The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (7 page)

While in prison, Zarqawi became the leader of a group of Muslims upon whom he imposed strict discipline and to whom he was fanatically devoted. A fellow jihadi who knew Zarqawi in those days recalled that he was “well-known for loving his brothers in God more than his relatives.”
⁴

In May 1999, Zarqawi was released from prison after serving only a third of his sentence, under a general amnesty granted by Jordan’s King Abdullah. The wisdom of that amnesty was immediately cast into doubt when Zarqawi got involved in a jihad scheme known as the “Millennium Plot”; plotters intended to bomb a luxury hotel and other sites in Jordan frequented by tourists.
⁵
The plot was foiled; Zarqawi fled to Pakistan and eventually ventured into Afghanistan, where he founded the Party of Monotheism and Jihad.
⁶
In Afghanistan he met Osama bin Laden, who decided to set him up with funding for a jihad training camp for Zarqawi in Herat, where he trained jihadis from Jordan, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere for actions in Europe.
⁷

After 9/11, Zarqawi and his men crossed from Afghanistan into Iran, where they were able to operate until April 2002. At that point, eight of his jihadis were discovered in Germany, plotting jihad mass murder attacks against Jewish targets.
⁸
Expelled from Iran as a result of this discovery, Zarqawi made his way to Iraq, where he anticipated that an American attack was imminent. He trained his Party of Monotheism and Jihad to be an anti-American jihad force and positioned himself as the leader and guide of the jihadis from all over the world who had begun to stream into Iraq to fight the Americans.

Thus Zarqawi’s ascent to international fame began. He became infamous as a pioneer of the media jihad for which ISIS has now become feared and hated and was personally responsible for one of the first decapitation videos to be posted on the internet and capture the attention of the West—that of American hostage Nicholas Berg in May 2004.

A few months later, Zarqawi’s group also filmed and distributed the beheadings of two other Americans, contractors Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley.
⁹

Zarqawi was morally responsible for many murders, but in the cases of Berg and Armstrong it appears that he actually wielded the murder weapon as well. According to the caption of the Nicholas Berg video and the Party of Monotheism and Jihad online announcement of Armstrong’s murder, Zarqawi himself is the masked figure who is seen sawing those victims’ heads off with a knife.
¹⁰

The Alliance with al-Qaeda

On October 17, 2004, with his notoriety at its peak, Zarqawi pledged his loyalty and that of his organization to Osama bin Laden and renamed his group
Tanzim Qai’dat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn,
al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers. Soon it became popularly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

The Zarqawi group’s declaration of allegiance to al-Qaeda stressed the importance of Muslim unity, something that would also be a priority of the Islamic State. The declaration began with an epigraph from the Qur’an: “Hold fast to the rope of God and you shall not be divided” (3:103), and then added, “Praise be to God, the Cherisher
and Sustainer of worlds, and let there be no aggression except upon the oppressors”—that is, no aggression between Muslims.

The statement boasted that the alliance was “undoubtedly an indication that victory is approaching, God willing, and that it represents a return to the glorious past. We shall, with great fury, instill fear in the enemies of Islam, who consider that through their war in Iraq they have nearly uprooted Islam from its recent stronghold. For this, we will turn [the war] into a hell for them.”

By this time, Zarqawi’s unapologetic embrace of terror as a tactic of war had made him a virtual folk hero among jihadis worldwide; he rivaled his new chief as the world’s most renowned and reviled jihad terrorist. The U.S. considered Zarqawi so important that it placed a $25 million bounty on his head—the same amount as that offered for bin Laden.

Ultimately, Zarqawi—but not his movement—was killed in a U.S. airstrike on June 7, 2006. No jihad group depends upon a charismatic leader—even one as fanatically devoted to his cause and able to galvanize others to join it as Zarqawi. Such organizations are rather, as we shall see, ideologically driven. Thus Zarqawi’s group survived him.

On October 13, 2006, al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers reconstituted itself as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).
¹⁴
It continued to harass American troops in Iraq, biding its time until the inevitable day when the Americans would leave. That day came on December 14, 2011, when Barack Obama, speaking at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina, to some of the last soldiers to come home from Iraq, boasted about ending the war and called the withdrawal of all American troops a “moment of success.”
¹⁵

But the jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq didn’t agree that the war was over. They weren’t walking away or folding up shop—in fact, they were expanding. They seized the opportunity that uprisings against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad provided to move into that neighboring country and on April 9, 2013, renamed their organization again as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS).
¹⁶
They then took advantage of the successes of the Sunni rebels in Syria (for whom Obama had asked Congress to authorize military support in the summer of 2013) and the weakness of the Shi’ite regime in Baghdad to assert control over territory in both Syria and Iraq. Both Assad and the Iraqi government in Baghdad were too weak to stop them.

Rift between Islamic State and al-Qaeda Becomes Official, Western Leaders and Media Overjoyed

Early in 2014, al-Qaeda attempted to reassert control over ISIS. Osama bin Laden had been killed in May of 2011, but the organization continued to operate under the leadership of his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a scholarly Egyptian eye surgeon who had served as bin Laden’s personal physician. Zawahiri demanded that ISIS stand down and leave the jihad in Syria to another al-Qaeda–allied group, Jabhat al-Nusra.
¹⁸
When ISIS did not comply, al-Qaeda made the announcement on February 2, 2014: “ISIS is not
a branch of the Qaidat al-Jihad group, we have no organizational relationship with it, and [our] group is not responsible for its actions.”
¹⁹

Now this formal break came long after the alliance had ceased to exist anywhere but on paper. ISIS hadn’t even used the name “al-Qaeda” in over seven years. Nonetheless, Western leaders and the mainstream media made all they could out of the split between ISIS and al-Qaeda.

In the midst of its lengthy campaign to convince Americans that the Islamic State was not Islamic at all, the Obama administration (and its willing enablers in the mainstream media) welcomed the rift between the two terror organizations as proof for its theory that ISIS was distorting and hijacking the religion of peace. “They’re more extreme than al-Qaeda,” said Secretary of State John Kerry in June 2014. This became a recurring theme in the media coverage of the jihadi groups.
²²
MSNBC’s David Gregory said in August 2014 that ISIS was “cast off by al-Qaida because this group is considered too extreme.”
²³
The UK’s
Guardian
told readers that “The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) is so hardline that it was disavowed by al-Qaida’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.”
²⁴
The UK’s
Daily Mail
noted that “lying among a pile of papers at the hideout in Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden was shot dead was a carefully worded 21-page letter” written by one of Osama’s men in 2011. This letter found at bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound warned that ISIS “had such complete disregard for civilian life that it could damage the reputation of Al Qaeda,” listing as some of the acts that were beyond the pale “the use of chlorine gas as a chemical weapon, bombing mosques and a massacre in a Catholic church in Baghdad.”
²⁵