them the Islamic State, because they are neither Islamic or a state,” said Hillary Clinton. 5 President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, Vice President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and virtually every otherpolitician in the Western world agreed with Clinton that the Islamic State had nothing to do with Islam. All the major Muslim groups in the West likewise condemned the Islamic State and questioned its claims not just to be the caliphate, but to be Islamic at all.
Despite this chorus of condemnation, however, the Islamic State is drawing Muslims from around the world to join it in unprecedented numbers. By February 2015, over twenty thousand Muslims from all over the world had traveled to Iraq and Syria to wage jihad for the Islamic State—an outpouring of support that no other jihad group, or in fact terror group of any kind, had ever inspired. 6
In this book I explain the roots of its success—in the political situation created by the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, the war against Bashar Assad in Syria, and the resulting chaos—but also in the deep currents of Islamic thought. I demonstrate how the Islamic State’s rapid success would never have been possible without its claim to reconstitute the caliphate, a claim that has proven to be extraordinarily potent among Muslims worldwide.
I’ll take you inside the mindset of the leaders of ISIS, of those who have killed in its name, and of the Muslims from Western countries who have been inspired to give up everything they have known and leave their families in order to move to the Islamic State and take up its jihad.
Wherever possible, I’ll let the Islamic State speak for itself. I’ll use the words of the people who have joined it and who run it (as well as of those who have been victimized by it)—so that you can see directly what they think of themselves and of their actions. You will also see what they think of you. I’ll bring you the Islamic State’s own explanations of what it has done, and why, and—most chilling of all—its plans for the future.
I show what constitutes its appeal among young Muslims, and why the condemnations of ISIS from Muslim groups have been completely ineffectivein stopping young Muslims from traveling thousands of miles from all over the globe to join the group. The Islamic State is likely to be around for years to come, but it can be defeated, and indeed must be; in this book, I’ll detail how it can be stopped, and what is likely to follow in its wake once it is defeated. You’ll also discover the shocking extent of the nature and magnitude of the ISIS threat within the United States.
Above all, I show why the Islamic State is nothing less than the most pressing danger of our time. And why our struggle against it is a struggle against a force so purely evil, so focused, and so determined that our struggle against ISIS is, without exaggeration, a struggle for the survival of civilization itself.
We can win. And we must win. For the sake of a society that preserves humane values. For the sake of the continued existence of free societies that maintain respect for the dignity of every human person. For our children’s sake.
Chapter One
BORN OF BLOOD AND SLAUGHTER
T he organization now known as the Islamic State was born in the struggles of Muslim hard-liners in the Middle East in the 1990s to topple the relatively secular Arab nationalist governments that dominated the region and restore the rule of Islamic law. But the blood and ruin wreaked by the Islamic State have their ultimate origin in the battles and raids that Islamic tradition ascribes to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and in the jihad conquests of the Abbasid, Umayyad, and Ottoman caliphates.
----
Did you know?
• ISIS founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi became a devout Muslim while he was in prison for drugs and sexual assault
• Osama bin Laden hesitated to found a caliphate for