ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (5 page)

ISIS: THE GENESIS

With apologies to the Obama administration, ISIS did not appear out of thin air one balmy day in Mosul in June 2014. By then, the roots of the Islamic State already stretched back more than a decade. They were laid down by a former street thug and ex-con who has been described as “barely literate.”
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Abu Musab al-Zarqawi followed a long, twisted, and bloody road from petty criminal to founding father of the world’s most successful jihadist terror organization. By the time he was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in 2006, al-Zarqawi had become one of the world’s most wanted men and the face of the Sunni jihadist insurgency against Coalition forces. Unfortunately, his dark vision for the Middle East would outlive him and eventually change the face of the entire region. Al-Zarqawi is revered by ISIS’s leadership and in its official publications today. ISIS youth groups are nicknamed “al-Zarqawi’s [lion] cubs,” and
an Islamic State training base in Raqqa is also named after the terror kingpin.
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In 1989, al-Zarqawi abandoned a shiftless life of petty crime, leaving his hometown of Zarqa, Jordan, and joining the jihad in Afghanistan. He returned to Jordan in 1993 as a battle-tested jihadist zealot and ended up serving six years in prison for plotting terror attacks on Jordanian soil. After being released from prison, al-Zarqawi eventually made his way back to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden provided him with seed money to set up a terrorist training camp in the city of Herat, near the Iranian border. Despite this early financial assistance, bin Laden and al-Zarqawi reportedly had a contentious relationship, with al-Zarqawi refusing several times to give
bayat,
or a vow of allegiance, to the al Qaeda mastermind.
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Following the 9/11 attacks, al-Zarqawi made his way into Iran and bounced between there and the Kurdish regions of Iraq, building up his terror network, before setting up shop in Iraq for good in 2003, a few months after the U.S. invasion, and quickly becoming a key figure in the burgeoning insurgency against Coalition forces.

In 2004, al-Zarqawi finally pledged bayat to bin Laden and founded al Qaeda in Iraq (also known as al Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers)—the organization that would eventually become known as ISIS. Al-Zarqawi’s group went on to spearhead a wave of terror and extreme brutality throughout Iraq that included the same kind of tactics that are ISIS staples today: beheadings, suicide bombings, torture, executions, and the rabid targeting of Shiites, whom al-Zarqawi considered apostates and hated with a passion. In the process of inflicting unspeakable cruelty upon Iraqis of all backgrounds, al-Zarqawi angered al Qaeda’s core leadership (much as ISIS has done today, as we’ll see shortly) who realized that his frequent attacks against Shia Muslims and their mosques were turning Muslim opinion against al Qaeda.
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After al-Zarqawi’s death, al Qaeda in Iraq became part of an umbrella organization of Sunni terrorist groups called the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).
They continued al-Zarqawi’s wave of terror, particularly in western Iraq’s Anbar province (an ISIS stronghold once again today), until the American military, working with local Sunni tribes, smashed ISI in a campaign that became known as “The Surge.” ISI was further weakened in 2010 when Iraqi security forces, aided by U.S. forces, killed two of its top leaders, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. Ironically enough, their deaths elevated the man who would go on to become the caliph of the Islamic State.

THE RISE OF ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI

Bookish. Quiet. Bespectacled. Pious. A fine soccer player. A family man.

Judging by the accounts of those who knew him before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the bloodthirsty fanatic who would one day declare himself leader of the world’s Muslims, become the most wanted jihadist on the planet, and direct the most powerful, vicious terrorist organization in memory was, in a word, unimpressive. Little is known of the background of ISIS leader—and self-declared caliph—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (a.k.a. “Abu Du’a”) but the scant information that is available about his early days does not suggest a budding terrorist mastermind.

