ISIS

Ideology, Symbolics, and Counter Narratives

Masood Raja, Masood Ashraf Raja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138486188
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351046176
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Relying on a thorough understanding of the role of ideology, discourse, and framing, this volume discusses ISIS as an Islamist ideological organization, and examines its philosophical scaffolding within the material conditions produced by neoliberal capital. As Raja asserts, it is this nexus of specifically retrieved Islamic history and the current global economic system that creates the kind of social identity ideally suited for ISIS. The combination of the historical narratives and the contemporary means of communication enables ISIS to frame and spread its message, recruit its adherents, and replicate itself.

While many scholarly and journalistic works on ISIS provide a wealth of information, not many elaborate on the terms that are often invoked in these writings. For example, scholars often use the term "Salafi-Jihadi" but they do not provide a comprehensive explanation of such concept within the same text. This book not only provides an explanation of the instructive terms used to explain the ISIS phenomenon, but also asserts that only one school of thought in Islam [The Sunni Wahabis] is likely to be the ideal target for ISIS recruitment. This claim, of course, does not rely on an essentialized pathology of Wahabi Sunnis, but provides an explanation of the Wahabi Islam as a proverbial "slippery slope," as an absolutely necessary first step for an individual's transformation into an ISIS fighter.

Written in a clear and direct style, this volume provides scholars and lay readers alike with a deeper understanding of ISIS and its strategies of recruitment and self sustenance.

Chapter 1

Historical overview of the rise of ISIS

A lot has been written about the sudden rise of ISIS, and this chapter, therefore, is a kind of summation of the works of my predecessors on the subject. In the later chapters, I will, however, also provide a discussion of the presence of historical vocabularies and symbolics that inform the self history of ISIS and the long-term historical view of the general Islamic world in terms of Islam’s contacts and conflicts with the West. One important distinction is crucial to understanding the historical rise of ISIS: While the Western historians look at the rise of ISIS as a modern phenomenon and explain it through the immediate causality of the Iraq war and the Arab spring, within ISIS and also within the Muslim historical tradition the interactions between Islam and the West are also posited and read within the long history of contact and conflict between the West and Islam. It is a combination of these two interwoven historical narratives that is crucial for a better historical understanding of the rise of ISIS.

In June 2014 “the so-called Islamic State Group marched across Iraq and conquered its second-largest city, Mosul” (McCants, 2015, p. 1). After this surprising military success, the ISIS leadership “proclaimed the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, called the caliphate” (p. 1). While this was ISIS’s spectacular entry into the global arena, 2014 was not necessarily the year of its inception as an organization.

It is prudent to first decipher several names that ISIS has either used or been referred to by its opponents. ISIS also goes by ISIL and IS, and it is called DAESH by its opponents in the Middle East. ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria which is a rough translation of the Arabic name of the organization: Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. ISIL is another acronym used for the same organization, which stands for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. This usage was preferred by the Western media. The Associated Press provides the following reason for this preference:

In Arabic, the group is known as Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham, or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. The term “al-Sham” refers to a region stretching from southern Turkey through Syria to Egypt (also including Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan). The group’s stated goal is to restore an Islamic state, or caliphate, in this entire area.

(Kent, 2014)

IS is used interchangeably with ISIS or ISIL and stands as a shortened version of both, meaning the Islamic State. DAESH, however, is an acronym created from the Arabic letters of the full designation of ISIS—Dawla: D; Al-Islamiya: A; Iraq: E; Sham: S. Note that while Iraq is spelled with an “I” in English, in Arabic it starts with the letter “ain (

),” which in English would be phonetically closer to an “e” sound. Similarly, while the “sh” sound in Sham in English is formed by combining two letters (S and H), in Arabic the “sha (

)” sound is produced by one letter, “sheen.” Hence, the full acronym becomes DAESH (

). It is believed that ISIS itself does not like the acronym, even though it does not mean anything derogatory in Arabic. Alice Guthrie (2015), an Arabic expert and translator, provides the following convincing reason for this ISIS dislike for the acronym:

in Arabic, acronyms are not anything like as widely used as they are in English, and so arabophones are not as used to hearing them as anglophones are. Thus, the creation and use of a title that stands out as a nonsense neologism for an organisation like this one is inherently funny, disrespectful, and ultimately threatening of the organisation’s status. Khaled al-Haj Salih, the Syrian activist who coined the term back in 2013, says that initially even many of his fellow activists, resisting Daesh alongside him, were shocked by the idea of an Arabic acronym, and he had to justify it to them by referencing the tradition of acronyms being used as names by Palestinian organisations (such as Fatah). So saturated in acronyms are we in English that we struggle to imagine this, but it’s true.

