The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  How to Survive in the West details how jihadis should use the internet carefully, how they should communicate with each other, how they should keep in shape, and even how they should undertake weapons training using “Toy guns (Nerf guns), or Pellet guns or Paintball guns for target practice.”76 It also includes bomb-making instructions and tips on how to make sure one is not under surveillance. It goes into the Charlie Hebdo jihad massacre, explaining how the Kouachi brothers got their weapons and carried out their attack—making it clear that the Islamic State intends to train new cadres of jihadis to carry out an increasing number of jihad massacres in the United States and Europe.

  They are coming.

  Chapter Ten

  HOW TO DEFEAT ISIS—AND WHY WE MUST

  The Islamic State is nothing less than the foremost evil force of our time.

  It is, as Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said, an “apocalyptic death cult.”1 In an age when the entire U.S. and European foreign policy establishment is geared toward negotiation, compromise, and accommodation, it is fanatically intransigent. The idea of reaching a negotiated settlement with ISIS is inconceivable.

  Did you know?

  •For lack of good intel on targets, U.S. bombing runs on the Islamic State are returning without dropping their bombs nearly 75 percent of the time

  •Defeating ISIS risks empowering Iran

  •The Pentagon published a map that showed ISIS losses of territory, but left out their gains

  •Japan’s post–World War II constitution provides a clue to how ISIS might be stopped

  The Islamic State wants the death of the United States and the free West. Many of its members want to die in the process of killing us. Like other jihadis, Islamic State members loudly proclaim their love for death. Black Flags from Palestine contains what it says is a quote from a Russian general, speaking of the jihadis in Chechnya: “How can you defeat an enemy who looks into the barrel of your Gun and sees Paradise?”2

  This faith rules out the possibility that Islamic State jihadis will be deterred by the threat of death. They want to be killed, so that they can receive Allah’s rewards for martyrs: the virgins, pearl-like boys, cool breezes, and non-intoxicating wine of Islamic Paradise. The old Cold War–era concept of Mutually Assured Destruction will not work in this context.

  The Islamic State has published numerous calls for jihad terror attacks in the United States and the West, along with manuals to explain to young Muslims how they can carry out such attacks without being caught and imprisoned. They mean to drain our economy dry with counter-terror measures against an increasingly numerous and aggressive foe. They mean to kill us by means of the death of a thousand cuts.

  As long as the Islamic State exists, the West will not have peace. As long as the Islamic State exists, the United States will not have peace.

  Either the Islamic State will die, or we will.

  But how to kill it?

  Barack Obama’s Foredoomed Plan

  The Obama administration has been striking the Islamic State from the air and claiming great success. Of course, airstrikes alone have never won a war, and Obama is relying on Kurdish and other forces, supported by the U.S. from the air, to roll back the territory that the Islamic State controls. At the end of May 2015 it emerged that almost “75 percent of U.S. bombing runs targeting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria returned to base without firing any weapons in the first four months of 2015, holding their fire mainly because of a lack of ground intelligence and raising questions about President Obama’s key tactic in pushing back an enemy that continues to expand its territory in the war zone.”3

  In September 2014, the New York Times had reported that Obama “said he envisioned the Free Syrian Army’s providing the ground presence needed to confront ISIS in Syria.”4 Obama told Chuck Todd of NBC, “We have a Free Syrian Army and a moderate opposition that we have steadily been working with that we have vetted. They have been on the defensive, not just from ISIL, but also from the Assad regime. And what—you know, if you recall, at the West Point speech that I gave, I said, we need to put more resources into the moderate opposition.”5

  There were at least two problems with Obama’s plan:

  1. The Free Syrian Army are allies of the Islamic State, not of the U.S. The “moderate opposition” to which Obama wanted to devote more resources was not actually opposing the Islamic State at all. Two months before Obama stated that he was depending upon the Free Syrian Army to fight against the Islamic State, several Free Syrian Army brigades had already pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.6 And it was the Dawood Brigade, another group that had been aligned with the Free Syrian Army, that originally captured American journalist James Foley; when the Dawood Brigade pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, Foley fell into the hands of ISIS, and they beheaded him.7

  The day after Obama said that he was depending on the Free Syrian Army to defeat the Islamic State, Bassel Idriss, the commander of an anti-Assad force aligned with the Free Syrian Army, declared, “We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front [al-Qaeda’s representatives in Syria] by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in . . . Qalamoun. . . . Our battle is with the Assad regime, and it is on Syrian lands only.”8 In other words, they were not fighting against the Islamic State, either in Syria or Iraq.

