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  “Self-radicalized”? Did Ahmad Abousamra turn away from the tolerant and peaceful Islam that he had learned at home? Possibly. However, it is noteworthy that his father Dr. Abdul Abousamra (or Abou-Samra, as he now styles it), in addition to his distinguished medical career, also served as the longtime president of the Islamic Center of New England and vice president of the Boston branch of the Muslim American Society.131

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  “Abousamra expressed his belief that suicide bombings were permissible. . . . Abousamra found justification for his position in the religious writings of Muslim extremists. Abousamra justified attacks on civilians, such as the September 11, 2001 attacks. Abousamra stated that civilians were not innocent because they paid taxes to support the government and because they were Kufar (non-believers). . . . Abousamra always justified their extremist views by citing Islamic teachings.”

  —from the 2009 criminal complaint against Ahmad Abousamra130

  The Muslim American Society is the principal name under which the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States.132 According to a captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document, the Brotherhood’s “work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”133

  What’s more, on top of his father’s dubious ties, Abousamra himself was a member of the Islamic Society of Boston, which was also attended over the years by jihadis such as Aafia Siddiqui, who was convicted of trying to murder American soldiers and may also have been plotting a jihad attack against an American city, and Abousamra’s friend Mehanna, who is now in prison for aiding al-Qaeda. The Islamic Society of Boston was founded by al-Qaeda financier Abdurrahman Alamoudi.

  The JTTF’s Williams said confidently that Abousamra and Mehanna were “self-radicalized,” but she actually had no way of knowing whether or not they (and others) were “radicalized” at the Islamic Society of Boston. In the wake of the Boston Marathon jihad bombing on April 15, 2013, FBI director Robert Mueller admitted that the only time FBI agents had visited the Islamic Society of Boston was “as part of our outreach efforts”—not to investigate what was taught there.134

  However Abousamra came to believe that he should put his considerable talents at the service of violent jihad, the Islamic State had the full benefit of his expensive American education in computer technology—until the spring of 2015, when the computer whiz was reported to have been killed in an airstrike.135

  The Girls of the Islamic State: The Jihadi Brides

  The Islamic State has not only attracted young Muslim men but also hundreds of Muslim women from all over the world, and for the same reason that the men go: the lure of the caliphate. British authorities have estimated that ten percent of the Muslims from Britain who have traveled to the Islamic State are women, and the same proportion of women go to the Islamic State from continental Europe, Australia, and the United States.136 These girls are overwhelmingly joining ISIS to become the wives of jihad warriors. A small number of women have also taken up arms themselves.137

  Some have made the trip while as young as thirteen, and many girls in their mid-teens have gone, including two Muslim teens from Vienna, Sabina Selimovic, fifteen, and Samra Kesinovic, sixteen. Before they left, Samra had become notorious around her school for speaking out for jihad and leaving graffiti around the building reading, “I love al-Qaeda.” The girls left a note for their parents, saying, “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah—and we will die for him.”138

  These girls are ready not just to die, but to kill for Allah as well. Before she left her home in Avignon, France, for the Islamic State, Nora el-Bathy, fifteen, posted on Facebook a photo of a veiled woman holding a rifle, with the caption, “Yes, kill! In the name of Allah.”139

  Others betray just how young they really are. The twins Zahra and Salma Halane, sixteen, left England for the Islamic State, where Zahra posed for a photo in which she is fully veiled and holding a rifle in front of the Islamic State’s black flag of jihad. But soon after that she was back on social media lamenting the loss of her beloved kitten, who never returned home after her jihadist husband angrily threw it outside one night.140

