State of Terror:
The War Against ISIS

The Washington Post

Yassin al-Jassem, pictured on the cover, was told by Islamic State rulers that if he gave his son to them to fight, they would pay for his 2-year-old grandson’s operation to remove a deadly brain tumor. Yassin chose to escape instead. Looking out on a bleak expanse of the Jordan desert, he told a Washington Post reporter, “I am never going back to Syria. It’s not my Syria anymore.” (Photo by Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post)

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Diversion Books
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Copyright © 2015 by The Washington Post
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First Diversion Books edition November 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68230-182-1

Table of Contents

Introduction

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’ - Spoils for the rulers, terror for the ruled

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’: JUSTICE - A climate of fear and violence

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’: WOMEN - ‘Till martyrdom do us part’

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’: ECONOMY - Where the poor starve and the tax man carries a whip

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’: EDUCATION - For boys, God and guns; for girls, God and cooking

From hip-hop to jihad, how the Islamic State became a magnet for converts

Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine

Why the Islamic State leaves tech companies torn between free speech and security

Islamic State appears to be fraying from within

‘Jihadi John’: Islamic State killer is identified as Londoner Mohammed Emwazi

French Muslims caught between Islamophobia and extremism

The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.

In campaign against terrorism, U.S. enters period of pessimism and gloom

U.S. launches secret drone campaign to hunt Islamic State leaders in Syria

An American family saved their son from joining the Islamic State. Now he might go to prison.

Islamic State has increasingly hit soft targets outside of ‘caliphate’ borders

A father’s futile struggle to save his son from what he would become: A Paris suicide bomber

For the Islamic State, paroxysms of violence portend apocalypse

Is it too late to solve the mess in the Middle East?

Is the United States safe from a Paris-style Islamic State attack?

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Introduction

On June 10, 2014, the Islamic State arrived dramatically on the world stage with its surprise capture of the largest city in northern Iraq. The militant group, also known as ISIS, quickly spread throughout Iraq and Syria, filling a power vacuum left by years of fighting that had shattered many public institutions. They now occupy an arc of land as big as the United Kingdom.

Over the past two years, the militants have produced a torrent of startlingly sophisticated online propaganda that has helped persuade at least 20,000 foreign fighters to come join their fight from as far away as Australia. Their ultimate goal is to create an Islamic caliphate over much of the Mideast, governed by the militants’ extreme version of Islamic sharia law.

And now, with the attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger plane, the Islamic State has declared war on the wider world, galvanizing new calls for an intensified global response.

The pope and the king of Jordan have gone so far as to say ISIS has triggered a “third world war on humanity.”

Inside the Islamic State itself, people interviewed by the Washington Post reporters over the last year say the militants have created a brutal, two-tiered society, where daily life is starkly different for the occupiers and the occupied. Most lives are filled with fear and deprivation in the “caliphate.”

In often secret interviews, dozens of people who are now living under, or have recently fled, the Islamic State said the group had made their lives much worse, in ways that could be felt for decades to come — reversing gains in public education, ruining the medical infrastructure, establishing a justice system based on terror, and exposing a generation of children to gruesome and psychologically devastating violence.

“We went back to the Stone Age,” said Mohammad Ahmed, 43, a former Arab League worker from Deir al-Zour, a town near Raqqa, the militants’ self-proclaimed capital in northern Syria.

Those whose cities and towns are held by the Islamic State said they face not only the casual savagery of militants who behead their enemies and make sex slaves out of some minority women but also severe shortages of the basics of daily life.

And despite President Obama’s wariness of getting the United States entangled in another Mideast war, the challenges posed by the brutal Islamic State regime reach our shores daily.

Since the United States designated the Islamic State as a terrorist organization in 2014, the FBI has made an arrest almost every week in connection with the group, many of them young people who were radicalized online. More than 60 people have been charged with material support and other charges.

The social-media savvy of the militant group is raising difficult questions for many U.S. firms like YouTube: how to preserve global platforms that offer forums for expression while preventing groups such as the Islamic State from exploiting those free-speech principles to advance their terrorist campaign.

Now that Russia and France have begun retaliatory air strikes in Syria to help in the battle against ISIS, U.S. efforts there have grown infinitely more complex. The Pentagon’s effort has so far focused on establishing a Syrian rebel force to counter the Islamic State, but it has shifted to aiding groups that are already fighting.

At the beginning of 2015, The Post set out to closely track the rise and evolution of the Islamic State and chronicle the reality of life under its rule, its implications for the Middle East, and efforts by the U.S. government and others to undermine it. The result is a startling body of work that illuminates just how intractable and dangerous ISIS is, and how difficult it will be to forever end their ability to terrorize the world.

The stories are collected together for the first time in this e-Book.

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’
Spoils for the rulers, terror for the ruled

By Kevin Sullivan
October 1, 2015

Yassin al-Jassem fled to Jordan from militant-controlled Tibni, Syria. Islamic State propaganda promises “paradise,” but life in the “caliphate” is actually filled with violence, shortages of basic needs and terror for women living under the militants.

The white vans come out at dinnertime, bringing hot meals to unmarried Islamic State fighters in the city of Hit in western Iraq.

A team of foreign women, who moved from Europe and throughout the Arab world to join the Islamic State, work in communal kitchens to cook the fighters’ dinners, which are delivered to homes confiscated from people who fled or were killed, according to the city’s former mayor.

The Islamic State has drawn tens of thousands of people from around the world by promising paradise in the Muslim homeland it has established on conquered territory in Syria and Iraq.

But in reality, the militants have created a brutal, two-tiered society, where daily life is starkly different for the occupiers and the occupied, according to interviews with more than three dozen people who are now living in, or have recently fled, the Islamic State.

Foreign fighters and their families are provided free housing, medical care, religious education and even a sort of militant meals-on-wheels service, according to those interviewed. The militants are paid salaries raised largely from taxes and fees levied on the millions of people they control, in an arc of land as big as the United Kingdom.

Those whose cities and towns are held by the Islamic State said they face not only the casual savagery of militants who behead their enemies and make sex slaves out of some minority women but also severe shortages of the basics of daily life.

Many residents have electricity for only an hour or two a day, and some homes go days without running water. Jobs are scarce, so many people can’t afford food prices that have tripled or more. Medical care is poor, most schools are closed, and bans on most travel outside the Islamic State are enforced at gunpoint.

Over the past two years, the militants have produced a torrent of startlingly sophisticated online propaganda that has helped persuade at least 20,000 foreign fighters, many with families, to come from as far away as Australia. The campaign, largely distributed on YouTube and social media, depicts a place filled with Ferris wheels and cotton candy, where local families cheerfully mingle with heavily armed foreigners.

But local people interviewed said their daily lives are filled with fear and deprivation in the Islamic State “caliphate,” governed by the militants’ extreme version of Islamic sharia law.

“We went back to the Stone Age,” said Mohammad Ahmed, 43, a former Arab League worker from Deir al-Zour, a town near Raqqa, the militants’ self-proclaimed capital in northern Syria.

“We used to have a beautiful house with marble and ceramic floors,” said Ahmed, who fled his home in June and now lives alongside 20,000 other Syrians in Jordan’s Azraq refugee camp. “All our lives, we had everything we needed. Then, when they came, we were cooking over a fire outside and washing our clothes in a bucket.”

Several of those interviewed said the Islamic State was actually less corrupt and provided more efficient government services, such as road construction and trash collection, than the previous Syrian and Iraqi governments. In Iraq, some said, the Sunni Islamic State militants treated them better than the Shiite-dominated central government in Baghdad. But none of those interviewed said they supported the militants, and all said efficient government did not excuse the group’s brutal and fanatical behavior.

“We hate them,” said Hikmat al-Gaoud, 41, the former mayor of Hit, who fled in April and now divides his time between Baghdad and Amman, Jordan.

The Islamic State came to power in the wake of years of fighting in Syria and Iraq that already had shattered many public institutions. But people interviewed said the Islamic State had made the damage worse, in ways that could be felt for decades to come — reversing gains in public education, ruining the medical infrastructure, establishing a justice system based on terror, and exposing a generation of children to gruesome and psychologically devastating violence.

For women, living in the Islamic State homeland often means being subjected to a virtual assembly-line system for providing brides to fighters, or sometimes being abducted and forced into unwanted marriages.

Many who were interviewed gave only their first name or declined to be identified at all, for their own safety and the security of their family members still living under Islamic State control. They were interviewed via Skype or telephone calls from Syria and Iraq, or in person in Iraq, Turkey and Jordan.

Those who spoke from inside areas controlled by the Islamic State did so at great peril, saying the militants closely monitor Internet access. They agreed to speak so that they could tell their story of life inside the Islamic State caliphate.

Nearly everyone interviewed said they had witnessed a beheading or another savage punishment. It is virtually impossible to independently verify these accounts, just as it is impossible to verify the claims in much of the propaganda material put out by the Islamic State. The militants almost never allow journalists or other observers inside their territory, and they have posted video of the beheadings of several they have captured.

The interviews, conducted over several months, were arranged largely at random or through long-established contacts in the region. Although several activists were among those interviewed, The Washington Post did not rely on activist groups to provide interview subjects. At the Azraq camp, Post reporters reviewed records of arrivals and sought out those who had come recently from militant-controlled areas. Many of the interviews lasted two hours or longer.

A young boy in the Azraq refugee camp in the Jordan desert, where about 20,000 Syrians have taken shelter.

