The Mystery of ISIS

[Recursion]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/aug/13/mystery-isis/

Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.

The rise of Ahmad Fadhil—or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable. The year 2003, in which he began his operations in Iraq, seemed to many part of a mundane and unheroic age of Internet start-ups and a slowly expanding system of global trade. Despite the US-led invasion of Iraq that year, the borders of Syria and Iraq were stable. Secular Arab nationalism appeared to have triumphed over the older forces of tribe and religion. Different religious communities—Yezidis, Shabaks, Christians, Kaka’is, Shias, and Sunnis—continued to live alongside one another, as they had for a millennium or more. Iraqis and Syrians had better incomes, education, health systems, and infrastructure, and an apparently more positive future, than most citizens of the developing world. Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter all these historical institutions, and—defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth—create a mini empire?

The story is relatively easy to narrate, but much more difficult to understand. It begins in 1989, when Zarqawi, inspired by his Islamic self-help class, traveled from Jordan to “do jihad” in Afghanistan. Over the next decade he fought in the Afghan civil war, organized terrorist attacks in Jordan, spent years in a Jordanian jail, and returned—with al-Qaeda help—to set up a training camp in Herat in western Afghanistan. He was driven out of Afghanistan by the US-led invasion of 2001, but helped back onto his feet by the Iranian government. Then, in 2003—with the assistance of Saddam loyalists—he set up an insurgency network in Iraq. By targeting Shias and their most holy sites, he was able to turn an insurgency against US troops into a Shia–Sunni civil war.

Zarqawi was killed by a US air strike in 2006. But his movement improbably survived the full force of the 170,000-strong, $100 billion a year US troop surge. In 2011, after the US withdrawal, the new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, expanded into Syria and reestablished a presence in northwest Iraq. In June 2014 the movement took Mosul—Iraq’s second-largest city—and in May 2015 the Iraqi city of Ramadi and the Syrian city of Palmyra, and its affiliates took the airport in Sirte, Libya. Today, thirty countries, including Nigeria, Libya, and the Philippines, have groups that claim to be part of the movement.

[SereneG]

1. Interesting

Thanks for posting this. The article failed to say where AL Baghdad was born. I heard Israel.

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Iraq

Not Israel.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. His name implies he's from Baghdad, like Zarqawi is from Zarqa

It's more or less "... the Baghdadi", to distinguish him from other Abu Bakrs.

[tblue37]

3. K&R for visibility. nt

[zalinda]

6. If you take a look at these type of groups

and drill down to the basics, it's about returning to a better time. This also goes for the our Christian extremists. They believe if we could get back to what was said in the Bible or Koran that everything will now be all right. We will all have enough again.

The plain simple fact is that when people have nothing or very little, they live in fear. It's the fear that what little they have will be taken away from them. They look at any form of progress as the culprit for making their lives less than what it is.

The plain simple truth is that if everyone had enough, three quarters, maybe more, of our crime would be stopped. There will always be those who seek power, and will get that power from weaker people, but by and large, people are good.

There was a study done by a university (can't remember which one) that took rats and subjected them to population stress. They found that rats who lived in enough space with enough food and water, were docile. While the rats that kept having more rats invade their space, started fighting even though their was enough food and water. Even the perception of not getting enough food and water was enough to start this fight to survive. I can't even imagine what would happen if there wasn't enough space and not enough food or water.

This is what we are facing. A fight for survival, and more fighting is not going to fix it.

Z