ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (24 page)

ISIS took sole control of al-Bab that morning.

The safe house where one of the authors had stayed belonged to a rebel fighter named Abu Ali, a personal friend of Lattif. “He left his wife and children with my family. ISIS took control of his house. Abu Ali’s family stayed for four, maybe five months. Now they’re with him in Aleppo.” Lattif’s family, however, are still in al-Bab.

WHEN ISIS RULES

At first, Lattif said, ISIS treated civilians “gently,” even assuming some of the civil administrative duties that had been handled by volunteers and the FSA. They fixed damaged roads, planted flowers in the street, cultivated gardens, and cleaned the local schools. But not long thereafter, Lattif said, ISIS instituted Sharia law, forcing women to wear what he called “the Daesh clothes”—the
niqab
or full head-and-face covering. “They banned hairdressing. Beard shaving is also forbidden. No woman can leave her house without a male escort now. There’s no smoking, no
shisha
[hookah], no playing cards. They’ve made everything bad for civilians now. They force the people to go [to] the mosque for prayers, to close their businesses. No one can walk in the street during prayers. They kidnapped almost everybody working in the relief centers. About a month ago [November 2014], they closed the school. If you want to study now, you have to go to the Daesh school in the mosque.”

Torture is common, too. ISIS has taken to arresting members of the FSA, whom they accuse of being agents of foreign intelligence services. Also sentences for various ISIS-designated crimes are carried out publicly in al-Bab’s town square. These range from dismemberments to beheadings, depending on the offense. “They cut off heads and hands in the square. Do you remember the hookah place?” Lattif was referring to a popular cafe in central al-Bab where, in 2012, he had outlined for his vision of a free and democratic Syria. “The beheadings are taking place now in front of there. They shut down the hookah place, of course.”

In the first months after ISIS seized control of al-Bab, the regime refrained from bombing the city. Then, in November 2014, the Syrian Air Force started up again, dropping barrel bombs—“flying IEDs,” which have proved some of the deadliest ordnance used by the regime in the war— that killed sixty-two civilians in one air
strike. According to Lattif, the Air Force dropped a barrel bomb in the main street of al-Bab, nowhere near any ISIS location.

This followed ISIS’s eastern offensive against a series of regime military installations, such as the Tabqa air base in Deir Ezzor, the Division 17 base in Raqqa, and the Regiment 121 base in Hasaka—a noticeable uptick in the group’s anti-regime sorties that followed directly after its blitz into central and northern Iraq. “The regime wants al-Bab to stay under the control of Daesh,” Lattif said. “Assad has soldiers about fifteen kilometers west of al-Bab, but they never try to take the city back. Now, every time the regime sends its forces against the north areas of Aleppo, ISIS also attacks some places in the north. Both [the] regime and ISIS are attacking the FSA at the same time, but separately. The regime sees many benefits of ISIS’s control of al-Bab and Raqqa—without them, allied forces won’t strike Syria. The regime lost its authority in the beginning of the revolution. To get it back, it needs terrorists in Syria. Now there are many voices in the West saying that al-Assad is the only force against terrorists in the Middle East. Now the main players in Syria are the terrorists, Daesh, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the regime.”

ISIS VS. ASSAD

Lattif’s story conforms not just to what the Syrian opposition has been saying for years—that al-Assad and ISIS are, at the very least, tacit allies in a common war against the FSA and Islamist rebels—but to what regime loyalists have begun to say lately as well. To sack Tabqa, Division 17, and Regiment 121, ISIS relied on weapons looted from fallen Iraqi Security Forces bases in Ninewah and Anbar. As we’ve seen, prior to June 2014, when Mosul fell to ISIS, al-Assad’s forces had largely refrained from fighting the takfiris in Syria while insisting in their propaganda that those were all they ever fought. After the fall of Mosul, however, the regime sensed a
renewed opportunity to partner with the West as an agent of counterterrorism. So Syrian warplanes began bombing dozens of ISIS targets in Raqqa, or so they made a show of doing. “They did not bomb the [ISIS] headquarters until June, and even then only after it had been evacuated,” Masrour Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish intelligence head told the
Guardian
in late August 2014. “We are all paying the price now.”