The militants control small farming communities and large urban areas, including Mosul, an Iraqi city with a population of more than 1 million people. The Islamic State’s policies differ somewhat in each area, so there is no single, uniform way of life; but in the interviews, consistent themes emerged about women, health, education, justice and the economy in the Islamic State.

Women must be fully veiled and can be whipped for leaving the house without a male-relative escort. Many simply stay at home for fear of being picked up on the street and forced to marry a foreign fighter.

Hospitals are usually reserved for foreign fighters and are staffed by doctors who have come from as far as Britain and Malaysia. Local people are forced to seek care in ill-equipped clinics, which have expired medications and poorly trained staff.

In some places, the Islamic State has shut down cellphone service and Internet access. Where it still exists, the militants try to control it closely. They have set up Internet cafes that have become centers for propaganda, where recruiters encourage young people around the world to leave their homes and come to the Islamic State. They have persuaded about 200 Americans — some still in their teens — in Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and other U.S. cities to try to come to Syria. Most were arrested before reaching their destination, according to U.S. law enforcement officials.

Except for religious schools for the children of foreign fighters, schools are generally closed. Militants have confiscated college diplomas and burned them publicly.

“Life under Daesh is a nightmare each day,” said a female math teacher who lives in Mosul, using an Arabic name for the Islamic State.

“We have an unknown future,” she said, asking that her name not be used. “Maybe Daesh will kill us or maybe we will die in the war, or maybe after. What we are going through right now is a slow death.”

The militants have established checkpoints to prevent people from fleeing. But those interviewed said a growing network of smugglers is helping people get away, and they are entering Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and non-militant-controlled areas of Iraq in increasing numbers. U.N. officials said that 60 percent of refugees who have crossed the Syria-Jordan border recently were escaping areas controlled by the militants.

The Islamic State’s propaganda portrays the militants as liberators; one recent video showed armed fighters delivering sweets to a home for the elderly. But according to those interviewed, the majority of residents view the militants as a merciless occupying force, and they stay away from them as much as possible.

“Even if we see them in the streets or in the shops, there is no mingling,” said an activist who calls himself Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, a native of Raqqa who runs a social media site called Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently.

People in Raqqa, he said, “feel like strangers in their own city.”

Life is bleak in the Azraq camp, but it is a welcome sanctuary for those fleeing the Islamic State militants.

Why people join and stay

The Islamic State has had some success recruiting local people. Those interviewed said many of their friends and neighbors in Syria and Iraq have chosen to join the Islamic State, becoming fighters, teachers or workers in their government offices.

Some do so because they believe in the militants’ goal of uniting the world under their extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

But most of the people who work for the Islamic State do so out of economic desperation, according to those interviewed. In places where the cost of food has skyrocketed and where many people are living on little more than bread and rice, some men have concluded that becoming an Islamic State warrior is the only way to provide for their family.

“There is no work, so you have to join them in order to live,” said Yassin al-Jassem, 52, who fled his home near Raqqa in June. “So many local people have joined them. They were pushed into Daesh by hunger.”

Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College in London, said that although foreign fighters have given the Islamic State a boost, “in the long term, they will turn out to be a burden.” He said that local tribes rose up against al-Qaeda in Iraq in the mid-2000s partly because that group was perceived as a foreign organization. He said people now under Islamic State control could do the same — especially in Iraq.

But those interviewed who had lived under the Islamic State said it has gone to great lengths to suppress any potential uprisings, killing anyone suspected of disloyalty.

Faten Humayda, 70, a grandmother who fled her town near Raqqa in May and now lives in the Azraq camp, said the violence increases local anger at the militants, but it also creates suspicion among local people. It is harder for any kind of resistance movement to form when people think their friends and neighbors might be informants for the militants.

“They have turned us against each other,” she said.

Faten Humayda and her family fled to Jordan from Syria.

Ahmed, who fled his town near Raqqa in June, said some of the Arab fighters would try to mix with the local population, but the Europeans and other non-Arabs never did. He said that although the Islamic State militants claimed they were there to create a better life for Muslims, they seemed mainly focused on battles with other rebel groups and government forces.

“They were always very aggressive, and they seemed angry,” he said. “They are there to fight, not to govern.”

Interviewed in his baking-hot metal hut in the Azraq camp, Jassem recalled that while he was living under Islamic State control, his 2-year-old grandson developed a brain tumor. Doctors wanted $800 to remove it.

Jassem, a farm hand, hadn’t worked since Islamic State militants took over his home town. He was desperate, so in late May he went to the militants to beg for his grandson’s life, and they offered him a choice.

“They said to me, ‘If you give us your son to fight with us, we will pay for your grandson’s treatment,’ ” he said.

The idea of one of his sons becoming an Islamic State fighter turned his stomach, and the thought of losing his grandson broke his heart. So Jassem took his family and escaped in the back of a smuggler’s truck. He said his son is now asking Jordanian authorities for medical help for the little boy.

“I am never going back to Syria,” Jassem said, looking out from his 12-by-18-foot hut at the bleak expanse of empty Jordan desert. “It’s not my Syria anymore.”

Photos by Charles Ommanney.

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’: JUSTICE
A climate of fear and violence

By Kevin Sullivan
October 1, 2015

Hikmat al-Gaoud, the former mayor of Hit, Iraq, at a coffee shop in Amman, Jordan. Militants have imposed their fanatical version of sharia law, creating a justice system that uses beheadings, amputations and fear to maintain control in occupied cities and towns.

Islamic State militants dragged the blindfolded man into the main square in a town near the city of Raqqa, their self-proclaimed capital in Syria. It was Friday, right after prayers, when the market was filled with people. The fighters loudly announced that the man was a government spy, and they pulled off his blindfold so that everyone could see his face.

Nabiha, a 42-year-old woman who fled the town in April and now lives in a refugee camp in Jordan, recalled her disgust as she watched the militants force the man down on a wooden block normally used to slaughter sheep, then raise a heavy butcher’s cleaver.

“It was just one swing,” said Nabiha, who asked that her last name not be used, fearing for her safety. “His body went one way, and his head went the other. I will never forget it.”

The Islamic State uses its brutal and often arbitrary justice system to control the millions of people who live in its territory. By publicly beheading and crucifying people suspected even of disloyalty, the militants have created a culture of horror and fear that has made it virtually impossible for people to rise up against them.

“For you outsiders, it might be easy to ask: ‘Why does the public not protest more against Daesh? Why aren’t more voices speaking up against them?’ ” said a businessman in Raqqa, reached via Skype, who asked not to be identified for his security. “But you are not the ones that have to live under and with them.”

Local people ruled by the Islamic State are subject to the extreme laws of police and judges who are mostly foreigners from Tunisia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Russia, France, Britain and other countries, according to more than three dozen interviews with people who live there or have fled recently.

It is impossible to verify those accounts because the militants forbid outside observers from entering their territory, and they kill those who try. But they are consistent with the conclusions of human rights groups and independent analysts who have studied the Islamic State.

The militants make legal judgments based on an extreme interpretation of Sharia law. In some places, a female police force is deployed to enforce rules for women and orders to keep hospitals, schools and other public places strictly segregated by gender.

Residents who smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, keep shops open during prayer time or dress in Western clothing are often whipped publicly — or worse.

Yassin al-Jassem, 52, a Syrian from a village outside Raqqa, said he watched one day as Islamic State police caught a neighbor’s teenage son smoking a cigarette.

“They held his left hand down on a block, and they took a big butcher knife and chopped off his first two fingers, the ones he used to hold the cigarette,” he said. “Then they just threw him into the street and left him to take care of himself.”

Those suspected of spying or collaborating with the Islamic State’s enemies are executed. The killings are generally done on market days or after Friday prayers, or at high-visibility locations, to make sure that the maximum number of people see the brutality.

Yahyah Hadidi fled from Manbij, Syria, to the Azraq camp in Jordan.

Yahyah Hadidi, 26, who fled Islamic State territory in July, said the main square in his town near Aleppo in northwestern Syria was known as “Judgment Square” because of the executions there each Friday.

“They put up a special L-shaped pole that they used to hang the bodies and the heads. They hung them with butchers’ hooks,” he said.

“They want to terrify people. Lots of Muslims are good Muslims but don’t think like they do, and for that, they slaughter them,” Hadidi said.

Ahmed Ali Humaidi, 19, who also recently fled with his family from Raqqa to Jordan, said the militants routinely behead people in a traffic circle in the city center, impaling their heads on spiked poles.

“My life had always been okay, and in my whole life, I never really felt afraid,” he said. “But when I saw that, for the first time in my life, I felt real fear.”

In interviews, some people said the Islamic State’s criminal justice system was less corrupt than the Syrian government’s institutions under President Bashar al-Assad.

And in Iraq, some people have joined the Islamic State because Sunnis often see the Sunni Islamic State as preferable to the Shiite government in Baghdad.

Hikmat al-Gaoud, the former mayor of Hit, Iraq, said he hates the Islamic State and is trying to recruit Sunni tribesmen to fight against it. But he said some Iraqis join the militants, saying: “The Iraqi government disrespects me and my wife and my children. I’d be willing to put my hand in with any devil in order to live my life with dignity. The Islamic State is the lesser of two evils.”

But Jassem said the Islamic State justice system was capricious and abusive. He said three of his neighbors were killed because their enemies lied about them to Daesh, as the Islamic State is often called in Arabic.

“I saw people use Daesh to get back at people they were feuding with,” he said. “They would go to them and say the person they were feuding with was a regime spy, and Daesh would just go and kill him on the spot.”

