ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (21 page)

Inside Iraq, the dynamics and nature of ISIS changed as well. Al-Baghdadi had earnestly taken up the PR gambit inaugurated by al-Zarqawi, and then expanded by al-Masri and the first al-Baghdadi, and further Iraq-ized ISI, outfitting its upper echelons with former Saddamists. By incorporating al-Nusra’s lower and middle cadres,
al-Baghdadi thus found himself once again commanding a more internationalized terror army, one that spanned the Levant and Mesopotamia. Thus, by renouncing al-Qaeda, al-Baghdadi actually returned ISIS to a version of its earliest incarnation in Iraq.

THE SCHOOLTEACHER OF RAQQA

Souad Nawfal remembered when the anti-Assad protests gained traction in Raqqa. It was March 15, 2012, shortly after the death of Ali Babinsky, the first resident of the eastern province of Syria to be killed by regime forces. He was seventeen years old. “We buried him and then when we had a funeral and protest on his behalf, they fired on us and killed sixteen of our people.”

She also remembered when she started protesting ISIS. “I started demonstrating because they took Father Paolo,” she said, referring to the Italian Jesuit priest who for decades ran a parish north of Damascus and supported the Syrian revolution from its inception. After joining protests in Raqqa in late July, he was kidnapped by ISIS and has not been heard from since. “Paolo was my guest,” Nawfal, a short, forty-year-old, hijab-wearing former schoolteacher told one of the authors during an interview in November 2013. “He used to come to break the fast at Ramadan in my house. He was coming to speak out against ISIS. He wanted to stop the killings and secrecy, all the stuff the regime does. He went in to speak to ISIS, but he never came out.”

Nawfal became a hero to Syrian moderate activists, as well as a minor Internet celebrity for a four-minute video she made in which she lambasted ISIS for their draconian rule and religious obscurantism. The video is titled
The Woman in Pants
in reference to her refusal to adhere to ISIS’s dress code for women. Nawfal said that she’s spent the last two months protesting the new ideologues of her province, whom she sees not only as tarnishing Islam, but also as the mirror
image of the very totalitarians she and her fellow activists wanted to be rid of in the first place. “They treat people horribly. They’re exactly like Assad’s regime. They scare people into submission.”

Much like the Mukhabarat during the early days of the protest movement, ISIS has also banned civilians from taking photographs or making any recordings of provocative behavior in Raqqa. “ISIS would beat people in the street with leather. If anyone was going around taking ‘illegal’ pictures of this with a camera, they’d be taken into custody. In the month and a half I was protesting in front of the headquarters, no one would take my picture because they were scared.”

The jihadi movement has succeeded, Nawfal believes, by preying upon the poverty, illiteracy, and wartime exigencies of this province to curry favor with the population. An especially effective tactic has been the brainwashing of Raqqa’s children. “People that are poor and uneducated and not paying attention to what their kids are doing, their ten-year-olds will go out and then ISIS will promise the family food and money. They elevate these kids and call them ‘sheikhs’ and give them weapons and power, turn them into child soldiers. But these are ten-year-old boys who have never studied theology, and now they’re sheikhs! I am worried that this is really ruining the idea of what Muslims are and what Islam is.”

Nawfal became a daily fixture in front of ISIS’s local headquarters, where she was cursed at, spit on, manhandled, and even run over. “I was standing out in front of this place, and there was an ISIS man with a long white beard who wanted to park his car there. But it’s a huge area. He told me I had to move. I told him no. So he started swearing at me, berating me, but I still wouldn’t move. So he hit me with the car twice. It wasn’t that hard, but more for him to make a point.”

She continued, “Every day they’d point a Kalashnikov at my head and threaten to shoot me. I’d tell them, ‘Do it. If you kill me first, then the second bullet has to go to Bashar’s head.’ That’d irritate them.”

Where her chutzpah may discombobulate the takfiris, the fact
that she’s both a small, middle-aged woman and more or less a solo act in defying them likely accounts for her survival and precarious freedom thus far. Nevertheless, she insists that she’s narrowly escaped ISIS’s distinct brand of social justice more than once, the last time after standing up for the rights of Raqqa’s Christian community.

