The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Other medical professionals followed her. In March 2015, nine Muslim medical students from Britain went to the Islamic State to work in hospitals there. Turkish politician Mehmet Ali Ediboglu, who met with their families when they went to Turkey to try to persuade their children to return, remarked, “Let’s not forget about the fact that they are doctors; they went there to help, not to fight. So this case is a little bit different.”81 A little, but not much. Surely a British doctor who traveled to Nazi Germany to work in a German hospital in 1943 would have been recognized as a traitor.

  In any case, the Islamic State still hadn’t achieved universal access to healthcare. In mid-April 2015 it executed ten doctors in northern Iraq for refusing to treat its jihadis.82 And two weeks later, the Islamic State issued a video announcing the formation of the Islamic State Health Service.83 The clip featured a Muslim pediatrician from Australia, Dr. Tareq Kamleh (now known as Abu Yusuf), standing in a hospital and holding a newborn baby. He called upon Muslim doctors to travel to the Islamic State: “Please consider coming, please don’t delay.” Providing medical services in the Islamic State was his “jihad for Islam,” the good doctor said.84

  On April 26, 2015, just days after Kamleh’s video appeared, a photo of a newborn baby with a handgun and a grenade placed next to him, along with what was claimed to be the Islamic State’s first official birth certificate, began circulating on Twitter.85

  Cubs of the Caliphate

  When that lad gets older, he may join the Islamic State’s answer to the Hitler Youth, “Cubs of the Caliphate.” Between January and late March 2015, the ISIS youth organization enrolled at least four hundred Syrian children under the age of eighteen, giving them training in how to fire weapons as well as an intensive indoctrination into the Islamic State worldview. An ISIS video released in March showed one of these boys shooting and killing an accused spy.

  The caliphate has called upon Muslim parents around the world to send their children to the Islamic State for jihad training.86 The Cubs of the Caliphate program makes it likely that even if the Islamic State is defeated and eradicated, its aftershocks will be felt around the world for years to come.

  ISIS: Bringing Mass-Murdering Totalitarian Government Back into Fashion

  The Islamic State’s confident and emphatic proclamations that it is the foremost exponent of the Islamic faith, and its primary earthly authority, have not kept it from the infighting and internal strife that plague most organizations—and particularly those of a strongly authoritarian bent.

  “Daesh tries to portray itself as one thing, but beneath the surface there’s a lot of dirt,” said a critic of the group inside its capital of Raqqa, Syria. There were fights within the group, he claimed, over money and power.87 Jamie Dettmer of the Daily Beast reported in February 2015 that there were “quarrels over a range of issues—from divvying up of the spoils of war to competition over women and, yes, the handling of foreign hostages.”88

  After ISIS besieged but then failed to capture the town of Kobani on the Syrian border with Turkey, other tensions emerged as well. One refugee who fled from the Islamic State said: “The prolonged battle for Kobani caused a lot of tensions—fighters accused each other of treachery and eventually turned on each other.”89 A Free Syrian Army member noted: “There is a lot of mutual suspicion among the commanders. We tried to exchange some information with an ISIS commander recently and within days he was executed.”90

  The anti-ISIS Syrian group “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently” has reported that the Islamic State is just as brutal with dissenters as antecedent totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. After the Islamic State burned alive Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh, “an ISIS cleric in Aleppo province who dared to criticize the immolation of al Kasasbeh has been removed from his post by the ‘caliphate’ leadership and will be put on trial by the group. The Saudi-born imam had said those responsible for the video-recorded murder are the ones who should be put on trial.”91

  Also like the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states, the Islamic State has made it difficult for those who have joined it to change their minds and go home. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported in December 2014 that in a two-month span ISIS had killed at least 116 foreign jihadis who had tried to leave the caliphate for home, and added, “We believe that the real number of people that had been killed by IS is higher than the number documented.”92 In March 2015 came another report, that the Islamic State had killed nine of its own jihadis who had tried to abandon the caliphate.93

