ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (15 page)

Western sensationalism has perversely contributed to the lure or glamour of ISIS as much as it has to its lurid appeal to the young and disaffected. Stories about pretty, middle-class teenage Austrian girls going to off to fight with and marry the takfiris—and copycats who are stopped en route before they can reach Syria—continue to draw headlines in the manner that Charles Manson’s latest nuptials do. People are fascinated by the psychopathic spectacle of ISIS, and especially by those they see as “like them” but who are so drawn to it that they abandon seemingly comfortable lives in the West to jihadism.

Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan,
has made a close study of the psychological and social motivations behind jihadism and argues that ISIS is really no different from the revolutionary-romantic movements that have reveled in bloodshed throughout history. “You can’t inspire people to kill people and harm others without moral virtue,” he told us. “It’s very much like the French Revolution. When Robespierre introduced the terror as a tool of democracy—they were quite ostentatious about it.”

Who would join ISIS? In 1940 George Orwell wrote an essay in which he asked a similar question of a book advocating what he summarized as a “horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.” How could such a “monstrous vision” be put across when liberal democracy was meant to have ended such barbarism, he wondered? And why was a nation flinging itself at the feet of a man who offered “struggle, danger and death” where other forms of government were offering a “good time”? Orwell was reviewing
Mein Kampf
.

9

REVOLUTION BETRAYED

JIHAD COMES TO SYRIA

On January 31, 2011, Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to the
Wall Street Journal.
Reflecting on the revolutions that had swept Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, he was in a boastful mood about the chances of a similar upheaval coming to his own country. “Syria is stable,” he proclaimed. “Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue.” Al-Assad was right: it was the core issue.

Just three days before his interview took place, soldiers from his regime had dispersed a candlelight vigil organized in solidarity with the Egyptian protestors in Bab Touma, a Christian quarter in Damascus’s Old City. Then, on February 17, a spontaneous protest erupted in the souk in the capital’s neighborhood of al-Hariqa after a police officer insulted the son of a local merchant. Although the protest was carefully directed against the behavior of the police officer, the slogan transcended a single crime: “The Syrian people will not be humiliated.” That demonstration came to an end after Syria’s Interior Minister arrived on the scene to address the angry
crowd and apologize. It was too late. More demonstrations erupted and spread against the atrocities being committed by Gaddafi in Libya and, implicitly, by the dynastic dictator at home who had just described his reign as unimpeachable.

“THE PEOPLE WANT THE FALL OF THE REGIME”

A reform movement became a full-fledged revolution after a hinge incident in the city of Deraa. Fifteen schoolboys, some as young as ten years old, were arrested by the regime’s security forces under the supervision of al-Assad’s cousin, General Atef Najib, for scrawling pro-democracy graffiti on their school’s walls. Some of the slogans were adopted from TV broadcasts about other countries, but one especially creative phrase, which rhymes in Arabic, ran, “It’s your turn, Doctor,” referring to al-Assad’s ophthalmology degree. A common account of what followed claims that when the families of detainees told Najib that these were their only children, he replied: “Send us your wives, and we will make you new children.”

Similar protests soon broke out in Damascus, Homs, Baniyas, and then across all of Syria. The response was widespread state violence. Many peaceful demonstrators and activists were shot by soldiers, riot police, Mukhabarat, and pro–al-Assad militiamen. Others were arrested and hauled off to any number of security prisons. As documented by Human Rights Watch, the secret police used a broad array of torture against their captives, including pipe beatings, whippings, electrocutions, acid burns, fingernail extractions, bastinados, and mock executions. Detainees of all genders and ages were also raped. One woman held at the Palestine Branch of Military Intelligence in Damascus, one of the most feared Mukhabarat prisons in Syria, told the BBC what happened to a fellow female prisoner. “He inserted a rat in her vagina. She was screaming. Afterwards we saw blood on the floor. He told her: ‘Is this good enough
for you?’ They were mocking her. It was obvious she was in agony. We could see her. After that she no longer moved.”

