The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

Robert Spencer

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781621574538
• eBook ISBN: 9781621574644
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

ISIS rocketed onto the world stage seemingly out of nowhere, beheading American hostages, bulldozing international borders, routing the American-trained Iraqi army, and carving out a new state that rules eight million people and a territory larger than the United Kingdom. But who are they? Where did ISIS come from, and how did they rise to power in so little time? What is driving them—and how can they be stopped? New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer reveals the blood-drenched history and inner workings of the Islamic State—its military conquests, how it is financing its expansion, and the ideology that is driving its success. As Spencer reveals, the Islamic State has taken the first steps on the path to becoming a serious world power—steps that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda dreamed of but were afraid to take. The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS is your one-stop easy reference for all you need to know about ISIS—and how "infidels" can stop its reign of terror.

Chapter One

BORN OF BLOOD AND SLAUGHTER

The organization now known as the Islamic State was born in the struggles of Muslim hard-liners in the Middle East in the 1990s to topple the relatively secular Arab nationalist governments that dominated the region and restore the rule of Islamic law. But the blood and ruin wreaked by the Islamic State have their ultimate origin in the battles and raids that Islamic tradition ascribes to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and in the jihad conquests of the Abbasid, Umayyad, and Ottoman caliphates.

---

Did you know?

• ISIS founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi became a devout Muslim while he was in prison for drugs and sexual assault

• Osama bin Laden hesitated to found a caliphate for fear of America’s power “to lay siege on any Islamic State”

• Our word “assassin” derives from the word for the followers of a medieval Persian ruler who built a Potemkin Islamic paradise to recruit murderers with girls and hashish

---

ISIS began as an Iraqi jihad group known as the Jama‘at al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad, the Party of Monotheism and Jihad. It was founded in 1999 by a Muslim named Ahmed Fadhil Nazar al-Khalaylah, who became internationally famous as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His career in jihad is illuminating not only of the background of the Islamic State, but of the goals of jihad terrorists in general.

From Small-Time Criminal to Terror Master

Zarqawi’s nom de jihad means “Musab’s father from Zarqa,” and the man who would become for a time one of the two most renowned and feared jihad terrorists in the world was indeed born in the Jordanian town of Zarqa, on October 30, 1966. Zarqawi’s father died when he was seventeen, leaving his mother with ten children to raise and the future terrorist with an angry, bitter heart. Zarqawi was jailed for possession of drugs and sexual assault, whereupon he found religion, gave up drinking and drugs, memorized the Qur’an, and embarked upon the path that would lead him to become one of the most notorious men in the world.¹

Zarqawi’s first taste of jihad came fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but he saw little action there, and in 1992 he returned to Jordan to wage jihad at home.² He founded a jihad group named Jund al-Sham (Soldiers of the Levant), which foreshadowed ISIS in its dedication to overthrowing a relatively secular government (that of Jordan) and uniting a larger territory (the Levant) in a single Islamic state. Arrested after a cache of weapons was discovered in his home, Zarqawi was given a fifteen-year sentence in March 1994 at the end of a trial during which he showed his contempt for authorities who did not govern according to Islamic law by handing the judge a paper on which the terror mastermind had written out an indictment naming Jordan’s king and the judge himself as defendants.³

While in prison, Zarqawi became the leader of a group of Muslims upon whom he imposed strict discipline and to whom he was fanatically devoted. A fellow jihadi who knew Zarqawi in those days recalled that he was “well-known for loving his brothers in God more than his relatives.”⁴

In May 1999, Zarqawi was released from prison after serving only a third of his sentence, under a general amnesty granted by Jordan’s King Abdullah. The wisdom of that amnesty was immediately cast into doubt when Zarqawi got involved in a jihad scheme known as the “Millennium Plot”; plotters intended to bomb a luxury hotel and other sites in Jordan frequented by tourists.⁵ The plot was foiled; Zarqawi fled to Pakistan and eventually ventured into Afghanistan, where he founded the Party of Monotheism and Jihad.⁶ In Afghanistan he met Osama bin Laden, who decided to set him up with funding for a jihad training camp for Zarqawi in Herat, where he trained jihadis from Jordan, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere for actions in Europe.⁷

After 9/11, Zarqawi and his men crossed from Afghanistan into Iran, where they were able to operate until April 2002. At that point, eight of his jihadis were discovered in Germany, plotting jihad mass murder attacks against Jewish targets.⁸ Expelled from Iran as a result of this discovery, Zarqawi made his way to Iraq, where he anticipated that an American attack was imminent. He trained his Party of Monotheism and Jihad to be an anti-American jihad force and positioned himself as the leader and guide of the jihadis from all over the world who had begun to stream into Iraq to fight the Americans.

