ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (3 page)

Al-Baghdadi had the audacity—and with ISIS’s military prowess and territorial gains, the means—to do what al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Iranian regime, and virtually every prominent radical Islamic entity has dreamed of doing for the past ninety years. Regardless of their tactical and even theological differences (Shia Iran, for instance, seeks more of an “Imamate,” with an Iranian ayatollah at the helm), all radical Islamist organizations share the ultimate goal of reestablishing a caliphate, or pan-Islamic super state, that will confront Israel and the West and return Islam to its former glory days. This grand, borderless coalition of Islamic nations governed by sharia law would ideally be united politically, economically, and militarily; control a large share of the world’s oil supply, and boast nuclear capability. A formidable foe, without question—and one with big shoes to fill, historically:

          
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Under the Umayyad Caliphate, the second of the four major caliphates after Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, the Muslim world empire reached its zenith. Between 661 and 750 AD, the Umayyads, whose capital was Damascus, ruled over 5 million square miles of contiguous land, including Spain and Portugal—rebranded “Al Andalus” by their Muslim conquerors—and drove into central France before being repelled by the armies of Frankish warrior Charles Martel. Despite the setback in France, the caliphate continued its advance elsewhere. The island of Sicily eventually came under Islamic control, and Muslim armies launched frequent raids into southern Italy, even plundering suburban Rome in 846 AD. These were only the beginnings of a long
struggle between Europe and Islam that only intensified under the Ottomans and still goes on today, albeit in a different form, as we’ll see in
chapters six
and
seven
.

          
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The Ottoman Caliphate was established in 1571 and at its height encompassed most of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus, not to mention a large chunk of southeastern Europe, including Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, the former Yugoslavia, and parts of modern-day Hungary. The Ottoman Turks even reached the gates of Vienna twice before being turned back. Yet by the dawn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire had declined to the point that it was known as “the sick man of Europe.” Its caliphate gradually shrank in size and influence and was ultimately abolished by the secular Turkish ruler Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924.

          
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The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt four years later as a direct response to the dissolution of the caliphate, an event the Brothers and their founder, Hassan al-Banna, considered a catastrophe.

          
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But the Brotherhood’s slow-and-steady incremental strategy for reviving the caliphate was insufficient for al Qaeda and other more impetuous Brotherhood offshoots that broke away from the “Brother-ship” with the goal of establishing a sprawling Islamic state—stretching from the Himalayas in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west—through violent jihad.

          
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Finally ISIS took the al Qaeda formula, added tens of thousands of foot soldiers and heavy weaponry, and ran with it, succeeding where AQ and the Brotherhood had failed and violently imposing an Islamic State across a large area of Iraq and Syria—the heartland of the caliphates of old.

Compared to the Umayyad and the Ottoman, the self-declared ISIS caliphate is tiny. But those previous caliphates weren’t built in a day, either. The ultimate long-term goal of ISIS, as of its predecessors, is to expand its current mini-empire to the four corners of the earth, imposing Islamic sharia law on all mankind and either slaughtering those who do not comply or forcing them to live a humiliating second-class existence as
dhimmis.
Of course, given ISIS’s track record of wholesale massacres in the areas that it has conquered thus far, there would likely be few people left to dhimmify.

Another important aspect of the Islamist vision is that all areas—including Israel and European nations such as Spain—that were ever part of the caliphate at some point in history are still considered Muslim land and must be brought back into the fold, through violent jihad if necessary. On that, there can be no compromise.

While global domination is the endgame, in the short term ISIS will settle for expanding the current borders of the Islamic State into the countries in its immediate backyard: Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the remaining areas of Iraq and Syria that it has not yet conquered, including the big prizes of Baghdad and Damascus. In ISIS’s vision, assaults on Israel and the hated Shia stronghold of Iran would also come at some point, followed by forays into North Africa and South Asia. Does that sound like an unlikely scenario? It may seem that way. But it’s not impossible in today’s wildly unstable Middle East.

As recently as November 2010, just before the first stirrings of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, few foresaw the toppling of secular Arab strongmen whose iron-fisted regimes had ruled for decades (much easier to predict, unfortunately, were the radical Islamic regimes that would follow them). Who would have predicted that two massive revolutions would engulf Egypt, the most populous and influential Arab Muslim nation, in the span of just two years? And what about ISIS’s lightning seizure of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June 2014, a geopolitical earthquake
that apparently took the Obama administration, and much of the world, completely by surprise? The point is that events are unfolding so rapidly and unpredictably in today’s Middle East—and the West’s response is so weak, disjointed, and muddled—that nothing is beyond the realm of possibility in the region, including an ISIS caliphate stretching well beyond its current borders.

And as the Twin Cities terror pipeline shows, ISIS’s influence is felt far beyond the Middle East. While the bulk of ISIS’s soldiers hail from Syria and Iraq, at least a third of its ranks consist of foreign fighters who have flocked to the Islamic State caliphate from eighty countries around the world,
⁴
including thousands from Europe and approximately 130 from the United States.
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Boasting fanatical adherents on six continents and flush with tons of cash, territory, and heavy weaponry, ISIS may very well go down as the most powerful and influential terrorist movement in history. It is already the richest, with an estimated overall worth of $2 billion.
⁶

It is also the most brutal—“a group of marauders unparalleled in Mesopotamia since the time of the Mongols”
⁷
—crucifying, raping, pillaging, and beheading their way across Iraq and Syria and gleefully posting videos and pictures of the slaughter on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for their devoted followers worldwide to revel in. Old and young, male and female, Christians and Kurds, Yazidis and Shiites: none are immune to ISIS’s savagery.

