Iraqis abandoned US-supplied equipment in Ramadi

WASHINGTON (AP) — Iraqi troops abandoned dozens of U.S military vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces when they fled Islamic State fighters in Ramadi on Sunday, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

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1. Rout in Ramadi calls US Iraq strategy into question Associated Press
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3. IS militants look for collaborators after taking Iraqi city Associated Press
4. Contested Iraqi city of Ramadi falls to Islamic State group Associated Press
5. Iraq sends troops to Ramadi, largely held by Islamic State Associated Press

A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Steve Warren, estimated that a half dozen tanks were abandoned, a similar number of artillery pieces, a larger number of armored personnel carriers and about 100 wheeled vehicles like Humvees. He said some of the vehicles were in working condition; others were not because they had not been moved for months.

This repeats a pattern in which defeated Iraq security forces have, over the past year, left behind U.S.-supplied military equipment, prompting the U.S. to destroy them in subsequent airstrikes against Islamic State forces.

Asked whether the Iraqis should have destroyed the vehicles before abandoning the city in order to keep them from enhancing IS's army, Warren said, "Certainly preferable if they had been destroyed; in this case they were not."

Warren also said that while the U.S. is confident that Ramadi will be retaken by Iraq, "It will be difficult."

The fall of Ramadi has prompted some to question the viability of the Obama administration's approach in Iraq, which is a blend of retraining and rebuilding the Iraqi army, prodding Baghdad to reconcile with the nation's Sunnis, and bombing Islamic State targets from the air without committing American ground combat troops.

 

Security forces defend their headquarters against attacks by Islamic State extremists during sand st …

 

"The president's plan isn't working. It's time for him to come up with overarching strategy to defeat the ongoing terrorist threat," House Speaker John Boehner said.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama has always been open to suggestions for improving the U.S. approach in Iraq.

"It's something that he's talking about with his national security team just about every day, including today," Earnest said.

Derek Harvey, a retired Army colonel and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer who served multiple tours in Iraq, says that while the extremist group has many problems and weaknesses, it is "not losing" in the face of ineffective Sunni Arab opposition.

"They are adaptive and they remain well armed and well resourced," Harvey said of the militants. "The different lines of operation by the U.S. coalition remain disjointed, poorly resourced and lack an effective operational framework, in my view."

 

Map shows location of fighting across Iraq.; 

 

One alternative for the Obama administration would be a containment strategy — trying to fence in the conflict rather than push the Islamic State group out of Iraq. That might include a combination of airstrikes and U.S. special operations raids to limit the group's reach. In fact, a Delta Force raid in Syria on Friday killed an IS leader known as Abu Sayyaf who U.S. officials said oversaw the group's oil and gas operations, a major source of funding.

Officials have said containment might become an option but is not under active discussion now.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a written statement Monday that suggested Ramadi will trigger no change in the U.S. approach.
"Setbacks are regrettable but not uncommon in warfare," Dempsey said. "Much effort will now be required to reclaim the city."

It seems highly unlikely that Obama would take the more dramatic route of sending ground combat forces into Iraq to rescue the situation in Ramadi or elsewhere. A White House spokesman, Eric Shultz, said Monday the U.S. will continue its support through airstrikes, advisers and trainers.

 

A Syrian opposition group, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, fighte …

 

The administration has said repeatedly that it does not believe Iraq can be stabilized for the long term unless Iraqis do the ground fighting.

Pentagon officials insisted Monday the current U.S. approach to combating IS in Iraq is still viable and that the loss of Ramadi was merely part of the ebb and flow of war, not a sign that the Islamic State had exposed a fatal weakness in the Iraqi security forces and the U.S. strategy.

Others are skeptical.

"We don't really have a strategy at all," former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday on MSNBC. "We're basically playing this day by day."

Gates, who headed the Pentagon for Obama as well as President George W. Bush's administration before that, said "right now, it looks like they're (Iraq) going the way of Yugoslavia," suggesting an eventual breakup of the state.

The Institute for the Study of War, which closely tracks developments in Iraq, said Ramadi was a key Islamic State victory.

"This strategic gain constitutes a turning point in ISIS' ability to set the terms of battle in Anbar as well to project force in eastern Iraq," the institute said.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Nedra Pickler contributed to this report.

What ISIS Really Wants

http://www.theatlantic.com/

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

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Graeme Wood

March 2015

• 3462 Comments

What is the Islamic State? 

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.
We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.
Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)
We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohammad Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.

Nearly all the Islamic State’s decisions adhere to what it calls, on its billboards, license plates, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology.”

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam.
To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)
But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.

Control of territory is an essential precondition for the Islamic State’s authority in the eyes of its supporters. This map, adapted from the work of the Institute for the Study of War, shows the territory under the caliphate’s control as of January 15, along with areas it has attacked. Where it holds power, the state collects taxes, regulates prices, operates courts, and administers services ranging from health care and education to telecommunications.

I. Devotion

In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video tracing its origins to bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi, the brutal head of al‑Qaeda in Iraq from roughly 2003 until his killing in 2006, as a more immediate progenitor, followed sequentially by two other guerrilla leaders before Baghdadi, the caliph. Notably unmentioned: bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, the owlish Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads al‑Qaeda. Zawahiri has not pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, and he is increasingly hated by his fellow jihadists. His isolation is not helped by his lack of charisma; in videos he comes across as squinty and annoyed. But the split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the making, and begins to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust of the latter.
Zawahiri’s companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda’s intellectual architect and the most important jihadist unknown to the average American newspaper reader. On most matters of doctrine, Maqdisi and the Islamic State agree. Both are closely identified with the jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, the “pious forefathers.” These forefathers are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.

The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.

Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man’s advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi’s penchant for bloody spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred of other Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous. “If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ ” the Prophet said, “then one of them is right.” If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi heedlessly expanded the range of behavior that could make Muslims infidels.
Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution and “not issue sweeping proclamations of takfir” or “proclaim people to be apostates because of their sins.” The distinction between apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.
Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.

Musa Cerantonio, an Australian preacher reported to be one of the Islamic State’s most influential recruiters, believes it is foretold that the caliphate will sack Istanbul before it is beaten back by an army led by the anti-Messiah, whose eventual death— when just a few thousand jihadists remain—will usher in the apocalypse. (Paul Jeffers/Fairfax Media)

Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.

Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.
Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.
Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to Haykel. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.
According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”
All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammad’s earliest conquests were not tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in the narrations of the Prophet’s rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent and violent time. In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

Our failure to appreciate the essential differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda has led to dangerous decisions.

The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.
Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”
Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few centuries had attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model than the Wahhabis of 18th‑century Arabia. They conquered most of what is now Saudi Arabia, and their strict practices survive in a diluted version of Sharia there. Haykel sees an important distinction between the groups, though: “The Wahhabis were not wanton in their violence.” They were surrounded by Muslims, and they conquered lands that were already Islamic; this stayed their hand. “ISIS, by contrast, is really reliving the early period.” Early Muslims were surrounded by non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri tendencies, considers itself to be in the same situation.
If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”
In October, Dabiq, the magazine of the Islamic State, published “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” an article that took up the question of whether Yazidis (the members of an ancient Kurdish sect that borrows elements of Islam, and had come under attack from Islamic State forces in northern Iraq) are lapsed Muslims, and therefore marked for death, or merely pagans and therefore fair game for enslavement. A study group of Islamic State scholars had convened, on government orders, to resolve this issue. If they are pagans, the article’s anonymous author wrote,

Yazidi women and children [are to be] divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations [in northern Iraq] … Enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.

II. Territory

Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated to the Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many other places. Many have come to fight, and many intend to die.
Peter R. Neumann, a professor at King’s College London, told me that online voices have been essential to spreading propaganda and ensuring that newcomers know what to believe. Online recruitment has also widened the demographics of the jihadist community, by allowing conservative Muslim women—physically isolated in their homes—to reach out to recruiters, radicalize, and arrange passage to Syria. Through its appeals to both genders, the Islamic State hopes to build a complete society.
In November, I traveled to Australia to meet Musa Cerantonio, a 30-year-old man whom Neumann and other researchers had identified as one of the two most important “new spiritual authorities” guiding foreigners to join the Islamic State. For three years he was a televangelist on Iqraa TV in Cairo, but he left after the station objected to his frequent calls to establish a caliphate. Now he preaches on Facebook and Twitter.
Cerantonio—a big, friendly man with a bookish demeanor—told me he blanches at beheading videos. He hates seeing the violence, even though supporters of the Islamic State are required to endorse it. (He speaks out, controversially among jihadists, against suicide bombing, on the grounds that God forbids suicide; he differs from the Islamic State on a few other points as well.) He has the kind of unkempt facial hair one sees on certain overgrown fans of The Lord of the Rings, and his obsession with Islamic apocalypticism felt familiar. He seemed to be living out a drama that looks, from an outsider’s perspective, like a medieval fantasy novel, only with real blood.
Last June, Cerantonio and his wife tried to emigrate—he wouldn’t say to where (“It’s illegal to go to Syria,” he said cagily)—but they were caught en route, in the Philippines, and he was deported back to Australia for overstaying his visa. Australia has criminalized attempts to join or travel to the Islamic State, and has confiscated Cerantonio’s passport. He is stuck in Melbourne, where he is well known to the local constabulary. If Cerantonio were caught facilitating the movement of individuals to the Islamic State, he would be imprisoned. So far, though, he is free—a technically unaffiliated ideologue who nonetheless speaks with what other jihadists have taken to be a reliable voice on matters of the Islamic State’s doctrine.
We met for lunch in Footscray, a dense, multicultural Melbourne suburb that’s home to Lonely Planet, the travel-guide publisher. Cerantonio grew up there in a half-Irish, half-Calabrian family. On a typical street one can find African restaurants, Vietnamese shops, and young Arabs walking around in the Salafi uniform of scraggly beard, long shirt, and trousers ending halfway down the calves.
Cerantonio explained the joy he felt when Baghdadi was declared the caliph on June 29—and the sudden, magnetic attraction that Mesopotamia began to exert on him and his friends. “I was in a hotel [in the Philippines], and I saw the declaration on television,” he told me. “And I was just amazed, and I’m like, Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?”
The last caliphate was the Ottoman empire, which reached its peak in the 16th century and then experienced a long decline, until the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, euthanized it in 1924. But Cerantonio, like many supporters of the Islamic State, doesn’t acknowledge that caliphate as legitimate, because it didn’t fully enforce Islamic law, which requires stonings and slavery and amputations, and because its caliphs were not descended from the tribe of the Prophet, the Quraysh.
Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his Mosul sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the caliphate—which had not functioned except in name for about 1,000 years—was a communal obligation. He and his loyalists had “hastened to declare the caliphate and place an imam” at its head, he said. “This is a duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been lost for centuries … The Muslims sin by losing it, and they must always seek to establish it.” Like bin Laden before him, Baghdadi spoke floridly, with frequent scriptural allusion and command of classical rhetoric. Unlike bin Laden, and unlike those false caliphs of the Ottoman empire, he is Qurayshi.
The caliphate, Cerantonio told me, is not just a political entity but also a vehicle for salvation. Islamic State propaganda regularly reports the pledges of baya’a (allegiance) rolling in from jihadist groups across the Muslim world. Cerantonio quoted a Prophetic saying, that to die without pledging allegiance is to die jahil (ignorant) and therefore die a “death of disbelief.” Consider how Muslims (or, for that matter, Christians) imagine God deals with the souls of people who die without learning about the one true religion. They are neither obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Cerantonio said, the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent god and prays, but who dies without pledging himself to a valid caliph and incurring the obligations of that oath, has failed to live a fully Islamic life. I pointed out that this means the vast majority of Muslims in history, and all who passed away between 1924 and 2014, died a death of disbelief. Cerantonio nodded gravely. “I would go so far as to say that Islam has been reestablished” by the caliphate.
I asked him about his own baya’a, and he quickly corrected me: “I didn’t say that I’d pledged allegiance.” Under Australian law, he reminded me, giving baya’a to the Islamic State was illegal. “But I agree that [Baghdadi] fulfills the requirements,” he continued. “I’m just going to wink at you, and you take that to mean whatever you want.”
To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority. This last criterion, Cerantonio said, is the hardest to fulfill, and requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State achieved that long before June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert within the group’s ranks—Cerantonio described him as “something of a leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a caliphate. He and others spoke quietly to those in power and told them that further delay would be sinful.

