Islamic State a Spook-Run Operation

One of the principal canards about Islamic State peddled in the Western press is that the caliphate is an indigenous formation growing out of grievances that Sunnis have with the Shiite-majority government of Iraq and the Alawites of Syria. But besides the high profile of the Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, where is there any evidence that ISIS is a homegrown movement? In fact, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that ISIS is exogenous to Iraq and Syria, attracting foreign fighters, thanks to a sophisticated online presence, to enter the caliphate through Turkey.

Patrick Cockburn has recently published a number of stories for The Independent describing life inside Islamic State. (The stories have been re-posted on the CounterPunch website.) Cockburn
interviews members of the growing Sunni diaspora in Iraqi Kurdistan, people, mostly from Anbar Province, who have fled the ISIS occupation of their towns and cities.

Cockburn's "The One-Day Siege: ISIS’s Conquest of Hit" is a good example:

It was on 4 October last year that Isis captured the small city of Hit, seizing complete control in the space of just a few hours. For the city’s 100,000 mostly Sunni residents the takeover by the self-proclaimed Islamic State has brought changes that some support, but others deeply resent. 

Among those living in Hit when Isis rolled in was Faisal, a 35-year-old government employee who is married with two children, and a keen observer of all that has befallen the agricultural centre and former transport hub over the past five months. 

He recently fled to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, where he described to me the rule of Isis and its impact on Hit, starting with the day the city was captured.

Faisal goes on to describe a religious police state where there is little money to pay for food, little communication with the outside world, and no work except for the jihadis -- all overseen by foreign fighters and imams:

The internet has not worked in Anbar Province for the last eight months, compelling people to use satellite internet connections that are monitored by Isis. More recently the group offered a limited internet service, though this is only available in internet offices and other locations monitored by the jihadist group. There is no internet access from private homes, while in the public locations, Faisal says, “Isis can spy on computers so they can see what you are surfing and to whom you are talking”.

Predictably, Isis focuses on religion and spreading its variant of Islam. Faisal says: “Many preachers (imams) were replaced by foreign preachers from the Arab world, mostly Saudis, Tunisians and Libyans, as well as Afghans. Some new imams are appointed temporarily just for Friday speech and prayer, while others are permanent appointments. Isis removed some of the old preachers who have left for Baghdad or KRG (the Kurdish-controlled region). These are often Sufis, whose beliefs are rejected by Isis.”

There are many other signs of Isis imposing its cultural agenda in Hit. Faisal says that “at the entrance to every main street and bazaar, there are Isis groups holding black dresses that cover the whole body including the face and head. If a woman does not have one, she must buy one [for about £8] and the money goes to the Isis treasury.”

Are people joining Isis in Hit? Faisal says they do, often for economic reasons. “I know many people in my neighbourhood in Hit who joined Isis,” he says. “They are paid little money, about 175,000 dinars (£80), but they say that the salary is enough because they also enjoy many privileges, including free fuel, cooking gas, sugar, tea, bread, and many other foodstuffs and services.

“Isis still has a strong financial basis. It confiscates the houses of the people who were previously employed in the police, courts, and security forces. These houses, and any furniture in them, are confiscated by the Sharia (legal or religious) court, where the judges are Libyan and Tunisian, though the other staff are locals. The ruling authority in Hit is headed by the military governor, the religious (legal) governor, the security governor and finally the administrative governor.”

Faisal’s account of life in Hit is confirmed by eyewitnesses from other parts of the Islamic State. Isis at first benefited from widespread popular relief that the Iraqi Army was gone, but there is deepening resentment against the enforcement of outlandish rules on personal behaviour that is contrary to local religious and social traditions. These include women being forced to wear the niqab (covering their faces), obligatory attendance at prayers and the destruction of mosques, such as the Younis mosque in Mosul, deemed by Isis to be un-Islamic shrines.

There is also the fear of conscription of young men to fight for the Islamic State, an obligation that is increasingly difficult to avoid and is leading many families to try to leave Isis-controlled territory, which is not easy to do.

But despite resentment by many at its takeover of mosques and schools, Isis is able to use these to propagate its views and to make converts – something that may strengthen the forces of the Islamic State. Conscription does not seem to have diluted the fanaticism of Isis fighters, or their willingness to take heavy casualties, according to Kurdish commanders who have come under attack by Isis units in recent months.

Local eyewitnesses confirm that the unpopularity of Isis is not universal. Sameer, a Kurdish shopkeeper in Mosul, told The Independent last November that “in spite of the coalition air strikes every night and every morning, Isis increases in terms of the number of its men and the territory they occupy”.

Since then, Isis has retreated from much of the Sinjar area west of Mosul, but Ali Hussein Mustafa, a 21-year-old university student who left Mosul last month, says that “many Isis men were much better than the fighters of the Iraqi Army in dealing with people and helping them”.

He says this better behaviour was not invariable and criticised Isis fighters at some checkpoints who harassed or swore at women whose face was not hidden. He added, however, that many people had now concluded that “Isis rule is no better, and maybe worse, than what they endured before [when the US or Iraqi government was in charge of Mosul from 2003 to 2014]”.

It should be said that Patrick Cockburn has always stuck to the "ISIS is an indigenous response to Shiite misrule of al-Maliki" argument, putting the leftist journalist in line with the U.S. State Department. But recently he published a story, "Is the Defeat of ISIS in Iraq Inevitable?," that sort of softened his pro-Sunni "It's all Maliki's fault" slant:

As Isis’s columns advanced last year, its fighters carried out massacres to spread fear just as Saddam Hussein had done against the Kurds and Shia a quarter of a century earlier. When the government’s Badush prison, near Mosul, was captured by Isis, its fighters slaughtered 670 Shia prisoners. At Camp Speicher, outside Tikrit, 800 Shia cadets were lined up in front of trenches and machine-gunned. Pictures of the scene resemble those of atrocities carried out by the German army in Russia in 1941. In August, when Isis fighters stormed into Kurdish-held regions, they targeted the Yazidis as “pagans” to be murdered, raped and enslaved.

To me it seems obvious that ISIS is a spook-run operation, meaning a government intelligence bureau is either at the control board or actively assisting a small leadership group in directing the caliphate. Popular movements are messy and enthusiastic, always either falling short or spilling over stated objectives in a public way. ISIS is nothing of the sort. It is opaque and mercenary; its messaging strictly controlled. No, this is definitely a top-down production.

When ISIS suffered a defeat recently in Tikrit at the hands of the Iraqi Army and Shiite militias working in concert with Kurdish pesh merga there was a prompt asymmetrical response: the terror attack targeting tourists at a museum in Tunisia and the suicide bombings at two Zaydi Shiite mosques in Sana. This reminded me of the old Rumsfeld neocon logic of "When you have a problem one way to solve it is to make it bigger."

Scott Shane had a story, a good one, that was featured prominently on The New York Times website for most of the weekend. In "From Minneapolis to ISIS: An American’s Path to Jihad," it is clear that the young Somali men from Minneapolis were able to hook up with ISIS recruiters at a mosque in Bloomington. Answer the question of who paid for their plane tickets and we'll be a little clearer how the ISIS network operates and who funds it.

And it will turn out that ISIS is no different than Al Qaeda, an organization funded and supported by the Gulf Sheikhdoms.