(Guthrie, 2015)

Probably the main reason ISIS dislikes DAESH so much, according to Guthrie, is because the name “lends itself well to satire” as the preposterous long title of the organization is literally reduced to meaningless gibberish in Arabic. Furthermore, Guthrie suggests that DAESH also becomes significant in Arabic because “it is also only one letter different from the word ‘daes

,’ meaning someone or something that crushes or tramples.” In other words, while the acronym makes ISIS sound silly, it also gives more offense to ISIS because “it implies they are monsters, and that they are made-up.” Thus, overall there are several designations for ISIS but all of them refer to an organization that, unlike Alqaeda, sees itself as a “sovereign” supranational entity with a divine mission: establishment of Khilāfah on earth, which I will discuss in the next chapter.

While ISIS got the world’s attention in 2014 because of its capture of Mosul and the brutalities that followed the capture, the rise of the organization predates this cataclysmic event. In his impeccable work on the history of ISIS, Gerges (2016) asserts that the rise of “ISIS must be contextualized through its origins, its journey traced from the crux of the American led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003” (p. 50). In a way, then, while the ideological basis for the eventual rise of ISIS, or any other such group, might have already been present within the region, the US invasion of Iraq provided the very conditions in which something such as ISIS could have emerged. Gerges also attributes the rise of ISIS to a “post-Al Qaeda generation” (p. 52) of Jihadists of whom “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi” was the most significant figure. Once again, as I argue in the subsequent chapters, the Soviet–Afghan war, in which the US openly supported the Jihadist groups, was the ultimate forging ground for Zarqawi as well. Born in Zarqa, Jordan, Zarqawi in his youth “became known for committing petty crimes … and eventually wound up in prison, charged with sexual assault and drug possession” (Gerges, 2016, p. 53). Even though Zarqawi did go to Afghanistan, he could not actively participate in the Jihad, as the Soviets had already been defeated, but it was in Afghanistan that he formed the transnational alliances with other Jihadists that came to play an important role in his rise as one of the founding fathers of what would become ISIS. It was during his second visit to Afghanistan in 1999 that, through an understanding with Alqaeda Central (AQC), Zarqawi was able to establish “a jihadist training camp in Herat” (Gerges, 2016, p. 59). Zarqawi was one of the Al Qaeda Central leaders who escaped Tora Bora in 2001 and eventually, through the help of other Jihadist groups, ended up in Iraq. In Iraq, Zarqawi was a “trailblazer for Al Qaeda in Iraq and built a home in a deeply scarred country [after the US invasion], one that would survive his death by American forces in 2006” (Gerges, 2016, p. 67). As the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) Zarqawi alienated the local Sunni Arab population because of his brutal actions and, by the time of his death, had lost the support of the “silent Sunni majority” (Gerges, 2016, p. 89) in the region. After Zarqawi’s death “Abu Hamza al-Muhajjer, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” (Gerges, 2016, p. 85) took over the operations of AQI, which eventually became ISIS. On October 13, 2006 “the Mujahideen Shura Council merged with like-minded local insurgents [in Iraq] and declared … the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)” (Gerges, 2016, p. 93), which eventually became ISIS, even though initially it was still called AQI. After Abu Hamza al-Muhajjer and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi were killed in a US raid in 2010

a new captain named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi began rebuilding the organization, turning it into a lethal weapon capable of controlling a large part of Iraq and Syria. Baghdadi’s hold on the organization would soon threaten the very foundation of the state system in the heart of the Arab world.