Social-media posts from the Islamic State suggest that executions happen more or less continually.

Cerantonio said a faction arose that was prepared to make war on Baghdadi’s group if it delayed any further. They prepared a letter to various powerful members of ISIS, airing their displeasure at the failure to appoint a caliph, but were pacified by Adnani, the spokesman, who let them in on a secret—that a caliphate had already been declared, long before the public announcement. They had their legitimate caliph, and at that point there was only one option. “If he’s legitimate,” Cerantonio said, “you must give him the baya’a.”
After Baghdadi’s July sermon, a stream of jihadists began flowing daily into Syria with renewed motivation. Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German author and former politician who visited the Islamic State in December, reported the arrival of 100 fighters at one Turkish-border recruitment station in just two days. His report, among others, suggests a still-steady inflow of foreigners, ready to give up everything at home for a shot at paradise in the worst place on Earth.

Bernard Haykel, the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology, believes the group is trying to re-create the earliest days of Islam and is faithfully reproducing its norms of war. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness” about the group’s dedication to the text of the Koran, he says. (Peter Murphy)

In London, a week before my meal with Cerantonio, I met with three ex-members of a banned Islamist group called Al Muhajiroun (The Emigrants): Anjem Choudary, Abu Baraa, and Abdul Muhid. They all expressed desire to emigrate to the Islamic State, as many of their colleagues already had, but the authorities had confiscated their passports. Like Cerantonio, they regarded the caliphate as the only righteous government on Earth, though none would confess having pledged allegiance. Their principal goal in meeting me was to explain what the Islamic State stands for, and how its policies reflect God’s law.

Choudary, 48, is the group’s former leader. He frequently appears on cable news, as one of the few people producers can book who will defend the Islamic State vociferously, until his mike is cut. He has a reputation in the United Kingdom as a loathsome blowhard, but he and his disciples sincerely believe in the Islamic State and, on matters of doctrine, speak in its voice. Choudary and the others feature prominently in the Twitter feeds of Islamic State residents, and Abu Baraa maintains a YouTube channel to answer questions about Sharia.
Since September, authorities have been investigating the three men on suspicion of supporting terrorism. Because of this investigation, they had to meet me separately: communication among them would have violated the terms of their bail. But speaking with them felt like speaking with the same person wearing different masks. Choudary met me in a candy shop in the East London suburb of Ilford. He was dressed smartly, in a crisp blue tunic reaching nearly to his ankles, and sipped a Red Bull while we talked.
Before the caliphate, “maybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,” Choudary told me. “These laws are in abeyance until we have khilafa”—a caliphate—“and now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example, individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the territory where the caliph is applying these laws. One of Choudary’s prize students, a convert from Hinduism named Abu Rumaysah, evaded police to bring his family of five from London to Syria in November. On the day I met Choudary, Abu Rumaysah tweeted out a picture of himself with a Kalashnikov in one arm and his newborn son in the other. Hashtag: #GenerationKhilafah.
The caliph is required to implement Sharia. Any deviation will compel those who have pledged allegiance to inform the caliph in private of his error and, in extreme cases, to excommunicate and replace him if he persists. (“I have been plagued with this great matter, plagued with this responsibility, and it is a heavy responsibility,” Baghdadi said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph commands obedience—and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are considered apostates.
Choudary said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its incomplete application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead murderers and cut off thieves’ hands. “The problem,” he explained, “is that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.” That whole package, he said, would include free housing, food, and clothing for all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work could do so.
Abdul Muhid, 32, continued along these lines. He was dressed in mujahideen chic when I met him at a local restaurant: scruffy beard, Afghan cap, and a wallet outside of his clothes, attached with what looked like a shoulder holster. When we sat down, he was eager to discuss welfare. The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit. Health care, he said, is free. (“Isn’t it free in Britain, too?,” I asked. “Not really,” he said. “Some procedures aren’t covered, such as vision.”) This provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy choice of the Islamic State, but a policy obligation inherent in God’s law.

Anjem Choudary, London’s most notorious defender of the Islamic State, says crucifixion and beheading are sacred requirements. (Tal Cohen/Reuters)

III. The Apocalypse

All Muslims acknowledge that God is the only one who knows the future. But they also agree that he has offered us a peek at it, in the Koran and in narrations of the Prophet. The Islamic State differs from nearly every other current jihadist movement in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character. It is in this casting that the Islamic State is most boldly distinctive from its predecessors, and clearest in the religious nature of its mission.
In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political movement, with worldly goals in sight at all times—the expulsion of non-Muslims from the Arabian peninsula, the abolishment of the state of Israel, the end of support for dictatorships in Muslim lands. The Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running), but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. Bin Laden rarely mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to presume that he would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine comeuppance finally arrived. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni families who look down on this kind of speculation and think it’s something the masses engage in,” says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who is writing a book about the Islamic State’s apocalyptic thought.
During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the world. McCants says a prominent Islamist in Iraq approached bin Laden in 2008 to warn him that the group was being led by millenarians who were “talking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions” based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive. “Al-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders] to say ‘Cut it out.’ ”
For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need. Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the world—might look. Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do not yet have the status of doctrine. But other parts are based on mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.
The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.
“Dabiq is basically all farmland,” one Islamic State supporter recently tweeted. “You could imagine large battles taking place there.” The Islamic State’s propagandists drool with anticipation of this event, and constantly imply that it will come soon. The state’s magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.” A recent propaganda video shows clips from Hollywood war movies set in medieval times—perhaps because many of the prophecies specify that the armies will be on horseback or carrying ancient weapons.
Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. “Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said a masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who’d been held captive for more than a year. During fighting in Iraq in December, after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.
The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the enemy as Rome. Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely.

After mujahideen reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.

After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth, but Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus. An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.
“Only God knows” whether the Islamic State’s armies are the ones foretold, Cerantonio said. But he is hopeful. “The Prophet said that one sign of the imminent arrival of the End of Days is that people will for a long while stop talking about the End of Days,” he said. “If you go to the mosques now, you’ll find the preachers are silent about this subject.” On this theory, even setbacks dealt to the Islamic State mean nothing, since God has preordained the near-destruction of his people anyway. The Islamic State has its best and worst days ahead of it.

 

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared caliph by his followers last summer. The establishment of a caliphate awakened large sections of Koranic law that had lain dormant, and required those Muslims who recognized the caliphate to immigrate. (Associated Press)

IV. The Fight

The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group’s actions. Osama bin Laden was seldom predictable. He ended his first television interview cryptically. CNN’s Peter Arnett asked him, “What are your future plans?” Bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.” By contrast, the Islamic State boasts openly about its plans—not all of them, but enough so that by listening carefully, we can deduce how it intends to govern and expand.
In London, Choudary and his students provided detailed descriptions of how the Islamic State must conduct its foreign policy, now that it is a caliphate. It has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as “offensive jihad,” the forcible expansion into countries that are ruled by non-Muslims. “Hitherto, we were just defending ourselves,” Choudary said; without a caliphate, offensive jihad is an inapplicable concept. But the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential duty of the caliph.
Choudary took pains to present the laws of war under which the Islamic State operates as policies of mercy rather than of brutality. He told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies—a holy order to scare the shit out of them with beheadings and crucifixions and enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.
Choudary’s colleague Abu Baraa explained that Islamic law permits only temporary peace treaties, lasting no longer than a decade. Similarly, accepting any border is anathema, as stated by the Prophet and echoed in the Islamic State’s propaganda videos. If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year. He may not rest, or he will fall into a state of sin.
One comparison to the Islamic State is the Khmer Rouge, which killed about a third of the population of Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge occupied Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. “This is not permitted,” Abu Baraa said. “To send an ambassador to the UN is to recognize an authority other than God’s.” This form of diplomacy is shirk, or polytheism, he argued, and would be immediate cause to hereticize and replace Baghdadi. Even to hasten the arrival of a caliphate by democratic means—for example by voting for political candidates who favor a caliphate—is shirk.
It’s hard to overstate how hamstrung the Islamic State will be by its radicalism. The modern international system, born of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, relies on each state’s willingness to recognize borders, however grudgingly. For the Islamic State, that recognition is ideological suicide. Other Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, have succumbed to the blandishments of democracy and the potential for an invitation to the community of nations, complete with a UN seat. Negotiation and accommodation have worked, at times, for the Taliban as well. (Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan exchanged ambassadors with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, an act that invalidated the Taliban’s authority in the Islamic State’s eyes.) To the Islamic State these are not options, but acts of apostasy.

The United States and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State belatedly and in an apparent daze. The group’s ambitions and rough strategic blueprints were evident in its pronouncements and in social-media chatter as far back as 2011, when it was just one of many terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq and hadn’t yet committed mass atrocities. Adnani, the spokesman, told followers then that the group’s ambition was to “restore the Islamic caliphate,” and he evoked the apocalypse, saying, “There are but a few days left.” Baghdadi had already styled himself “commander of the faithful,” a title ordinarily reserved for caliphs, in 2011. In April 2013, Adnani declared the movement “ready to redraw the world upon the Prophetic methodology of the caliphate.” In August 2013, he said, “Our goal is to establish an Islamic state that doesn’t recognize borders, on the Prophetic methodology.” By then, the group had taken Raqqa, a Syrian provincial capital of perhaps 500,000 people, and was drawing in substantial numbers of foreign fighters who’d heard its message.

If we had identified the Islamic State’s intentions early, and realized that the vacuum in Syria and Iraq would give it ample space to carry them out, we might, at a minimum, have pushed Iraq to harden its border with Syria and preemptively make deals with its Sunnis. That would at least have avoided the electrifying propaganda effect created by the declaration of a caliphate just after the conquest of Iraq’s third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama told The New Yorker that he considered ISIS to be al-Qaeda’s weaker partner. “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” the president said.
Our failure to appreciate the split between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the essential differences between the two, has led to dangerous decisions. Last fall, to take one example, the U.S. government consented to a desperate plan to save Peter Kassig’s life. The plan facilitated—indeed, required—the interaction of some of the founding figures of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and could hardly have looked more hastily improvised.

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it appears the best of bad military options.

