’s precipitous and ill-considered withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (as precipitous and ill-considered as it was to put them there in the first place) left a vacuum that Sunni groups could and would exploit.

The Islamic State, being the most ruthless, best equipped, and most fanatically dedicated to Islamic principles of all these jihad groups, was able to take advantage of Sunni discontent in both Syria and Iraq, and the weakness of the central governments of both, to take the most effective advantage of the power vacuum and proclaim its caliphate.

The Spoils of War

It helped that the Islamic State was able to gain control of several reliable—and immense—sources of wealth and ultimately to become the richest jihad terror group the world has ever known. The Islamic State looted nearly $500 million from the banks in the city of Mosul alone.
¹

It has also obtained an astonishing amount of war materiel in the same way. The Islamic State’s conquests include millions of dollars’ worth of American munitions and fighting equipment taken from the Iraqi Army. Just at Mosul, ISIS is reported to have taken twenty-three hundred Humvees.
²
And at the fall of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, in May 2015, the Pentagon admitted that Iraqi troops abandoned “a half-dozen tanks, a similar number of artillery pieces, a larger number of armoured personnel carriers and about 100 wheeled vehicles like Humvees” to the Islamic State.
³
Video of a Ramadi police station from an ISIS jihadi showed “box after box of American mortar shells and bullets that appeared shiny and new. Several Humvees, apparently not long out of the packing crates, sat abandoned nearby. ‘This is how we get our weapons,’ the narrator said in Arabic. ‘The Iraqi officials beg the Americans for weapons, and then they leave them here for us.’”
⁴

David Cohen, the Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said on October 23, 2014, that the Islamic State had “amassed wealth at an unprecedented pace and its revenue sources have a different composition from those of many other terrorist organizations.”
⁵
He noted that the Islamic State “obtains the vast majority of its revenues from local criminal and terrorist activities.”
⁶

And there is also the oil.

A Million Dollars a Day: ISIS Awash in Oil

The resurgent global jihad of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has always been powered by oil. In the mid-twentieth century, the Saudis began spending their oil billions to spread the virulent Wahhabi understanding of Islam throughout the Islamic world, confronting head-on the relatively benign and peaceful forms of cultural Islam that had become dominant in areas of Central Asia, East Africa, and elsewhere.

The foremost child of this ideological campaign has been the Islamic State, a caliphate declared in line with the rigorist version of Islam that the Saudis have spent billions to spread, right on the Saudis’ doorstep and, in a neat bit of poetic justice, denying the legitimacy of the House of Saud. Still, one thing that the Saudis’ ideological children have in common with their despised parents is their use of oil revenues in the cause of Islam and jihad.

Theodore Karasik, research director at the Dubai-based think tank INEGMA, explained in July 2014 that the Assad regime was unprepared for the Islamic State’s concentrated assault on Syria’s oil fields: “These fields were probably under guard, but not in a robust nature that could take overwhelming force from groups like ISIS. They are trying to establish a state, and these types of revenues are important for the state’s formation because it makes up a significant chunk of their revenue.” Karasik explained that seizing oil fields was “part of an ongoing plan” that the Islamic State had “to develop their own economic system.”

And the plan worked. Karasik noted that “officials from the Iraqi oil industry have said that ISIS reaps $1 million per day in Iraq in oil profits.” If the Islamic State took all the oil fields upon which it had designs, “the total would be $100 million per month for both Iraq and Syria combined.” The jihadis sell the oil at prices that so far undercut OPEC that many cannot resist buying it on the black market: “They sell it for $30 a barrel because it’s a black market. It’s not pegged to international standards for oil prices, which are over $100 a barrel. The oil is bought through Turkey from Syria, and it’s sold to black market traders who function throughout the Levant.”
⁷

Our “Ally” Turkey

Turkey is ostensibly an ally of the United States and a fellow NATO member. It is key, however, to the Islamic State’s black market trade in oil. Barack Obama and John Kerry have failed in repeated efforts to persuade the Turkish government to move against this black market in oil.
⁸

The Pentagon has even spotted oil tanker trucks moving Islamic State oil in Turkish territory—but has hesitated to strike them, for fear of further weakening what is not much more than a paper alliance at this point.

The fact that Turkey is still considered an ally against the Islamic State manifests the crying need for a thoroughgoing reevaluation and realignment of U.S. foreign policy, which is still based on old Cold War models, procedures, and alliances that not only do not apply to the struggle against the global jihad and against the Islamic State in particular, but are actively counterproductive.

In September 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to sign a pledge committing the nations of the Persian Gulf region to fighting the Islamic State, even though that pledge was so toothless as to specify that the participating nations were only committing to fighting ISIS to the extent that each deemed “appropriate.”

Forty-nine Turkish diplomats were being held hostage in the Islamic State, Turkish authorities explained, and declaring that Turkey was going to fight against ISIS would endanger them. The possibility that refusing to sign up to fight the Islamic State might present an appearance of weakness that ISIS could exploit by kidnapping even more Turkish diplomats was not considered.
⁹

In any case, black market oil, a key element of the Islamic State’s wealth, continues to be transported through Turkey, with our friends and allies the Turks doing absolutely nothing to stop it.

According to Undersecretary Cohen, “Our best understanding is that [ISIS] has tapped into a longstanding and deeply rooted black market connecting traders in and around the area.” He assured the world that the United States was working with “our partners in the region to choke off cross-border smuggling routes and to identify those involved in smuggling networks.”
¹⁰

Despite the lack of Turkish cooperation, these endeavors have been successful at least to some degree. Speaking in February 2015, a week after the Islamic State failed to take the Syrian town of Kobani after a four-month siege, Pentagon spokesperson Rear Admiral John Kirby announced, “We know that oil revenue is no longer the lead source of their [ISIS’s] income in dollars.” He explained that this was because the Islamic State had suffered losses on the battlefield: “They are changing. They are largely in a
defensive posture. They aren’t taking new ground. So, they are losing ground. They are more worried now about their lines of communications and supply routes.”

Kirby sounded a confident note: “This is a different group than it was seven months ago. I’m not saying they’re not still dangerous. I’m not saying they’re not still barbaric, but they’re different. Their character, their conduct, their behavior is different. And that’s a sign of progress.”

The Islamic State was unable to rely as much upon oil sales as it had been, he explained, because it had “lost literally hundreds and hundreds of vehicles that they can’t replace. They’ve got to steal whatever they want to get, and there’s a finite number.”