By WILLIAM MCCANTS
August 19, 2015
Brutality and doomsday visions have made ISIL the world’s most feared terrorist group.
The American journalist James Foley was beheaded a year ago by an Islamic State fighter in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes on the group. In a video of the brutal act circulated online, Foley’s masked executioner promised more beheadings if the United States didn’t stop attacking the newly-proclaimed caliphate. Three months later, the same fighter beheaded American aid worker Peter Kassig and 18 Syrian soldiers outside the small Syrian town of Dabiq. Although Kassig had converted to Islam, the fighter proclaimed his death to be the first step in fulfilling an ancient Islamic prophecy of an apocalyptic showdown in Dabiq between Muslims and infidels.
The Islamic State’s brutality and its insistence on apocalypse now and caliphate now set it apart from al-Qaeda, of which it was a part until 2014. We’re used to thinking of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden as the baddest of the bad, but the Islamic State is worse. Bin Laden tamped down messianic fervor and sought popular Muslim support; the return of the early Islamic empire, or caliphate, was a distant dream. In contrast, the Islamic State’s members fight and govern by their own version of Machiavelli’s dictum “It is far safer to be feared than loved.” They stir messianic fervor rather than suppress it. They want God’s kingdom now rather than later. This is not Bin Laden’s jihad.
In some ways, the difference between Bin Laden and the Islamic State’s leaders is generational. For Bin Laden’s cohort, the apocalypse wasn’t a great recruiting pitch. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and tyranny than against the Antichrist. Today, though, the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense. Titanic upheavals convulse the region in the very places mentioned in the prophecies. Sunnis and Shi’a are at war, both appealing to their own versions of prophecies to justify their politics.
The French scholar of Muslim apocalypticism, Jean-Pierre Filiu, has argued that most modern Sunni Muslims viewed apocalyptic thinking with suspicion before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. It was something the Shi’a or the conspiracy-addled fringe obsessed over, not right-thinking Sunnis. Sure, the Sunni fringe wrote books about the fulfillment of Islamic prophecies. They mixed Muslim apocalyptic villains in with UFOs, the Bermuda triangle, Nostradamus and the prognostications of evangelical Christians, all to reveal the hidden hand of the international Jew, the Antichrist, who cunningly shaped world events. But the books were commercial duds.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the stupendous violence that followed dramatically increased the Sunni public’s appetite for apocalyptic explanations of a world turned upside down. A spate of bestsellers put the United States at the center of the End-Times drama, a new “Rome” careering throughout the region in a murderous stampede to prevent violence on its own shores. The main antagonists of the End of Days, the Jews, were now merely supporting actors. Even conservative Sunni clerics who had previously tried to tamp down messianic fervor couldn’t help but conclude that “the triple union constituted by the Antichrist, the Jews, and the new Crusaders” had joined forces “to destroy the Muslims.”
The Iraq war also changed apocalyptic discourse in the global jihadist movement. The languid apocalypticism of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri now had to contend with the urgent apocalypticism of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and his immediate successors. Iraq, the site of a prophesied bloodbath between true Muslims and false, was engulfed in a sectarian civil war. As Zarqawi saw it, the Shi’a had united with the Jews and Christians under the banner of the Antichrist to fight against the Sunnis. The Final Hour must be approaching, to be heralded by the rebirth of the caliphate, the Islamic empire that had disappeared and whose return was prophesied.
Because of the impending Final Hour, Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, quickly dissolved al-Qaeda in Iraq in order to establish the Islamic State in 2006. Masri rushed to found the State because he believed the Mahdi, the Muslim savior, would come within the year. To his thinking, the caliphate needed to be in place to help the Mahdi fight the final battles of the apocalypse. Anticipating the imminent conquest of major Islamic cities as foretold in the prophecies, he ordered his commanders in the field to conquer the whole of Iraq to prepare for the Mahdi’s coming and was convinced they would succeed in three months. The Islamic State’s forces fanned out across the country, only to be recalled a week later because they were spread too thin. When those close to Masri criticized him for making strategic decisions on an apocalyptic timetable, Masri retorted, “the Mahdi will come any day.”
Chastened by his failed predictions that first year, Masri’s messianic ardor cooled. At the same time, the person of the Islamic State’s first commander of the faithful, Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, became more substantial. Iraqis in the Islamic State were unhappy with the power amassed by Masri, an Egyptian, and the other Arab foreign fighters. They gravitated toward Abu Umar, a fellow Iraqi, which enhanced his standing in the organization. As his stature grew, so did the power of his office.
