ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (20 page)

ISIS even has its own signature hand gesture that members flash incessantly for the cameras: a single index finger, raised in the air. Predictably, the raised index finger salute has caught on among ISIS sympathizers around the world—and as you might expect, it’s more than just the jihadi version of a gang sign:

          
When ISIS militants hold up a single index finger on their right hands, they are alluding to the tawhid, the belief in the oneness of God and a key component of the Muslim religion. The tawhid comprises the first half of the shahada, which is an affirmation of faith, one of the five pillars of Islam, and a component of daily prayers: “There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” . . . But for ISIS, the symbol is more sinister than a mere declaration of monotheistic beliefs. As Salafi jihadists, members of the group adhere to a fundamentalist interpretation of tawhid that rejects non-fundamentalist regimes as idolatrous. In other words, the concept of tawhid is central to ISIS’ violent and uncompromising posture toward its opponents, both in the Middle East and in the West. When ISIS militants display the sign, to one another or to a photographer, they are actively reaffirming their dedication to that ideology, whose underlying principle demands the destruction of the West. . . . The gesture is equally important for what it means to Westerners, most of whom cannot read Arabic. By raising their index fingers, militants send an easy-to-understand message of the group’s goals of theological supremacy and military hegemony. When potential ISIS recruits in London, New York, or Sydney see the symbol on Twitter, they can grasp the scale of ISIS’ ambitions and its underlying aims. At
some visceral level, less-radicalized viewers understand that it means dominance.
¹⁷

And if Western recruits would like to “flash their colors” by rocking a black ISIS hoodie or T-shirt, they can find plenty of them sold online, featuring various Islamic State logos and images.
¹⁸
For ISIS sympathizers, the options to latch on to jihadi cool are limitless. Ryan Mauro, a national security analyst with the Clarion Project who closely monitors ISIS’s online activity, explains the group’s appeal to young radicals weaned on Western culture:

          
The personality profiles of ISIS supporters greatly differ from Al-Qaeda-types. You could never envision Bin Laden or Zawahiri dropping the f-bomb in a rap music video, making a crude joke, talking about videogames and complaining about not having enough Krispy Kremes. This is partially an outreach effort; ISIS wants to reach the young and show that you can enjoy parts of Western culture and still be a jihadist. But this isn’t just an outreach effort. ISIS supporters genuinely enjoy American entertainment and have reconciled that with their anti-American ideology.
¹⁹

The
New York Post
recounted how an ISIS supporter lamented the death of actor/comedian Robin Williams in August 2014:

          
Even jihadist militants took a break from murder and mayhem to mourn Robin Williams.

                
A 19-year-old self-proclaimed Islamic State supporter who goes by
@mujahid4life
on Twitter professed his sadness about Williams’ death.

                
“#RobinWilliams is dead? Weird. Grew up watching his movies,” the poster, who calls himself Abdullah and is pictured on Twitter dressed in mujahideen garb, tweeted Monday.

                
“Shame. I liked Jumanji,” responded
@Ibn_Fulaan
, a London-based Islamic State sympathizer. “I had it on video lol.”

                
“Good movie. Loved it as a kid,” Abdullah added. “‘Juman-jihadi’? It’s kinda catchy.”

When other Twitter users started asking him about his love of Western films after the Williams tweet, Abdullah complained that people seems to think he grew up “in a mud hut.” And

          
After numerous media outlets reached out to him, Abdullah became concerned that his love for Robin Williams would overpower his devotion to the Islamic State.

                
“Now I’m actually worried that people will start to follow me because they wanna hear about my favorite movies instead of reporting jihad.”
²⁰

ISIS-loving jihadists engaging in pop culture patter—and gaining a curious, and even enthusiastic audience—are an unfortunate byproduct of a culture saturated with moral relativism and fascinated with the macabre.
Sure, ISIS does some things that are unadvisable and probably even wrong. But hey, who am I to tell them how to practice their religion? To each his own. Besides, other than all the jihad stuff, they seem like pretty normal dudes—watching Robin Williams flicks, listening to hip-hop . . . are we really so different? I’m actually kind of intrigued. What makes these guys tick?

