ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (11 page)

An ISIS handbook released in December 2014 entitled “Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves” justifies these atrocities, stating, “It is permissible to have sexual intercourse with the female captive. Allah the almighty said: ‘[Successful are the believers] who guard their chastity,
except from their wives or [the captives and slaves] that their right hands possess, for then they are free from blame’ [Koran 23:5-6].”

The handbook also goes on to condone sexual intercourse “with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however if she is not fit for intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse.”
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Inside the Islamic State, such directives are taken quite literally. According to some reports, girls as young as nine years old have been raped by ISIS fighters.
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Indeed, the exploitation of children is a way of life inside the caliphate and is not limited to the horrors of sexual molestation:

          
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In Raqqa, children under fifteen are “forcibly” conscripted and placed in ISIS training camps where they’re taught to behead infidels, using dolls with blonde hair and blue eyes for practice.
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They’re also taught how to handle automatic weapons and shown videos of beheadings, stonings, and crucifixions.
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Supplementing the daily brainwashing at the training camps, ISIS provides a handbook for mothers that encourages them to train their children in all forms of physical fitness (including martial arts) “from the time they are babies” in order to prepare them to one day assume the mantle of jihad for the Islamic State.
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To the average Westerner, all of it is unthinkable: the mass rapes, the slave markets, the crucifixions, beheadings, stonings, and child soldiers. Yet growing numbers of American and European citizens not only agree with these Islamic State “values”—they wish to see them enforced on Western soil.

From Paris to Ottawa to New York City, they’ve proven ready and willing to maim, murder, and menace their fellow citizens.

If they can’t live inside the caliphate, they’ll do the next best thing.

Bring the caliphate home.

CHAPTER THREE

TARGET AMERICA: WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT ISIS

“WOW, THAT GUY LOOKS REALLY ANGRY.”

“At what?”

“At us.”

My cameraman, Ian, directed my attention to a café a few feet from where we were standing. An elderly Somali man inside was wildly gesticulating at us through the window with a look of fury in his eyes. His long beard was dyed bright orange with henna in emulation of Islam’s prophet Mohammed, who is said to have worn his beard in a similar fashion.

Since we were separated by glass, I couldn’t make out what the colorfully bearded old man was shouting at us. But I could guess that it wasn’t “Peace be upon you.”

“I think he’s mad that we’re filming,” Ian said.

“We’ve overstayed our welcome,” I agreed.

We had been shooting footage at the Karmel Square mall and Suuqq (or “souk”: Arabic for mall or bazaar) in southwest Minneapolis for a series
of reports I was producing about ISIS recruitment in the Twin Cities—particularly among the area’s large Somali Muslim community. Known to locals as the “Somali Mall,” the Karmel facility hosts some 150 Somali-owned businesses, plus an Islamic prayer center that was under construction when we visited in September 2014. Area sources had told me the sprawling complex was an exclusively Somali enclave that was indicative of that community’s troubling lack of assimilation.

The existence of such an enclave came as no surprise. In my 2011 book,
The Terrorist Next Door,
and in several on-the-ground reports for CBN News, I’ve documented the troubling insularity of Somali communities in the United States in places such as rural Shelbyville, Tennessee. These communities have a predisposition to self-segregate and circle the wagons. Their members face massive cultural barriers to engagement with the larger American culture, and they tend to gravitate to what is familiar, particularly Islam. Combine Islamic radicalism with alienation and a resistance to assimilation, and you have a combustible mix. Witness the dozens of young Somalis from the Twin Cities who have traveled abroad to join ISIS.

I’ve been to outdoor souks in the Middle East. The Karmel mall had the same noisy Third World feel, only moved indoors. Its maze-like halls were packed with stalls and small shops selling an abundance of hijabs, niqabs, and Islamic clothing as well as jewelry, carpets, cell phones, and other assorted knick-knacks. There were also cafés where groups of men sat and chatted. Other than Ian and me, there was nary a non-Somali in sight, and we received quizzical looks from shop owners and patrons who didn’t know quite what to make of the two tall white men wielding a video camera. We engaged in some small talk with an older Somali man who told us he loved the mall because it felt like home. “It is like Mogadishu came to Minnesota,” he said with a laugh.

Yet the longer we lingered, filming, the more intense the stares grew. We were outsiders who had stepped into a world that was very remote from Minneapolis and St. Paul. And we had a video camera, the sight of
which made the Somali women, who were dressed in conservative Islamic garb, visibly uncomfortable. It was obviously time to go—a fact that was only underlined by the enthusiastic send-off from our orange-bearded friend.

As we left, I couldn’t help but recall my conversation the previous day in nearby St. Paul with Omar Jamal, a local Somali activist who has long warned of jihadist infiltration in the Twin Cities’ Somali communities. Jamal told me that, “even an ‘A’ student” in a university can be vulnerable to the ISIS propaganda machine and that jihadi recruitment in the Twin Cities doesn’t only happen in mosques. “It can happen anywhere,” he said. “A coffee house, a basement, university, colleges, in meeting rooms.”