When Masri and Abu Umar were killed in 2010, the new commander of the faithful, Abu Bakr al-Baghadi, brought even greater substance to the office. Also an Iraqi, Baghdadi was supposedly descended from the Prophet and had scholarly credentials his predecessor lacked. Rather than declare Baghdadi the Mahdi, the Islamic State’s scholars argued he was one of the prophesied handful of just caliphs who would rule before the end of the world. The immediacy of the Mahdi’s return and the apocalypse to follow was attenuated in favor of building the institution of the caliphate. Messiah gave way to management. It was a clever way to prolong the apocalyptic expectations of the Islamic State’s followers while focusing them on the immediate task of state building.
Although the messianic fervor has cooled in the Islamic State’s leadership, the group’s apocalyptic rhetoric has intensified. References to the End Times fill Islamic State propaganda. It’s a big selling point with foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today lend credibility to the prophecies.
Most people, al-Qaeda’s leaders among them, can’t imagine that political success could come from enraging the masses rather than charming them. But the Islamic State has deliberately provoked the anger of Muslims and non-Muslims alike with its online videos of outrageous and carefully choreographed violence. It showcases the beheading of prisoners—something Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda today, had expressly warned against—and dumps enemy soldiers in mass graves while the camera is rolling. The State revels in gore and wants everyone to know it. And yet it has been remarkably successful at recruiting fighters, capturing land, subduing its subjects, and creating a state. Why?
Because violence and gore work. We forget that this terrifying approach to state building has an impressive track record. The pagan Mongols used it to great effect in the thirteenth century to conquer land stretching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. They were far more brutal than the Islamic State, massacring entire towns that refused to surrender in order to discourage anyone else from resisting. The Bible says the ancient Israelites did the same in their conquest of Canaan. More brutal too was the Saud family and its ultraconservative Wahhabi allies, who came to power three times between 1744 and 1926, when the third and last Saudi state was established. A Spanish traveler who saw firsthand the rise of the Wahhabis in their second incarnation describes the scene when their fighters stormed the Shi’i holy city of Karbala in 1801: “The inhabitants made but a feeble resistance; and the conqueror put to the sword all the men and male children of every age. Whilst they executed this horrible butchery, a Wehhabite [sic] doctor cried from the top of a tower, ‘Kill, strangle all the infidels who give companions to God.’” A contemporary Wahhabi historian wrote, “We took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people [as slaves], then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that and say: ‘And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.’” It was one massacre of many, and locals thought twice before resisting.
More recently, the Sunni Taliban came to power in the 1990s in Afghanistan by murdering thousands of unarmed civilians, often Shi’a or ethnic minorities. After capturing cities and villages that resisted, they would line up and gun down the locals, including women and children. According to a report on the Taliban’s recapture of Bamian in 1999, “Hundreds of men and some women and children were separated from their families, taken away, and executed; all of them were noncombatants. In addition, houses were razed to the ground, and some detainees were used for forced labor.”
All these groups were savvy at working with local tribes with whom they had ethnic and religious ties. Some tribes joined for political advantage over their rivals or because they wanted a share in the spoils. Others saw the fight as a religious duty. Still others didn’t want to resist for fear of what would follow. But playing nice with a tribal leader whose followers have guns is not the same thing as trying to win over your average citizen to the cause.
This is not to say that the softer approach can’t work. America’s own revolution is a case in point, especially when compared to the French Revolution a few years later. The American rebels warred with British troops and avoided deliberate attacks on civilians; in contrast, the French revolutionaries executed an ever-widening circle of “enemies of the revolution” to subdue the public in what the revolutionaries enthusiastically called “The Terror,” from which we get the term “terrorism.”
The point is that extreme brutality is not incompatible with establishing a new state. It may not be the wisest course of action, and it probably won’t create a state many people would want to live in. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.
Just as most people can’t imagine that brutality would be a winning political strategy, they also can’t imagine that any religious scripture would justify such a thing. Muslims and non-Muslims are equally baffled as to how anyone could commit atrocities in the name of God. To explain it, some either assume the perpetrators use scripture cynically or that they are ignorant of its nuances.
To be sure, many of the Islamic State’s foot soldiers are ignorant of their own scriptures. Islamic scripture is vast, encompassing not only the Qur’an but also the ahadith, the words and deeds attributed to Muhammad by his followers. Collections of ahadith run into the hundreds of volumes, and that’s just the Sunni variety. The Shi’a have their own collections, adding more volumes to the pile. Want to find passages justifying peace and concord? They’re in there. Want to find passages justifying violence? They’re in there too. Medieval Muslim scholars spent their whole careers trying to reconcile the contradictions between them. It’s extremely difficult to do, which is why early Muslims called the effort ijtihad, or “hard work.” People chuckled at the news of two men buying a copy of Islam for Dummies on their way to join the Islamic State. But having spent two decades studying the intricacies of Islamic scripture, I empathized with their bewilderment.
