Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (19 page)

Exchange on one of IS’s question-and-answer websites
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A
bu Bakr al Sadiq was the first caliph, ruling from the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 until his own death in 634, and his main achievement during his short reign was to force the “apostate” Arab tribes to return to the proper practice of Islam. Many of the Arabian tribes that had submitted to Muhammad’s armies abandoned the new religion after his death, or at least combined it with elements of their old beliefs, and al Sadiq waged ruthless jihad against the tribes—tens of
thousands of Arabs were burned, beheaded, dismembered, or crucified—to force them to return to the fold of orthodox Islam. It was only after these “apostates and hypocrites” had been dealt with that the second caliph, Omar al-Khattab, embarked on the conquest and forcible conversion of the neighbouring non-Muslim peoples. Today’s Islamists, therefore, believe they should have the same priorities.

Islamic State leaders almost never use the actual names of the groups of Muslims they want to kill or convert, preferring to use Quranic or historical examples to indicate their targets. There is no doubt, however, that Shias are the primary target: in the same reply on the IS website quoted above, the spokesperson refers to the policy of Saladin, the commander who won Jerusalem back from the Crusaders: “It was said to Salah ad-Din al-Ayubi: ‘You fight the Shia and the Fatimids in Egypt and allow the Latin Crusaders to occupy Jerusalem?’ And he responded: ‘I will not fight the Crusaders while my back is exposed to the Shia.’ ” In other words, kill the Shias first.

All the Islamist groups share this ancient obsession with the Shias to a greater or lesser extent, but it has been particularly prominent in the chain of jihadi organizations that culminated in Islamic State. Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s decision in 2006 to start using suicide bombings to slaughter Iraqi Shias had a specific strategic purpose—to trigger a violent Shia reaction that would drive Iraqi Sunnis into the arms of his organization—but it also conformed to his
deeply held belief that Shias should be killed. His successors, down to “Caliph Ibrahim” today, share that belief, and are equally willing to put it into practice.

This is good news, at least in the short term, for Jews, Christians and others who are also on the Islamic State’s hit list. If the Assad regime were to fall, however, it would be very bad news for Syrian Alawites and other Shias, who are seen as “apostates” and therefore eligible to be killed if they refuse to convert, and for the Druze, who are seen as pagans. It should be somewhat less bad news for Syrian Christians, since Islam traditionally gives Christians the additional option of accepting the loss of all their political rights and paying a heavy annual tax in order to be allowed to live as a subject people; but Islamic State has killed significant numbers of Christians on grounds that they are part of the “nation of the Cross,” which is allegedly at war with Islam. (Unbelievers and those like the Druze who follow religions other than Judaism, Christianity or Islam may be killed or enslaved according to taste.) Hitherto, Islamic State has conquered only areas where non-Sunni Muslims were a very small proportion of the population, and the minorities have been dealt with very harshly. To expect IS to deal in a gentler manner with the very large minorities in the parts of Syria still controlled by the Assad regime would probably be a mistake. When religious fanatics tell you what their beliefs compel them to do, you should probably take them at their word. Millions may be killed.

Here we are, burying the first American Crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive
.

Islamic State executioner, speaking on a video of the beheading of the American aid worker Peter Kassig on November 16, 2014
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Islamic State is strictly constrained in what it can and cannot do by what it believes are traditional Islamic rules governing the behaviour of the caliph. The caliphate must not join the United Nations or any international organization, because that would be to recognize an authority other than God. It must not establish diplomatic relations with any other country, including other Muslim countries. (The Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 1996–2001 was severely criticized by Islamists for exchanging ambassadors with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.) The caliphate may not even recognize permanent international borders of any sort, since all will eventually be swept away by its own expansion. And although it is not obliged to wage jihad all the time against everybody, temporary peace treaties may last no longer than ten years (although they are renewable)—and the caliph
must
wage jihad against at least one enemy each year. Islamic State can never be at peace.

The caliphate is even more constrained, however, by its adherence to what it calls “the Prophetic method” and its belief that it is living out the prophecies. Early Muslims,
like early Christians before them, were convinced that they were living in the End Times, and that the Day of Judgement would soon be upon them. Contemporary Islamists, wishing to return to the faith as practised by the first three generations of Muslims (
as-Salaf as-Saleh
, the pious predecessors), have restored that “end-times” theme to a central place in their own theology as well. Indeed, they believe they have a script for how the end times will occur, and that they are the divine instrument for making those prophecies come to pass.

This is where Dabiq comes in, for it is where the great battle that sets the End Times in motion will, they believe, take place. It is on the plain outside the town of Dabiq, just north of Aleppo in Syria, that the “army of Rome” will set up camp. (The Byzantine Empire, originally the eastern part of the Roman Empire, was known to the Muslims as “Rum” right down to the fifteenth century. The assumption is that the “Crusader” army that arrives there in the near future will be the army of the United States, the Rome of our time.) The armies of Islam will defeat the Americans and will go on to capture Constantinople, now known as Istanbul—which you might think would give Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, cause to reconsider his policy of allowing foreign jihadis to cross the border into Syria and join ISIS.