  Harakat Hazm, yet another group that was aligned with the Free Syrian Army and had received training and weapons from the United States, far from welcoming and helping to coordinate the U.S. airstrikes in Syria, denounced them as “an attack on the revolution.”9

  One Free Syrian Army fighter who joined the Islamic State and then labored to get others to follow suit observed in November 2014, “Isis now is like a magnet that attracts large numbers of Muslims.”10

  2. There are no “moderates”—and fighting the Islamic State is aiding Iran. There is no significant force in either Iraq or Syria that wants to establish a Western-style secular republic. The nation that stands to gain the most from the removal of the Islamic State from Iraq and Syria is Iran, where throngs chant “Death to America” at Tehran rallies as the tanks and rockets roll by. The U.S.-backed government in Baghdad is a weak client government of Iran, as is Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria. Shi’ite militias have gone into action against the Islamic State in Iraq. The Islamic State must be removed, but if it is, the Iranians could end up controlling an arc of territory stretching from Baghdad to Beirut. There is simply no easy solution to this problem.

  The Pentagon Becomes a Ministry of Propaganda

  Apparently aware that Obama’s plan, such as it was, to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State had no chance of accomplishing that goal, and that any successes it did have would play into the hands of one of America’s most vicious enemies, the Pentagon began to reassure the American people that all was well: the airstrikes were a huge success, and combined with ground forces from the area, they were recapturing large segments of Islamic State territory.

  The mainstream media, always eager to make Barack Obama look good, began announcing the Islamic State’s imminent demise late in 2014. The articles came in a steady stream: A CNN headline asked in November 2014, “Has ISIS Peaked? Terror Group Suffers Setbacks in Iraq.”11 The Atlantic announced in January 2015, “ISIS Is Losing Its Greatest Weapon: Momentum: Evidence Suggests That the Islamic State’s Power Has Been Declining for Months.”12 Not to be outdone, CNN followed a few weeks later with “For ISIS, Tough Times as It Seeks to Regroup.”13 The New York Times announced on February 4, 2015, “ISIS Is Losing in Iraq.”14

  All this speculation about the Islamic State on its heels appeared to be confirmed on April 13, 2015, when the Pentagon announced: “ISIL is no longer the dominant force in roughly 25 to 30% of the populated areas of Iraqi territory where it once had complete freedom of movement.”15 On April 15, Vox buttressed this claim with its own report: “ISIS Is Losing.”16

  Just two days after this announcement, however, the U.S. military spokes
men had egg on their faces as the Islamic State placed the key city of Ramadi, just seventy miles from Baghdad, under siege, demonstrating all the characteristics of a confident, advancing force rather than a shattered, defeated, retreating one.17

  Then on April 22 came definitive confirmation that the Pentagon had misled the public. The map the Pentagon had used to illustrate its claim that the Islamic State had lost 25 to 30 percent of its territory was inaccurate and misleading, leaving out or obscuring evidence that the U.S. airstrikes had not been successful: it showed territory the Islamic State had lost between August 2014—when the airstrikes started—and April 2015, but it didn’t show what territory the Islamic State had gained during that same period.

  Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren insisted that the omission was beside the point. “ISIL’s own doctrine,” he said, “says it must gain and hold territory. This map shows they are not achieving their stated goals.” But he acknowledged that the map wasn’t “meant to be a detailed tactical map—it is simply a graphic used to explain the overall situation.” By that measure, it was highly misleading—it left out all of western Syria, where the Islamic State had made significant gains.18

  During the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Americans laughed as “Baghdad Bob”—Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf—repeatedly declared that the Iraqi Army was making huge gains and humiliating the Americans everywhere, and would soon throw them out of the country altogether, whereupon Allah would “roast their stomachs in hell”—when in reality, the U.S. was defeating Saddam Hussein’s army with little difficulty.19

  Twelve years later, Baghdad Bob could just as well have been the U.S. Secretary of Defense, triumphantly announcing that Allah would soon roast the stomachs of the Islamic State jihadis in hell.

  But appearance would never conquer reality. As the Pentagon spun its misinformation, the Islamic State went from success to success.

  OSTRICH ALERT

  ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl: “Would you say that overall the strategy’s been a success?”

  White House press secretary Josh Earnest: “. . . Overall, yes.”

  —the White House continuing to claim success for its anti-ISIS strategy in the wake of the fall of Ramadi21

  Just a month and a day after the release of the deceptive map, Islamic State forces, using armored construction equipment and ten suicide bombers, breached the walls of Ramadi.20 Within three days the city was firmly within ISIS control—and ISIS was within seventy miles of Baghdad.

  So now the capital of Anbar Province, the heart of the “Sunni Awakening,” where local Iraqi tribes first turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq to support U.S. forces in 2006—in other words, the home base of some of America’s few potential strong allies against ISIS on the ground—has been absorbed into the caliphate. And the U.S. was reduced to blaming our weak allies in the Shia-dominated Iraqi Army: “What apparently happened is the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered,” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said. “In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force. That says to me, and I think to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight [Isis] and defend themselves.”22

  The chairman of the defense and security committee in the Iraqi parliament wasn’t having any of it: “Hakim al-Zamili . . . calls Carter’s comments ‘unrealistic and baseless.’ He said the US should bear much of the blame for the fall of Ramadi, for its failure to provide ‘good equipment, weapons and aerial support’ to the soldiers. Now he says the US military is seeking to ‘throw the blame on somebody else.’”