  Another reminder of these girls’ extreme youth came in February 2015, when three Muslim schoolgirls from Britain, Amira Abase, fifteen, Shamima Begum, fifteen, and Khadiza Sultana, sixteen, sneaked away from their homes and families to join the Islamic State. Abase Hussen, Amira’s father, appeared before the cameras clutching the girl’s teddy bear and affecting shock, sorrow, and outrage that his daughter would do such a thing. He excoriated British authorities for failing to prevent the girls from leaving Britain. However, it later came to light that young Amira may have been acting on what she learned at home when she decided to make her trip to the caliphate: in his pre–teddy bear–clutching days, back in 2012, Abase Hussen had attended a rally led by firebrand British jihad cheerleader Anjem Choudary, at which rally-goers chanted “Allahu akbar” and “The followers of Mohammed will conquer America.”141

  One eighteen-year-old Muslim woman from Britain, Umm Khattab, said that she would like to see “David Cameron’s head on a spike” and fled the Sceptered Isle. Once safely in the caliphate, she took to Twitter to exhort other Muslim girls from Britain to join her. In Britain, she claimed fancifully, it was almost impossible to live in an Islamically correct manner: Muslims, she said, had been forced to sign a petition to head off the prohibition of halal meat (that is, meat slaughtered according to the specifications of Islamic law).142

  The Enforcers and Recruiters

  A six-foot-tall woman named Umm Hamza, also known as “The Slaughterer,” who is said to pack not only a gun, but several daggers and a cattle prod, is believed to be heading up the armed al-Khansa brigade of women patrolling Raqqa to ensure that women are obeying the strictures of Islamic law—and that enemy fighters aren’t hiding behind niqabs to infiltrate the Islamic State. ISIS pays them a salary of about $150 a month, and they make their rounds covered in black from head to toe, including veils that completely obscure their faces.143

  Aqsa Mahmood, one of Umm Hamza’s colleagues among these female Sharia enforcers, is a native of Glasgow, Scotland, who has captured attention for her open praise of the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby on a London street in 2013 and also of the Boston Marathon and Fort Hood jihad massacres. In her view, these jihad attacks in the West are just as valuable as making the trip to the Islamic State: “If you cannot make it to the battlefield, then bring the battlefield to yourself.”144

  Aqsa is the daughter of an immigrant from Pakistan who starred for Scotland’s cricket team. She attended Craigholme, an upscale private school. Her parents noted that when the uprising against Assad began in Syria, Aqsa, who had been quite secular, became interested in her religion and began reading the Qur’an avidly. Ultimately, she fled from her home in Scotland to the Islamic State in November 2013, when she was nineteen.

  Since arriving there, Aqsa has taken to social media to exhort other young Muslim girls to follow in her footsteps. She has also pooh-poohed the idea that Muslims were drawn to jihad by poverty and social alienation.

  Aqsa is the recruiter for the Islamic State who promised “a house with free electricity and water provided to you due to the Khilafah and no rent included.” But her main selling point is that volunteers for ISIS will receive “an even BIGGER reward in the Aakhirah (afterlife).” She has told potential journeyers to the Islamic State that certainly they will miss their families, but “the family you get in exchange for leaving the ones behind are like the pearl in comparison to the Shell you threw away into the foam of the sea.”146

  NOT BUYING THE POVERTY-IS-THE-ROOT-CAUSE-OF-JIHAD THEORY

  “The media at first used to claim that the ones running away to join the Jihad as being unsuccessful, di
dn’t have a future and from broke down families etc. But that is far from the truth. Most sisters I have come across have been in university studying courses with many promising paths, with big, happy families and friends and everything in the Dunyah [material world] to persuade one to stay behind and enjoy the luxury. If we had stayed behind, we could have been blessed with it all from a relaxing and comfortable life and lots of money.”

  —Aqsa Mahmood on the Muslims from happy, prosperous families who have left ample opportunities behind to join ISIS145

  To potential recruits, she emphasizes their duty as Muslims: “To those who are able and can still make your way, hasten hasten to our lands . . . This is a war against Islam and it is known that either ‘you’re with them or with us’. So pick a side.”147 Aqsa warns, however, that girls who follow in her footsteps will baffle and grieve their more secular-minded parents: “How does a parent who has little Islamic knowledge and understanding comprehend why their son or daughter has left their well-off life, education and a bright future behind to go live in a war-torn country. Most likely they will blame themselves, they will think they have done something. But until they truly understand from the bottom of their heart that you have done this action sincerely for Allah’s sake they will live in hope that you will return.”148 Aqsa emphasized that although she missed her own mother, she would not go home.

