Terrorism, Inc
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ISIS’s extortion practices demand between 10 and 20 percent of revenue from businesses in its territories and operates other “mafia-style” rackets that help the group bring in as much as $1 million a day.50 According to Jonsson, ISIS couches its extortion related activities in terms of jizya, which is traditionally a tax paid by non-Muslims living in Muslim lands and is similar to other forms of “revolutionary” taxes collected by a number of other insurgent groups.51 In Mosul alone, ISIS earned an estimated $8 million a month from its extortion activities in 2012 and 2013,52 with the bulk of funding coming from commercial, reconstruction, and oil sectors of northern Iraq,53 including taxes collected on trucks and cell phone towers.54 ISIS also extorts individuals or groups moving back and forth through critical border crossings between Syria and Iraq.55 The group has even extorted the Syrian government, as was the case in February 2013 when ISIS militants seized control of the Tabqa Dam in eastern Syria and sold electricity back to the Assad regime.56
External State Support
Similar to the modus operandi of AQI, there has been no hard evidence that ISIS has received funding directly from states in the Gulf, especially “the usual suspects,” Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar.57 Elizabeth Dickinson agrees that countries like Qatar, which is closely tied to many prominent Salafist groups, likely have not provided ISIS with direct financial support; however, some of the jihadists who have benefited from Qatari funds have left their respective groups to join more radical organizations like ISIS, taking their money and weapons with them.58 Furthermore, even if no evidence has surfaced of direct government sponsorship of ISIS, a prominent analyst of terrorist financing does believe that wealthy sympathizers and individuals from Qatar and Kuwait are indeed donating money to the group.59
WHAT ISIS ACHIEVED WITH THESE FUNDS
Since storming through Iraq from a base in eastern Syria in the summer of 2014, ISIS militants have secured control over large swaths of eastern Syria and western Iraq, although this territory takes different forms at different times. Money does not always directly translate to legitimacy, but it does help bolster the insurgents’ operational and organizational capabilities. In the case of ISIS, the group now seeks to build and maintain a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. State building is an expensive endeavor, though, so for all of the money ISIS brings in, it also has a significant number of debits for providing a range of services to those living within its proclaimed territory.60
Operational Capabilities
When AQI operated in Anbar province throughout the mid to late 2000s, financial documents recovered by the U.S. military indicate that fighters were paid for food, accommodations, and other expenses described as “assistance.” During this time, fighters were paid approximately 60,000 Iraqi dinars (IQD), roughly $41 USD, and an additional 30,000 IQD for each dependent. Furthermore, as long as AQI remained viable, payments continued even after a fighter was killed or captured.61 While it is unclear how much ISIS fighters are being paid in early 2015, the group consists of an estimated 31,000 fighters and also maintains on-again off-again alliances with other Sunni factions including the Ba’thist Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandiyya (JRTN).62
Weapons
Not only is ISIS one of the most well-funded terrorist groups in history, it is also one of the most well-equipped.63 And unlike many terrorist and insurgent groups that operated during the Cold War, ISIS does not rely upon external states to provide it with weaponry. Instead, the group has forcibly looted hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons and equipment from Iraqi and Syrian military installations in those two countries.64 The group has diversified its weapon sources, which include weapons acquired from other insurgents in Syria who have defected to ISIS, weapons purchased from other insurgents that receive them from foreign donors, weapons captured from vanquished enemies, and weapons purchased or traded for with corrupt members of the security forces in both Syria and Iraq.65 ISIS has even acquired sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry like the Chinese-made FN-6, though to have been provided by the Qataris (and possibly the Saudis, too) to Syrian rebels before falling under ISIS’s control.66
In addition to armored vehicles purchased on the black market or acquired when the Iraqi security forces retreated from the battlefield,67 ISIS militants also have M79 antitank rockets made in the former Yugoslavia, American made M16 and M14 rifles, small arms and ammunition.68 The weapons and equipment that ISIS militants now have in their possession were intended to give the Iraqi Army both a qualitative and quantitative edge over its adversaries.69 In October 2014, reports suggested that U.S. planes dropped weapons in ISIS territory that were intended for Kurdish fighters near Kobani, but were instead commandeered by the militants.70
In August 2014, ISIS fighters used a mini-surveillance drone in preparation for an attack on a Syrian army base near Raqaa province in northern Syria. Footage from the drone shows two suicide bombers detonating vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) at the gate of the base before its fighters stormed the compound.71 The use of “technicals,” which are pickup trucks modified with machine guns or anti-aircraft weaponry, provides the militants freedom of movement and much-needed mobility. ISIS fighters have used artillery and RPGs in Syria while also making use of Humvees and T-55 tanks captured from the Iraqi security forces.72
Intelligence
