Read The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Online
Authors: Robert Spencer
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #History, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #Non-Fiction
A teenage boy who also got away remembered more horrors: “In Palestine Street, I saw two members of Daesh playing with a severed head as if it was a football.”
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In October 2014, ISIS executed a seventeen-year-old boy for apostasy and then crucified the dead body, leaving it on display as a warning to others.
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In one frenzied two-day period of January 2015, Islamic State jihadis hurled a gay man off a tower, stoned a woman to death for adultery, and crucified no fewer than seventeen young men.
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The Islamic State drew crowds to
such events, holding grisly executions in public even as children watched.
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On other occasions it published photographs of stonings and other Sharia punishments on social media.
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All this was likely calculated to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (Qur’an 8:60). But the gruesome executions also appear to be serving as entertainment for his friends. It seems that some within the Islamic State’s domains have grown accustomed to the bloodlust and begun to enjoy the spectacle—or perhaps they fear to show anything but enthusiasm for the executions, under the watchful eye of the Sharia police. In February 2015, the Islamic State set up giant screens around Raqqa to show its burning alive of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh; throngs watched and cheered the poor man’s horrific death.
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The Islamic State has developed an elaborate and sophisticated secret service structure, worthy of a nascent totalitarian state that intends to assert total control over its citizens, and to watch them closely to ensure they toe the line. This spy network enables ISIS not only to enforce Sharia penalties, but to assert total control of an area. When conquering a new town or city, Islamic State operatives have been instructed to:
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List the powerful families.
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Name the powerful individuals in these families.
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Find out their sources of income.
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Name names and the sizes of (rebel) brigades in the village.
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Find out the names of their leaders, who controls the brigades, and their political orientation.
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Find out their illegal activities (according to Sharia law), which could be used to blackmail them if necessary.
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All this and more is used to assert total control over the new area, and solidify that control quickly and decisively.
It Really
Is
a State—It Even Has a Consumer Protection Office
Even amidst all this coercion, terror, and bloodlust, however, the Islamic State is trying to set up a viable state. “With the departments they have established, they really have created a state. One cannot deny that, for instance, they opened a consumer protection office. If one has a restaurant and they came to check it out, and the meat was bad, or it was exposed to dirt or sunlight, they would take expired material and dispose of it as a sanitary action. They follow up on these issues completely with the departments they have created.” So reported Abu Saif, an opponent of the Islamic State in Raqqa.
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And it was true: the Islamic State moved quickly to establish genuine governance. It was initially organized with a command structure that indicated its intention to govern in a manner that at least in some ways resembles the manner in which a conventional state is governed. As of October 2014, the Islamic State leadership included the following officials (some of the offices appear to be what we might style “in waiting”—the ISIS governor of Baghdad, for example, like a member of Britain’s “shadow cabinet” standing ready to take power—except that while Labour is hoping to win the next election, ISIS is planning to conquer the Iraqi capital by force of arms):
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Caliph:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
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Deputy to the Caliph, Overseer of the Iraqi Provinces:
Abu Muslim al-Turkmani
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(killed in December 2014)
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Deputy to the Caliph, Overseer of the Syrian Provinces:
Abu Ali al-Anbari
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War Minister:
Abu Suleiman
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Senior Military Commander:
Abu Wahib
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Director of Military Operations in Syria:
Umar al-Shisani
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Finance Minister:
Abu Salah
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Minister of General Coordination:
Abu Hajar al-Assafi
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Minister of General Management:
Abu Abd al-Kadir
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Minister for Social Services:
Abu Saji
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Minister of General Security:
Abu Louay (a.k.a. Abu Ali)
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Governor of Baghdad:
Abu Maysara
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Governor of Anbar and Chief of the Military Council:
Abu Abdul Salem (Abu Mohammed al-Sweidawi)
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Governor of the “Border Provinces”:
Abu Jurnas
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Governor of the South and Central Euphrates:
Abu Fatima (Ahmed Mohsen Khalal al-Juhayshi)
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Governor of Kirkuk:
Abu Fatima (Naima Abd al-Naif al-Jouburi)
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Governor of Raqqa:
Abu Luqman
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Governor of Aleppo:
Abu Atheer al-Absi
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Governor of Deir ez Zour:
Haji Abd al-Nasir
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Governor of Homs:
Abu Shuayb al-Masri
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Governor of Salaheddin:
Abu Nabil
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Chief Spokesman:
Abu Muhammad al-Adnani (Taha Sobhi Falaha)
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Chief of Media Operations:
Ahmad Abousamra
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Then there were a few positions that we don’t see in the cabinets of Western leaders—at least not yet:
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Minister for Foreign Fighters and Suicide Bombers:
Abu Kassem
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Sharia Official:
Abu Hummam al-Athari
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Coordinator for the Affairs of Martyrs and Women:
Abu Suja
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Minister for Explosives:
Abu Kifah
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Minister for Weapons:
Abu Sima
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Minister of Prisoners:
Abu Mohammed (Bashar Ismail al-Hamdani)
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ISIScare
Mujahidah bint Usama (Jihad Warrior the Daughter of Osama) was a doctor in Britain before she traveled to the Islamic State. Once there, she posted on her Twitter feed a photo of herself wearing a niqab, the Islamic veil that covers the face, and a white lab coat and holding a severed head as two children stand by. Her caption: “Dream Job.. A Terrorist Doc,” along with a smiley face and two hearts.