  The Sex Slaves

  Nor will most of the non-Muslim women that the Islamic State has taken captive.

  In line with the Qur’anic permission to Muslim men to enjoy the sexual favors of the “captives of the right hand,” the Islamic State captured three thousand non-Muslim Iraqi women—Yazidis and Christians—in the summer of 2014, and forced them into sex slavery.

  These unfortunate women and girls were looked after by the all-female al-Khansa Brigade. Female Muslims from Britain who were part of the Islamic State’s police apparatus were given the responsibility of supervising the de facto brothels where the captives were forced to live and work.149

  In April 2015, the Islamic State sold 216 Yazidi captives, including fifty-five boys and girls, back to non-Muslim humanitarian aid workers. Once freed, many began to give the details of what they had been through. Ziyad Shammo Aladany, an aid worker for an organization devoted to assisting Yazidis, explained that the boys as well as the girls had been “distributed among houses” in two cities that the Islamic State controlled, Mosul and Tal Afar. “They were treated very badly,” said Shammo. “The girls were dragged away from their mothers. If the mothers pleaded them not to give away their daughters, they were beaten and tortured.”

  Then they were “forced to convert to Islam and pray, and say the Shahada [the Islamic profession of faith]. They also gave them lectures about Islam.” After that, some of the girls were given to Islamic State jihadis, sometimes after ISIS victories, as the spoils of war.

  “A lot of them,” said Shammo, “have been sold to ISIS fighters, they have been raped in . . . public, and by more than two or three people at a time. They were tortured, beaten and subject to any type of violence.”150

  One nineteen-year-old Yazidi woman who escaped after being a captive of the Islamic State for four months told a horrific story. She was captured when the Islamic State invaded the Kurdish city of Sinjar. When the Islamic State jihadis entered her house, she recalled, “My mother started screaming and begging for mercy as the Daesh (Isis) fighters told my sister and me to join the group of younger women specially selected. But they tore us from her grasp. I saw other women in the building being dragged out to waiting lorries by their hair.”

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  A twelve-year-old Yazidi girl recalled that when the Islamic State entered her village, “we were surrounded. They told us to convert (to Islam), but we wouldn’t. They took us to the school in the village and separated the men. Then they took us away.” She was sold to a fifty-year-old jihadist who raped her repeatedly.151

  The men were separated from the woman, and the married women from the unmarried. “The Daesh took our names and ages and noted everything down. It was organised and they took us away like cattle.” Among the Islamic State jihadis were some men she recognized from her town: “A local mechanic was among them. The Sunni men in our area became Daesh as soon as they got a smell of them approaching. No one even had to ask them to join.”

  She was then given to an Islamic State member and raped repeatedly—and then sold to another. Amid physical and mental abuse, she was forced to convert to Islam.152

  The father of one girl who escaped said, “We had no hope. We knew thousands of women had been sold.”153 Slave auctions went on for days, as girls were sold for as little as $15, and some of those who were being offered for sale attempted suicide; several were successful. One girl who was sold to an Islamic State jihadi was taken by him to a home where his other sex slaves were waiting. When the new girl told him she had a husband, he beat her.154 According to Islamic law, when an infidel woman is taken captive, her previous marriage is immediately annulled.

  Another escapee recalled that at an auction of sex slaves, the girls all wept, and the men “were very happy.” She was sold in Raqqa, and then also repeatedly raped and beaten.155 Seeing no other way out of her situation, she tried suicide several times—to the disgust of her captors, who then promptly sold her to other jihadis. The girls’ captors emphasized that the slavery was all about religion: “We said we are human beings. They said, ‘You are our property.’ They said, ‘You are infidels. We will do what we want with you.’”

