The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (12 page)

Zawahiri anticipates Zarqawi’s objection:

           
And your response, while true, might be: Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the Crusaders and their helpers? And isn’t the destruction of the villages and the cities on the heads of their inhabitants more cruel than slaughtering? And aren’t the cluster bombs and the seven ton bombs and the depleted uranium bombs crueler than slaughtering? And isn’t killing by torture crueler than slaughtering? And isn’t violating the honor of men and women more painful and more destructive than slaughtering?

These are Qur’anic references that Zawahiri knew Zarqawi would understand. The Qur’an directs Muslims to “make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the enemies of Allah” (8:60)—hence Zawahiri’s anticipated question from Zarqawi, “Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the Crusaders and their helpers?”

Likewise, his refrain about various alleged Western atrocities being “crueler than slaughtering” is a reference to the Qur’an’s declaration that “persecution is worse than slaughter” (2:191, 2:217). Islamic tradition
explains that this statement from the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad after he ordered a group of Muslims to raid one of the trading caravans of their enemies, the Quraysh, at Nakhla, a settlement near Mecca. In order not to lose their chance at the caravan altogether, the raiders struck during one of the sacred months of the Arabic calendar, during which violence was forbidden—violating the sacred month.

Muhammad, it is said, at first received them coldly—until Allah revealed to him the phrase, “persecution is worse than slaughter.” The Muslims were persecuted by the Quraysh, or claimed they were, and so slaughtering them even in the sacred month was acceptable: the prohibition against fighting in the sacred month could be set aside for extenuating circumstances.

Zawahiri was thus anticipating that Zarqawi would object to his request to rein in his jihad by pointing out enemy atrocities and justifying his response with the Qur’anic phrase. And he stood by his statement that public opinion in this case would trump even the directive from the Muslim holy book, for their supporters, he said, did not comprehend this principle, and Zarqawi’s actions would be vulnerable to “a campaign by the malicious, perfidious, and fallacious campaign by the deceptive and fabricated media. And we would spare the people from the effect of questions about the usefulness of our actions in the hearts and minds of the general opinion that is essentially sympathetic to us.”

This was the core of the difference between al-Qaeda and what would become ISIS: al-Qaeda believed that the tactics practiced by Zarqawi, which he would pass on to the Islamic State, were counterproductive, arousing the horror and revulsion of the world, which could backfire by stirring the infidels to fury against the Muslims—an infuriated foe is harder to defeat than a complacent one.

Of course this was a bit rich coming from the masterminds of the single event most responsible for sparking the present round of the conflict between the West and the Islamic world: the September 11 attacks. Nothing
aroused the anger of the world in the way that 9/11 did, and both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State read the Qur’an, which directs them to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (8:60). As Zawahiri conceded, Zarqawi would be “justified” in objecting to his letter by pointing to this divine imperative. He could also have pointed to the fact that al-Qaeda and his group shared the same goals and the same beliefs, but differed only in tactics.

And on tactics, who turned out to be right? The problem with prudential arguments is that who’s right depends on what actually happens next. You can never tell for sure who has the better end of the argument until you see how things turn out in practice. Zawahiri warned Zarqawi not to put too much stock in “the praise of some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the shaykh of the slaughterers.” He thought that “the Muslim populace who love[d] and support[ed]” Zarqawi wouldn’t ever find hostage-murder snuff videos “palatable.” But as we’ll see, Zarqawi and his successors in ISIS, aiming their PR campaign straight at the “zealous young men” demographic that Zawahiri discounted, were able to find a mass audience that would be inspired by those murders, so inspired that they would flock from all over the world in the tens of thousands to join ISIS’s jihad—when they weren’t undertaking jihad attacks at home in Europe and America. Ironically, bin Laden’s organization apparently underestimated the appeal of the strictest Sharia and the most violent jihad—and overestimated the resolve of the United States to oppose it. So today, history seems to have passed al-Qaeda by, and ISIS is in the ascendant.

Zarqawi won the argument.

Chapter Two

ISIS COMES TO AMERICA

“I
’ll see you guys in New York,” the Islamic State’s future Caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, supposedly said when he was released from Iraq’s Camp Bucca.

