The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands. (www.raymondibrahim.com/2015/01/01/egypts-sisi-islamic-thinking-is-antagonizing-the-entire-world/)

  If a Muslim leader of one of the oldest and greatest nations on our planet is calling for a “religious revolution,” we must accept, and help lead, the defeat of the jihadis within his own religious and political system. His words are powerful and true. In order for us to defeat Radical Islam and its allies, a reformation is required.

  War of Ideas, War on the Battlefield

  Winning the ideological war requires that we also win the shooting war. The two go hand in hand. Our enemies believe they have irresistible support, whether it comes from heaven, or history’s laws, or inspired leaders. They cannot imagine losing to us, with our failed (as they see it) and corrupt democratic system, and our hopelessly feckless leaders.

  It’s an old story. If Marx and Lenin have foreseen the inevitable defeat of capitalism, then it will indeed fall. If the Aryan race is greatly superior to our impure population, then we had better start studying German. Now there’s a new certainty that drives the jihadis: if Allah has blessed jihad against America, it cannot fail.

  Remember that, just as the Japanese believed they could deliver a devastating blow to us at Pearl Harbor in 1941, Osama bin Laden thought 9/11 would be a knockout punch to America, and he and his successors never stopped working to bring us down. The leaders of the Islamic State and al Qaeda relentlessly identify the United States as their main target, and call for global jihad. Here’s the Islamic State caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in December 2015 on the eve of his tactical defeat in Ramadi:

  Stand up against the tyrant and apostate people of [the Saudi coalition] and champion your brothers in the Levant, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, the Philippines, Africa, Indonesia, Turkestan, Bangladesh, and everywhere.…

  The “caliphate’s” leader insists that all Muslims are confronted by a “Jewish-Crusader-Safavid alliance that is led by America and was devised by the Jews.” From Baghdadi’s perspective, the Crusaders include America, Europe, and Russia. Safavid is a derogatory word that is used to describe Shiites and Iran. All of these parties have come together in a coalition to supposedly wage “war on Islam and Muslims.” (www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/12/baghdadi-claims-infidel-nations-are-afraid-of-final-war.php)

  Here is Qasim al-Rahmi, the head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), at virtually the same time, with the same message:

  The jihadists should not think of their local battles as the only fight that matters, according to al Rahmi. “We are a single ummah [community of worldwide Muslims] and we are the same people even if we are present in different locations.” If one thinks of only himself and “believes in borders,” al Rahmi says, then he has “isolated” himself “from the ummah and the [wider] battle.”

  As the war rages on, the jihadists should “look at the issue from the point of view of a single ummah to find out who is the real enemy,” and not from “the standpoint” of stand-alone battlefields in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, or elsewhere. From this perspective, al Rahmi argues, it becomes clear that “the true enemy is the American.” (www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/12/aqap-leader-says-america-is-the-primary-enemy.php)

  A global war is being waged against us by all true Radical Islamists in the name of Allah.

  What happens if they lose? What does it mean? Defeat at our hands raises some very uncomfortable questions for them, as we saw when we beat al Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban in key parts of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda (and their Iranian allies) lost favor among potential jihadis. There was an immediate drop in recruitment for al Qaeda in Iraq, and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan sought sanctuary in Pakistan, where they would not have to face the likes of the United States Marine Corps.

  We should have taken the ideological offensive, asking whether the Almighty had changed sides in the holy war. After all, if previous victories were the results of divine blessing, were defeats not proof that their cause had been rejected on high?

  As in the twentieth century, the military defeat of totalitarian regimes does great damage to their doctrines. Communism lost mass appeal when the Soviet Empire fell. Italian Fascism became an object of ridicule when Italy was defeated on the battlefield; Mussolini went from a leader who “was always right” to the prisoner of an Italian government that joined the Allies; and Hitler was left to proclaim the German people unworthy of him.

  The jihadis know this, and they have told their fighters not to be surprised or discouraged if there are military setbacks, as Allah has promised severe challenges for the true believers. It’s up to us to make sure they are fully tested.

  We must destroy the jihadis on the ground, eliminate their support from friendly or frightened states, and destroy their commercial and virtual networks.

  We know how to win on the ground, as we demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Above all, it requires good intelligence and leaders determined to win. We can’t do it exclusively with airplanes and drones; we need our fighting men and women. To be sure, we need to work with local forces—there are plenty of Muslim troops with whom we can profitably ally—but, with the exception of the Kurds (not all of whom are Muslim), they won’t be sufficient. Al Qaeda bases and all the territory claimed by the Islamic State must be destroyed and returned to local control, and we must insist on good governance—not, as we have so often done, turning it all over to the locals and accepting yet more “Islamic republics.” It’s not just a matter of changing local leaders; we want to change the whole system as we used to do.

