ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (10 page)

                
It worked. Mr Fajar, a floor fitter from Kobane, and his wife and children aged three to 12, ran for their lives.

                
“The children saw the headless people. They saw them,” he said quietly, sitting cross-legged on a rug in his tent in a squalid refugee camp in Suruc.
⁵⁰

As of this writing, ISIS was on its heels in Kobane, beaten back by Kurdish ground forces supported by Coalition airstrikes. Many other towns in Syria and Iraq, however, have been successfully absorbed into the
ISIS caliphate—and once they’re cleansed of non-Sunni Muslims (who are either killed or sold into slavery), their inhabitants are forced to live under sharia law. The disciplined ISIS bureaucracy, including several important councils that help the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, govern his territory and make decisions, dispatches religious police, called the “al-Hesbah” force, around the caliphate to ensure that sharia norms are followed—and to deal out harsh punishments if they find otherwise.

Interestingly enough, two former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani and Abu Ali al-Anbari, are al-Baghdadi’s top deputies, overseeing Iraq and Syria, respectively. According to a comprehensive report by the Soufan Group, a respected security and intelligence firm:

          
Abu Bakr [al-Baghdadi] and his two senior advisors set the overall strategic objectives of the group, which are then passed down through the hierarchy with each lower rung having a degree of autonomy in their fulfillment. This is especially true in military operations where a local commander will know what he has to achieve, and even where to attack, but the exact timing and method may be left to his discretion. This system of devolved authority has enabled The Islamic State to operate on many fronts at more or less the same time, both administratively and militarily. . . .

                
The Councils are responsible for the military and administrative organization of The Islamic State, providing advice to [al-Baghdadi] and overseeing strategic planning, military operations, and civilian administration. The Shura Council is the highest advisory body and theoretically must approve [al-Baghdadi’s] appointments and even the choice of who should succeed him as Caliph, which is decided by the Sharia Council. Theoretically, it also has the power to dismiss the
Caliph if he fails to carry out his duties in accordance with the guiding (sharia) principles of the organization.
⁵¹

The report notes that ISIS also maintains a Security and Intelligence Council “responsible for eliminating rivals to Abu Bakr [al-Baghdadi] and rooting out any incipient plots against him,” as well as Military, Finance, and Media Councils and a Provincial Council that “oversees the civilian administration of the State through its 18 provinces.”
⁵²
In addition, the red-bearded Abu Omar al-Shishani (real name: Tarkhan Batirashvili), an ethnic Chechen—one of many in ISIS’s ranks—who served as a sergeant in the Georgian army, has been described as ISIS’s top military commander, reportedly helping to engineer some of its most important conquests, including the takeover of Mosul.
⁵³

At the end of 2014, ISIS bragged of a $250 million surplus, with plans to use the extra money left over from its $2 billion budget “to help fund [the Islamic State’s] war against the West and western allies.”
⁵⁴
The Islamic State is financially independent and, while it does receive donations from wealthy donors based in Persian Gulf countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (longtime hotbeds of terrorism financing), is not beholden to any nation. ISIS controls several oil fields in western Iraq and eastern Syria and is driven, in large part, by oil money. ISIS was making as much as $3 million per day by selling oil in the Levant region’s black market (which thrives in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan)
⁵⁵
until U.S. airstrikes reportedly put a dent in its revenue.
⁵⁶

Nevertheless, the Islamic State continues to rake in the dough via a mixture of private donations, oil sales, smuggling, blackmail, ransoms (European nations have paid tens of millions of dollars to free citizens held by ISIS)
⁵⁷
and taxation and extortion in the areas it has conquered.
⁵⁸
ISIS pays its fighters about $400 per month, certainly not a princely sum but reportedly more than members of the various Syrian rebel groups and the Iraqi military earn.
⁵⁹

For ISIS foot soldiers, the glory of jihad and the spoils of war more than make up for what they lack in salary. They are not driven by money but by a fanatical ideological commitment to expanding the caliphate and enforcing their totalitarian vision upon the Middle East and the world—beginning, of course, with Syria and Iraq.

