The ISIS Caliphate: From Syria to the Doorsteps of India

The ISIS Caliphate

From Syria to the Doorsteps of India

THE ISIS

CALIPHATE

From Syria to the Doorsteps of India

Stanly Johny

First published in India 2018

© 2018 by Stanly Johny

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For the girls

Seetha and Pipa

CONTENTS

Preface

Part I

The Core

Chapter 1: The Predecessor

Chapter 2: The Commander

Chapter 3: Fitna

Chapter 4: The State

Part II

The Periphery

Chapter 5: The Indian Connection

Chapter 6: The War Goes On

Annexure

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Notes

PREFACE

Till early 2013, not many had known about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. His organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was widely believed to have been incapacitated by a coalition of US and Iraqi troops, and Sunni militias from north-western Iraq. The US had already withdrawn most of its troops from Iraq, in line with a plan set by President Barack Obama. But that was just the lull before the storm. In 2013, the Islamic State in Iraq, the new incarnation of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and its Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, captured huge swathes of territories: first, in the civil war-stricken Syria, and then, in Iraq. By mid-2014, the organisation renamed itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or Greater Syria (ISIS), and captured territories across the Iraqi-Syrian border as much as Great Britain’s, including Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. The group has also declared an Islamic ‘Caliphate’, and Baghdadi proclaimed himself as the ‘Caliph’ and demanded the loyalty of the world’s Muslims.

This rapid rise of ISIS left many bemused.¹ Even al-Qaeda took years to establish an international brand among the jihadists. It largely operated from its hideouts in deserts or in forest caves, hit urban and military centres and retreated. ISIS, on the other side, did not only establish a proto-state, effectively erasing the border between Iraq and Syria, but also turned that state into a jihadist haven, attracting youth from around the world into its Caliphate to join ‘jihad’. This marked a new phase in global jihadism. ISIS became an organisation that controls territories, resists and defeats conventional armies (Iraqi and Syrian, for instance), advertises its brutalities through high-quality video productions, builds an online ecosystem to reach out to the world’s Muslims, launches suicide attacks in faraway locations and recruits youngsters in tens of thousands from around the world. This was unprecedented in the history of the modern world.

How did it do it? What made ISIS emerge as the most potent terror machinery of our time in a matter of few years? What makes it so special among jihadists that it would attract many thousands more fighters than al-Qaeda ever did? Like many other students of the Middle Eastern history and geopolitics, I was also perplexed by these questions. It was from this surprise and confusion, that this book was born. There are conflicting accounts about ISIS. There are plenty of conspiracy theories as well. Some try to paint the whole Islamic faith with the ISIS brush. Some others say ISIS does not doesn’t have anything to do with Islam. Another group says ISIS is a Jewish-imperialist conspiracy. This book keeps aside the conspiracy theories, stops short of stepping into generalisations and has made its study based on the facts available.

Still I faced a methodological problem. One popular method of analysing jihadist groups is to look into the context that led to their rise. For example, we have heard about how the US abetted the rise of jihadist groups in Afghanistan in the 1980s as part of its Cold War foreign policy. It aligned with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to sponsor ‘jihad’ against the Soviet Union, which, after the withdrawal of the Soviets, transformed into a deadly militancy and led to the Taliban rule which supported al-Qaeda. The same argument can be raised in the context of ISIS as well. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s predecessor, before the Iraq war. The Iraq war that destroyed the Iraqi state of Saddam Hussein created a vacuum which there was no competent power to fill in. The Jihadists exploited this vacuum.

But when it comes to Europe or countries like India where there is there’s no external military intervention, the objective conditions change. Europe was badly affected by the rise of ISIS. Thousands of Europeans have travelled to Syria to join ISIS. Some of them came back to orchestrate terrorist attacks in their home states. The last three years were particularly bloody for Europe which saw a number of terror attacks, in Paris, Nice, Berlin, Brussels and London. The contextualist argument in the case of Europe is that structural discrimination against Muslims in the continent is turning its youth into radicalism. Interviews with some of the radicalised youth underscore this argument. They say they cannot live like true Muslims in Europe. The families that left India to join ISIS also share the same view. They told their relatives in Kerala, the southern Indian state, that it was impossible to practise Islam in the land of infidels and urged them to follow suit.