A woman who lives in the Iraqi city of Mosul, who asked not to be identified, said militants there recently cut off the hands of four boys, about 14 or 15 years old, who were accused of stealing wire to bring electricity to their home.

Interviewed via Skype, she also said the militants overheard a man complaining about the Islamic State, so they cut off his ears.

“I am afraid of them,” she said. “I look at them, holding their weapons and knives, and think: ‘They are monsters. How did they become this way? They took the city from us.’ ”

Another woman from Mosul, also interviewed via Skype, said she worries about the effect on her children growing up around so much violence.

“Last week, my 6-year-old son took a candy bar from his brother. And then he said, ‘Are you going to cut off my hand?’ I wish I had died before hearing my son say something like that,” she said.

Another day, she said, she and her family were in their car when they came upon an execution in progress. The crowds were so big that they blocked the road.

“I started crying and covering my children’s eyes,” she said. “I can’t imagine their future. But we can’t afford to leave.”

The Islamic State’s law-enforcers also limit cellphone service and access to the Internet.

Hadidi, from the village near Aleppo, said foreign Islamic State fighters regularly came into the cellphone shop where he worked and reviewed his records. Then they would go to the homes of his customers to inspect their phones.

He said they publicly whipped one teenage boy for downloading music to his phone, and they executed two others for having an image of a Syrian flag on their phones, suggesting they supported the government.

“They think everyone is a spy,” Hadidi said.

Video: Why the Islamic State propaganda arm is more important than its fighters

Photos by Charles Ommanney.

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’: WOMEN
‘Till martyrdom do us part’

By Kevin Sullivan
October 1, 2015

Nabiha, 42, and her daughter Rudeina, 17, walk through the Azraq camp for Syrian refugees in northern Jordan. Islamic State militants demand a steady supply of wives to provide sex and children, so local women and girls live in constant fear of forced marriages, abductions and even sex slavery.

Somewhere in Syrian territory controlled by Islamic State militants, a jihadist from the Netherlands posted a cheerful photo on Twitter, showing off an Oreo cheesecake that she had made.

It was a fizzy propaganda moment that she shared with others who might be thinking about traveling to Syria to join the cause. It also had a very Islamic State twist: The cheesecake was photographed next to a grenade.

About 200 miles to the south, in an oven-hot refugee camp in Jordan, Rudeina, 17, said her life under the Islamic State in northern Syria, which she fled in April, was miserable. She said she stayed inside her house near the city of Raqqa, the Islamic State capital, for more than a year, terrified that if she went outside she would be abducted and forced to marry a foreign fighter.

“They cut the Internet, but we didn’t even want it anymore,” she said. “If we looked at the Internet, we would see people living in the outside world. That made us sad. Seeing the outside world was just another sorrow.”

In Islamic State propaganda, life for women in the self-declared caliphate is filled with love, children and the joys of domestic life, such as an Oreo dessert. But the reality is often far more harsh for women who have moved there from the Arab world, Europe or the United States, according to specialists who monitor Islamic State social media postings.

Those women, usually drawn by romantic notions of supporting revolutionaries and living in a state that exalts their religion, can quickly find themselves part of an institutionalized, near-assembly-line system to provide fighters with wives, sex and children. And when their husbands are killed, they are expected to celebrate their “martyrdom” and then quickly marry other fighters.

The situation is even worse for millions of women in Syria and Iraq who have found their cities and towns overtaken by the Islamic State, according to interviews, conducted via Skype and in person, with more than three dozen people who live in militant-held areas or have recently fled to Turkey, Jordan and government-controlled areas of Iraq.

Their accounts are impossible to verify because the Islamic State does not permit journalists and other independent observers to enter its territory — and it has beheaded several of them. But the accounts of the people interviewed were remarkably consistent and are similar to statements given to aid organizations and human rights workers.

“Our biggest fear was that we would be put in the women’s prison,” Rudeina said, sitting in the metal hut, where she now lives, in the Azraq refugee camp in northeastern Jordan, along with 20,000 other Syrians. Like many of those interviewed, she declined to give her last name for security reasons.

She said the militants would use any pretext to detain women: “They use the women prisoners for wives for the foreign fighters. If you go to prison, you are given away to God- only-knows who.”

Her mother, Nabiha, 42, said that happened to a neighbor’s daughter, who had been jailed because her husband was a soldier in the Syrian army.

“They told her, ‘Either you marry a fighter, or we will cut off your head and hang it in the square,’ ” Nabiha said. “So she married the fighter, and we never heard of her again.”

Amina Mustafa Humaidi fled to Jordan with her children from Raqqa, Syria.

Only roles for women

In the Islamic State’s ideology, a woman’s place is in the home, tending to her husband and producing children.

“Her creator has ruled that there was no responsibility greater for her than that of being a wife to her husband,” according to “Women of the Islamic State,” a manifesto issued this year by the al-Khanssaa Brigade, a women’s group inside the Islamic State caliphate.

The manifesto, translated into English by Charlie Winter, senior researcher at the London-based Quilliam Foundation, offers one of the most comprehensive windows to date into the treatment of women by the Islamic State.

It says that women should leave their homes only in specific circumstances, including going to study religion or to work in situations where women are strictly segregated. The manifesto rails against Western values.

Women who choose to join the Islamic State, whether they are foreigners or locals who believe in the militants’ ideology, seem to accept or even relish their new role. Some form loving marriages and embrace a system that rejects Western ideals of fashion and beauty.

But many local women find the restrictions extreme, backward and terrifying, according to those interviewed.

The rules are especially jarring for residents of urban areas such as Raqqa and the Iraqi city of Mosul, where women have always dressed modestly but where many used to simply drape a scarf over their hair and wear jeans and sandals. These days, they must wear full-face veils and robes in public, and they can’t leave their homes without a male relative.

Amina Mustafa Humaidi, 40, who fled Raqqa in May, said she used to keep her 9-year-old daughter at home because she feared the militants.

“We heard many stories of girls kidnapped off the streets by the foreign fighters,” she said, sitting in her hut at the Azraq camp. “When they first arrived, they made an announcement that they were going to take a girl from every house and marry them to foreign fighters. It never happened. I think they just said that to terrify us.”

But Humaidi’s fear for her young daughter is justified: The “Women of the Islamic State” manifesto says girls can be married at age 9.

The Islamic State also has systematically made sexual slaves out of thousands of women and girls from the Yazidi minority in Iraq, according to groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The militants themselves, in the October 2014 issue of their publication Dabiq, said that female Yazidis had been given to fighters essentially as “spoils of war.”

An official Islamic State document published late last year set forth guidelines for how the slaves are to be treated, stating that it is permissible to beat them and to have sex with them before they reach puberty, according to Human Rights Watch.

The parents of Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker in her 20s who was held hostage by the Islamic State, told reporters in August that their daughter had been taken as a “wife” and repeatedly raped by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s leader, according to accounts of a Yazidi teenager who was held with her. Mueller died while being held by the Islamic State, but the exact cause of her death is unclear.

Among their own members and the millions of Iraqi and Syrian women living in their conquered territory, the militants have created an elaborate social architecture to ensure a steady supply of brides and sex for fighters.

When a married foreign fighter and his children arrive in the Islamic State, they are given a house, which usually has been confiscated from local families who either have fled, been killed or forced out.

Unmarried foreign women are required to stay in a hostel, where they get food and a monthly “allowance,” according to a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, which studied the experiences of a dozen foreign women by tracking their social media postings.

Shiraz Maher, a researcher at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College in London, said single fighters are permitted to come to the unmarried females’ hostel, meet the women and ask them to remove their veils. If the men like what they see, they can become engaged immediately. Maher said women in the Islamic State may have some say over whom they marry — but not much.

“There’s not a long process,” he said. “You meet that morning; you are engaged by evening.”

Still, Maher said that with local Syrian families keeping their daughters away from the militants, there has been a shortage of available wives for foreign fighters. He said some fighters, including one from Britain, have complained on Twitter about being unable to find a spouse — a rare sign of discord in the flow of rosy propaganda from the militants.

“Some of these guys are getting really frustrated,” Maher said.

A woman who calls herself Shams, an Islamic State online propagandist, described her marriage on her Tumblr account. She said she had lived as a single woman in Syria for two months after arriving in February 2014 and found single life “quite hard,” so she decided to marry a fighter after meeting him twice.

She posted a picture of herself fully veiled in white, with only her eyes showing, and her husband, who is wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and a black skinny necktie. The photo is captioned: “Marriage in the land of jihad. Till martyrdom do us part.”

Shams has identified herself as a 27-year-old physician from Malaysia and her husband as a Moroccan-born fighter. She posted what she called a selfie of the wedding couple: a stethoscope wrapped around an AK-47.

Video: Islamic State tries to project an image of plenty

Barred from battle

There is growing frustration among foreign women who come to the Islamic State not to marry, but to fight, which is forbidden by the militants.

“We’ve seen a number of women who are not that happy with fact they are not allowed to fight and who are quite vocal,” said Peter Neumann, director of the radicalization institute at King’s College.

Neumann said some of the complaints reflect a clash between the Western societies — mainly Europe — where these women were raised, and their new home, which is largely modeled on Islamic society from 1,400 years ago.

“They are obviously attracted to a medieval ideology, and at the same time, some of their attitudes are very Western,” Neumann said.

Erin Marie Saltman, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said the frustration among foreign women was evident from their increasingly harsh social media posts.

“There are more women now, and more Western women, and they are actually taking on the more violent voice,” she said.

Saltman said many of the women also are shocked to discover that life in the Islamic State is filled with violence and many shortages, including of electricity and clean water — far from the paradise portrayed in propaganda.

