The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (34 page)

What’s more, if British authorities were so venomously Islamophobic that they spent their time and resources harassing innocent young Muslims like poor Mohammed Emwazi, why were they so inattentive that they allowed Emwazi to make his way to the Islamic State?

Then again, one doesn’t need a visa to go there.

The Computer Wizard

Ahmad Abousamra grew up in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a toney suburb of Boston. His father, Dr. Abdul Abousamra, was for two decades an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and is now a professor of medicine, physiology, and molecular genetics in the School of Medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Young Ahmad attended top schools: Xaverian Brothers High School, where he made the honor roll, and then Northeastern University, where he made the Dean’s List and graduated with a technology degree.
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But he was deeply committed to Islam from an early age, and finally in 2004, when he was twenty-two, he went to Iraq and joined al-Qaeda in Iraq’s “media wing”—foreshadowing the key role he would play ten years later in establishing the Islamic State’s widely touted social media presence. He also went to Pakistan and Yemen to try to get jihad terror training.
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Returning to the United States two years later, Abousamra was questioned, was released without being charged with anything, and fled to Syria.
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In 2009, he was implicated in a jihad plot to gun down Americans in shopping malls and murder U.S. officials and was finally charged with terrorist activity.
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Special Agent Heidi Williams of Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) said that Abousamra and his fellow Boston jihadi Tarek Mehanna were inspired by 9/11, and “they celebrated it.”
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Ahmad Abousamra made the FBI’s Most Wanted List, with a $50,000 reward on his head.
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Until the spring of 2015, he was believed to be in the Islamic State, where he oversaw ISIS’s sophisticated social media campaigns.

Williams said of Abousamra and his co-conspirator Tarek Mehanna, the son of a professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences: “Both men were self-radicalized and used the Internet to educate themselves. They came to it independently, but once they found each other, they encouraged each other’s beliefs.”
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“Self-radicalized”? Did Ahmad Abousamra turn away from the tolerant and peaceful Islam that he had learned at home? Possibly. However, it is noteworthy that his father Dr. Abdul Abousamra (or Abou-Samra, as he now styles it), in addition to his distinguished medical career, also served as the longtime president of the Islamic Center of New England and vice president of the Boston branch of the Muslim American Society.
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The Muslim American Society is the principal name under which the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States.
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According to a captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document, the Brotherhood’s “work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
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What’s more, on top of his father’s dubious ties, Abousamra himself was a member of the Islamic Society of Boston, which was also attended over the years by jihadis such as Aafia Siddiqui, who was convicted of trying to murder American soldiers and may also have been plotting a jihad attack against an American city, and Abousamra’s friend Mehanna, who is now
in prison for aiding al-Qaeda. The Islamic Society of Boston was founded by al-Qaeda financier Abdurrahman Alamoudi.

The JTTF’s Williams said confidently that Abousamra and Mehanna were “self-radicalized,” but she actually had no way of knowing whether or not they (and others) were “radicalized” at the Islamic Society of Boston. In the wake of the Boston Marathon jihad bombing on April 15, 2013, FBI director Robert Mueller admitted that the only time FBI agents had visited the Islamic Society of Boston was “as part of our outreach efforts”—not to investigate what was taught there.
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However Abousamra came to believe that he should put his considerable talents at the service of violent jihad, the Islamic State had the full benefit of his expensive American education in computer technology—until the spring of 2015, when the computer whiz was reported to have been killed in an airstrike.
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The Girls of the Islamic State: The Jihadi Brides

