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| (Law & Liberty) |
1. One
of the strengths of the Islamic State is that it has always had a core set of
principles since Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. What are those main ideas that have
sustained the group?
One of the
key reasons why we wrote the book was to trace how certain ideas about
ideology, violence, politics, governance, propaganda, and leadership have evolved
over the course of the Islamic State movement’s multidecade history. While change
and adaption have been crucial for the survivability and resilience of the
Islamic State, this adaptability has occurred around a core of central
principles that have been largely constant throughout its history. Some of the
most important of these principles underpin the Islamic State’s manhaj (method,
program) for establishing an Islamic State which it claims mirrors that of the
Prophet Muhammad and his companions with all that implies for its apparent
credibility as a divine politico-military movement. Encapsulated in that manhaj
are persistent principles such as:
·
the
deployment of violence as a powerful tool not only for tactical and operational
ends but for fueling favorable strategic conditions;
·
the
imperative of governance as a means to not only control the population but
demonstrate both the efficacy of its agenda and its divine sanctity;
·
implementing
a political strategy that builds on (exploits) local ethno-tribal structures as
a means to ingratiate with the population and, overtime, transform perceptions
of the group; and,
·
a
reverence for the power of propaganda as a transformative tactical, operational
and strategic mechanism.
We trace
the constants in other regards too. For example, the issue of takfir
(i.e. declaring self-identifying Muslims as non-Muslims) in Islamic State
ideology largely distinguishes it from other jihadi groups in its
virulence. This is also a group that clearly appreciates the importance of
leadership and we trace that throughout the group’s history not just via the
speeches and decisions of its leaders but also the doctrine that it developed
to help shape the development of its current and future leaders.
Understanding
these principles and trends is going to be important for researchers and
practitioners. Just as important is appreciating how these trends come together
in a self-reinforcing way. The book is divided into four parts representing
distinct historical periods and this interconnectedness is really clear in
certain chapters such as in Zarqawi’s 2004 letter to al-Qaida leadership
(Chapter 2), the Fallujah Memorandum (Chapter 5), Islamic State’s propaganda
doctrine (Chapter 10), and Al-Adnani’s September 2016 speech (Chapter 13). In
these chapters, readers will see how a core set of principles have acted as
constants throughout its history.
2. The
Islamic State has always been known for its extreme violence, from mass
casualty suicide bombings to the massacre of Yazidis. These have often been
portrayed as indiscriminate but there was always a goal behind it all. How has violence
fit into the group’s strategy?
Throughout
its history, the Islamic State has demonstrated a willingness to use brutal,
seemingly indiscriminate, often cowardly, violence of all types. From its
public executions broadcast to the world, genocidal massacres of Yazidi and
Shia people, indiscriminate mass casualty attacks, and the torture and rape of
civilians, it can seem difficult (even wrong) to search for a logic that drives
such appalling actions. As one works through The ISIS Reader it is
difficult to escape the fact that throughout its history there has almost always
been a rationale driving its violence that typically has both short-term
(e.g. tactical/operational) and longer-term (e.g. strategic) aims. What seems
to be consistent is the deployment of violence to foment advantageous political,
social, and psychological conditions; to create an environment that is
conducive to its political agenda, advantageous to its strategic/operational
strengths, and exacerbating of its adversary’s weaknesses. Indeed, the more
brutish and gruesome the violence it seems the more important that violence has
tended to be for achieving those larger strategic aims.
We talk
about four periods of Islamic State history, it is how we chose to organize the
book, and each of those periods is characterized by an extraordinary
transformation. In the Zarqawi era, it was a shift from a little-known cadre to
the establishment of its first state in Iraq. In the next period, it was the
extraordinary rebuilding effort of Abu Umar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza
al-Muhajir in the aftermath of the Islamic State in Iraq’s humbling at the
hands of the Sahwa (Sunni Tribal-led “Awakening”). It was under the
leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that the group transforms again to become a
transnational enterprise and declare its caliphate. Since 2016, it has morphed
in its heartlands back into a steady state insurgency with wilayah across
the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Violence has been a crucial tool in each of
these transformations.
Let’s take
one especially horrific example: the Speicher massacre, which we chose as the
topic for our first post on The ISIS Reader website
on the six year anniversary of the atrocity. During the collapse of Iraqi
security forces in the summer of 2014 in Northern and Western Iraq, the group’s
key leaders leveraged the opportunistic capture of large numbers of stranded
Iraqi Air cadets near Camp Speicher outside of Tikrit and used mass violence to
sanctify the future announcement of the Caliphate. The fleeing cadets obviously
posed no military threat to the group; their large-scale massacre—videotaped by
a team of its provincial media department—would
instead provide a living testament to the Islamic State’s principle of
association and disassociation (al-wara wal-bara), spread fear among its
enemies, and demonstrate that the group’s capabilities were state-like in
nature and a viable challenge to the Iraqi government. Such actions, in many
ways reminiscent of the extreme violence designed to plunge Iraq into a
sectarian bloodbath about a decade earlier, drove a wedge between Iraq’s
communities that increased fears of reprisals for all and, in doing so, create
psychosocial conditions advantageous to Islamic State goals. These types of actions would convince and
coerce thousands of locals of the inevitability of Islamic State control.
