ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (6 page)

When the uprising against the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad erupted in March 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, continuing his reboot of the Islamic State of Iraq, saw an opportunity. Late that year, he sent a contingent of his soldiers across the border into Syria to join the fight against Assad’s forces. Led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani, these ISI jihadis established a group called the “al-Nusra Front” that quickly gained battlefield success and followers “from both inside and outside” Syria.
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As the Syrian Civil War became the go-to destination for battle-hungry jihadists worldwide, the al-Nusra Front became increasingly independent and drifted from its parent organization, ISI, prompting al-Baghdadi to declare “the unification of the two organizations under his leadership” in April 2013.
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Al-Baghdadi, seeking to reassert absolute control, christened the merger of the two organizations, The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. Yet things did not go according to plan and an “As the Jihad Turns”–like sequence of events followed:

          
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Al-Golani rejected the merger and instead pledged his allegiance to al Qaeda’s top overall leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

          
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Al-Zawahiri supported al-Golani and weighed in against the merger. He ordered al-Baghdadi (at the time still technically his subordinate) to limit his operations to Iraq and cede Syria to al-Golani’s al-Nusra Front.

          
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Al-Baghdadi refused.

          
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Al-Zawahiri formally disowned ISIS and kicked it out of the al Qaeda network in February 2014. The al-Nusra Front was now the sole representative of al Qaeda in Syria.

Much as his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had done nearly a decade before, al-Baghdadi had alienated (and threatened) al Qaeda’s core leadership through a combination of hubris, ruthless ambition, and wanton violence that targeted “apostate” Muslims every bit as much as non-Muslims.

Booted from al Qaeda, ISIS was now officially an independent actor, and al-Baghdadi wasted no time outmaneuvering the rival al-Nusra Front in pursuit of his boundless vision: “Abu Bakr [al-Baghdadi] . . . set about establishing himself in Syria, drawing away a great many of al Nusra’s foreign members. ISIS quickly became a dominant force in Syria and as well as attracting recruits from al Nusra and other rebel groups, it also received donations and support from outside the area, both as a successful salafist/takfiri group, and as an opponent to the regime of Bashar al Assad.”
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Although the al-Nusra Front continues to be a formidable fighting force today, crushing competing rebel groups and controlling large areas
of northwestern and western Syria (including along the border with Israel, near the Golan Heights) with possible designs on declaring an emirate of its own, ISIS has clearly eclipsed it in virtually every way. The two organizations’ bitter rivalry has, at times, spilled over into open battle in Syria, but recently there have been signs of a thaw.

Jihadists from ISIS and the al-Nusra Front crossed from Syria into Lebanon in August 2014, attacking the Lebanese town of Arsal. The combined jihadi force killed and wounded dozens of Lebanese soldiers and kidnapped twenty-nine others, beheading some of them. At the time of this writing, reports persist that the Arsal incursion was a “dry run,” and that the two jihadi organizations were preparing to open a new front in Lebanon.
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Such a move would certainly fit with ISIS’s vision of an expanded caliphate.

In November 2014, improbable as it would have seemed not so long ago, leaders of ISIS and the al-Nusra Front reportedly met outside Aleppo to discuss a merger—the same kind of arrangement al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani had rejected just a year and a half before. It’s funny how the establishment of a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East can change the equation.

Serious differences between the two organizations remain, but as ISIS continues to steamroll its way across the region, gaining fresh recruits and (as we’ll see in
chapter two
) new affiliates, the al-Nusra Front and other jihadi groups may soon be forced to come to a realization.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

In 2005, a Lebanese journalist named Fouad Hussein published details of an al Qaeda “twenty-year plan” that had been leaked to him by AQ members. The plan had seven phases, culminating in “Definitive Victory” in the year 2020.

Interestingly enough, the fifth phase of the plan, which al Qaeda projected would unfold between 2013 and 2016, was “to establish an Islamic state, or caliphate.” In 2014, ISIS—an al Qaeda offshoot—did exactly that. “The Plan,” it seems, is right on course. We now appear to be moving toward the sixth—and next to last—phase: “Total Confrontation,” in which “al-Qaida anticipated an all-out war with the unbelievers” between the years 2016 and 2020.
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In 2014, that war began to take shape, not only in the Middle East—where ISIS is actively pursuing genocide against any group that does not share its bleak vision—but also in the West, where homegrown ISIS supporters are laying the groundwork for a virtual guerrilla war in American and European cities. How the war will end depends largely on Western leaders, who, at the moment, seem absolutely flummoxed as to how to confront the Islamist threat, both at home and abroad. As we’ll see throughout this book, the results of their impotence and ignorance have already been disastrous.

The caliphate has returned—and in its short, ugly existence, has already heaped untold misery upon millions of people.

And there’s much worse in store.

CHAPTER TWO

HELL AWAITS: WELCOME TO THE ISLAMIC STATE

“WHAT REALLY TOOK A TOLL ON ME WAS HEARING WHAT THEY DID
after they kidnapped Yazidi and Christian women. It was too much.”

As ISIS raped and pillaged its way through Iraq’s Nineveh province in the summer of 2014, Steven Nabil spent hours wide awake through the night, on the phone and on social media, listening as anguished Yazidi and Christian women told him the horrors inflicted upon their sisters and daughters by the invading jihadist hordes. Nabil, a twenty-six-year-old Iraqi-American activist with a network of contacts throughout Iraq, including in government and military circles, was even able to communicate with some of the prisoners directly to get firsthand accounts of the atrocities.