In late September ISIS attacked and burned two churches in the province, removing their crosses from the spires and replacing them with their black flag of global jihad. On September 25 it did this to the Sayidat al-Bishara Catholic Church, after which around two dozen people turned up at the site to protest. “I told them, ‘What are you doing here? Go to the headquarters,’ ” Nawfal said. She led a march, and some of the protestors began following her, but by the time she reached the headquarters, she found that she was all by herself. Everyone had dropped out of the retinue out of fear. A day later, another church was stormed; Nawfal again went to demonstrate after she heard that people had been arrested. This time she carried a sign that read “Forgive me.” The message was intended for her family, because she was certain that that day she’d either be killed or abducted. “First they tried to scare me away. They let off a bomb near me. I was there for ten minutes, and a sixteen-year-old member of ISIS came to me and called me an infidel and turned to the other ISIS men and said, ‘Why are you letting her live?’ He was about to kill me, but apparently he got orders for no one to talk to me.

“Five minutes later, a car came with guns and weapons. Somebody jumped out and started grabbing at my arm, hitting me on the shoulder. Another person was spitting at me, swearing at me. I thought I was finished at this point. I started to call the Syrian people around me. I shouted, ‘Are you happy, Syrians? Look what they’re doing to me. Look at your women, how they’re getting raped, how they’re getting attacked, and you’re just sitting there, watching.’ ”

Nawfal said she’ll only go outside to protest so long as no one
on the street recognizes her. The minute an ISIS militant sees her, she leaves. She doesn’t stay in one place anymore but moves from house to house, a fugitive in her own city. She doesn’t believe the current situation will change in the near future. “If people have fear, Raqqa will not have freedom from ISIS. As long as ISIS continues to use the tactics of the regime, it’s not going to become free.”

Nawfal has since fled to Turkey.

SYRIA’S SAHWA

There are thousands more like Nawfal who have resisted ISIS locally in Raqqa and elsewhere. Abu Jarir al-Shamali’s criticism of al-Qaeda’s Waziristan operation—that the entire territory was more in thrall to Pashtun tribes than to the mujahidin—was of a piece with ISIS’s obsession about sahwats, be they in Iraq or in Syria. Paradoxically, in trying to forestall an Awakening, it ended up precipitating one.

On July 11 2013, Kamal Hamami, a commander of the FSA’s Supreme Military Council, was shot dead by ISIS gunmen at a checkpoint in Latakia. Although tensions following that incident ran high—“We are going to wipe the floor with them,” one FSA commander told Reuters—the matter was swiftly hushed up, and Hamami’s murder was referred to a Sharia court for “investigation.” Similarly, when ISIS “accidentally” beheaded Mohammed Fares, a commander from Ahrar al-Sham, believing him to have been an Iraqi Shia militiaman (he allegedly muttered Shia mantras in his sleep), ISIS asked for “understanding and forgiveness” to preempt internecine war. Neither ISIS nor any mainstream or Islamist rebel group wanted to start a civil war within a civil war. And though many FSA rebels saw ISIS’s draconian rule as a long-term danger for Syria, they also understood that Sahwa-come-too-soon would only benefit one man: Bashar al-Assad, who would then
either sit back and watch the opposition devour itself, if not contribute to this self-cannibalization by helping ISIS attack the FSA.

That said, ISIS seemed intent on provoking a backlash. It kidnapped revered opposition activists, it terrorized civilians under its sway, it established monopolistic checkpoints that functioned more like chokepoints for rival factions. And it attacked Syrian rebels. On August 1, 2013, for instance, ISIS sent a car bomb to the base of Ahfad al-Rasoul (Grandsons of the Prophet) in Raqqa, killing thirty. ISIS then expelled the brigade from the city.

In late December 2013, the city of Maarat al-Numan, in Syria’s Idlib province, staged a protest in favor of rebel unity against the al-Assad regime—and for the release of an FSA officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Saoud, who had been kidnapped days earlier by ISIS at a checkpoint. Curiously enough, Saoud, a defector from the Syrian army, had been traveling with a retinue to the Taftanaz air base in Idlib in order to parlay with ISIS and negotiate the release of military equipment—including antiaircraft missiles—that the latter had stolen from Fursan al-Haqq, an FSA faction. Saoud also represented the Idlib Military Council—a regional assembly representing all the rebel groups in the province—which had publicly demanded that ISIS free all its kidnapped civilians and pursue any civil or criminal complaints it had with rebels in the relevant Sharia courts. Saoud’s own kidnapping, then, came in the midst of his trying to broker a compromise with ISIS. Maarat al-Numan’s rally on his behalf had the intended effect: within hours of the protest action, ISIS released Saoud, making him the first FSA officer to leave its custody alive.