It entailed the enlistment of Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, the Zarqawi mentor and al-Qaeda grandee, to approach Turki al-Binali, the Islamic State’s chief ideologue and a former student of Maqdisi’s, even though the two men had fallen out due to Maqdisi’s criticism of the Islamic State. Maqdisi had already called for the state to extend mercy to Alan Henning, the British cabbie who had entered Syria to deliver aid to children. In December, The Guardian reported that the U.S. government, through an intermediary, had asked Maqdisi to intercede with the Islamic State on Kassig’s behalf.
Maqdisi was living freely in Jordan, but had been banned from communicating with terrorists abroad, and was being monitored closely. After Jordan granted the United States permission to reintroduce Maqdisi to Binali, Maqdisi bought a phone with American money and was allowed to correspond merrily with his former student for a few days, before the Jordanian government stopped the chats and used them as a pretext to jail Maqdisi. Kassig’s severed head appeared in the Dabiq video a few days later.
Maqdisi gets mocked roundly on Twitter by the Islamic State’s fans, and al‑Qaeda is held in great contempt for refusing to acknowledge the caliphate. Cole Bunzel, a scholar who studies Islamic State ideology, read Maqdisi’s opinion on Henning’s status and thought it would hasten his and other captives’ death. “If I were held captive by the Islamic State and Maqdisi said I shouldn’t be killed,” he told me, “I’d kiss my ass goodbye.”
Kassig’s death was a tragedy, but the plan’s success would have been a bigger one. A reconciliation between Maqdisi and Binali would have begun to heal the main rift between the world’s two largest jihadist organizations. It’s possible that the government wanted only to draw out Binali for intelligence purposes or assassination. (Multiple attempts to elicit comment from the FBI were unsuccessful.) Regardless, the decision to play matchmaker for America’s two main terrorist antagonists reveals astonishingly poor judgment.

Chastened by our earlier indifference, we are now meeting the Islamic State via Kurdish and Iraqi proxy on the battlefield, and with regular air assaults. Those strategies haven’t dislodged the Islamic State from any of its major territorial possessions, although they’ve kept it from directly assaulting Baghdad and Erbil and slaughtering Shia and Kurds there.

Some observers have called for escalation, including several predictable voices from the interventionist right (Max Boot, Frederick Kagan), who have urged the deployment of tens of thousands of American soldiers. These calls should not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly genocidal organization is on its potential victims’ front lawn, and it is committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls.
One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

Abu Baraa, who maintains a YouTube channel about Islamic law, says the caliph, Baghdadi, cannot negotiate or recognize borders, and must continually make war, or he will remove himself from Islam.

And yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment. Add the incompetence of our previous efforts as occupiers, and we have reason for reluctance. The rise of ISIS, after all, happened only because our previous occupation created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the consequences of another botched job?
Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.
The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest. Al-Qaeda’s core is rare among jihadist groups for its focus on the “far enemy” (the West); most jihadist groups’ main concerns lie closer to home. That’s especially true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its ideology. It sees enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the expansion to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much directly: in November he told his Saudi agents to “deal with the rafida [Shia] first … then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] … before the crusaders and their bases.”

Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary could mentally shift from contemplating mass death to discussing the virtues of Vietnamese coffee, with apparent delight in each.

The foreign fighters (and their wives and children) have been traveling to the caliphate on one-way tickets: they want to live under true Sharia, and many want martyrdom. Doctrine, recall, requires believers to reside in the caliphate if it is at all possible for them to do so. One of the Islamic State’s less bloody videos shows a group of jihadists burning their French, British, and Australian passports. This would be an eccentric act for someone intending to return to blow himself up in line at the Louvre or to hold another chocolate shop hostage in Sydney.
A few “lone wolf” supporters of the Islamic State have attacked Western targets, and more attacks will come. But most of the attackers have been frustrated amateurs, unable to immigrate to the caliphate because of confiscated passports or other problems. Even if the Islamic State cheers these attacks—and it does in its propaganda—it hasn’t yet planned and financed one. (The Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in January was principally an al‑Qaeda operation.) During his visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees not as soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from the Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they review their religion.”
Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.
Even so, the death of the Islamic State is unlikely to be quick, and things could still go badly wrong: if the Islamic State obtained the allegiance of al‑Qaeda—increasing, in one swoop, the unity of its base—it could wax into a worse foe than we’ve yet seen. The rift between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda has, if anything, grown in the past few months; the December issue of Dabiq featured a long account of an al‑Qaeda defector who described his old group as corrupt and ineffectual, and Zawahiri as a distant and unfit leader. But we should watch carefully for a rapprochement.
Without a catastrophe such as this, however, or perhaps the threat of the Islamic State’s storming Erbil, a vast ground invasion would certainly make the situation worse.

V. Dissuasion

It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State “a problem with Islam.” The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.
Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.
The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: no question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.

Non-muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion properly. But Muslims have long since begun this debate within their own ranks. “You have to have standards,” Anjem Choudary told me. “Somebody could claim to be a Muslim, but if he believes in homosexuality or drinking alcohol, then he is not a Muslim. There is no such thing as a nonpracticing vegetarian.”

There is, however, another strand of Islam that offers a hard-line alternative to the Islamic State—just as uncompromising, but with opposite conclusions. This strand has proved appealing to many Muslims cursed or blessed with a psychological longing to see every jot and tittle of the holy texts implemented as they were in the earliest days of Islam. Islamic State supporters know how to react to Muslims who ignore parts of the Koran: with takfir and ridicule. But they also know that some other Muslims read the Koran as assiduously as they do, and pose a real ideological threat.
Baghdadi is Salafi. The term Salafi has been villainized, in part because authentic villains have ridden into battle waving the Salafi banner. But most Salafis are not jihadists, and most adhere to sects that reject the Islamic State. They are, as Haykel notes, committed to expanding Dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, even, perhaps, with the implementation of monstrous practices such as slavery and amputation—but at some future point. Their first priority is personal purification and religious observance, and they believe anything that thwarts those goals—such as causing war or unrest that would disrupt lives and prayer and scholarship—is forbidden.
They live among us. Last fall, I visited the Philadelphia mosque of Breton Pocius, 28, a Salafi imam who goes by the name Abdullah. His mosque is on the border between the crime-ridden Northern Liberties neighborhood and a gentrifying area that one might call Dar al-Hipster; his beard allows him to pass in the latter zone almost unnoticed.

A theological alternative to the Islamic State exists—just as uncompromising, but with opposite conclusions.

Pocius converted 15 years ago after a Polish Catholic upbringing in Chicago. Like Cerantonio, he talks like an old soul, exhibiting deep familiarity with ancient texts, and a commitment to them motivated by curiosity and scholarship, and by a conviction that they are the only way to escape hellfire. When I met him at a local coffee shop, he carried a work of Koranic scholarship in Arabic and a book for teaching himself Japanese. He was preparing a sermon on the obligations of fatherhood for the 150 or so worshipers in his Friday congregation.
Pocius said his main goal is to encourage a halal life for worshipers in his mosque. But the rise of the Islamic State has forced him to consider political questions that are usually very far from the minds of Salafis. “Most of what they’ll say about how to pray and how to dress is exactly what I’ll say in my masjid [mosque]. But when they get to questions about social upheaval, they sound like Che Guevara.”
When Baghdadi showed up, Pocius adopted the slogan “Not my khalifa.” “The times of the Prophet were a time of great bloodshed,” he told me, “and he knew that the worst possible condition for all people was chaos, especially within the umma [Muslim community].” Accordingly, Pocius said, the correct attitude for Salafis is not to sow discord by factionalizing and declaring fellow Muslims apostates.
Instead, Pocius—like a majority of Salafis—believes that Muslims should remove themselves from politics. These quietist Salafis, as they are known, agree with the Islamic State that God’s law is the only law, and they eschew practices like voting and the creation of political parties. But they interpret the Koran’s hatred of discord and chaos as requiring them to fall into line with just about any leader, including some manifestly sinful ones. “The Prophet said: as long as the ruler does not enter into clear kufr [disbelief], give him general obedience,” Pocius told me, and the classic “books of creed” all warn against causing social upheaval. Quietist Salafis are strictly forbidden from dividing Muslims from one another—for example, by mass excommunication. Living without baya’a, Pocius said, does indeed make one ignorant, or benighted. But baya’a need not mean direct allegiance to a caliph, and certainly not to Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi. It can mean, more broadly, allegiance to a religious social contract and commitment to a society of Muslims, whether ruled by a caliph or not.
Quietist Salafis believe that Muslims should direct their energies toward perfecting their personal life, including prayer, ritual, and hygiene. Much in the same way ultra-Orthodox Jews debate whether it’s kosher to tear off squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that count as “rending cloth”?), they spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that their trousers are not too long, that their beards are trimmed in some areas and shaggy in others. Through this fastidious observance, they believe, God will favor them with strength and numbers, and perhaps a caliphate will arise. At that moment, Muslims will take vengeance and, yes, achieve glorious victory at Dabiq. But Pocius cites a slew of modern Salafi theologians who argue that a caliphate cannot come into being in a righteous way except through the unmistakable will of God.
The Islamic State, of course, would agree, and say that God has anointed Baghdadi. Pocius’s retort amounts to a call to humility. He cites Abdullah Ibn Abbas, one of the Prophet’s companions, who sat down with dissenters and asked them how they had the gall, as a minority, to tell the majority that it was wrong. Dissent itself, to the point of bloodshed or splitting the umma, was forbidden. Even the manner of the establishment of Baghdadi’s caliphate runs contrary to expectation, he said. “The khilafa is something that Allah is going to establish,” he told me, “and it will involve a consensus of scholars from Mecca and Medina. That is not what happened. ISIS came out of nowhere.”
The Islamic State loathes this talk, and its fanboys tweet derisively about quietist Salafis. They mock them as “Salafis of menstruation,” for their obscure judgments about when women are and aren’t clean, and other low-priority aspects of life. “What we need now is fatwa about how it’s haram [forbidden] to ride a bike on Jupiter,” one tweeted drily. “That’s what scholars should focus on. More pressing than state of Ummah.” Anjem Choudary, for his part, says that no sin merits more vigorous opposition than the usurpation of God’s law, and that extremism in defense of monotheism is no vice.
Pocius doesn’t court any kind of official support from the United States, as a counterweight to jihadism. Indeed, official support would tend to discredit him, and in any case he is bitter toward America for treating him, in his words, as “less than a citizen.” (He alleges that the government paid spies to infiltrate his mosque and harassed his mother at work with questions about his being a potential terrorist.)
Still, his quietist Salafism offers an Islamic antidote to Baghdadi-style jihadism. The people who arrive at the faith spoiling for a fight cannot all be stopped from jihadism, but those whose main motivation is to find an ultraconservative, uncompromising version of Islam have an alternative here. It is not moderate Islam; most Muslims would consider it extreme. It is, however, a form of Islam that the literal-minded would not instantly find hypocritical, or blasphemously purged of its inconveniences. Hypocrisy is not a sin that ideologically minded young men tolerate well.
Western officials would probably do best to refrain from weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate altogether. Barack Obama himself drifted into takfiri waters when he claimed that the Islamic State was “not Islamic”—the irony being that he, as the non-Muslim son of a Muslim, may himself be classified as an apostate, and yet is now practicing takfir against Muslims. Non-Muslims’ practicing takfir elicits chuckles from jihadists (“Like a pig covered in feces giving hygiene advice to others,” one tweeted).
I suspect that most Muslims appreciated Obama’s sentiment: the president was standing with them against both Baghdadi and non-Muslim chauvinists trying to implicate them in crimes. But most Muslims aren’t susceptible to joining jihad. The ones who are susceptible will only have had their suspicions confirmed: the United States lies about religion to serve its purposes.

Within the narrow bounds of its theology, the Islamic State hums with energy, even creativity. Outside those bounds, it could hardly be more arid and silent: a vision of life as obedience, order, and destiny. Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary could mentally shift from contemplating mass death and eternal torture to discussing the virtues of Vietnamese coffee or treacly pastry, with apparent delight in each, yet to me it seemed that to embrace their views would be to see all the flavors of this world grow insipid compared with the vivid grotesqueries of the hereafter.

