William McCants writes: 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. [Continue reading…]

The business of political analysis is all about offering plausible answers to difficult questions. In the constant churning of events, those answers don’t have to acquire lasting traction, but they need to reinforce the perception that the analyst has a clue. Rarely in print or on television is space given to an expert who confesses he is baffled. Indeed, such an admission would generally be viewed as evidence of a lack of expertise.

It is refreshing, then, to see an article in the New York Review of Books which goes to some lengths in explaining how little we understand ISIS and how inexplicable its success has been.

The author understandably yet disappointingly has chosen to remain anonymous, though we are told that he or she “was formerly an official of a NATO country” and has “wide experience in the Middle East.”

The clearest evidence that we do not understand this phenomenon is our consistent inability to predict — still less control — these developments. Who predicted that [the movement’s founder, Abu Musab al] Zarqawi would grow in strength after the US destroyed his training camps in 2001? It seemed unlikely to almost everyone that the movement would regroup so quickly after his death in 2006, or again after the surge in 2007. We now know more and more facts about the movement and its members, but this did not prevent most analysts from believing as recently as two months ago that the defeats in Kobane and Tikrit had tipped the scales against the movement, and that it was unlikely to take Ramadi. We are missing something.

Part of the problem may be that commentators still prefer to focus on political, financial, and physical explanations, such as anti-Sunni discrimination, corruption, lack of government services in captured territories, and ISIS’s use of violence. Western audiences are, therefore, rarely forced to focus on ISIS’s bewildering ideological appeal. I was surprised when I saw that even a Syrian opponent of ISIS was deeply moved by a video showing how ISIS destroyed the “Sykes-Picot border” between Iraq and Syria, established since 1916, and how it went on to reunite divided tribes. I was intrigued by the condemnation issued by Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar — one of the most revered Sunni clerics in the world: “This group is Satanic — they should have their limbs amputated or they should be crucified.” I was taken aback by bin Laden’s elegy for Zarqawi: his “story will live forever with the stories of the nobles…. Even if we lost one of our greatest knights and princes, we are happy that we have found a symbol….”

But the “ideology” of ISIS is also an insufficient explanation. Al-Qaeda understood better than anyone the peculiar blend of Koranic verses, Arab nationalism, crusader history, poetic reference, sentimentalism, and horror that can animate and sustain such movements. But even its leaders thought that Zarqawi’s particular approach was irrational, culturally inappropriate, and unappealing. In 2005, for example, al-Qaeda leaders sent messages advising Zarqawi to stop publicizing his horrors. They used modern strategy jargon — “more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media” — and told him that the “lesson” of Afghanistan was that the Taliban had lost because they had relied — like Zarqawi — on too narrow a sectarian base. And the al-Qaeda leaders were not the only Salafi jihadists who assumed that their core supporters preferred serious religious teachings to snuff videos (just as al-Tayeb apparently assumed that an Islamist movement would not burn a Sunni Arab pilot alive in a cage).

Much of what ISIS has done clearly contradicts the moral intuitions and principles of many of its supporters. And we sense — through Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s careful interviews [in ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror] — that its supporters are at least partially aware of this contradiction. Again, we can list the different external groups that have provided funding and support to ISIS. But there are no logical connections of ideology, identity, or interests that should link Iran, the Taliban, and the Baathists to one another or to ISIS. Rather, each case suggests that institutions that are starkly divided in theology, politics, and culture perpetually improvise lethal and even self-defeating partnerships of convenience.

The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough — even in hindsight — to have predicted the movement’s rise.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.

Aron Lund writes: In July, the al-Qaeda branch known as the Nusra Front expelled one of its founding members a man known as Saleh al-Hamawi. As described in Friday’s post, another founding member of the group, Abu Maria al-Qahtani, has reportedly been sidelined and stripped of power.

With the Syrian jihadis’ internal debates increasingly spilling online, one recent social media posting has revealed new details about the Nusra Front’s mysterious leader, Abu Mohammad al-Golani, and the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Hudheifa Azzam is the son of the legendary Palestinian Islamist ideologue Abdullah Azzam. The elder Azzam is often regarded as the founder of the modern jihadi movement, although it is not obvious he would have liked the direction it later took. Differences between Azzam and his junior associate in 1980s Afghanistan and Pakistan, a Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden, were already apparent at the time of Azzam’s mysterious death in 1989.