THE CROSS IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Assyrian Christians in Iraq’s Nineveh province had a proud history stretching back two thousand years.

That history is now over.

After ISIS swept into Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, the city was literally emptied of its Christian population. In July 2014, ISIS handed out leaflets to Christian leaders in Mosul informing them that they had three options if they decided to stay: convert to Islam, pay the
jizya
(an exorbitant tax levied against non-Muslims under sharia law), or die. And they only had a few days to decide. Most of Mosul’s estimated three thousand Christians left the city by the deadline, quickly gathering their belongings and beginning new lives as refugees, joining some five hundred thousand others who had fled Mosul after ISIS’s arrival.
⁶⁰
Laying low and staying in Mosul was not a viable option: Islamic State jihadists had spray-painted the Arabic letter for “N” in red to mark homes and businesses that were owned by Christians. The N stood for “Nazarene,” indicating followers of Jesus of Nazareth.
⁶¹
Reportedly, ISIS has even turned churches into torture chambers in Iraq and Syria—after looting them of invaluable artifacts and relics to sell on the black market—and in July 2014, used sledgehammers to destroy the tomb of the biblical prophet Jonah in Mosul.
⁶²

ISIS’s blitzkrieg across the Christian areas of northern Iraq was the climax of a decade-plus wave of persecution that began after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when jihadists, led by ISIS’s predecessor, al Qaeda in
Iraq, embarked on a campaign of church bombings and murders that have resulted in over a million Christians leaving Iraq. As of the summer of 2014, three hundred thousand still remain but if ISIS continues its rampage, they won’t be there for long.
⁶³

Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of St. George’s Church in Baghdad, the city’s last remaining Anglican church, visited CBN’s Jerusalem bureau in November 2014 and shared eyewitness accounts of the horrors ISIS is inflicting upon Iraqi Christians. White is a native of England whose ministry, the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, offers humanitarian and spiritual aid to Christians in Iraq and Syria who’ve seen their worlds turned upside down thanks to ISIS. In an interview with my CBN News colleague Chris Mitchell, he described the unfathomably hellish situation:

          
In Iraq at the moment, it is impossible to describe how it really is. It is so awful. Most of our people originate from Nineveh, which is Mosul, and they come from there because that is really where our faith started. . . . Things were bad in Baghdad and there were bombs and shootings and our people were being killed, so so many of our people fled from Baghdad back to Nineveh—their traditional homes. It was safer. And then one day, ISIS . . . came in . . . and hounded all of them out. Not some, all of them. And they killed huge numbers. They chopped the children in half, they chopped their heads off. And they moved north. . . . they said to one man, an adult, they said “Either you say the words of converting to Islam or we kill all your children.” He was desperate. He said the words. And then he phoned me, “Abounah, Abounah [Father], I said the words. Does that mean Yeshua [Jesus] doesn’t love me anymore? I’ve always loved Yeshua, but I said those words because I couldn’t see my children being killed.” I said, “Elias, no, Jesus still loves you. He will
always love you.” A few days later . . . ISIS turned up and they said to the children, “You say the words, that you will follow Mohammed.” And the children, all under fifteen, all of them, they said, “No, we love Yeshua, we have always loved Yeshua, we have always followed Yeshua. Yeshua has always been with us.” [ISIS] said, “Say the words.” They said, “No we can’t.” They chopped all their heads off. . . . That is what we are going through. Most of my staff are still in the north of Iraq trying to look after all the displaced people. [ISIS was] threatening to kill me, they were after me. They wanted that Abounah from England. . . .
⁶⁴

When children are being beheaded and cut in half, crucifixion is a logical next step in the savagery department. Sure enough, ISIS has taken to hanging bodies on crosses in Syria—and not just of Christians. The victims include one seventeen-year-old Muslim boy who allegedly took pictures of ISIS’s military headquarters in Raqqa. His body was hung on a cross for three days in the city’s central square, where he met an agonizing death. ISIS uses crucifixions and beheadings as a way to intimidate the local population—in Raqqa, severed heads hanging from street posts are a familiar sight.
⁶⁵
Perhaps the Islamic State will include those details in its travel brochure.

