ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (2 page)

          
There is no question that the Internet is one of the primary mediums to get a kid hooked . . . it is the gateway drug. But there needs to be some real people on the ground that reinforce what they are hearing on the Internet. There needs to be a person that touches them on a personal level . . . what I refer to as “The Guide.” There is going to be a person that physically gets in touch with these kids, and helps facilitate that travel [to the Islamic State]. . . . [Recruits] need to procure travel documents; they need to raise money, usually somewhere in the area of $4,000 to $5,000 to help facilitate all the travel that takes place and plus . . . these kids want to have money when they get there. And they need to make sure someone is purchasing the tickets . . . they need a driver and a facilitator to get them to the airport. . . . So there is, I don’t like to use the word “team,” but there is an organization that makes this happen. But usually there is one principal person that . . . I call “The Guide” that can take this person in this [radicalized] ideological state and guide them to Syria or wherever it might be. . . . and of course, there are people in the Middle East . . . that are constantly feeding and supporting this decision.
¹³

Somalis first began arriving in the United States in the early 1990s, thanks to a taxpayer-funded refugee resettlement program run by the State
Department. In my 2011 book,
The Terrorist Next Door,
I described how tens of thousands of Somali Muslims, with the U.S. government’s help, have left the chaos of their homeland over the past few decades and settled in places such as Nashville, Boston, San Diego, Columbus, Ohio, Portland, Maine, and especially the Twin Cities.

The exodus is not hard to explain. Somalia has had no functioning central government since 1991 and is among the most dangerous countries in the world (as the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident, in which nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed in a raging gun battle against warlords and jihadists in the capital city of Mogadishu, showed so vividly). It’s also a hotbed for Islamic terrorism, with the al Qaeda–linked al-Shabaab perpetrating acts of horrific carnage not only inside Somalia but in neighboring Kenya—where al-Shabaab terrorists laid siege to an upscale Nairobi shopping mall for four days in September 2013, murdering sixty-seven people, including several Western tourists.

Many Somali-Americans are undoubtedly grateful to have escaped the chaos of their homeland and started a new life in the United States. But in reporting extensively since 2008 on the growth of Islamic radicalism in Somali-American communities throughout the U.S., I have found time and again that failure to assimilate—and in some cases, a lack of any desire to do so—is a major issue for a significant chunk of Somali immigrants.

For an unemployed, isolated nineteen-year-old Somali with little education who doesn’t feel quite at home in the United States, the lure of being a gun-toting jihadi rock star in the Islamic State—and a supposed champion and defender of Muslims around the world—can be quite appealing.

But ISIS doesn’t attract just high school dropouts and pot-smoking knuckleheads. Omar Jamal, a longtime Somali community activist based in the Twin Cities, told me that while the Islamic State does indeed target the “confused, lost-identity kids” and high school dropout types, he had come to realize that “Even an ‘A’ student in universities and colleges is . . . vulnerable to [ISIS’s] powerful propaganda machine. . . . It has been
very successful—kids are responding to it. . . . The attraction is a very strict, ideological-driven message and indoctrination process. Kids are led to believe they are part of a bigger mission, something much bigger than them. They feel grandiose.”
¹⁴

Department of Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson paid a visit to Little Mogadishu in November 2014, meeting with local and state law enforcement and community leaders to devise strategies to combat “violent extremism” among Twin Cities residents.
¹⁵
Unfortunately, branding the problem of Islamic terrorism with the vague, evasive label of “violent extremism,” is getting off on the wrong foot. To be crystal clear: the root cause of the virtual terror pipeline from Minnesota to the Islamic State is a powerful, well-defined Islamic jihadist ideology that, as we’ll see throughout this book, resonates among a significant number of Muslims of all races, nationalities, education levels, and socio-economic backgrounds.