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Other medical professionals followed her. In March 2015, nine Muslim medical students from Britain went to the Islamic State to work in hospitals there. Turkish politician Mehmet Ali Ediboglu, who met with their families when they went to Turkey to try to persuade their children to return, remarked, “Let’s not forget about the fact that they are doctors; they went there to help, not to fight. So this case is a little bit different.”
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A little, but not much. Surely a British doctor who traveled to Nazi Germany to work in a German hospital in 1943 would have been recognized as a traitor.
In any case, the Islamic State still hadn’t achieved universal access to healthcare. In mid-April 2015 it executed ten doctors in northern Iraq for refusing to treat its jihadis.
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And two weeks later, the Islamic State issued a video announcing the formation of the Islamic State Health Service.
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The clip featured a Muslim pediatrician from Australia, Dr. Tareq Kamleh (now known as Abu Yusuf), standing in a hospital and holding a newborn baby. He called upon Muslim doctors to travel to the Islamic State: “Please consider coming, please don’t delay.” Providing medical services in the Islamic State was his “jihad for Islam,” the good doctor said.
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On April 26, 2015, just days after Kamleh’s video appeared, a photo of a newborn baby with a handgun and a grenade placed next to him, along with
what was claimed to be the Islamic State’s first official birth certificate, began circulating on Twitter.
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Cubs of the Caliphate
When that lad gets older, he may join the Islamic State’s answer to the Hitler Youth, “Cubs of the Caliphate.” Between January and late March 2015, the ISIS youth organization enrolled at least four hundred Syrian children under the age of eighteen, giving them training in how to fire weapons as well as an intensive indoctrination into the Islamic State worldview. An ISIS video released in March showed one of these boys shooting and killing an accused spy.
The caliphate has called upon Muslim parents around the world to send their children to the Islamic State for jihad training.
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The Cubs of the Caliphate program makes it likely that even if the Islamic State is defeated and eradicated, its aftershocks will be felt around the world for years to come.
ISIS: Bringing Mass-Murdering Totalitarian Government Back into Fashion
The Islamic State’s confident and emphatic proclamations that it is the foremost exponent of the Islamic faith, and its primary earthly authority, have not kept it from the infighting and internal strife that plague most organizations—and particularly those of a strongly authoritarian bent.
“Daesh tries to portray itself as one thing, but beneath the surface there’s a lot of dirt,” said a critic of the group inside its capital of Raqqa, Syria. There were fights within the group, he claimed, over money and power.
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Jamie Dettmer of the Daily Beast reported in February 2015 that there were “quarrels over a range of issues—from divvying up of the spoils of war to competition over women and, yes, the handling of foreign hostages.”
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After ISIS besieged but then failed to capture the town of Kobani on the Syrian border with Turkey, other tensions emerged as well. One refugee who fled from the Islamic State said: “The prolonged battle for Kobani caused a lot of tensions—fighters accused each other of treachery and eventually turned on each other.”
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A Free Syrian Army member noted: “There is a lot of mutual suspicion among the commanders. We tried to exchange some information with an ISIS commander recently and within days he was executed.”
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The anti-ISIS Syrian group “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently” has reported that the Islamic State is just as brutal with dissenters as antecedent totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. After the Islamic State burned alive Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh, “an ISIS cleric in Aleppo province who dared to criticize the immolation of al Kasasbeh has been removed from his post by the ‘caliphate’ leadership and will be put on trial by the group. The Saudi-born imam had said those responsible for the video-recorded murder are the ones who should be put on trial.”
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Also like the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states, the Islamic State has made it difficult for those who have joined it to change their minds and go home. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported in December 2014 that in a two-month span ISIS had killed at least 116 foreign jihadis who had tried to leave the caliphate for home, and added, “We believe that the real number of people that had been killed by IS is higher than the number documented.”
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In March 2015 came another report, that the Islamic State had killed nine of its own jihadis who had tried to abandon the caliphate.
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