  While the Americans and Iraqis pointed fingers at each other, the Islamic State was consolidating its control of more newly captured territory—this time, in Syria—including most notably the city of Palmyra “and a nearby military airbase.” Palmyra—just a hundred and fifty miles from the Syrian capital—was home to fifty thousand Syrians and also a UNESCO heritage site containing priceless Roman ruins.23 Islamic State jihadis found immediate use for Palmyra’s Roman amphitheatre, staging public executions there before a crowd of locals and ISIS fighters.24

  Then, the next week, ISIS launched “a surprise assault” that “opened a new front in the multi-pronged war being waged by the extremist group across Iraq and Syria, and . . . underscored the Islamic State’s ability to catch its enemies off guard.” This new offensive in the Aleppo Province of Syria brought ISIS within striking distance of Azaz on the border with Turkey—and put the Islamic State on the verge of cutting off rival militant groups’ supply lines and seizing control of border areas that would make smuggling weapons and foreign jihadis through Turkey all the easier.25

  ISIS was winning the war.

  The Only Way the Islamic State Can Be Defeated

  There is only one way to defeat this kind of rogue state, short of a nuclear holocaust: by utterly defeating it and destroying the wellsprings of its ideological indoctrination. In the case of the Islamic State, nothing is much less likely than that these things will happen.

  No ground force capable of recapturing the Islamic State’s territories and preventing their reconquest is likely to be fighting ISIS, at least for the foreseeable future. America won’t be doing it—not if Barack Obama has his way. The president campaigned on a promise to withdraw from Iraq and made good on his promise; the last thing he wants to do is betray the fact that the withdrawal was precipitous and ill-considered by committing U.S. ground forces to Iraq again.

  Without a return of the Americans, it is hard to imagine what force on the ground can defeat the Islamic State. The Kurds withstood the ISIS siege of the Syrian border town of Kobani, but they have not been able to make significant advances into Islamic State territory. Bashar Assad has not been able to prevent the Islamic State from occupying ever larger portions of Syria—and threatening Damascus itself. The Shi’ite regime in Baghdad has (as per the Pentagon’s misleading map) made some gains against Islamic State holdings in Iraq, but the Islamic State is not seriously threatened by it, and continues to advance elsewhere. The Turks appear unwilling to act, perhaps so that they can use the Islamic State’s successes to their own advantage. King Abdullah of Jordan promised a massive retaliation against the Islamic State after its murder of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh in February 2015, but took little real action.

  That leaves Iran. Yet while they are aiding the Baghdad regime in actions against the Islamic State, the Iranians don’t appear disposed to get into a full-scale war with the Islamic State. This reluctance may stem from their awareness of the fact that if they advance deeply into Sunni territory, they will face resistance even from people who despise the Islamic State.

  The Ideological War

  Even if the U.S. did invade and destroy the Islamic State, American troops can’t remain in Iraq forever. As soon as they left, the vacuum could well be filled by an entity very like the Islamic State. The problem that the Islamic State poses will persist as long as the United States and the West are unwilling to confront the ideology that gave ISIS its impetus in the first place.

  After American troops toppled Saddam Hussein, we installed a constitution that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land. This was in stark contrast to what should have been done: the explicit and enforced limiting of political Islam.

  There are precedents: in October 1945, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes wrote to General Douglas MacArthur, directing him to restrict the influence of the Shintoism, the ideology that had fueled Japanese militarism, in postwar Japan:

  Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. People would not be taxed to support National Shinto and there will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion—National Shinto, that is—will go . . . Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto . . . The dissemina
tion of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. And the Japanese Government will be required to cease financial and other support of Shinto establishments.26

  Allowing Islamic Sharia law into the constitutions of the U.S.-created Islamic (!) Republic of Afghanistan and Republic of Iraq in 2004 and 2005 was as foolhardy as it would have been to write emperor-worship and Shinto militarism into Japan’s 1946 constitution.

  Also providing an example for the modern day is the nineteenth-century British General Sir Charles Napier, who when he was Governor of Sindh in the British Raj was confronted by Hindu leaders angered by his prohibition of the practice of sati, the casting of widows upon their husbands’ funeral pyres. Napier replied, “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”27

  Of course it would be considered the height of ethnocentric impropriety to follow such examples today—either to confront ISIS on its own turf or to challenge mosques and Islamic schools in the U.S. and elsewhere to institute programs teaching against the Islamic State’s core beliefs and actively discouraging young Muslims from joining it. Yet if this were done, many Muslims who don’t want to live under Sharia any more than anyone else does would cast their lot with the free world; our ideas are better, our way of life is better, our civilization is better. But no one dares say that, or act upon it.