And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (24 page)

The balance of power shifted in eastern Syria when ISIS took over Mosul and captured stockpiles of American-made weapons. Mohammed went into hiding. He knew the rebels couldn’t defeat ISIS after Mosul.

“I stayed at home for seven months,” Mohammed said. “Later on, ISIS started arresting members of the Free [Syrian] Army. One of the detainees told them I was also a member.”

Mohammed didn’t know he’d been informed on until a group of ISIS fighters showed up at his door to seize him.

After Mohammed was discovered and arrested, he was locked in an ISIS jail for two months. He says he was in a room with seventy-five other boys and men. He says they were all tortured savagely, his shins beaten with bats and electric shocks to his genitals.

“Many people died there. No water, no electricity.
They provided water twice a day. We used the toilet once a day,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed was released from prison and also sentenced to repent by going to an ISIS indoctrination school. But Mohammed was convinced that if he went to the school, he’d be sent to the front lines to die or used as a suicide bomber. Mohammed decided to try to escape with a group of friends.

One of them turned him in.

Within a few hours, Mohammed was brought before an ISIS judge. His crime was trying to escape ISIS-held areas, thereby choosing to leave the realm of “true Islam” for the land of the infidels, which ISIS considers everywhere else.

“He said to me ‘This is the judgment of Allah. You were going to the land of the infidels . . . so you are like them. Your leg and arm must be cut off.’ ”

The punishment was carried out the next day.

The “chopping” ritual was carried out in a carnival-like atmosphere with an assembled crowd cheering and jeering as the condemned were brought to a city square. A section of honor in the square was reserved for the children of foreign fighters.

The sons of foreign fighters were expected to cheer and jeer the loudest. They were being trained, Mohammed said, to be elite members of ISIS’s next generation of suicide bombers and foreign terrorists. Sometimes the sons of foreign fighters carried out executions themselves, erasing their respect for human life while they’re still impressionable.

Mohammed’s punishment was to have his opposing limbs cut off: his right hand (considered in Islamic culture to be the “clean” hand) and his left foot. ISIS attempts to make the horrific ritual appear hygienic. The ISIS members who held Mohammed’s
limbs in place wore surgical gloves and squirted iodine on his hand and foot. Mohammed said he was given an injection. He didn’t know what it was but said he was told it would calm him down.

ISIS members tied Mohammed’s arm and leg with tourniquets to cut off the blood flow to his hand and foot. The purpose of the amputations was not to kill the victim, but maim him forever. The tourniquets were left on for about fifteen minutes. Then, Mohammed’s arm was stretched out on a block of wood. A large meat cleaver was placed on top of his wrist at the point where the cut would be made. A man with a mallet smashed the back of the cleaver so it would cut straight through bone and flesh. Mohammed and others identified the man who carried out the punishment as an Iraqi from ISIS’s “chopping committee,” known by the nickname “the Bulldozer.”

The first chop was met with celebratory cries of Allahu Akbar. The ritual was repeated to cut off his foot. Mohammed was then taken to an ISIS clinic where his skin was stretched and sewn over the stumps.

Mohammed’s mother picked him up from the clinic, brought him home, and smuggled him into Turkey a few days later.

“They are fooling children with money,” Mohammed said. “They are fooling them to bomb themselves. They give a boy some money, or a bicycle, and after two days they take him in a car to bomb himself. They target children the most. They focus on children, because children are unaware of anything in this life.”

In Turkey, Mohammed didn’t have enough money for medical and psychological care. His brother and the family friend who nurses him did the best they could with the help of a few generous Turks. Mohammed cried every time his bandages were changed. He was having nightmares, wet his bed, and often got confused.
One time, he forgot his foot was missing and tried to walk out, falling down the stairs of the building where he was living. His brother took him outside every day to get some fresh air.

“I can only sleep after I take sleeping pills,” Mohammed said. “The most difficult time is when I go to sleep. The pain starts. In the daytime, I sit in the street and watch the people passing by to forget the pain.”

