And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  At one ISIS checkpoint, the militants stopped us and started talking to the driver. You could see them trying to figure out what to do: “Do we take these guys on? Do we remove Salim Idris and his Western journalist and crew from the car?” I’m not a mind reader, so I can’t be 100 percent sure what they were thinking. But judging by their body language, the tone of their questions, and the spirited conversations they had among themselves, it sure looked like a kangaroo court had been convened.

  They eventually waved us through. A few months later, I don’t think we would have made it. By then, the FSA was no match for ISIS. Salim Idris no longer had any clout. We would have just been taken. And ISIS wouldn’t have been concerned about the consequences. There would have been little if any political backlash, just pleas from NBC and the US government to let us go. I know this sounds melodramatic, but anyone who’s crossed a lawless border—in Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan—knows the feeling. You can simply disappear and no one would be the wiser.

  When I went into Syria again in August 2013, this time to collect soil samples to test for evidence that Assad had used chemical weapons, the first person I saw was an ISIS gunman with a ski mask and a headband with an Islamic slogan written on it. The ISIS fighters were sending a message to the FSA and al-Qaeda and everyone else in Syria that they were now in charge. ISIS evolved in plain sight, right under the world’s nose and often in front of our camera. ISIS is not a virus that came from nowhere. It started in Iraq, and then expanded in Syria, cannibalizing the rebel movement and capitalizing on Syrians’ dashed hopes and growing anger.

  ISIS also learned to market itself. The group is obsessively concerned with its public image, knowing that it’s key to recruiting and to its jihadist preeminence. So it reacts swiftly to any development that raises doubts about its control of its caliphate in Iraq and Syria. In late June 2015, for example, Kurdish fighters stirred ISIS’s ire when, with the help of US warplanes, they captured the Syrian town Tal Abyad. This was not just any town. It sits astride a key supply line for arms and fighters bound for Raqqa, ISIS’s command center in Syria. Raqqa, a city of 220,000, lies fifty-five miles south of the Turkish border and a hundred miles east of Aleppo.

  ISIS responded with a barrage of snuff videos. In one, five men described as spies were put in a cage and lowered into a swimming pool while a camera captured their drowning throes. A second group was crammed into a car that was then blown up by a rocket-propelled grenade; the scene was made all the more gruesome when the car burst into flames. In the third, seven men were decapitated simultaneously by an explosive cable strung around their necks.

  When ISIS captured the ancient city of Palmyra in May 2015, the world rightly feared for its archaeological treasures. Under ISIS’s austere monotheism, human statues and memorials constitute idolatry forbidden by Sunni Islam.

  ISIS had grander plans for Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site located 135 miles northeast of  Damascus. On July 4, 2015, a date perhaps chosen for its resonance in the United States, ISIS released a ten-minute video whose cinematic style resembled the early epics of Cecil B. DeMille. In a meticulously choreographed death pageant, ISIS fighters led twenty-five Syrian soldiers into an ancient Roman amphitheater. The Syrians, dressed in dark green fatigues, were lined up on the stage and forced to kneel. Then an equal number of ISIS teenagers, wearing sand-colored clothes and tan headscarves, filed past the stage, with a soundtrack of musical chants giving them a heroic air. They mounted the stage, each taking a place behind one of the soldiers, pointed handguns at the Syrians’ heads, and pulled the triggers at the same time.

  ISIS had become more than a savage terrorist group; it had also become a state of mind, a place off the grid of humanity where only ISIS rules mattered. While most of the horrific acts given an ISIS label were committed by “core” members in the caliphate, a growing number were carried out by “branches,” “offshoots,” or “affiliates” inspired by ISIS—or lone-wolf copycats turned on by ISIS snuff videos.

  On June 26, 2015, which ISIS called “Bloody Friday,” four attacks were carried out on three continents in the wake of the group’s call for “calamity for the infidels” during Ramadan. In a beach rampage in Sousse, Tunisia, a lone gunman killed thirty-eight people, most of them British tourists. ISIS claimed responsibility, but investigators believed the killer belonged to a separate network of Salafis. The gunman, twenty-four-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui, trained with an extremist group in Libya, along with two other militants who killed twenty-two people at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis in March 2015.