“When you arrive in the Islamic State, it’s never going to be what it says on the can,” Saltman said. “You almost are forced to radicalize further to justify the journey that you made, to justify leaving your home behind.”

Some women have been given a quasi-fighter role as members of female police brigades that enforce the Islamic State’s regulations, especially on women’s dress and activities. Others have reportedly been used to help search women at checkpoints.

But, according to the Islamic State manifesto, women will be placed in fighting roles only if a religious fatwa is issued stating that the “situation for Muslims has become desperate.”

Neumann said the Islamic State inevitably would start using women as suicide bombers, as al-Qaeda, which gave rise to the Islamic State, did in Iraq. Already, there are signs that at least some women have suicide vests prepared in their homes.

According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue report, a woman calling herself Umm Khattab wrote on Twitter in December about hearing gunshots in Raqqa and being afraid her home was about to be attacked.

She wrote that she was so worried, “I put the belt on and everything.”

Inside the Azraq camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan.

Married, again and again

By definition, the Islamic State will nearly always be at war, as its stated aim is to establish a global caliphate by force. That means endless deaths of its fighters and countless young widows who will be encouraged to remarry again and again.

When a fighter is killed, his widow observes the traditional Islamic mourning period of four months and 10 days. After that, she is available to be married to another fighter.

Although many Islamic State marriages seem to be purely pragmatic arrangements for producing children, Saltman said that many also involve a deep attachment between husband and wife.

“There is a romantic, escapist element for many of these women,” Saltman said. “When you are younger, when you have lost your virginity to someone, had their child, they are your provider. It’s not the love we see in a Western teen movie, but this is an attachment to somebody. And it’s a very deep love in its own way.”

Photos by Charles Ommanney.

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’: ECONOMY
Where the poor starve and the tax man carries a whip

By Kevin Sullivan
October 1, 2015

Faten Humayda with her great-grandson. The family fled to Jordan from Syria. The Islamic State has brought stability and efficiency to local government in some areas, but residents face heavy taxes and severe shortages of food, electricity, medicine and other basic needs.

Before the Islamic State captured Faten Humayda’s town in northern Syria nearly two years ago, a tank of propane gas for her stove cost the equivalent of 50 cents. But as the militants settled in, the cost shot up to $32, forcing Humayda, a 70-year-old grandmother, to cook over an open fire in the back yard.

“It used to be paradise,” she said, describing her former life along the Euphrates River, while sitting in a metal hut in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, where she arrived in May with the help of smugglers.

The Islamic State has tried to do what al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups never attempted: establish an actual state, with government institutions and a functioning economy. Although the militants have had some success at governing, millions of people under their control find food, fuel and other basics of daily life either impossible to come by or too expensive to afford.

Interviews with more than three dozen people who live in militant-controlled areas or have recently fled them suggest that the Islamic State has created a two-tiered system in which local people struggle to eat, while Islamic State occupiers have free electricity and food, even imported goods such as Red Bull energy drinks.

Those interviewed said food is easier to find in areas where fruits and vegetables are grown or where farm animals are plentiful. But with traditional supply routes closed because of fighting, even basic items such as sugar or baby formula have to be smuggled in and are prohibitively expensive.

The situation is even worse because so many people are unemployed, those interviewed said. Factories and large stores have closed because their owners fled or because smuggled raw materials are not affordable.

Amina Mustafa Humaidi's husband, Ali, was killed by Islamic State militants.

“I would only cook lentils and rice. That’s all we had,” said Amina Mustafa Humaidi, 40, who recently fled the Syrian city of Raqqa with her family and now lives in the Azraq camp, one of about 20,000 refugees residing in the desert about 40 miles east of Amman.

She said her husband was shot dead by Islamic State militants last year. His family gave her an electric pressure cooker after he died, but she had only an hour a day of electricity.

“When the electricity came on, my God I used to rush to cook,” she said. “If I missed that hour, my kids couldn’t eat. We had a refrigerator, but couldn’t use it.”

Sitting on her concrete floor in the refugee camp, Humaidi said her youngest son was 9 months old when the militants came to Raqqa, and suddenly she could no longer find baby formula for him.

“The Islamic State did not bring order. It brought chaos,” she said.

The new rulers also seem opposed to humanitarian assistance from the outside world. In April, photos appeared on Islamic State Web sites showing the militants burning two 18-wheeler loads of chicken from the United States bound for victims of the Syrian civil war.

Inside the Azraq camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan.

Withering medical care

Medical care and medication are also in desperately short supply, and many hospitals treat only Islamic State members or assign the best staff and equipment to them, according to people interviewed in Iraq and Syria.

Many medical professionals fled as the Islamic State fighters arrived. Now, if doctors seek permission to travel outside militant-controlled areas, they are often required to have as many as five people guarantee their return, according to several people interviewed. The implication is that if they don’t come back, the friends and family members who vouched for them will be punished or killed.

In Mosul, a city of more than a million people in northern Iraq, doctors said they are coping with shortages of everything from radiologists to anesthesia and blood.

“Whatever difficulties you imagine, we have them,” said one female Iraqi doctor who works at a Mosul hospital.

She said the hospital no longer does preventive surgery, reserving resources for only life-saving operations. The constant power outages mean that the hospital relies on generators, but it is often hard to find fuel for them. No power for water pumps means no running water.

“Imagine a hospital without water,” the doctor said. “It’s as if we are living in the 18th century. I am trying to leave Mosul, but I have a good house from 25 years of work. I can’t leave my house; it’s the fruit of my life. But this is not a life.”

An effective government

To control the people it rules, the Islamic State has set up local governments that regulate services such as building permits and even fishing regulations. (Fishing with dynamite or electrical charges is now banned.)

In interviews, some people said government services had stopped, while others said that the Islamic State has improved them.

A cleric in the central Iraqi city of Fallujah, who was interviewed by telephone and who asked not to be identified for his safety, said that he opposed the militants but that they had established an effective government.

He said they had set up offices that issue marriage licenses and identification cards and that settle disputes. Islamic State-paid workers sweep the streets and have set up generators to power some street lights, he said.

They have established Islamic Sharia courts and a Hisbah office, a sort of religious police department.

“They observe prices; if anyone raises prices too much, they are punished,” the cleric said.

Several people interviewed said the previous Syrian and Iraqi governments were notorious for demanding bribes, while the Islamic State seems to have strict rules against its officials taking payoffs.

In Mosul, the militants posted a detailed notice about trash collection, instructing people to place their garbage in black plastic bags and to leave them outside for pickup just after evening prayers.

“Things are very well regulated,” said a businessman in Raqqa, interviewed via Skype, who grudgingly acknowledged that some of the engineers, architects and other skilled professionals who the militants have recruited from around the world have improved services.

“We no longer see garbage being thrown on the ground as it used to be before,” he said.

But others interviewed said the Islamic State militants were far more focused on fighting than on making daily life easier for ordinary people.

Video: Where does the Islamic State get its funding

Raising taxes

The Islamic State raises money from pilfered oil, plundered banks, extortion, kidnapping, selling antiquities on the black market — and from taxing local people.

Those interviewed said they used to pay between 2.5 percent and 10 percent of their income in zakat, a charitable contribution that Muslims make to support the poor. But they said the Islamic State now demands that zakat payments be made to it instead.

An activist from Raqqa who calls himself Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi said that zakat and other taxes and fees raised by the Islamic State are widely believed to be used to pay the salaries of Islamic State fighters and other foreigners who come to join the Islamic State. The foreigners pay no tax.

Humayda, the grandmother who fled from a village near Raqqa, said the militants took 10 percent of her family’s wheat crop, claiming that it was for the poor.

She said that once or twice a year, the Islamic State delivered a shipment of food to her village that everyone had to scramble for.

“I think they were trying to make us like them,” she said. “But then they whipped poor people for not paying their taxes.”

Photos by Charles Ommanney.

LIFE IN THE ‘ISLAMIC STATE’: EDUCATION
For boys, God and guns; for girls, God and cooking

By Kevin Sullivan
October 1, 2015

Yahyah Hadidi, 26, fled to Jordan from Manbij, Syria. Across their vast territory, Islamic State militants have closed most schools, banned “worthless” secular education, burned college diplomas and established military training for boys as young as 7.

War closed most schools in Yahyah Hadidi’s home town in 2013, as battles raged between Syrian rebels and the government.

Hadidi, a recent college graduate with a passion for education, decided to do something about it. He started conducting impromptu classes in an abandoned school in his neighborhood, drawing more than 50 boys and girls each day.

Then the Islamic State arrived in early 2014 and ordered all schools closed.

Hadidi was crushed, and he asked for permission to reopen his school, in the village of Manbij between the northern cities of Raqqa and Aleppo.

He said a large, bearded fighter from Saudi Arabia told him that if he wanted to teach, he could conduct religious education classes at the mosque, for boys only, under Islamic State supervision.

“I couldn’t do that,” said Hadidi, 26, who fled Syria in July with his wife and now lives in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan. “I wanted to educate children correctly, not brainwash them.”

The Islamic State has devastated public education for millions of children, compounding years of damage done by crippling wars in Syria and Iraq, according to interviews with more than three dozen people who live in militant-controlled territory or have fled recently.

According to Islamic State propaganda, primary school education is a pillar of daily life in the group’s self-declared caliphate. But those interviewed said the militants have virtually eliminated it.