Whether or not he said it, ISIS had designs on Gotham.

On October 23, 2014, in Queens, a man named Zale Thompson attacked four New York police officers with an eighteen-and-a-half-inch hatchet, wounding one in the head and another in the arm before he was shot dead. His father ascribed the attack to the racism that had apparently destroyed his son’s life: “He wanted white people to pay for all that slavery and all that racism. I think he committed suicide—and he was taking one of y’all with him. . . . He just said, ‘They have to pay for all their unfairness.’ Unfairness for the way they treat black people.”
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But the police investigation of the attack uncovered a different motive. As one law enforcement official said, “This guy spent every waking moment on the Internet. . . . He Googled the words ‘jihad against police.’”
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He had also searched the internet for information for “lone wolf,” “jihad,” “jihad against the infidels,” “fatwa against americans,” and “death to America in Arabic.”
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Thompson had also searched on the internet for information about two recent jihad attacks in Canada.
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Incitement to Murder

What exactly might Zale Thompson have seen in his relentless internet searches that could have inspired him to try to hack four members of the NYPD to death?

How about this: “You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit [rebels against Allah]. Strike their police, security and intelligence members”?
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And, if he needed any further encouragement, how does this sound? “Knocking off a police, military or any other law-enforcement officer sends a chilling message to the so-called ‘civilians’ and fills their hearts with consternation.”
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Those incitements to murder had been issued by the Islamic State in September of 2014, the very month before Thompson’s hatchet attack. This encouragement to engage in violent jihad in America and the rest of the West were part of a continuing campaign on the part of ISIS to bring the war home to the “crusader” powers—by enlisting Muslims already present
in the United States, Europe, and Australia to carry out the very kind of “lone wolf” attacks that Thompson had been searching for information about on his computer.

As one of the September 2014 Islamic State appeals calling Western Muslims to jihad noted, there are 2.6 million Muslims living in the United States today.
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If ISIS can persuade even a small percentage of them to throw in their lot with the caliphate and commit acts of violence here, they could cause serious mayhem. ISIS would achieve the desired result: “you will pay the price as you walk on your streets, turning right and left, fearing the Muslims. You will not feel secure even in your bedrooms.”
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Bringing the War Home to America

Just before ISIS proclaimed itself the caliphate in late June 2014, it had issued a warning to Americans that jihad attacks against U.S. embassies and American civilians would follow any American attack upon the terror group’s holdings (grammar, spelling, and punctuation reproduced as in the original):

           
1.
   
If the United States bomb Iraq, every American citizen is a legitimate target for us.

           
2.
   
Every American doctor working in any country will be slaughtered if America attack Iraq.

           
3.
   
Any company in Arab countries which employs Americans is a legitimate target for every Muslim.

           
4.
   
If America attacks Iraq; every American embassy in the world will be exposed and attacked with car bombs.

           
5.
   
American civilian blood is not more precious than the blood of the children and women of Iraq.

           
6.
   
Is the blood of American civilians forbidden? The blood of the children of Fallujah permissible?

           
7.
   
For every drop of blood shed by the Iraqis, Americans will shed a river of blood.

           
8.
   
Every government that is willing to open its territory for U.S. aircrafts to launch attacks will bear the consequences.

           
9.
   
Bin Laden says; dont consult anyone when killing Americans.
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By August 2014, Baghdadi’s Islamic State had succeeded and grown to such an extent that then–Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that it was “as sophisticated and well-funded as any group we have seen. They are beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of . . . military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded. This is beyond anything we’ve seen.” What’s more, he said that the Islamic State was “an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else.”
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“Anywhere else” included the United States. As Hagel was sounding his warning, Islamic State supporters posted photos of Islamic State symbols being held in front of the White House and other American sites, with the message: “We are in your state, we are in your cities, we are in your streets.”
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That same month, VICE Media’s Medyan Dairieh released a video report of his three weeks in the Islamic State–controlled city of Raqqa, Syria—the de facto capital of its new caliphate. Dairieh recorded ISIS spokesman Abu Mosa boasting and threatening: “I say to America that the Islamic Caliphate has been established. Don’t be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq. We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”
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