ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (26 page)

ISIS also forced municipality personnel to work, unlike previous groups that had allowed Syrian state employees to continue to receive their salaries (mostly from the regime) while they sat at home and did nothing, no doubt with attendant kickbacks. “The streets are cleaner now; 70 percent of the employees were not working, even though they received salaries,” said a former media activist with the FSA from Deir Ezzor. “They cancelled the customary day off on Saturday; they’re supposed to make Thursday the day off instead.”

Regulations and price control are another area in which ISIS’s governance proved successful. It banned fishermen from using dynamite and electricity to catch fish. It also prohibited residents in the Jazira from using the chaos of war to stake new land claims, principally in the Syrian desert, where they had tried to build new homes or establish businesses, much to the chagrin of their neighbors. ISIS also limited the profit margins on oil by-products, ice, flour, and other essential commodities. Before ISIS controlled eastern Syria, an oil well produced around thirty thousand barrels per
day, and each barrel sold for two thousand Syrian pounds—eleven dollars at the current exchange rate. Local families that worked in refineries would make two hundred liras (a little more than one dollar) on each barrel they refined primitively. After ISIS took over, a barrel of oil became cheaper because it fixed the price of a liter of oil at fifty pounds (thirty cents).

ISIS also banned families from setting up refineries close to residences under the threat of confiscation, a policy that led some families to quit the oil business altogether. Collectively, price control and regulations balanced the decline in resources and services. 

Subsidies from Gulf countries, where many of those who live in ISIS-controlled areas work, also helped some families afford electricity-generating engines and oil by-products. “Those in the Gulf who used to send once a month now send twice a month because they understand the situation,” said the former FSA media activist. “Also, there is no big difference in value. In 2010 a kilo of chicken was 190 pounds [$1] and is now 470 [$2.60].”

Oil was a major revenue generator for ISIS until the coalition air strikes began. Before that, ISIS was thought to have earned millions of dollars a month from oil in Syria and Iraq—$1 to 2 million a day. The revenue dropped significantly after the air strikes. But oil smuggling to neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan, and to other areas in Syria and Iraq, still makes significant revenue for ISIS. The sharp decline in oil production affected civilians more than it affected ISIS, which could still generate wealth from other sources, but it hampered ISIS’s ability to provide for the local communities, especially much-coveted materials such as gas cylinders. “I estimate that the impact of air strikes was 5 percent,” said the media activist, who still lives in Deir Ezzor. “They affected oil primarily. Food is plenty, and most of it comes from Turkey or Iraq. Borders are open; if you don’t like prices here, you go to Anbar. I see the situation as normal.”

ISIS’s oil market savvy has impressed and shocked many observers, although Derek Harvey isn’t one of them. “I know for a fact that the Saddamists who were smuggling the oil in the ’90s, to evade UN sanctions, are now doing so for ISIS,” he said. “People are saying that they’re selling it for thirty-five dollars a barrel. What we bombed recently is some of the local refineries. If you’re selling it at that price, it’s fifty to fifty-five dollars off the current market price. But here’s what happens: these middlemen are selling it, and there’s a kickback coming back in to ISIS’s senior leaders. They’re getting another twenty, twenty-five dollars a barrel in kickbacks, but that’s not on the books or being factored in by everybody. It’s going back into the kitty of financiers at the top of the pyramid. The ISIS fighters in Deir Ezzor would not be aware of that.”

Locals in eastern Syria had learned to survive on remittances from the Gulf and local economies even before the uprising. High oil prices led many to rely less on agricultural products since the energy had to be spent pumping water from the Euphrates or Tigress rivers to their farmlands many miles away. After the war started, cheaper oil revived the Syrian agribusiness—smuggling and livestock trade markets began booming again. When ISIS seized control of the Jazira, people were already buying their own oil for irrigation and electricity and didn’t need to rely on subsidized services.

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichten–dienst (BND), has cautioned against “overblown” speculation about ISIS’s high oil revenue because there is a tendency to discount the massive overhead and spending inside its territories. But, as per Harvey, ISIS pockets most of this revenue, as it sometimes taxes residents for services supplied by the regime, such as electricity and telecommunication. Unlike Islamist groups that operated regime-established facilities for the local communities gratis, ISIS has developed a surcharge economy to replenish its own coffers.