The Islamic State has closed many public schools, they said. In some cases, they have reopened schools after retraining teachers and sharply refocusing the curriculum on the militants’ extreme interpretation of Islam. They have eliminated subjects such as music, art and geography.

The interviews suggest that the Islamic State has failed to attract much popular support for its education system, which appears to be largely separate and unequal. Local youths stay out of school, while foreign fighters send their children to institutions that indoctrinate them in Islamic State ideology.

Although it is impossible to independently verify those accounts, because the Islamic State does not permit journalists or other outside observers into its territory, they closely mirror the conclusions of analysts who study the Islamic State.

“The aim of the education system is to indoctrinate children,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College in London. “Every totalitarian movement, the Nazis or whatever, puts a lot of emphasis on indoctrinating young people and raising a new generation to create the fighting society that they want.”

The Islamic State is only part of the complex web of problems in Syria, but the militants have played a significant role in reversing decades of progress in public education. A report released in March by Save the Children found that public education enrollment had decreased to 50 percent from nearly 100 percent before the civil war started in 2011.

The Islamic State, known as Daesh in Arabic, has worked hard to get more local children to attend its religious schools — including using the “Daesh Bus.”

Hadidi said the militants drive through towns and villages in an old white bus. They use a loudspeaker to call children to come for a ride, and to watch cartoons on a big TV screen.

But when the kids get on, he said, the militants give them lectures on their extreme version of Islam and pass out pamphlets to give to their parents.

“This is very dangerous; our country is going to go backward 20 years,” Hadidi said. “Not only are our children not being educated, but they are being forced down the wrong path. We lived in a rural area, and it took us a long time to get poor farmers to send their kids to school. And now that culture is dying out.”

Mohammad Ahmed and his family fled to the Azraq camp from Deir al-Zour, Syria.

An education in war

Instead of learning to read and write, boys are learning to fight.

Many of those interviewed said the militants have military-style training camps for boys, who are mainly teenagers but also include many as young as 7 years old.

Hikmat al-Gaoud, 41, the former mayor of Hit, in Iraq’s Sunni-dominated Anbar province, said that the Islamic State set up a training camp for boys in an abandoned salt mine outside of town.

“They would take them there for three or four months to train them, and then they would come back as fighters,” he said in an interview in Amman, Jordan, one of the places where he has taken refuge. “In my neighborhood, everybody went, but my son refused.”

Gaoud said many Sunni boys in Anbar sign up to join the Islamic State because of their anger with the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, which they see as too closely linked to Shiite Iran. But some of those interviewed cited other reasons.

“For young people, it’s not really about ideology,” said Mohammad Ahmed, 43, who lived in the countryside near Raqqa, until he and his family fled to Jordan in June. “They see their friends join, and then they come back from training carrying AK-47s and wearing medals on their chest. They say, ‘My neighbor became something big, and I want to be something big, too.’ ”

Ahmed’s 14-year-old son, Ziad, said at least 50 boys from his school, which has been closed, have joined the militants.

“They love having their guns,” Ziad said.

Video: The fanatical cubs of the Islamic State

The Islamic State places little value on the education of girls, according to “Women of the Islamic State,” a manifesto written this year by the Al-Khanssaa Brigade, a sort of female religious police unit.

It scorns Westernized women who pursue “worthless worldly sciences . . . to study the brain cells of crows, grains of sand and the arteries of fish!”

The document stresses that women cannot fulfill their roles as wives and mothers if they are “illiterate or ignorant.” But it says girls’ education should last from ages 7 to 15 and focus on religion and “skills like textiles and knitting, basic cooking.”

Nabiha, 42, a mother from Raqqa interviewed in the Azraq refugee camp, said the militants found out that her sister’s daughter was studying at a university in a government-controlled area of the city of Homs. They confronted her sister and said they would execute her if her daughter did not return to Raqqa within 30 days.

“We all know these people have no mercy, so she called her daughter back home,” Nabiha said.

She said the militants also went door to door looking for people who had graduated from college.

“They gathered up their diplomas and burned them in a big fire,” she said.

Photos by Charles Ommanney.

From hip-hop to jihad, how the Islamic State became a magnet for converts

By Anthony Faiola and Souad Mekhennet
May 6, 2015

THE HAGUE — She was a redheaded rebel, the singer in the family, a trash-talking, tattooed 21-year-old wrapped up in a hip-hop dream of becoming Holland’s Eminem. Then Betsy found Allah.

After her sudden conversion to Islam last summer, Betsy — a name given by her family to protect her identity — began dressing in full Muslim robes. By January, the once-agnostic Dutch woman, raised in a home where the only sign of religion was a dusty Bible on a shelf, began defending homegrown terrorists. A feud with her father over her apparent radicalization prompted her to leave home — turning up days later, her parents and Dutch authorities now say, in Syria, where she would become the bride of an Islamic State fighter.

She also became part of a growing crisis in Europe, where a surging number of young people from non-Muslim homes are flocking to the Middle East to heed the call of violent jihad. It is happening, terror experts say, as converts emerge as some of the most dangerous and fanatical adherents to radical Islam — a fact driven home this week by Elton Simpson, a 30-year-old American convert who joined one other man in opening fire on a Garland, Tex., contest for cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

“I don’t blame Islam,” said Betsy’s mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her daughter. “I blame the people who made her believe in a radical way of life.”

As the Islamic State’s recruiting efforts have grown, concern in the West has largely centered on Europe’s entrenched Muslim communities — communities that have spawned more than 4,000 mostly young and socially isolated Muslims who have left to join Islamist militants fighting in Syria and Iraq. Once there, the new arrivals can transform into what intelligence officials call the most dangerous kind of radical: one with a Western passport.

Yet the Islamic State’s allure is hardly confined to traditional Muslim homes. In fact, as many as 1 in 6 Europeans joining the self-styled caliphate are converts to Islam from non-Muslim faiths including Christianity, as well as nonreligious backgrounds. In some countries, such as France, the ratio of converts among those leaving is significantly higher: about 1 in 4, according to European intelligence officials and terrorism experts.

The swell of converts happens as the Islamic State appears to be actively wooing them, using savvy social media outreach and recruitment drives. A number of female converts who have joined the Islamic State, for instance, have turned to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to encourage others to join. Increasingly, converts are being deployed in Islamic State propaganda aimed at the West, including videos for recruitment as well as for stirring fear.

In one video, for instance, Swedish convert Michael Nikolai Skramo — who grew up near Gothenburg and who European security officials believe moved with his wife and two children to Raqqa, Syria, in September — is shown calling, in Arabic and Swedish, for more Western fighters to join the Islamic State. “The door to jihad is standing there waiting for you,” he says. “It is the fastest way to paradise.”

In another Islamic State video released last year, several fighters — including “Jihadi John,” identified by The Washington Post as Mohammed Emwazi — were shown cutting the throats of captured Syrian pilots. At least one of the killers has been identified as Maxime Hauchard, a French convert to Islam from Normandy. And last month, a high-quality video released by the group graphically depicts its ruthless deeds as Denis Cuspert, a German hip-hop artist known as Deso Dogg who converted in 2010 and later joined the Islamic State, delivers a rap-like chant portraying the path to jihad as a chance for empowerment, spiritual fulfillment, vengeance and adventure.

Simpson — who, along with 34-year-old Nadir Soofi, was killed after opening fire on a security guard at the Texas event — was an Illinois-born homegrown radical who converted at a young age. His attorney described him as extremely devout, and U.S. officials think he and Soofi may have been inspired by the Islamic State.

Simpson was suspected previously by authorities of attempting to fly overseas to wage violent jihad, telling an FBI informant in May 2009, “It’s time to go to Somalia, brother,” later adding, “We gonna make it to the battlefield. . . . It’s time to roll,” according to court records.

Converts “are the most vulnerable because they do not yet fully understand Islam,” said Jamal Ahjjaj, an imam at As-Soennah Mosque in The Hague, where Betsy’s parents say she occasionally worshiped. “When we have religious classes for converts, sometimes there are people — the wrong people — waiting outside the mosque to greet them.”

Who are the converts?

In the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, cases of converted extremists have cropped up on both sides of the Atlantic and include the likes of Adam Gadahn, an American who rose through the ranks of al-Qaeda, and John Walker Lindh, another American who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet the number of converts streaming to aid the Islamic State, experts say, is far greater than in any other modern conflict in the Islamic world.

For Europe, in particular, the broad appeal of the Islamic State is rapidly morphing the group’s message of violence into a dangerous social problem at home, increasing the risk of homegrown terror and the chance that lost youths become indoctrinated into a perilous, cultlike lifestyle.

The profiles of converts joining the Islamic State often mirror that of Betsy. The child of divorced parents, she dropped out of school by age 14, was busted for shoplifting by 16 and was struggling with a drug problem at one point.

Here in the Netherlands, more than a dozen of those who have left for the Islamic State came, like Betsy, from the single largest pool of converts: young women. For instance, at As-Soennah Mosque, the heated national debate in the Netherlands over Islamist extremism has fueled a mini-boom in converts. Last year had the highest number, 97, since the mosque opened in 1993. Most were ages 19 to 21, and more than 70 percent were women. Many of them, mosque officials said, were dealing with problems at home.

“You find that a lot of the converts going to the Islamic State are girls, girls with problems, girls who have been prostitutes, girls with psychological and behavioral issues, sometimes borderline personalities,” said Marion van San, a senior researcher on foreign fighters at an institute affiliated with Erasmus University in Rotterdam. “Then someone comes along and promises that Allah is going to give them a second chance.”

