The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (20 page)

Chapter Three

IRRESISTIBLE ISIS

W
hile a disturbing number of Muslims in America and Europe are heeding the call to make their jihad at home, a much larger number are flocking to the Islamic State.

ISIS is so appealing to many young Muslims that by the end of May 2015, nearly thirty thousand from one hundred countries had joined it in Iraq and Syria, with five thousand joining its Libyan wing.
¹
These numbers included as many as 150 Muslims from the United States.
²

The foreign jihadis in the Islamic State are a gleam in the eye of any Director of Diversity and Inclusion worth his (or her, or their, etc.) salt. They include a former Catholic altar boy from Belgium, a rapper from Tunisia, three teenage girls and nine physicians from Britain, and even former military men from the United States.
³

A significant and growing number of these foreign jihadis are coming from Europe. As of April 2015, there were at least 1,430 Muslims from France waging jihad in the Islamic State—almost half of the European Muslims who had gone to the caliphate. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an early 2015 interview that three thousand Muslims from Europe were already in the Islamic State, and estimated that that number would reach five thousand by mid-summer and ten thousand by the end of 2015.
⁵

In February 2015 Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, put the total of Muslims from the West in the Islamic State at thirty-four hundred and noted: “The rate of foreign fighter travel to Syria is unprecedented. It exceeds the rate of travelers who went to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.”
⁶
This is the lure of the caliphate.

The estimates of both Valls and Rasmussen could be low. In August 2014, Khalid Mahmood, a Muslim Parliamentarian in Britain, estimated that as many as fifteen hundred young Muslims from Britain had gone to the Islamic State—more than twice the number of Muslims in the British military.
⁷
Three months later he revised that estimate up to two thousand—which if true would make the total number of Muslims from the West in the Islamic State much higher than Valls’s estimate, since Muslims have gone to the Islamic State in large numbers not just from Britain and France, but from all over continental Europe.
⁸
Intelligence officials from outside Britain estimated in April 2015 that there were sixteen hundred Muslims from Britain in the Islamic State.
⁹

ISIS on Social Media: They R Callin U 2 #Jihad

Many analysts have attributed the attractiveness of the Islamic State to young Muslims in the West to ISIS’s sophisticated social media campaigns. The UK’s
Daily Mail
reported in September 2014 that “ISIS has shown remarkable sophistication with its online presence. When the group released its video showing the execution of journalist James Foley, it was simultaneously posted on dozens of online forums, Twitter accounts [and] other social media sites. A slew of Twitter and Facebook accounts spread the group’s message by posting pictures of the brutal executions and torture that ISIS terrorist bestow [sic] on their enemies—all while staying a step ahead of Silicon Valley’s attempts to shut them down.”
¹¹

Said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki: “There’s no question what we’re combating with ISIL’s propaganda machine is something we have not seen before. It’s something we need to do a lot more work on. We are seeing 90,000, I think, tweets a day that we’re combating.”
¹²
Even more than that: “Islamic State sympathisers,” the
Australian
reported in March
2015, “produce about 100,000 pieces of online propaganda every day, including fitness programs for jihadis, smartphone apps and ideological computer games.”
¹³

The Islamic State is proud of its social media acumen. An ISIS supporter wrote on his Twitter page in June 2014: “Praise be to Allah, who gave Twitter to the mujahideen so that they may share their joys and not have listen to [sic] the BBC.”
¹⁴
Not having to listen to the BBC is indeed a consummation devoutly to be wished, but the Islamic State’s alternative offered little to those who were not young, Muslim, and angry.

For that targeted demographic, however, they offered plenty. The Center for Terrorism and Security Studies’ Horgan noted that the Islamic State has “become so adept at social media that they are reaching out to disaffected individuals on a global scale.”
¹⁵
According to CNN, this campaign specifically targets young people in their native online habitats: “UK surveillance chief Robert Hannigan has said ISIS and other extremist groups use platforms like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp to reach their target audience in a language it understands. Their methods include exploiting popular hashtags to disseminate their message.”
¹⁶

According to an October 2014 report in the German publication
Spiegel
about their media effectiveness, the Islamic State jihadis “even market themselves to kids, manipulating popular video games such as
Grand Theft Auto V
so that Islamic State fighters and the group’s black flag make an appearance.” Life in the Islamic State is portrayed as superior to life in the West:

           
In short videos from the series “Mujatweets,” an apparently German fighter talks about his supposedly wonderful life in the Caliphate. Such scenes, depicting the multicultural Islamic State brotherhood, are clearly meant for Muslims in the West. “Look here,” the message is, “everyone is equal here!” The images
suggest that jihad has no borders; that it brings people together and makes them happy. Other blogs include women gushing about family life in wartime and the honor of being the widow of a martyr.

“Their propaganda is unusually slick,” said FBI Director James B. Comey in November 2014. “They are broadcasting their poison in something like 23 languages.”
¹⁷
Nazir Afzal, the United Kingdom’s former Chief Crown Prosecutor, agreed: “What is happening with ISIL, ISIS, Deash [sic]—they are very evil people, but they are very good at propaganda, they are good at marketing.”
¹⁸

It’s All about the Islam

The Western analysts who note the Islamic State’s propaganda skill generally fail to observe the obvious fact that the substance of all this slick propaganda is wholly and solely Islam. The Islamic State bases its appeal on Islamic teachings, and its propaganda demonstrates an intimate knowledge of Islamic tradition—an appealing feature to the young and devout. The Islamic State’s professionally designed, lavishly illustrated online magazine, for example, is called
Dabiq,
after the name of a town in Syria where a hadith records Muhammad as predicting that an apocalyptic battle between the Romans—that is, the Christians—and the Muslims will take place.

The Islamic State is thus positioning itself as the harbinger of the end times—of the final and decisive battle between the Muslims and the enemies of Allah, from which the Muslims will emerge victorious, after which peace—the peace of total Sharia adherence—will prevail all over the earth.

It’s this religious content that appeals to young Muslims far more than the slick and highly professional presentation—the deep knowledge of Islam, the fanatical loyalty to it, and the unapologetic claim of the Islamic
State to be the fulfillment of the desires of so many Muslim hearts for so long. Not only does it embody the restoration of the caliphate; it is also a harbinger of the end times.

As we have seen, al-Qaeda’s Zawahiri warned ISIS founder Zarqawi not to build his strategy on public atrocities even if they could be justified by a rigorist application of Islamic principles, and not to let his head be turned by the plaudits of the “zealous young men” demographic that those atrocities and that rigorism appealed to most strongly. The al-Qaeda position was that jihadis should stick with tactics more “palatable” to the Muslim population in general, not rush to implement harsh elements of Sharia that could turn off supporters. But the phenomenal success of the ISIS media campaign is a testimony to the power of the unapologetic, full-bore Islam that Zarqawi and his successors have insisted on.

Western analysts in the Obama years, however, who have been trained to ignore and downplay the Islamic aspects of the Islamic State’s appeal, are compelled to find other sources for the group’s appeal. Thus they fasten on the gloss and slickness of the Islamic State’s media approach, mistaking the medium for the message.

It may seem strange that a group that has become notorious, hated, and feared for its videos of beheadings and of the burning alive of a captive would be noted for its media savvy. Would the Islamic State win over even more young Muslims to its cause if it weren’t so bloodthirsty and so exhibitionistic about its savagery and violence? Its propagandists obviously don’t think so; they appear to believe that it is preferable to use contemporary means of communication to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (Qur’an 8:60)—that doing so will appeal to young Muslims who know what the Qur’an says but don’t see other Muslims acting upon it to their satisfaction.