Although the Islamic State’s soldiers might not know Islamic scripture very well, some of its leaders do. The caliph has a Ph.D. in the study of the Qur’an, and his top scholars are conversant in the ahadith and the ways medieval scholars interpreted it. There are many stupid thugs in the Islamic State, but these guys are not among them.
As to whether the Islamic State uses scripture cynically to justify whatever it wants to do, that’s harder to know. It’s certainly the case that the State’s scholars pick and choose scripture to suit their biases and desires. But anyone who reads and acts on scripture does that.
The better question to ask is where those biases and desires come from.
First, the Islamic State’s biases: The Islamic State’s theology and method of engaging with scripture is nearly identical to Wahhabism, the ultraconservative form of Islam found in Saudi Arabia. It’s very different from the kind of Islam you find in other parts of the world. In Wahhabism, religious innovation is bad; medieval scholarly authorities are respected but disregarded if need be; outside cultural influences should be expunged; and the definition of a good believer is very narrow. Wahhabi scholars might reach different conclusions from Islamic State scholars, but they start at much the same place.
Second, the Islamic State’s desires: The Islamic State’s politics differ profoundly from that of most Wahhabis, who view the Saudi kingdom as a legitimate Islamic government. As the State sees things, no Muslim-majority state in the world deserves to call itself Islamic, which is why it set up its own state and declared a caliphate. To achieve that end, the Islamic State had to wage an insurgency, which it justified with scripture.
Still, brutal insurgency doesn’t necessarily follow from Islamic scripture. Bin Laden and other jihadists found plenty of scriptural support for waging a hearts-and-minds campaign in the Muslim world. The Islamic State’s scholars acknowledge these passages of scripture but look for ways around them or find other passages that fit their views. Thus, the Islamic State’s disagreement with al-Qaeda’s leadership isn’t scriptural; it’s strategic. The State doesn’t believe a hearts-and-minds strategy is effective, and for the past few years it has been proven right.
Al-Qaeda’s leaders had advised patient coalition building before declaring an Islamic state, much less a caliphate. They looked upon the Islamic State’s military defeat in 2008 as an object lesson in what not to do. The State had angered its allies and supporters among the Sunni Arab tribes, who worked with the Americans to reduce the group from a powerful insurgent militia to a terrorist nuisance. But even when the Islamic State was nearly destroyed, its idea of immediately establishing Islamic governments without the support of the Sunni masses caught fire among the jihadist rank and file. When the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 created political instability, al-Qaeda groups leapt at the chance to establish governments even though Bin Laden warned them not to. The Islamic State also tried again and was far more successful the second time around, parting company with al-Qaeda to realize its ambition.
Part of the State’s success had to do with its style of governing. There were carrots: It tried to provide public services, such as fixing potholes, running post offices, and distributing food. It even had a campaign to vaccinate its subjects against polio. Several of the Islamic State’s former sister affiliates in al-Qaeda had attempted the same.
The State also rewarded tribal allies with a share of the spoils to buy their support. As one Islamic State commander wrote to Baghdadi, “We have focused on bribing tribesmen and encouraging them to support the mujahids.” In dealing with the Sunni tribes, the State benefited a great deal from the tribes’ anger toward the central governments in Damascus and Baghdad.
Bin Laden would have approved of the Islamic State’s carrots, but he would have objected to its sticks. The al-Qaeda leader had counseled his affiliates to be lenient in their application of the hudud, the harsh fixed punishments mentioned in Islamic scripture. To do otherwise would only alienate the locals. The Islamic State ignored this counsel, either out of religious conviction or to convince other ultraconservatives of its conviction. The hands of thieves were severed, adulterers were stoned, bandits were shot and crucified, all in full public view. The Islamic State’s harsh punishments subdued the locals as effectively as massacring its enemies had. Religious convictions and political benefit are not always antithetical.
Bin Laden had also advised his affiliates against attacking tribes that didn’t want to cooperate. He worried it would start a cycle of blood feuds. And yet the Islamic State killed hundreds of tribal members when their leaders refused to bend the knee. Rather than inaugurating blood feuds, the massacres silenced dissent because the tribesmen could find no support from their governments or from foreign nations.
