ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (7 page)

ISIS’s takeover of the Mosul Dam in August 2014 was a prime example. The dam, described by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the most dangerous in the world, thanks mainly to its unstable foundation, is Iraq’s largest, “holding back 11 billion cubic meters of water and producing over 1,000 megawatts of electricity.” Seizing it gave ISIS control of “the water flowing into Baghdad and to the agrarian areas south of Baghdad,” putting the jihadists “in a position to impose a famine on the rest of Iraq” or to simply destroy the dam and flood areas as far south as Baghdad with a “60-ft. wave” that would leave hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in its wake and have far-reaching economic impacts (including skyrocketing oil and gas prices).
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Thankfully, Kurdish forces, backed by U.S. airstrikes, retook the dam later in August. But ISIS’s control of it, however brief, demonstrated the catastrophic potential of the Islamic State.

So did ISIS’s lightning advance into areas of northern Iraq that same month. ISIS conquered the town of Sinjar and surrounding villages, killing or capturing (and selling into slavery, as we’ll see shortly) thousands of members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority—an ancient sect that ISIS labels “devil worshippers.”
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At the same time, tens of thousands of survivors fled onto nearby Mount Sinjar, many with nothing but the clothes on their backs. ISIS surrounded the mountain with the intention of slaughtering the trapped Yazidis, who were stranded on the mountaintop in the sweltering summer heat with no food, water, or medical supplies. As dozens of elderly people and small children succumbed to exposure to the elements and died, the Yazidis were left with no options other than remain on the mountain and watch their family members die of thirst, or leave and meet a merciless fate at the hands of ISIS below.
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Meanwhile, ISIS routed outgunned Kurdish Peshmerga forces that had been defending Sinjar and moved closer to the city of Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq. The potential fall of Erbil—a prosperous hub of pro-American sentiment and home to a consulate where dozens of U.S. personnel are stationed—combined with the very
real prospect of a wholesale ethnic cleansing of Yazidis on Mount Sinjar, finally compelled President Obama to act. He ordered limited U.S. airstrikes against ISIS forces around Sinjar and Erbil and authorized humanitarian airdrops for Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar. The airstrikes had an effect, as up to twenty thousand Yazidis were able to flee the mountain and make their way to Kurdistan.
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Although President Obama declared the ISIS siege of Mount Sinjar broken following those initial airstrikes, at least seven thousand Yazidis remained trapped on the mountain for over four more months, until they were finally freed thanks to an offensive by Kurdish forces in December 2014.
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On August 19, 2014, shortly after the Sinjar siege unfolded, ISIS released a graphic propaganda video featuring a black-clad, masked butcher dubbed “Jihadi John” hacking off the head of captured American photojournalist James Foley. Two weeks later, ISIS released a similar video showing Jihadi John beheading another captured American journalist, Steven Sotloff. ISIS blamed its executions of the two men on U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Iraq.
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As of this writing, ISIS has also released videos of Jihadi John decapitating American aid worker Peter Kassig and two British citizens, David Haines and Alan Henning.

President Obama has had a typically confounding response to ISIS’s onslaught of beheadings, rapes, and torture. He—along with Secretary of State John Kerry and British Prime Minister David Cameron—has declared that ISIS is “not Islamic.”
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In other words, the self-described “Islamic State”—whose leaders quote copiously from Islamic texts and frequently cite Islamic history to justify their actions—is just a gang of miscreants who have completely twisted Islamic teachings.

Take beheadings, for instance. Following the release of an ISIS video showcasing the severed head of Peter Kassig in November 2014, President Obama declared that ISIS’s rampant beheadings, “represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith.”
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So Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, and Christians
would all be more likely to behead someone than Muslims, who, in the president’s view, apparently, are the “least” likely of all religions to engage in that sort of violence.
That’s right, you bigoted Islamophobes. Koran-and-hadith-compliant Muslims would never harm a hair on anyone’s head—because there is absolutely, positively nothing in Islamic texts that extols violence. Islam is an inherently peaceful religion that teaches only love and coexistence. Imam Obama hath spoken.

And it wasn’t his first fatwa. During his infamous Cairo speech in 2009, the president intoned that he considers it part of his “responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
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The Founding Fathers must have forgotten to write that one into the job description. They certainly would have never envisioned an American president saying, as President Obama did before the UN General Assembly in 2012, that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
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In the future, our Theologian in Chief may want to brush up on his Islamic history before playing armchair sheikh. As we learned in
chapter one
, previous Islamic caliphates were not established by jovial Muslim missionaries handing out tracts on street corners. Rather, Islam spread mainly by the sword, and its prophet, Mohammed, was not just a spiritual leader but also a military-political leader, conqueror, and warrior. This is all part of the historical record to which Muslims—moderate and extreme alike—will readily attest. Further, the Koran refers to the characteristically Islamic concept of jihad no less than 164 times (mostly in a violent context).
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Does every Muslim in the world subscribe to these unsavory teachings, and take them literally? Of course not. Most Muslims want no part of jihad or sharia and just want to get on with their daily lives. At the same time, it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims (or roughly 240 million) are indeed radicalized—and presumably take Koranic admonitions such as “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” quite literally.
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Further, they believe that any Muslim who disagrees with their
viewpoint is really not a Muslim at all and should be killed—and that they have a compelling Koranic argument for their actions.