Converts, experts say, also make easier targets. At least some tend to be lost souls searching for answers. For a minority of them, the radical ideology of the Islamic State is providing a heady sense of belonging, structure and a clear set of rules.

‘This is the way, brother’

A 30-year-old former convert to Islam who asked that his name be withheld because he has received death threats for leaving the faith and is still on parole after serving a prison sentence in the Netherlands on terrorism charges cited his own spiritual and political journey as an example. His first contact with Islam came after his parents divorced when he was a teenager and he began socializing with devout Muslim friends in the immigrant neighborhood where his alcoholic father had relocated.

“I noticed they had all the answers,” he said. “They offered me what I was looking for.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, he followed a more radical path. He began surfing the Internet for information on the Taliban and found its absolutist worldview to be intoxicating. He began skipping school to read the Koran, spending more time studying the lives of “martyrs,” whose deaths in violent jihad had, he believed, paved their way to paradise. He left his moderate mosque for a more conservative one and quickly met a Dutch Moroccan extremist in the Netherlands who would further radicalize him.

Soon he was on a plane to Pakistan to train in a terrorist camp. After his arrest and deportation to the Netherlands, he connected again with a group of homegrown radicals whom he had known before, some of whom were advocating domestic terrorist attacks akin to the 2004 killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Not knowing that his home was under police surveillance, the convert agreed to store a cache of hand grenades in an apartment. When the hideout was stormed, he threw a grenade at police. “I wanted to die in bullets and go to paradise,” he said.

But he was apprehended alive. And during 8 1/2 years in prison, he began clearing his head of radical notions by, “of all things,” reading the works of Plato and by putting his faith in science and philosophy instead of religion. He emerged, he said, as if from a dream, shedding the hold that Islamist thought had over him.

Although he abandoned his adopted faith, his radicalization left a painful legacy in the form of his younger bother. The 30-year-old had helped to convert him years earlier, and, as the older brother sat in jail, the younger one maintained his associations with radicals, growing increasingly extreme. Three months ago, the 30-year-old said, his brother left the Netherlands for Syria to join the Islamic State.

“Dutch parents tend to be very liberal. They aren’t giving clear answers to what’s right and wrong, so some of us go looking for answers elsewhere,” the older brother said. “You don’t understand what it’s like when you meet someone who can set aside all your doubts and has convincing arguments and tells you, ‘This is the way, brother, and all you have to do is follow it.’ ”

Such transformations, like Betsy’s, can occur before parents understand what is happening.

‘Looking for something’

In the fall of 2013, a slightly awkward redhead with thick Poindexter glasses took the stage at “The Next MC” — a contest show like “American Idol” for aspiring hip-hop artists in the Netherlands. A YouTube video shows Betsy, with her long locks in cornrows and sporting a navy blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “b----,” rapping in Dutch to an insouciant crowd.

“You try to be tough, but you aren’t,” one of the judges tells her. “You are really a sweet girl.”

That was the Betsy her parents knew.

They divorced when she was still a child, so Betsy grew up between homes, initially living with her mother. After her mother suffered a serious illness, Betsy moved in with her father. By then, she was a teenager hanging with a tough crowd, experimenting with drugs and running afoul of the law. She got a tattoo on her middle finger — “C’est la vie” — to accentuate her point when flipping the bird.

Still, her father, Pete, 53, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used, said, “She had a softness about her.” And he sensed a change for the better brewing in 2013. She had sought out the old Bible he kept on a shelf. “She was looking for something, I don’t know what, but some kind of peace,” he said.

The precise timing of her leap from aspiring rapper to Islamic State bride is somewhat unclear. But in 2013, she started a relationship with a young Dutch Turkish man who, according to people familiar with the situation, had left for Syria in 2014 to join the Islamic State. That same year, a close friend of Betsy’s who had converted to Islam, began introducing her to the faith, Betsy’s parents said.

Betsy, said her mother, contacted another Dutch convert in 2014 who had left for Syria that year with a former boyfriend, whom she married. Betsy also began to attend special events with a small Muslim prayer group that was not sanctioned by the local mosque and that her parents think included radical voices that wooed their daughter into extremism.

In a religious ceremony late last year, she married a Syrian man but left him only days later, claiming he was “too soft” a Muslim.

Yet the timing of her departure, Betsy’s family thinks, appeared spontaneous — a choice born of anger following the blowup at home after she defended the Islamist shooters who went on a rampage in Paris. After the family had heard nothing from her for days, Betsy finally sent a text to her father.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Where do you think,” she replied, “in Syria.”

“No!!!” he texted back.

“Don’t pretend that you care,” she answered.

Her parents later found evidence on a computer that she had cashed in her savings and booked travel to Turkey. An arranged contact met her in Istanbul and took her by bus to the Syrian border, which she eventually crossed. Dutch authorities declined to comment on her case beyond confirming that they think she is still in Syria. She has told her parents that she is now the bride of a Dutch Moroccan national fighting for the Islamic State and that she spends most of her time learning Arabic and studying the Koran.

Her parents now live for her texts, which come once a week at best, apparently during rare times when she has an Internet connection. She has relocated from place to place, her parents said, because of bombing campaigns. A photo that she recently sent them shows her in a flowing blue niqab, in a room with a Middle Eastern-style wood-burning oven. But something about her face seemed different, Pete said.

“You can see there is no innocence left,” he said. “I look at that hard expression, and I cannot see my baby girl.”

Graphic: The Islamic State's atrocities

Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine

By Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet
November 20, 2015

RABAT, MOROCCO — The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of the Islamic State, the seal of the terrorist group’s media emir, and the site of that day’s shoot.

“The paper just gives you the location,” never the details, said Abu Hajer al-Maghribi, who spent nearly a year as a cameraman for the Islamic State. Sometimes the job was to film prayers at a mosque, he said, or militants exchanging fire. But, inevitably, a slip would come with the coordinates to an unfolding bloodbath.

For Abu Hajer, that card told him to drive two hours southwest of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the capital of the caliphate, or Islamic realm, declared by the militant group. There, he discovered that he was among 10 cameramen sent to record the final hours of more than 160 Syrian soldiers captured in 2014.

“I held my Canon camera,” he said, as the soldiers were stripped to their underwear, marched into the desert, forced to their knees and massacred with automatic rifles.

His footage quickly found a global audience, released online in an Islamic State video that spread on social media and appeared in mainstream news coverage on Al Jazeera and other networks.

Abu Hajer, who is now in prison in Morocco, is among more than a dozen Islamic State defectors or members in several countries who provided detailed accounts to The Washington Post of their involvement in, or exposure to, the most potent propaganda machine ever assembled by a terrorist group.

What they described resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan out across the caliphate every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards.

Cameras, computers and other video equipment arrive in regular shipments from Turkey. They are delivered to a media division dominated by foreigners — including at least one American, according to those interviewed — whose production skills often stem from previous jobs they held at news channels or technology companies.

Senior media operatives are treated as “emirs” of equal rank to their military counterparts. They are directly involved in decisions on strategy and territory. They preside over hundreds of videographers, producers and editors who form a privileged, professional class with status, salaries and living arrangements that are the envy of ordinary fighters.

“It is a whole army of media personnel,” said Abu Abdullah al-Maghribi, a second defector who served in the Islamic State’s security ranks but had extensive involvement with its propaganda teams.

“The media people are more important than the soldiers,” he said. “Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They have the power to encourage those inside to fight and the power to bring more recruits to the Islamic State.”

Increasingly, that power extends beyond the borders of the caliphate. The attacks in Paris were carried out by militants who belonged to a floating population of Islamic State followers, subjects who are scattered among dozens of countries and whose attachments to the group exist mainly online.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged architect of the attacks who was killed in a raid in France, had appeared repeatedly in Islamic State recruiting materials. The barrage of videos and statements released afterward made clear that the overriding goal of the Islamic State is not merely to inflict terror on an adversary but also to command a global audience.

The United States and its allies have found no meaningful answer to this propaganda avalanche. A State Department program to counter the caliphate’s messaging has cycled through a series of initiatives with minimal effect. Islamic State supporters online have repeatedly slipped around efforts to block them on Twitter and Facebook.

Overmatched online, the United States has turned to lethal force. Recent U.S. airstrikes have killed several high-level operatives in the Islamic State’s media division, including Junaid Hussain, a British computer expert. FBI Director James B. Comey recently described the propaganda units of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS, as military targets.

“I am optimistic that the actions of our colleagues in the military to reduce the supply of ISIL tweeters will have an impact,” Comey said at an event last month in Washington. “But we’ll have to watch that space and see.”

Research for this article involved interviews with Islamic State defectors and members, as well as security officials and counterterrorism experts in six countries on three continents. The most authoritative accounts came from seven Islamic State defectors who were either in prison in Morocco or recently released after facing terrorism charges upon their return from Syria. All spoke on the condition that they be identified only by the adopted names that they used in Syria.

Those interviews were conducted with the permission of the Moroccan government in the administrative wing of a prison complex near the nation’s capital. The prisoners said they spoke voluntarily after being approached by Moroccan authorities on behalf of The Post. Other prisoners declined. Most of the interviews took place in the presence of security officials, an arrangement that probably led participants to play down their roles in the Islamic State but seemed to have little effect on their candor in describing the caliphate’s media division.

The cameraman

Abu Hajer, a soft-spoken Moroccan with a thin beard and lean physique, said he had been active in jihadist media circles for more than a decade before he entered Syria in 2013. He began participating in online Islamist forums after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he said, and later became an administrator of an influential site known as Shamukh, giving him authority to admit new members and monitor the material other militants posted.