---

THE COMMON TOUCH

Pious and emotional, Zarqawi was committed to the well-being of his men. Their awareness that he was one of them who had come from a similar background won him a loyalty that rivaled that given to Osama bin Laden—whose status as a wealthy, aristocratic Saudi placed a distance between him and his rank-and-file jihadis that was never a problem for Zarqawi.

---

Thus Zarqawi’s ascent to international fame began. He became infamous as a pioneer of the media jihad for which ISIS has now become feared and hated and was personally responsible for one of the first decapitation videos to be posted on the internet and capture the attention of the West—that of American hostage Nicholas Berg in May 2004.

A few months later, Zarqawi’s group also filmed and distributed the beheadings of two other Americans, contractors Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley.⁹

Zarqawi was morally responsible for many murders, but in the cases of Berg and Armstrong it appears that he actually wielded the murder weapon as well. According to the caption of the Nicholas Berg video and the Party of Monotheism and Jihad online announcement of Armstrong’s murder, Zarqawi himself is the masked figure who is seen sawing those victims’ heads off with a knife.¹⁰

The Alliance with al-Qaeda

On October 17, 2004, with his notoriety at its peak, Zarqawi pledged his loyalty and that of his organization to Osama bin Laden and renamed his group Tanzim Qai’dat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers. Soon it became popularly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

---

NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

“Is it not time for you [Muslims] to take the path of jihad and carry the sword of the Prophet of prophets? . . . The Prophet, the most merciful, ordered [his army] to strike the necks of some prisoners in [the Battle of] Badr and to kill them. . . . And he set a good example for us.”

–Zarqawi invoking Muhammad’s example in defense of the murder of Nicholas Berg¹¹

---

The Zarqawi group’s declaration of allegiance to al-Qaeda stressed the importance of Muslim unity, something that would also be a priority of the Islamic State. The declaration began with an epigraph from the Qur’an: “Hold fast to the rope of God and you shall not be divided” (3:103), and then added, “Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of worlds, and let there be no aggression except upon the oppressors”—that is, no aggression between Muslims.

The statement boasted that the alliance was “undoubtedly an indication that victory is approaching, God willing, and that it represents a return to the glorious past. We shall, with great fury, instill fear in the enemies of Islam, who consider that through their war in Iraq they have nearly uprooted Islam from its recent stronghold. For this, we will turn [the war] into a hell for them.”

---

MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY

In October 2004 Zarqawi’s group vowed allegiance to Osama bin Laden: “By God, O sheikh of the mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey. If you forbade us something, we would abide by your wishes. For what a fine commander you are to the armies of Islam, against the inveterate infidels and apostates!”¹²

Late in December of the same year, Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape, purportedly of Osama bin Laden, declaring, “The dear mujahed brother Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq, so we ask all our organization brethren to listen to him and obey him in his good deeds.”¹³

---

By this time, Zarqawi’s unapologetic embrace of terror as a tactic of war had made him a virtual folk hero among jihadis worldwide; he rivaled his new chief as the world’s most renowned and reviled jihad terrorist. The U.S. considered Zarqawi so important that it placed a $25 million bounty on his head—the same amount as that offered for bin Laden.

Ultimately, Zarqawi—but not his movement—was killed in a U.S. airstrike on June 7, 2006. No jihad group depends upon a charismatic leader—even one as fanatically devoted to his cause and able to galvanize others to join it as Zarqawi. Such organizations are rather, as we shall see, ideologically driven. Thus Zarqawi’s group survived him.

On October 13, 2006, al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers reconstituted itself as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).¹⁴ It continued to harass American troops in Iraq, biding its time until the inevitable day when the Americans would leave. That day came on December 14, 2011, when Barack Obama, speaking at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to some of the last soldiers to come home from Iraq, boasted about ending the war and called the withdrawal of all American troops a “moment of success.”¹⁵

But the jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq didn’t agree that the war was over. They weren’t walking away or folding up shop—in fact, they were expanding. They seized the opport...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• An ISIS Timeline
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Born of Blood and Slaughter
• Chapter Two: ISIS Comes to America
• Chapter Three: Irresistible ISIS
• Chapter Four: How They Did It—and Who’s Trying to Stop Them
• Chapter Five: Inside the Islamic State
• Chapter Six: The Caliphate: What It Means and Why It Matters
• Chapter Seven: The Caliphate’s Bloody History
• Chapter Eight: Is the Islamic State Islamic? (Is the Pope Catholic?)
• Chapter Nine: On the Islamic State’s To-Do List (Rome, Non-Muslims, and the Final Showdown)
• Chapter Ten: How to Defeat ISIS—and Why We Must
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index