ISIS’s influence in the United States can be felt not only among the Somali communities of the Twin Cities, or in the “lone wolf” terrorist attacks it has inspired in places such as Oklahoma and New York City, but among radicalized young Muslims across the country, all interconnected by a manic ISIS social media campaign for which the group and its supporters blast out some ninety tweets per minute.
¹⁶

Twitter is only one means by which ISIS reaches an English-speaking American audience with its message. The crown jewels of its multimedia onslaught are its propaganda videos, which feature ultra-slick production values reminiscent of a Hollywood action flick.

One ISIS video released in November 2014—featuring the gruesome beheadings of American aid worker Peter Kassig and twenty-two captured Syrian soldiers—had an estimated equipment cost of $200,000, used multiple takes, and took between four and six hours to film.
¹⁷
Needless to say, the days of Osama bin Laden staring into a single camera and droning on in Arabic for hours are long gone. ISIS has singlehandedly revolutionized jihadi multimedia in an ambitious effort to appeal to Western Muslims—the same American and European recruits that
reportedly crave Snickers, Pringles, and Red Bulls upon their arrival to the rugged Islamic State.
¹⁸

Take, for instance, ISIS’s magnum opus, a graphic, fifty-five-minute documentary entitled
Flames of War
that debuted on jihadi websites in September 2014. The film features an ISIS fighter speaking in American-accented English. In one scene, he presides over captured Syrian soldiers as they dig their own graves. As Ryan Mauro of the Clarion Project describes,

          
The film utilizes romantic imagery carefully crafted to appeal to dissatisfied and alienated young men, replete with explosions, tanks and self-described
mujahedeen
winning battles. Anti-American rhetoric provides the voice-over to stop motion and slow motion action sequences. The use of special effects such as bullet-time is interspersed with newsreel footage.

                
This up-to-date, sophisticated cinematography combined with the bloodthirsty message makes the film
Flames of War
reminiscent of Hitler propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film
Triumph of the Will
.
¹⁹

The decision to make an American the face of a high-profile project such as
Flames of War
was a stroke of strategic brilliance by ISIS that surely did not go unnoticed in the jihadi underground of the United States. The message of the film is unmistakable:
Our movement knows no racial, ethnic, or national boundaries. It does not matter where you are from or what language you speak. Unlike America, the Islamic State does not discriminate. My American brothers, you, too, can rise in the ranks, slaughter the unbelievers and pagans, avenge Islam, and be among the founding fathers of a new caliphate that will one day rule the world. You will become legend. Join us.

ISIS really does know no boundaries. One of the most influential “spiritual authorities” inspiring ISIS fighters is based not in Raqqa or Fallujah
but in the midwestern United States. According to a study by the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, some 60 percent of foreign fighters in Syria follow a Dearborn, Michigan–based imam named Sheikh Ahmad Musa Jibril on Twitter.
²⁰
The report found that Jibril is playing a very subtle game. He “does not openly incite his followers to violence nor does he explicitly encourage them to join the Syrian jihad. Instead, he adopts the role of a cheerleader: supporting the principles of armed opposition to [Syrian dictator Bashar al-] Assad, often in highly emotive terms, while employing extremely charged religious or sectarian idioms.”

At the time of this writing, Jibril, who is in his early forties, had upwards of 245,000 likes on Facebook and over 26,000 followers on Twitter. He has “spent six years in federal prison for crimes including money laundering, tax evasion and trying to bribe a juror” and was reportedly banned from one Michigan mosque for “urging his followers to kill non-Muslims.”
²¹
Upon his release from prison in 2012, Jibril quickly became a favorite among young Western jihadis and has even interacted directly with foreign fighters in Syria via Twitter.
²²

U.S. intelligence agencies are undoubtedly aware of Jibril’s influence. He’s subject to restrictive bail conditions that limit his movements, but he remains a free man, reportedly living in his father’s Dearborn bungalow, in the shadow of Detroit.
²³
Jibril’s output on social media has dipped with increased scrutiny of his activities, but other American citizens are eager to spread the ISIS message.