Perhaps even in an isolated Somali mall.

While the Twin Cities’ Somali communities have arguably become America’s number one terrorist breeding ground, the lure of jihad extends far beyond the upper Midwest. According to reliable estimates, as of August 2014 at least a hundred American citizens were fighting alongside jihadist groups in Syria, including ISIS.
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Some have placed the number as high as three hundred.
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Of course, neither of those estimates includes the untold number of ISIS sympathizers already living inside the United States and gleefully re-tweeting Islamic State beheading videos.

When American jihadists are through learning the finer points of bomb-making and hostage-taking from their ISIS brethren in Syria—not to mention gaining invaluable battlefield experience and ideological training—at least some of them will return to the United States. What happens then is anyone’s guess. The Islamic State isn’t exactly turning out the type of upstanding young gents who can be expected to transition back into a quiet, jihad-free existence upon returning from the caliphate. A guy who
just last week was dismembering Yazidi sex slaves or screaming “Allahu Akbar” as he charged Syrian Army positions isn’t likely to get a 9-to-5 job or go back to school and get his bachelor’s degree. Rather, these U.S. passport holders, assuming they clear customs, are prime candidates to follow the example of Mehdi Nemmouche.

Nemmouche, a French citizen, gunned down four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels after returning to his native Europe following a stint with ISIS in Syria. It was tragic, horrific—and, sadly, predictable. A former ISIS hostage described how Nemmouche relished torturing prisoners and boasted of raping and murdering a woman before beheading her baby.
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All in a day’s work for the guardians of the Islamic State.

Nemmouche is no outlier. The ranks of ISIS are filled with sadists and murderous sociopaths of his ilk. And it’s not alarmism or exaggeration to say that some of them could be coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Welcome to Unpleasantville.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) studied twenty U.S. citizens who fought alongside terrorist groups abroad, or attempted to do so, in 2013 and 2014. Some of the report’s key findings, in the ADL’s words:

          
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They range in age from 18 to 44, but the majority are in their 20s. . . .

          
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13 of the 20, or 65%, are reportedly converts to Islam.

          
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They come from across the country: Six came from California, two each from Minnesota, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida and New York. Other states represented include Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts and Arizona.

          
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Only two of the 20 were women. (ADL has documented 13 female citizens and permanent residents of the U.S. arrested on terrorism charges since 2002.)
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FBI Director James Comey told
60 Minutes
in an October 2014 interview that he was “aware of” only “about ‘a dozen or so’ Americans who
have joined ISIS,”
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versus the one hundred or more that Obama administration officials had maintained for months were with the jihadists.
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Comey said the FBI knew who the twelve Americans were and that the Bureau was keeping an eye on them. He added that if these same U.S.-born jihadists wished to return to America, they are “entitled to come back,” unless their passport is revoked. The fact that they have committed treason by joining a terrorist group committed to our destruction apparently does not change that equation. Welcome to Obama’s America, where even ISIS recruits are “entitled.”

But never fear: according to Comey, “Someone who has fought with ISIL, with an American passport, [that] wants to come back, we will track them very carefully.”
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Forgive me if I don’t feel reassured.

If Comey and the Bureau have things under control, how do they explain Moner Mohammad Abusalha? A twenty-two-year-old U.S. citizen who was born and raised in Florida, Abusalha fought with the al Qaeda–affiliated al-Nusra Front terror group in Syria, eventually blowing himself up in a suicide bombing against Syrian troops. He recorded the now-obligatory “martyrdom” video prior to carrying out his suicide mission, warning, “You think you are safe where you are in America. You are not safe.”

Abusalha had actually made two separate trips to Syria. After the first trip in early 2013, he returned to the United States—and moved around the country, free and unmonitored, for months. According to the
Washington Post,
“There were no U.S. air marshals watching the newly cleanshaven passenger on the transatlantic flight, no FBI agents waiting for him as he landed in Newark in May 2013 after returning from Syria’s civil war.” He was selected for “additional screening,” but the TSA did little but search his luggage and call his mother to verify that he had been “visiting relatives in the Middle East,” as he claimed. Then he “was waved through without any further scrutiny or perceived need to notify the FBI that he was back in the United States. . . . His movements went unmonitored despite a major push by U.S. security and intelligence agencies over the past two years to track the flow of foreign fighters into and out of Syria.”
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FBI field agents have done some fantastic work since the 9/11 attacks, and the Bureau’s performance overall in breaking up terror plots and arresting aspiring terrorists—including some who had planned to join ISIS—should be commended. But as the case of Moner Mohammad Abusalha shows, the FBI is not infallible. Further, it’s unclear whether the Bureau is being completely forthcoming about the extent of the domestic ISIS problem. For example, New York Congressman Tim Bishop, a Democrat and Obama supporter, has said that some forty of the hundred U.S. citizens who have traveled to Syria to join ISIS have already returned home and “are under FBI attention and surveillance. So they are known and being tracked by the FBI.”
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That’s a far cry from the supposed twelve American ISIS fighters Comey alluded to in his
60 Minutes
interview.