But Mohammed said what hurt more than falling down the stairs was when a Turkish man approached him and gave him fifty Turkish lira, the equivalent of about $15. Mohammed wasn’t begging. He was just sitting in his wheelchair, as he said, to forget the pain.

When he looked at the money in his lap, he started to cry. It dawned on him that he’d become what in Arabic is called a miskeen, someone who deserves pity. That’s not how Mohammed saw himself, but he realized that’s how others saw him.

What was even more disturbing was that ISIS, even while bragging about and showing off its brutality, continued to grow. General James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, told Congress in February 2015 that ISIS had as many as thirty-one thousand fighters. Based on conversations with US military officials, I think the number of fighters was probably double that, and well over one hundred thousand if the ISIS support network is included.

Who are these would-be jihadists? In simpler times most jihadists were motivated by idealism, misguided or not. In Antakya in September 2013, I interviewed a Tunisian man who called himself Abu Abdul Rahman, not to be confused with Zarqawi’s deputy of the same name, as he waited for a smuggler to take him across the Turkish border into Syria.
(Tunisia had by mid-2015 sent upward of three thousand fighters to Syria, more than any other country, despite having a population of only 10.8 million, little more than half the 20.1 million people who live in the New York metropolitan area.)

Abu Abdul Rahman, a twenty-two-year-old college student who had never fired a gun in anger, thought he was volunteering for al-Qaeda, but his contact across the border was ISIS. The lines between the two groups were still blurry back then. Regardless, his motives were typical of recruits for both groups. “This was a dream for me, to wage jihad for Allah’s sake, because this is one of the greatest deeds in Islam, to lift aggression off my brothers, to bleed for Allah and no other,” he said in my report on the
Nightly News
.

He was going to Syria to defend Muslims who Assad’s regime was killing with barrel bombs. He was going to Syria because no one else was helping. He called his mother on the way to the border. She asked him to wait for her so she could come to Turkey to say good-bye in person. He lied to her, saying he was already in Syria and it was too late. “I am happy,” he told me. “People say that by coming here I might die, there is shelling and so forth. . . . I did not come for money, I only came for Allah’s sake and to support my Muslim brothers.”

By 2015, ISIS was attracting not only idealists but also a grab bag of off-kilter types: sociopaths aroused by bloodlust; loners and misfits who craved a sense of belonging; thrill seekers who wanted to test themselves in combat; Muslims in Europe and America who felt they were excluded from Western prosperity or demeaned by Western permissiveness; people who resented authority in any form; naïfs seduced by slickly produced propaganda that gave violence a romantic patina.

The ISIS economy was healthy. The group controlled roughly 9 million people, a sizable tax base. The jihadists also had significant earnings from the sale of artifacts and oil pumped in areas it controlled. Plunder from conquests was another profit center: after taking Mosul, ISIS stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the central bank and several small banks. Kidnappings provided a steady revenue stream. Between 2008 and 2014, according to US government estimates, radical Islamist groups received $200 million in ransom payments.

ISIS also tried to show it could be a functioning government. In Mosul, ISIS fixed roads, spruced up gardens, installed streetlamps, and swept up cigarette butts. But it also blew up iconic shrines, shut down cell-phone towers and the Internet, and limited outside travel. In May 2015, when ISIS captured Ramadi, tens of thousands of residents had already fled. After killing opponents and seizing weapons, ISIS set about repairing roads, distributing fuel, maintaining the electrical grid, and ensuring the markets had food.

After the adrenaline rush of combat, sweeping streets and picking up garbage is pretty humdrum stuff. It could be argued that Saudi Arabia was born in a similar way, with Ibn Saud conquering four regions and proclaiming them a kingdom in 1932. Saudi Arabia became a major oil producer and a modern country with a court system, albeit one that condemns prisoners to beheadings. But I don’t see ISIS becoming another Saudi Arabia. It’s too radical and too intolerant. And its fighters have drunk too much blood. Saudi Arabia was born with ISIS’s zeal and intolerant Sunni vision, but it wasn’t run by a collection of murderous maniacs who’d come specifically to a place so they could carry out war crimes.