The Islamic State has not only attracted young Muslim men but also hundreds of Muslim women from all over the world, and for the same reason that the men go: the lure of the caliphate. British authorities have estimated that ten percent of the Muslims from Britain who have traveled to the Islamic State are women, and the same proportion of women go to the Islamic State from continental Europe, Australia, and the United States.
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These girls are overwhelmingly joining ISIS to become the wives of jihad warriors. A small number of women have also taken up arms themselves.
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Some have made the trip while as young as thirteen, and many girls in their mid-teens have gone, including two Muslim teens from Vienna, Sabina Selimovic, fifteen, and Samra Kesinovic, sixteen. Before they left, Samra had become notorious around her school for speaking out for jihad and leaving graffiti around the building reading, “I love al-Qaeda.” The girls left
a note for their parents, saying, “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah—and we will die for him.”
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These girls are ready not just to die, but to kill for Allah as well. Before she left her home in Avignon, France, for the Islamic State, Nora el-Bathy, fifteen, posted on Facebook a photo of a veiled woman holding a rifle, with the caption, “Yes, kill! In the name of Allah.”
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Others betray just how young they really are. The twins Zahra and Salma Halane, sixteen, left England for the Islamic State, where Zahra posed for a photo in which she is fully veiled and holding a rifle in front of the Islamic State’s black flag of jihad. But soon after that she was back on social media lamenting the loss of her beloved kitten, who never returned home after her jihadist husband angrily threw it outside one night.
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Another reminder of these girls’ extreme youth came in February 2015, when three Muslim schoolgirls from Britain, Amira Abase, fifteen, Shamima Begum, fifteen, and Khadiza Sultana, sixteen, sneaked away from their homes and families to join the Islamic State. Abase Hussen, Amira’s father, appeared before the cameras clutching the girl’s teddy bear and affecting shock, sorrow, and outrage that his daughter would do such a thing. He excoriated British authorities for failing to prevent the girls from leaving Britain. However, it later came to light that young Amira may have been acting on what she learned at home when she decided to make her trip to the caliphate: in his pre–teddy bear–clutching days, back in 2012, Abase Hussen had attended a rally led by firebrand British jihad cheerleader Anjem Choudary, at which rally-goers chanted “Allahu akbar” and “The followers of Mohammed will conquer America.”
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One eighteen-year-old Muslim woman from Britain, Umm Khattab, said that she would like to see “David Cameron’s head on a spike” and fled the Sceptered Isle. Once safely in the caliphate, she took to Twitter to exhort other Muslim girls from Britain to join her. In Britain, she claimed fancifully, it was almost impossible to live in an Islamically correct manner: Muslims, she said,
had been forced to sign a petition to head off the prohibition of halal meat (that is, meat slaughtered according to the specifications of Islamic law).
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The Enforcers and Recruiters

A six-foot-tall woman named Umm Hamza, also known as “The Slaughterer,” who is said to pack not only a gun, but several daggers and a cattle prod, is believed to be heading up the armed al-Khansa brigade of women patrolling Raqqa to ensure that women are obeying the strictures of Islamic law—and that enemy fighters aren’t hiding behind niqabs to infiltrate the Islamic State. ISIS pays them a salary of about $150 a month, and they make their rounds covered in black from head to toe, including veils that completely obscure their faces.
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Aqsa Mahmood, one of Umm Hamza’s colleagues among these female Sharia enforcers, is a native of Glasgow, Scotland, who has captured attention for her open praise of the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby on a London street in 2013 and also of the Boston Marathon and Fort Hood jihad massacres. In her view, these jihad attacks in the West are just as valuable as making the trip to the Islamic State: “If you cannot make it to the battlefield, then bring the battlefield to yourself.”
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Aqsa is the daughter of an immigrant from Pakistan who starred for Scotland’s cricket team. She attended Craigholme, an upscale private school. Her parents noted that when the uprising against Assad began in Syria, Aqsa, who had been quite secular, became interested in her religion and began reading the Qur’an avidly. Ultimately, she fled from her home in Scotland to the Islamic State in November 2013, when she was nineteen.

Since arriving there, Aqsa has taken to social media to exhort other young Muslim girls to follow in her footsteps. She has also pooh-poohed the idea that Muslims were drawn to jihad by poverty and social alienation.

Aqsa is the recruiter for the Islamic State who promised “a house with free electricity and water provided to you due to the Khilafah and no rent
included.” But her main selling point is that volunteers for ISIS will receive “an even BIGGER reward in the Aakhirah (afterlife).” She has told potential journeyers to the Islamic State that certainly they will miss their families, but “the family you get in exchange for leaving the ones behind are like the pearl in comparison to the Shell you threw away into the foam of the sea.”
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