The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (33 page)

And over a six-month period the Islamic State’s reign of terror claimed the lives of at least 1,878 people—including over 1,175 civilians, 930 of whom were members of a tribe that had fought the ISIS jihadis for control of two oilfields. It also executed over 500 soldiers of Bashar Assad’s regime,
and nearly 100 who were fighting against Assad but as members of groups other than the Islamic State.
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Who’s Who in ISIS: The Caliph

The Islamic State’s Caliph Ibrahim is more commonly known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but that is a
nom de guerre.
His real name, insofar as any of the information that has been reported about him is accurate, is Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri. According to many accounts, he hails from a family that has produced numerous Muslim clerics, and he himself has a Ph.D. in Islamic law from the Islamic University in Baghdad.
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While all that we know about him is questionable, some of the reports contain interesting details. The most vivid impression that Baghdadi apparently left on those who knew him in his early life in his native city of Samarra was of a quiet, bookish boy just the opposite of Zarqawi, the thuggish ISIS founder. A neighbor recalled that he was “so quiet you could hardly hear his voice. He was peaceful. He didn’t like to chat a lot.”
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The future caliph was deeply committed to Islam from the beginning: “He always had religious or other books attached on the back of his bike, and I never saw him in trousers and shirt, like most of the other guys in Samarra. He had a light beard, and he never hung out in cafés. He had his small circle from his mosque.” Another former neighbor recalled, “He was from a poor but well-mannered family. He was someone very introverted . . . go the mosque [sic], study, read books, that’s it.” A third remembered that he “was, like most of his family, a devoted Muslim.”
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From 1994 to 2004, while the worldwide jihad was heating up, Baghdadi lived quietly in a room at a mosque in Baghdad, occasionally leading prayers when the imam was away.
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A former neighbor recalled that despite his devout commitment to Islam he was a quiet man who wasn’t even stirred to open action when American
troops entered Iraq: “He didn’t show any hostility to the Americans. He wasn’t like the hot blooded ones. He must have been a quiet planner.”
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One of Baghdadi’s classmates at the Islamic University remembered him as “quiet, and retiring. He spent time alone.” The classmate eventually joined the jihad against the Americans, and didn’t find Baghdadi among its leaders: “I used to know all the leaders personally. Zarqawi was closer than a brother to me. But I didn’t know Baghdadi. He was insignificant. He used to lead prayer in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him.”
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This shy, quiet Muslim cleric did, however, eventually join the jihad against the U.S. forces, and he was imprisoned by the Americans.
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It was on his release from Camp Bucca that he is said to have issued his famous veiled threat, “I’ll see you guys in New York.”
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The future caliph’s support for the idea of the caliphate was based on a straightforward idea of fairness. One Islamic State supporter has explained: “In short, for Sheikh Baghdadi, each religion has its state except Islam, and it should have a state and it should be imposed. It is very simple.”
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A warrior for the rival al-Qaeda group Jabhat al-Nusra remarked, “He is becoming very popular among jihadis. They see him as someone who is fighting the war of Islam. . . . He has received letters expressing loyalty from Afghanistan and Pakistan as well. Sheikh Zawahri is trying but I think it is too late.”
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With all the reports of dissension with the Islamic State, there have not been any reports of serious challenges to the authority of the caliph Ibrahim. There has been no hint of a power struggle like the one that went on between Ali ibn Abi Talib and Muawiya in the early days of Islam, and no rival claimants or pretenders to the caliph’s throne.

A power struggle could be going on behind the scenes, of course, and locked up as tightly as al-Baghdadi himself, who has only been seen once in public since he proclaimed his caliphate in June 2014.

Since then, al-Baghdadi’s serious injury and even death have been reported more than once: “Iraqi Isis Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ‘Severely Injured and Flees to Syria,’” read the International Business Times headline just six days after the proclamation of the caliphate.
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And then Al Arabiya reported four months later that al-Baghdadi had been seriously wounded in an airstrike on November 8, 2014.
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There was widespread speculation at that time that the caliph was dead. General Nicholas Houghton, the Chief of the Defence Staff of the British Armed Forces, said the next day: “I can’t absolutely confirm that Baghdadi has been killed. Probably it will take some days to have absolute confirmation.”
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We’re still waiting. Just a few days after the airstrike, the caliph released an audiotape full of bravado and threats. “America and its allies are terrified, weak, and powerless,” he bragged, and denounced the familiar bogeymen: the Jews and the “apostate” and “treacherous” Muslim leaders who rejected his authority.