SOME US SECURITY EXPERTS STRESS
that ISIS is more interested in consolidating power in the Islamic world and less focused than al-Qaeda on attacking the United States and other Western countries. I don’t agree. ISIS has made no secret of its interest in going global. In 2014, the group’s principal spokesman, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, issued a manifesto in which he said Allah had called on Muslims to “punish in similar fashion as you were afflicted.” Adnani claimed that US aggression had taken close to 10 million Muslim lives in recent decades. “So if a bomb is launched at them that will kill ten million of them, and it will burn their land as they burned Muslim lands, this is therefore permissible.” In a video released on February 15, 2015, showing ISIS militants executing twenty-one Egyptian Christians on a Libyan beach, one of the gunmen pointed across the Mediterranean and declared, “We will conquer Rome, by the will of Allah.”

The rivalry and competition between ISIS and al-Qaeda is also a concern. If al-Qaeda is going to catch up with ISIS and regain its leadership of the international jihad, it needs to strike at the heart of the West as it did on 9/11. Another troubling scenario is one in which ISIS and al-Qaeda sort out their differences and realize they’re on the same team.

When I arrived in 1996, a state system was in place in the Middle East: Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Gadhafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt. The Assad family, first Hafez and then Bashar, in Syria. Ben Ali in Tunisia. The Jordanian and Saudi monarchies. These regimes or their predecessors had survived the shock of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. They were not the most enlightened leaders around, they were corrupt and thuggish, but the Arab world was
at least a functioning place. The Middle East house may have been rotten, but it was standing.

But between President Bush’s misguided military action and President Obama’s inconsistent and confused action, the United States managed to destroy the status quo in just fifteen years, plunging the region into chaos and exposing the rot that had long been festering within. The combined and contradictory actions of the Bush and Obama administrations pushed over the row of rotten houses in the Middle East, unleashing the bitterness stewing inside, and it will be difficult to erect them again. I suspect people will eventually get fed up with the chaos, as they did in Egypt amid the turmoil that followed the Arab Spring. After a year in office, Mohammed Morsi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the first democratically elected head of state in Egypt’s history, was deposed by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a military coup. At this writing, Morsi is in jail, sentenced to death. Egypt always leads the way in the Middle East, so what happened there is instructive.

I started my career at the peak of the Arab big men in the late 1990s. I watched the region change with the death of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. I followed its descent into chaos in Iraq. I saw the rise of a cynical new type of war in Lebanon where only violence mattered. I watched the zigzag policies of the Obama administration, the hopes and anguish of the Arab Spring and the madness that followed. I can only guess what will happen next. I suspect that over the next several years, we’ll see strongmen back in power in all or most Middle East countries. Out of the chaos, new dictators will offer themselves as an alternative to the horrors of ISIS, the Sunni-Shia bloodshed, Turkish-Kurdish enmity, and Arab-Persian proxy wars. Once in power, the new
dictators—the ones to establish a new status quo—will likely be worse than the old strongmen because they’ll be able to use new technologies to identify and hunt down their enemies by their digital fingerprints. They will have the ability to point to the ugliness of recent history as a justification for taking their citizens’ rights. “Give me your freedoms unless you want to return to the way things were,” they might say.

But these would-be strongmen face a difficult path ahead. Many dictators will try to assert themselves. Not all will survive. The chaos that has been unleashed by the breaking of the old status quo won’t easily be contained. ISIS supporters will fight to the death to retain the foothold they’ve taken for themselves. A lot of killing remains to be done before leaders of stature emerge—and before the fires of chaos are tamped down once again.

TWENTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE
I headed to Cairo to cover what I sensed would be the story of my generation, just as reporters before me had gone to Vietnam and Moscow to cover the big stories of their times. It turned out the train of history would pass through the Middle East’s station, but who would have guessed that the United States would fight two of the longest ground wars in its history and plunge the Muslim world into a frenzy of violence and revolution. My ambition was to ride the train of history, and the train came rumbling right at me.