I could enjoy their company, as a guilty intellectual exercise, up to a point. In reviewing Mein Kampf in March 1940, George Orwell confessed that he had “never been able to dislike Hitler”; something about the man projected an underdog quality, even when his goals were cowardly or loathsome. “If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.” The Islamic State’s partisans have much the same allure. They believe that they are personally involved in struggles beyond their own lives, and that merely to be swept up in the drama, on the side of righteousness, is a privilege and a pleasure—especially when it is also a burden.
Fascism, Orwell continued, is

psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

Nor, in the case of the Islamic State, its religious or intellectual appeal. That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may convince some potential converts that the group’s message is false, and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn’t last until the end of time.

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Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. His personal site is gcaw.net.

Iraq envoy to UN: Islamic State might be harvesting organs

By CARA ANNA 7 hours ago 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations asked the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to look at allegations that the Islamic State group is using organ harvesting as a way to finance its operations.

Ambassador Mohamed Alhakim told reporters that in the past few weeks, bodies with surgical incisions and missing kidneys or other body parts have been found in shallow mass graves.

"We have bodies. Come and examine them," he said. "It is clear they are missing certain parts."

He also said a dozen doctors have been "executed" in Mosul for refusing to participate in organ harvesting.

Alhakim briefed the council on the overall situation in Iraq and accused the Islamic State group of "crimes of genocide" in targeting certain ethnic groups.

The outgoing U.N. envoy to Iraq, Nikolay Mladenov, told the council that 790 people were killed in January alone by terrorism and armed conflict.

Mladenov noted the increasing number of reports and allegations that the Islamic State group is using organ harvesting as a financing method, but he said only that "it's very clear that the tactics ISIL is using expand by the day." He used an acronym for the group.

He said Iraq's most pressing goal is to win back the vast territory that the Islamic State group has seized in the past year. The Sunni militants seized a third of both Iraq and neighboring Syria and imposed strict Sharia law.

"Especially worrying is the increasing number of reports of revenge attacks committed particularly against members of the Sunni community in areas liberated from ISIL control," Mladenov said.

http://www.vox.com/

This one paragraph shows just how bad things in Libya have gotten

Updated by Zack Beauchamp on February 17, 2015, 1:40 p.m. ET @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com

 

On Sunday, Libyan militants claiming to represent ISIS released a video in which they beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians. The video is horrifying, which is what makes the truth of this statement even more astonishing: the small ISIS contingent in eastern Libya is in some ways just a symptom of the country's larger problems.
To get a sense of just how bad the situation in Libya is, here is one very absolutely devastating paragraph from Jon Lee Anderson's long dispatch from the country in the New Yorker:

There is no overstating the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya. Two competing governments claim legitimacy. Armed militias roam the streets. The electricity is frequently out of service, and most business is at a standstill; revenues from oil, the country's greatest asset, have dwindled by more than ninety per cent. Some three thousand people have been killed by fighting in the past year, and nearly a third of the country's population has fled across the border to Tunisia. What has followed the downfall of a tyrant-a downfall encouraged by NATO air strikes-is the tyranny of a dangerous and pervasive instability.

Nearly a third of the country has fled. A third. That's how horrible the post-2011 collapse has been for Libya's citizens. You see that chaos play out in many ways: the collapse in central governance, the rising extremism, the militia alliance controlling much of the country's west, the army run by General Khalifa Hifter entrenched in the east, and the fighting that continues to kill so many. A number of Libyans are trying bravely to bring order to their country, but there is little hope on the horizon.

 

ISIS' incredible show of force on Europe's doorstep: Terrorists in Libya who beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians parade their fleet of brand new 'police cars' in front of cheering children

• The video shows fleet of Toyota pickup trucks carrying Islamic State flags Men, women and children cheer as the cars drive through city of Benghazi  Uploaded by extremist group Ansar al-Sharia who want Sharia law in Libya The terror group pledged its allegiance to Islamic State in October last year Linked to public and bloody executions of 21 Egyptian Christians this week

By Jay Akbar For Mailonline

Published: 12:24 EST, 17 February 2015 | Updated: 18:41 EST, 17 February 2015

The video appears to show a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers carrying the notorious black flag of Islamic State as they drive in perfect unison through the streets of Libya.

Men, women and children cheer and salute the pick-up trucks as they drive freely through what is believed to be the city of Benghazi. 

The carefully produced propaganda video was uploaded by terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia on February 5.

The group declared city an 'Islamic emirate' in July 2014 before pledging allegiance to Islamic State just three months later. In November of that year, the UN blacklisted it as a terrorist organisation.

The group was widely blamed for the death of US Ambassador Christopher Stephens in Benghazi in 2012. And only this week, it was linked to the bloody executions of 21 Egyptian Christians on a beach in Libya.

Fears of an equally brutal execution were raised following the news that 35 more Egyptians may have been kidnapped by Jihadists in the country.

The latest abduction is thought to be a direct response to Egyptian airstrikes on extremist locations in the Libyan city of Derna, following the mass murder of their countrymen.

Footage shows fleet of Jihadi cars moving through streets

 

 

Procession: A fleet of cars parade freely through the Libyan city of Benghazi, showing the level of control they exercise in the country ruled almost entirely by rebel forces

Power: The ominous show of discipline and wealth shows how the country has been overrun by extremism as efforts to suppress ISIS focus on Iraq and Syria

Support: The parade of Toyota Land Cruisers is welcomed by the locals in Benghazi. The video was posted by terrorist group Ansar Al-Sharia - who pledged allegiance to Islamic State last October

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Chilling: Even young children salute the procession of cars as they pass undeterred through the streets of Benghazi

Spreading extremism: Dr Theodore Karasik told MailOnline: 'Libya is seen by North Africans now as the place to go spread the Caliphate'

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In plain sight: The slickly-edited video - in style with Islamic State's propaganda videos - ends with a group of masked men aggressively facing the camera as one man addresses the viewer

The Islamic Youth Shura Council - a branch of Ansar Al-Sharia - was responsible for the very first footage of a beheading to surface from the North-African country.

In November 2014, it released footage showing the murder of an Egyptian soldier who publicly supported his government's forces led by General Khalifa Haftar.

Masked men in camouflage cut Muftah el-Nazihi's neck with a knife before removing his head and placing it on his back. 

The group has been enforcing Sharia Law by carrying out public beheadings and beatings in Libya since their formation in at least August 2014.

Power exorcised by radical groups like the Islamic Youth Shura Council continued to grow until February this year when the Islamic State of Levant self-declared 'caliphate' in Sirte - where 21 Egyptians were believed to be beheaded recently.

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Its fighters traveled to the district in 40 heavily armoured cars and ordered residents to follow Islamic State's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

He has since appointed Ali Al-Qarqaa as Libya's Emir- or leader - meaning control over the country's fractured terror groups falls to him according to Gulf-based analyst Dr Theodore Karasik.

He told MailOnline: 'Libya is seen by North Africans now as the place to go spread the Caliphate. Unlike a few years ago, when everyone was leaving Libya to go to the Levant, you now have people going back.

'Because the idea of 'state' is there and now with the executions, they will feel like there are enough numbers on the ground to fight. They know at the same time the West is slow at acting.'

Three years after the removal of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as the country's ruler, Libya's main cities have surrendered control to a melting pot of extremist groups. 

Most of them - including Ansar al-Sharia, Libya Dawn and the Islamic Youth Shura Council - have pledged their allegiance to Islamic State who seek to use the country's location to establish a foothold in North Africa. 

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Overrun: The majority of Libya's coastal cities have surrendered control to Islamic State and other rebel extremist groups created to oppose the NATO-led invasion which removed Gaddafi from power

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Support: A young girl cheers and waves at the dozens of cars driving in perfect unison through the Libyan city of Benghazi as they carry the black flags of Islamic State

Islamic State: Most of Libya's fractured extremist groups - including Ansar al-Sharia, Libya Dawn and the Islamic Youth Shura Council - have pledged their allegiance to ISIS

Terrorism: Dr Theodore Karasik said Libyans who traveled to fight in Syria are returning to their home country, where there are 'enough numbers on the ground to fight'

Total control: Flags and signposts featuring the black flag of Islamic State litter the city of Benghazi

The internationally recognised government and parliament have since fled to Tobruk, near the Egyptian border.

ISIS exploited the gaps between the democratically elected Libyan government in Torbruk and the Islamist-led General National Congress in the capital Tripoli.

Their joint failure to stop the spread of Islamic State has allowed the extremist group to seize control in a number of coastal cities including Nofaliya, Benghazi, Derna and Sirte - where the Coptic Christians were executed on Sunday.

The caption alongside the five-minute documenting the murderous video read: 'The people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church.'

Before the killings, one of the militants stood with a knife in his hand and said: 'Safety for you crusaders is something you can only wish for.' 

Egyptian warplanes struck Islamic State targets in Libya on Monday in swift retribution for the extremists' beheading of a group of Egyptian Christian hostages on a beach, shown in a grisly online video released hours earlier.

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Executed: At least 35 more Egyptians are believed to have been kidnapped by jihadists in Libya, raises the chilling prospect of yet another mass execution like the one seen on Sunday when the Islamic State released a horrific video showing the beheading of 21 Christians on a beach (above)

Retaliation: Egypt blitzed ISIS training camps, weapons stockpiles and fighters in two waves of air strikes following the gruesome murder of captured Egyptian workers in a video (above) released on Sunday 

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Horror: Blood is seen in the Mediterranean Sea. In the video the jihadis say they now plan to 'conquer Rome'

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Murder: The Islamic Youth Shura Council - a branch of Ansar Al-Sharia - was responsible for the very first footage of a beheading to surface from the North-African country. Masked men in camouflage cut Muftah el-Nazihi's (pictured) neck with a knife before removing his head and placing it on his back.

In a radio interview today, Egypt's president said a UN-backed coalition was Libya's best chance of ridding Libya of its many extremist groups. 

Speaking to France's Europe 1 Radio, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said Egyptian airstrikes against Islamic State group positions in Libya on Monday were in self-defense.

He siad: 'We will not allow them to cut off the heads of our children. We have abandoned the Libyan people as prisoners of the militias.

'The militias have to give up their arms and must work in a civil context. We have to disarm and prevent arms from falling into the hands of extremists.

'What happened [beheading of Egyptian Christians] is a crime, a monstrous terrorist crime that our children have their throats cuts in Libya and not to react. It's a kind of self-defense accepted by the international community. We will not allow them to cut off the heads of our children.'

Meanwhile British Prime Minister David Cameron says he does not regret his country's efforts to rid Libya of Muammar Gaddafi, despite growing unrest and the threat from terrorists.

The Prime Minister said UK would not abandon Libya as he maintained his decision to send British military forces to the north African country in 2011 was the 'right thing to do'.

He said: 'Britain is giving Libya support through our aid budget. We did a major training project for the Libyan security forces. We are doing work to try and bring together a national unity government in Libya.

'But of course what we face in Libya is a very difficult situation with far too many armed militias, without a proper government and with the growth of ungoverned space, and we've had the appalling events of the last few days with the brutal, senseless murders of Coptic Christians on the beach, which I know has shocked the whole world.