MODERN-DAY SLAVERY

Even her father pelted her with stones.

At point blank range.

ISIS had accused the unnamed Syrian woman of committing adultery. The sentence for her alleged crime was stoning. And in accordance with sharia law, ISIS carried out “justice” in grisly fashion, stoning the woman (whose face was covered) to death and then posting a video of the deed online. Her father refused to forgive her despite her pleas and chose instead
to participate in the execution, hurling stone after stone at his own daughter’s head as ISIS jihadists encouraged him.
⁶⁶

That’s just a small sampling of what life is like for women in the Islamic State. But while Muslim women are subjected to stonings, repression, and second-class status, non-Muslim women are treated worse than animals. Simply put, captured Christian and Yazidi women are being subjected to mass rape by Islamic State jihadists, who have created a thriving sex slavery trade. Thousands of Yazidi women, in particular, have been rounded up “like cattle” by ISIS, which places price tags on them at markets in cities like Mosul and Raqqa.
⁶⁷
In many cases, their family members have already been executed by ISIS. The women are all alone, destined to live a life of inhuman servitude in the power of “sex jihadists.” According to an op-ed by two former CIA analysts in
Foreign Policy:
“The Islamic State’s (IS) fighters are committing horrific sexual violence on a seemingly industrial scale: For example, the United Nations . . . estimated that IS has forced some 1,500 women, teenage girls, and boys into sexual slavery. Amnesty International released a blistering document noting that IS abducts whole families in northern Iraq for sexual assault and worse. Even in the first few days following the fall of Mosul . . . women’s rights activists reported multiple incidents of IS fighters going door to door, kidnapping and raping Mosul’s women.”
⁶⁸

In September 2014, the
Telegraph
recounted how an Italian newspaper was able to get in touch with a seventeen-year-old-Yazidi girl, who, along with some forty other Yazidi women, was being kept as a sex slave by ISIS “in a building with barred windows and guarded by men with weapons”:

          
The woman said her captors had initially confiscated her mobile and those of all the other women, but had then “changed strategy”, returning the phones so that the women and girls could recount to the outside world the full horror of what was happening to them.

                
“To hurt us even more, they told us to describe in detail to our parents what they are doing. They laugh at us because they think they are invincible. They consider themselves are [sic] supermen. But they are people without a heart.

                
“Our torturers do not even spare the women who have small children with them. Nor do they spare the girls—some of our group are not even 13 years old. Some of them will no longer say a word.” The woman, given the false name Mayat by
La Repubblica,
said the women were raped on the top floor of the building, in three rooms. The girls and women were abused up to three times a day by different groups of men.

                
“They treat us as if we are their slaves. The men hit us and threaten us when we try to resist. Often I wish that they would beat me so severely that I would die.

                
. . . If one day this torture ever ends, my life will always be marked by what I have suffered in these weeks. Even if I survive, I don’t know how I’m going to cancel from my mind this horror.

                
“We’ve asked our jailers to shoot us dead, to kill us, but we are too valuable for them. They keep telling us that we are unbelievers because we are non-Muslims and that we are their property, like war booty. They say we are like goats bought at a market.”
⁶⁹

If you think this type of medieval barbarism is due solely to a backwards Middle Eastern culture, think again. ISIS jihadists of French and British origin have openly bragged on social media of using Yazidi women as sex slaves.
⁷⁰
And as we’ll see in
chapter six
, British women who have migrated to the Islamic State actually run brothels where they provide sex slaves for ISIS fighters.