HOW ISIS CORNERED THE TERROR MARKET
FIRST, the good news: It turns out President Obama was right. Al Qaeda is being destroyed. One could even say he deserves some credit for this happy turn of events.
Which brings us to the bad news: Al Qaeda is dying out because it’s being replaced by something far worse.
According to a fascinating report in The Guardian, two of al Qaeda’s leading clerics say the Islamic State has all but destroyed its parent organization. Basically, people in the market for jihad think ISIS offers the best product on the market.
It’s ironic. For a decade, terror analysts marveled about how creative al Qaeda was. Al Qaeda’s jihadis got paid vacations, roundtrip tickets home to visit family, health care, etc. They saved huge money on retirement gifts, since Allah promised to provide 72 virgins at the end of a productive career in lieu of a goldwatch.
Among al Qaeda’s biggest innovations: franchising. A 2003Washington Post headline put it well: “Terrorism Inc.; Al Qaeda Franchises Brand of Violence to Groups Across World.” Like the McDonald’s home office, al Qaeda HQ would help startups with branding, training and marketing and then let them do their thing.
Back in 2003, that model was working well for the organization. A senior US official told the Post that al Qaeda’s children were “growing up and moving out into the world, loyal to their parents but no longer reliant on them.”
And there’s the rub. Not all kids are loyal.
The Al Qaeda in Iraq franchise was always too much of an innovator for al Qaeda’s executive leadership. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian head of the outfit, refused to protect the brand. Al Qaeda proper was in the war on America business. But while Zarqawi had no qualms about killing Americans, he thought there was room to grow in not just robbery, but in extortion and religiously motivated slaughter.
When he started killing Iraqi Shiites in huge numbers, Ayman Zawahiri, then al Qaeda’s No. 2 man, sent Zarqawi a letter that amounted to a reprimand from the home office. “Why were there attacks on ordinary Shia?” he asked.
Al Qaeda wanted a pan-Islamic caliphate. Slaughtering Shiite civilians was a violation of their strategic plan. But Zawahiri’s letter was telling for another reason: He asked the Iraq franchise to share more of its profits.
Fast forward to today. ISIS, which grew out of Zarqawi’s dissident franchise, is gobbling up market share. Having declared it wants a monopoly on jihadist terror wherever it operates, it recently beheaded 10 members of the Taliban.
There are many reasons for ISIS’s success. But one crucial factor was President Obama’s decision to pull US troops out of Iraq in 2011. He spent the next few years dismissing it as the “jayvee team” so he could brag about “decimating” al Qaeda.
Now that ISIS is encircling Baghdad, the president wants to replicate the surge — but on the cheap. This week he said he wants to send a few hundred advisers to “stand up National Guard Units to help Sunni communities secure their own freedom from ISIL’s control.”
Sunni tribes helped make the “Anbar Awakening” possible. There’s little reason for confidence this will work, given the fact that the Sunni tribes have little reason to trust the United States after having been abandoned once already.
But as disastrous as the president’s mishandling has been, it’s important to note that extremists aren’t flocking to fight with ISIS because of anything he has done or said. They’re flocking to ISIS because it has, for all its twisted cruelty and evil, a much more compelling marketing campaign than al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda was stodgy and abstract. ISIS is exciting and even fun, at least for a certain kind of fanatic. The reports describing— and viral videos showing — young men ransacking and pillaging, riding cars wherever they want and buying sex slaves for as cheap as a pack of cigarettes are intoxicating for those who want to join an Islamic foreign legion for losers.
Add in religious fervor and, most importantly, the justifiable sense that ISIS is winning, and you can see why al Qaeda was a victim of what economists call “creative destruction.”
ISIS is exciting and even fun, at least for a certain kind of fanatic.