'I discussed it yesterday with the president of Egypt and what the whole world needs to do is come together and work for a Libya that has a national unity government, obviously excluding terrorists, and that can start to build the institutions of a state.'

http://www.ibtimes.com

ISIS Demands Blood Donations For Wounded Fighters In Syria, Mandatory Transfusions Performed Without Proper Medical Tools

Smoke raises behind an Islamic State flag after Iraqi security forces and Shiite fighters took control of Saadiya in Diyala province from Islamist State militants, Nov. 24, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer

By  Julia Glum

As U.S.-led airstrikes continued to take down Islamic State group fighters this week, the extremists reportedly forced Syrian civilians to donate blood for their wounded. Up to 100 residents of Raqqa, the ISIS capital in eastern Syria, were required to get blood drawn at the city's private hospitals, according to the Independent. Most were men.
“Forcing civilians to donate blood is prohibited and inhuman, especially since the IS group does so randomly, regardless of the type of blood,” al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper reporter Jiwan Soz told ARA News. "The group is drawing blood in a primitive way without using the medical tools necessary for this process."
Blood transfusions in Raqqa used to be voluntary and even popular at one point when bombs were hitting civilians in 2014. But this recent blood drive was mandatory, motivated by the need to care for militants hurt by airstrikes in Kobani, Syria, and battles with Kurdish fighters near Mosul, Iraq, according to the Independent. There have also been reports of female Yazidi hostages being forced to give blood.
"They even take our girls' and old women's blood," Yazidi activist Nareen Shammo told the Independent. "They use it for their wounded ISIS fighters."
The extremist organization has been treating its members in private hospitals, so it's difficult to estimate death tolls. Reuters reported that at least 20 ISIS fighters died Thursday, and since August, U.S.-led coalition bombs have killed about 7,000 ISIS militants. The CIA estimated last year that ISIS' membership in the Middle East was between 20,000 and 31,500.
"We will continue to fight this war until we have achieved its goal, wiping ISIS from the face of the Earth," Maj. Gen. Mansour Jabour of the Royal Jordanian Air Force told the Washington Post.
In addition to the U.S., Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Netherlands and the United Kingdom are dropping bombs in Iraq. Coalition countries conducting airstrikes in Syria include the U.S., Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

ISIS Turns to Chemical Weapons As It Loses Ground in Iraq

By Riyadh Mohammed 4 hours ago

A few weeks ago, the US Central Command announced that an air raid had killed an ISIS chemical weapon expert in Mosul. The ISIS operative, Iraqi engineer Mahmoud al-Sabawi, used to work at Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program before he joined al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 US led invasion.
The idea that ISIS terrorists have access to chemical weapons brings back images of the genocide inflicted on the Kurds by Saddam Hussein in the late 1980’s. The Halabja Massacre killed up to 5,000 and injured between 7,000 and 10,000 more.

If ISIS jihadists have a stash of chemical weapons, they won’t hesitate to use them on the Kurdish people or anyone else who has challenged their authority. Since President Obama has just asked Congress to for additional war powers to fight ISIS, it is important to know if the enemy has such weapons.

ISIS’s chemical weapons aspiration dates back to the very early roots of the group. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late Jordanian terrorist and the founder of ISIS predecessor organization al-Qaeda in Iraq was very interested in acquiring chemical weapons and using poisons in terrorist attacks.
Related: US Marines on the Ground in Iraq as ISIS Burns 45 Alive
Zarqawi was born in Jordan in 1967 where he was involved in several terrorist plots and spent several years in prison. He also traveled twice to Afghanistan to join the Afghan Jihad. Around the year 2000 and during his second term in Afghanistan, he arranged a deal with Osama bin Laden that enabled him to establish a training camp in the eastern Afghan city of Herat for Jordanian extremists without pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda.  His organization researched the making and usage of poisons and chemical weapons.
When the US invasion of Afghanistan took place in October 2001 -- following the 9/11 attacks -- Zarqawi fought against the Americans, then reportedly fled to Iran and then Iraq. There, he had reportedly developed a relationship with a Kurdish Iraqi extremist group called Ansar al-Islam.
Ansar al-Islam was established in September 2001 and it controlled a small area in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Iraq by the Iranian border. Just like Zarqawi, the group was supported by al-Qaeda but it was independent. It was also very interested in developing and using chemical weapons and poisons in terrorist attacks.
In 2002 and in early 2003, Ansar al-Islam’s activities prompted a disagreement among President Bush’s advisors over whether or not to strike its camps in northern Iraq. The US Defense department favored the action, but the State department opposed. Bush sided with the later.
Related: Beheadings Show ISIS Has Formed a New Power Center​
When the Americans invaded Iraq in March 2003, they raided the camps of Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq and uncovered labs where the group was experimenting with chemicals and poisons. In the meantime, Zarqawi rose up to be the leader of the deadliest insurgency group, named in 2004 to lead al-Qaeda branch in Iraq.  Zarqawi was by then able to acquire more resources to continue his chemical weapons program, which included access to Saddam Hussein’s former engineers, funding from several sources including hostage taking and taxes on businesses, materials from Saddam Hussein’s looted factories and weapons caches, and lands that insurgents who reported to him controlled.
“Zarqawi assigned Abu Mohammed al-Lubnani and an engineer called Ammar al-Ani to handle the chemical weapons profile”, said Hisham al-Hashimi, ISIS analyst at the Iraqi National Security Advisor office. Al-Lubnani was Zarqawi’s second in command.
“Special development units were built on farms…to the north of Baghdad. However, all the development experiments failed due to difficulties in acquiring basic manufacturing materials or local replacements. They were also unable to control the strength of the explosion once the chemicals or poisonous stuff burned or melted,” added al-Hashimi.
Zarqawi’s terror wasn’t limited to Iraq. U.S. officials believe that Zarqawi trained others in the use of poison (ricin) for possible attacks in Europe. On April 26, 2004, Jordanian authorities announced they had broken up an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons in Amman. Among the targets were the U.S. Embassy, the Jordanian prime minister’s office and the headquarters of Jordanian intelligence. The Jordanian authorities seized 20 tons of chemicals.
Related: 9 ISIS Weapons That Will Shock You
When Zarqawi was killed in an air raid in Iraq in 2006, his successors Abu Ayoub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi continued the terror organization’s chemical project.  The two men established the Islamic State of Iraq in October 2006. In that month, a series of Chlorine bombings began in Iraq. More than a dozen attacks with Chlorine took place between October 2006 and June 2007.

• In October 2006, a car bomb carrying two 100-pound chlorine tanks detonated, wounding four Iraqis in Ramadi.
• In January 2007, a suicide bomber drove a dump truck carrying chlorine tank killing 16 people by the explosives, not by the chlorine.
• In February 2007, a suicide bombing in Ramadi involving chlorine killed two Iraqi security forces and wounded 16 other people.  A bomb blew up a tanker carrying chlorine north of Baghdad, killing nine and made 148 others ill. A pickup truck carrying chlorine gas cylinders exploded in Baghdad, killing at least five people and hospitalizing over 50.
• In March 2007, three separate suicide attacks used chlorine in one day. The first attack occurred in Ramadi, when a truck bomb wounded one US service member and one Iraqi civilian. A second truck bomb detonated in Fallujah, killing two police officers, leaving a hundred Iraqis with signs of chlorine exposure.

Related: Kurds Are Close to Retaking Mosul from ISIS​​​​

• Another chlorine-laden truck bomb exploded south of Fallujah, killing six and injuring 250. On another day, suicide bombers detonated a pair of truck bombs, one containing chlorine in Fallujah. It left 14 American forces and 57 Iraqi forces wounded.
• In April 2007, a chlorine-laden suicide truck bomb detonated in Ramadi, leaving 27 dead. Thirty people were wounded. Many more suffered breathing difficulties. A chlorine truck bomb detonated in western Baghdad, killing one Iraqi and wounding two others. A tanker laden with chlorine exploded in Ramadi, killing six people and wounding 10.
• In May 2007, a chlorine bomb exploded in a village of in Diyala province, killing 32 people and injuring 50. A suicide truck bomb exploded his vehicle outside Ramadi, killing two police officers and wounding 11 others.
• In June 2007, a car bomb exploded in Diyala. The gas sickened at least 62 US soldiers.

The attacks in Iraq were poorly executed because much of the chemical agent was rendered nontoxic by the heat of the explosives. The attacks resulted in hundreds of injuries but were not a feasible way of inflicting large loss of life. Their primary effect was widespread panic, with many civilians suffering non-life threatening injuries. Higher levels of exposure can cause fatal lung damage; but because the gas is heavier than air, it will not disperse, and it is ineffective as an improvised chemical weapon.
Related: The Perverted, Powerful Logic Behind ISIS’s Burned Pilot
In all the previous attacks and others, the ISIS experiments ultimately failed. Unless the target is enclosed and has been hit directly by the gas, the gas won’t be particularly lethal.
The American forces attacked ISIS factories in al-Tarmiya in 2008. They killed Abu Gazwan al-Hayali, who supervised and protected the engineers and specialists there. But they didn’t find any ready to produce materials or important raw materials, al-Hashimi added.
ISIS Rethinks Its Chemical Strategy
In 2010, the Iraqi and American forces killed Zarqawi’s successors. That opened the door for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to rebuild his dismantled jihad organization. When the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011, he seized the opportunity to expand and gradually his organization grew into ISIS. In June 2014, they were able to capture the city of Mosul.
Related: The Three Hidden Messages Behind ISIS’s Bloody Rampages​
With the fall of massive areas in northern and western Iraq, ISIS was able to control a key area north of Baghdad that used to produce chemical weapons under Saddam. However, the site was empty. The UN inspection teams had destroyed and cleared the site completely from the industrial tools and the main materials that could be used to make chemical or biological weapons, according to the UN teams’ reports.
When the US led alliance started to bomb ISIS positions in Iraq and in Syria after August 2014, ISIS lost its momentum in Iraq. Since October, ISIS has suffered a series of defeats on every front in Iraq. This weakened position could explain why ISIS chemical ambitions have been recently renewed.
In late January 2015 in one of ISIS bomb-making factories in Mosul, something went wrong while preparing a chlorine bomb. “ISIS members informed the nearby residents to close their doors and windows. They said a gas leak was caused by an air raid. But there were no air raids...people were panicked,” said Maouris Milton, a blogger from Mosul.
A few days later, On January 29, ISIS tried to extract some chemical and poisonous waste buried carefully by UN teams in Tikrit. But the concrete structure around the burial site stood as an obstacle despite numerous attempts to destroy it with explosives, Hashimi recalled.

Currently, the man in charge of ISIS chemical weapons is an Egyptian engineer with an MS from Cairo. It is believed that he operates somewhere in an agricultural area in southern Baghdad.  Hashimi says his assistant was killed by a US air raid a few weeks ago.  

UK worries how to stop teenage girls traveling to Syria

By Katherine Haddon 12 hours ago

 London (AFP) - Britain debated Sunday how to stop teenage girls joining the Islamic State group in Syria after three high-achieving youngsters became the latest to run away from home.School friends Kadiza Sultana, 17, and 15-year-olds Shamima Begum and Amira Abase left their east London homes on Tuesday and flew to Istanbul, raising concerns they would travel on to Syria to join IS jihadists.All three were spoken to in December by police investigating the disappearance of a friend who went to Syria but Scotland Yard insists nothing indicated they would follow suit.

Amira's father Abase Hussen, 47, said nothing in his daughter's behaviour indicated anything was wrong when she told him he was leaving to attend a wedding.

"She said 'Daddy, I'm in no hurry'," Hussen Abase told journalists at police headquarters. "There was no sign to suspect her at all."

In fact, she had travelled to Gatwick Airport to take a flight to Turkey, despite never showing signs of an interest in extremism to her family.

"She doesn't dare discuss something like this with us. She knows what the answer would be," Abase Hussen, holding a Chelsea FC teddy bear that his football fan daughter had given her mother.

"The message we have for Amira is to get back home. We miss you. We cannot stop crying. Please think twice. Don't go to Syria," he said.

 

Abase Hussen, father of 15-year-old British girl Amira Abase who left her east London home on Februa …

Some have questioned whether more could have been done to stop them leaving.

