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  FIGHT THE JIHAD—SHRINK YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT

  “Understand, climate change did not cause the conflicts we see around the world, yet what we also know is that severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram [which pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in March of 2015]93. . . . It’s now believed that drought, crop failures, and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.”

  —President Obama explains how climate change contributes to jihad conflicts around the world in his 2015 commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy94

  So as far as Kerry was concerned, jihad terrorism was all about poverty—poverty brought about by global warming. If that poverty were alleviated, presumably jihad terror would evanesce worldwide.

  The secretary of state also blamed Israel: “As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the ISIL coalition, the truth is we—there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt—and I see a lot of heads nodding—they had to respond to. And people need to understand the connection of that. It has something to do with humiliation and denial and absence of dignity.”95

  The idea that poverty causes terrorism (of which the idea that the jihadis just need jobs is one variant) is, in fact, U.S. government policy: the United States spent billions building schools, hospitals, and roads in Afghanistan under the assumption that once Afghans were well educated and had access to modern services and amenities they would not turn to jihad.

  And in October 2013, the idea that poverty is responsible for terrorism was cemented even more firmly as a cornerstone of U.S. policy at a meeting of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), when Secretary of State John Kerry and Turkish Foreign Minister (and soon to be Prime Minister) Ahmet Davutoglu launched what they called the “Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience,” which was intended to counter “violent extremism” essentially by giving potential jihad terrorists economic assistance.96

  Kerry spoke about the importance of “providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment” into jihad groups.97 The GCTF devoted $200 million to this project, a core element of Barack Obama’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program.98

  Kerry said this money would be used for “challenging the narrative of violence that is used to justify the slaughtering of innocent people.”99 How? By giving young would-be jihadis jobs: “Getting this right isn’t just about taking terrorists off the street. It’s about providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment. In country after country, you look at the demographics—Egypt, the West Bank—60 percent of the young people either under the age of 30 or under the age of 25, 50 percent under the age of 21, 40 percent under the age of 18, all of them wanting jobs, opportunity, education, and a future.”101

  ISLAMIC STATE SUPPORTERS AT BROOKLYN COLLEGE

  An indication of how popular the Islamic State is among young middle class Muslims in the United States came on April 22, 2015, when human rights activist Pamela Geller spoke to an extremely hostile, mostly Muslim crowd at Brooklyn College. The Muslim college students heckled and hectored Geller throughout her talk and took to Twitter and other social media to boast about how they were disrupting her address. One Muslim student posted a picture of a group of attendees, several of whom were holding up one finger in the gesture of adherence to Islamic monotheism that has come to be associated with support for the Islamic State. And when Geller referred in her speech to the rapid growth of the Islamic State, one of the Muslim students in the audience called out “Alhamdulillah”—thanks be to Allah. None of the other Muslim students in the crowd rebuked or contradicted the one who had thanked Allah for the growth of the Islamic State.100

  This initiative is foredoomed. In reality, study after study has shown that jihadists are not poor and bereft of economic opportunities, but generally wealthier and better educated than their peers. A 2009 Rand Corporation report, for example, found that “terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.”102 Rand’s Darcy Noricks noted that “terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.”103

  The Economist reported in 2010:

  Social scientists have collected a large amount of data on the socioeconomic background of terrorists. According to a 2008 survey of such studies by Alan Krueger of Princeton University, they have found little evidence that the typical terrorist is unusually poor or badly schooled.104

  A National Bureau of Economic Research study likewise found that “the risk of terrorism is not significantly higher for poorer countries.”105

  But none of this has sunk in among the political elites. In his inaugural address as caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said of the unity of Muslims from all over the world in the caliphate, “If kings were to taste this blessing, they would abandon their kingdoms and fight over this grace.”106 That in a nutshell explains why Harf and Kerry are wrong, and why the “Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience” is a gargantuan boondoggle. It doesn’t take into account the fact that human beings have souls, and that they long to do something that matters—to be part of some great cause.

  The Muslims who have flocked to the Islamic State from all over the world have done so because they long to be warriors for the restoration of the great caliphate, the center of the unity of the Muslims worldwide, the tip of the spear of worldwide jihad against the infidel—just as young men have always flocked to join great causes throughout history. ISIS gives their lives meaning and purpose. This movement to join the global jihad is not about poverty or lack of economic opportunity; it is about living a life that means something.