“I have never really dealt with that kind of emotional pain,” he told me as we talked by phone in September 2014. “A captured Yazidi girl told me how ISIS had just brought two more busloads of Yazidi women to the place where she was being held captive. She said she could hear them scream
throughout the night as they were being raped. They had two choices. The ones who converted to Islam were married off to ISIS terrorists or given as gifts to [Iraqi] tribal leaders who had sworn allegiance to [ISIS]. The ones who didn’t convert were just raped.”
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Nabil described another occasion, when he received a phone call from a local Yazidi friend living in Phoenix. “It was a man, older than me,” Nabil said. “He was weeping. He said, ‘ISIS is moving toward Yazidi villages, people are fleeing to the mountains—Steven, you are the only one who can help me.’”

“That’s how my nights are,” Nabil sighed. “It all got me so down that I didn’t even go out for about two months.”

Despite the often gut-wrenching nature of his work, Nabil did not shy away. Instead, he became a go-to source for breaking information out of Iraq, receiving regular updates from his contacts in Mosul and elsewhere and posting them on Facebook and other social media sites in real time. As ISIS closed in on Mosul in early June 2014, Nabil, a native Arabic speaker, warned on social media about the impending invasion. And as ISIS began to inflict atrocities upon Iraqi civilians, Nabil received harrowing on-the-ground accounts and photos that he shared with his many followers online. In the meantime, he was still holding down a 9-to-5 day job.

“Iraqi intelligence started watching my postings to get updates,” he told me. “Even the Iraqi air force started to benefit from some of the information I was sharing.”

But his work isn’t limited to social media. On June 13, 2014, just three days after the fall of Mosul, Nabil, along with other Iraqi-Americans, helped organize what he calls the world’s first Iraqi-led protest against ISIS, in downtown Phoenix. Such activities have not gone unnoticed by the Islamic State.

“ISIS has threatened me on social media,” Nabil shared. “They’ve tried to hack into my Facebook page numerous amounts of times. They publicly
attacked my page three times and they were finally able to disable it for a while.”

“I’ve paid out of my pocket, out of my time, out of my time off from work, to do this,” he continued. “I’m not benefiting financially. I’m just doing it to fight ISIS.”

I first met Nabil in 2011 when, despite his youth, he was already becoming a leading advocate for the persecuted Christians of the Middle East, holding several demonstrations in downtown Phoenix calling attention to their plight. For Nabil, it was personal: he was born and raised as an Assyrian Christian in northern Iraq before coming to the U.S. as a foreign exchange student.

After attending high school in Virginia, he graduated from Arizona State University and, in July 2013, started a daily online video journal that he used to communicate with young Iraqis. He quickly gained a large following of Iraqis from all religious backgrounds, and by the time ISIS roared into Mosul in June 2014 Nabil had built up an extensive network of friends and contacts eager to share their stories.

Their accounts of life under ISIS are frequently horrifying. For instance, Nabil has spoken to nurses in Mosul hospitals who have treated girls for internal bleeding caused by rape at the hands of ISIS terrorists.

“For Shias, Yazidis, or Christians inside the caliphate, there is death unless you convert,” Nabil told me. “There are beheadings every day and mass shootings. Crucifixions are very common—in Syria, there are lots of them. Also, if you’re caught with beer or cigarettes, you’re sentenced to eighty lashes.”

By summer 2014, the kind of brutality Nabil’s contacts were describing, combined with ISIS’s boundless ambition—both in the Middle East and among its fanatical Western supporters—had spurred calls for the Obama administration to take action against the Islamic State. Remember, the president had essentially shrugged off ISIS’s seizure of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in January 2014 as an isolated outburst by a group of al Qaeda
castoffs—a mere blip on the national security radar screen, perpetrated by a terrorist “JV” team that posed no threat to the United States.

That position became considerably more difficult to sustain a few months later when ISIS conquered Mosul—a city of nearly two million people and Iraq’s second-largest—embarrassing the U.S.-trained Iraqi Army and preparing to advance on Baghdad. Then came Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration of a caliphate and the revelation that thousands of Western passport holders—including several Americans—were fighting for the fledgling Islamic State, raising the strong possibility that they would one day return home and continue their jihad on U.S. or European soil. The clear and present danger ISIS posed to the region and to the United States had now become undeniable.

Yet all the while President Obama insisted that he would “not be sending US troops back into combat in Iraq.”
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After all, he said, it was “ultimately . . . up to the Iraqis, as a sovereign nation, to solve their problems.”
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That certainly is the goal, at some point. But Iraq’s army had just folded like a cheap suit as soon as the first ISIS flag showed up in Mosul. And the Iran-friendly, Shia-dominated government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had alienated Iraq’s Sunni minority (undoubtedly driving many into the arms of ISIS), had proven completely unequipped to confront Iraq’s many problems, let alone its biggest one: ISIS. Although al-Maliki would step down from his post as prime minister under heavy pressure in August 2014, the same daunting challenges remain.

Indeed, what was true as U.S. troops withdrew prematurely in December 2011 remained true as ISIS knocked on Baghdad’s doorstep in the summer of 2014: Iraq, although technically a sovereign nation—as President Obama pointed out continually while deflecting suggestions of U.S. military force against ISIS—was nowhere near the point of being able to provide for its own stability and security. The unpleasant reality of Iraq’s repeated defeats at the hands of a terrorist caliphate bent on attacking the United States meant that Mesopotamia’s problems were—once again—America’s problems.