ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (16 page)

Much of the online propaganda is coming from ISIS’s plentiful crop of British female recruits inside Syria. The
Guardian
reported that, “Some British women and girls have posted pictures of themselves carrying AK-47s, grenades and in one case a severed head, as they pledge allegiance to ISIS. But they are also tweeting pictures of food, restaurants and sunsets to present a positive picture of the life awaiting young women in an attempt to lure more from the UK.”
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Their strategy is working. An estimated fifty British girls and women have reportedly joined ISIS, with many of them now based in the city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital.
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As we’ll see in
chapter six
, British jihadists—both male and female—are taking on important roles in the Islamic State. Reports have emerged of British women leading an all-female sharia police unit called the “al-Khansaa Brigade” that brutally enforces
Islamic law and dress codes among female civilians inside Raqqa.
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This terror squad composed of British citizens is even reportedly running brothels that force captured Iraqi women into sex slavery in the service of ISIS fighters.
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If needed, the al-Khansaa Brigade will find no shortage of willing Western accomplices to assist in their dark work. At least forty German women have relocated to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, while over sixty French women have joined ISIS and other terrorist groups in the region, with many more reportedly eager to take the jihadi plunge.
¹⁷

Fletcher, who left the St. Paul police force in 2013 and now works closely with local Somali leaders to battle Islamic radicalism within their community, knows the jihadi recruiting process well, having seen dozens of Somalis from the Twin Cities join terror groups overseas in recent years. ISIS’s targeting of women comes as no surprise to the former sheriff. “Their handlers and their recruiters in Syria, they want them to help build a society,” he told me. “While they are recruiting men, they also promised them wives when they get there. They need women in their society to keep their fighters content. It’s a scary thing, but the women are really being used in a variety of ways once they get there.”

Yes, you need women to build a caliphate—after all, someone has to make babies and raise them up to be good
mujahideen
while Daddy is off plundering. And ISIS likes ’em young. The average age for ISIS’s female recruits is between sixteen and twenty-four—and some are even younger.
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Once they arrive in Syria, they don’t stay single for long. The Islamic State has its own jihadi Mingle-style dating service: a “marriage bureau” near Raqqa that seeks to match new arrivals with male ISIS fighters.
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ISIS has also established a special institute for these female recruits, called “al-Zawra,” intended to “prepare sisters for the battlefields for jihad.” According to Vocativ: “To prepare women for their roles as mujahedeen, al-Zawra offers classes in five areas, including domestic work such as sewing and cooking, medical first aid, Islam and Sharia law, weaponry, and in
a surprisingly progressive twist, training in social media and computer programs for editing and design.”
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Al-Zawra instructs aspiring female jihadists to get in shape, learn first aid, and learn to sew and cook. And of course, to watch YouTube and learn weapons training, because ISIS wants gals who are, “interested in explosive belt and suicide bombing more than a white dress or a castle or clothing or furniture.”
²¹
Frozen
is apparently not very popular in the Islamic State.

A pair of Austrian teenagers found out the hard way about a girl’s life in the caliphate. Austrian authorities believe Samra Kesinovic, seventeen, and Sabina Selimovic, fifteen, two pretty friends from Vienna, were radicalized online and at a local mosque.
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In April 2014 the pair left a note for their parents that read, “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah, and we will die for him.” They then departed for Syria to join ISIS, ending up married—and reportedly pregnant—to two Islamic State fighters in Raqqa. Kesinovic and Selimovic soon became known as the “poster girls” of jihad, with images (reportedly doctored by ISIS) of them clad in burqas and brandishing AK-47s posted regularly to social media.
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When reports surfaced that the girls realized they’d made a horrible mistake and wished desperately to return to Austria, the seventeen-year-old Kesinovic gave an interview via text message to a French magazine saying the rumors were untrue and that she was happy in Syria. But Austrian security sources believe Kesinovic was being held at gunpoint by her doting hubby as she gave her answers.
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Tragically, there have been reports that at least one of the girls has been killed during fighting in Syria.
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The danger hasn’t stopped other Austrian girls from wanting to trade in their tiaras for Islamic State burqas. In September 2014, Austrian police detained two girls, aged fourteen and fifteen, “with full suitcases . . . intending to go to Syria” and follow in the footsteps of Kesinovic and Selimovic.
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Want to rebel and make Mom and Dad mad these days? Forget bringing home a guy with facial piercings and neck tattoos. Instead, run away to Syria and marry a bearded jihadi with a fondness for severed heads.

You’d think that young women and teenage girls brought up in the comfort, freedom, and security of the West would view ISIS with complete revulsion. As we saw in
chapter two
, the Islamic State engages in every form of sexual violence and degradation imaginable and imposes a dehumanizing, second-class existence upon women; it surpasses even the Taliban in sheer brutality. The eyewitness horror stories are readily available online—it’s tough to romanticize gang rape, woman battering, sex slavery, and polygamy.

Yet ISIS continues to attract Western females: from the love-starved to the lost and naive, from anti-social loners to foolish young thrill-seekers looking for danger and a way to rebel against authority. Shannon Conley seems to have fallen into each of those categories to some varying degree. She seemed utterly convinced that she’d find a wonderful life in the new caliphate and help build an Islamic utopia where she would play a pivotal role.

And she is not alone.

What kind of person would leave a middle class suburb of Denver, London, Amsterdam, or Montreal to trek to a bloody war zone and into the embrace of the world’s most sadistic terrorist organization? Former CIA case officer Patrick Skinner puts ISIS’s fighters into three categories: the Psychopaths, the Pious, and the Sunni Pragmatists. He refers to the Pious as “True Believers” who are drawn to the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and see the reestablishment of the caliphate as a religious duty. A good number of Western recruits undoubtedly fall into this category.

