Converts to ISIS and “Five-Star Jihadists”

The intellectuals.

[Mothanna Abdulsattar] spoke with gusto about his journey into ISIS, downplaying the eight hours he had spent in its custody as more of a rite of passage than a life-or-death grilling. Abdulsatter said that he was ultimately swayed by ISIS’s “intellectualism and the way it spreads religion and fights injustice.”

A great number of ISIS members who were interviewed for this book echoed similar sentiments—and hyperbolic appraisals—of the terror army, which has mastered techniques to break down the psyches of those it wishes to recruit, and then build them back up again in its own image.

The novice.

The Kurds.

Hussain Jummo, the political editor at the Dubai-based Al Bayan newspaper, and a prominent analyst of Kurdish politics, offers the most plausible explanation for why Kurds have joined ISIS. After Saddam’s Halabja massacre, many families in the town were left impoverished, while others built new homes and carried on with their lives as before. Charities that were started and meant to tend to the victims of the chemical attacks were mainly Salafist in orientation, organized and funded by Gulf state sponsors, including Kuwait’s Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage, which has been accused by the United States of bankrolling al-Qaeda. So after decades of proselytization in the Kurdish regions of the Middle East, Halabja became the epicenter of Kurdish Islamism.

In Syria the Kurdish turn to ISIS has been less common, although not unheard-of. Syrian Kurds are predominantly secular or Sufi from the Khaznawi order, named after the family that inaugurated it. We spoke with two Kurds from Aleppo and Hasaka, however, who said they were driven to ISIS because of the organization’s pan-Sunni, rather than pan-Arab, philosophy. A Kurdish ISIS member from Hasaka related to the authors a conversation he had had with an ISIS recruiter shortly before he joined. The recruiter told him that al-Nusra, which had by then split from ISIS, was essentially an “Arab” organization, rather than an Islamic one. ISIS was blind to ethnicity, he said, and attended only to true faith—a theme that recurs frequently in its propaganda.

The prisoners.

According to journalist Wael Essam, who met al-Absi after the Syrian uprising started, the jihadist has considered many of his fellow former inmates at Sednaya to be kuffar, including those who now lead rival Islamist brigades and battalions in Syria. Why? Because they refused to pronounce as nonbelievers the taghut (tyrannical) Muslim rulers in the Middle East and the majority of Muslims in the region. Also, al-Absi explained, these Islamists acceded to the surrender of Sednaya to the Syrian authorities after the bloody 2008 riot.

The fence-sitters.

Another category of ISIS recruits consists of those who already held Islamist or jihadist views but had limited themselves only to orbiting takfiri ideology. The final gravitational pull, as it were, differed depending on circumstance. Some recruits joined for the simple reason that ISIS overran their territories and became the only Islamist faction available to join. Others were impressed with ISIS’s military prowess in campaigns against rival rebel factions. Still others fell out with their original insurgencies and found ISIS more organized, disciplined, and able-bodied.

For what might be called “extra-mile extremists,” the conversion experience is hardly as sweeping or comprehensive as it was for men like Abdulsattar. They have tended to trickle into ISIS from the rank and file of the Islamic Front and Islamist-leaning groups in Iraq and Syria as a result of either leadership disputes or the abortive Syrian Sahwa that erupted in late December 2013.

The politickers.

As it happens, the closer ISIS came to realizing its territorial ambitions, the less religion played a part in driving people to join the organization. Those who say they are adherents of ISIS as a strictly political project make up a weighty percentage of its lower cadres and support base.

For people in this category, ISIS is the only option for Sunni Muslims who have been dealt a dismal hand in the past decade—first losing control of Iraq and now suffering nationwide atrocities, which many equate to genocide, in Syria. They view the struggle in the Middle East as one between Sunnis and an Iranian-led coalition, and they justify ultra-violence as a necessary tool to counterbalance or deter Shia hegemony. This category often includes the highly educated.

The pragmatists.

In areas fully controlled by ISIS, people support the group because it is effective in terms of governance and delivery of basic services, such as sanitation and food delivery. ISIS has established a semblance of order in these “governed” territories, and people view the alternatives—al-Assad, the Iraqi government, or other militias—as far worse. For those weary of years of civil war, the ability to live without crime and lawlessness trumps whatever draconian rules ISIS has put into place. Members of this category sometimes keep their distance from ISIS, to avoid trouble; others seek out areas where ISIS is said not to be committing atrocities.

The opportunists.

There are also those who were drawn to ISIS largely because of personal ambition. The opportunists tend to serve in the group’s rank and file as well as its low-level command structures. They join to undermine a rival group, to move up the chain of a dominant military and political force, or simply to preempt ISIS’s brutal justice because of some past offense or crime they might have committed against the group.

The foreign fighters.

The radicalization expert Shiraz Maher of King’s College London has explained how digital apps or social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and, in the ex-Soviet context, VKontakte (Russia’s answer to Facebook) have revolutionized jihadist agitprop. Much of the online chatter among Western-born ISIS recruits sounds more like a satire of the group than an earnest commitment to it: “Does the Islamic State sell hair gel and Nutella in Raqqa?” “Should I bring an iPad to let Mom and Dad know that I arrived safely in caliphate?” “I was told there’d be Grand Theft Auto V.”

In December 2013, Maher’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation calculated that the number of foreign fighters enjoined with the Syrian opposition was “up to 11,000 . . . from 74 nations.” Most of them signed up with ISIS or other jihadist groups, with few going to join mainstream FSA factions. Western Europe, the study found, accounted for 18 percent of the total, with France leading among nations as the number-one donor country for jihadists, followed closely by Britain. That number only grew, particularly in light of the US coalition war against ISIS. By September 2014, the CIA calculated that there were fifteen thousand foreign fighters in Syria, two thousand of whom were Westerners. These figures had doubled by September 2015. The predominant emigration trend has always been from the Middle East and North Africa, with Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia being the major feeder countries of foreign Sunni militants.

Missionary jihadists who were driven by civilian suffering, according to Maher, constituted a plurality of the Britons who joined ISIS. They saw jihad as an obligation to defend women and children as the war dragged on in Syria, Maher said.

Maher notes a second category of foreign fighters: martyrdom-seekers, who want nothing more than to carry out a suicide operation and thus be lionized in the annals of jihadism. For many foreign fighters from the Gulf states, the glorification of suicide bombers has been a constant on jihadist chat forums and websites since al-Qaeda in Iraq got started. Saudi nationals often point to the fact that many Saudis carry out these self-immolations, to argue that ISIS leaders discriminate against their compatriots by sending them to their deaths, whereas Iraqis hoard all the leadership positions in the organization for themselves.

The final factor leading foreign fighters to ISIS, according to Maher, is pure adventurism. Adrenaline junkies tend to be nonpracticing Muslims and are often drug users or addicts, or involved in criminality and gang violence back home—much as al-Zarqawi himself was in Jordan before discovering the mosque. Going off to fight in Syria represents just another rush.

Source: ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (2015) by Michael Weiss.