ISIS also makes millions from
zakat
(different forms of Islamic
alms payable to the state). Zakat is extracted from annual savings or capital assets (2.5 percent), gold (on values exceeding $4,500), livestock (two heads out of 100 heads owned by a farmer), dates, crops (10 percent if irrigated by rain or a nearby stream or river, and 5 percent if irrigation costs money), and profits (2.5 percent).

ISIS also imposes annual taxes on non-Muslims living in its territories, especially Christians (4.25 grams of gold for the rich and half of that for moderate-income individuals). It makes money by stealing dressed up as civil penalties: it confiscates the properties of displaced or wanted individuals or as punishment for fighting ISIS. This includes, of course, enormous stocks of weapons and ammunition as part of its community disarmament policies.

While donations from foreign sponsors constitute a meager percentage of its treasury, deep-pocked individuals, whether foreign donors or members who have joined the group, still contribute to the group.

More significantly,
ghanima
(war spoils, which in ISIS’s definition encompasses robbery and theft) is one of the group’s largest and most valuable sources of income. ISIS seized millions of dollars worth of American and foreign military equipment after it forced three Iraqi divisions to flee in June 2014, and it has also seized large stockpiles of weapons as well as equipment, facilities, and cash from Syria’s regime and rebel groups. Artifacts are also lucrative for ISIS—one man interviewed in Turkey said trade in artifacts grew during ISIS rule, with one of his cousins smuggling into Turkey golden statues and coins found in Mari ancient ruins, eleven kilometers away from Albu Kamal.

EPILOGUE

Days before the video showing James Foley’s beheading was aired around the world, Iraq’s authoritarian prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, resigned under US and Iranian pressure, ostensibly addressing the political impasse for which the rise of ISIS has been blamed. His successor was a fellow member of the Dawa Party, the sixty-two-year-old Haider al-Abadi, who had spent years of exile in London. Many Iraqi Sunnis we talked to at the time praised al-Abadi as an improvement on al-Maliki, but none thought he could or would make a substantive difference in the way Iraq was governed. This, they all said, owed to the endemic sectarian dimensions of the nation’s politics and Tehran’s overweening influence on Baghdad.

It didn’t bode well for the new premier’s tenure that in one of his first press conferences he advocated a strategic partnership between the United States and Iran in combating ISIS—a partnership that many Sunnis believed started in 2003. “The American approach us to leave Iraq to the Iraqis,” Sami al-Askari, a former Iraqi MP and senior advisor to al-Maliki, told Reuters. “The Iranians don’t say leave Iraq to the Iraqis. They say leave Iraq to us.”

One of the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism now presents itself as the last line of defense against terrorism. Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani has overseen the creation of a multipronged shadow army consisting of the very same Special Groups not only responsible for killing American soldiers and countless Sunni civilians in Iraq, but now equally committed to propping up
the murderous regime in Damascus. According to Phillip Smyth, there are now more than fifty “highly ideological, anti-American, and rabidly sectarian” Shia militias operating and recruiting in Iraq. The conditions have been recreated, in other words, for exactly the same sectarian holy war envisioned by al-Zarqawi in 2004—only this time, it will be played out in two countries at the same time. As a former Iraqi official put it, “I’m not very hopeful. This is almost like a last chance for Iraq to remain as a unified state.”

• • •

Despite al-Abadi’s calls for national unity, the sectarian bloodletting continues. According to Human Rights Watch, ISF and Shia militias have executed 255 prisoners in six villages and towns since June 9, 2014, a day before the fall of Mosul. Eight of the victims were boys younger than eighteen. On August 22, 2014, the Musab Bin Omair mosque in Diyala—where ISIS has anticipated its fiercest battles—was raided by ISF personnel and Asaib Ahl al-Haq militants dressed in plainclothes. They massacred dozens.

Al-Abadi’s Interior Minister, Mohammed al-Ghabban, is also a senior official in the Badr Organization, which means that a notorious death squad has once again been given purview over Iraq’s police force. The Badr has lately been accused of “kidnapping and summarily executing peopl[and] expelling Sunnis from their homes, then looting and burning them, in some cases razing entire villages,” according to Human Rights Watch’s Iraq researcher Erin Evers. “The [United States] is basically paving the way for these guys to take over the country even more than they already have.”