The rest of the prophetic story need not detain us long. It’s fairly standard Middle Eastern apocalypse fare: a oneeyed “false messiah” known as Dajjal appears and leads
many Muslims astray. He kills the vast majority of the caliphate’s fighters, and the survivors, only five thousand strong, retreat to Jerusalem. They are about to be destroyed when the Mahdi, the successor to the Prophet Muhammad, appears, accompanied by Isa, the Islamic version of Jesus. Isa will kill Dajjal with a spear, and the Mahdi will rule over the world for seven years (or nine, or nineteen, depending on the version of the story), bringing peace and justice everywhere. Then, after some further turbulence, comes the end of the world and the Day of Judgement.

All very dramatic, but the only bit that really matters from our point of view is the first bit: the battle at Dabiq that triggers the events of the apocalypse. This is so central to the beliefs of Islamic State that its main propaganda magazine is simply called
Dabiq
. Indeed, this fixation on the End Times was a main source of the dispute between al Qaeda and the various predecessors to Islamic State that finally led to a decisive break between the two organizations. (It is also the principal obstacle today to any reconciliation between the two, their beliefs and goals being otherwise very closely aligned.)

Islamic State has a different strategy than earlier Islamist movements like al Qaeda, but oddly it envisages the same result. Al Qaeda launched terrorist attacks on Western countries to provoke them into sending their armies into the Muslim world, hoping to use those invasions to mobilize the Muslim masses and lead revolutions that would create true Islamic states. Islamic State already is one, at
least in its own eyes, and it depends on conquest, not on revolutions, for its expansion.

This difference ought to mean that it does not need to launch major attacks on Western targets, and indeed Islamic State does put other tasks like killing Shias and destroying local Arab regimes higher on its agenda. But the need to fulfill the prophecies means that the “armies of Rome” must show up at Dabiq, and so the West must still be provoked into invading Islamic State. In fact, it must somehow be persuaded to send a large army to Dabiq. That may be quite difficult to arrange, but sooner or later attacks on the West are bound to rise to the top of Islamic State’s agenda. So what should the West do about that?

The Western countries face three options: to do a lot, to do a little, or to do nothing. Islamic State’s fixation on Dabiq creates a great temptation to do a lot. Why not just put a big Western army into Dabiq? The jihadis would flock there in great numbers, determined to be part of the great victory foretold by prophecy, and they could then be destroyed by Western firepower in the kind of big conventional battle that the West is sure to win. Islamic State would be discredited in the eyes of its own supporters, and everybody else would live happily ever after.

This temptation should be resisted. Why? Even the prospect of such a large army from Western countries arriving
in Syria might well force a reconciliation between Islamic State and al Qaeda, which would be a most undesirable outcome. It would also create even greater anger at Western intervention in the Arab world, and it would be practically impossible to just withdraw such an army again after a victory at Dabiq. The pressure to push on and finish the dismantling of Islamic State would be well nigh irresistible, and staying on to complete the job would lead to the kind of military occupation and prolonged anti-guerrilla campaign that the West has shown itself to be very bad at—and neither of its major allies in the region would be willing to help.

Start with Saudi Arabia, for instance. Its relationship with the jihadis has been complicated from the start. Part of its policy, from the Islamist seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 onwards, has been to encourage and even pay Saudi Islamists to go and live out their extremist fantasies in other Muslim countries rather than practising them at home. That’s how thousands of Saudi Arabians ended up as mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s—and since Saudi financial support was mostly funnelled through private donations in a relatively uncontrolled way, it’s quite likely that some Saudi money even helped finance the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
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When the non-violent revolutions of the “Arab Spring” spread to Syria in 2011, Saudi Arabia’s preferred outcome was not the democratic, secular republic the original protesters wanted. It wanted a sectarian Sunni triumph over
the Alawites, Shias, Druze and Christians who make up about a third of the population. So Riyadh and some of the smaller Gulf kingdoms and emirates poured money into the jihadi groups in Syria, and it was precisely those groups that were the first to move to armed insurrection. Saudi money was not the only reason that the non-violent, democratic protests were sabotaged by anti-regime violence (which was then used by the Assad regime to justify savage repression)—but it was probably the biggest reason.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers showed little hesitation in supporting the jihadis as long as they were not within their country’s own borders. They are, after all, kindred spirits in many ways. All the jihadi movements in Sunni Islam have borrowed much from the Saudi kingdom’s own state-supported fundamentalist form of Islam, Wahhabism, including their views on women, their love of antique punishments like beheading, their contempt for democracy, and their visceral hatred for Shias and other minority Islamic sects. It never seemed to occur to the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was then running the Syrian operation, that what American strategists call “blowback” could affect them too.