  In Kuwait, a branch of ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack on a Shiite mosque. (The same group had previously claimed responsibility for killing twenty-four in attacks on two other Shiite mosques, both in eastern Saudi Arabia, in May 2015.) In Somalia, a radical group called Al-Shabaab, which several years ago pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, killed dozens of Burundian soldiers at an African Union base. Al-Shabaab ditched al-Qaeda in favor of an allegiance to ISIS, partly because al-Qaeda was demanding kickbacks from the Somali group and partly because ISIS was the hot new brand in the terror business.

  Perhaps the most disturbing ISIS-related attack on Bloody Friday only took one life. A worker at a US-owned industrial plant in southeastern France killed his boss, then decapitated him and put his head atop a fence outside the factory. He also took pictures of the victim’s body draped with an Islamist flag. The suspect had visited Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, was thought to be connected to a Salafist group, and had been under surveillance by French authorities off and on for the last decade. Yet his stated motive for the atrocity was chillingly banal: he wanted to get back at his boss for chewing him out for dropping a pallet of valuable material.

  Watching the ISIS videos is disturbing. Meeting the group’s victims in person, however, leaves a mark.

  In the summer of 2015, I met Mohammed, fourteen, in the southern Turkish city of Sanliurfa, an ancient city of stone walls and canals filled with fish from a sacred pond. The city looks more like Aleppo than cosmopolitan Istanbul. I met Mohammed in a small apartment where he lived with his brother and a friend of the family who was acting as his nurse. Mohammed was using a wheelchair to move around the apartment on the third floor of a dilapidated walk-up building. It had no air-conditioning. The doorways in the apartment were narrow. His wheelchair didn’t fit through all of them, so Mohammed, originally from eastern Syria, often pushed himself out of the chair and hopped around the apartment on one foot.

  ISIS had chopped off Mohammed’s right hand and left foot two weeks before I met him. ISIS tried to turn Mohammed into a child soldier. The group disfigured him because he refused to cooperate.

  Although Mohammed looked like a typical young teenager, pimples and all, he had been part of the Free Syrian Army, fighting against the Syrian regime and ISIS. Mohammed worked as a spotter, using binoculars to help the rebels locate their targets.

  “First we were going to [anti-government] demonstrations. Later on we got armed with the Free [Syrian] Army, and we fought the al-Assad regime for three years,” Mohammed said with obvious pride in his voice.

  The balance of power shifted in eastern Syria when ISIS took over Mosul and captured stockpiles of American-made weapons. Mohammed went into hiding. He knew the rebels couldn’t defeat ISIS after Mosul.

  “I stayed at home for seven months,” Mohammed said. “Later on, ISIS started arresting members of the Free [Syrian] Army. One of the detainees told them I was also a member.”

  Mohammed didn’t know he’d been informed on until a group of ISIS fighters showed up at his door to seize him.

  After Mohammed was discovered and arrested, he was locked in an ISIS jail for two months. He says he was in a room with seventy-five other boys and men. He says they were all tortured savagely, his shins beaten with bats and electric shocks to his genitals.

  “Many people died there. No water, no electricity. They provided water twice a day. We used the toilet once a day,” M
ohammed said.

  Mohammed was released from prison and also sentenced to repent by going to an ISIS indoctrination school. But Mohammed was convinced that if he went to the school, he’d be sent to the front lines to die or used as a suicide bomber. Mohammed decided to try to escape with a group of friends.

  One of them turned him in.

  Within a few hours, Mohammed was brought before an ISIS judge. His crime was trying to escape ISIS-held areas, thereby choosing to leave the realm of “true Islam” for the land of the infidels, which ISIS considers everywhere else.

  “He said to me ‘This is the judgment of Allah. You were going to the land of the infidels . . . so you are like them. Your leg and arm must be cut off.’ ”

  The punishment was carried out the next day.

  The “chopping” ritual was carried out in a carnival-like atmosphere with an assembled crowd cheering and jeering as the condemned were brought to a city square. A section of honor in the square was reserved for the children of foreign fighters.

