The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (6 page)

INTRODUCTION

T
he Islamic State, a.k.a. ISIS, is the wealthiest, most successful, and most dangerous terror group in the world—and the most mysterious.

Al-Qaeda shocked the world and staggered the United States when it destroyed the Twin Towers and struck the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad maintain steady pressure upon Israel with attacks on Israeli civilians and rockets lobbed from Gaza. Hizballah menaces Israel from Lebanon. In the Philippines, Islamic jihad groups have succeeded in compelling the government to grant Muslims an autonomous region in Mindanao. In Nigeria, Islamic jihadists horrified the world and moved Michelle Obama to take to Twitter with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls by kidnapping infidel girls and pressing them into sex slavery. Other jihad groups around the world wage jihad campaigns against
various non-Muslim and non-Sharia governments, all for the goal of establishing an Islamic state.

But one jihad terror group has outdone them all by actually establishing that Islamic state—and embarking upon a reign of terror unmatched in recent memory—rivaling the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

This, of course, is the group that calls itself the Islamic State, that most of the rest of the world calls ISIS, and that Barack Obama and his administration call ISIL. ISIS constitutes a threat to the U.S. greater than that of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, Boko Haram, and all other jihad groups
combined.
Undeniably, its success has already been far greater than that of any of them. The Islamic State has become the first jihad terror group to rule over a significant expanse of territory for any extended period. It has won the loyalty of other jihadis far outside its domains—in Libya and Nigeria, and even as far away as the Philippines. It has called for attacks in the West, and Muslims in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and France have heeded its call.

On June 29, 2014, the group that had up to that point called itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or
al-Sham
in Arabic; hence the synonymous acronyms ISIL and ISIS) announced that it was forming a new caliphate—a single unified government of all the Muslims, according to Sunni Muslim thought—and would henceforth drop the second half of its name and call itself simply the Islamic State.
¹

This claim to constitute a new caliphate became the basis of the Islamic State’s appeal to Muslims worldwide, the inspiration for them to travel in unprecedented numbers to Iraq, Syria, and Libya to join ISIS. Once the Islamic State declared itself the new caliphate, it swiftly began to consolidate control over the large expanses of Iraq and Syria that it had taken by military force—an area larger than the United Kingdom, with a population of eight million people.
²
Blithely disregarding the world’s universal condemnation of its pretensions, it has moved to assemble the accouterments
of a state: currency, passports, social services, and the like. Its control of oil wells in Iraq quickly gave it a sizeable and steady source of wealth.

And ISIS has achieved remarkable military success. Despite a promise from the president of the world’s only remaining superpower to “degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL,”
³
the new caliphate continues to add to its territory.

By May 2015 it had taken both Fallujah and Ramadi—reversing gains America had won over the Islamic State’s precursor organization al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) at a huge cost in our blood and treasure and the lives and confidence of our local allies. In the north toward Turkey, it was also in control of the formerly million-inhabitant city of Mosul, half of whose residents were driven out as refugees. The Islamic State had captured American tanks, artillery, and thousands of U.S.-made armored vehicles from the hapless Iraqi Army. As ISIS forces stood within seventy miles of Baghdad, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government exchanged mutual accusations of incompetence and lack of commitment to the fight. In Syria, the Islamic State occupied half the nation’s territory, carried out mass public executions in the ancient Roman amphitheatre in Palmyra, and threatened Damascus. Coalition pilots were able to drop their bombs on only one out of four bombing runs because of a lack of ground intelligence on targets, and American airstrikes seemed to be no match for armored bulldozers and suicide bombers—some of them citizens of Western countries who had abandoned comfortable lives for the glamor of the new caliphate.

The Islamic State’s conquests have been accompanied by savage brutality that commands the attention of the world. ISIS has beheaded Americans on video, burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive in a metal cage, and made sex slaves of thousands of women and young girls. It executes men for smoking and tortures women for the tiniest infractions against covering themselves in public.

Yet despite all this and more, most Americans know very little about ISIS. And that’s not just Americans who know what they know about world affairs from watching network news shows. Even the nation’s highest authorities and our intelligence apparatus have shown that they know very little about the Islamic State.

Back in January 2014, less than six months before ISIS declared itself a new caliphate, Barack Obama dismissed the group with a now-infamous analogy. After the group took over the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Obama declared that he did not take them seriously: “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” He added: “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”
⁴

Just a few months later, this JV team that was supposed to be “engaged in various local power struggles” controlled a nation-sized expanse of Iraq and Syria and had organized a police force, amassed an army of over one hundred thousand fighters, and become the world’s richest (and best-armed) jihad terror group.