  We will only be safe and secure when others are safe and secure, and we are facing a complete breakdown of order in the region. Our own history teaches us that we were a nation built on an idea and that idea was to be free, to live our lives based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That can only be accomplished in an orderly society.

  Although it is a pipe dream or a president’s “willing ignorance” to believe we can bring full democracy to this region in the near future, we could certainly bring order.

  As we do that, we need to have some tough love conversations with the leaders of countries who pretend to be our friends, but who also collaborate with our enemies. Countries like Pakistan need to be told that we will not tolerate the existence of training camps and safe havens for Taliban, Haqqani, and al Qaeda forces on their territory, nor will we permit their banks and other financial institutions to move illicit funds for the terror network. They are going to have to choose, and if they continue to help the jihadis, we are going to treat them harshly, cutting them off from American assistance, and operating against enemy safe havens.

  The same tough approach applies to the financing of the jihadi network. Over the years, the terrorists have raised a lot of money from individual donors (sometimes contacted in person, other times online), but criminal activities are a much more important source of money. Some of the best intelligence work carried out by the American government has been done in this area. We can thank the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Treasury Department, along with the CIA, and especially our FBI and local law enforcement organizations such as the New York City Police Department, one of the outstanding counterterrorist organizations anywhere. Their intelligence shows that terrorists and common criminals work together very closely, having created an underground railroad of spectacular sophistication and size. Drugs, money, and weapons are moved between North and South America, West and sometimes North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

  If you look into this underground railroad, you will find the usual suspects: terrorists, the countries that support them, and drug cartels and criminal opportunists of every species.

  As I noted i
n early 2010, in an article coauthored with Simone Ledeen, the merging of narcotics traffickers, organized criminals, and terrorists was produced by the availability of and access to money. They traffic in drugs, arms, human beings, and even weapons of mass destruction. It’s imperative to deprive these groups of access to easy money, in order to weaken and eventually break the deadly alliance between terrorists, conventional criminals, and the states that support them both.

  Just ask the Iranians, who have been desperately trying to break the grip of sanctions on their banks and trading companies for years. The Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, has been particularly active in the terror-criminal network, as demonstrated by the activities of the Barakat brothers in the South American Tri-Border Area.

  In the spring of 2014, Brazilian police arrested Hamzi Ahmad Barakat and accused him of embezzling money from fellow Lebanese immigrants, and creating false documents to create companies to cover for trafficking in arms and drugs. According to press accounts, Barakat sent the proceeds of his various illegal activities to Hezbollah. He put the well-known Brazilian gang “First Capital Command” in contact with weapons dealers in the Tri-Border region between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, where there are between 7 and 13 million Lebanese. The region is a Wild West area, and is infamous for corruption, loose border controls, and several Mafia-type organizations.

  Hamzi’s brother, Assad Ahmad Barakat, was arrested in Brazil in 2004, extradited to Paraguay for tax evasion, and sentenced to seven years in jail. Assad Barakat, who has been identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as one of Hezbollah’s most prominent and influential members (indeed, the Paraguay police described him as the terrorist group’s military commander in the region), raised some $50 million for the terrorist organization in the five years before 2001 (of the roughly $100 million sent to Hezbollah in that period).

  The story of the Barakat brothers is typical of the nexus between organized crime and organized terror. There’s a lot of money to be made in the terror business, and it is an even greater incentive than Radical Islamic doctrines. In Iraq at the beginning of this decade we found that fully three quarters of those involved in the terror network were in it for the money rather than religious convictions.

  As is so often the case when looking at the battlefield, I also found a Russian connection. When the Soviet Empire fell, there were a lot of unemployed KGB officials scrambling to make a living. They were a perfect fit with the terror networks, had few moral compunctions about cooperating with violent anti-American organizations (they’d been doing it for decades), and over the next few years many of the KGB’s safe houses, station headquarters, and secure communications networks were put at the disposal of terror groups.

  The addition of the former KGB officers gave the network of terrorists and criminals a big boost in professionalism, but I knew a great deal about the individuals involved, and knew the U.S. had our own professionals who were highly skilled in tracking the flow of funds and the movement of arms, drugs, and captive women. I certainly wouldn’t say that the KGB connection helped us map the enemy network, but it did offer us an additional window into their world and it also gave us many opportunities that we should now exploit even more vigorously.

  As the U.S. Intelligence and Law Enforcement communities document the details of the connections between terrorists, drug dealers, money launderers, and traffickers in human beings, it adds to our arsenal against them, both in terms of law enforcement and the ideological war. Exposing such unsavory connections gravely undermines the Radical Islamists’ claim to piety and moral standing. It is difficult for them to argue that Allah has blessed the efforts of drug dealers and the like. As the common criminals among them are rounded up and imprisoned, we should publicly point out there is very little religious virtue involved in such activities. As of the end of 2015, the Islamic State was primarily funded by such activities: extortion, oil smuggling, kidnapping, and so on.