ISIS relies on subversion and clandestine operations to carry out attacks in both Syria and Iraq, including suicide bombings, assassinations, and offensive raids on critical military targets, such as Syrian Army bases. In response to U.S. airstrikes in the fall of 2014, ISIS fighters began to stress the importance of operational security, assuming a “covert posture submerged within the population,” donning masks that cover fighters’ faces, and even eschewing any identifying information while operating in public.73 As he assumed power, Baghdadi relied on ISIS’s internal security apparatus to purge the organization of suspected informants.74 When new recruits arrive from abroad, especially from Western countries but also from the broader region, they are screened by ISIS fighters through a series of interviews during which personal information is obtained, passports are examined and donations are accepted.75
ISIS’s counterintelligence is robust—a captured ISIS computer revealed a downloaded copy of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM) 3-24.76 What is extremely worrisome to Western intelligence and law enforcement officials is that in addition to receiving training in guerilla warfare skills, ISIS fighters could be receiving skills that would prepare them to return to their countries of origins to conduct a terrorist attack. These skills include how to conduct surveillance, how to avoid detection, and how to build a clandestine network.77
Sanctuary, Safe Haven, and Operational Space
More than any other insurgent group in recent memory, the Islamic State now holds a significant amount of territory across Syria and Iraq. In Syria, ISIS maintains a sanctuary in Ayn Isa, Raqqa City, and parts of Idlib and Aleppo provinces where they established training camps. In Aleppo, as of late 2014, the group controlled the Jarabulus crossing to the west and the Tal Abayd crossing to the east, critical chokepoints that regulate the flow of men, money, and materiel coming into Syria from Turkey.78
Unlike core Al-Qaida based in Pakistan, ISIS enjoyed safe haven in Syria for long enough to allow it to really hold territory that it could use to train, produce media, and begin implementing a preview of how it might govern a caliphate.79 ISIS is so confident in some parts of the territory it holds that it has allowed municipal workers and civil servants to remain in their jobs, including some mayors of cities and other top local officeholders who have been allowed to keep their posts in return for acknowledging ISIS’s supremacy. ISIS may have recognized the success of a true hybrid group like Hezbollah, the Shiite terrorist organization that maintains a quasi-army and vast social service network while also controlling seats in the Lebanese parliament.80
Accordingly, the control of
territory means the control of resources, including oil, wheat, water and ancient artifacts, all of which can be sold to further ISIS’s financial portfolio.81 Perhaps just as important as the territory and resources the group commands are its human capital. As it continued to grow, ISIS took over territory inhabited by JRTN, Sunni tribes and Iraqi Islamist “resistance groups” such as Jaysh Muhammad and Ansar al-Sunnah.82 As of mid-October 2014, ISIS controlled swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria that were on par with the size of the state of Maryland.83 In the areas in Syria under its control, ISIS has stood up an electricity office that monitors electricity-use levels, installs new power lines and instructs workshops on how to repair damaged ones.84 Furthermore, ISIS checkpoints throughout the territory it controls provide the militants with multiple opportunities to “tax” those attempting to pass through.85
Another frightening scenario is the spread of ISIS’s virulent ideology beyond the Middle East and into North Africa, South Asia and other jihadist hot spots around the world. In late January 2015, a group linked to ISIS attacked a luxury hotel in Tripoli, Libya, killing eight people, five of whom were foreigners, including one American.86 There are also reports of ISIS flags flying in Afghanistan and Pakistan.87 Moreover, even the Chinese are now concerned that ISIS’s ideology could influence the minority Uighur population: an estimated 300 Chinese citizens are allegedly fighting alongside ISIS in Syria in Iraq, many of whom are linked to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), responsible for an increasing number of attacks in China’s restless Xinjiang province.88 Nor are there are any signs that the flow of Westerners, especially from European countries, has abated.89
Training
By the summer of 2014, ISIS had established logistical hubs, headquarters, training camps and other vital infrastructure throughout Syria, with a significant portion of its operations based in Raqqa.90 Training for ISIS recruits, especially foreign fighters, is important because it builds a militant’s practical skills, but also “imbues him with a sense of solidarity with a larger cause.”91 Upon passing screening from ISIS intelligence operatives, new recruits spend several weeks undergoing both religious and military training, primarily on how to fire pistols, assault rifles, RPGs and mortars. Some recruits that prove especially proficient or might have prior training are occasionally selected to receive further training on more sophisticated weapons.92 Because ISIS holds territory and maintains a sanctuary in Syria, it is able to train more effectively than core Al-Qaida ever could while hiding in the mountains of Waziristan. Even before U.S. airstrikes commenced in late September 2014, ISIS dispersed its forces and resources to avoid exposing its fighters to American bombs.93
Organizational Capabilities
In line with the ISIS’s stated goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate, the group has devoted a robust portion of its funding to the nascent stages of state building. In August 2014, ISIS paid municipal salaries, provided public works, maintained electric, trash and sewage services, offered health care and education to its supporters and even attempted to enforce parking laws and regulations in areas it controlled or claimed to control.94 ISIS dedicates attention and resources to spreading its message and diffusing its propaganda, exemplified by its pervasive use of social media, including active Twitter campaigns in each of the provinces where it operates and promotes its activities and the battles it fights.95 As one commentator noted, “Gulf state fundamentalists, battle-hardened Chechens, and middle-class Londoners were all drawn into ISIS by its powerful messaging and the promise to, in a twist on an old phrase, be the evil you want to see in the world.”96