Both these theories of war and discrimination will struggle to explain the radicalisation of some youth in Bangladesh, which is a Muslim majority country that has not seen any external military intervention since its independence in 1971. There were a number of ISIS-inspired attacks in Bangladesh in recent years, which the group has claimed responsibility for. So what drives radicalisation in Bangladesh?

The objective conditions are valid and vital but an equally important approach is to understand the subjective role the jihadists are playing. There are places where the conditions favour their rise, and there are places where they build influence through their ideology and praxis. In the case of ISIS, the study should start with the group’s ideology. Does it have anything to do with Islam? Are there any parallels for ISIS in the vast and diverse Islamic history? How does ISIS continue to inspire Muslim youth from different parts of the world - from Orlando, in the US to Kasaragod, in India - , to join its ideological fold despite the violence and atrocities it commits and its Caliphate coming under heavy attacks? And what do they want and what is their strategy to attain those objectives?

In this book, I will try and tell you the story of ISIS and the challenges it poses through these questions. I shall also attempt to show that ISIS is the fourth Wahhabi State in history, and why the idea of ISIS is not going to be defeated any time soon, irrespective of the military setbacks it has suffered in Iraq and Syria.

Part I

The Core

CHAPTER 1

THE PREDECESSOR

Hafeezudin T.K., hailing from an upper middle class business family in Kasaragod, Kerala, was just like any other boy in the early 20s. Not particularly interested in studies, and showing only moderate interest in religious matters. A college dropout, Hafeezudin used to hang around with his friends, enjoyed driving the car his father bought, and loved music and movies. Occasionally he helped his father, Abdul Hakkim, who runs an automobile workshop in Dubai. His friends recall him dancing at his sister’s wedding three years ago at their mansion in Padannain Kasaragod, the northern most district of Kerala. His lifestyle and outlook started changing much later. Two years ago when Hafeezudin was in Dubai with his father, he started complaining about the life style in the Emirate, Hakkim told me in July 2016. Women are not covering their faces. Men and women are allowed to mingle with each other in public places. Alcohol is available everywhere, he used to say. Hafeezudin, 21 years old then, said to his father that they have to leave Dubai because the Emirate had become totally un-Islamic. Soon after, he returned to Kerala.

At home, he turned more reclusive and ultra-religious. He started growing a beard, cut the television cables at home declaring that music and cinema were haram (forbidden). He stopped using the car because it was bought with a loan which he regarded un-Islamic. He used to tell me to sell my business and properties and start living a simple life, Hakkim told me sitting on a large sofa in the visiting hall of his two-storey mansion in Padanna.¹ On May 28, 2016, Hafeezudin left home, telling his parents that he was going to study the Quran in Kozhikode, a northern town in Kerala. Two days later, he told them he was going to Sri Lanka. He never came back.

Hafeezudin was one of 21 people, including six women and three children, who mysteriously went missing from Kerala in mid-2016. On July 6 (which was when Eid fell that year), Hafeezudin’s family got a message from him on the Telegram app that he and his friends have reached jannat (heaven) where there is ‘no tax, no interest, and no kings’. India’s intelligence agencies believe that all of them travelled to areas controlled by ISIS, either in Afghanistan or in the Middle East. They took Iranian VISAs and boarded flights on different dates from Bangalore to Tehran, and then, they went off the radar. All of them were from middle class or upper middle class families. One of them – a doctor, and a friend and neighbour of Hafeezudin’s – also sent a telegram to his family saying they had reached Dawlatul Islam (Islamic State). Family members, friends and local police officers say they were not part of any local organisation or political party; nor did they have any criminal background. But they were influenced by the worldview of ISIS.