Someone using a Twitter account in Shamima Begum's name last Sunday seems to have contacted Aqsa Mahmood, a woman from Glasgow, Scotland who reportedly travelled to Syria last year to marry an IS group fighter.

Mahmood's family, who strongly condemn her actions, have questioned why authorities did not act on the message as her social media accounts are monitored.

"She is now engaging with other young people and trying to recruit them," Aamer Anwar, a lawyer for the Mahmood family, told the BBC on Sunday.

"(The family are) saying 'what exactly are the security services doing in this country?'"

- Jihadi bride -

After the girls' friend disappeared last year and was thought to have travelled to Syria, Renu Begun, 27, asked her sister Shamima: "You wouldn't do anything stupid like that, would you?"

 

The eldest sister of missing British girl Shamima Begum, holds a picture of her sister while being i …

Shamima had replied that she would not as she had the support of her family, Renu recalled.
"She's a clever girl but she's only young and young minds can easily be swayed," Renu said.
"My little sister is an A-star student. To convince such young girls at that age, who are vulnerable, it's just wrong. It's a really evil thing to do," Begum added.
Counter-terrorism experts estimate that around 50 women have travelled from the UK to Syria to join the IS group, while tales of "jihadi brides" have become a staple of Britain's tabloid press.
Some 550 women from across Europe have gone to Iraq and Syria, where they often marry fighters and help to recruit others, according to a study from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue think-tank last month.
In an attempt to stop the flow of IS supporters to Syria, the passports of Britons suspected of travelling to Syria or Iraq can be seized before travel under a new law that came into effect this month.
However, in this case the girls involved were not suspected in advance.
Prime Minister David Cameron, who plans to introduce additional measures including enhanced screening at airports, said that schools and universities had to help identify those at risk.
"The fight against Islamist extremist terror is not just one that we can wage by the police and border control," Cameron said.
Turkish Airlines, with whom the girls flew to Istanbul, said its responsibility was checking passengers' visas and pre-flight security issues were the "responsibility of official airport authorities."

Britain's first female Muslim cabinet minister, Sayeeda Warsi, who resigned last year over the government's Gaza policy, warned of the role of the Internet in radicalising young Muslims.

There is no "single journey to somebody becoming a terrorist," she told Sky News.

That was echoed by Ross Frenett of the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, who stressed more effort should be made to counter online propaganda.

"An awful lot of extremism... is people looking for a sense of belonging," Frenett said.

"That's not unique to people who are maladjusted. An awful lot of extremism of all types actually comes from people with well-off backgrounds who tend to be very well-adjusted".

http://nypost.com/

Female ISIS captives endure ‘brutal and abnormal’ sex

By Bruce Golding

February 18, 2015 | 2:08am

Photo: Reuters

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Perverted ISIS militants are trying to score Viagra to fuel their lust for “brutal and abnormal” sex, according to a shocking report from activists in the terror group’s main Syrian stronghold.
The supposedly ultra-conservative Muslim fundamentalists have been forcing women in the city of Raqqa to marry them and engage in savage sex acts that result in hospital treatment, the report says.
The jihadists also buy kinky lingerie — described in the report as “strange underwear” — for their reluctant brides, according to the “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently” activist group.
“A large section of ISIS members suffer from sexual anomalies and brutal instinctive desire for sex,” the group wrote on its website.
Several families have reportedly fled the city — and one girl committed suicide — to avoid the lusty ISIS terrorists’ clutches.
ISIS overran Raqqa in 2013 and turned the northern Syrian city into its de facto capital, imposing harsh religious laws and publicly beheading and crucifying opponents in the ironically named Paradise Square.
In a related development, two British human rights groups on Wednesday said ISIS kidnapped at least 3,000 women and girls last year from the areas it controls in Iraq.
Some victims were forced to marry ISIS terrorists, while others were sold into sexual slavery, according to a report by Minority Rights Group International and the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights.
The report said firsthand accounts from victims who spoke secretly by phone in August revealed that ISIS fighters were raping women on a daily basis, with some victims begging the activists to arrange airstrikes on their locations and end their suffering.
One kidnapped girl who belongs to the minority Yazidi religious group also said she was among 350 girls transported to Syria and offered for sale “as if in a chicken market.”
With Post Wires

ISIS Burns 8000 Rare Books and Manuscripts in Mosul

  By Riyadh Mohammed 15 hours ago 

 
 ISIS Burns 8000 Rare Books and Manuscripts in Mosul

While the world was watching the Academy Awards ceremony, the people of Mosul were watching a different show. They were horrified to see ISIS members burn the Mosul public library. Among the many thousands of books it housed, more than 8,000 rare old books and manuscripts were burned.

“ISIS militants bombed the Mosul Public Library. They used improvised explosive devices,” said Ghanim al-Ta'an, the director of the library. Notables in Mosul tried to persuade ISIS members to spare the library, but they failed.

Related: Kurds Are Close to Retaking Mosul from ISIS

The former assistant director of the library Qusai All Faraj said that the Mosul Public Library was established in 1921, the same year that saw the birth of the modern Iraq. Among its lost collections were manuscripts from the eighteenth century, Syriac books printed in Iraq's first printing house in the nineteenth century, books from the Ottoman era, Iraqi newspapers from the early twentieth century and some old antiques like an astrolabe and sand glass used by ancient Arabs. The library had hosted the personal libraries of more than 100 notable families from Mosul over the last century. 

During the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the library was looted and destroyed by mobs. However, the people living nearby managed to save most of its collections and rich families bought back the stolen books and they were returned to the library, All Faraj added.
Related: 9 ISIS Weapons That Will Shock You
“900 years ago, the books of the Arab philosopher Averroes were collected before his eyes...and burned. One of his students started crying while witnessing the burning. Averroes told him... the ideas have wings...but I cry today over our situation,” said Rayan al-Hadidi, an activist and a blogger from Mosul. Al-Hadidi said that a state of anger and sorrow are dominating Mosul now.  Even the library's website was suspended.
“What a pity! We used to go to the library in the 1970s. It was one of the greatest landmarks of Mosul. I still remember the special pieces of paper where the books’ names were listed alphabetically,” said Akil Kata who left Mosul to exile years ago.
On the same day the library was destroyed, ISIS abolished another old church in Mosul: the church of Mary the Virgin. The Mosul University Theater was burned as well, according to eyewitnesses. In al-Anbar province, Western Iraq, the ISIS campaign of burning books has managed to destroy 100,000 titles, according to local officials. Last December, ISIS burned Mosul University’s central library.
Related: The Perverted, Powerful Logic Behind ISIS’s Burned Pilot
Iraq, the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of agriculture and writing and the home of the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Arab civilizations had never witnessed such an assault on its rich cultural heritage since the Mongol era in the Middle Ages.

Last week, a debate in Washington and Baghdad became heated over when, how and who will liberate Mosul. A plan was announced to liberate the city in April or May by more than 20,000 US trained Iraqi soldiers. Either way, and supposing everything will go well and ISIS will be defeated easily which is never the case in reality, that means the people of Mosul will still have to wait for another two to three months.

Until then, Mosul will probably have not a single sign of its rich history left standing.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:

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 http://www.vox.com/

ISIS is losing

Updated by Zack Beauchamp on February 23, 2015,
9:30 a.m. ET @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com

A Kurdish fighter poses next to a destroyed ISIS truck.  
(Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)

If you want to understand what's happening in the Middle East today, you need to appreciate one fundamental fact: ISIS is losing its war for the Middle East.
This may seem hard to believe: in Iraq and Syria, the group still holds a stretch of territory larger than the United Kingdom, manned by a steady stream of foreign fighters. Fighters pledging themselves to ISIS recently executed 21 Christians in Libya.
It's certainly true that ISIS remains a terrible and urgent threat to the Middle East. The group is not on the verge of defeat, nor is its total destruction guaranteed. But, after months of ISIS expansion and victories, the group is now being beaten back. It is losing territory in the places that matter. Coalition airstrikes have hamstrung its ability to wage offensive war, and it has no friends to turn to for help. Its governance model is unsustainable and risks collapse in the long run.
Unless ISIS starts adapting, there's a very good chance its so-called caliphate is going to fall apart.

Believe it or not, Iraq is looking better than anyone could have hoped six months ago

Control of territory in Iraq as of February 2, 2015. (Institute for the Study of War/Sinan Adnan)

One year ago, ISIS was soon to launch the offensive in Iraq that, in June, would sweep across northern Iraq and conquer the country's second-largest city, Mosul. Today, the Iraqi government is prepping a counter-offensive aimed at seizing Mosul back, which the US believes will launch in April.
In that year, the situation has changed dramatically. After ISIS's seemingly unstoppable rampage from June to August of 2014, the Iraqi government and its allies have turned the tide. Slowly, unevenly, but surely, ISIS is being pushed back.
"There's really nowhere where [ISIS] has momentum," Kirk Sowell, the principal at Uticensis Risk Services and an expert on Iraqi politics, told me in late January.
"There are a significant string of [Iraqi] victories all along the northern river valley, up through Diyala and Salahuddin [two central Iraqi provinces]," Doug Ollivant, National Security Council Director for Iraq from 2008-2009 and current managing partner at Mantid International, explained.
"The Islamic State ... will lose its battle to hold territory in Iraq"
In northern Iraq, Kurdish forces are threatening to cut off a highway that serves as ISIS's main supply line between Iraq and Syria. They took the town of Sinjar, which sits on the highway, in December; by late January, they had taken a longer stretch of the highway near a town called Kiske.
Ollivant describes much of the Kurdish progress in the north as a "circling around Mosul." Though the Kurds won't attempt to retake the city on their own, a joint Iraqi-Kurdish force is now poised to do so. Re-taking Mosul would be a major blow to ISIS.
To be clear, ISIS isn't on the retreat everywhere. "The news in [western province] Anbar is more mixed," Ollivant says. "Things are shifting, but not to anyone's particular advantage. The Iraqi government gains ground here, and loses ground there." In February, an ISIS offensive in Anbar threatened al-Asad airbase, where US troops are training Iraqi soldiers.
Still, ISIS is falling back in most places where it's facing a serious push. And Iraq watchers are starting to see ISIS's struggles as harbingers of a larger collapse.
"The Islamic State ... will lose its battle to hold territory in Iraq," Ollivant writes in War on the Rocks. "The outcome in Iraq is now clear to most serious analysts."
Sowell agrees. "There is no Islamic 'State' in Iraq. They're basically operating as an insurgency/mafia," he says. "They just don't have the ability, the wherewithal in Iraq to set up Sharia courts, patrol, and really govern a state."

ISIS is at a standstill in Syria

Kurdish fighters in Kobane. (Ahmet Sik/Getty Images)

Syria is a different story. ISIS has a firm hold on the Syrian city Raqqa and its environs; it's stronger there than it is anywhere in Iraq. No faction in Syria is in a position to challenge ISIS's core holdings, at least in the near term.
Still, ISIS's months of progress in Syria have stalled. And that bodes poorly for the group's long-term prospects.
By the end of January, ISIS had been driven out of Kobane, a Kurdish town in northern Syria that it had spent enormous amounts of manpower and resources trying to seize. Kobane isn't hugely important in strategic terms. But the fact that Kurdish forces pushed ISIS back there, with support from heavy American airstrikes, does matter.
"We can take [Kobane], to a limited extent, as a signal that the airstrikes are helping roll back or at least stop [ISIS] progress in Syria," says Sasha Gordon, an associate at the private research and consulting firm Caerus Associates, who tracks developments on the ground at Syria closely.
"A lot of [elite ISIS forces] might have been lost at Kobane," adds Yasir Abbas, another Caerus associate on the Syria desk.
And ISIS has failed to make major gains outside of Kobane. "If you start with the beginning of US airstrikes in late September," Gordon says, "you'll find that ISIS hasn't taken any territory to speak of, and in fact has been rolled back in areas."

