The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (9 page)

According to some reports, which may or may not be more reliable than anything else reported about him, al-Bagdadi may have made an interesting remark in Bucca. As he left, he is said (although this could be legend born of his later notoriety) to have given a hint of what he had in mind for the future, telling his guards:

“I’ll see you guys in New York.”
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Cheering the Hearts of Jihadis Everywhere

The new caliphate galvanized opinion worldwide. Jihadis took fresh energy from the declaration of the Islamic State. It seemed like a giant step forward toward the fulfillment of their dreams and plans. The reestablishment of the caliphate had long been an aspiration dear to the hearts of many jihadi terrorists—including al-Qaeda.

As bin Laden lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri had written to Zarqawi in a July 9, 2005, letter, “It has always been my belief that the victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in the heart of the Islamic world, specifically in the Levant, Egypt, and the neighboring states of the Peninsula and Iraq; however, the center would be in the Levant and Egypt.”
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In that letter Zawahiri had heaped praise on Zarqawi for helping bring that state—the revived caliphate—closer to reality: “If our intended goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet and if we expect to establish its state predominantly—according to how it appears to us—in the heart of the Islamic world, then your efforts and sacrifices—God permitting—are a large step directly towards that goal.”

Zawahiri then offered Zarqawi his “humble opinion that the Jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals,” the first of which was to “expel the Americans from Iraq.” The second stage, wrote Zarqawi, would be exactly what the Islamic State ended up doing nine years later:

           
The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate—over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni areas, is in order to fill the void stemming from the departure of the Americans, immediately upon their exit and before un-Islamic forces attempt to fill this void, whether those whom the Americans will leave behind them, or those among the un-Islamic forces who will try to jump at taking power.

Following the establishment of this state, the third stage would be to “extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq,” followed by the fourth stage, which “may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.”

Zawahiri wrote in an extremely deferential manner to Zarqawi, repeatedly assuring the Iraq commander that his analysis was not “infallible.” Nonetheless, he did not hesitate to give him direction, emphasizing that “the mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal.” If they did that, “we will return to having the secularists and traitors holding sway over us. Instead, their ongoing mission is to establish an Islamic state, and defend it, and for every generation to hand over the banner to the one after it until the Hour of Resurrection.”

Zawahiri summed up the “two short-term goals” as “removing the Americans and establishing an Islamic amirate in Iraq, or a caliphate if possible.” Attaining them, he wrote, would ensure possession of “the strongest weapon which the mujahedeen enjoy–after the help and granting of success by God,” which was “popular support from the Muslim masses in Iraq, and the surrounding Muslim countries.”

He Who Hesitates Is Lost

But al-Qaeda hesitated to declare a caliphate for fear that the Americans would nip it in the bud.

As a letter apparently from Osama bin Laden, found in the trove of documents at the Abbottabad compound and declassified in May 2015, explained,

           
We should stress on the importance of timing in establishing the Islamic State. We should be aware that planning for the establishment of the state begins with exhausting the main influential power that enforced the siege on the Hamas government, and that overthrew the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan and Iraq despite the fact this power was depleted. We should keep in mind that this main power still has the capacity to lay siege on any Islamic State, and that such a siege might force the people to overthrow their duly elected governments. We have to continue with exhausting and depleting them till they become so weak that they can’t overthrow any State that we establish. That will be the time to commence with forming the Islamic state.

Bin Laden saw the restoration of the caliphate as the ultimate goal of al-Qaeda’s activities: “the result that we deployed for” was “to reinstate the wise Caliphate and eliminate the disgrace and humiliation that our nation
is suffering from.” But he argued against “insisting on the formation of an Islamic State at the time being”—and instead wanted his followers “to work on breaking the power of our main enemy by attacking the American embassies in the African countries, such as Sierra Leone, Togo, and mainly to attack the American oil companies” first.
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In the event, bin Laden’s appraisal of the risks of declaring a caliphate appears to have been overcautious. (Perhaps, after America’s strong initial response to the September 11 attacks, he was in once-burned-twice-shy mode.) So far, the Islamic State has survived and thriven. America may “still ha[ve] the capacity to lay siege on any Islamic State,” but we don’t seem to have the political will—or, perhaps, the necessary understanding of the threat—to do so effectively.