Nearly every major Iraqi offensive against ISIS has borne Suleimani’s fingerprints. In late October, when ISIS was driven from Jurf al-Sakher, a town about thirty miles southwest of Baghdad along the Euphrates River Valley, agents of the Quds Force and Lebanese Hezbollah were embedded with some seven thousand Iraqi Security Forces soldiers and militiamen, providing training
and distributing arms. The entire operation was planned by Suleimani.

Indirectly supported by US warplanes, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kata’ib Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist entity, played a lead combat role in ending ISIS’s months-long siege of Amerli, a Shia Turkomen town of about fifteen thousand, in November 2014. Suleimani was photographed smiling in Amerli shortly after it was retaken.

US Abrams tanks have been photographed in the possession of Kata’ib Hezbollah, making ISIS not the only terrorist organization to have requisitioned American materiel intended for the ISF.What has the last seven months of US-led air strikes in Syria and Iraq accomplished? The Pentagon announced that sixteen out of the twenty oil refineries ISIS had been using to fund its activities were rendered inoperable. According to Dr. Hisham al-Hashimi, by the end of 2014, ISIS had lost 90 percent of its oil-driven revenue, nine out of eleven weapons warehouses in Iraq, and three out of ten warehouses in Syria. Adding to this seemingly impressive list of damage was the elimination of thirty ISIS leaders in air strikes. These included a dozen high-ranking officials such as Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, al-Baghdadi’s deputy, Ridwan Taleb al-Hamdouni, the “governor” of Mosul, and the military commanders of Ramadi, Salah ad-Din, Fallujah and Ninewah. Al-Abadi has claimed that al-Baghdadi himself was injured in a sortie on al-Qaim. Washington says that ISIS has lost around seven hundred square kilometers of terrain.

While it is certainly true that the momentum of ISIS’s blitzkrieg in Iraq has been stalled considerably—it no longer threatens to take Erbil, much less Baghdad—its defeats so far have been tactical. “Purely from a military perspective, the single factor that stands out the most to me is that ISIS has always had the strategic initiative,” said Chris Harmer. “There are times when they’ve been
more active in one place than another. But they’ve never been on the strategic defensive. Tactically, they’ve been on the defensive: they took Mosul Dam, then lost it. They took Bayji Oil Refinery, then lost it. But is ISIS ‘losing’? No.”

ISIS has suffered mainly within enemy lines rather than in its geostrategic heartlands across Syria and Iraq. Sinjar and Bayji, for example, are crucial to the Kurds. Baqubah and Dhuluiya provide entryways into Baghdad and thus matter greatly to the ISF and Shia militias, which have ethnically cleansed them, according to Ayad Allawi, now the vice president for reconciliation. Despite some 1,700 air strikes, ISIS has still managed to advance in places where it has either a natural constituency or can dominate a Sunni population too fearful or indifferent to rise up against it. Two months into Operation Inherent Resolve, the jihadists sacked Hit, the town where Adam Such glimpsed an early and localized Sahwa in 2005. Other villages and hamlets in Anbar have fallen since.

As Derek Harvey demonstrated a decade ago, just because jihadists have been expelled from ethnically mixed terrain, such as Baghdad, doesn’t mean they’ve been defeated or are less capable of conducting operations. ISIS continues to rule more or less uncontested in al-Bab, Minbij, Jarablous, Raqqa, southern Hasaka, Tal Afar, Qa’im, and outside the city center of Ramadi. Rebellion from within in these areas is extremely unlikely in the short term. In Haditha and Amiriya Fallujah, Sunni tribes are divided over what do about ISIS—and the consequence is tribal infighting, which only forecloses on the possibility of another Awakening.

According to al-Hashimi, ISIS has compensated for its 10 percent territorial losses in Iraq by
gaining
4 percent in Syria, though you wouldn’t know it to listen to US officials. “The strategy with respect to Syria has not changed,” Alistair Baskey, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reported in November 2014. “While the immediate focus remains to drive [ISIS] out of Iraq, we
and coalition partners will continue to strike at [ISIS] in Syria to deny them safe haven and to disrupt their ability to project power.”