  And over a six-month period the Islamic State’s reign of terror claimed the lives of at least 1,878 people—including over 1,175 civilians, 930 of whom were members of a tribe that had fought the ISIS jihadis for control of two oilfields. It also executed over 500 soldiers of Bashar Assad’s regime, and nearly 100 who were fighting against Assad but as members of groups other than the Islamic State.94

  Who’s Who in ISIS: The Caliph

  The Islamic State’s Caliph Ibrahim is more commonly known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but that is a nom de guerre. His real name, insofar as any of the information that has been reported about him is accurate, is Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri. According to many accounts, he hails from a family that has produced numerous Muslim clerics, and he himself has a Ph.D. in Islamic law from the Islamic University in Baghdad.95

  While all that we know about him is questionable, some of the reports contain interesting details. The most vivid impression that Baghdadi apparently left on those who knew him in his early life in his native city of Samarra was of a quiet, bookish boy just the opposite of Zarqawi, the thuggish ISIS founder. A neighbor recalled that he was “so quiet you could hardly hear his voice. He was peaceful. He didn’t like to chat a lot.”96 The future caliph was deeply committed to Islam from the beginning: “He always had religious or other books attached on the back of his bike, and I never saw him in trousers and shirt, like most of the other guys in Samarra. He had a light beard, and he never hung out in cafés. He had his small circle from his mosque.” Another former neighbor recalled, “He was from a poor but well-mannered family. He was someone very introverted . . . go the mosque [sic], study, read books, that’s it.” A third remembered that he “was, like most of his family, a devoted Muslim.”97

  From 1994 to 2004, while the worldwide jihad was heating up, Baghdadi lived quietly in a room at a mosque in Baghdad, occasionally leading prayers when the imam was away.98

  A former neighbor recalled that despite his devout commitment to Islam he was a quiet man who wasn’t even stirred to open action when American troops entered Iraq: “He didn’t show any hostility to the Americans. He wasn’t like the hot blooded ones. He must have been a quiet planner.”99

  One of Baghdadi’s classmates at the Islamic University remembered him as “quiet, and retiring. He spent time alone.” The classmate eventually joined the jihad against the Americans, and didn’t find Baghdadi among its leaders: “I used to know all the leaders personally. Zarqawi was closer than a brother to me. But I didn’t know Baghdadi. He was insignificant. He used to lead prayer in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him.”100

  This shy, quiet Muslim cleric did, however, eventually join the jihad against the U.S. forces, and he was imprisoned by the Americans.101 It was on his release from Camp Bucca that he is said to have issued his famous veiled threat, “I’ll see you guys in New York.”102

  The future caliph’s support for the idea of the caliphate was based on a straightforward idea of fairness. One Islamic State supporter has explained: “In short, for Sheikh Baghdadi, each religion has its state except Islam, and it should have a state and it should be imposed. It is very simple.”103 A warrior for the rival al-Qaeda group Jabhat al-Nusra remarked, “He is becoming very popular among jihadis. They see him as someone who is fighting the war of Islam. . . . He has received letters expressing loyalty from Afghanistan and Pakistan as well. Sheikh Zawahri is trying but I think it is too late.”104


  With all the reports of dissension with the Islamic State, there have not been any reports of serious challenges to the authority of the caliph Ibrahim. There has been no hint of a power struggle like the one that went on between Ali ibn Abi Talib and Muawiya in the early days of Islam, and no rival claimants or pretenders to the caliph’s throne.

  A power struggle could be going on behind the scenes, of course, and locked up as tightly as al-Baghdadi himself, who has only been seen once in public since he proclaimed his caliphate in June 2014.