The Sunni Pragmatists, Skinner says, include Iraqi tribal sheikhs “whose allegiance to ISIS originates not in a cultish death wish but in a desire to win security and well-being, and who seem to be using the Psychopaths
and the True Believers as convenient allies.” This category does not apply to Western jihad seekers.

The Psychopaths, however, are a different story. Skinner describes them as having “more taste for grindhouse than Islamic jurisprudence . . . exemplars of the most lurid and photogenic of the three types of ISIS fighter.” He says ISIS’s foreign legion “tend to be hyperviolent,” especially in comparison to more pragmatic indigenous fighters: “As men without significant military training—like most jihadis from Western or upper-class backgrounds—their main purpose is to create grotesque propaganda and, perhaps, to perform the low-skill role of blowing themselves up.”
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The vulnerable, the impressionable, the lonely, the desperate, the troubled, the sinister, the violent, and the psychotic are leaving the comfort of Western societies behind to join the Islamic State. The Islamic State is like a valley of lost souls stretching across a vast swath of the Middle East; it has become a gathering place for the evil, the disturbed, and the depraved. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, all of Middle Earth’s malevolent forces flock to Mordor to serve the Dark Lord, Sauron, and destroy the forces of good. In Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel
The Stand
a megalomaniacal dictator named Randall Flagg draws all of America’s surviving psychopaths and criminal elements to Las Vegas, where he sets up a totalitarian society after a pandemic wipes out most of mankind. ISIS and its caliph are having a similar effect on an array of Western misfits and malcontents, men and women alike, who are drawn to the Islamic State’s audacious violence, dark vision, and online bravado as to a magnet.

This is actually a phenomenon I had documented for years before ISIS’s gory rise. In my 2011 book,
The Terrorist Next Door,
I included a chapter called “Freaks, Geeks, and Jihadis” that warned this Losers’ Jihad would become, “increasingly familiar in the near future”:

          
In recent years, social outcasts have increasingly found appeal in Islamism. They might be lonely nerds, love-starved women,
ex-cons, or people who grew up in abusive families. Some are white converts to Islam, others are African-American or Hispanic. All have one thing in common: they find meaning and purpose in the jihadist cause that they previously lacked in life. . . . For the first time in what they themselves often view as their wretched lives, these misfits become part of something bigger, something that matters—a powerful, world-changing movement. Overnight, one can go from being a friendless sad sack or a directionless street thug to being a member of the ummah, or global Islamic community, simply by entering a jihadi chat room or sharing an Al Qaeda video on YouTube. For an ex-con or a lonely, tormented soul who blames his failures and unhappiness on a U.S. system and society that has done them wrong, aiding and abetting America’s enemies in a jihad against that very power structure is a perfect way to gain revenge.
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For someone with a proclivity toward violent, anti-social behavior, the sight of ISIS raping, pillaging, and hacking off heads while calling for world domination is a major thrill. When a radical imam comes along online or at the mosque and tells that sort of person that there is a religious justification for his actions—that the wanton killing of innocent people will earn him a trip to heaven—these freaks and geeks can’t sign up for jihad quickly enough. “In the old days,” I wrote in
The Terrorist Next Door,
“they may have joined a cult, hooked up with a street gang, or listened to the darkest form of heavy metal music . . . the scary quiet kid with the distant stare, bad acne, and
Ozzfest
t-shirt that sat next to you in biology class is now a prime candidate to carry the banner of Islamic jihad. Ditto the thuggish troublemaker who was in and out of juvenile hall throughout high school.”
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Today, if you’re the troubled, rootless sort who is drawn to the darker side of life, it doesn’t get any darker or more forbidden than ISIS and its army of serial killers.

What follows are the stories of a few American outcasts who have answered the Islamic State’s call.

THE HEARTLAND BEHEADER

“SHARIA LAW IS COMING!!!”

Pronouncements like that on Alton Nolen’s Facebook page left little doubt as to the ex-convict’s religious and political beliefs. A Quaker he was not.

Nolen, who had taken to calling himself “Jah’Keem Yisrael” following his conversion to Islam in prison in 2011, frequently took to Facebook to post anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-jihad screeds, as well as photos of Osama bin Laden, Taliban fighters, and the 9/11 attacks.
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He also posted various photos of himself wearing Muslim garb at Oklahoma City–area mosques, including a snapshot of him with his index finger raised to the sky, which, as we’ll see in
chapter five
, has become the unofficial hand gesture of ISIS fighters and sympathizers.

But one photo in particular, uploaded by Nolen on March 7, 2014—while he was still on probation, no less—would prove to be morbidly prophetic. It showed the gruesome image of a partially decapitated man along with the Koranic verse: “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off of them.”
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When this passage, from Surah 8, verses 9–13 of the Koran, talks about smiting unbelievers above their necks, it isn’t talking about giving them a free facial—as Nolen would soon show he understood all too well.

On September 25, 2014, just six months after the Islamo-beheading propaganda appeared on his Facebook timeline, the thirty-year-old Muslim convert walked into the Vaughan Foods processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma, where he worked. Nolen, who had been fired by the plant earlier that same day for alleged racist rants against white people, was carrying a large knife. He encountered a co-worker, fifty-four-year-old
grandmother Colleen Hufford, and attacked her from behind with the knife, decapitating her. He then slashed at another co-worker, forty-three-year-old Traci Johnson, wounding her seriously before the company’s chief operating officer (a reserve deputy with the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Department) shot him with a rifle, ending the rampage. Nolen survived and is facing charges of first-degree murder at the time of this writing.