Read The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Online
Authors: Robert Spencer
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #History, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #Non-Fiction
The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (8 page)
FLUIDITY
On April 16, 2015, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, a Muslim who lived in Columbus, Ohio, was indicted for plotting to carry out a jihad terror attack in the United States—he had talked about attacking a military base and murdering American soldiers “execution style.”
20
Mohamud had returned to the United States from Syria, where he had received training from Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda group that Ayman al-Zawahiri had insisted that ISIS defer to in Syria—leading directly to the split between the two groups.
Before he left for Syria, Mohamud posted on his Facebook page the black flag of jihad in the design that has become associated with the Islamic State, as well as another photograph also containing the Islamic State symbol. Authorities said that he went to Syria intending to join the Islamic State, but ended up in Jabhat al-Nusra instead.
21
Exactly how and why this happened is unclear, but it does indicate that the gulf between the two groups is not so wide as to prevent jihadis from moving from one to the other. They share the same religious perspectives, ideology, and goals, and that’s good enough.
The al-Qaeda letter did complain about some of the bloody tactics ISIS was using. But its putative author, al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn, better known as “Azzam the American,” seemed chiefly concerned with the PR fallout. The massacre of Catholics at the church in Baghdad, for example, had come at a particularly inopportune moment—just as the author of the letter was doing the preparatory research for an appeal to fast-secularizing Irish Catholics to embrace Islam. He had also been “thinking of preparing an Arabic message to the Christians of the Arab region, calling them to Islam, and to caution them from cooperating with invader enemies of Islam who oppose the Islamic State.”
26
So the timing was terrible.
GEE, I WONDER WHY CATHOLICS AREN’T RUSHING TO CONVERT TO ISLAM?
“The Catholics are a fertile ground for call of God and to persuade them about the just case of the Mujahidin, particularly after the rage expanding against the mother church (Vatican) as a result of its scandals. . . . But the attacks on the Christians in Iraq, like the Baghdad attack and what took place earlier in Mosul and others, does not help us to convey the message. Even if the ones we are talking to have some grudge against the mother church, they will not grasp in general the targeting of their public, women, children and men in their church during Mass.”
—from
pages 6–7
of the twenty-one-page 2011 al-Qaeda letter detailing differences with ISIS
The Obama administration and the media were taking a dispute primarily about timing and tactics and making it into something that it clearly wasn’t: a principled condemnation of the world’s most notorious terror group of the 2010s by the most notorious terror group of the 2000s on the grounds that it had transgressed the bounds of Islamic law.
27
OSTRICH ALERT
“It is a corruption of the Islamic faith. It is a distortion of it. It does not represent the Muslim community or Islam.”
—CIA Director John Brennan, explaining how ISIS is not Islamic
28
Steamrolling to the Caliphate
The split with al-Qaeda did not slow ISIS down. On June 10, 2014, ISIS jihadis posted online photos of the bulldozing of the Syria-Iraq border, under the title “Smashing the Sykes-Picot border.”
29
They were referring to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which had delineated the British and French spheres of influence in the post–World War I Middle East, with France getting Syria and northern Iraq and Britain, southern Iraq—and thus had ultimately demarcated the border between the nations of Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State did not recognize the Syria-Iraq border: they considered it to be an artificial construction of the West and saw it as a symbol of how the non-Muslim West had oppressed the Muslims of the world by, among other things, dividing them into artificial nation states and destroying the
divinely ordained unity they had enjoyed under a single political leader, the caliph.
The destruction of the border was a manifestation of the belief that Muslims should be united in a single state under a single ruler. And once the Syria-Iraq border was no more, the next step was essentially inevitable. On June 29, 2014, ISIS declared the formation of a new caliphate and dropped the second half of its name, rebranding itself yet again—this time, as simply the Islamic State.
30
That new name was a claim to the loyalty of the entire
Ummah,
the community of all Muslims worldwide.
The
Islamic State was laying claim to be
the
Islamic government in the world and demanding all Muslims’ allegiance. The revival of the caliphate was a return to the form of government of the glory days of Islam—from Muhammad’s death through Islam’s Golden Age up until the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I—when Muslims were ruled by a caliph, the successor to Muhammad as spiritual and political leader of Islam.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
And who was that leader? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s leader since 2010 and its new Caliph Ibrahim, proclaimed as such in June 2014 with the declaration of the caliphate. He is a supremely shadowy figure, and virtually nothing that has been reported about him is known for certain; the material here has been widely reported, but none of it is unquestionable.
The most noteworthy fact reported about Baghdadi is that he has a Ph.D. in Islamic law from the Islamic University in Baghdad and comes from a family of Muslim clerics.
31
Even before his rise to the leadership of the group that Zarqawi had founded, the future caliph was not entirely unknown to America. It seems that Baghdadi was actually arrested and imprisoned by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca under his given name Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi is a
nom de guerre
)—not as a known terrorist, however, but as a “civilian internee,” that is, someone who had been linked to jihad terrorists but not found to be engaging in terror activity himself.
32
Nevertheless, it has been reported that before his arrest in 2004 the future caliph had played a role in founding “a militant group, Jeish Ahl al-Sunnah al-Jamaah, which had taken root in the restive Sunni communities around his home city.”
33
Camp Bucca was the model U.S. prison camp to which inmates from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison were transferred after the scandal there.
34
Unfortunately, while the crimes at Abu Ghraib provided a huge propaganda coup for the jihadis, the relatively relaxed conditions at Camp Bucca seem to have provided networking opportunities that would be at least as valuable in advancing the cause of jihad. Apparently al-Baghdadi was a natural leader who seemed to his American guards like a model prisoner. “He was respected very much by the US army,” a man who claims to have been one of his prison associates and colleagues in ISIS has said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all.”
35
NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM
“O ummah of Islam, indeed the world today has been divided into two camps and two trenches, with no third camp present: The camp of Islam and faith, and the camp of kufr (disbelief) and hypocrisy—the camp of the Muslims and the mujahidin everywhere, and the camp of the jews, the crusaders, their allies, and with them the rest of the nations and religions of kufr, all being led by America and Russia, and being mobilized by the jews.”
—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s Caliph Ibrahim, in his inaugural message upon being named caliph, “A Message to the Mujahedin and the Muslim Ummah in the Month of Ramadan,” July 1, 2014 (capitalization as in the original)