Reportedly born in 1971 and raised just north of Baghdad in the town of Samarra in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, al-Baghdadi (real name: Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarra) was an introverted loner as a child. Described as “studious, pious and calm,” he was focused on Islam and soccer, where he excelled playing for a team sponsored by his local mosque.
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At the age of eighteen, al-Baghdadi moved to the Iraqi capital to study Islam, eventually earning a Ph.D. in sharia law from Baghdad’s Islamic University. For a decade, he lived among both Sunnis and Shias in the run-down neighborhood of Tobchi on the western edge of the city. He married, had children, and apparently showed no overt signs of rabid extremism, magnetic charisma, or bold leadership.
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Perhaps al-Baghdadi was, as one former acquaintance mused, “a quiet planner” who was merely waiting for the right moment to burst onto the world stage and implement a carefully crafted ideology that would enslave millions. He helped organize a jihadist group called “Jeish Ahl al-Sunnah al-Jamaah” following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an act that led to his detainment by American forces and imprisonment at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.
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Some believe he was “radicalised by jihadists” from al Qaeda while at Camp Bucca, although he seems already to have been well on his way down the jihadist path at the time of his arrest.
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Accounts of al-Baghdadi’s time at the U.S.-run prison—which was home to some twenty-four thousand inmates and has been likened to “a summer camp for ambitious terrorists”—vary. It’s not clear even which years he was imprisoned there.
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Some say he arrived at Camp Bucca in 2004, others say 2005. Was he released in late 2004? 2006? 2009? Like everything surrounding al-Baghdadi, it seems no one can say for certain. One associate, a man calling himself Abu Ahmed who met al-Baghdadi at Camp Bucca and later joined him in ISIS, has described the future caliph as “someone important” who had “a charisma,” but added that, “there were others who were more important. I honestly did not think [al-Baghdadi] would get this far.” Still, Abu Ahmed says, he “got a feeling from [al-Baghdadi] that he was hiding something inside, a darkness that he did not want to show other people. He was the opposite of other princes who were far easier to deal with. He was remote, far from us all.”
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Al-Baghdadi may have provided a chilling glimpse of his future plans when, deemed no longer a threat, he was released from Camp Bucca. Upon his departure, he told a group of U.S. troops, “I’ll see you in New York”:

          
“He knew we were from New York, and he knew he was going to get out,” said Col. Kenneth King, who oversaw the former detention facility near the Kuwaiti border.

                
King told Fox News Channel that he escorted al-Baghdadi on a flight to Baghdad, where the handover took place. Al-Baghdadi was ultimately released by Iraqi government officials.

                
“Their decision to let him go was personally disappointing,” King said. “But I have to respect the decisions of a sovereign government.”

                
In another interview with
The Daily Beast,
King said he took al-Baghdadi’s words as something of a joke—“like, ‘This is no big thing. I’ll see you on the block.’”

                
But al-Baghdadi didn’t seem like the type who’d end up leading an insurgency that threatens to topple Iraq’s government.

                
“I’m not surprised that it was someone who spent time in Bucca, but I’m a little surprised it was him,” King said. “He was a bad dude, but he wasn’t the worst of the worst.”
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Al-Baghdadi, true to form, appears to have been intentionally inconspicuous during his time at Camp Bucca. Today, although he is arguably the world’s most infamous terrorist, he continues to shroud himself in mystery like a jihadi Keyser Söze. Before he emerged in a Mosul mosque on July 5, 2014, clad in black turban and black robes, and declared himself caliph, there were only two grainy photographs of him known to exist. Dubbed “the invisible sheikh,” he almost never appears on video. During meetings with ISIS commanders, he reportedly wears a mask.
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One Raqqa man who was present at a mosque where al-Baghdadi made a rare public appearance described the scene:

          
“The minute he entered, the mobile coverage disappeared,” says a 29-year-old resident of Raqqa in Syria—who asked to be identified only as Abu Ali—recalling the flawless security on one occasion when al-Baghdadi entered a mosque. “Armed guards closed the area. The women were sent upstairs to the women’s
section to pray. Everyone was warned not to take photos or videos. It was the most nerve-racking atmosphere.