Doubt that ISIS is catching on? At least twenty-eight thousand pro-ISIS Twitter accounts were created in the two weeks following James Foley’s beheading. In addition, some 10 percent of all tweets posted in the twenty-four hours after the beheading of Steven Sotloff characterized his murder positively.
²¹
Twitter’s efforts to shut down these types of accounts—which frequently show horrific imagery of ISIS atrocities in Syria and Iraq—have been met with threats from supporters of the Islamic State, including one who called for the assassination of Twitter employees.
²²

The Islamic State’s media savvy extends far beyond its veritable Twitter addiction and into the realm of video production. Jihadi videos, including those featuring beheadings, are certainly nothing new. In 2004, for instance, ISIS’s predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, released videos showing its decapitations of American contractor Nicholas Berg and British contractor Ken Bigley. But while Foley and Sotloff met the same fate as Berg and Bigley and wore similar orange jumpsuits in their respective videos, the difference in production values and professionalism was striking:

          
. . . while Bigley and Berg’s murder videos involved grainy and chaotic camcorder footage, Foley’s differs from predecessors due to its comparatively high production values. The makers of . . . [the] video used multiple cameras, and professional microphones.

                
They worked competently with graphics and visual effects, and used editing tools to intersperse film of Foley with video of rolling news footage.

                
While Bigley and Berg’s videos were produced in Arabic, Foley’s was in English, with subtitles. This should perhaps not come as a surprise: the Islamic State is now very well funded, due to its control of oil fields in Iraq and Syria (so it can afford expensive kit). It boasts an estimated 2,000 recruits from Europe, many of whom are well-educated, with backgrounds in IT or video production.
²³

ISIS’s fifty-five-minute
Flames of War
propaganda video featured special effects, slow-motion explosions, and all the trappings of a Hollywood action flick (including a teaser trailer posted online in the days before its release). In short, ISIS’s ghoulish productions far surpass anything that has come before them in the jihadi video category, making them all the more appealing to a young Western audience weaned on 3-D, HD, and slickly made, graphic horror flicks:

          
In the evolution of modern jihadist propaganda, Bin Laden, addressing a single static camera with long-winded rhetoric in highly formal Arabic, represented the first generation. (His videos had to be smuggled to Al Jazeera or another television network to be aired.) The most prominent figure of the second generation was the YouTube star Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, who addressed Westerners in colloquial English, had a blog and Facebook page and helped produce a full-color, English-language magazine called
Inspire
.
²⁴

ISIS is the third generation—tech-savvy jihad on steroids—to the point that its video editors have even doctored footage of President Obama to make him appear older, washed out, and haggard. According to the
Telegraph,
in the Steven Sotloff beheading video, which featured a clip of the American president speaking at a podium, “Mr. Obama’s blue jacket is made to appear a funereal black. His strands of grey hair are picked up and exaggerated. The editor has also caused an interlacing effect of black lines to run across the president’s white shirt. For good measure, he has carefully stretched the screen lengthways in order to make Mr. Obama appear thin and gaunt.”
²⁵

These subtle editing tweaks—clearly not the work of a novice—achieve the desired propaganda effect: an impression that the Islamic State has America on its heels, and Obama is beleaguered (the president’s painful, “no strategy” dithering during ISIS’s rapid rise in the summer of 2014 did nothing to dispel that impression). With America on the decline and the caliphate ascendant, why not hop on board the ISIS express and join the winning team? Heck, adopt the right look and just the right amount of demonic viciousness, and you may even become famous. As we’ll see shortly, the exploits of individual ISIS fighters have enabled them to achieve rock star status among the global jihadist set. But before we meet a few of them, let’s go inside the world of the alleged American mastermind behind ISIS’s sophisticated multimedia offensive.