  There is absolutely no chance that these young men will trade being a noble mujahid, waging jihad for the sake of Allah, for a chance to greet people entering Walmart or to spend their days saying, “Would you like fries with that?” Kerry spoke about “humiliation” and “absence of dignity” that supposedly drives Palestinians to the jihad, with no apparent appreciation of how his plan was asking the warriors of Allah to forsake Allah’s battlegrounds for what, in comparison, is exactly that: humiliation and the absence of dignity.

  Chapter Four

  HOW THEY DID IT—AND WHO’S TRYING TO STOP THEM

  The Islamic State is the wealthiest and most successful terror group in the history of the world. If it is able to maintain control over its territory for an extended period, it will provide a modern-day example of how a gang of warriors and thugs is able to make the transition from warfare and violent intimidation to stability and governance.

  Did you know?

  •ISIS uses WhatsApp and Kik to facilitate donations from sympathizers

  •The Islamic State received $20 million in ransom payments in 2014

  •In March 2015, the Islamic State bulldozed the 3,300-year-old city of Nimrud

  •The Islamic State caliph has called the destruction of the Pyramids a “religious duty”

  Throughout history, others have made this transition—from the Germanic tribes that harassed the Western Roman Empire to the Ottomans who harried the Eastern Roman Empire and ultimately extinguished it altogether. And let’s not forget the Palestine Liberation Organization, which, if Barack Obama gets his way, is about to make the final step from terror organization to respected national government.

  The Islamic State is attempting to make that transition now. Whether or not it will succeed remains to be seen, but it has already gotten farther along the way than any other jihad terror group in modern times, as
ide from the Palestinians.

  How Was the Islamic State Able to Gain Control over a Nation-Sized Expanse of Land?

  The Islamic State’s foremost achievement, what sets it apart from other jihad terror groups, is that it has managed to conquer and hold territory. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), an al-Qaeda–linked group, declared an independent state of Azawad in Malian territory in April 2012, but this “state” soon collapsed into infighting, and in February 2013, the MNLA withdrew its declaration of independence. The Islamic State isn’t likely either to succumb to infighting or give up its pretensions anytime soon; nor does there appear to be a power on hand with the will to take decisive action to destroy it.

  In seizing control of large areas of Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State was following in the footsteps of the first great Arab conquests, and its attainments are similar to those of the early Arab conquerors.

  Early in the seventh century, the two great powers of the day, the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Persian Empire, fought a series of bloody and costly wars. In 611, the Persians under the Emperor Khosrau (called Chosroes by the Byzantines) began a remarkably successful offensive, routing Byzantine forces in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, and elsewhere. In 613 the Persians took Chalcedon, right across the Bosporus from the Byzantine capital of Constantinople.

  The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius sued for peace and paid huge sums in tribute to the Persians, while quietly rebuilding his army. In the early 620s he began an enormously successful counteroffensive against the Persians, defeating them almost everywhere his armies had been defeated a decade before and in 628 taking the war to the gates of Ctesiphon, the Persian capital.

  Heraclius was thus able to restore the glory of the Byzantine Empire and send the Persian one into a spiral of decline. This victory, however, came at an enormous cost. By the early 630s, the Byzantines didn’t have troops in sufficient numbers to properly man their garrisons in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Their control over these areas was more a matter of political convention and history than present-day reality; they were ripe for conquest by any group with the will and means to take them. The Persians had the will, but no longer the means, and in previous decades, that would have been enough to secure Byzantine control over these regions until the Christian empire was able to reassert a more active presence. At this point, however, the newly united and energized Arabs were ready to exploit the Byzantines’ weakness. They moved quickly to take advantage of the power vacuum to embark upon their own series of conquests, laying the foundation for what has been known ever since as the heart of the Islamic world.

  The parallels with the rise of the Islamic State are striking. The Iraq war that saw the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and the installation of a weak Shi’ite regime in Baghdad left much of Iraq in chaos. The Baghdad regime was essentially a client of Shi’ite Iran, but much of the Sunni areas of the country was never in its control, and significant numbers of Sunnis deeply resented the Shia-dominated regime.

  Meanwhile, the “Arab Spring” uprisings heralded pro-Sharia revolts against relatively secular regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and ultimately Syria; while the Western mainstream media celebrated these as pro-Western, pro-democracy popular uprisings, the only regard many of the protesters had for democracy was as a means to an end: to install Islamist governments all over the region with the blessing of the United States.

  When Assad stood much firmer than his counterparts Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt had, Syria was engulfed in a great civil war, with Iran backing its client Alawite regime in Damascus while Sunnis all over the rest of the country aligned with various jihad groups that were determined to remove Assad and install an Islamic regime in Syria. Barack Obama’s precipitous and ill-considered withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (as precipitous and ill-considered as it was to put them there in the first place) left a vacuum that Sunni groups could and would exploit.