“Oh soldiers of the Islamic State, continue to harvest the [enemy] soldiers,” al-Baghdadi exhorted. “Erupt volcanoes of jihad everywhere. Light the earth with fire under all the tyrants and their soldiers and supporters.”

Since then, silence. The caliph has become as spectral and surrounded by myth as Orwell’s Big Brother, or Osama bin Laden in his secret Pakistani redoubt. But the brutality of the caliphate he leads is an all too solid reality.

The Shadow Caliph

On April 21, 2015, it was reported yet again that the caliph had been seriously wounded in an airstrike.
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The Pentagon, however, immediately denied the report, saying that the caliph was not in the car that had been hit.
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Ignoring this denial, Iraqi government adviser Hisham al Hashimi stated that al-Baghdadi’s de facto replacement was a former protégé of Osama bin Laden, Abu Alaa Afri: “After Baghdadi’s wounding,” al Hashimi said, “he has begun to head up Daesh with the help of officials responsible for other portfolios. He will be the leader of Daesh if Baghdadi dies.”
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On April 27, reporter Kareem Shaheen of the UK’s
Guardian
said: “Sources tell us Baghdadi is still alive, but still unable to move due to spinal injury sustained in the March air strike.”
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That same day, Radio Iran reported that the caliph was dead.
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The conflicting reports made it impossible to tell what al-Baghdadi’s condition really was, but there was no reason to doubt that Afri was an important figure inside the Islamic State. Al Hashimi, the Iraqi government adviser, claimed that Afri was more important to the Islamic State’s leadership than the caliph himself: “Yes—more important, and smarter, and with better relationships. He is a good public speaker and strong charisma [sic]. All the leaders of Daesh find that he has much jihadi wisdom, and good capability at leadership and administration.”
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Al Hashimi added that Afri had been a physics teacher and “has dozens of publications and religious (shariah) studies of his own.”
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He was also apparently Osama bin Laden’s choice to lead al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2010 and
is thought to support reconciliation between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. In May 2015, the Iraq military claimed that Afri himself had been killed in an airstrike, but the Pentagon would not confirm the claim,
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and the video of the airstrike released by the Iraqis was apparently from a different location from the one they claimed.
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The Executioner

In sharp contrast to the elusive caliph, the Islamic State’s principal killer is highly visible, although his identity wasn’t discovered until his international notoriety was already well established. The man whose knife sawed into the throats of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, Peter Kassig, Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto, and others while the Islamic State cameras rolled always wore a balaclava over his face, and never announced who he was. He speaks with a pronounced English accent and is known as “Jihadi John” after John Lennon of the Beatles, he and three other British Muslims in ISIS—“Paul,” “George,” and “Ringo”—having been nicknamed after the Fab Four by hostages they held in the Islamic State.
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Jihadi John’s “bandmates,” however, have remained obscure, while the prominence of “John” in Islamic State beheading videos inspired an all-out effort to discover his identity. “Jihadi John” turned out to be Mohammed Emwazi, a former London resident in his mid-twenties. Emwazi was born in Kuwait and moved with his family to London in 1994, where he lived a quiet middle class existence and attended a Greenwich mosque. He graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in computer programming.
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Once it became clear that Emwazi had not suffered from poverty, the root cause to which a Muslim’s turn to jihad terror is typically attributed, the mainstream media began casting Emwazi as a victim of Britain’s overzealous security services. Emwazi and two of his friends had flown to Tanzania in August 2009; they said they just wanted to go on safari, but authorities in Dar es Salaam refused him admission. In September 2009 he went to his native Kuwait; ten months later he returned to Britain and then was refused a visa to go back to Kuwait. “I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” Emwazi recounted. “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London, a person imprisoned and controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace and country, Kuwait.”
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This was the cause of Emwazi’s “radicalization,” claimed Asim Qureshi of Cage, a far-Left group in Britain that agitates for the release of Guantanamo detainees and other jihadists. Qureshi complained, “When we treat people as if they are outsiders they will inevitably feel like outsiders—our entire national security strategy for the last 13 years has only increased alienation. A narrative of injustice has taken root.”
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Perhaps—but does this “narrative of injustice” and alienation-producing national security strategy really apply to Tanzania? None of those who claimed that Emwazi had been “radicalized” by his supposedly unfair treatment at the hands of British security officials explained why it was not only the British who had denied Emwazi a visa to go to Kuwait, but also Tanzanian officials who had refused to let him into that country. Emwazi aroused the suspicion of security officials in not one but two nations long before he became “Jihadi John.”