  The sons of foreign fighters were expected to cheer and jeer the loudest. They were being trained, Mohammed said, to be elite members of ISIS’s next generation of suicide bombers and foreign terrorists. Sometimes the sons of foreign fighters carried out executions themselves, erasing their respect for human life while they’re still impressionable.

  Mohammed’s punishment was to have his opposing limbs cut off: his right hand (considered in Islamic culture to be the “clean” hand) and his left foot. ISIS attempts to make the horrific ritual appear hygienic. The ISIS members who held Mohammed’s limbs in place wore surgical gloves and squirted iodine on his hand and foot. Mohammed said he was given an injection. He didn’t know what it was but said he was told it would calm him down.

  ISIS members tied Mohammed’s arm and leg with tourniquets to cut off the blood flow to his hand and foot. The purpose of the amputations was not to kill the victim, but maim him forever. The tourniquets were left on for about fifteen minutes. Then, Mohammed’s arm was stretched out on a block of wood. A large meat cleaver was placed on top of his wrist at the point where the cut would be made. A man with a mallet smashed the back of the cleaver so it would cut straight through bone and flesh. Mohammed and others identified the man who carried out the punishment as an Iraqi from ISIS’s “chopping committee,” known by the nickname “the Bulldozer.”

  The first chop was met with celebratory cries of Allahu Akbar. The ritual was repeated to cut off his foot. Mohammed was then taken to an ISIS clinic where his skin was stretched and sewn over the stumps.

  Mohammed’s mother picked him up from the clinic, brought him home, and smuggled him into Turkey a few days later.

  “They are fooling children with money,” Mohammed said. “They are fooling them to bomb themselves. They give a boy some money, or a bicycle, and after two days they take him in a car to bomb himself. They target children the most. They focus on children, because children are unaware of anything in this life.”

  In Turkey, Mohammed didn’t have enough money for medical and psychological care. His brother and the family friend who nurses him did the best they could with the help of a few generous Turks. Mohammed cried every time his bandages were changed. He was having nightmares, wet his bed, and often got confused. One time, he forgot his foot was missing and tried to walk out, falling down the stairs of the building where he was living. His brother took him outside every day to get some fresh air.

  “I can only sleep after I take sleeping pills,” Mohammed said. “The most difficult time is when I go to sleep. The pain starts. In the daytime, I sit in the street and watch the people passing by to forget the pain.”

  But Mohammed said what hurt more than falling down the stairs was when a Turkish man approached him and gave him fifty Turkish lira, the equivalent of about $15. Mohammed wasn’t begging. He was just sitting in his wheelchair, as he said, to forget the pain.

  When he looked at the money in his lap, he started to cry. It dawned on him that he’d become what in Arabic is called a miskeen, someone who deserves pity. That’s not how Mohammed saw himself, but he realized that’s how others saw him.

  What was even more disturbing was that ISIS, even while bragging about and showing off its brutality, continued to grow. General James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, told Congress in February 2015 that ISIS had as many as thirty-one thousand fighters. Based on conversations with US military officials, I think the number of fighters was probably double that, and well over one hundred thousand if the ISIS support network is included.

  Who are these would-be jihadists? In simpler times most jihadists were motivated by idealism, misguided or not. In Antakya in September 2013, I interviewed a Tunisian man who called himself Abu Abdul Rahman, not to be confused with Zarqawi’s deputy of the same name, as he waited for a smuggler to take him across the Turkish border into Syria. (Tunisia had by mid-2015 sent upward of three thousand fighters to Syria, more than any other country, despite having a population of only 10.8 million, little more than half the 20.1 million people who live in the New York metropolitan area.)

  Abu Abdul Rahman, a twenty-two-year-old college student who had never fired a gun in anger, thought he was volunteering for al-Qaeda, but his contact across the border was ISIS. The lines between the two groups were still blurry back then. Regardless, his motives were typical of recruits for both groups. “This was a dream for me, to wage jihad for Allah’s sake, because this is one of the greatest deeds in Islam, to lift aggression off my brothers, to bleed for Allah and no other,” he said in my report on the Nightly News.