After the takeover of Division 17, ISIS executed upward of fifty Syrian soldiers, beheading some and then photographing the lopped-off heads in Raqqa, according to Rami Abdel Rahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, who told Agence France-Presse: “There is a clear shift in the ISIS strategy. It has moved from consolidating its total control in areas under its grip. It is now spreading. For ISIS, fighting the regime is not about bringing down Assad. It is about expanding its control.”

This was all too much for many Assad loyalists. By the summer of 2014, after seeing how little resistance ISIS faced in its eastern offensive, many pro-regime activists began denouncing their own side. In a video posted online, they accused the regime of nothing short of treason at Tabqa air base, justifying their criticism by citing a statement once made by Hafez al-Assad: “I don’t want anyone to be silent about a mistake.” The video shows Syrian officers speaking confidently about their fight against ISIS, but the narrator explains that they were duped into believing that helicopters full of fifty tons of ammunition and supplies were on the way. In the event, the only helicopters that arrived carried no cargo to Tabqa but plenty of it away: namely, the head of the air base, Adel Issa, along with of three of his generals. This was eighteen hours before the base was stormed by ISIS militants. The video also accuses Syria’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, of covering up this treachery and then lying about its grisly aftermath. Assad’s own cousin, Douraid al-Assad, is quoted as saying: “I call for the expulsion of the defense minister, the chief
of staff, the air force chief, the information minister, and everyone involved in the fall of the Tabqa military base and its consequences.” Finally, the video ends with statements such as: “Our bullets—nine of them are directed to the traitors and one to the enemy.”

Elia Samaan, a Syrian official with the Ministry of Reconciliation, had openly inquired as to the absence of the Syrian Air Force in the war against ISIS in June 2014, after al-Baghdadi’s men tore back into Syria from Iraq with renewed vigor and much stolen matériel. Though he discounted the allegation that the regime in any way colluded or cooperated with ISIS, Samaan admitted to the
New York Times
’s Anne Barnard that fighting the terrorist group was not a “first priority” for Damascus. Instead, al-Assad had been all too “happy to see ISIS killing” the FSA and Islamic Front instead of his own troops. When the Syrian Air Force finally escalated its air campaign against ISIS, it ended up killing, as per Lattif’s account, more innocents than militants. Khaled, an ISIS fighter, told Barnard, “Most of the air strikes have targeted civilians and not ISIS headquarters. Thank God.”

MINBIJ

Where ISIS may have thrived in part from the Assad regime’s malign neglect, it also benefited from savvy politicking against what Lattif called the “bad FSA battalions.”

Ayman al-Zawahiri had counseled al-Zarqawi, in the early years of AQI, not just about the folly of slaughtering Iraq’s Shia, but about the need for effective Islamic governance in the areas ruled by al-Qaeda in Iraq. “[I]t’s imperative that, in addition to force, there be an appeasement of Muslims and a sharing with them in governance,” al-Zawahiri wrote his field commander in 2005. What he had advocated was something akin to the steady application of jihadist soft power. While clearly shirking al-Zawahiri’s injunction about Shia, ISIS has more or less heeded his advice on creating
popular incentives for Islamic governance. Minbij is a case in point.

A city of approximately two hundred thousand situated strategically between Aleppo, Raqqa, and the Turkish border, Minbij was abandoned by Syrian regime forces in November 2012, after which residents set up a municipal administration for self-rule. Soon, the city became an important but temporary symbol for the Syrian revolution that a post-Assad state needn’t be a Hobbesian nightmare at all. That idyll lasted for about a year.

Accusations that nationalistic or secular rebel groups were behaving like brigands or gangsters were rife throughout Syria, often making more hard-line Islamist factions, including al-Nusra, seem models of discipline and fairness by comparison. Fortified with nearly all of al-Nusra’s former foreign fighter contingent, ISIS established a base in the city in April 2013, operating side by side with several other armed factions, and continued to serve as a small but feared gendarmerie of about fifty men.