                
“What made it [more nerve-racking] is that when Baghdadi finally showed up, wearing black, head to toe, the guards started shouting, ‘Allah akbar! Allah akbar!’ [God is great.] This made us even more scared,” says Ali. “The guards then forced us to swear allegiance to him. Even after Baghdadi left, none of us were allowed to leave the mosque for another 30 minutes.”
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The U.S. State Department has placed a $10 million bounty on al-Baghdadi’s head. Not surprisingly, he moves around often—likely between Raqqa and Mosul.
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In early November 2014, Iraqi officials claimed that al-Baghdadi had been injured in an airstrike in Iraq, but a few days later, he released an audiotape mocking the United States, calling for attacks on Saudi Arabia, and encouraging ISIS’s supporters to “Erupt volcanoes of jihad everywhere” and “Light the Earth with fire.”
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It appeared the caliph was very much alive and kicking, to the delight of his followers worldwide. It is unclear whether ISIS has a suitably charismatic successor in the wings capable of galvanizing support should al-Baghdadi be killed. Adding to al-Baghdadi’s mystique is his claim to be a direct descendant of Islam’s prophet Mohammed (a claim made, no doubt, to bolster his credentials as caliph).

Al-Baghdadi’s meteoric rise began in 2010, after his stint at Camp Bucca, when he assumed leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq and proceeded to revive an organization—the former al Qaeda in Iraq—that had been pulverized by the U.S. military. Al-Baghdadi’s moment had finally arrived, and he would soon give new meaning to the term “silent but deadly.” When the last U.S. troops departed Iraq in December 2011, the path was cleared—as the Obama administration had been warned it would be—for al-Baghdadi to “rebuild [ISI] and gather strength to renew its terrorist campaign against the Shi’ite population and the central Iraqi
government.”
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In an ominous sign of things to come, some 434 people, mostly Shiites, were killed in terror attacks across Iraq in the first month after U.S. forces withdrew.
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Things would only get worse:

          
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Under al-Baghdadi’s direction, ISI embarked on a wave of suicide bombings throughout Iraq in 2012 and 2013. The effects were immediately apparent: three thousand people were killed in suicide bombings between September and December of 2013 alone; altogether there were ninety-eight suicide bombings that year.
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In the meantime, ISI initiated a year-long campaign called “Breaking the Walls” that saw it carry out a number of jailbreaks, freeing countless hardened al Qaeda operatives who would replenish ISI’s ranks—including five hundred inmates from Abu Ghraib prison in July 2013.
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The prison breaks coincided with yet another coordinated campaign engineered by al-Baghdadi, dubbed “Soldiers’ Harvest,” in which ISI targeted members of the Iraqi security forces for assassination. According to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, “In addition to demolitions of soldiers’ homes, the first six months of ‘Soldiers Harvest’ witnessed a sharp 150% increase in the number of sophisticated close quarters assassinations of troops manning checkpoints and effective under-vehicle improvised explosive device (IED) attacks on key leaders.”
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The stunning resurgence of the Islamic State of Iraq, meticulously mapped out by al-Baghdadi (who has gained a reputation as a skilled military tactician) and the ISI brain trust (which included former high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime intimately familiar with every corner of Iraq), was in full swing. At the same time, al-Baghdadi’s rapidly growing organization was also becoming much
better acquainted with Iraq’s next-door neighbor. Soon, ISI’s foray into Syria would not only dramatically expand ISI; it would also transform the organization into a transnational movement with a new name that would become synonymous with terrorist mayhem: the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria), better known as ISIS.

THE CALIPHATE COMETH

Even by the gruesome standards of the Middle East, the numbers are staggering.

As of January 2015, the Syrian Civil War had already claimed the lives of over two hundred thousand people in under four years. The dead included some sixty-three thousand civilians, including more than ten thousand children, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
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At the same time, millions of Syrian refugees have fled the fighting, flooding into Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq and creating a massive humanitarian crisis. In short, the Syrian conflict is a hellish, unmitigated disaster on every level, with no end in sight. And ISIS could not be happier.