Leadership
ISIS is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi also known as Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry, thought to have been born in Samarra in 1971.97 Al-Baghdadi is widely viewed as the most ruthless jihadist leader since AQI’s former chieftain, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Baghdadi is rumored to have received a doctorate in Islamic Studies from the Islamic University in Baghdad, the ISIS leader combines theological credentials with tactical success on the battlefield. Captured by U.S. forces near Fallujah in 2004, al-Baghdadi spent years at Camp Bucca, a detention facility where he is thought to have grown even further radicalized and anti-American, while also broadening his network among aggrieved Iraqi Sunni Arabs, including many from Anbar and Nineveh provinces.98
While the group’s leadership does include some prominent foreign fighters, such as a Chechen named Omar al-Shishani,99 most of ISIS’s leadership cadre consist of former Baath party military and intelligence officers that held high-ranking positions during Saddam Hussein’s regime, including Abu Ali al-Anbari and Abu Muslim al-Turkmani.100 Two other former regime loyalists are Fadel al-Hayali and Adnan al-Sweidawi, both of whom served as military officers and Baath party insiders.101 Indeed, ISIS maintains a leadership council, a cabinet, and has ties to local leaders. The leadership council helps deal with religious issues and doctrine, but also apparently makes decisions about executions. The cabinet maintains oversight on finance, security, media, prisoners, and recruitment, while local leaders are comprised of roughly a dozen deputies spread between Iraq and Syria.102 ISIS operates in a more decentralized fashion than Al-Qaida ever did, with operations carried out by a network of regional commanders that each maintain responsibility for subordinates, who have their own autonomy, but find time to collaborate and coordinate with the regional commanders on a variety of tactical issues.103
Ideology
The brand of Islam practiced by the Islamic State has been described, perhaps most accurately, as “untamed Wahhabism” that views the killing of those deemed unbelievers as a necessity to furthering its mission of purifying the community of the faithful.104 The group’s ideology, defined by a very narrow interpretation of sharia on social and criminal issues, explains its use of beheading as a way of murdering its victims, which have included several Westerners, Christian, and Yazidi religious minorities, Shiite Muslims (considered apostates), Kurds, Alawites, and even other Sunni Muslims who ISIS deems worthy of elimination.105 It has been labeled “the most elaborate and militant jihad polity in modern history.”106 After it seized Mosul in June 2014, ISIS publicized a “city charter” that called for the amputation of thieves’ hands, mandatory prayers, the banning of all drugs and alcohol and the desecration of shrines and graves considered to be polytheistic.107 Some scholars believe that ISIS’s ideology is an even more nefarious threat than its military capabilities.108
The group’s adherence to such an austere, unforgiving brand of Islam was partly responsible for its split with Al-Qaida senior leadership, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, who viewed the group’s extreme violence as ultimately counterproductive.109 The overarching goal of the Islamic State is to establish a caliphate throughout parts of “al-Sham,” or the Levant, to include land stretching from Lebanon across Syria and into Iraq. Moreover, the very public split with Al-Qaida has seemingly forced jihadists to choose sides,110 although in an interesting twist, some ISIS fighters likely get some of their ideological guidance on building an Islamic State from “The Management of Savagery,” a manifesto penned by one of core Al-Qaida’s main ideologues, Abu Bakr Naji.111
Several groups have already sided with ISIS and its harsher ideology, including fighters (though not the entire organization) from AQIM, AQAP, Ansar-al Sharia branches in both Libya112 and Tunisia, as well as jihadists in Gaza/Sinai and Indonesia.113 Its ideology has been described as “aggressive” and “expansionist” with no recognition of modern-day political borders.114 To be sure, ISIS regards state boundaries as “artificial creations of colonial powers designed to divide the Muslim world.”115 The fact that ISIS has announced the establishment of an Islamic state—referred to by Aaron Zelin as the khilafa project—is proof in the eyes of many Muslims worldwide that Baghdadi will be able to resurrect the caliphate, a feat unable to be accomplished by the Khilafat Movement in British India and the Sharifian Caliphate in modern-day Saudi Arabia.116 In all of its public announcements, ISIS refers consistently to
“the Prophetic methodology,” which governs how its members live and how the organization rules the territory it controls.117
Human Resources and Recruitment
Though the numbers are murky, in September 2014 the CIA estimated that ISIS had approximately 31,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, nearly three times as high as its original estimate.118 Thousands of Europeans have flocked to Syria to fight alongside Al-Qaida linked Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIS. In fact, the conflict in Syria has attracted more Westerners than any other conflict in the modern era, to include the 1979–1989 anti-Soviet jihad.119 The lion’s share of these fighters is from the Middle East, North Africa, and other regions typically associated with global jihad, like the Caucasus and Central Asia. However, there are also a significant number of Westerners counted among ISIS’s ranks, including fighters from the United States,120 the United Kingdom, Australia, Scandinavia, and many European countries.121 Some estimates peg the number of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq at around 15,000 individuals from as many as 80 different countries. Most of these jihadists have joined to fight with ISIS.122 Moreover, the group has deliberately recruited extremely young fighters, including many teenagers.123