Those credentials cleared his path to coveted assignments within the Islamic State, a group that began as al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq before splitting off from that terrorist network in an ideological rupture two years ago.

The group has an elaborate system for evaluating and training new arrivals. Abu Hajer said that shortly after entering Syria he was groomed to be part of the Islamic State’s media team. He spent two months undergoing basic military training before he was admitted to a special, month-long program for media operatives.

The program “specializes in how to do filming. How to mix footage. How to get the right voice and tone” in interviews, he said. After completing the course, he was given a Canon camera, a Samsung Galaxy smartphone and an assignment with the caliphate’s media unit in Raqqa.

Abu Hajer, who is in his mid-30s, had come from an impoverished corner of Morocco. Now that he is in prison, his wife and children have returned to the encampment where they lived before departing, a shanty village of corrugated tin and plywood with no running water near a cement plant on the outskirts of Rabat.

In Syria, they were given a villa with a garden. Abu Hajer was issued a car, a Toyota Hilux with four-wheel drive to enable him to reach remote assignments. He was also paid a salary of $700 a month — seven times the sum paid to typical fighters — plus money for food, clothes and equipment. He said he was also excused from the taxes that the Islamic State imposes on most of its subjects.

He quickly settled into a routine that involved getting his work assignments each morning on pieces of paper that also served as travel documents enabling him to pass Islamic State checkpoints. Most jobs were mundane, such as capturing scenes from markets or celebrations of Muslim holidays.

Abu Hajer said he encountered only one Western hostage, John Cantlie, a British war correspondent who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012. Cantlie was cast by his captors in a series of BBC-style news reports that touted the caliphate’s bustling economies and adherence to Islamic law while mocking Western governments.

Abu Hajer said he filmed Cantlie in Mosul in 2014, and he said that by then the British broadcaster was no longer wearing an orange jumpsuit or confined to a darkened room and was allowed to wander among the markets and streets of Mosul for camera crews.

“I cannot tell you whether he was coerced or threatened. He was walking freely,” Abu Hajer said, an assertion that is at odds with what is known about Cantlie’s captivity.

A video released in January shows Cantlie in multiple locations in Mosul, including one in which he is riding a motorcycle with an armed militant seated behind him. It was among his final appearances before the series was halted with no explanation or subsequent indication of Cantlie’s fate, although articles attributed to him have since appeared in the caliphate’s magazine.

One of Abu Hajer’s next assignments took him to an elaborately staged scene of carnage, a mass execution-style killing choreographed for cameras in a way that has become an Islamic State signature.

After arriving at the site, he said that he and the other camera operators gathered to “organize ourselves so that we wouldn’t all film [from] the same perspective.”

Abu Hajer said he had grave objections to what happened to the Syrian soldiers in the massacre that he filmed in the desert near Tabqa air base. But he acknowledged that his misgivings had more to do with how the soldiers were treated — and whether that comported with Islamic law — than any concern for their fates.

As the soldiers were stripped and marched into the desert, Abu Hajer said he filmed from the window of his car as an Egyptian assistant drove alongside the parade of condemned men.

“When the group stopped, I got out,” he said. “They were told to kneel down. Some soldiers got shot. Others were beheaded.” The video, still available online, shows multiple camera operators moving in and out of view as Islamic State operatives fire hundreds of rounds.

“It wasn’t the killing of soldiers that I was against,” Abu Hajer said. “They were Syrian soldiers, Nusairis,” he said, referring to the religious sect to which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his closest supporters belong. “I thought they deserved to get shot.”

“What I didn’t like was that they were stripped to their underwear,” he said, an indignity that he considered an affront to Islamic law.

Abu Hajer also said he kept his lens aimed away from the beheadings because of his objections to the practice. But asked whether he considered refusing to record the massacre, he said he feared that would consign him to the fate of those he filmed.

“You don’t want to do it,” he said, “but you know that you cannot say, ‘No.’ ”

The machine

The contradictions of the Islamic State’s propaganda apparatus can make its structure and strategy seem incoherent.

The group exerts extraordinarily tight control over the production of its videos and messages but relies on the chaos of the Internet and social media to disseminate them. Its releases cluster around seemingly incompatible themes: sometimes depicting the caliphate as a peaceful and idyllic domain, other times as a society awash in apocalyptic violence.

The dual messages are designed to influence a divided audience. The beheadings, immolations and other spectacles are employed both to menace Western adversaries and to appeal to disenfranchised Muslim males weighing a leap into the Islamist fray.

A separate collection depicts the Islamic State as a livable destination, a benevolent state committed to public works. Videos show the construction of public markets, smiling religious police on neighborhood patrols and residents leisurely fishing on the banks of the Euphrates.

Even the concept of the caliphate has a dual aspect. The terrorist group’s rise is a result mainly of its demonstrated military power and the tangible territory it has seized. But a remarkable amount of its energy is devoted to creating an alternative, idealized version of itself online and shaping how that virtual empire is perceived.

That project has been entrusted to a media division that was operational well before the caliphate was formally declared in 2014. U.S. intelligence officials said they have little insight into who controls the Islamic State’s propaganda strategy, although it is presumed to be led by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the caliphate’s main spokesman.

The media wing has relied on veterans of al-Qaeda media teams, young recruits fluent in social media platforms, and a bureaucratic discipline reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. Defectors and current members said that phones and cameras they brought to Syria were impounded upon arrival by the Islamic State to prevent unauthorized and potentially unflattering images from finding their way online.

Only sanctioned crew members were allowed to carry cameras, and even they were to follow strict guidelines on the handling of their material. Once finished with a day’s shooting, the crews were to load their recordings onto laptops, transfer the footage to memory sticks, then deliver those to designated drop sites.

In an Islamic State enclave near Aleppo, the media division’s headquarters was a two-story home in a residential neighborhood, defectors said. The site was protected by armed guards, and only those with permission from the regional emir were allowed to enter.

Each floor had four rooms packed with cameras, computers and other high-end equipment, said Abu Abdullah, 37, who made occasional visits to the site as a security and logistics operative. Internet access went through a Turkish wireless service.

The house served as an editorial office of Dabiq, the Islamic State’s glossy online magazine. Some also worked for al-Furqan, the terrorist group’s main media wing, which accounts for the majority of its videos and mass-audience statements.

Overall, there were more than 100 media operatives assigned to the unit, Abu Abdullah said. “Some of them were hackers; some were engineers.”

Images from the Islamic State media obtained by The Washington Post are seen in screen grabs taken from the mobile messaging service Telegram, a promotional and recruitment platform for Islamic State.

Abu Abdullah had no affiliation with the media arm, but he often did its bidding. At one point he was tapped to install a generator at the media headquarters so that it would not lose power when electricity went down.

Another assignment involved recovering corpses from battle scenes and arranging them to be photographed for propaganda videos exalting their sacrifice. He would wash away dried blood, lift the corners of dead fighters’ mouths into beatific smiles, and raise their index fingers in a gesture adopted by the Islamic State as a symbol of its cause.

Many in the American public were introduced to the Islamic State through wrenching videos in which Mohammed Emwazi — a masked, knife-wielding militant with a British accent known as “Jihadi John” — slit the throats of Western hostages, including Americans James Foley and Steve Sotloff.

Scrutiny of those and other videos revealed an extraordinary level of choreography. Discrepancies among frames showed that scenes had been rehearsed and shot in multiple takes over many hours.

The releases showed professional-caliber attention to lighting, sound and camera positioning. Certain videos, including one showing a decapitated American Peter Kassig, appear to have employed special effects software to digitally impose images of Kassig and his killer against a dramatic backdrop.

Those production efforts were reserved for videos aimed at mass Western audiences and were addressed explicitly to President Obama. But defectors said that even internal events not intended for a global viewership were similarly staged.

Abu Abdullah said he had witnessed a public execution-style killing in the city of Bab in which a propaganda team presided over almost every detail. They brought a white board scrawled with Arabic script to serve as an off-camera cue card for the public official charged with reciting the condemned man’s alleged crimes. The hooded executioner raised and lowered his sword repeatedly so that crews could catch the blade from multiple angles.

The beheading took place only when the camera crew’s director said it was time to proceed. The execution wasn’t run by the executioner, Abu Abdullah said. “It’s the media guy who says when they are ready.”

The brand

For two decades, the dominant brand in militant Islam was al-Qaeda. But the Islamic State has eclipsed it in the span of two years by turning the older network’s propaganda playbook on its head.

Al-Qaeda’s releases always exalted its leaders, particularly Osama bin Laden. But the Islamic State’s propaganda is generally focused on its fighters and followers. Appearances by leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or his senior lieutenants have been rare.

Rejecting the lecture format employed by al-Qaeda, the Islamic State’s videos are cinematic, emphasizing dramatic scenes, stylized transitions and special effects.

“The group is very image-conscious, much like a corporation,” said a U.S. intelligence official involved in monitoring the Islamic State’s media operations. Its approach to building its brand is so disciplined, the official said, “that it’s very much like saying ‘This is Coca-Cola’ or ‘This is Nike.’ ”

The propaganda competition with al-Qaeda is a high priority, defectors said. One former Islamic State fighter said that he came under enormous pressure from the organization after it learned that his father had been a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative killed in Pakistan in a CIA drone strike.

Islamic State media figures pushed the recruit to appear in a video renouncing his father’s organization, said the son, who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his father be identified. His refusal, and reluctance to fight al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, damaged his standing in the Islamic State, and he said he fled in fear for his life.