As a young man, Azzam’s son Hudheifa worked with his father in support of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union, and he remained active on the jihadi scene. Recently, he left Jordan to settle in northern Syria, where he has presented himself as an independent scholar. He seems to work closely with Syrian Islamist hardliners like Ahrar al-Sham, but he is a strong opponent of the Islamic State and has been critical of the Nusra Front and al-Qaeda as well.

Like many other independent Islamist figures in Syria, Hudheifa Azzam has found Twitter to be an excellent means of broadcasting his opinions. On July 21, he fired off a series of tweets targeted at the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The information in these tweets was vouched for by two Nusra Front dissidents, Saleh al-Hamawi and Abu Maria al-Qahtani, who were to varying degrees involved in the events he describes.

In short, Azzam’s story is as follows, with the addition of a great deal of context for clarity. Whether you think his information is to be trusted or not is up to you. [Continue reading…]

Lina Khatib writes: The rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (also known as ISIS and ISIL, for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) has signaled the start of a new jihadist era. The Islamic State has declared a long-term goal, which is to establish an Islamic state, or a caliphate, based on an extremist interpretation of sharia, making it more than just a terrorist organization despite its origins as an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Islamic State is a hybrid jihadist group. It has appropriated the radical Islamist ideology of al-Qaeda while implementing the centralized command model of the paramilitary Hezbollah and some tactics from the Taliban’s local governance structures.

Its strategy for survival and growth has relied on a number of components: pragmatism regarding the Syrian regime; the control and development of territories as a method of commanding local populations and attracting foreign fighters; the use of ideology and the media as tools to control populations, recruit fighters, and raise funds; and a centralized military strategy.

Since its expansion into Syria in 2013, the Sunni extremist group has been engaged in an existential battle with al-Qaeda. And, with all of its strategic tools, the Islamic State has presented itself as the “true” al-Qaeda, asserting that it is making al-Qaeda’s ideological goal of an Islamic state a concrete reality, which provides a cloak of authenticity that has appealed to donors and recruits.

But although ideology plays an important role in how the Islamic State operates, the organization’s strategic objectives are not driven by ideology but instead revolve around the acquisition of money, resources, and power. Establishing a caliphate in Iraq and Syria is therefore the beginning, not the end, for the group—the clue to the Islamic State’s long-term aims lies in its slogan, “lasting and expanding” (baqiya wa tatamaddad). However, this does not mean simply the indefinite geographical expansion of the caliphate’s physical boundaries, but also the expansion of its global influence in order to support the viability of the state project. [Continue reading…]

Malise Ruthven writes: In November 2001, two months after the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, James Buchan, a novelist and a former Middle East correspondent, published an article in the London Guardian in which he imagined the triumphant entry into Mecca of Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist:

It was no ordinary evening, but possibly the holiest in the holiest month of Islam, the so-called Lailat al-Qadr, or the Night of Power, on which, according to the Koran, God’s revelation was sent down to the Prophet Mohammed…. More than 50,000 people had gathered on the hot pavement of the mosque enclosure and in the streets outside to pass the evening in prayer. Millions of others were watching on a live television broadcast at home.

As Sheikh Abdul Rahman, famous all over the Islamic world for the beauty of his voice, mounted the pulpit, a hand reached up and tugged at his robe. There was a commotion, and in the place of the Imam stood a tall man, unarmed and dressed in the white cloth of the pilgrim…, and recognisable from a million television screens: Osama bin Laden, flanked by his lieutenants….

Armed young men appeared from the crowd and could be seen padlocking the gates, and taking up firing positions in the galleries.

So began the insurrection that was to overturn the kingdom of Saudi Arabia….

While the details in Buchan’s fantasy describing “the west’s worst nightmare” have changed, the scenario he outlined appears more plausible today than it did fourteen years ago. Bin Laden is dead, thanks to the action of US Navy SEALs in May 2011, but as Abdel Bari Atwan explains in Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s official successor as leader of “al-Qa‘ida central,” looks increasingly irrelevant. Bin Laden’s true successor is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy caliph of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State. As “Commander of the Faithful” in that nascent state he poses a far more formidable threat to the West and to Middle Eastern regimes—including the Saudi kingdom—that are sustained by Western arms than bin Laden did from his Afghan cave or hideout in Pakistan.

One of the primary forces driving this transformation, according to Atwan, is the digital expertise demonstrated by the ISIS operatives, who have a commanding presence in social media. A second is that ISIS controls a swath of territory almost as large as Britain, lying between eastern Syria and western Iraq. As Jürgen Todenhöfer, who spent ten days in ISIS-controlled areas in both Iraq and Syria, stated categorically in January: “We have to understand that ISIS is a country now.” [Continue reading…]