ISIS used its base to quietly reach out to the local population, inviting people to its
madhafa
(meeting place) to socialize and also to learn about al-Baghdadi’s broad Islamic project for the region. ISIS mediated disputes and responded to complaints from locals, acting as de facto mukhtars in a city devoid of any state authority. However, ISIS’s presence in Minbij grew steadily and quietly; rented houses were used as secret weapon and ammunition stockpiles, making the true extent of the jihadist presence publicly calculable. Also, its policy of arbitration grew less transparent and more severe. ISIS arrested FSA fighters without resorting to the Sharia commissions established by the rebels; it intimidated secular activists and controlled whatever resources it could lay its hands on to try and buy off the rest of the population through the dispensation of social services. It kept its fighters away from the front lines and instead struck tactical deals with FSA and other Islamist groups: in exchange for suicide bombers, who could be used to detonate
VBIEDs at regime checkpoints or to blow up military installations with surplus matériel, the rebels who were fighting al-Assad’s forces would share their war booty with ISIS. By September 2013 ISIS’s heavy-handedness and its play for monopolistic control of the city’s services boiled over into outright confrontation with rival groups.

It declared war against Kurds in Minbij, vowing to “cleanse” the region of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whose Syrian branch, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of Kurdistan was the most powerful armed faction among Syria’s Kurdish minority.

In October rebel forces in Minbij seized the flour mills from ISIS and told the jihadists to refrain from bypassing military and Sharia councils in the city in the settlement of public disputes. When the rebels in Aleppo and Idlib declared war against ISIS in January 2014, local forces in Minbij overran the ISIS base and killed or captured all of its fighters. 

However, according to several residents from Minbij who spoke to the authors, locals
sympathized
with ISIS and lamented its expulsion. “People did not see anything but good things from ISIS, even though they did not like its religious ideas,” said resident Shadi al-Hassan. “They also know that those who fought it were the worst people in the area.” ISIS’s retreat from Idlib and northern Aleppo helped it return to Minbij with a vengeance. It took control of the city after it sent reinforcements from Raqqa and northeastern Aleppo. Soon it established a full-fledged system of governance, impressing city denizens and displaced refugees alike. Hard as it may be to believe, given the luridness of ISIS’s atrocities, Syrians actually flocked in large number to join the jihadist group or work with it at the local level. ISIS members had different roles: some were dedicated to fighting, while others acted as security, administered medical services, operated bakeries, ran Sharia courts, and so on. For the local community, the difference was quickly felt: ISIS provided safety and security; its methods of justice were swift, and nobody was exempt
from punishment, including its own fighters who deviated from the strict moral code it had laid down. Consequently, kidnappings, robberies, and acts of extortion all but disappeared.

Ayman al-Mit’ib, a Minbij resident who since November 2013 had been internally displaced in Minbij, said, “There is no absolute support for its acts but no absolute opposition to its acts either. The reason why people support the Islamic State is its honesty and practices compared to the corruption of most of the FSA groups. Some FSA groups joined it, too.”

The story of how ISIS grew in Minbij rings true in other areas under its control, particularly where FSA factions failed to rein in corruption or human rights abuses. A defector from the Syrian army, for instance, told the
Guardian
in November 2013 how ISIS operated like a virus in Syria by taking over other battalions and the territories they controlled. “What they do is attack the weaker units on the pretext that their commander is a bandit or a looter—they only fight one force at a time,” he said, adding that once ISIS was ensconced in a city, it spread outward, seizing towns and villages surrounding that urban hub.

Indeed, one of the first rebel leaders to be publicly executed by ISIS was Hassan Jazra of Ghuraba al-Sham. Jazra had been a watermelon merchant before the revolution, then a peaceful protestor against al-Assad, and finally a rebel who stole to finance his military activity. In an obituary for Jazra, journalist Orwa Moqdad wrote, “Aleppo knew Hassan Jazra as a thief. Yet he did not leave his post at the front for a year and a half in the face of regular army attacks. He was a son of the protest movement who was driven by deteriorating circumstances to become a military leader . . .that became increasingly typical over the course of the war.” ISIS executed him, along with six of his fighters, in November 2013. The execution was used by ISIS to prove a point: those who sought self-gain from the war, or who strayed from a pure revolutionary path, were as bad as the regime. Although in death Jazra’s reputation
depended on whom you asked, for ISIS his execution was a necessary form of justice. Its popularity went up accordingly. After that, it began to assert itself even more in rebel-held areas.