Hunting Season: James Foley, Isis, and the Kidnapping Campaign That Started a War by James Harkin

Author:James Harkin [Harkin, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics, War, Terrorism, Middle East
ISBN: 9780316305198
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2015-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

What could they tell them? One thing apparent to everyone in the room was that their European guards were only useful try-hards—good for translation and media work but clearly following orders from above. As had been the British who’d kidnapped Foley and Cantlie: also present that day, and clearly in charge, was a tubby, diminutive Iraqi who ran his own battalion in the Idlib countryside. “It’s a very centralized, very disciplined organization,” concluded François. “[The British guards] were mid-level people, and everything goes back to the top.”

The “Iraqi sheikh,” as Foley and Cantlie came to know him, had turned his British protégés into a small, semi-professional kidnapping team; at least some of them seem also to have been involved in the abduction of David Haines and Federico Motka four months later. He traced his support for Islamic State from long before the Syrian revolution, and claimed to have fought for the terror group Islamic State of Iraq against the American army; he even claimed to have spent several years in a U.S. military prison. Now he seemed to want to get his own back. From what Foley and Cantlie had seen he loved sweets, guns, and the ritualistic torture of Western hostages.

The breaking of nations is not a pretty sight. No one can predict who will come along to pick up the pieces. Three years earlier Islamic State of Iraq, like its parent organization al-Qaeda, had been on the ropes. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and some of its key lieutenants had thrown it into a tailspin, while the huge demonstrations of the Arab Spring sucked the air from its revolutionary ambitions. The two had always had an uncomfortable relationship anyway: Islamic State of Iraq sprang from an outfit led by a Jordanian called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose brutal, monopolistic tactics and relentless slaughter of Shia Muslims was an embarrassment to al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. But when Islamic State moved into Syria, bringing weapons and expertise, another doctrinal difference emerged.

Inaugurated by a small band of jihadist veterans from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s aim had been to build a terror organization powerful enough to take the battle to its enemies in the West, but Islamic State saw its mission as more religiously purist and more constructive: to improve the piety of Sunni Muslims and build a government around them. If al-Qaeda thrived in the chaos and the vacuum, the appearance of ISIS in spring 2013 spoke of something new—a pressing demand for the re-establishment of order.

From its new seat in Qadi Askar, one of the first things ISIS did was to send out emissaries to the poorest areas of rebel-held Aleppo, requesting that they teach their fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran and observe their puritanical strictures. From now on, they demanded, boys and girls should be separated from the age of six or seven and men prohibited from teaching girls—even if no women teachers were available. Either grateful for the protection or fearful of the consequences, the schools agreed. Other rebel groups

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