Consider the case of a twenty-nine-year-old single mother named Heather Coffman. Coffman, who lived with her parents and seven-year-old son in rural Henrico County, Virginia, was arrested by federal agents in November 2014 and charged with making false statements to the FBI about her connections to ISIS. According to an FBI affidavit, she posted pro-ISIS material on Facebook under various accounts and tried to help an undercover FBI agent facilitate a fictional Islamist sympathizer’s travel to the Islamic State.
²⁴

If you’re surprised that a single mom living with her parents in rural Virginia would convert to Islam and enter the dark world of ISIS, don’t be. As we’ll see in
chapter four
, the ideology and triumphs of the fledgling Islamic State have resonated with a host of troubled men and women throughout America who are not repelled by, but drawn to, its gleeful sadism and massive success. ISIS is not just a movement—it is an event.

In just a few years of existence, ISIS has upended the geography of the Middle East, drawn America back into the region, and quite possibly changed the course of world history in the process. It is a growing global phenomenon that profoundly threatens America from within and without.

And it is just getting started.

CHAPTER ONE

THE CALIPHATE RETURNS

“WE’RE TALKING ABOUT EGYPT TODAY BUT IN A FEW MONTHS,
everybody will be talking about Iraq. Trust me.”

It was mid-August 2013, and as we chatted in the green room of Fox News Channel’s Washington, D.C., bureau, a friend who is a decorated U.S. military veteran and had spent significant time in Iraq throughout that year was providing an ominous glimpse of things to come.

“Iraq is out of control right now and no one is even paying attention,” he lamented. “We left, but the jihadists didn’t.”

At the time of our conversation, the major story in the Middle East was the second Egyptian revolution and the demise of Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood regime. Iraq had largely disappeared from the headlines despite a horrific wave of violence that commenced practically from the moment U.S. forces withdrew in December 2011. Most of the bloodshed was carried out by an ultra-violent terror group called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria), otherwise known as ISIS, that
would soon—through an unprecedented campaign of conquest and carnage—make Iraq the biggest story in the world once again, just as my friend was predicting.

ISIS, or the Islamic State, is more than just a terrorist organization. It is a fully fledged terrorist army boasting some thirty-five thousand battle-hardened jihadists
¹
and controlling roughly thirty-five thousand square miles of territory across vast swaths of Syria and Iraq, smack dab in the middle of the Middle East.
²
To put it in perspective, that’s an area that’s been described as roughly the size of Jordan (or the state of Indiana). It is home to some 8 million unfortunate souls living under ISIS’s sadistic rule.
³

ISIS and its followers are adherents of Jihadist-Salafism, the most extreme and violent interpretation of Islam—and the ideology of choice for Sunni Islamic terrorists. Salafi jihadists despise the West, modeling themselves after Islam’s prophet Mohammed and his earliest followers in the seventh-century Arabian desert. In the modern era, this worldview has translated into the merciless application of Islamic sharia law in all areas under ISIS control. As we’ll examine in
chapter two
, public beheadings, amputations, crucifixions, sexual slavery, and slave-trading are all normal features of life in the Islamic State caliphate. Religious minorities and women have particularly precarious positions in ISIS’s sharia society; they’re subjected to mass persecution and second-class-citizen status in places such as Raqqa, Syria—the de facto capital of the Islamic State.

To say that ISIS’s emergence has captured the attention of Islamists worldwide would be an understatement. The prospect of a reborn Islamic superpower dominating the world stage has loomed large in the imaginations of Muslim radicals for almost a century; ever since the last caliphate came to an end in 1924 after the collapse of the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire, Islamists great and small have pined for its return.

So, needless to say, when ISIS announced the reestablishment of the caliphate, or Islamic State, on June 29, 2014, the news sent shockwaves throughout the Muslim world. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared the
caliph,
or political and spiritual leader of all Muslims worldwide, and demanded their allegiance—a move that was met with disapproval in many Islamic corners (in many cases not out of opposition to a caliphate, but to ISIS’s presuming to declare and claiming to lead it) but embraced in others.