Except that ISIS has more than a “safe haven” in Syria, and it continues to project even more power since Operation Inherent Resolve began. Today it controls roughly a third of the geography of the country. Even in the most fiercely contested battle for Kobane, it continues to hang on to parts of the Syrian-Turkish border town, which even the White House sees as more “symbolic” than strategically essential—and this is three months into the most intense US aerial sorties waged in all of Syria.

Those who have understood the long-term challenges posed by ISIS have not been rewarded. In October 2014 Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sent a two-page memo to the National Security Council outlining his concerns about America’s strategy in Syria. He was fired as defense secretary at the end of the following month, in part because he cautioned that the continued failure to confront the al-Assad regime—which members of the Obama administration have rightly called a “magnet” for terrorism—would only redound to al-Baghdadi’s benefit. It has also redounded to al-Assad’s.

“What’s amazing is how we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, in Iraq but also in the broader Middle East,” Ali Khedery told us. “I’ve seen senior American officials waste time tweeting about the number of air strikes. Who cares about these tactical developments? Sunnis are being radicalized at record proportions. A counterterrorism approach isn’t going to work with ISIS. We saw that in Iraq, and we’ll see it in Syria.”

The law of unintended consequences reigns supreme. Just as US warplanes began striking ISIS locations in Syria, mainstream rebels who have received American weapons took to criticizing the operation for its one-sidedness. “The sole beneficiary of this foreign interference in Syria is the Assad regime, especially in the absence of any real strategy to topple him,” Harakat Hazm (the Movement
of Steadfastness) posted to its Twitter account in late September 2014. “Last Friday, for the first time I can recall, opponents of the government of President Bashar al-Assad burned an American flag,” wrote Robert Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria who resigned in protest over the Obama administration’s Syria policy, in the
New York Times.
That was in early October 2014.

Of course, the US isn’t
only
targeting ISIS in Syria—it’s also targeting Jabhat al-Nusra. In one strike, in the town of Kafr Daryan, Idlib, an ad hoc refuge for internally displaced Syrians was reportedly hit in an attempt to bomb installations belonging to al-Nusra, specifically a subunit of it known as the Khorasan Group, which the White House says was plotting attacks on Western targets. This has only aggravated Syrian grievances against America; as one rebel media activist put it, if “the raids had targeted the regime and a large number people had been killed by mistake, we would have said they were a sacrifice for our salvation.” It has also strengthened al-Nusra, which has been joined by ISIS in waged localized, opportunistic campaigns against US-backed rebel groups, now branded as little more than mujahidin-hunting hirelings of the Pentagon. The White House’s stated plan of training five hundred rebels a year for the sole purpose of fighting ISIS isn’t set to start until the spring of 2015, but already it has had profound negative consequences on the battlefield.

True, the contingency that al-Nusra will ever formally reconcile with ISIS is remote. However, it doesn’t have to in order for a jihadist civil war—or even a jihadist cold war—to affect the Western designs in the region, and at home. ISIS has pledged rhetorical solidarity with al-Nusra against a common “crusader” enemy in Syria. It has also offered its warm congratulations to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s recent handiwork in the West.

On January 7, 2015, Said and Chérif Kouachi, two French brothers, slaughtered a dozen journalists and cartoonists at the of
fices of satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo
in Paris. Two days later, one of the brothers’ accomplices, Ahmed Coulibaly, seized the Hyper Cacher kosher market in the same city, killing four customers before the French police shot him.

The Kouachi brothers were part of a French cell responsible for sending men to join AQI in the early days of the insurgency. Like al-Zarqawi, both had been radicalized first in a mosque, and then in a prison. They read al-Maqdisi. Chérif was arrested before he could join the Sheikh of the Slaughterers.

Coulibaly has claimed inspiration and pledged allegiance to al-Zarqawi’s successor, al-Baghdadi.

Many are now asking if the streets of Europe, and eventually the United States, are to serve as the blood-soaked arenas for a game of one-upmanship between a jihadist parent company and its former subsidiary. It’s a good question.

More than eleven years after the United States invaded Iraq, a deadly insurgency adept at multiple forms of warfare has proved resilient, adaptable, and resolved to carry on fighting. A legacy of both Saddam and al-Zarqawi, ISIS has excelled at couching its struggle in world-historical terms. It has promised both death and a return to the ancient glories of Islam. Thousands have lined up to join it, and even more have already fallen victim to it.

The army of terror will be with us indefinitely.