THE COMPUTER GEEK

“And so we have a huge common interest in dealing with this issue of poverty, which in many cases is the root cause of terrorism . . . .”

That was Secretary of State John Kerry in January 2014, speaking after a meeting at the Vatican. His poverty-causes-terrorism comments mirrored similar remarks he had made a few months before about providing “economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk” in order to combat terrorist recruitment.
²⁶
Kerry reiterated those thoughts once again in September 2014, telling a global development forum, “[Jihadists] don’t have a plan to create jobs or deliver opportunity. They don’t have any of those things that people most want. But they do have a strategy to capitalize on the grievances of those who feel under-represented and left behind.”
²⁷

Secretary Kerry, meet Ahmad Abousamra.

The alleged brain behind ISIS’s cutting-edge social media and video operation was not raised in a dilapidated Afghan hut or a squalid Baghdad slum. Instead, Abousamra, a dual Syrian-American citizen, was reared in leafy Stoughton, Massachusetts, a highly desirable Boston suburb that boasts no shortage of affluent professionals—including Abousamra’s own father, a leading endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Opportunities abounded for the younger Abousamra, who made the honor roll at a prestigious Catholic high school and later the Dean’s List at Northeastern University.
²⁸

Privileged, well-educated, and with a knack for computers, Abousambra, now in his early thirties, could have enjoyed a successful and lucrative career in the technology industry. Instead, in 2004, he chose to travel to Iraq in an attempt to join al Qaeda and kill U.S. troops. He did so not because of poverty—clearly—but because of jihadist ideology. The FBI believes Abousamra was self-radicalized with online resources and hooked up with another aspiring terrorist, fellow U.S. citizen Tarek Mahanna.
²⁹
The pair helped run al Qaeda in Iraq’s media operation until Mahanna was arrested on terrorism charges.
³⁰
He was convicted in 2012 and sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for supporting al Qaeda.
Mahanna, it should be mentioned, was a pharmacist from the Boston suburbs—again, hardly the desperate, uneducated street urchin that Secretary Kerry imagines as the face of global jihad.

As for Abousambra, he fled the U.S. for Syria in 2006 after being questioned by the FBI and is currently wanted by U.S. authorities. If Abousambra is indeed the driving force behind ISIS’s current multimedia blitz, he may have learned a few tricks of the trade from yet another American jihadist, Samir Khan. A Pakistani-American from Charlotte, North Carolina, Khan made his way to Yemen in 2009 and went on to head up the media wing of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He became editor and publisher of
Inspire
magazine, an online glossy geared toward young, English-speaking Muslims and including articles with charming titles like “How to Make A Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

Khan, who was killed in the same U.S. drone strike that took out American al Qaeda mouthpiece Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011, was young, clever, and plugged in to Western culture, qualities that made
Inspire
magazine a very effective propaganda tool. Yet as in the social media and video production realms, ISIS has once again outdone al Qaeda by producing its own online magazine—which Ahmad Abousambra ostensibly has a major hand in—called
Dabiq.

The title of a
New Republic
article comparing
Dabiq
and
Inspire
summarized the new publication accurately: “ISIS’s New Mag Looks like a New York Glossy—with Pictures of Mutilated Bodies.” According to the piece,
Dabiq
is the far superior product. “Al Qaeda is like AOL”—outdated, unhip—while “The Islamic State is Google” and has replaced al Qaeda as “the go-to organization for young jihadists”:

          
“Dabiq” refers to a small town near Aleppo where the prophet Muhammad foretold that Muslims and the West would clash before the apocalypse. It follows that much of
Dabiq
’s content focuses on a coming apocalypse, while pulling out the same glossy stops that one would expect from an American
magazine. . . . Al Qaeda isn’t selling the same vision. Articles in
Inspire
range from tutorials . . . to Q&As with prominent Al Qaeda members and denunciations of Western culture, but don’t call for the establishment of an Islamic State or elimination of all other religions.