ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (17 page)

After Tello was released from Adra, Baloosh was transferred to Sednaya where, in 2008, he became one of six ringleaders of a notorious prison riot, the events and aftermath of which have been rendered somewhat opaquely, although at least twenty-five people were killed and ninety more were injured. “Directly after he and the others took over the prison, they executed a handful of inmates,” Tello recounted, “claiming they were regime informants. Baloosh was personally responsible for executing one of these inmates. His victim wasn’t an informant, he just didn’t agree with Baloosh’s ideology.”

When the regime finally regained control of Sednaya, it executed the six ringleaders of the riot—except Nadeem Baloosh. “He received no death sentence and he was released in 2010, well in advance of
completing his original sentence, which was supposed to have lasted until 2015. He returned to Latakia and opened up a shop.”

In the early days of the Syrian uprising, Baloosh joined the peaceful demonstrations in Latakia, the coastal province whence the al-Assad family claims its ancestry. However, he was kicked out by other activists because of his viciously sectarian slogans against the Alawites—these, in the Alawite heartland of Syria. “They didn’t accept him. Less than a year later, maybe nine months, some rebels took up arms against the regime in Latakia. They ran to the mountains and founded battalions. Baloosh was one of them. Nobody was following him, but he went to the mountains and established his own battalion. His battalion then joined Jabhat al-Nusra,” Tello said, referring to the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria.

Although Baloosh was released from Sednaya before the protest movement began, his story generally tracks with what foreign and Syrian officials have said in the past few years about the makeup of the country’s now-numerous terrorist cells. For instance, in January 2014, Major General Fayez Dwairi, a former Jordanian military intelligence officer who helped run the kingdom’s Syria crisis portfolio, told the Abu Dhabi–based newspaper the
National
, “Many of the people who established Jabhat Al Nusra were captured by the regime in 2008 and were in prison. When the revolution started they were released on the advice of Syrian intelligence officers, who told Assad ‘they will do a good job for us. There are many disadvantages to letting them out, but there are more advantages because we will convince the world that we are facing Islamic terrorism.’ ”

In an even more noteworthy example, a twelve-year veteran of Syria’s own Military Intelligence Directorate told the same newspaper that al-Assad’s general amnesty in 2011 was designed to sow terrorism in Syria for propaganda value. “The regime did not just open the door to the prisons and let these extremists out, it facilitated them in their work, in their creation of armed brigades,”
the intelligence officer, an Alawite who defected from his unit in northern Syria in the summer of 2011, told the
National
. “This is not something I heard rumours about, I actually heard the orders, I have seen it happening. These orders came down from [Military Intelligence] headquarters [in] Damascus.” The regime also made an abundance of weapons available to these extremists in Idlib and Deraa, the officer added.

Nawaz Fares was the former Syrian ambassador to Iraq, a country which, as we examined in a previous chapter, al-Assad was intent on destabilizing with terrorism up until late 2009. Fares defected in July 2012 and told the press that Damascus was still playing with jihadist fire well into the revolution. Fares was in a position to know firsthand how this collaboration had worked; before moving to the Syrian embassy in Baghdad, and after the toppling of Saddam, he had served as a regime security chief as well as a provincial governor near the Syrian-Iraqi border. He recalled to the
Sunday Telegraph
how he “was given verbal commandments that any civil servant that wanted to go [to Iraq] would have his trip facilitated, and that his absence would not be noted.” He also said that he knew several regime “liaison officers” who were coordinating with al-Qaeda operatives up until the moment of his defection—the summer of 2012. More intriguingly, Fares claimed, all the large-scale terrorist attacks that had occurred in Syria, beginning in late 2011, were “perpetrated by al-Qaeda through cooperation with the security forces,” including an especially devastating one that had targeted a military intelligence building in a Damascus suburb in May 2012.

Are such allegations invented or politically motivated? Perhaps, though in the case of the Alawite intelligence officer, it bears mentioning that he told the
National
that he still preferred al-Assad’s rule to the victory of a radicalized opposition. Whatever the truth, these allegation are founded on the plausible premise of proven past collusion between Damascus and AQI, which extended almost to
2010. So if the regime categorically
terminated its relationship with jihadists in the yearlong space between the bombings in Baghdad and the outbreak of unrest in Deraa, then it is one of the most dramatic recipients of blowback in modern history.

HOW ISI CAME TO SYRIA

A few months before the last American GI left Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dispatched a handful of operatives into Syria. According to journalist Rania Abouzeid, who has embedded with jihadists in Syria, eight men crossed into the country’s northeastern province of Hasaka in August 2011, during Ramadan. Among those making the journey was Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, a Syrian from Damascus who had fought with ISI and was about to redirect his attention against the regime that had likely once facilitated his traffic in the opposite direction.

Although it’s been rumored that al-Jolani, who’s in his early thirties, had also been released from Sednaya under the general amnesty, there’s no hard evidence to substantiate that claim. Major General Dwairi told the
National
that al-Jolani was in regime custody at one point, but he did not specify the time or the prison. Al-Jolani’s first point of contact in Hasaka, Abouzeid reported, was a former Sednaya inmate who hosted the ISI cohort, consisting as it did of “several Syrians, a Saudi, and a Jordanian,” during their first night in Syria. (What has been established with certainty is that al-Jolani had been a detainee at Camp Bucca, where he was misidentified by US forces as an Iraqi Kurd from Mosul.)

Al-Jolani’s cell allegedly waged a series of car bombings in Damascus targeting the security services and the army in late 2011, but it didn’t claim credit for them until January 23, 2012, when Jabhat al-Nusra declared its formation as a group.

Al-Jolani also took care to hide his organizational ties to ISI
and AQI, so much so that even members of his own cell weren’t quite sure what Jabhat al-Nusra was getting up to or how it had carried out its daring attacks. Christoph Reuter, a correspondent for the German weekly
Der Spiegel
, who has reported extensively in Syria, told us: “The first real al-Nusra groups emerged in July 2012 in Aleppo. When we talked to one of them, asking them, ‘Oh, so, you are al-Nusra?,’ they said, ‘Yes, yes yes!’ ‘So how did you blow up the security building in Damascus?’ ‘No clue,’ they conceded after a while. ‘We took the name, because it is a great name, and we get money from the Gulf with it.’ ”

Al-Jolani, in other words, spent close to six months building—or reconstituting—a clandestine jihadist network in Syria before he debuted it as a strictly homegrown affair. This was incredibly savvy, as it turned out, because al-Nusra not only proved to be one of the most formidable anti-Assad insurgencies in the civil war, but its relative “moderation” in its engagement with local communities earned it the respect and approval of even non-Islamists. Al-Nusra, for instance, did not declare war on Syria’s minorities, as ISIS later did. In some cases, it even protected churches to show Christians that it was very much part of the social and religious mosaic of Syria, not a foreign takfiri group. In this, analysts say, al-Jolani conformed to al-Zawahiri’s plan of action following bin Laden’s assassination in May 2011. “Zawahiri was strictly against targeting other religious groups or sects such as Shia, Yazidis, Hindus, Christians, and Buddhists unless they targeted Sunnis first,” Laith Alkhouri said. “This owed to the enormous negative backlash against al-Qaeda in Iraq from the time of Zarqawi and Masri and Baghdadi. Zawahiri also urged jihadi groups to reach out to the Muslim public, people who he claimed had been absent from true Islamic teaching in Syria, Lebanon, and North Africa. The goal was to unify people around the concept of tawhid, or
monotheism.”

Takfirism as a binding social contract for al-Qaeda had failed
in Iraq, thanks to US and tribal efforts. Al-Nusra was thus the vehicle by which al-Zawahiri hoped to refurbish in Syria the damaged reputation his franchise had incurred next door. Al-Jolani later explained to Al Jazeera the origins of al-Nusra as the belated realization of a long-held ambition of al-Qaeda, to help free the Syrian people from a tyrannical regime:

“Nobody can ignore the significance of the Levant,” he said. “It is the land of conflict, ancient and modern. . . .When the [Syrian] uprising started, one of the leaders of [the] Islamic State in Iraq asked us what to do. We said let’s begin working there. . . .The regime was grossly oppressive and people were far away from the idea of picking up arms against it or even accepting the path we are taking and unable to beat the consequences of any confrontation with this regime. So this uprising removed many of the setbacks and paved the way for us to enter this blessed land. . . .We asked for [permission to found Jabhat al-Nusra], but this idea was in the mind of the al-Qaeda leadership for a while.”

As commander of al-Nusra, al-Jolani personally oversaw his group’s operations all over the country, in some cases posing as a decoy representative dispatched by the real al-Jolani to test the mettle of his rank and file. (As in Camp Bucca, AQI resorted to counterintelligence feints not only to fool its enemies but also to trick its own recruits.)

Al-Zawahiri issued two communiqués in early 2012, implicitly certifying al-Jolani’s endeavor without ever acknowledging it. In the second communiqué, released on February 11, the Egyptian “appeal[ed] to every Muslim and every noble, free man in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon to come to support his brothers in Syria with all that he possesses with himself, his wealth, his opinion, and information.” Al-Zawahiri excoriated the al-Assad regime for keeping “the splendor of the Ummah’s youth in its prisons, torturing and killing them. It has protected the Israeli borders [for] about
forty years, participated with America in the war against Islam in the name of terrorism, shed the blood of Muslims in horrible massacres in Hama, Homs, Jisr al-Shughur and Daraa, for consecutive decades, and includes a group of thieving robbers, who are looting the wealth and resources of Syria using iron and fire.”

Not about to let another good war go to waste, al-Zawahiri was once against channeling the Services Bureau era, and his dead boss, in issuing a global casting call for mujahidin.

10

CONVERTS AND “FIVE-STAR JIHADISTS”

PROFILES OF ISIS FIGHTERS

For this book we conducted interviews with dozens of ISIS associates who operate inside Syria and Iraq in a range of sectors, including religious clerics, fighters, provincial emirs, security officials, and sympathizers, and we found that what draws people to ISIS could easily bring them to any number of cults or totalitarian movements, even those ideologically contradictory to Salafist Jihadism. Far from homogenous, the organization spans an array of backgrounds and belief systems, from godless opportunists to war profiteers to pragmatic tribesmen to committed takfiris.

THE POWER OF PERSUASION

In October 2014 ISIS’s security squad arrested Mothanna Abdulsattar, a well-spoken nineteen-year-old media activist working for the Free Syrian Army, around two months after it assumed control of his region in eastern Syria. He was taken for an
interrogation at a nearby jihadist base amid threats to his life, the fate of which, he found out, could be determined by his professional affiliation. Working for the Syrian opposition or Saudi media arms meant death. “If you are working for Orient or Al-Arabiya, we’ll chop your head off,” Abdulsattar was told. Working for Qatar’s Al Jazeera, according to the conversation between Abdulsattar and the ISIS members, was evidently less of a problem. Abdulsattar told us that he was relieved when a smiling, respectful older jihadist stepped in to save him from an ISIS commissar’s line of questioning.

“Abu Hamza was quiet and respectful,” Abdulsattar remembered, referring to Abu Hamza al-Shami, a senior religious cleric in ISIS from the township of Minbij in eastern Aleppo. “Even his face makes you comfortable. He began by talking about the FSA, and why ISIS was fighting it. He said because they accept ungodly laws and receive funding from America, and God said: ‘Whoever aligns with them, he’s one of them.’ He then talked about al-Dawla. He asked me, ‘Why aren’t you pledging allegiance? The Prophet said that those who die without having bayat to someone—their death will be a
jahiliyyah
[un-Islamic] death.’ Honestly, when I heard that, I was shocked to my core. For the first time, I realized, the hadith is true.”

But Abdulsattar still wasn’t ready to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. So Abu Hamza smiled and asked him to take his time. A week or so later, Abdulsattar decided to commit. 

He spoke with gusto about his journey into ISIS, downplaying the eight hours he spent in its custody as more of a rite of passage than a life-or-death grilling. Abdulsatter said that he was ultimately swayed by ISIS’s “intellectualism and the way it spreads religion and fights injustice.”

A great number of ISIS members who were interviewed for this book echoed similar sentiments—and hyperbolic appraisals—of the terror army, which has mastered how to break down the
psyches of those it wishes to recruit, and then build them back up again in its own image. Abdulsattar’s reference to “intellectualism” may seem bizarre or even grotesque to a Western observer, but it refers to ISIS’s carefully elaborated ideological narrative, a potent blend of Islamic hermeneutics, history, and politics.

What he described was no different from the total moral and intellectual immersion explained by Communists who later abandoned their faith in Marxism-Leninism. “We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast,” Arthur Koestler’s Rubashov remembers in
Darkness at Noon
after facing his own interrogation by Party commissars. Minutes later, Rubashov is shot by the very dictatorship to which he had given his life for forty years.

“When you listen to the clerics of the al-Dawla,” Abdulsatter said, “you are shocked that most of our Islamic societies have deviated from the true religion. They follow a religion that was invented two decades ago, or less. Most of our societies that claim to be Muslim, their religion is full of impurities, 90 percent of it is bida’a [religious innovation]. Take
shirk
for example: we associate in our worship things other than God, and we don’t even realize it. Omens, for example. When we adjust our posture in front of other people inside a mosque, that is
riya’
[ostentation].” ISIS offered Abdulsattar something he could not find under Assadism or the Free Syrian Army. It offered him “purified” Islam.

“When you meet a cleric or a foreigner with ISIS, and he sits with you for two hours, believe me you will be convinced,” he continued. “I don’t know, they have a strange way of persuading people. When they control an area, they enforce religion by force, you have to pray whether you like it or not. We were all oblivious to the most important obligation in Islam—jihad. They shed light on jihad. Every time you watch a video by them, you are going to have a strange feeling that pushes you toward jihad.”

Even those victimized or persecuted by ISIS attest to the group’s “power of persuasion.”

Abu Bilal al-Layli had been in charge of funding the FSA in his hometown, Albu Layl in Deir Ezzor. When ISIS arrived, he left for Turkey. The jihadists burned down his house and put him on its wanted list. He sees them as a band of illiterate thugs who hold a twisted understanding of religion, but he nonetheless admires their ability to persuade the young and the old, particularly those with little religious background. “ISIS used money and talk of justice and war against thieves to lure people. For some, it worked. In our areas, you see people longing for Islam and wanting someone to fight . . .
haramiya
[thieves]. They bought into the ‘Islamic State’ idea, thinking that the jihadists were honest. Those who joined Daesh hardly memorized a few Quranic verses. They had no religious base. They were simply lured by the power of persuasion.”

THE NOVICE

Hamza Mahmoud was a fifteen-year-old boy from a well-to-do family in Qamishli, in northern Syria. Hamza’s parents learned that he joined ISIS after he started to disappear from their home for long stretches in the summer of 2014. After many failed attempts to prevent him from returning to the group, one of his brothers said, Hamza’s father deliberately broke one of Hamza’s legs. Once it healed, he left his family home again and severed direct communication with his parents. According to his brother, Omar, Hamza refused to speak to his family lest his mother’s cries or his father’s admonitions influence his decision to remain with ISIS. He would only communicate with his brothers, who were outside the country.

During a Skype conversation organized for the authors, Omar haplessly tried to persuade Hamza to quit ISIS and return home. “Hamza, this is not right, you’re still young, this is a misguided
group,” Omar told him. “Nothing in Islam calls for slaughter and violence.” Hamza responded, in mechanical but classical Arabic, by citing hadith and verses to validate acts carried out by his new masters. Also, he insisted, the common portrayal of ISIS was biased and wrong. “Don’t believe everything you hear in media,” Hamza said. “The brothers are true Muslims. They are doing nothing but the right thing. If you see what I see and hear what I hear, you will know.”

Omar then told Hamza that Syria has people from various sects and religions who have lived side by side for centuries. Hamza was particularly shocked when his brother added that among his friends who were living in the same residence were Alawites and Yazidis. “You have Yazidis next to you?” Hamza answered. “Kill them and get closer to God.”

THE KURD

The idea that a Kurd would join ISIS seems counterintuitive, given that the organization’s upper cadres are replete with former Saddamists from the Baathist regime that was responsible for a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. More recently, ISIS has targeted Kurdish villages and towns, such as Kobane, on the Syrian-Turkish border, and besieged Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, before having its advance halted by US air strikes in August 2014. Kurdish militias in Syria and Iraq, including the Iraqi peshmerga and the People’s Protection Units (YPG), are considered secularists and Marxists, respectively, and therefore marked for death. And whereas other Sunni insurgencies with strong Baathist composition—particularly al-Douri’s Naqshbandi Army—have tried and mostly failed to recruit Kurds, not only has ISIS succeeded, it has found remarkable success in the very site of Saddam’s genocide, the Iraqi city of Halabja.

ISIS’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, has justified
the campaign against the largest stateless people of the Middle East in the following terms: “Our war with Kurds is a religious war. It is not a nationalistic war—we seek the refuge of Allah. We do not fight Kurds because they are Kurds. Rather, we fight the disbelievers amongst them, the allies of the crusaders and Jews in their war against the Muslims. . . .The Muslim Kurds in the ranks of the Islamic State are many. They are the toughest of fighters against the disbelievers amongst their people.” Emphasizing the point, and also driving the wedge among Kurds deeper, in October 2014, one of ISIS’s “Muslim Kurds,” Abu Khattab al-Kurdi, was reportedly leading the jihadists’ battle against the YPG in Kobane. He was joined by other Kurds from Hasaka, Aleppo, and northern Raqqa.

Why are Kurds joining ISIS? Hussain Jummo, the political editor at the Dubai-based
Al Bayan
newspaper, and a prominent analyst of Kurd politics, offers the most plausible explanation. After Saddam’s Halabja massacre, many families in the town were left impoverished as others built new homes and carried on with their lives as before. Charities that were started and meant to tend to the victims of the chemical attacks were mainly Salafist in orientation, and organized and funded by Gulf state sponsors, including Kuwait’s Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage, which has been accused by the United States of bankrolling al-Qaeda. So after decades of proselytization in the Kurdish regions of the Middle East, Halabja became the epicenter of Kurdish Islamism. (Recall, too, that al-Zarqawi’s first landing point in Iraq was via Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda affiliate, in the mountains of northern Kurdistan.)

In Syria the Kurdish turn to ISIS has been less common, although not unheard of. Syrian Kurds are predominately secular or Sufi from the Khaznawi order, named after the family that inaugurated it. However, we spoke with two Kurds from Aleppo and Hasaka who said they were driven to ISIS because of the organization’s pan-Sunni, rather than pan-Arab, philosophy. A Kurdish ISIS
member from Hasaka relayed a conversation to the authors he had with an ISIS recruiter shortly before he joined. The recruiter told him that Jabhat al-Nusra, which had by then split from ISIS, was essentially an “Arab” organization, rather than an Islamic one. ISIS was actually blind to ethnicity, he said, and attended only to true faith.

In much the same vein, ISIS has also attracted large numbers from the Turkomen minority, which has suffered a large share of discrimination and repression under despotic Arab regimes. Turkomen ISIS members have been key to the rise of the organization in Mosul and the areas outlying it. Al-Baghdadi’s deputy, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, who was reportedly killed in December 2014, is Turkomen.

THE SEDNAYA ULTRAS

A particular breed of takfiris dominates ISIS’s mid- and upper echelons, subscribing to a narrow set of doctrinal tenets at odds with the more expansive and welcoming ideology described previously. Abu al-Athir al-Absi, the former Sednaya prisoner who was released under al-Assad’s general amnesty, is the perfect case study in this category.

Al-Absi formed a group, Usud al-Sunna (“Sunni Lions”), in Aleppo’s countryside soon after he was released; he then became instrumental in rallying support for ISIS after its split from Nusra in 2013. Al-Absi took a hard line against other Islamist and jihadist groups many months before ISIS was formed—a position that many say was an extension of the ideological conflict among jihadists at Sednaya prison (although that may also be linked to the fact that al-Absi holds many of the groups responsible for the death of his brother Firas).

According to Wael Essam, who met al-Absi after the Syrian uprising started, the jihadist has considered many of his fellow former inmates at Sednaya to be kuffar, including those who now lead rival
Islamist brigades and battalions in Syria. Why? Because they refused to pronounce as nonbelievers the
taghut
(tyrannical or false) Muslim rulers in the Middle East and the majority of Muslims in the region. Also, al-Absi explained, these Islamists acceded to the surrender of Sednaya to the Syrian authorities after the bloody 2008 riot.

Al-Absi and his cohort were outliers among Salafists at Sednaya. Few of the inmates shared their ultraist ideology or joined them in defying the regime even after it had amassed soldiers from the 4th Armored Division outside their ward.

The tensions between ISIS and other jihadist and Islamist groups in the Syrian Civil War can be viewed as the resumption of an argument that took place behind bars in the preceding years. Abu Adnan, a security official in ISIS, told us that most of the rebel Islamist brigades and battalions were formed as insurgent reunions within the various prison wards. “They did not just come together,” he said. “These men all knew each other, and the factions that were formed later already had the personnel and ideological infrastructure in place. The personality conflicts and political differences continued.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi visited Syria in late 2012. Al-Absi was one of his staunchest defenders and one of the loudest proponents of the declaration of an Islamic caliphate, helping al-Baghdadi secure the allegiance of various al-Nusra fighters and other jihadists and militants then part of rival insurgencies in Syria.

THE FENCE-SITTERS

Another category of ISIS recruits consists of those who already held Islamist or jihadist views but had limited themselves to only orbiting takfiri
ideology. The final gravitational pull, so to speak, differed depending on circumstance. Some joined for the simple reason that
ISIS overran their territories and became the only Islamist faction available to join. Others were simply impressed with ISIS’s military prowess in campaigns against rival rebel factions. Still others fell out with their original insurgencies and found ISIS more organized, disciplined, and able-bodied.