Control of territory in Syria, as of February 15, 2015. (Thomas van Linge)

Though there have been some reports of ISIS advances in western Syria, "the territories they have gained are meaningless [or] they didn't get to keep them," Abbas explains.
"All of their major offensives since the airstrikes began — Kobane, [Deir ez-Zor] Air Base, Sha'ir Gas Field — have either been stalemates or ended in outright defeat once they squared off against Assad's troops," Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me in late January.
Part of the reason ISIS hasn't been pushed back further is that no other faction in Syria — Bashar al-Assad's regime, al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, or the major rebel groups — have concentrated their efforts on the Islamic State.
"Everyone in Syria sees [ISIS] as a secondary priority," Gordon says, "because it's so universally unpopular that destroying it is very easy to sell and easier to do than for the regime to defeat the opposition or vice versa."
This is good and bad news for ISIS. Syria's other major groups are all focused on one another. But, at some point, that's going to change, and when it does ISIS's situation will be much more difficult.
"Do I think [ISIS] is going to be around forever? I don't think so," Gordon concludes. "But I think it can limp along so long as there's no army to take care of it."

Why ISIS is being pushed back: they're outgunned, outnumbered, and friendless

A US airstrike near Kobane. (Kutluhan Cucel/Getty Images)

There are three simple reasons why ISIS is so weak in its supposed strongholds.
(1) Coalition airstrikes. No one expects airstrikes to collapse ISIS on their own. But they've been extraordinarily effective at blunting ISIS's ability to launch offensives in Iraq and Syria. Large masses of ISIS troops, required for such offensives, are really easy to target from the air.
"Their freedom of movement, even within their own territory [in Syria], has been significantly affected" by the strikes, Abbas says. "Before, they could send a group of elite fighters to al-Hasakah [in] the east, fight there for a couple of days, take territory then, and retreat and go and fight in Deir ez-Zor."
ISIS "relied heavily" on fast movement of elite forces for military success in both Iraq and Syria, according to Abbas. That tactic "has been taken away from them."
Moreover, US and allied air strikes have been effective at aiding ground operations against ISIS. This was most most obviously true in Kobane, where a barrage of US airstrikes was critical to the Kurdish defense's success. The strikes have also help enabled the Iraqi and Kurdish advances in Iraq.
(2) ISIS has lost the element of surprise. In conventional terms, ISIS is pretty badly outnumbered. The CIA estimates that ISIS has between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters; some private sector sources suggest that figure may be closer to 100,000. There are about 48,000 official Iraqi government soldiers, but they're buttressed by 100,000 to 120,000 Shia militiamen fighting on the government's side. The BBC reports that there are 190,000 Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq's north. And that's to say nothing of ISIS's enemies in Syria.
Now, ISIS has always been outnumbered, but had used quick surprise strikes to overwhelm its enemies. One reason ISIS managed to sweep northern Iraq last June, according to Ollivant, is that Iraqi forces were "misdeployed:" positioned in small units designed to deal with an insurgency, but vulnerable to ISIS's fast, massed vehicular assaults.

Peshmerga on their way to the Mosul Dam in August, celebrating

 progress against ISIS. (Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)

Now, American airstrikes are hampering ISIS's ability to conduct fast advances, and ISIS's enemies have redeployed. That'll allow anti-ISIS forces to leverage their superior numbers.
ISIS might be able to deal with its numbers problem if it had allies. But it doesn't, and that's the third major problem:
(3) ISIS is congenitally incapable of making allies. The group's ideology demands total and absolute adherence to its narrow and extremist interpretation of Islamic law. In their view, nobody — including al-Qaeda — is sufficiently pure. This causes ISIS fighters to lash out at people and groups who would otherwise be allies, making any alliances that ISIS forms temporary at best.
This is most pronounced in Syria: unlike Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise, ISIS has had a tough time cooperating with other rebel factions against the Assad regime, and indeed has clashed with every major faction in Syria at one point or another. In a civil war defined by the fact that no one group can overpower another, ISIS's isolation puts it at serious risk.
This is part of why ISIS "is in a much worse situation" than it was several months ago, says Joshua Landis, Director of the University of Oklahoma's Center for Middle East Studies.
"Had they just taken this large Sunni tribal region from the edge of Baghdad all the way to Aleppo, they might have been able to keep it," Landis says. "If ISIS had kept its head down, and not had such an expansive revolutionary ideology to reconquer the entire Middle East and to take on all of the crusader states, it could have been left alone by the international community."

ISIS's self-destructive ideology is its greatest weakness

ISIS's so-called "caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. 

(Al-Furqan Media/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

ISIS has staked its entire political project on one theory: they are the true revival of the early Islamic caliphate, destined not only to maintain and expand their theocratic state but to bring on the apocalypse. Once you understand that, ISIS's blunders look less like miscalculations and more like inevitable results of its animating ideology.
"When they declared the caliphate, their legitimacy came to rest on the continuing viability of their state," Gartenstein-Ross told me in October.
More rational insurgent groups, facing a conventionally stronger foe, have a well-established playbook. Stay away from open engagements, hide among a population that's willing to shelter you, and use hit-and-run attacks to bleed the enemy to death.
The Taliban, for example, responded to the 2001 US-led invasion by giving up its state and becoming a highly durable insurgency, one that is now resurgent in Afghanistan. But ISIS so far insists on maintaining its state — even if that means fighting battles it is likely to lose against more powerful enemies. More than that, even, the group's ideology demands that it continue expanding, exposing its vulnerabilities even further.
"To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law," Graeme Wood explains in an excellent Atlantic feature on ISIS's theology. One condition is that "the caliph have territory in which he can enforce Islamic law." Once the caliphate is established, "the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential duty of the caliph." Everything we know about ISIS suggests its members earnestly believe this — including leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
When ISIS does something obviously shortsighted, such as deciding to invade Iraqi Kurdistan and start a losing war with the previously uninvolved Kurds, that's their ideology. They believe they need to expand territory, and that God will ensure that they do in the end.
So ISIS troops will remain out in the open, making them vulnerable to American and coalition bombs. They'll engage in conventional fights with superior enemies, because they need to keep them out of ISIS territory. And they'll continue attacking neutral parties or potential partners, because they hold territory that ISIS wants.

The deeper problems that gave rise to ISIS will be around for some time

Unidentified Iraqi militants in January 2014.

 (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

All of these factors have put ISIS on the path to major losses, but that doesn't make the group's complete destruction inevitable, much less quick or painless. And there's no reason to believe that ISIS's defeat would solve the underlying problems that led to its rise, and will continue to plague Iraq and Syria for some time.
Even if Iraqi troops manage to topple ISIS in their country — which isn't guaranteed, and would take months or years of difficult fighting — the group's individual fighters could reform as yet another Sunni insurgency. ISIS, after all, is in many ways just one chapter in the Iraqi sectarian war that began in 2003, and it might not be the last one.
Syria is in even worse shape. Though ISIS is stalled there, it will likely have a safe haven for as long the Syrian civil war remains divided between several competing factions. Decisively addressing the factors that allowed ISIS's rise in Syria means ending both the civil war and the sectarianism that Bashar al-Assad cultivated since it began; those problems could be with us for generations.
In the short term, ISIS's setbacks in Syria have had the perverse effect of primarily benefitting not ordinary Syrians but rather al-Qaeda, ISIS's main competitor there for the mantle of Sunni extremism. As ISIS has retreated, the al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra has advanced, standing to gain both territory and recruits.
That even the rollback of ISIS could come with such terrible consequences is a testament to just how bad things are in Iraq and, especially, Syria. Even still, ISIS is perhaps the world's most vicious and inhumane militant group. That it is slowly losing its grip on its territory — and, with it, its ability to murder and torment the people of the Middle East — is worth appreciating.

With sledgehammer, Islamic State smashes Iraqi history

  8 hours ago 

By Isabel Coles and Saif Hameed

ARBIL/BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Ultra-radical Islamist militants in northern Iraq have destroyed a priceless collection of statues and sculptures from the ancient Assyrian era, inflicting what an archaeologist described as incalculable damage to a piece of shared human history.

A video published by Islamic State on Thursday showed men attacking the artifacts, some of them identified as antiquities from the 7th century BC, with sledgehammers and drills, saying they were symbols of idolatry.

"The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him," an unidentified man said in the video.

The militants shoved stone statues off their plinths, shattering them on the floor, and one man applied an electric drill to a large winged bull. The video showed a large exhibition room strewn with dismembered statues, and Islamic songs played in the background.

Lamia al-Gailani, an Iraqi archaeologist and associate fellow at the London-based Institute of Archaeology, said the militants had wreaked untold damage. "It’s not only Iraq’s heritage: it’s the whole world’s," she said.

"They are priceless, unique. It's unbelievable. I don’t want to be Iraqi any more," she said, comparing the episode to the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Afghan Taliban in 2001.

As well as Assyrian statues of winged bulls from the Mesopotamian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud, Gailani said the Islamic State hardliners appeared to have destroyed statues from Hatra, a Hellenistic-Parthian city in northern Iraq dating back around 2,000 years.

Eleanor Robson, professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at University College London, also said on Twitter that statues from Hatra and Nineveh had been wrecked, though she added that some objects shown in the video were modern replicas.

The director of UNESCO's Iraq office, Axel Plathe, would not comment on the content of the video, saying it has yet to be verified. But he described the damage to Iraq's heritage since Islamic State overran Mosul last year as an attempt "to destroy the identity of an entire people".

Plathe said UNESCO was working with Iraqi authorities and governments of neighboring countries to crack down on the smuggling of artifacts from areas under Islamic State control, and had alerted auction houses to be on the lookout for stolen items.

Islamic State espouses a fiercely purist school of Sunni Islam, deeming many other Muslims to be heretics. Its fighters have destroyed Shi'ite and Sufi religious sites and attacked churches and other shrines in the parts of Syria and Iraq under their control.

"Muslims, these relics you see behind me are idols that were worshipped other than God in the past centuries," the unidentified man in the Islamic State video said.

"What is known as Assyrians, Akkadians and others used to worship gods of rain, farming and war other than God and pay all sorts of tributes to them."

Last week, Islamic State released another video showing a pile of books in flames.

An employee of the Mosul museum said he feared these books were manuscripts from the library of endowments, although the library itself was still in tact last week.

(Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

FBI: 'We Are Losing the Battle' to Stop ISIS Radicalization Online

By MIKE LEVINE 3 hours ago

FBI: 'We Are Losing the Battle' to Stop ISIS Radicalization Online (ABC News)

The FBI’s top counterterrorism official offered a blunt assessment today of U.S. efforts to stop ISIS from spreading its merciless message online: “We are losing the battle.”

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The terrorist group wreaking havoc in Syria and Iraq as it blasts videos of beheadings to the world “has proven dangerously competent like no other group before it at employing [online] tools for its nefarious strategy,” the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, Assistant Director Michael Steinbach, told lawmakers today.
He said the FBI and other U.S. agencies have implemented “an effective counter narrative” online, but “the sheer volume” of ISIS messaging online, particularly through social media, “eclipses our effort.”
Few Arrests of Americans Who Fought In Syria or IraqIdentity of 'Jihadi John' RevealedIn fact, while U.S. authorities have been warning that thousands of Westerners recruited to fight with ISIS overseas could pose a threat to the U.S. homeland, that threat “is a small problem” compared with the group’s ability to reach into the United States and radicalize someone without anyone else knowing.