That brings us to the major reason why the Islamic State was so successful from 2013 to 2014: It was left alone. Whereas other Sunni rebels in Syria tried to overthrow their government, the State focused on making its own government in the Sunni hinterland. It filled its leadership with ex-Ba’athists from Saddam’s military and intelligence services who had been fighting an insurgency for a decade and were accustomed to running an authoritarian government. The Islamic State also replenished its foot soldiers with thousands of foreigners, more than any other rebel group attracted, by using a propaganda mix of apocalypticism, puritanism, sectarianism, ultraviolence and promises of a caliphate. The head of the National Counterterrorism Center in the United States testified in February 2015 that the rate of influx of foreign fighters to Syria “is unprecedented,” exceeding “the rate of travelers who went to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.” The government in Baghdad couldn’t stop the Islamic State and the government in Syria didn’t want to, preferring to keep it around as a boogeyman to antagonize President Assad’s enemies and scare his subjects. Better to focus the firepower of the Syrian state on other rebel groups that posed an immediate threat to his rule.
Bolstered by a combination of government neglect, careful planning, brutal tactics and clever recruitment, the Islamic State had the manpower, money, and territory to make a credible claim to be a state. Whether the Islamic State is actually a caliphate is something for Muslims to decide. But judging purely by political criteria, the Islamic State is the only insurgent group in the Middle East to have made a plausible claim to the office since the fall of the Ottoman caliphate in the early twentieth century. And it did it by defying the common wisdom about how to govern properly.
The Islamic State today is full of contradictions, which make its actions hard to explain. Apocalyptic language suffuses its propaganda, yet the group is careful in its planning and cunning in its execution, qualities that we do not often associate with apocalypticists. The State subscribes to a puritanical religious ideology, yet it is willing to collaborate with the self-interested leaders of local tribes and with former and current members of Saddam’s secularist Ba’ath party. The Islamic State believes it is better to be feared than to be loved and deliberately stokes the anger of international onlookers—just today its members displayed the decapitated corpse of an 82-year-old retired director of Roman antiquities in Palmayra, Syria in a gruesome echo of the Foley execution a year ago. But the group also tries to provide government services to its subjects.
One explanation is that these are just criminals or cynics who’ll say and do whatever it takes so long as they can seize and hold power. Their apocalyptic and puritanical religious rhetoric is designed to appeal to people who are interested in that sort of thing, but the Islamic State’s leaders don’t really believe it themselves. They’ll dress their actions up in prophecy and adopt the trappings of an austere Islamic caliphate but it’s not from conviction. They see religious symbols and laws as useful vehicles for realizing their ambitions, which is not an irrational strategy.
But there’s another way to reconcile the contradictions: The group is devoted to establishing an ultraconservative Islamic state at all costs, so it modifies its religious and political doctrines when they get in the way of that goal. The early Islamic State nearly destroyed itself because of the messianic beliefs of its founder. So the State modified its apocalyptic doctrine to focus on institution building rather than on the imminent appearance of a savior. The Islamic State’s narrow definition of a good Muslim would make it impossible to collaborate with many of its coreligionists, which would hamper the group’s ability to win an insurgency. So the State makes allowances for working with others as long as they do not get in the way of its project. The State’s brutality risks turning its subjects against it in large numbers, which would make it impossible for a state to function. So the group sees to the economic well-being of its subjects in order to maintain a low level of support and a tax base to fund its project.
Whatever one makes of the true motivations of the Islamic State’s leaders, the political impact is the same: the founding of a brutal government at war with its neighbors. But the Islamic State’s expansionary policy puts at risk what its leaders hold most dear: the continued existence of its state. Perhaps the Islamic State will modify its doctrine as it has modified others in the interest of self-preservation. Or perhaps this is the one doctrine it can’t let go because it believes it is destined to be a world-encompassing state. If the latter, it would go against the argument that these are mere thugs who want power. Criminal gangs aren’t suicidal.
Either way, the world can’t afford to wait and find out.
Some of the usual methods for dealing with jihadist statelets might have worked early on in Syria and Iraq. But the Islamic State is too entrenched now for quick solutions. Defeating its government is going to take time. Disrupting the Islamic State’s finances will be difficult because the group does not rely much on outside funding. Attacking from the air will degrade the Islamic State but will not destroy it. Its soldiers are in urban areas where they are hard to target without killing thousands of civilians.
Some methods will help only at the margins. Stanching the flow of foreign fighters is very difficult, given Syria’s porous borders and the excitement the Islamic State generates among Muslim radicals. Reducing the mass appeal of the State is pointless, given that it doesn’t have mass appeal and isn’t trying to cultivate it. What little appeal the Islamic State has rests on its ability to endure and expand. Take away either of those and you erode its legitimacy. In this case, the ideological fight is an actual fight.