Then, on December 29, ISIS raided several dissident news organizations in Kafranbel, a city in the northwestern Idlib province, which had somehow managed, through two years of regime bombardment and the proliferation of jihadism, to retain the democratic principles of the original Syrian uprising. Among the buildings targeted was the Kafranbel Media Center run by the forty-one-
year-old Raed Fares, an artist whose pro-revolutionary posters and slogans—all written in colloquial English and very often wittily allusive to Western popular culture—had helped make an Arab revolution intelligible to non-Arab audiences the world over. In one celebrated poster, the famous “king of the world” scene from the movie
Titanic
is reproduced, with Vladimir Putin cast as Leonardo DiCaprio and Bashar al-Assad as Kate Winslet. Lately, Fares had taken to comparing ISIS’s depravity to the regime’s, making them twin enemies of the Syrian people.

Hours earlier, before the ISIS raid, Fares’s Media Center broadcast a radio program featuring Syrian women discussing their recent divorces. All too much for the takfiris, who abducted six of Fares’s employees (they were released two hours later) and stole or smashed the center’s computers and broadcasting equipment.

“The reason Kafranbel became important is because it’s been persistently and consistently supporting the revolution in all of its aspects—whether it’s the nonviolent revolution or the armed revolution or the humanitarian and civil society work,” Fares told us. “The regime, when we would say something in opposition to them, they’d shell us. ISIS, when we made a drawing against them—the first in June of this year—they wanted to attack us, so they came and raided the Media Center. At the end of the day, they’re both the same. They’re both tyrants.” (Not long after this interview, which took place as Fares was touring the United States, ISIS tried to assassinate him in Idlib. He was shot several times but recovered from his injuries.)

On New Year’s Day 2014, ISIS finally overplayed its hand in Syria, killing Hussein al-Suleiman, or Abu Rayyan, a respected physician and commander in Ahrar al-Sham. Like Saoud, Abu Rayyan was abducted while heading to a negotiation meeting with ISIS. Abu Rayyan was locked up for twenty days and horribly tortured before being shot. Images of his mutilated corpse were then circulated on social media, outraging even those Ahrar
al-Sham supporters who had hitherto urged patience and reconciliation with ISIS. However, the brigade accused it of exceeding even the barbarity of the al-Assad’s Mukhabarat and warned that “if ISIS continues with its methodical avoiding of refraining from . . .resorting to an independent judicial body, and its stalling and ignoring in settling its injustices against others, the revolution and the jihad will head for the quagmire of internal fighting, in which the Syrian revolution will be the first loser.”

On January 2 ISIS hit another FSA location, this time in Atareb, Aleppo, driving even Islamist fighters into an alliance with the FSA. The Islamic Front, which not a month earlier had commandeered an FSA warehouse full of weapons and supplies in the Idlib village of Atmeh, declared solidarity with a fellow victim of jihadist fanatics. “We hereby address the Islamic State of the requirement to immediately withdraw from the city of al-Atareb,” the Islamic Front stated in a press release, “and to end the killing of the fighters based on false excuses and return all unfairly confiscated properties of weapons and bases to their rightful owners. They must also accept the rule of God by agreeing to the judgments of the independent religious courts to resolve the conflicts that arise between them and the other factions. We remind ISIS that those who originally liberated al-Atareb and the suburbs of Aleppo in general are those whom you are now fighting.”

By that point, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Saoud had joined with a new rebel formation known as the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, which claimed to have aggregated as many as twenty separate factions belonging to the Idlib Military Council. This new mainstream front, Saoud told us, was founded with one purpose: “to fight [ISIS].”

The last group to join this budding Sahwa movement in northern Syria was the Army of the Mujahedeen, an alliance of eight rebel brigades, all based in Aleppo. “We, the Army of the Mujahedeen,” it declared, “pledge to defend ourselves and our honor,
wealth, and lands, and to fight [ISIS], which has violated the rule of God, until it announces its dissolution.” The Army of the Mujahedeen gave ISIS a stark choice: either it could defect to the mainstream rebellion or it could surrender its arms and leave Syria.