  Since then, al-Baghdadi’s serious injury and even death have been reported more than once: “Iraqi Isis Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ‘Severely Injured and Flees to Syria,’” read the International Business Times headline just six days after the proclamation of the caliphate.105 And then Al Arabiya reported four months later that al-Baghdadi had been seriously wounded in an airstrike on November 8, 2014.106 There was widespread speculation at that time that the caliph was dead. General Nicholas Houghton, the Chief of the Defence Staff of the British Armed Forces, said the next day: “I can’t absolutely confirm that Baghdadi has been killed. Probably it will take some days to have absolute confirmation.”107

  We’re still waiting. Just a few days after the airstrike, the caliph released an audiotape full of bravado and threats. “America and its allies are terrified, weak, and powerless,” he bragged, and denounced the familiar bogeymen: the Jews and the “apostate” and “treacherous” Muslim leaders who rejected his authority.

  “Oh soldiers of the Islamic State, continue to harvest the [enemy] soldiers,” al-Baghdadi exhorted. “Erupt volcanoes of jihad everywhere. Light the earth with fire under all the tyrants and their soldiers and supporters.”

  DON’T WORRY, THE CALIPH IS SAFE AND SOUND—THE JIHAD WILL SOON REACH ROME

  “Be assured, O Muslims, for your state is good and in the best condition. Its march will not stop and it will continue to expand, by Allah’s permission. The march of the mujahidin [Muslim holy warriors] will continue until they reach Rome. And soon, the Jews and Crusaders will be forced to come down to the ground and send their ground forces to their deaths and destruction.”

  —the caliph reassuring ISIS supporters after the November 2014 airstrike that gave rise to speculation he had been killed108

  Since then, silence. The caliph has become as spectral and surrounded by myth as Orwell’s Big Brother, or Osama bin Laden in his secret Pakistani redoubt. But the brutality of the caliphate he leads is an all too solid reality.

  The Shadow Caliph

  On April 21, 2015, it was reported yet again that the caliph had been seriously wounded in an airstrike.109 The Pentagon, however, immediately denied the report, saying that the caliph was not in the car that had been hit.110 Ignoring this denial, Iraqi government adviser Hisham al Hashimi stated that al-Baghdadi’s de facto replacement was a former protégé of Osama bin Laden, Abu Alaa Afri: “After Baghdadi’s wounding,” al Hashimi said, “he has begun to head up Daesh with the help of officials responsible for other portfolios. He will be the leader of Daesh if Baghdadi dies.”111 On April 27, reporter Kareem Shaheen of the UK’s Guardian said: “Sources tell us Baghdadi is still alive, but still unable to move due to spinal injury sustained in the March air strike.”112 That same day, Radio Iran reported that the caliph was dead.113

  The conflicting reports made it impossible to tell what al-Baghdadi’s condition really was, but there was no reason to doubt that Afri was an important figure inside the Islamic State. Al Hashimi, the Iraqi government adviser, claimed that Afri was more important to the Islamic State’s leadership than the caliph himself: “Yes—more important, and smarter, and with better relationships. He is a good public speaker and strong charisma [sic]. All the leaders of Daesh find that he has much jihadi wisdom, and good capability at leadership and administration.”114

  Al Hashimi added that Afri had been a physics teacher and “has dozens of publications and religious (shariah) studies of his own.”115 He was also apparently Osama bin Laden’s choice to lead al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2010 and is thought to support reconciliation between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. In May 2015, the Iraq military claimed that Afri himself had been killed in an airstrike, but the Pentagon would not confirm the claim,116 and the video of the airstrike released by the Iraqis was apparently from a different location from the one they claimed.117

  The Executioner

  In sharp contrast to the elusive caliph, the Islamic State’s principal killer is highly visible, although his identity wasn’t discovered until his international notoriety was already well established. The man whose knife sawed into the throats of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, Peter Kassig, Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto, and others while the Islamic State cameras rolled always wore a balaclava over his face, and never announced who he was. He speaks with a pronounced English accent and is known as “Jihadi John” after John Lennon of the Beatles, he and three other British Muslims in ISIS—“Paul,” “George,” and “Ringo”—having been nicknamed after the Fab Four by hostages they held in the Islamic State.119

  THE BLUE MEANIES TAKE IRAQ

  “It’s bullshit. What they are doing out there is against everything The Beatles stood for. . . . If we stood for anything we never stood for that. The four of us absolutely stood for peace and love. But we are not in control.”