Some methods work well but have a lot of downsides. Arming the Sunni tribes against the Islamic State doesn’t guarantee they’ll fight against it. They don’t trust the Shi’i governments in Damascus and Baghdad and could just as easily decide to support the Islamic State or sit out the fight.
Arming Arab Sunni rebel groups to fight the Islamic State is no guarantee they’ll get the job done either. They’re focused on fighting their respective governments in Syria and Iraq and reluctant to tangle with a powerful rival. Furthermore, a number of those groups are religiously extreme and won’t contribute to building a pluralistic future in either country.
Arming the Kurds is attractive because they’re more pluralistic, but they won’t be able to do much against the Islamic State in its Sunni Arab stronghold. The Kurds are an ethnic minority in Syria and Iraq, and they won’t take and hold Arab territory far from their homeland. Plus, the Kurds might use the weapons to fight for their own independence, which would create further instability.
Building the capacity of the governments in Iraq and Syria to deal with the Islamic State is also fraught with problems. Bolstering the Shi’a-dominated government in Baghdad might further reinforce the country’s sectarian politics that alienated its Sunnis in the first place. It’s an even more dangerous policy in Syria because of its leader, who has let the Islamic State flourish to make his bloody methods appear less repugnant and to destroy his opposition from the inside.
The last option, sending in a large contingent of American troops, would enflame public opinion at home and abroad, ensuring that the United States will not be able to see its mission through. It would also absolve local governments of making the tough political choices required to end the Sunni disenfranchisement that fuels the insurgency.
Until the Shi’i governments in Syria and Iraq reach an accommodation with their Sunni citizens, the international coalition against the Islamic State can only constrain its growth. The coalition should continue using air power to diminish the State’s ability to raise money and wage war. It shouldn’t work with President Assad in Syria because he has deliberately fueled the rise of the Islamic State and probably won’t stop. The government in Baghdad hasn’t deliberately helped the State come to power, but its anti-Sunni policies have contributed to the State’s success. So the coalition should give the government in Baghdad all the intelligence and logistical support it needs to fight against the Islamic State, but it should be wary of supplying more heavy weapons than are necessary to prosecute the war. The weapons could end up in the State’s hands, as happened when Iraq’s soldiers fled Mosul; but perhaps more important, giving the government whatever it wants discourages it from making the hard political compromises with the Sunnis that will sap the Islamic State’s base of support.
The international coalition can also support proxies to fight against the Islamic State, but the support must be carefully calibrated so as to avoid creating more long-term political problems. The coalition should provide air cover and intelligence to Sunni tribal militias and rebel groups that fight against the Islamic State, whether Arab or Kurd. If it looks like the groups are in the fight for the long haul, then the coalition should consider arming them with light weaponry if they need it. Working with the Shi’i militias against the Islamic State is unnecessary, given that they already have a powerful state sponsor in Tehran.
If you think all of that sounds a lot like the coalition’s current military strategy, you’re right. It’s not a great plan, but it’s the best option at the moment.
I’m confident that the Islamic State’s government in Syria and Iraq will crumble. No modern jihadist statelet has provoked international intervention and survived. But the disappearance of a jihadist statelet doesn’t mean the disappearance of the jihadists. They will continue to wage insurgencies, taking advantage of the political instability and social unrest that gave rise to their statelets in the first place. The Islamic State stuck around after its defeat in 2008. So did al-Qaeda’s affiliates in Mali, Yemen and Somalia after they tried and failed to create states.
The question is, how will the jihadists evaluate the demise of the Islamic State? Will it prove to them that Bin Laden was right? Or will it prove that the State just needed to double down on its strategy? There’s no obvious answer to the question because foreign powers always end the experiment prematurely. Even if a government established by global jihadists isn’t serious about attacking foreign nations, those nations won’t wait long to find out.
The current political conditions in the Arab world all but ensure that some jihadists will follow the Islamic State’s playbook, especially the group’s growing number of affiliates or “provinces.” Large-scale violence heightens the appeal of apocalyptic narratives, particularly in areas mentioned in the prophecies, and it creates the political vacuums in which armed groups can flourish. Of course, the Islamic State copycats can be defeated using some of the same methods the international coalition is using against the State in Iraq and Syria. But the Islamic State has demonstrated that a modern caliphate is possible, that doomsday pronouncements and extreme violence attract bloodthirsty recruits, and that cutting out the hearts and minds of a population can subdue them faster than trying to win them over. This may not be Bin Laden’s jihad, but it’s a formula future jihadists will find hard to resist.
William McCants directs the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. This article has been adapted from his book, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State.
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