  The Islamic State jihadis preferred younger girls—the younger, the better: “They raped girls who were nine or ten or even eight. They said they preferred the young ones. They would say the older ones know a few things, the young ones know nothing.”156

  One Yazidi woman described the house of horrors in a building in Syria where approximately sixty women were held as slaves: “From 9:30 in the morning, men would come to buy girls to rape them. I saw in front of my eyes ISIS soldiers pulling hair, beating girls, and slamming the heads of anyone who resisted. They were like animals. . . . Once they took the girls out, they would rape them and bring them back to exchange for new girls. The girls’ ages ranged from 8 to 30 years . . . only 20 girls remained in the end.”157

  The Deserters

  It is not surprising, given how enamored the Islamic State is with blood, death, and destruction, that some of those who make their way to it with high ideals of living in the caliphate quickly become disillusioned.

  In December 2014, ISIS jihadis in their Raqqa capital executed a hundred men for desertion. A local opponent of the group claimed that inside the Islamic State, “Morale isn’t falling—it’s hit the ground.” He said that the disillusionment was besetting both the native jihadis and the foreigners: “Local fighters are frustrated—they feel they’re doing most of the work and the dying . . . foreign fighters who thought they were on an adventure are now exhausted.”158

  The situation had so deteriorated in Raqqa that the Islamic State had given some military policemen the sole task of punishing jihadis who failed to perform their assigned duties. According to opponents of ISIS in Raqqa, four hundred jihadis had been arrested by November 2014.159 It is not known what happened to them after that, but given the nature of the regime, it is unlikely that they are still alive.

  A rare former Islamic State fighter who successfully escaped was Abu Almouthanna, a twenty-seven-year-old from Syria. He said he had been tortured by the Assad regime, which had also killed his family, and “when your family has been killed, you will want to kill, too.” He first joined the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the group that both the Obama administration and Republican leaders such as John McCain had touted as the “moderates” who were going to save Syria from both Assad and the Islamic State. Then he joined Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate that al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri had demanded that the Islamic State yield to in Syria.

  After the Islamic State soun
dly defeated Jabhat al-Nusra in battle, Almouthanna and two thousand of his comrades joined the winning side. “I was happy to move to ISIS. They had the most money and the best weapons,” he explained. “Other than that they were just the same.”

  He was sent to an Islamic State boot camp, where foreign jihadis trained him. He bunked with two Muslims from France and one from Britain who did little outside of training but study the Qur’an and boast of their coming exploits for Allah: “From Day One, they joked about cutting heads and making the enemy pay.”

  WE HAD ’EM

  A significant portion of the Islamic State’s senior leadership served time in U.S. detention centers, including:

  •Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: caliph160

  •Adnan Ismail Najem al-Bilawi (a.k.a. Abu Abed Abdul Rahman al-Bilawi): the Islamic State military chief who planned the conquest of Mosul161

  •Haji Bakr (Samir Abd Muhammed al-Klifawi): assistant to the caliph, overseer of Syrian operations162

  •Abu Louay (Abu Ali): Minister of General Security163

  •Abu Kassem: Minister for Foreign Fighters and Suicide Bombers164

  •Abu Suja: Coordinator for the Affairs of Martyrs and Women165

  •Abu Abdul Salem (a.k.a. Abu Mohammed al-Sweidawi): Governor of Anbar and head of the military council166

  •Abu Sima: Minister for Weapons167

  •Abu Muhammad al-Adnani (Taha Sobhi Falaha): Chief Spokesman168

  Almouthanna fought for the Islamic State for a little over a year. He had no trouble killing civilians, he said: “They were all enemies.” He participated in public beheadings in town squares, with the townsfolk watching agog as the jihadis fought over who would have the privilege of actually performing the beheading. They vied for this privilege, Almouthanna said, because cutting off an infidel’s head “brings them closer to Allah.” After the fighting and beheading, slave women would cook dinner for the jihadis, and the camaraderie was close.