The Management of Savagery

Al-Zarqawi’s sinister strategy for fomenting a complete societal breakdown in Iraq hewed closely to a text titled Idarat al-Tawahhush, or The Management of Savagery. Published online in 2004 as a combined field manual and manifesto for the establishment of the caliphate, it is the jihadist answer to The Art of War and Leviathan. Its author, Abu Bakr Naji, conceived of a battle plan for weakening enemy states through what he called “power of vexation and exhaustion.” Drawing the United States into open as opposed to “proxy” warfare in the Middle East was the whole point, because Naji believed that once American soldiers were killed by mujahidin on the battlefield, the “media halo” surrounding their presumed invincibility would vanish. Muslims would then be “dazzled” at the harm they could inflict on a weak and morally corrupted superpower as well as incensed at the occupation of their holy lands, thus driving them to jihad. He urged that they should then focus on attacking the economic and cultural institutions (such as the hydrocarbon industries) of the “apostate” regimes aligned with the United States. “The public will see how the troops flee,” Naji wrote, “heeding nothing. At this point, savagery and chaos begin and these regions will start to suffer from the absence of security. This is in addition to the exhaustion and draining [that results from] attacking the remaining targets and opposing the authorities.” He used the time-honored example of Egypt, but he was also implicitly referring to Iraq, where he urged the fast consolidation of jihadist victory in order to “take over the surrounding countries.”

There are four “primary objectives” to the power of vexation and exhaustion, according to Naji. The first is to tire out the enemy and those regimes collaborating with it so that they cannot catch their breath. The second is to attract young jihadists to the cause through “qualitative operations,” or terror attacks, which need not rise to the level of a 9/11, but could be small and frequent. The third objective is to dislodge regions from the control of the “apostate” regimes entirely: the conquest of land, to be followed by the governance or administration of savagery by the jihadists. The fourth and final goal is the “advancement of groups of vexation through drilling and operational practice so that they will be prepared psychologically and practically for the stage of the management of savagery.”

As Naji defines it, this stage is really nothing more than the application of a rudimentary jihadist political economy, the rescue of Muslims from the Hobbesian chaos that was to be brought about by the toppling of the aforementioned regimes. The actual “management” consists of twelve basic needs that must be satisfied:

1. The establishment of internal security such that the local population would be protected from violence other than that meted by the Islamic authority;
2. The provision of food and medicine;
3. The securing of the borders from foreign invaders;
4. The installing of a system of Sharia jurisprudence to govern those ruled;
5. The creation of a pious and “combat-efficient” youth movement;
6. The spread of Islamic jurisprudence as well as “worldly science”;
7. The “dissemination of spies” and the creation of an intelligence service;
8. Buying the fealty of the local population through bribery and financial inducements;
9. “Deterring hypocrites,” by which Naji meant dissuading any internal resistance to challenges to the ruling Islamic authority;
10. Laying the groundwork for the expansion of this fief and a greater offensive against the enemy, whose money should be plundered and who should be put in a “constant state of apprehension and desire for reconciliation”;
11. Building “coalitions” with other groups, including those who have not pledged full allegiance to the Islamic authority (elsewhere in the text, Naji gives a separate disquisition on the role of “affiliates”);
12. The advancement of “managerial groups”—bureaucracies, in effect—who would work toward the future establishment of a bona fide Islamic state. This was the end goal of jihad, after all, and the stage of the management of savagery was to be the “bridge” to such a state, “which has been awaited since the fall of the caliphate.” This stage was also the most “critical” through which the global Islamic community would now have to pass, as Naji states in the subtitle to his tract.

One Isis-affiliated cleric told us that The Management of Savagery is today widely circulated among provincial Isis commanders and some rank-and-file fighters as a way to justify beheadings as not only religiously permissible but recommended by God and his prophet. For ISIS, the manifesto’s greatest contribution lies in its differentiation between the meaning of jihad and other religious matters.

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

Interesting book.