ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan

Author:Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan [Weiss, Michael]
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: Regan Arts.
Published: 2015-01-28T22:00:00+00:00

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CONVERTS AND “FIVE-STAR JIHADISTS”

PROFILES OF ISIS FIGHTERS

For this book we conducted interviews with dozens of ISIS associates who operate inside Syria and Iraq in a range of sectors, including religious clerics, fighters, provincial emirs, security officials, and sympathizers, and we found that what draws people to ISIS could easily bring them to any number of cults or totalitarian movements, even those ideologically contradictory to Salafist Jihadism. Far from homogenous, the organization spans an array of backgrounds and belief systems, from godless opportunists to war profiteers to pragmatic tribesmen to committed takfiris.

THE POWER OF PERSUASION

In October 2014 ISIS’s security squad arrested Mothanna Abdulsattar, a well-spoken nineteen-year-old media activist working for the Free Syrian Army, around two months after it assumed control of his region in eastern Syria. He was taken for an interrogation at a nearby jihadist base amid threats to his life, the fate of which, he found out, could be determined by his professional affiliation. Working for the Syrian opposition or Saudi media arms meant death. “If you are working for Orient or Al-Arabiya, we’ll chop your head off,” Abdulsattar was told. Working for Qatar’s Al Jazeera, according to the conversation between Abdulsattar and the ISIS members, was evidently less of a problem. Abdulsattar told us that he was relieved when a smiling, respectful older jihadist stepped in to save him from an ISIS commissar’s line of questioning.

“Abu Hamza was quiet and respectful,” Abdulsattar remembered, referring to Abu Hamza al-Shami, a senior religious cleric in ISIS from the township of Minbij in eastern Aleppo. “Even his face makes you comfortable. He began by talking about the FSA, and why ISIS was fighting it. He said because they accept ungodly laws and receive funding from America, and God said: ‘Whoever aligns with them, he’s one of them.’ He then talked about al-Dawla. He asked me, ‘Why aren’t you pledging allegiance? The Prophet said that those who die without having bayat to someone—their death will be a jahiliyyah [un-Islamic] death.’ Honestly, when I heard that, I was shocked to my core. For the first time, I realized, the hadith is true.”

But Abdulsattar still wasn’t ready to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. So Abu Hamza smiled and asked him to take his time. A week or so later, Abdulsattar decided to commit.

He spoke with gusto about his journey into ISIS, downplaying the eight hours he 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 how to break down the psyches of those it wishes to recruit, and then build them back up again in its own image. Abdulsattar’s reference to “intellectualism” may seem bizarre or even grotesque to a Western observer, but it refers to ISIS’s carefully elaborated ideological narrative, a potent blend of Islamic hermeneutics, history, and politics.

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