  He was going to Syria to defend Muslims who Assad’s regime was killing with barrel bombs. He was going to Syria because no one else was helping. He called his mother on the way to the border. She asked him to wait for her so she could come to Turkey to say good-bye in person. He lied to her, saying he was already in Syria and it was too late. “I am happy,” he told me. “People say that by coming here I might die, there is shelling and so forth. . . . I did not come for money, I only came for Allah’s sake and to support my Muslim brothers.”

  By 2015, ISIS was attracting not only idealists but also a grab bag of off-kilter types: sociopaths aroused by bloodlust; loners and misfits who craved a sense of belonging; thrill seekers who wanted to test themselves in combat; Muslims in Europe and America who felt they were excluded from Western prosperity or demeaned by Western permissiveness; people who resented authority in any form; naïfs seduced by slickly produced propaganda that gave violence a romantic patina.

  The ISIS economy was healthy. The group controlled roughly 9 million people, a sizable tax base. The jihadists also had significant earnings from the sale of artifacts and oil pumped in areas it controlled. Plunder from conquests was another profit center: after taking Mosul, ISIS stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the central bank and several small banks. Kidnappings provided a steady revenue stream. Between 2008 and 2014, according to US government estimates, radical Islamist groups received $200 million in ransom payments.

  ISIS also tried to show it could be a functioning government. In Mosul, ISIS fixed roads, spruced up gardens, installed streetlamps, and swept up cigarette butts. But it also blew up iconic shrines, shut down cell-phone towers and the Internet, and limited outside travel. In May 2015, when ISIS captured Ramadi, tens of thousands of residents had already fled. After killing opponents and seizing weapons, ISIS set about repairing roads, distributing fuel, maintaining the electrical grid, and ensuring the markets had food.

  After the adrenaline rush of combat, sweeping streets and picking up garbage is pretty humdrum stuff. It could be argued that Saudi Arabia was born in a similar way, with Ibn Saud conquering four regions and proclaiming them a kingdom in 1932. Saudi Arabia became a major oil producer and a modern country with a court system, albeit one that condemns prisoners to beheadings. But I don’t see ISIS becoming another Saudi Arabia. It’s too radical and too intolerant. And its fighters have drunk too much bloo
d. Saudi Arabia was born with ISIS’s zeal and intolerant Sunni vision, but it wasn’t run by a collection of murderous maniacs who’d come specifically to a place so they could carry out war crimes.

  * * *

  SOME US SECURITY EXPERTS STRESS that ISIS is more interested in consolidating power in the Islamic world and less focused than al-Qaeda on attacking the United States and other Western countries. I don’t agree. ISIS has made no secret of its interest in going global. In 2014, the group’s principal spokesman, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, issued a manifesto in which he said Allah had called on Muslims to “punish in similar fashion as you were afflicted.” Adnani claimed that US aggression had taken close to 10 million Muslim lives in recent decades. “So if a bomb is launched at them that will kill ten million of them, and it will burn their land as they burned Muslim lands, this is therefore permissible.” In a video released on February 15, 2015, showing ISIS militants executing twenty-one Egyptian Christians on a Libyan beach, one of the gunmen pointed across the Mediterranean and declared, “We will conquer Rome, by the will of Allah.”

  The rivalry and competition between ISIS and al-Qaeda is also a concern. If al-Qaeda is going to catch up with ISIS and regain its leadership of the international jihad, it needs to strike at the heart of the West as it did on 9/11. Another troubling scenario is one in which ISIS and al-Qaeda sort out their differences and realize they’re on the same team.

  When I arrived in 1996, a state system was in place in the Middle East: Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Gadhafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt. The Assad family, first Hafez and then Bashar, in Syria. Ben Ali in Tunisia. The Jordanian and Saudi monarchies. These regimes or their predecessors had survived the shock of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. They were not the most enlightened leaders around, they were corrupt and thuggish, but the Arab world was at least a functioning place. The Middle East house may have been rotten, but it was standing.