ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (9 page)

ISIS in Derna, Libya:
As Libya continues to spiral into terrorist chaos and civil war in the wake of the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi by NATO forces (an event hailed by the Obama administration as a great foreign policy victory), Derna has been overrun by jihadists who’ve pledged allegiance to ISIS and transformed this port city of eighty thousand people into “a colony of terror”:

          
[Derna] is the first Islamic State enclave in North Africa. The conditions in Libya are perfect for the radical Islamists: a disintegrating state, a location that is strategically well situated and home to the largest oil reserves on the continent. Should Islamic State (IS) manage to establish control over a significant portion of Libya, it could trigger the destabilization of the entire Arab world.
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Incidentally, Libya’s next-door neighbor Tunisia has supplied more foreign fighters to ISIS (possibly as many as three thousand) than any other country.
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Soldiers of the Caliphate:
This small Algeria-based outfit made a gory splash in September 2014 when it pledged allegiance to ISIS and promptly kidnapped and beheaded a French tourist. Algerian Special Forces say they killed the group’s leader in December 2014. It’s unclear whether the “Soldiers” have staying power, but Algeria has long been a hotbed for Islamic militancy.
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Pakistani Taliban (TTP) jihadists:
In October 2014, the spokesman for the influential Pakistani Taliban, along with five of TTP’s commanders, gave their allegiance to the Islamic State. They were subsequently banished from the Pakistani Taliban for disloyalty.
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The leader of Jamaatud-Dawa, another major South Asian terrorist organization that boasts approximately 150,000 members, has also reportedly expressed support for ISIS, albeit without offering any sort of official pledge of allegiance.
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In supporting the Islamic State caliphate, these organizations and individuals have not only chosen to get behind a “strong horse.” They have given their seal of approval to one of the most depraved, violent, and barbaric societies in memory.

He played dead, and so he lived.

He was the only one.

When ISIS tore through the Iraqi city of Tikrit (Saddam Hussein’s hometown), about 150 miles south of Mosul, in June 2014, twenty-three-year-old Ali Hussein Kadhim was one of hundreds of Iraqi military recruits who were rounded up by the jihadists to be executed en masse.

Kadhim, a father of two small children, had joined the Iraqi military on June 1 in hopes of making a salary that could support his young family. Instead, not long after enlisting, he ended up staring into a freshly dug trench alongside hundreds of his fellow Shia Muslims, sentenced to death for apostasy by ISIS’s Sunni jihadists. Yet miraculously, Kadhim survived. He recounted his harrowing ordeal for the
New York Times:

          
As the firing squad shot the first man, blood spurted onto Mr. Kadhim’s face. He remembered seeing a video camera in the hands of another militant.

                
“I saw my daughter in my mind, saying, ‘Father, father,’” he said.

                
He felt a bullet pass by his head, and fell forward into the freshly dug trench.

                
“I just pretended to be shot,” he said.

                
A few moments later, Mr. Kadhim said, one of the killers walked among the bodies and saw that one man who had been shot was still breathing.

                
“Just let him suffer,” another militant said. “He’s an infidel Shia. Let him suffer. Let him bleed.”
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Kadhim lay in the trench, playing dead, for “about four hours . . . until it was dark and there was only silence.” He spent the next three weeks traveling through “insurgent badlands,” making his way to safety in Kurdistan before finally returning home to his family in southern Iraq. ISIS claimed that it killed 1,700 people in the mass execution (Human Rights Watch put the number between 560 and 770 deaths).
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Kadhim is the only known survivor. As you can see in his video interview with the
Times,
he could scarcely believe his good fortune. It’s not hard to see why: since first capturing territory in Syria in 2013, ISIS has proven to be a well-oiled, ruthless, killing machine with zero regard for the populations it has conquered—particularly if the vanquished are not Sunni Muslims. The Islamic State caliphate was founded upon the corpses of thousands of Shias, Yazidis, Christians, and any Sunni Muslims who dared to dissent from its barbarous vision.

A former ISIS fighter captured by Kurdish forces has explained, “Whenever ISIS goes into an area . . . the people there who don’t adhere to their Islamic law are apostates. . . . Everything has to follow ISIS’ way. Even women who don’t cover their faces . . . women would get their heads chopped off.” Another captured ISIS fighter told CNN, “. . . there are different kinds of death—they would torture you for sure, they might decapitate you, or cut off your hands. They will not simply shoot a bullet in your head.”
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ISIS blazed an appalling trail of murder and mayhem across Iraq throughout 2014 in Mosul, Sinjar, Tikrit, and Anbar province. And according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, ISIS jihadists killed nearly two thousand people, mostly civilians, in Syria between June and December of that same year. ISIS also reportedly executed 120 of its own members, “most of them foreign fighters trying to return home.”
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In the Hotel
Killafornia that is the Islamic State, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

ISIS doesn’t just conquer towns—it utterly ravages them, slaughtering men and women, children and the elderly. Survivors of the months-long ISIS siege of Kobane, a town in northern Syria located near the Turkish border, described for the
Daily Mail
a stomach-churning orgy of bloodletting reminiscent of the Mongols’ devastation of the Middle East eight centuries earlier:

          
According to those who escaped [Kobane], the jihadis’ savagery is more hideous than anyone feared.

                
Headless corpses litter the streets of the besieged Syrian border town, they say, and some of the mainly Kurdish townsfolk have had their eyes gouged out.

                
Refugees who made it to Suruc, just across the border in Turkey, tell of witnessing appalling horrors in hushed tones, as if they can barely believe it themselves.

                
Father-of-four Amin Fajar, 38, said: “I have seen tens, maybe hundreds, of bodies with their heads cut off. Others with just their hands or legs missing. I have seen faces with their eyes or tongues cut out—I can never forget it for as long as I live. They put the heads on display to scare us all.”