ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (4 page)

                
Pictures of grinning Islamist warriors cruising in U.S. Humvees bedecked with white-on-black militant flags flooded the Internet and became the signature image of the ISIS rampage.
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So much for the years of training and equipment and $25 billion in aid that the U.S. has invested in the Iraqi military, whose brave warriors ran for the hills at the first sight of a jihadi-filled pickup truck, all but gift-wrapping loads of U.S. military hardware for ISIS. The effects of this shameful retreat were profound and quickly reverberated elsewhere in Iraq. One senior Kurdish official lamented that ISIS, “took the weapons stores of the 2nd and 3rd [Iraqi army] divisions in Mosul, the 4th division in Salah al Din, the 12th division in the areas near Kirkuk, and another division in Diyala. . . . We’re talking about armaments for 200,000 soldiers, all from the Americans.”
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ISIS’s seizure of a Saddam Hussein–era chemical weapons depot outside Baghdad in June 2014 may have given it access to rockets filled with sarin gas,
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Obama administration officials downplayed the incident and said that any chemical materials still stored at the facility were likely unusable.
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But then reports began flooding in about ISIS using chemical weapons—in the form of chlorine gas—against Iraqi security forces.
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Similarly, news that ISIS stole eighty-eight pounds of uranium from Mosul University, also in June, was essentially dismissed by the UN’s nuclear agency, which branded the materials “low-grade” and not “high risk”
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. . . until an alleged ISIS weapons maker referring to himself as Muslim al-Britani began boasting on Twitter that “A Radioactive Device has entered somewhere in Europe” and that ISIS was in possession of a dirty bomb thanks to uranium taken from—you guessed it—Mosul University in June 2014.
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The same uranium the UN dismissed as low risk.

Perhaps al-Britani was lying. And perhaps the uranium does indeed pose no threat. Whatever the case, the fact that ISIS—an organization that regularly engages in mass executions and has already attempted genocide against Iraqi Christians and Yazidis—is actively working to procure weapons of mass destruction is anything but a low risk scenario.

Exhibit A: Syria. Although the Assad regime, under pressure from the United States, has supposedly destroyed all of its “declared” chemical arsenal, Western intelligence officials are concerned that Assad still has a secret stash of “undeclared” chemical weapons, not to mention a biological weapons program.
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The ISIS jihadists who are continuing their advance in Syria would no doubt love to get their hands on these chemical and biological agents and do horrible things with them.

In the meantime, ISIS has reportedly developed its own makeshift biological weapon in the form of “scorpion bombs.” According to the
Daily Mail,
“Militants fighting for the Islamic State in Iraq have unveiled . . . bombs containing hundreds of live scorpions designed to spread fear among their enemies. Canisters packed with poisonous varieties of scorpion are being blasted into towns and villages, which explode on impact—scattering the scorpions and causing panic among the innocent local population.”
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Whether through beheadings, torture, mass rape, or scorpions, ISIS seems prepared to make infidels’ worst nightmares come true—and to relish every minute of it.

So how did we get here? After all, a global movement that controls thirty-five thousand square miles of prime Middle Eastern real estate, rakes in up to $3 million per day in revenue (much of it in the illicit oil trade), draws thousands of Westerners to its ranks, beheads American citizens, and pulls the United States back into the world’s most tumultuous region
couldn’t have just appeared overnight—although, if you were listening to the Obama administration from 2012 through the first half of 2014, you’d be forgiven for thinking so.

Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, President Obama continually trumpeted the death of Osama bin Laden while proclaiming that al Qaeda was “on the run,” and “on the path to defeat”—“decimated,” as the president asserted on the campaign trail, and “on its heels.”
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Even after al Qaeda–linked terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, killing four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Obama doggedly stuck to his narrative that al Qaeda was in its death throes.

While the president was busy scoring political points and willfully misleading the American people about the nature of the Islamic terror threat, al Qaeda was not contracting but expanding—to the point where AQ and its affiliates and allies cover more geographical ground today than they did on 9/11: from the tribal regions of Pakistan to Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya, Sinai, Europe, India, and the Sahara desert region covering northern Mali and southern Algeria. Yes, jihadist organizations like al Qaeda are “on the run” indeed—
overrunning
large areas of the Muslim world.

None more so than ISIS. When ISIS roared into the city of Fallujah, in western Iraq, in January 2014 and declared it part of an Islamic State, you’d think that would have been a massive wake-up call for the Obama administration. Not only does Fallujah lie just forty-five miles from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. In 2004 U.S. forces had reclaimed the city, which had become the nerve center of an al Qaeda–led insurgency, after two hellacious battles that were the bloodiest—and costliest—of the entire Iraq War. Over one hundred American troops were killed and hundreds more wounded in brutal building-to-building fighting against Sunni terrorists. One can only imagine the agony that veterans of the Fallujah campaigns must have felt as they watched ISIS raise its black banner above a city they had fought
so valiantly to liberate just a few years earlier. Talk about a bitter pill to swallow. President Obama, however, seemed completely unfazed.