Hafeezudin’s story is the same as that of the tens of thousands of Muslim youth who have travelled from around the world to Iraq and Syria – to either join the ranks of ISIS, or to live in the ‘Caliphate’ the group has created across Iraq and Syria, and with branches in several parts of the world, from Libya to Afghanistan to Nigeria. Their transformation actually tells the story of ISIS, the most recent entrant in the global jihadist landscape which went on to become the most potent one, even surpassing al-Qaeda, in a matter of a few years. What distinguished ISIS from other terror outfits is that it could globalise its ideology of terror, and attract thousands of Muslim youth from as far as Canada in North America to India in Asia. There are marked differences between the strategies of ISIS and al-Qaeda. al-Qaeda, largely operating from hideouts, decentralised its organisation, letting autonomous cells in different parts of the world operate on their own. al-Qaeda core will interfere only if there was an urgency, a dispute between the cells, for instance. ISIS concentrated power in the Caliphate, provided training to the fighters in the territories it controlled; but it decentralised its ideology. ISIS leaders asked Muslims around the world to declare loyalty to the new Caliph and travel to the Caliphate. Those who were not able to travel were urged to carry out terror attacks in their home states, which in ISIS worldview, were ruled by Romans, crusaders or apostates. This strategy has worked for the organisation. As of December 2015, ISIS had over 30,000 foreign fighters from about 100 countries, with Tunisia being the largest source of fighters.² How did they manage to do it? In the case of the Afghan civil war of the 1980s, when foreign nationals travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Army, at least three major countries were facilitating the jihad. The US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan came together to train and bankroll the militancy against the Red Army, as the three of them saw the Communist presence in Afghanistan as a threat to their interests³. At the height of the Afghan conflict, mujahedeen volunteers from over 40 countries were present in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda largely recruited from these fighters and membership was given after high scrutiny to avoid infiltration by intelligence agencies. But in the case of ISIS, no nation state is overtly supporting the group’s jihad. It is, on the other hand, fighting a number of national armies simultaneously.

The conflicts in Iraq and Syria provided the founders of ISIS a backdrop where they built the organisational networks, trained their fighters, devised strategies and set up a proto-state. But what helped them become a global force to reckon with is the revival of a medieval idea, which as a physical entity ceased to exist almost 100 years ago. After the Prophet Muhammad’s death, Abu Bakr, father of Muhammad’s wife Aisha, was elected the leader of the Islamic ummah (community) or the political successor to Muhammad. He took the title ‘Khalifat rasul-Allah’ to become the first Caliph in Islamic history.⁴ Since there were several Caliphates, some of them were widely recognised by Muslims such as the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. After the death of Al-Mustasim, the last Abbasid Caliph who was ruling from Baghdad, in 1258, there were no universally recognised Caliphs until the Ottoman Sultan Selim I took the title in 1517 after defeating the Mamluk Sultanate.⁵ For modern generations, the concept of Caliphate, however, existed only in history books. After Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk officially abolished the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, the Muslim world has evolved into today’s nation states. After Abdulmejid II, the last Ottoman Caliph, no Muslim leader could claim the title with the political and spiritual authority which the Ottomans or other ecumenical Caliphs had enjoyed over the world’s Muslims.⁶ There were occasional attempts by Muslim leaders to revive the title. The prominent among them was Hussein Ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, who led the Arab revolt against the Ottomans during World War I.⁷

Fight for the Caliphate

Hussein, appointed the Sharif of Mecca by Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid in 1908, believed, like several other Arab intellectuals and leaders of that time, that the Caliphate was an Arab institution, which was forcibly seized by Sultan Selim I in 1517, and that it should be returned to the Arabs. Those who questioned the legitimacy of the Turks holding the title argued that the Prophet himself had said Caliphs needed to be descendants of his Quraysh tribe.⁸ Hussein, a member of the Quraysh tribe, and already controlling the holy places, Mecca and Medina, considered himself a natural claimant of the title at a time the new Turkish leadership was discussing abolishing it. He reached out to both the British and the Turks to win their support for his plans. He also invited the dethroned Sultan Vahdettin aka Mehmed VI to Mecca. The plan was to persuade the Sultan to formally offer him the title of the Caliph. Vahdettin, however, refused to be persuaded.⁹ By the time the Caliphate was abolished in 1924, Hussein’s power had started eroding. He had already lost huge chunks of territories in the Arabian Peninsula to Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan (who would later establish the kingdom of Saudi Arabia), and would lose Mecca later in the year. ¹⁰ The British lost interest in him. The Kemalists of Turkey ignored him. By the time he officially announced that he was taking over as the Caliph of the Muslim world, much of his clout among the ummah had been eroded and the announcement had become a non-issue.¹¹

Still, Hussein’s accession to the title of the Caliphate marks a crucial moment in Islamic history. Though he did not win the support of