  —Ringo Starr commenting on Jihadi John, Paul, George, and Ringo118

  Jihadi John’s “bandmates,” however, have remained obscure, while the prominence of “John” in Islamic State beheading videos inspired an all-out effort to discover his identity. “Jihadi John” turned out to be Mohammed Emwazi, a former London resident in his mid-twenties. Emwazi was born in Kuwait and moved with his family to London in 1994, where he lived a quiet middle class existence and attended a Greenwich mosque. He graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in computer programming.120

  Once it became clear that Emwazi had not suffered from poverty, the root cause to which a Muslim’s turn to jihad terror is typically attributed, the mainstream media began casting Emwazi as a victim of Britain’s overzealous security services. Emwazi and two of his friends had flown to Tanzania in August 2009; they said they just wanted to go on safari, but authorities in Dar es Salaam refused him admission. In September 2009 he went to his native Kuwait; ten months later he returned to Britain and then was refused a visa to go back to Kuwait. “I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” Emwazi recounted. “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London, a person imprisoned and controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace and country, Kuwait.”121

  This was the cause of Emwazi’s “radicalization,” claimed Asim Qureshi of Cage, a far-Left group in Britain that agitates for the release of Guantanamo detainees and other jihadists. Qureshi complained, “When we treat people as if they are outsiders they will inevitably feel like outsiders—our entire national security strategy for the last 13 years has only increased alienation. A narrative of injustice has taken root.”122

  Perhaps—but does this “narrative of injustice” and alienation-producing national security strategy really apply to Tanzania? None of those who claimed that Emwazi had been “radicalized” by his supposedly unfair treatment at the hands of British security officials explained why it was not only the British who had denied Emwazi a visa to go to Kuwait, but also Tanzanian officials who had refused to let him into that country. Emwazi aroused the suspicion of security officials in not one but two nations long before he became “Jihadi John.”

  What’s more, if British authorities were so venomously Islamophobic that they spent their time and resources harassing innocent young Muslims like poor Mohammed Emwazi, why were they so inattentive that they allowed Emwazi to make his way to the Islamic State?

  Then again, one doesn’t need a visa to go there.

  The Computer Wizard

  Ahmad Abousamra grew up in Stoughton, Massachuse
tts, a toney suburb of Boston. His father, Dr. Abdul Abousamra, was for two decades an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and is now a professor of medicine, physiology, and molecular genetics in the School of Medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit.

  Young Ahmad attended top schools: Xaverian Brothers High School, where he made the honor roll, and then Northeastern University, where he made the Dean’s List and graduated with a technology degree.123 But he was deeply committed to Islam from an early age, and finally in 2004, when he was twenty-two, he went to Iraq and joined al-Qaeda in Iraq’s “media wing”—foreshadowing the key role he would play ten years later in establishing the Islamic State’s widely touted social media presence. He also went to Pakistan and Yemen to try to get jihad terror training.124

  Returning to the United States two years later, Abousamra was questioned, was released without being charged with anything, and fled to Syria.125 In 2009, he was implicated in a jihad plot to gun down Americans in shopping malls and murder U.S. officials and was finally charged with terrorist activity.126

  Special Agent Heidi Williams of Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) said that Abousamra and his fellow Boston jihadi Tarek Mehanna were inspired by 9/11, and “they celebrated it.”127

  Ahmad Abousamra made the FBI’s Most Wanted List, with a $50,000 reward on his head.128 Until the spring of 2015, he was believed to be in the Islamic State, where he oversaw ISIS’s sophisticated social media campaigns.

  Williams said of Abousamra and his co-conspirator Tarek Mehanna, the son of a professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences: “Both men were self-radicalized and used the Internet to educate themselves. They came to it independently, but once they found each other, they encouraged each other’s beliefs.”129