3. The
Islamic State said that its information campaign was just as important as its
military operations. What role did propaganda and its various media outlets
play in its plans?
In the
public’s mind, the Islamic State is probably most associated with the horrific
violence found in its propaganda. Understanding the personalities,
organizational traits, strategic logic and thematic trends in Islamic State’s approach to
propaganda has
been a major focus of our collective work for years. Islamic State’s recognition
of the importance of propaganda stems from its founder al-Zarqawi’s experience
in Afghanistan and the impact it had on mobilizing transnational support. His
early speeches included in The ISIS Reader demonstrate this and his
organization developed a structured media department with
a flair for experimentation and innovation. The group had a standout media department as early
as 2004 in a crowded, competitive market in occupied Iraq, and the pressure to dominate
other Sunni groups was intense. Competition, and defeat at the hands of the Sahwa
and Coalition units during the Surge only reinforced the need to develop a
world-class media organization to outcompete the influence efforts of its
adversaries (see Chapter 5, The Fallujah Memorandum –
2009).
The
Islamic State’s prioritization of propaganda is evident in the rhetoric of its
leaders as well as the doctrinal guidance it provides its propagandists in
publications such as Media Operative, You are also a Mujahid which we
present in Chapter 10. This is far from mere rhetoric and token gestures as the
movement’s top leaders have almost always served time in the Islamic State’s
media units. This suggests that the Islamic State is seeking to not only harness
the power of propaganda as a tactical, operational and
strategic tool but encourage a mentality and culture across its organization
that intellectually appreciates the role of words and images in achieving the
movement’s aims.
Today, the
media department continues to produce material despite the loss of territory,
much like it did in the period before 2014. The targeting of media leaders like
Abu Muhammad al-Furqan and Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, and
the online effort to have it removed from social media platforms have caused
the group to continue to improve its internal security and evolve its
production and dissemination processes in order to remain competitive with its
ideological rivals (al-Qaeda, but also the Muslim Brotherhood).
4. The
group has proven to be incredibly adaptive when it faced setbacks. As early as
January 2004 Zarqawi talked about the jihad in Iraq possibly failing. Then it suffered
defeat with the 2007 Surge and once more in 2017 when it lost its last bit of
territory in Iraq and then later in Syria. How reflective has IS proven to be
and how has it been able to learn from its mistakes?
The
Islamic State has suffered defeat before but has strived to examine its
failures and learn from them. The leaders have a better appreciation now of the
need to dominate its Sunni political rivals and cultivate a base of support
among the largely rural residents of Eastern Syria and Western/Northern Iraq. For
instance, the Fallujah Memorandum (dissected in Chapter 5) captures a lot of the
debate on how to prepare for the departure of the United States in 2011, an
opportunity they are already focused on in 2009. The leaders of this period–Abu Umar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir–had to
rebuild popular support and recruit new cadres to continue its low-level
guerrilla warfare and terror campaigns. Their unappreciated efforts – they’ve
too often been ignored or derided by scholars as ineffectual – to keep the
group together laid the foundation for the Islamic State’s resurgence after
2011 under their successor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
A factor
in this resilience is consistency with which the Islamic State’s leaders have
maintained the movement’s consistent adherence to those core principles through
time of success and defeat. For one example, its message that a sectarian Iraqi
government would never include or respect its Sunni citizens was reinforced by the neglect of its Sahwa
rivals, who
withered on the vine as Abu Umar and Abu Hamza had
predicted. The
failure of the largest bloc of Sunni Iraqis attempting to reconcile with the
government is a primary cause for the growing political strength of the group
up to its military triumph in 2014.
This same
consistency paid dividends in the Syrian civil war, as the group used the same
sectarian wedges to propel its way to dominance of a fractured and contentious
Syrian opposition front against Assad. The expansion into Syria, long discussed
by Syrians in the Islamic State movement, most likely fed the expansionist aims
of group leaders enabled by the death of al-Qaeda’s founder, Osama Bin Laden.
It is important to note that this ambition created a new set of challenges that
the group mishandled, much like it did the tribes and rival resistance groups
in 2007, and inspired not only a revolt by its al-Nusra franchise in Syria and
split with al-Qaeda, but its global terror campaign inspired a massive
transnational “Counter-ISIL” coalition that broke the caliphate just three
years into its existence.
The group
has gone back to its roots and transitioned back to a uniform
insurgency in its
core areas and abroad. Here, it plans on conducting a patient and steady guerrilla
warfare campaign of low-level attacks and raids aimed at exhausting the support
of the global coalition and muscling regional security forces out of key areas
of support. The purpose will be to once again use its consistent principles and
presentation of a shadow government to provide an alternative to corrupt and
inefficient incumbents in Iraq, Syria, west and central Africa, South Asia, and
East Asia. By demonstrating success in the past, the group hopes to leverage
this success and steel the resolve of its fighters to continue the fight until
its enemies collapse one by one, undone by their own weakness and internal
contradictions. It is difficult to predict the outcome of this next phase of
the contest, but as we argue in The ISIS Reader, the group deserves our
continued attention and the global efforts to permanently defeat this
movement.
Link to Musings On Iraq's review of The ISIS Reader, Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement
Link to all of Musings On Iraq's interviews
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