Through its online campaign, ISIS is able to target radicalized Americans who are “frustrated” by an inability to leave the United States or just can’t afford it, according to Steinbach.

“So what they’re doing is … saying, 'Hey, if you can’t come to Syria, do something in the U.S. or Western countries,’" Steinbach added.

Steinbach cited Wednesday's arrest of three New Yorkers as “a good example” of the threat the FBI is seeing “more and more.” Two of those arrested allegedly discussed ways they could wage jihad inside the U.S. homeland, from assassinating President Obama to bombing Coney Island.

Nineteen-year-old Akhror Saidakhmetov, a Kazakhstan citizen living in Brooklyn, N.Y., was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he was allegedly trying to leave for Syria. 24-year-old Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, an Uzbekistan citizen also living in Brooklyn, was arrested at his apartment.

In August, Juraboev allegedly posed a question on an Uzbek-language site tied to ISIS: “I am in USA now. ... But is it possible to commit ourselves as dedicated martyrs anyway while here?”

In the same post, Juraboev suggested he could “shoot Obama and then get shot ourselves … That will strike fear in the hearts of infidels,” according to the FBI.

Over the following months, the FBI tracked their communications and sent a confidential informant to engage with them, recording many of their alleged conversations about traveling to Syria and launching attacks in the U.S. homeland.
In one November 2014 discussion, Saidakhmetov allegedly suggested he join the U.S. military so he could pass military information to ISIS – and if his plan ever fell apart, he could open fire on American soldiers, according charging documents.
A third Brooklyn man, 30-year-old Abror Habivov, was arrested in Florida, accused of funding some of the pair’s travel and operating “a domestic support network” for travel to Syria.
All three have been charged with conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist group and each faces 15 years in prison if convicted.
Today, Steinbach said the type of danger they posed “is a blending of homegrown violent extremism with the foreign fighter ideology,” calling it “today's latest adaption of the threat."
“The West is facing the most complex and severe terrorist threat we have seen certainly since 9/11,” said John Cohen, the former counterterrorism adviser at the Department of Homeland Security who’s now an ABC News consultant. “It may even be more [severe] than the ones we faced on 9/11.”
Part of the concern, Cohen said, is that traditional counterterrorism efforts -- which rely heavily on the likes of the CIA, National Security Agency and Defense Department -- “were never intended to deal with an individual becoming radicalized while sitting in the basement of his home in Minneapolis.”
In fact, over the past year, the FBI has arrested several young, Somali men from Minneapolis for allegedly trying to join ISIS in Syria. Many others from the Twin Cities actually made it there, though not all of them are still alive.
Countering that type of radicalization, Cohen said, requires local police working hand-in-hand with local faith organizations, mental health professionals, and others in community there on the frontline.
At the hearing today, a top law enforcement official from Minneapolis agreed, saying it all comes down to trust and an enduring, “respectful partnership” between everyone involved in a community.
But Hennepin County sheriff Richard Stanek said it’s important not to mix anti-radicalization efforts with community engagement.

“You cannot, shall not mix the two,” Stanek insisted. “If members of the diaspora community think that your community engagement techniques are nothing more than a front for intelligence gathering to counter violent extremism, that is a problem.”

Stanek said his department’s efforts with communities in the Twin Cities have paid dividends in recent years. He noted Somali leaders in Minneapolis “renounced” a video posted over the weekend by the Somalia-based terrorist group al-Shabab, calling for attacks at malls in the West.

“That would not have happened several years ago” because the Somali community did not “know how to respond” and did not feel empowered to do so, according to Stanek.

At today’s hearing and after yesterday’s arrests, law enforcement officials tried to emphasize that radicalized individuals do not represent Islam or any other religion.

“[They] violated the true tenants of their faith in pursuit of their radical, violent agenda,” said the head of the FBI’s field office in New York, Diego Rodriguez, about the three men arrested yesterday for allegedly trying to aid ISIS.

In a statement, he urged community members to flag “those who could be [similarly] radicalized” because “we cannot do this alone."

Outrage: Extremists take ancient statues, damage Iraqi site

By VIVIAN SALAMA and CARA ANNA 5 hours ago

BAGHDAD (AP) — Islamic State extremists trucked away statues as they damaged the irreplaceable remains of an ancient Assyrian capital, a local resident and a top UN official told The Associated Press Friday.

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Nimrud, a nearly 3,000-year-old city in present-day Iraq, included monumental statues of winged bulls, bearded horsemen and other winged figures, all symbols of an ancient Mesopotamian empire in the cradle of Western civilization.
The discovery that extremists removed some statues before using heavy equipment to destroy much of the site Thursday was cold comfort as outrage spread over the extremists' latest effort to erase history.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon considers the destruction a war crime, his spokesman said in a statement.
Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said in his Friday sermon that the extremists are savaging Iraq, "not only in the present but also to its history and ancient civilizations."
"I'm shocked and speechless," said Zeid Abdullah, who lives in nearby Mosul and studied at the city's Fine Arts Institute until the extremists shut that down. "Only people with a criminal and barbaric mind can act this way and destroy an art masterpiece that is thousands of years old."

FILE - In this March 1, 2015. file photo, Aaman at Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad walks past  …

A farmer from a nearby village told the AP Friday that militants began carrying tablets and artifacts away from the site two days before the attack, which began Thursday afternoon. The militants told the villagers that the artifacts are idols forbidden by Islam and must be destroyed, the farmer said, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals.
But the group also is known to have sold off looted antiquities as a source of revenue.
Some statues were "put on big trucks, and we don't know where they are, possibly for illicit trafficking," UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova said.
UN officials have seen images of destroyed Assyrian symbols including statues with the head of a man, the torso of a lion and wings of an eagle. These symbols were referred to in the Bible and other sacred texts, she said.
"All of this is an appalling and tragic act of human destruction," she said.

 

FILE - This Monday, Sept. 15, 2014 file photo shows a detail of a statue from the Assyrian period di …

UN officials were studying satellite imagery of the destruction, since it remains too dangerous to approach the site, she said.

These violent Sunni extremists have been campaigning to purge ancient relics they say promote idolatry that violates their interpretation of Islamic law. A video they released last week shows them smashing artifacts in the Mosul museum and in January, the group burned hundreds of books from the Mosul library and Mosul University, including many rare manuscripts. Many fear Hatra, another nearby ancient site could be next.

Iraqi authorities were still trying to assess Friday exactly how badly the ancient site was damaged Thursday.
"The destruction of Nimrud is a big loss to Iraq's history," Qais Mohammed Rasheed, the deputy tourism and antiquities minister, told The Associated Press on Friday. "The loss is irreplaceable."
UNESCO previously warned that the group was selling ancient artifacts on the black market for profit. Rasheed said authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the militants could try to sell these, too.

View gallery

This undated handout photo provided by the Library of Congress taken during the autumn of 1932 shows …

Bokova already wrote the International Criminal Court about a possible war crimes prosecution, and plans to alert INTERPOL, major museums, auction houses and Middle East governments to recover any trafficked artifacts.
"Somebody is going to buy these," said Iraq's U.N. Ambassador, Mohamed Alhakim.
Nimrud, also known as Kalhu, was the 9th century B.C., capital of Assyria, an ancient kingdom that swept over much of present-day Iraq and the Levant. The site spans 3.3 square kilometers on the Tigris River, and boasted the remains of temples, palaces and a ziggurat pyramid as well as the huge statues.
Many artifacts from Nimrud were moved to museums in Mosul, Baghdad, London and Paris.
In the 1980s, archaeologists discovered a trove of hundreds of gold items from Nimrud's royal tombs — considered one of the 20th century's most significant archaeological finds. The "treasures of Nimrud" were kept in a basement safe of the Central Bank in Baghdad for years until they were "re-discovered" in 2003, and now most of it is in the Baghdad Museum.

 

FILE - In this Nov. 24, 2009 file photo, a journalist looks at an Assyrian statue, center, in front  …

Nimrud was already on the World Monument Fund's list of most endangered sites due to extreme decay and deterioration before it was captured in June as extremists took over nearby Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city.
Last year, the militants destroyed the mosque believed to be the burial place of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, as well as the Mosque of the Prophet Jirjis — both revered ancient shrines in Mosul. They also threatened to destroy Mosul's 850-year old Crooked Minaret, but residents surrounded the structure, preventing the militants from approaching.
In July, they removed the crosses from Mosul's 1,800-year old Mar Behnam monastery and then stormed it, forcing the monks and priest to flee or face death.
A U.S.-led coalition has been striking the Islamic State group since August and is preparing a large-scale operation to retake the city of Mosul. But U.S. and Iraqi officials have been cautious about setting a timeline for preparing Iraq's embattled military for the campaign.

Meanwhile the battle to recover Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit progressed Friday with Iraqi government forces taking back the town of Dawr, 10 miles (15 kilometers) south of the city. Raed al-Jabouri, the provincial governor, said security forces should reach Tikrit by Sunday.

The Tikrit campaign launched Monday has been stalled because extremists lined strategic roads into the city with explosives and land mines, military officials said.

Dawr is the hometown of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's former deputy, who has been suspected of collaborating with the Islamic State militant group.

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Anna reported from the United Nations. Sameer N. Yacoub and Ahmed Sami in Baghdad, Verena Dobnik in New York, Amanda Myers in Washington, Jamey Keaten in Paris and Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report.

CIA chief says ISIS has 'snowballed'

Published March 14, 2015

FoxNews.com

March 13, 2015: CIA Director John Brennan addresses a

 meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York.

CIA Director John Brennan said Friday that the Islamic State had “snowballed” beyond Iraq and Syria, estimating that at least 20,000 fighters from more than 90 countries have gone to join the militant group, several thousand of them from Western nations, including the United States.
Brennan’s statement marks a change from the narrative the Obama administration has been pushing on the success of the fight against ISIS.
“Left unchecked, the group would pose a serious danger not only to Syria and Iraq, but to the wider region and beyond, including the threat of attacks in the homelands of the United States and our partners,” Brennan told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
He added that ISIS takes advantage of new technology to “coordinate operations, attract new recruits, disseminate propaganda and inspire sympathizers across the globe to act in their name.”
The CIA director said that the terror group has ballooned in size to about 20,000 members, and points to the recent pledge of allegiance to ISIS by Nigeria-based Boko Haram.
“This will be a long-term struggle,” he said. “If there is one thing we have learned over the years, it is that success against terrorism requires patience and determination.”
Brennan’s comments about ISIS’ staying power differs from claims made by top Obama administration officials as recently as last month assessing the progress against the terror organization.
Secretary of State John Kerry and retired General John Allen have both made public statements about ISIS in the past. In February, Allen said that half of the group’s leaders in Iraq had been killed. Kerry took it a step further and extended the claim to Syria as well.
Experts, though, say the claims of success are overinflated.
“We currently don’t have a percentage attached to that statistic,” Army Captain John J. Moore, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, told Bloomberg View.
Others, like Princeton University scholar of Near Eastern Studies Cole Bunzel, told Bloomberg claims of killing half of ISIS leadership is difficult to make because the terror organization’s “leadership” is subjective.
He added that he was “very skeptical” that 50 percent of the group’s leaders were killed because ISIS has publicly announced when senior members had been killed in the past but has not made such an announcement about someone in its core leadership being killed in the past five years.
Michael Smith, a principal at the counterterrorism consulting group Kronos Advisory LLC, largely echoed Bunzel’s comments and told Bloomberg “Jihadi groups typically eulogize slain leader,” and so far, there hasn’t been any evidence that high-ranking members had been killed.