  There is a lot to be done, but there are signs of progress. There is now an international counter-ISIS group, and its first meeting was held in March 2015, jointly chaired by Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Italy. Perhaps the members will benefit from a viewing of a recent documentary—From Russia with Cash—on the massive flows of cash into London, New York, and Miami. A lot of it gets invested in luxury real estate:

  The numbers are staggering. Annually, $1 trillion is stolen by corrupt officials from countries around the globe. That money needs to be spent, or laundered, and much of it goes into big anonymous real estate deals in the United Kingdom, which is seeing £1 billion in unrecorded capital inflows per month. The main source of that money? Russia. (www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/from-russia-with-cash-dirty-money-unchecked-in-london#.VnnrUJ1Ov8g.twitter)

  It is impossible to say with confidence how much of that cash (£1 billion per month in the U.K. alone) is involved in terror finance, but with a trillion dollars a year stolen by and from corrupt countries, it’s safe to assume the numbers are significant.

  There is also a lot to do in the digital universe. Earlier, I wrote about my beliefs of what the social media giants should be doing. We have long known that al Qaeda uses the Internet to distribute recruiting videos, send messages to its followers, criticize and intimidate its rivals, and distribute coded instructions to terrorists. Al Qaeda set a precedent for the other jihadis, and ISIS seems to have moved the bar even higher. The rapid expansion of the Islamic State is unprecedented, and its success is due at least in part to its skills online.

  According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, the territory controlled by ISIS now ranks as the place with the highest number of foreign fighters since Afghanistan in the 1980s, with recent estimates putting the total number of foreign recruits at around 20,000, nearly 4,000 of whom hail from Western countries. Many of these recruits made initial contact with ISIS and its ideology via the Internet. Other followers, meanwhile, are inspired by the group’s online propaganda to carry out terrorist attacks without traveling to the Middle East. (www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/from-russia-with-cash-dirty-money-unchecked-in-london#.VnnrUJ1Ov8g.twitter)

  ISIS and al Qaeda use the full array of digital technology, from Web sites and chat rooms to slick video productions and effectively encrypted messaging. It was only at the end of last year, to take perhaps the most recent deadly example of the use of text messaging to organize terrorist attacks, that French authorities revealed to Le Monde that the frightful slaughter in Paris on November 13, 2015, was coordinated from a single cell phone in Belgium, used solely for that purpose. The Belgian phone was activated the day before, at 10:24 p.m., and at 9:21 on the evening of the 13th it received a short text message from the Paris group headed for the concert to begin their attack: “We’re on our way, it’s starting.” Within two minutes, the phones were shut off.

  The French phone was found in a garbage can outside the concert hall where an American group, Eagles of Death Metal, was featured. The concert hall attack as well as two others that same evening in Paris were coordinated via text from the same phone in Belgium. As of this writing in April 2016, the user has still not been identified.

  Even the best technology can’t save us from well-organized killers. Unless there were other communications leading up to the 13th of November, there’s no digital technology that would have alerted Parisian authorities to the operation. We’d have had to infiltrate the group and known in advance about the attacks. Since we still don’t know who was on the line in Belgium, this obviously didn’t happen.

  Nor should you believe that intercepts of terrorists’ communications are necessarily reliable guides to their real intentions. In the War on Terror, for example, some of our top analysts came to believe that the Iranians were deliberately sending us misleading messages via what we believed to be real phone calls. Since the Iranians thought we were listening to most all of their conversations, it would have been to their advantage to muddy the inte
lligence waters. Technology will only take you so far; a trained and cunning mind is always necessary in these matters.

  Some believe that if we could thoroughly map the ISIS and al Qaeda digital networks, we would be able to monitor all the potential terrorists, but even this is overly optimistic. Oddly, in the United States it is not illegal to recruit or indoctrinate online; we have to wait until some “real” crime, such as traveling (or organizing a trip) from a Western country to terrorist training camps overseas, is committed. Our law enforcement agencies have done quite well at coping with such restrictions.

  Moreover, there’s an ongoing dispute within the intelligence community about the best use of the digital information. It’s similar to the kind of disagreements that inevitably crop up on the battlefield and in traditional espionage: some will always want to destroy any clearly identified enemy target, or arrest known hostile agents, while others will feel that the intelligence value of watching our enemies at work exceeds the gain from temporarily putting some of them out of business. Hostile digital operations are extreme cases of this dilemma, since it is so easy to create new sites online.

  My own view is that, once again, the truth is the most lethal weapon against Radical Islam. While some of this digital warfare (breaking their codes, identifying some of their sites in the so-called dark web, and tracking terrorists’ communications) must be done secretly, the bulk of it, the part that has to do with the ideological conflict, is best defeated by exposure. When potential followers and recruits become aware that we are watching sites to which they are attracted, many of them will be scared off. Knowing or believing that the Radical Islamists are under constant observation undercuts their appeal and sabotages their prestige.