Al-Qaeda Still Hearts ISIS

When the Islamic State did boldly go where Osama bin Laden was afraid to, declaring the caliphate on June 29, 2014, at least some members of bin Laden’s organization were apparently so heartened that they were ready to paper over the rift between al-Qaeda and ISIS. In August 2014, just six months after al-Qaeda’s declaration that it had no organizational relationship with ISIS, “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, declared its “solidarity” with the Islamic State: “We announce solidarity with our Muslim brothers in Iraq against the crusade. Their blood and injuries are ours and we will surely support them. We assert to the Islamic Nation [that is, to all Muslims worldwide] that we stand by the side of our Muslim brothers in Iraq against the American and Iranian conspiracy and their agents of the apostate Gulf rulers.”
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But then the AQAP leadership apparently had second thoughts. Just a couple of months later, in November 2014, Harith bin Ghazi al-Nadhari, a Muslim cleric affiliated with the al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, denounced the Islamic State for claiming Yemen as part of its new caliphate. “We did
not want to talk about the current dispute and the sedition in Syria,” said al-Nadhari, “however, our brothers in the Islamic State . . . surprised us with several steps, including their announcement of the caliphate [and] they announced the expansion of the caliphate in a number of countries which they have no governance, and considered them to be provinces that belonged to them.”
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Al-Nadhari asserted that “the announcement of the caliphate for all Muslims by our brothers in the Islamic State did not meet the required conditions.” Like Adam Gadahn (or whoever the author really was) in the twenty-one-page letter found in the Abbottabad compound, he seemed to be concerned about the particularly bloodthirsty tactics ISIS was becoming known for. He complained that the Islamic State was “going too far in interpretations in terms of spilling inviolable blood under the excuse of expanding and spreading the power of the Islamic State.”
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And the next month, Nasr bin Ali al-Ansi, a senior AQAP commander, criticized the Islamic State’s practice of filming its beheadings: “Filming and promoting it among people in the name of Islam and Jihad is a big mistake and not acceptable whatever the justifications are. This is very barbaric. Sheik Osama bin Laden used to say anyone with sound instincts cannot stand watching scenes of killings.”
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However, at the same time that he denounced the Islamic State’s beheadings, al-Ansi also declared that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula still supported the Islamic State’s “jihad against crusaders.”
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The new caliphate was bloody and brutal—like its antecedents going back to the beginning of Islamic history.

The Assassins

Though the Obama administration, the media, and Muslim spokesmen in the West often suggest that ISIS is not authentically Muslim, the history of Islam abounds with similar groups that have spread terror with their
ruthless brutality and their rigorist fidelity to the cruelest tenets of Islamic law. The Islamic State may have begun in the aftermath of the U.S. defeat of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but its antecedents in Islamic tradition go back much farther than that. One Muslim group that was almost as notorious (and as hated and feared) as ISIS is today was a Shi’ite Muslim sect, the Nizari Ismailis of the Middle Ages—popularly known as the Assassins.

The Assassins flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in territory now in Iran and Syria. By their activities—particularly the planned murders of many of their opponents—they gave the English language its word for one who commits a planned and deliberate murder, especially a public killing for political or ideological reasons.

The word
Assassin
is derived from
Hashashin,
“hashish smokers,” a name given to the group by its opponents on the basis of stories about their leader, a mysterious figure known as the Old Man of the Mountain, and his novel method for recruiting new members. The fullest account comes from Marco Polo’s
Travels
:

           
Mulehet is a country in which the Old Man of the Mountain dwelt in former days; and the name means “
Place of the Aram
.” I will tell you his whole history as related by Messer Marco Polo, who heard it from several natives of that region.

                
The Old Man was called in their language ALOADIN. He had caused a certain valley between two mountains to be enclosed, and had turned it into a garden, the largest and most beautiful that ever was seen, filled with every variety of fruit. In it were erected pavilions and palaces the most elegant that can be imagined, all covered with gilding and exquisite painting. And there were runnels too, flowing freely with wine and milk and honey and water; and numbers of ladies and of the most beautiful damsels in the world, who could play on all manner of instruments,
and sung most sweetly, and danced in a manner that it was charming to behold. For the Old Man desired to make his people believe that this was actually Paradise. So he had fashioned it after the description that Mahommet gave of his Paradise, to wit, that it should be a beautiful garden running with conduits of wine and milk and honey and water, and full of lovely women for the delectation of all its inmates. And sure enough the Saracens of those parts believed that it
was
Paradise!

                
Now no man was allowed to enter the Garden save those whom he intended to be his ASHISHIN. There was a Fortress at the entrance to the Garden, strong enough to resist all the world, and there was no other way to get in. He kept at his Court a number of the youths of the country, from 12 to 20 years of age, such as had a taste for soldiering, and to these he used to tell tales about Paradise, just as Mahommet had been wont to do, and they believed in him just as the Saracens believe in Mahommet. Then he would introduce them into his garden, some four, or six, or ten at a time, having first made them drink a certain potion which cast them into a deep sleep, and then causing them to be lifted and carried in. So when they awoke, they found themselves in the Garden.
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According to the legend that surrounded the Assassins, the “potion” that made these young men susceptible to the suggestion that they had visited Paradise was hashish.
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The Old Man would get his potential recruits high on the drug—an experience for which they had no cultural referent in those pre–
Sgt. Pepper
days—and then introduce them to his gardens, which, as Marco Polo related, had been scrupulously designed to correspond to the Qur’an’s descriptions of Paradise—fruits, women, and all:

           
Indeed, you [disbelievers] will be tasters of the painful punishment,

           
And you will not be recompensed except for what you used to do—

           
But not the chosen servants of Allah.

           
Those will have a provision determined—

           
Fruits; and they will be honored

           
In gardens of pleasure

           
On thrones facing one another.

           
There will be circulated among them a cup from a flowing spring,

           
White and delicious to the drinkers;

           
No bad effect is there in it, nor from it will they be intoxicated.

           
And with them will be women limiting [their] glances, with large eyes,

           
As if they were eggs, well-protected. (37:38–49)

The Old Man of the Mountain, according to Marco Polo’s account, used his young recruits’ experience of Paradise to manipulate them into doing his murderous bidding: