ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (19 page)

Detachment from the mundane realities of ISIS has made many Arabs susceptible to its self-aggrandizing portrayal as a God-anointed Sunni resistance movement inspired by early Islamic history and fundamentals. In order to control this self-presentation, ISIS has resorted to a sophisticated tool kit of propaganda and disinformation.

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FROM TWITTER TO
DABIQ

RECRUITING THE NEW MUJAHIDIN

“DON’T HEAR ABOUT US, HEAR FROM US”

A theme that recurs in our conversations with ISIS members is how the organization has improved on the mistakes of its jihadist forebears by not allowing detractors in the foreign press to shape popular perceptions about it. “Don’t hear about us, hear from us” is a phrase that has come up repeatedly in the course of our interviews with ISIS recruits.

Slightly overstating the power of social media in the terror army’s ascendance was Iraq’s former national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, who told Al Jazeera that it was more or less Twitter and Facebook that caused thirty thousand Iraqi Security Forces soldiers to drop their weapons, eschew their uniforms, and leave Mosul free for the jihadists’ taking.

Overstating though he may have been, al-Rubaie did have a point. Two weeks before the fall of the city, ISIS had released
one of its most popular videos to date, titled
Saleel al-Sawarim
, or
Clanging of the Swords
. A characteristic example of “jihadist pornography,” it demonstrated ISIS’s peerless ability to produce sleek, hour-long propaganda and recruitment films, featuring the very kind of content that Western politicians and diplomats have hoped will
dissuade
people’s attraction to the group.

A preacher brandishing a machete proclaims the Islamic State and warns the kuffar and Jews of Jerusalem that the jihadists are coming for them. He then leads the tearing up of passports.

In scenes we see so-called Rafidah Hunters drive by other cars on a road, blasting their guns at what they say are Shia soldiers headed to join their “Safavid” Iraqi army units. Inside the perforated vehicles are the bloodied corpses of young boys in civilian clothing; any who stir are fired upon. In another scene, ISIS shoots a man running away from them. He is injured but still alive and tells them, “I’m a driver.” The film then splices the image of him lying on the ground with his official Iraqi army photograph. He is killed.

A mosque in Anbar shows ISIS taking what look to be applications from unarmed civilians. The narrator explains that if you were formerly a member of the Anbar Awakening Councils, or Sunni politicians aligned with the Iraqi government, you are entitled to “repent and stop waging war against the mujahidin.” If you do, you’ll be granted “clemency” and all your past crimes against ISIS will be forgotten—but this must happen before ISIS gets “a hold of you.” Likewise, any Sunni soldiers or policemen or agents of the Mukhbarat are encouraged to quit and turn in their weapons. “You carried your weapons and stood with those rafida, fighting your sons,” one masked ISIS fighter tells a gathered assembly inside the mosque. “We are your sons, we are your brothers. We can protect your religion and your honor.”

Clanging of the Swords
also exhibits ISIS’s supposed omnipresence and its cloak-and-dagger tradecraft in reaching its enemies.

Its agents dress in Iraqi Security Forces uniforms and raid the
home of an Awakening commander. They are the “Sahwat Hunters.” When the commander is grabbed, he says he must call the army to verify these men’s identities because he is afraid they’re really from ISIS.

In the very next scene, two young boys, the sons of a Sahwa commander, are digging a giant pit in the dirt. They explain that their father convinced them to work with the Iraqi government. Then it’s their father’s turn to dig. When he falters, the mujahidin taunt him: “You didn’t get tired when you set out to become a commander in the Sahwa and were working at the checkpoints.” He addresses the camera, advising everyone in the Awakening to repent. “I am now digging my own grave,” he says.

A counterterrorism official from Samarra is interrogated in his living room. Then he is led into his bedroom as an ISIS fighter, also dressed as an Iraqi soldier, pulls his security uniforms out from his wardrobe. The man is blindfolded with a scarf. Then he is beheaded.

Not quite at the level of a Leni Riefenstahl film,
The Clanging of the Swords
more than adequately conveys its message to its target audience. The video debuted just as rebel groups in eastern Syria and Aleppo—sahwats of a more recent vintage—were battling ISIS. None of these factions had anything comparable to present to their militants or to outsiders suggesting a like prowess or unity of purpose. For Iraqis, if you were Shia in an ISIS-infiltrated area, you were doubtless terrified. If you were Sunni, why bother turning up for work as a soldier or policeman or elected councilman if a simple pledge of allegiance meant keeping your head for the foreseeable future? ISIS claimed to be unstoppable and indomitable. Many believed it.

TWEETING THE CALIPHATE

Clanging of the Swords
was posted on YouTube several times (although it was taken down just as often), and on file-sharing sites such
as archive.org and justpaste.it and heavily promoted by ISIS members and “fanboys” (groupies or unaffiliated enthusiasts) on Twitter and Facebook. This not only maximized its viewership through crowd-sourcing, it also helped drown out antagonists and critics. “Everybody should know that we are not who they think we are,” an ISIS media activist in Aleppo told us in what has become a common refrain. “We have engineers, we have doctors, we have excellent media activists. We are not
tanzim
[an organization], we are a state.”

Such triumphalism
to one side, ISIS’s propaganda suffers from the same inborn deficiency of all cultish or messianic messaging: the creation of false expectations, which inevitably leads to anticlimax and disillusionment. As Shiraz Maher put it, describing the general condition of war under less fanatical circumstances, “A lot of foreign jihadists get to Syria and after a few days or weeks start to complain about the downtime and boredom. The videos overdramatize the experience for them.”

We found that one of the less scrutinized social media tools used by ISIS is Zello, an encrypted application for smartphones and computers that allows users to establish channels to share audio messages. Often used by pro-democracy activists in the Middle East to hide from an authoritarian government’s scrutiny, Zello has lately been repurposed by ISIS as a simple how-to guide for making bayat to al-Baghdadi, thanks to a prominent pro-ISIS user, Ansar al-Dawla al-Islamiya. The application essentially turns mobile phones into walkie-talkies, through which anyone curious about ISIS or seeking to join up can listen to sermons by affiliated clerics, simulcast as Christian revivals might be.

Incredibly user-friendly, Zello is quite popular among ISIS’s younger audiences. According to Ahmed Ahmed, a Syrian journalist from Sahl al-Ghab, Hama, two young boys from his village joined ISIS after listening to sermons through Zello. Mohammed, a fourteen-year-old who worked in southern Turkey, disappeared at
the Bab al-Hawa border crossing in October 2014. Answering a call for help from Mohammed’s father, Ahmed composed a Facebook post asking his friends and followers for any information about the boy. An hour later, Ahmed told us, Mohammed called his parents from the Iraqi border and said, “I am with the brothers.”

Mohammed’s father was shocked to hear the news and later told Ahmed that his son would regularly listen to ISIS sermons through Zello. “His father warned him about them and told him that they were liars. But the boy would respond that he just wanted to hear what they were saying. The majority of young people join ISIS after they listen to their preaching.”

ISIS also has offline means for brainwashing youth. In May 2014 it abducted around 153 schoolchildren between the ages of thirteen and fourteen in Minbij as they traveled back to their hometown of Kobane, after having sat for exams in Aleppo. ISIS put the children in a Sharia training camp and kept them hostage for months, releasing them the following September. According to two journalists from Hama close to the families of a few of those abducted, some of the children voluntarily chose to stay on and become members of ISIS even after being offered the opportunity to return to their families.

A relative of one such recruit spoke of how his cousin refused to return with his mother despite contrary advice from a local ISIS emir. The mother had told the emir that the boy, Ahmed Hemak, was her only son and that her husband was dead, which, according to Islamic teachings, ought to have compelled the boy to remain with his mother. But the child had become a dogged convert and had no wish to abandon the movement.

END TIMES

In much of its public discourse, ISIS relies on Islamic eschatology for legitimacy and mobilization. A hadith attributed to the Prophet
Muhammad about an end-of-days battle between Muslims and Christians in Dabiq, a town in rural Aleppo, is a frequent reference point—so pervasive that ISIS’s propaganda magazine is named for it. In the videos, this hadith is recited by al-Zarqawi as an ISIS jihadist marches, in slow motion, holding up a black flag: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq and its heat will continue to intensify, by Allah’s permission, until it burns the crusader army in Dabiq.” It also opens every issue of
Dabiq
as a motto tantamount to “All the news fit to print.”

Much like its Baathist forerunners, ISIS has managed to turn outsider or enemy opinion of it into part of its world-historical struggle. For instance, the announcement in August 2014 of an international coalition to fight ISIS in Syria was hailed as a sign that the Islamic prophecy was nigh, especially as it followed the declaration of a caliphate, another event foretold by the Prophet. According to a famous hadith, Muhammad explained to his followers that after him, a caliphate modeled on prophethood would be established, and that would then be followed by a coercive kingdom and tyrannical rule. Finally, another caliphate modeled on prophethood would be established. Both Islamist and jihadist organizations often used this hadith to mean that a caliphate will replace the tyrannical regimes in the Arab world.

ISIS employs Islamic symbolism to animate its fighters and draw sympathy from Muslims outside of its orbit. Al-Baghdadi claimed to be a descendent of Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, which is a precondition set by many Islamic scholars for claiming legitimacy to rule Muslims. ISIS’s use of lineage tales is particularly important in its arguments with fellow jihadists, for whom these genealogies are profoundly evocative and can mobilize Muslim youth around an imminent project. Frustration with the more gradualist approaches to building an Islamic state endorsed by, say, the Muslim Brotherhood sometimes leads Islamists to look
at ISIS as an alternative. The fact that it has
already
announced the caliphate means that the hardest work has been done; Muslims can join and fight for its survival and expansion, even without traveling to Iraq and Syria.

Then there is the very land upon which the supposed caliphate has been founded. Al-Sham
refers to both Damascus and Greater Syria (an ancient territory that encompasses most of the contemporary northern Levant, including the Turkish city of Antakya) and was described by the Prophet Muhammad as “blessed” and “the land of resurrection.” Iraq and Syria were the cradles of the first Muslim empires, and the birthplaces of many of God’s prophets, and the burial sites of many of the Prophet’s companions. They are also sites for end times foretold by Muhammad. These symbols are used as ammunition for ISIS to promote its ideology and gain legitimacy among conservative Muslims, and are more effectively harnessed to audiences divorced from the day-to-day reality of ISIS control.

GLOSSY JIHAD

Dabiq
’s content, which we have cited throughout this book, explains ISIS’s core mission and its behavior through an eschatological prism. The introduction of sex slavery, for example, was defended by the editors as one of the signs of “the Hour,” meaning Judgment Day. According to a hadith, the apocalypse will come when a “slave gives birth to her master.”

Abolishment of slavery, then, would make the realization of this prophecy impossible. So
Dabiq
concludes: “After this, it becomes clear where [ISIS spokesman] al-Adnani gets his inspiration from when saying, ‘and so we promise you [O crusaders] by Allah’s permission that this campaign will be your final campaign. It will be broken and defeated, just as all your previous campaigns were
broken and defeated, except that this time we will raid you thereafter, and you will never raid us. We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us.”

Many of the practices that ISIS has revived are intended as tocsins of Islamic prophecy, including the blowing up of shrines and the tossing of homosexuals from rooftops. One of ISIS’s governors, Hussam Naji Allami, who was captured by Iraqi Security Forces in 2014, issued a fatwa ordering the demolition of shrines in Mosul on the premise that a hadith had called for it. In an interview with the Iraqi newspaper
Al-Sabah
, Allami said he issued the fatwa in response to criticism, namely from al-Qaeda, about the illegitimacy of ISIS, said not to be the foretold “caliphate modeled on the Prophet’s methodology.”

Whatever the perversion or barbarity, ISIS has a ready-made justification. The salability of its dark vision cannot be underestimated. Recently, the US State Department created a Twitter account called “Think Again Turn Away.” It tweets photographs of ISIS atrocities and casualties and links to news stories describing them. It also engages with pro-ISIS accounts, in effect trolling them. Thus, in opposition to @OperationJihad, who wrote to no one in particular, quoting a jihadist anthem, “We have nothing to achieve in this world, except martyrdom, [i]n the mountains we will be buried and snow will be our shroud,” the State Department rejoined: “Much more honorable to give a Syrian child a pair of boots than drive him from his home into snow w/your quest for death.”

@OperationJihad didn’t bother to reply.

Three days earlier, as the world was recovering from the terrorist slaughter of
Charlie Hebdo
journalists in Paris, ISIS or some contingent of its supporters appeared to have hacked the Twitter and YouTube accounts of CENTCOM, posting military documents and
jihadist threats, including a menacing Tweet that read: “AMERICAN SOLDIERS, WE ARE COMING, WATCH YOUR BACK.” Though the White House downplayed the incident as an act of “cybervandalism,” less innocuous was one of the documents the “CyberCaliphate” hackers released: a spreadsheet titled “Retired Army General Officer Roster,” which carried the names, retirement dates, and email addresses of US army generals. Posting such personal information on public platforms is known as doxxing.