Roots of terror
How big a threat are the Islamic State militants?
There is confusion about defining a terrorist organization whose very name seems unclear: the Islamic State, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, Al Qaeda in Iraq?
Or perhaps more appropriately, “The Un-Islamic Non-State,” as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon suggests.
There is also little consensus about the threat from so-called homegrown terrorists inspired by the group to join the fight abroad, or to wage attacks at home.
But what is clearly emerging is the structure of this group that seemed to appear out of nowhere and now controls a large part of Iraq and Syria.
They are financed and organized. Their tactics are ruthless. They attract recruits who are incensed by oppression, or are simply bored and directionless and have naive visions of a new world order.
“The Islamic State is an alarming phenomenon,” states a recent report by the Soufan Group, a New Yorkbased organization that conducts security analysis. “It may wither and die as quickly as it has emerged, or it may prove to be the catalyst for major change within the region and beyond.”
The beheadings of two American journalists and the swift fall of the Iraqi city of Mosul this past summer proclaimed the group’s presence to the world.
The killings of two soldiers last month in Ottawa and Quebec, by men police say were inspired by this organization, have forced Canadians to take note.
But the Islamic State, formed amid a confluence of conflicts, began a decade ago with a Jordanian who wore white New Balance sneakers and had trouble firing a machine gun. Al Qaeda in Iraq By 2003, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a name that inspired fear.
But like many of Al Qaeda’s leaders, Zarqawi began as an idealist Muslim in Afghanistan, drawn to the CIAfinanced jihad against the Soviets and the civil war that followed. Zarqawi was unremarkable, possessing none of the charisma of the towering Osama bin Laden.
Algerian Abdullah Anas, a former mujahedeen and now a security analyst living in the U.K., says he barely recalls Zarqawi, whose real name is Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah.
“Two years ago, we were looking at my black-and-white wedding video and my brother-in-law said to me, ‘I dare you to recognize that guy who is sitting in the corner,’” Anas said in an interview.
Anas, who was married in 1990 in Peshawar, Pakistan, looked closely at the grainy image of the man, who looked to be in his early 20s and was singing with the others.
He was stunned when told it was a young Zarqawi.
“There was nothing special about him,” Anas said. “He was going to training camps inside Afghanistan as hundreds of young non-Afghan fighters were doing. Suddenly in 2003, he’s a man fighting with the Americans in Iraq and an emir with Al Qaeda.”
Zarqawi refused to pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda, using the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as an opportunity to start his own group. But by 2004, as he gained power and recruits, Zarqawi finally agreed to join forces and his group officially became Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). A $25-million (U.S.) reward was offered for information leading to his capture.
As the war in Iraq progressed, AQI waned in popularity, in part because so many Muslims had been killed in suicide bombings and because of the relentless targeting of Shiite shrines and leaders. Shortly before Zarqawi was killed by U.S. forces in June 2006, the military released a video, which included outtakes of Zarqawi, wearing the American-made running shoes and struggling to fire a U.S.-made machine gun.
It had the intended effect — ridiculing an already unpopular leader.
Many predicted that Zarqawi’s death would be the death of AQI. But the group laid the roots of what has become the Islamic State today.
Then, in the spring of 2011, the people of Syria revolted. Syria’s uprising In Tunisia, it was the suicide of a destitute fruit vendor that started an uprising that eventually spread across the Arab world and North Africa, toppling decades-long dictatorships. In Syria, the protests were sparked by the death of Hamza alKhateeb, a pudgy-cheeked 13-yearold, who was tortured and killed while in the custody of President Basher Assad’s regime.
Those early Syrian protests are barely remembered, long ago overtaken by merciless guerrilla warfare that has spilled into Iraq and drawn in countries around the world, including Canada, which has joined a U.S.-led military campaign. The distinctions between groups fighting in Syria have always been blurred — alliances of convenience or necessity, united at first against the regime until they began to fight each other. Muslim fighters and humanitarians from around the world poured into Syria — Assad’s brutality serving as a siren call, as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had three decades earlier. From the chaos two groups emerged — the Jabhat al Nusra and Daesh, which is the Arabic shorthand for the group that has been translated to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Both groups adhered to Al Qaeda’s ideology, but each leader fought for supremacy. American journalist Theo Padnos, recently released after two years of captivity, was a hostage in Syria when the groups clashed. “The real issue between the Nusra Front and the Islamic State was that their commanders, former friends from Iraq, were unable to agree on how to share the revenue from the oilfields in eastern Syria that the Nusra Front had conquered,” Padnos wrote in the New York Times Magazine. “I knew exactly why these young men were dying: because the commanders said they must.” The Islamic State emerged as the victor. They were led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had taken over the remnants of Zarqawi’s group by 2010. He had slowly rebuilt the organization along with former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. While Baathism is largely a secular movement, adherents seek to return to the days before colonization, forming a pan-Arab state. And like al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State, the Soufan Group report notes, they “share a vision of a new beginning through a return to the past.” Many members of AQI and Baathist leaders formed alliances while being held in U.S. detention centres during the war. “Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them an opportunity to broaden their following,” Andrew Thompson, a U.S. military veteran, and academic Jeremi Suri wrote in the New York Times last month. “Simply being ‘suspicious looking’ military-aged males in the vicinity of an attack was enough to land one behind bars.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had spent nearly five years imprisoned in Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, declared himself “Caliph Ibrahim” after capturing Mosul earlier this year. And ISIS became the Islamic State. Twitter terror For an organization that rejects modernity and embraces a return to the time of the Prophet Mohammed, its members have a lot of smartphones and like to tweet. The Islamic State’s social media campaign is one of its most powerful weapons — especially in the recruitment of foreign members, who predominantly hail from Turkey, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and to a lesser degree Europe, Australia, the U.S. and Canada. Type Islamic State into a Twitter search and thousands of hits emerge, including many written by adherents of the group who post gruesome battle photos or vile rhetoric. If an account is suspended, another will quickly replace it. As security services have said, most notably in Canada after the Ottawa shooting, is it impossible to police the Internet and track those who are posting anywhere from Ajax to Aleppo. That differs from propaganda of former terrorist groups, where recruits have also been lured online — but the process was long and often intercepted by authorities.
“The big difference was before these discussions were happening in the private bulletin boards that were owned by jihadists,” says Will McCants, the Brookings Institute director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World.
“People were suspicious of you and it took a long time to get the private chat status.”
Another difficulty is deciphering the level of threat, as much of the propaganda can be both chilling and laughable.
Take, for instance, the widely circulated video in which a Canadian recruit vows to attack North America and threatens U.S. President Barack Obama. While alarming, the foreign fighters are filmed as they burn their passports, destroying the documents that would allow them to return home to carry out such attacks.
But trying to fight the Islamic State’s narrative through ridicule — as once was effective with Zarqawi and his New Balance shoes — does not have the same impact.
When al-Baghdadi declared himself the caliph, he was wearing a luxury watch that looked like a Rolodex — generating much online discussion.
But social media moves faster today than eight years ago and the story quickly died. And, as McCants notes, unlike Zarqawi, who was essential to AQI, the Islamic State is not dependent on al-Baghdadi.
“They’ve done a pretty good in not making this about a particular personality,” said McCants. Follow the money Black market oil sales, taxes, ransoms, extortion, suitcases of cash, robberies and wealthy Gulf donors — the Islamic State reportedly has a varied financial portfolio and generates at least $3 million per day.
While the numbers are staggering — and indeed the Islamic State has an unprecedented coffer, with estimates as high as $2 billion — it also must keep its costly war machine greased and govern the eight million people under its control, which is about the population of Quebec. It is easier to fight than to govern. And it is this difficult task, in addition to the tenuous alliances with tribal leaders in areas under the Islamic State’s control, that provides some hope.
Both Al Shabab, the Somalia-based Al Qaeda group, and the Yemenbased Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were forced to relinquish territory, unable to combat military offences as well as provide simple services to the people. The Islamic State claims to have re-established the caliphate, essentially declaring itself the leader of Muslims worldwide.
“So central to this group’s appeal is its ability to keep expanding,” Noah Bonsey, a Syrian analyst with the International Crisis Group told the New York Times. “But as soon as that stops, the whole narrative is less convincing.”