General Najib’s threat had not been idle, as rape was systematically used by the al-Assad regime from the early days of the uprising. According to Farha Barazi, a Virginia-based human rights campaigner, many rapes resulted in unwanted pregnancies, with Syrian gynecologists seeing victims as young as eleven. In April 2012 Barazi recounted to these authors the story of “Salma,” a young girl from Baba Amr, Homs, whose house was raided by the
shabiha,
mercenary gangs loyal to al-Assad
.
“She told them, ‘Please, please—don’t you have sisters? Don’t you have mothers? Just leave me, please not in front of my dad.’ ” The shabiha tied Salma’s father to a chair in his own house and forced him to watch as three or four men raped his daughter. “They made him keep his eyes open and watch,” Barazi said. “We have documented eleven cases so far of women needing abortions because they were raped. We had to move them all from either Baba Amr or Idlib to Aleppo, where it was safer to perform this procedure. They are all safe now, but when I called some of them, they were in hysterics. All have suffered severe psychological trauma because of what they’ve gone through.” Since Barazi’s interview almost three years ago, those documented cases have skyrocketed. Close to 200,000 people have been killed in Syria, and another 150,000 are still detained in regime prisons, according to “Caesar,” a code-named Syrian military police photographer who defected and smuggled out of the country some fifty thousand photographs depicting horrific detainee atrocities. “What is going on in Syria is a genocidal massacre that is being led by the worst of all the terrorists, Bashar al-Assad,” Caesar testified before the US Congress in July 2014. Stephen Rapp, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes, has said that his disclosures constitute “solid evidence of the kind of machinery of cruel death that we haven’t seen frankly since the Nazis.”

“ASSAD, OR WE BURN THE COUNTRY”

In his epic poem “Child of Europe,” which deals in a series of ironic couplets about the intellectual and moral depravities of totalitarianism, Czeslaw Milosz offered this apostrophe to the offspring of the twentieth century: “Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision / Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction.” Al-Assad resorted to much the same logic when faced with months of protests calling for his ouster.

From the outset, he had portrayed his opponents, even those who were only calling for modest economic reforms, as al-Qaeda terrorists, hirelings of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel—surely one of the most elaborate coalitions of the willing in modern history. The goal of this silly-seeming but consistent propaganda and disinformation campaign was simple. As we’ve seen, al-Assad was always desperate to win the attention and cooperation of the West, even while suborning terrorism against it. Faced with revolution, and blaming the West for the very crimes he himself had long committed, he sough to ensure his political longevity through self-fulfilling prophecy. His regime undertook several measures to bring violent Islamism home to Syria. It was no coincidence that one of the favored slogans of his loyalists was “Assad or we burn the country.”

Qusai Zakarya is a Palestinian refugee who lived in the Damascus suburb of Moadamiyeh and survived both the regime’s August 2013 chemical weapon attack and a months-long starvation campaign imposed on his town before he was able to leave Syria under complicated circumstances. “From the beginning, if you were Sunni, and especially if you were Palestinian, you were treated as something less than human by Bashar’s forces,” Zakarya told us. “ ‘There is no god but Bashar,’ the shabiha would say as they kicked protestors or pulled the hair from their head or beards. This was very deliberate. It was also genius.”

What Zakarya meant was that the verbal, psychological, and corporal abuse unleashed on Sunnis was
designed
to radicalize them and push them to acts of extremism. “Assad used a lot of the Alawite forces to repress the opposition in key areas,” said Shiraz Maher, an expert on radicalization (and a former Islamist himself) at King’s College in London. “It was physical torture mixed with a campaign to mock the core aspects of Sunni belief. That’s what caught the attention and anger all around the world, above and beyond what drew the average guy in the Midwest to pay attention to what was happening in Syria. Assad set the Sunni Muslim world on fire. This is why the foreign fighter trend started from the Gulf and North Africa.” Lighting this fuse proved remarkably easy after decades of dictatorial misrule.

Sectarianism in Syria, as in Iraq, long predated civil war and was as much the by-product of a minority sect lording it over a restive majority as it was of an antique dispute among Muslims about the lineage of the Prophet in the seventh century. In this case, it was the minority Alawites, a mostly cultural offshoot of the Shia, who constitute between 8 percent and 15 percent of the population in Syria, ruling over the Sunnis, who constitute close to 75 percent. As in Saddam’s Iraq, the majority sect was also well represented in all levels of government; for instance, al-Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, is a Sunni, as have been several high-ranking regime security and military officials. And though it was always the case that minorities were represented in the early protest movement, demography in Syria proved revolutionary destiny: Sunnis were viewed as, and most often were, the ones standing up to the regime in number. The expectation of this contingency had created a republic of fear and paranoia in Assadist Syria.