In an interview with the
New Yorker
magazine just a few days after ISIS had seized Fallujah in a jihadist takeover rife with strategic and symbolic significance, the president dismissed the growing strength of al Qaeda affiliates and offshoots such as, well, ISIS:

          
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.

                
“Let’s just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”
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Obamaspeak translation:
The only jihadists that matter are al Qaeda’s core leaders in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Our war is against them and them only and we’re literally droning them to death. ISIS and its ilk are smalltime, provincial hacks—JV!—and tough break and all, but Fallujah was an Islamist hotbed that was bound to go over to the dark side anyway. Above all, none of this poses any threat to the United States. As I have told you all again and again, Osama bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is on the path to defeat. Period. You guys can trust me. Now let’s go play some golf.

The president had a vested interest in downplaying ISIS’s gains in Iraq. Throughout the 2008 campaign and during his first term in office, he had promised to end the unpopular war in Iraq and bring the troops home. It was a cornerstone of his foreign policy—indeed, during his 2012 reelection campaign, he trumpeted the fact that he had “ended” American involvement in Iraq (except, as we’ll see, al Qaeda apparently didn’t get the memo).

Against the advice of his top commander on the ground, General Lloyd J. Austin III (who recommended keeping twenty-four thousand U.S. troops in Iraq), and other top military officials, President Obama had authorized the complete withdrawal of American troops from the country.
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In December 2011, as the last U.S. troops were departing Iraq, America’s commander in chief gave a speech at Fort Bragg declaring, “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We’re building a new partnership between our nations. And we are ending a war not with a final battle, but with a final march toward home.”
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Got that? Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq was
over.
El fin. Case closed. Not because the jihadists had conceded defeat in their quest to turn Iraq into an Islamic State, or had abandoned terrorism against U.S. and Iraqi interests. Far from it. No, the war in Iraq was ended because President Obama said so. Same with al Qaeda being “on the path to defeat”—we had the president’s word for it. In the president’s Middle East and national security playbook, if you repeat a mantra often enough and wish hard enough for it to become true, it does. Or not.

By the time ISIS was rampaging through Mosul in June 2014—five months after the president’s “JV” quip—it was clear that someone in the White House had some serious explaining to do. Although the president later laid the blame at the feet of the U.S. intelligence community—saying it had “underestimated what had been taking place in Syria” with ISIS prior to its foray into Mosul—ABC News reported that, in fact, “for nearly a year, senior officials in the U.S. government had been warning about the
alarming rise of ISIS . . . and the inability of the Iraqi government to confront the threat.” More than once:

          
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In testimony before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in November 2013, Brett McGurk, deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, had stated bluntly, “There is no question that [ISIS] is growing roots in Syria and in Iraq.” McGurk “cited the group’s alarming campaign of suicide bombings, its growing financial resources and its expanding safe haven in Syria.”
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Then in January 2014 the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Robert Beecroft, had called the situation in Iraq “very precarious” following ISIS’s seizure of Fallujah and part of the city of Ramadi, warning that, “a misstep anywhere could set off a larger conflict in the country.”
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Perhaps most damning to the Obama administration’s strategy of feigning shock and then throwing the intel community under the bus in the wake of the Mosul debacle was testimony from the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, in February 2014. Flynn, quite presciently, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “[ISIS] probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group’s ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”
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Interestingly enough, President Obama’s own handpicked CIA director, John Brennan, had made a similar assessment earlier that same month, testifying before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that al Qaeda camps in Syria and Iraq posed a threat to the United States.
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Not bad for a JV team.

The Obama White House was surely aware of Brennan’s assessments, Flynn’s testimony, and similar dire warnings by Beecroft, McGurk, and other top experts about the rise of ISIS in the months prior to the fall of Mosul. According to James Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012, the Obama administration, “not only was warned by everybody back in January [following ISIS’s invasion of Fallujah], it actually announced it was going to intensify its support against ISIS with the Iraqi armed forces. And it did almost nothing.”
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Jeffrey has said that he believed keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011 was “critical.”
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He, like other U.S. diplomatic and military officials who had spent significant time in Iraq and knew the dynamics of the country, realized that a complete U.S. withdrawal would leave a vacuum that would be filled by very bad actors. That much was clear as far back as 2003, after the American ouster of Saddam Hussein, as the organization that would one day become known as ISIS first began making its presence felt in Iraq—and the region—in a major way.