  The Islamic State, being the most ruthless, best equipped, and most fanatically dedicated to Islamic principles of all these jihad groups, was able to take advantage of Sunni discontent in both Syria and Iraq, and the weakness of the central governments of both, to take the most effective advantage of the power vacuum and proclaim its caliphate.

  The Spoils of War

  It helped that the Islamic State was able to gain control of several reliable—and immense—sources of wealth and ultimately to become the richest jihad terror group the world has ever known. The Islamic State looted nearly $500 million from the banks in the city of Mosul alone.1

  It has also obtained an astonishing amount of war materiel in the same way. The Islamic State’s conquests include millions of dollars’ worth of American munitions and fighting equipment taken from the Iraqi Army. Just at Mosul, ISIS is reported to have taken twenty-three hundred Humvees.2 And at the fall of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, in May 2015, the Pentagon admitted that Iraqi troops abandoned “a half-dozen tanks, a similar number of artillery pieces, a larger number of armoured personnel carriers and about 100 wheeled vehicles like Humvees” to the Islamic State.3 Video of a Ramadi police station from an ISIS jihadi showed “box after box of American mortar shells and bullets that appeared shiny and new. Several Humvees, apparently not long out of the packing crates, sat abandoned nearby. ‘This is how we get our weapons,’ the narrator said in Arabic. ‘The Iraqi officials beg the Americans for weapons, and then they leave them here for us.’”4

  David Cohen, the Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said on October 23, 2014, that the Islamic State had “amassed wealth at an unprecedented pace and its revenue sources have a different composition from those of many other terrorist organizations.”5 He noted that the Islamic State “obtains the vast majority of its revenues from local criminal and terrorist activities.”6

  And there is also the oil.

  A Million Dollars a Day: ISIS Awash in Oil

  The resurgent global jihad of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has always been powered by oil. In the mid-twentieth century, the Saudis began spending their oil billions to spread the virulent Wahhabi understanding of Islam throughout the Islamic world, confronting head-on the relatively benign and peaceful forms of cultural Islam that had become dominant in areas of Central Asia, East Africa, and elsewhere.

  The foremost child of this ideological campaign has been the Islamic State, a caliphate declared in line with the rigorist version of Islam that the Saudis have spent billions to spread, right on the Saudis’ doorstep and, in a neat bit of poetic justice, denying the legitimacy of the House of Saud. Still, one thing that the Saudis’ ideological children have in common with their despised parents is their use of oil revenues in the cause of Islam and jihad.

  Theodore Karasik, research director at the Dubai-based think tank INEGMA, explained in July 2014 that the Assad regime was unprepared for the Islamic State’s concentrated assault on Syria’s oil fields: “These fields were probably under guard, but not in a robust nature that could take overwhelming force from groups like ISIS. They are trying to establish a state, and these types of revenues are important for the state’s formation because it makes up a significant chunk of their revenue.” Karasik explained that seizing oil fields was “part of an ongoing plan” that the Islamic State had “to develop their own economic system.”

  And the plan worked. Karasik noted that “officials from the Iraqi oil industry have said that ISIS reaps $1 million per day in Iraq in oil profits.” If the Islamic State took all the oil fields upon which it had designs, “the total would be $100 million per month for both Iraq and Syria combined.” The jihadis sell the oil at prices that so far undercut OPEC that many cannot resist buying it on the black market: “They sell it for $30 a barrel because it’s a black market. It’s not pegged to international standards for oil prices, which are over $100 a barrel. The oil is bought through Turkey from Syria, and it’s sold to black market traders who functio
n throughout the Levant.”7

  Our “Ally” Turkey

  Turkey is ostensibly an ally of the United States and a fellow NATO member. It is key, however, to the Islamic State’s black market trade in oil. Barack Obama and John Kerry have failed in repeated efforts to persuade the Turkish government to move against this black market in oil.8

  The Pentagon has even spotted oil tanker trucks moving Islamic State oil in Turkish territory—but has hesitated to strike them, for fear of further weakening what is not much more than a paper alliance at this point.

  The fact that Turkey is still considered an ally against the Islamic State manifests the crying need for a thoroughgoing reevaluation and realignment of U.S. foreign policy, which is still based on old Cold War models, procedures, and alliances that not only do not apply to the struggle against the global jihad and against the Islamic State in particular, but are actively counterproductive.

  In September 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to sign a pledge committing the nations of the Persian Gulf region to fighting the Islamic State, even though that pledge was so toothless as to specify that the participating nations were only committing to fighting ISIS to the extent that each deemed “appropriate.”