ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh are supposed to be the cool kids in Middle Eastern terror: the folks who really know how to fight for Allah and take it to his enemies…until one actually shows up in Syria, and finds that it’s actually killing any Sunni Muslim who disagrees with them – instead of the Ba’athist regime of Bashar Assad, whose own bloodlust led one to Daesh in the first place.
This was the general account of dozens of Daesh volunteers who have defected from the mini-regime. They came; they saw; and they got the hell out of there as soon as they could. They talked to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) about their experience (Daily Telegraph). Their tales not only reveal Daesh as it really is, but reveals the truth as a powerful weapons against it.
The report cites some two major Daesh weaknesses.
First, there is the anger of the Syrian people. Granted, the suffering Syrians can’t do much – unless they’re looking for a quick execution, as this Der Spiegel piece from spring relates. They are, however, able to make it clear regular Daesh grunts just how upset they are – and it had an effect (back to the Telegraph).
The fact that foreign fighters were portrayed as liberators by their recruiters but received as oppressors by Syrian people themselves was a powerful influence in providing a cognitive opening for their defection. Instead of being the heroes they were aspiring to be, they found themselves forcing a brutal interpretation of Sharia on people who didn’t want it.
But…however bad Daesh might be, at least they were fighting the Assad regime, right? Er…..
The Isil narrative, and that of its predecessor al Qaeda, is based on the idea of protecting the Ummah (Muslim world) – saving the oppressed from both evil, external Western “crusaders”, and the equally evil, internal “apostates”. But the reality, defectors reveal, is that Isil willingly murders pretty much anyone who disagrees with it. According to some Isil defectors, they were even told they would get closer to God by killing other Muslims.
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That Isil disproportionately fights other Sunni Muslim groups rather than Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is a consistent sore spot for these defectors. That fellow Sunni Muslims who get on the wrong side of the caliphate’s religious police are victim to the same barbaric punishments handed out to Westerners, gay people and Yazidis in Isil propaganda is a key motivating factor for defectors for whom the organisation, its leadership and, on occasion, Isil’s cause has become delegitimized.
None of that should surprise anyone who has paid close attention to Daesh. As the Spiegel piece noted, Daesh wasn’t founded by devout Islamic extremists, but rather by two colonels in Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist military, who followed the late and un-lamented tyrants playbook to a terrorist T.
For the first time, the Haji Bakr documents now make it possible to reach conclusions on how the IS leadership is organized and what role former officials in the government of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein play in it.
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IS has little in common with predecessors like al-Qaida aside from its jihadist label. There is essentially nothing religious in its actions, its strategic planning, its unscrupulous changing of alliances and its precisely implemented propaganda narratives. Faith, even in its most extreme form, is just one of many means to an end. Islamic State’s only constant maxim is the expansion of power at any price.
A price which included a hands-off policy toward the Assad regime that was supposed to be Public Enemy No. 1.
Bashar Assad had a different motive to breathe new life into the alliance: He wanted to sell himself to the world as the lesser of several evils. Islamist terror, the more gruesome the better, was too important to leave it up to the terrorists. The regime’s relationship with Islamic State is — just as it was to its predecessor a decade prior — marked by a completely tactical pragmatism. Both sides are trying to use the other in the assumption that it will emerge as the stronger power, able to defeat the discrete collaborator of yesterday. Conversely, IS leaders had no problem receiving assistance from Assad’s air force, despite all of the group’s pledges to annihilate the apostate Shiites. Starting in January 2014, Syrian jets would regularly — and exclusively — bomb rebel positions and headquarters during battles between IS and rebel groups.
In battles between IS and rebels in January 2014, Assad’s jets regularly bombed only rebel positions, while the Islamic State emir ordered his fighters to refrain from shooting at the army. It was an arrangement that left many of the foreign fighters deeply disillusioned; they had imaged jihad differently.
IS threw its entire arsenal at the rebels, sending more suicide bombers into their ranks in just a few weeks than it deployed during the entire previous year against the Syrian army.
So what can we take away from this?
First, claims of Daesh momentum and morale are greatly exaggerated. This is not to say the mini-regime can be ignored. It is to say that it can be defeated – in no small part by exposure of their brutality, their friendliness with Assad, and their true nature – in which Islam is not a cause, but a hostage.
Second, do not trust Bashar Assad, or any of his allies. Assad would like the world to believe he is Daesh’s greatest enemy. Daesh fighters know better, and they learned the hard way. Any choice between the Assad regime and Daesh is a false one.
Finally, the Syrian people deserve freedom, and we should do what we can to help them achieve it. Given the numerous mistakes of the last few years, this will be neither short nor easy. It’s more likely than not that we’ll have to start with the newly exiled Syrian (one of the reasons why I argued we should be generous to them). Daesh is a danger, but so is its Damascus enabler…
…and if getting rid of both of them requires military action, we should at least consider it.
For now, however, we can begin with the truth, or truths presented by Deash’s defectors. The terrorists account of holy war is, well, full of holes.
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