In 2010 Nibras Kazimi published an incredibly prescient study titled
Syria Through Jihadist Eyes: A Perfect Enemy
,
which featured a number of telling vignettes, all drawn from his many interviews with Syrians of various religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds in the country. Kazimi met a “Damascus-born plastic
surgeon,” for instance, whose father was a high-ranking Alawite officer in the Syrian Arab Army and had been a personal friend of Hafez al-Assad. The surgeon was exhibited in a photograph with Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanese Hezbollah. As one of the beneficiaries of Assadism, this man ought to have been, writes Kazimi, “the portrait of an assimilated upper middle-class [Alawite], confident of his standing in Syrian society. But he isn’t. When he drives his late-model Volvo, he keeps a submachine gun handy on the passenger’s seat. He said, ‘Do you know the Sunnis have a saying,
mal’oon baba Hassan
(‘Cursed is Baba Hassan’)? Do you know who Baba Hassan is? He’s Ali bin Abi Taleb, the father of Hassan and the first of the twelve Shia Imams. They hate us. That is who they are. . . . If given the chance, they will massacre us.” Out of such societal dysfunction, a counterrevolutionary strategy was born.

“The sectarianism was carefully manufactured by Assad from the get-go as a tool of his suppression,” Maher said. “ ‘This is not a peaceful uprising, it’s a sectarian one, the Sunnis are rising up and will kill all the minorities.’ This was the original line, and it tried to do two things. First, peel off the rest of Syria from the Sunnis who were rebelling so that Alawite or Christian dissidents wouldn’t join the uprising, even though some of them did. Second, provoke concern in the international community about what was taking place—namely, that minorities were all going to be slaughtered by terrorists.”

The shabiha
were the main protagonists in furthering this agenda. Named “ghosts” after the Mercedes Shahab cars in which they used to smuggle everything from cigarettes and drugs to food and weapons into Syria’s gray market economy in the years before the revolution, these muscle-bound thugs, most of whom were Alawites, were enlisted by Damascus to commit some of the worst crimes against humanity. According to one who was detained by rebels in 2012, each
shabih
was paid $460 per month, plus another $150 bonus for every person he killed or captured. “We love
Assad because the government gave us all the power—if I wanted to take something, kill a person, or rape a girl I could,” he bragged. In the Houla region of Homs, in May 2012, the shabiha embedded with Syrian army regulars and went house to house in the town of Taldou, following its sustained artillery bombardment, slitting the throats of more than one hundred people. Most of them were women and children. (The shabiha were readily identifiable, locals later testified, by their white sneakers; Syrian soldiers wore black boots.) Al-Assad blamed al-Qaeda for the massacre. However, an investigation by the United Nations found “reasonable basis to believe that the perpetrators . . .were aligned to the Government.”

In an early awareness of what would later become al-Assad’s main war strategy, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland accused Iran of being an accomplice to the massacre. “The Iranians have clearly supplied support and training and advice to the Syrian army, but this shabiha thug force mirrors the same force that the Iranians use,” Nuland said. “The Basij [a volunteer paramilitary originally built by the Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to help fight in the Iran-Iraq War] and the shabiha are the same type of thing and clearly reflects the tactics and the techniques that the Iranians use for their own suppression of civil rights.” Nuland noted that on the very same weekend that the Houla massacre had been carried out, the Quds Force Deputy Commander Esmail Ghani claimed credit for playing a “physical and non-physical” role in Syria’s war.

SULEIMANI’S WAR

That role would only increase in the subsequent year when evidence emerged that the Quds Force and Lebanese Hezbollah were also training a more professionalized Basij guerrilla army, the so-called National Defense Force, and doing so in both Syria and Iran. With as many as one hundred thousand recruits, these irregulars have lately
become one of the regime’s main bulwarks in light of the successive failures of the Syrian army to beat back the rebels and reclaim territory on its own. Again, the legacy of Assadism bears on the current civil war: Many of the army’s rank-and-file soldiers are Sunnis who have defected, deserted, or even been confined to barracks because their commanding (Alawite) officers fear that they might do so. Other infantrymen have been killed by rebels in three years of attritional war.

“The Syrian army couldn’t handle this three-year crisis because any army would be fatigued,” IRGC operative Sayyed Hassan Entezari said by way of accounting for the genesis and necessity of the National Defense Force. “Iran came and said why don’t you form popular support for yourself and ask your people for help. . . .Our boys went to one of the biggest Alawite regions. They told the head of one of the major tribes to call upon his youth to take up arms and help the regime.” Each brigade of the National Defense Force is supervised by an IRGC officer who acts the part of an embedded commissar ensuring ideological discipline.

Reuters conducted interviews with several cadets of this IRGC program in April 2013. All were from Homs and most were Alawites, although some hailed from other minority sects. One interviewee, Samer, was one of the rare Christians who had undergone training in Iran. He told the news agency: “The Iranians kept telling us that this war is not against Sunnis but for the sake of Syria. But the Alawites on the course kept saying they want to kill the Sunnis and rape their women in revenge.”