(Gerges, 2016, p. 97)

It was this organization, ISIS, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, with the same brutal methods as those of his predecessors, that burst into the international scene after the fall of Mosul in June 2014. But before that, war-torn Syria provided the ideal formative ground for ISIS. “In April 2013, Baghdadi moved into Syria and changed the group’s name to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)” (Stanford University, 2017). Of course, one reason Syria became such an ideal space for the rise of ISIS was because the civil war, in which the US was a party, left vast territories that were not under any control of the Syrian government. Thus, it was “the US, Europe and their regional allies … that created the conditions for the rise of ISIS” (Cockburn, 2015, p. 9). The early success of ISIS was also enabled by the weak Iraqi government and ISIS’s strategy of harnessing the Sunni distrust of the Shiite government of Iraq. In its early days, according to Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger (2015), ISIS built its alliances as follows:

ISIS crafted a series of complex alliances with Sunni Arab tribes in Iraq, even with the tribes that did not necessarily share ISIS’s extreme ideology. Many Sunni Arabs were fed up with the Maliki regime, which had continued to describe the Sunni Arab uprising against his sectarian policies as terrorism.

(p. 44)

Thus, the general unrest in the region, the failure of local and regional governments, and the sectarian divide in Iraq and Syria became the enabling conditions for the transformation of AQI into ISIS. Before the capture of Mosul in June 2014, ISIS had already “seized and consolidated control of Raqqa, Syria … driving out both the [Syrian] regime and other rebels” (Stern & Berger, 2015, p. 44). The capture of Raqqa and surrounding territory enabled ISIS in establishing its capital and by defeating Nusra, its rival group in Raqqa, ISIS was finally able to establish “a crucial political and logistical way station near the border with Iraq” (Stern & Berger, 2015, p. 44). Thus, by establishing its capital in a strategic location, also a place of symbolic significance, and by consolidating the Jihadist sources in the region, ISIS was militarily ready to take on its lightning operations in Iraq, and Mosul was the first such victory.

The fall of Mosul, though claimed as a great victory by ISIS, was more about the abilities and capabilities of Iraqi armed forces and less about the brilliance of ISIS leadership and soldiers. ISIS attacked Mosul on June 6, 2014 and the city “fell four days later” (Cockburn, 2015, p. 11). What made this all the more baffling was that this military success was achieved by “a force numbering some 1,300 men against a nominal 60,000-strong force” (Cockburn, 2015, p. 11). Furthermore, a victory by such a small force sans close air support and heavy artillery against a city defended by a regular military force made this feat even more spectacular and frightening. Even though ISIS would claim this as a victory for their cause, the reasons for the fall of Mosul in four days can be summed up as follows:

Like much else in Iraq, however, the disparity in numbers was not quite what it looked like. Such was the corruption in Iraqi security forces that only about one in three of them was actually present in Mosul, the rest paying half their salaries to their officers to stay on permanent leave.

(Cockburn, 2015, p. 11)

Furthermore, as Cockburn (2015) points out, ISIS did use some diversionary operations to force the Iraqi government to commit forces elsewhere. Thus, before Mosul was attacked, ISIS launched a diversionary attack on “Samarra in Salah-ad-Din province on June 5 and seized much of the city” (Cockburn, 2015, p. 13) and, in another attack, “gunmen seized part of the university campus at Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province” (p. 13). In none of these attacks did ISIS actually hold territory, but as a diversionary tactic they worked, as the Iraqi government “helicoptered in reinforcements from its elite Golden Division to drive out the fighters” (Cockburn, 2015, p. 14) from Samarra. Thus, a combination of good tactics and the inherent weaknesses of the Iraqi army gave ISIS the first major victory in Mosul. Here is a rough timeline of various early ISIS victories:

• January 2014: ISIS takes over Falluja in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, declaring the latter its capital.

• June 2014: ISIS captures Mosul, Takrit, and oilfields in Baiji.

• May 2015: ISIS took Ramadi in Iraq, Palmyra in Syria and Sirte in Libya.

(O’Connor, 2016)

All of these early victories followed the succession of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to the leadership of AQI, which he later renamed as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as Ibrahim Awwad al-Badari, was “born in 1971 near the [Iraqi] city of Samarra” (Weiss & Hassan, 2016, p. 112). According to some sources from his youth, he was “the quiet type who in no way resembled the danger...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Historical overview of the rise of ISIS
• 2 The ISIS self narrative: ideology, framing, and discourse
• 3 The ISIS recruitment: Jihad, Mujahid, and perpetual war
• 4 The Management of Savagery: a critical reading
• 5 The neoliberal capital, the US counter-policies, and their ramifications
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index