Thanks to its sweeping gains in Iraq and Syria and its recruitment of some fifteen thousand foreign fighters from every corner of the globe, ISIS has overtaken al Qaeda—the group from which it was spawned—as the top jihadist organization on the planet. Think about it. Al Qaeda has branches around the world and remains an extremely dangerous beast, but it controls no territory and cannot field a standing army. The genocidal terror group Hamas has run the tiny Gaza Strip into the ground, creating a miserable mini–Islamic emirate with little influence beyond its
immediate neighborhood, outside of fundraising. The Taliban ruled the war-ravaged wasteland of Afghanistan for just five years, but only took the country even deeper into the Stone Age.

While al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Taliban are all formidable in their own ways (particularly Hamas, with its large rocket arsenal that can now reach every corner of Israel), none of them can match ISIS’s lethal combination of funding, foot soldiers, territory, global reach, multimedia influence, and advanced weaponry. Further, all three of the above-named organizations have been around for years and absorbed heavy blows to their leadership and infrastructures. They have likely already hit their ceilings, whereas ISIS, in its current incarnation, only exploded (no pun intended) onto the world scene in 2013 yet has already risen to the top of the jihadi heap.

The only entity comparable to ISIS is Hezbollah. The two terror heavyweights have battled each other in Syria and Iraq over the past few years as part of the ongoing Sunni-Shia strife sweeping the region (more on that in
chapter eight
), with Hezbollah’s top leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah warning, “The capabilities, numbers and capacities available to ISIS are vast and large. This is what is worrying everyone and everyone should be worried. . . . This [ISIS] monster is growing and getting bigger.”
⁸

Unlike the Islamic State, Hezbollah’s home base of southern Lebanon does not constitute a vast territory. But Hezbollah, essentially operating as a state within a state, does exert tremendous sway over the Lebanese government and also wields a global terror network that is active on six continents. Most important, Hezbollah is sponsored by the state of Iran, which has supplied it with tens of thousands of rockets and advanced missiles. Hezbollah also boasts a well-trained paramilitary force that has battled both the Israeli military and Syrian rebels in ground engagements.

Although (as we’ll see in later chapters) funds from Turkey, Qatar, and the Persian Gulf states have almost certainly fallen into its hands, ISIS,
unlike Hezbollah, has no clear state sponsor behind it—but ISIS
is
a state sponsor of terrorism. The territory controlled by the Islamic State encompasses large chunks of northern and western Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, from the outskirts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad to the periphery of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. Clearly, ISIS possesses the geographical expanse of a “state.” And it is beginning to build up other trappings of statehood as well, developing a sophisticated bureaucracy, issuing annual progress reports, minting its own currency, and even reportedly issuing its own Islamic State passports.
⁹

It’s also a good bet that, if left unchecked, the ISIS caliphate—like other state sponsors of terrorism—will export terror beyond its borders very soon, quite possibly to a neighborhood near you. In fact it has already exported terror, if only indirectly, in the form of Western sympathizers who have been inspired by ISIS to carry out solo “lone wolf” jihadi attacks in Canada, New York City, Australia, and Oklahoma.

As for rockets and missiles, ISIS could begin to close a wide gap with Hezbollah by, for starters, seizing some of the Syrian regime’s missiles and launching pads—a scenario that is certainly not outside the realm of possibility. ISIS actually showcased a captured Scud missile during a military parade in Raqqa in June 2014. It’s unclear whether the Scud was of Syrian or Iraqi origin, and experts believe it was inoperable.
¹⁰

Nevertheless, ISIS more than makes up for its deficiencies in surface-to-surface missiles with the other spoils it has seized in its victories over the Syrian and Iraqi militaries. The vast ISIS arsenal reportedly includes:

          
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Dozens of Soviet-made tanks.

          
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American-made armored Humvees.

          
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Howitzers and other field artillery.

          
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Chinese-made field guns.

          
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Anti-aircraft guns.

          
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Shoulder-fired RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades).

          
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Anti-tank missiles.

          
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Untold bundles of machine guns and AK-47s.
¹¹

          
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ISIS may also have older-model Soviet MiG fighter jets in its possession—no match, obviously, for U.S. fighter jets, but enough to give ISIS the beginnings, at least, of an air force.
¹²

          
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Perhaps most alarming for U.S. officials is ISIS’s reported use of advanced surface-to-air missiles, or MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defense System), which can be used to shoot down not only American fighter jets currently flying over Syria and Iraq but also civilian airliners. ISIS has even issued its foot soldiers a “how-to” guide on shooting down U.S. Apache helicopters using MANPADS.
¹³

The bitter irony is that a sizable chunk of ISIS’s arsenal was made in the United States. According to an extensive study by the London-based group Conflict Armament Research, “Islamic State forces have captured significant quantities of US-manufactured small arms and have employed them on the battlefield.”
¹⁴
Much of that haul was acquired when ISIS forces rolled into Mosul in June 2014.

ISIS’s conquest of Mosul—Iraq’s second-largest city, rich in history and culture and home to nearly two million inhabitants—was an unprecedented event in the modern era of Islamic terrorism. Not only did ISIS jihadists seize Mosul’s central bank and close to $500 million, but also, according to the
Los Angeles Times,

          
[Iraqi] Government forces retreated en masse from the [ISIS] onslaught, leaving behind a military hardware bonanza, including the U.S.-made armored Humvees as well as trucks, rockets, artillery pieces, rifles, ammunition, even a helicopter. Some of
the seized materiel was old or otherwise non-functioning; but a lot was promptly put to use on the battlefield.