Obama wasn’t the only person surprised by the sudden growth and stunning success of this group; its rapid advance shocked the world. No one, however, should have been shocked at all: the group’s success has been a long time in the making. Nonetheless, even after the Islamic State established its hold on so much territory, Western authorities continued to disparage it. “Whether you call them ISIS or ISIL, I refuse to call them the Islamic State, because they are neither Islamic or a state,” said Hillary Clinton.
⁵
President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, Vice President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and virtually every other
politician in the Western world agreed with Clinton that the Islamic State had nothing to do with Islam. All the major Muslim groups in the West likewise condemned the Islamic State and questioned its claims not just to be the caliphate, but to be Islamic at all.

Despite this chorus of condemnation, however, the Islamic State is drawing Muslims from around the world to join it in unprecedented numbers. By February 2015, over twenty thousand Muslims from all over the world had traveled to Iraq and Syria to wage jihad for the Islamic State—an outpouring of support that no other jihad group, or in fact terror group of any kind, had ever inspired.
⁶

In this book I explain the roots of its success—in the political situation created by the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, the war against Bashar Assad in Syria, and the resulting chaos—but also in the deep currents of Islamic thought. I demonstrate how the Islamic State’s rapid success would never have been possible without its claim to reconstitute the caliphate, a claim that has proven to be extraordinarily potent among Muslims worldwide.

I’ll take you inside the mindset of the leaders of ISIS, of those who have killed in its name, and of the Muslims from Western countries who have been inspired to give up everything they have known and leave their families in order to move to the Islamic State and take up its jihad.

Wherever possible, I’ll let the Islamic State speak for itself. I’ll use the words of the people who have joined it and who run it (as well as of those who have been victimized by it)—so that you can see directly what they think of themselves and of their actions. You will also see what they think of you. I’ll bring you the Islamic State’s own explanations of what it has done, and why, and—most chilling of all—its plans for the future.

I show what constitutes its appeal among young Muslims, and why the condemnations of ISIS from Muslim groups have been completely ineffective
in stopping young Muslims from traveling thousands of miles from all over the globe to join the group. The Islamic State is likely to be around for years to come, but it can be defeated, and indeed must be; in this book, I’ll detail how it can be stopped, and what is likely to follow in its wake once it is defeated. You’ll also discover the shocking extent of the nature and magnitude of the ISIS threat within the United States.

Above all, I show why the Islamic State is nothing less than the most pressing danger of our time. And why our struggle against it is a struggle against a force so purely evil, so focused, and so determined that our struggle against ISIS is, without exaggeration, a struggle for the survival of civilization itself.

We can win. And we
must
win. For the sake of a society that preserves humane values. For the sake of the continued existence of free societies that maintain respect for the dignity of every human person. For our children’s sake.

Chapter One

BORN OF BLOOD AND SLAUGHTER

T
he organization now known as the Islamic State was born in the struggles of Muslim hard-liners in the Middle East in the 1990s to topple the relatively secular Arab nationalist governments that dominated the region and restore the rule of Islamic law. But the blood and ruin wreaked by the Islamic State have their ultimate origin in the battles and raids that Islamic tradition ascribes to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and in the jihad conquests of the Abbasid, Umayyad, and Ottoman caliphates.

ISIS began as an Iraqi jihad group known as the
Jama‘at al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad,
the Party of Monotheism and Jihad. It was founded in 1999 by a Muslim named Ahmed Fadhil Nazar al-Khalaylah, who became internationally famous as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His career in jihad is illuminating
not only of the background of the Islamic State, but of the goals of jihad terrorists in general.

From Small-Time Criminal to Terror Master

Zarqawi’s
nom de jihad
means “Musab’s father from Zarqa,” and the man who would become for a time one of the two most renowned and feared jihad terrorists in the world was indeed born in the Jordanian town of Zarqa, on October 30, 1966. Zarqawi’s father died when he was seventeen, leaving his mother with ten children to raise and the future terrorist with an angry, bitter heart. Zarqawi was jailed for possession of drugs and sexual assault, whereupon he found religion, gave up drinking and drugs, memorized the Qur’an, and embarked upon the path that would lead him to become one of the most notorious men in the world.
¹

Zarqawi’s first taste of jihad came fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but he saw little action there, and in 1992 he returned to Jordan to wage jihad at home.
²
He founded a jihad group named
Jund al-Sham
(Soldiers of the Levant), which foreshadowed ISIS in its dedication to overthrowing a relatively secular government (that of Jordan) and uniting a larger territory (the Levant) in a single Islamic state. Arrested after a cache of weapons was discovered in his home, Zarqawi was given a fifteen-year sentence in March 1994 at the end of a trial during which he showed his contempt for authorities who did not govern according to Islamic law by handing the judge a paper on which the terror mastermind had written out an indictment naming Jordan’s king and the judge himself as defendants.
³