As they note, while this may have seemed like a compelling question at the time, it was also strange, given that the United States has been fighting ISIS in Iraq — in the group’s various incarnations — for almost a decade.
In the book’s introduction (which follows) we learn that the path which led many young men to fight for ISIS commonly began with the desire to fight against the Assad regime.
In late 2011, Abdelaziz Kuwan approached his Syrian uncle to connect him to Riad al-Asaad, a colonel in the Syrian Air Force and one of the earliest military defectors from the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. Abdelaziz, a sixteen-year-old teenager from Bahrain, wanted to join the armed rebellion in Syria, but his parents forbade him from going. So he defied them.
In early 2012, he flew first to Istanbul and then, as so many other foreign fighters have done, took a thirteen-hour bus ride to the southern Turkish border town of Reyhanli. From there, he crossed into the Syrian province of Aleppo, the northern countryside that had by then completely fallen into the hands of the armed anti-Assad rebellion. Abdelaziz fought for moderate rebel factions for several weeks before deeming them too corrupt and ineffective. Then he migrated through various Islamist brigades, joining first Ahrar al-Sham and then Jabhat al-Nusra, which later revealed itself to be the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. Having earned a reputation as a fearless and religiously devout fighter, Abdelaziz nonetheless grew disenchanted with his Islamist comrades and faced pressure from his family to return to Bahrain. He did at the end of 2012. Once home, Abdelaziz’s mother promptly confiscated his passport.
“I walk in the streets [of Bahrain] and I feel imprisoned,” Abdelaziz told the authors a year later, still pining for his days as a holy warrior. “I feel tied up. It’s like someone is always watching me. This world means nothing to me. I want to be free. I want to go back. People are giving their lives, that’s the honorable life.”
Abdelaziz’s family had moved to Bahrain from eastern Syria in the 1980s. His parents provided him with the means to lead a decent life. “His father raised him well,” one relative recalled. “He did not make him need anyone and wanted him to be of a high social status.” The relative added that Abdelaziz was “quiet,” “refined,” and “always behaved like a man.”
Abdelaziz stayed in Bahrain for three months before he managed to persuade his mother to give him back his passport. He left for Syria three days later. Once he arrived, Abdelaziz joined the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which was then rising in prominence as one of the most disciplined and well-organized jihadist groups in Syria. Abdelaziz later said that in his last few months in Bahrain he made the decision to join ISIS after speaking with “some of the brothers” in Syria via Skype. His prior experience with other Islamist factions ideologically similar to ISIS was an advantage in joining one that was dominated by foreign fighters. Abdelaziz rose through the ranks of ISIS, first becoming a coordinator among local emirs and other rebel groups, then delivering messages and oral agreements on behalf of his leader. When ISIS seized enormous swaths of territory in both Syria and Iraq in the summer of 2014, Abdelaziz was promoted to a security official overseeing three towns near the Syrian-Iraqi border town of Albu Kamal, long a portal between the two countries for men like him.
In ISIS, Abdelaziz discovered new things about himself. He learned that he was violent, brutal, and determined. He beheaded enemies. He kept a Yazidi girl in his house as a sabiyya, or sex slave. She was his prize for his participation in battles against the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces and other Kurdish militias in Sinjar, Iraq, near the Syrian border. According to ISIS’s propaganda magazine, Dabiq, one-fifth of the sex slaves taken from Sinjar was distributed to ISIS’s central leadership to do with as it so chose; the remainder was divided amongst the rank and file, like Abdelaziz, as the spoils of war.
Abdelaziz showed us a picture of his sabiyya. She was in her late teens. She “belonged” to Abdelaziz for about a month before she was handed off to other ISIS commanders.
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