Al-Qaeda has typically required extraordinary patience from its audience. Even its most media-savvy affiliate, the al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, often takes months to release new issues of its online magazine, Inspire.

The frequency and volume of releases by the Islamic State are staggering by comparison. The group has produced hundreds of videos in more than a half-dozen languages, puts out daily radio broadcasts and garners as many as 2 million mentions per month on Twitter.

Twitter and Facebook have moved to shut down accounts associated with the Islamic State and ban the distribution of its messages, but users have found ways to resurface. Thousands of loyalists have also flocked to new services that are less vulnerable to government scrutiny, including Telegram, a messaging application created by a Russian software entrepreneur, although Telegram began shutting down Islamic State channels after the Paris attacks.

The Islamic State has also exploited apparent connections to news organizations in the Middle East. A video that surfaced in 2013 appeared to show an Al Jazeera correspondent working with a cameraman, Reda Seyam, a militant who had been linked to terrorist plots and is a senior figure in the Islamic State.

In a comprehensive examination of the terrorist group’s media releases in the summer, Charlie Winter, until recently an analyst at the Quilliam Group in the United Kingdom, identified 1,146 distinct pieces of propaganda, including photos, videos and audio releases, during a single month-long stretch.

Winter counted as many as 36 separate media offices that answer to the Islamic State’s headquarters in Raqqa — including affiliates in Libya, Afghanistan and West Africa — and saw evidence of extraordinary coordination across the network.

At one point during his study, on July 19, he noticed that every affiliate had simultaneously shifted to a new logo with the same stylized Arabic script. The icon appeared in the same location on every image and in the initial frame of every video release.

“There was clearly a communique issued,” Winter said in an interview. “The Islamic State is constantly striving to be as formalized, as bureaucratic-seeming as possible, to keep up the appearance of being a state.”

That effort to simulate legitimacy is particularly pervasive inside the caliphate.

The same videos employed to shock outsiders are used internally to cow the group’s less enthusiastic subjects. A constant stream of utopian messages is designed to convince residents, in Soviet-style fashion, of the superiority of the Islamic State.

While Internet access is often restricted to the public, propaganda units set up giant viewing screens in neighborhoods where residents come out in the evenings to watch approved videos streamed from laptops.

“It’s like a movie theater,” said Abu Hourraira al-Maghribi, a 23-year-old with a shaved head who wore an Adidas hoodie when he met with reporters in prison. The videos are drawn from the Islamic State’s expanding film library, he said, depicting “daily life, [military] training and beheadings.”

The Islamic State’s most notorious videos — including those showing the beheadings of Western hostages and the burning of a caged Jordanian fighter pilot — were shown over and over, he said, long after their audiences beyond the caliphate dissipated.

Abu Hourraira said he attended one screening on a street near the University of Mosul that attracted about 160 people, including at least 10 women and 15 children. One of the videos showed an execution by Emwazi, who is believed to have been killed this month in a U.S. drone strike.

“The kids, they are not looking away — they are fascinated by it,” Abu Hourraira said. Jihadi John became a subject of such fascination that some children started to mimic his uniform, he said, wearing all “black and a belt with a little knife.”

The Americans

The Islamic State maintains strict bureaucratic boundaries within its media wing. Camera crews were kept separate from the teams of producers and editors who stitched the raw footage together, adding titles, effects and soundtracks. Real names were almost never exchanged.

But Abu Hajer and two other defectors said that an American in his late 30s with white skin and dark-but-graying hair was a key player in some of the Islamic State’s most ambitious videos.

“The American does the editing,” Abu Hajer said, and was the creative force behind a 55-minute documentary called “Flames of War” that was released in late 2014. The film strives to create a mythology surrounding the Islamic State’s origin and connection to the historic Muslim caliphate.

It culminates with scenes of Syrian soldiers digging their own graves while a masked fighter, speaking English with a North American accent, warns that “the flames of war are only beginning to intensify.”

Another American-sounding figure surfaced more recently, delivering daily news broadcasts that appear to emanate from a radio station that the Islamic State overran last year in Mosul. After the attacks in Paris, his voice was the one that most English-speaking audiences heard describing France as “the capital of prostitution and vice” and warning that governments involved in strikes in Syria “will continue to be at the top of the target list.”

U.S. officials said they have been unable to determine the identity of that speaker or others with North American accents. The militant who appeared in the “Flames of War” film remains the subject of an entry on the FBI’s Web site appealing to the public for help identifying him.

The defectors

The Islamic State’s relentless media campaign has fueled a global migration of militants. More than 30,000 foreign fighters from more than 115 countries have flooded into Syria since the start of that country’s civil war. At least a third arrived within the past year, the vast majority of them to join the Islamic State, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.

Of the defectors interviewed by The Post, all but one said their decisions to leave for Syria could be traced to videos they saw online, or encounters on social media, that ignited a jihadist impulse. The only outlier said that he had been prodded by a friend to come to Syria and was promptly imprisoned for refusing to fight.

Abu Hourraira, who spent months fighting in Iraq, said he began searching online for material about the Islamic State as the group began to dominate headlines about the war in Syria. He decided to abandon his job at a dry-cleaning business in Casablanca only after watching the group’s emotionally charged videos.

“Some were like Van Damme movies,” he said, referring to Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Hollywood action star. “You see these men fighting, and you want to be one of these brave heroes.”

Like many countries in the region, Morocco has struggled to offset that pull. Moroccan security officials said that more than 1,500 men had left the country to fight in Iraq and Syria, plus more than 500 women and children, many of them seeking to join their spouses, sons or fathers.

Several of the attackers in Paris, including the alleged architect, were of Moroccan descent, but were born and grew up in Europe.

“The fight now is with the propaganda because it plays a very big role in these numbers,” said a senior Moroccan security official who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his agency be identified. Al-Qaeda recruitment relied almost exclusively on direct contact in mosques or other settings, he said, but “now, 90 percent are being recruited online.”

Defectors offered conflicting views on whether the Islamic State would endure. Some said that a cohort of young males in Iraq and Syria are already coming of age immersed in the group’s propaganda and ideology, and that a generation of children was being raised to idealize its masked militants.

But all attributed their decisions to leave Iraq and Syria to a combination of factors, including not only fears for their safety but also a disenchantment that set in when the reality of the caliphate failed to match the version they had encountered online.

Some said they were haunted by scenes of cruelty they saw firsthand but that Islamic State propaganda teams edited out. Abu Abdullah, who wore a hood to disguise his identity during an interview, said he witnessed a mass killing near Aleppo in which Islamic State fighters fired into a crowd of Alawites including women and children.

When a 10-year-old boy emerged alive, the highest-ranking militant on hand “pulled out a gun and shot him,” Abu Abdullah said. The slaying was recorded by the ever-present camera crews, he said, but the footage “was never aired.”

Abu Hajer, the former cameraman, said his standing with the group began to slip when he became involved in helping to administer the Islamic State’s religious courts. After sharing views that he said were at odds with his superiors, the perks of his media position were withdrawn.

“They took away my weapons, my monthly income,” as well as his villa and car, he said. A relative told a Post reporter that Abu Hajer finally pulled his family out of Syria after he had received a warning in which an Islamic State militant dragged a finger across his throat.

A sympathetic colleague gave Abu Hajer the paperwork he needed to pass Islamic State checkpoints on the way out of Syria, he said. Another friend gave him cash to put his family on a flight out of Turkey. Moroccan authorities were waiting for him at the Casablanca airport.

He now shares a crowded cell with other militants in a high-walled Moroccan prison, with two years remaining on a three-year sentence. Asked whether he worries that his work will induce others to join the Islamic State, he gave an equivocal answer. “To a certain extent I feel responsible,” he said. “But I am not the main reason.”

His videos continue to circulate online.

Video: Why the Islamic State propaganda arm is more important than its fighters

Graphic: The propaganda wars since 9/11

Why the Islamic State leaves tech companies torn between free speech and security

By Scott Higham and Ellen Nakashima
July 16, 2015

When a lone terrorist slaughtered 38 tourists at a Tunisian resort on June 26, the Islamic State turned to one of America’s leading social-media companies to claim responsibility and warn of more attacks on the world’s nonbelievers.

“It was a painful strike and a message stained with blood,” the Islamic State announced on Twitter following the massacre in Sousse, a popular destination for Europeans on the Mediterranean. “Let them wait for the glad tidings of what will harm them in the coming days, Allah permitting.”

Three days before the assault, the Islamic State relied on another popular U.S. social-media platform, Google’s YouTube, to promote a grisly propaganda video of three separate mass killings. Men accused of cooperating with U.S.-coordinated airstrikes in Iraq and Syria are seen being incinerated in a car, drowned in a cage lowered into a swimming pool and decapitated by explosive necklaces looped around their necks.

Versions of it would remain on YouTube, even as company executives proclaimed during an international advertising festival that week in Cannes, France, that Google would not provide a “distribution channel for this horrible, but very newsworthy, terrorist propaganda.”

As the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, continues to hold large parts of Iraq and Syria and inspire terrorist attacks in more and more countries, it has come to rely upon U.S. social-media companies to summon fresh recruits to its cause, spread its propaganda and call for attacks, according to counterterrorism analysts.

“We also have to acknowledge that ISIL has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world, including here in the United States,” President Obama said July 6 at the Pentagon. “So the United States will continue to do our part, by working with partners to counter ISIL’s hateful propaganda, especially online.”

The social-media savvy of the militant group is raising difficult questions for many U.S. firms: how to preserve global platforms that offer forums for expression while preventing groups such as the Islamic State from exploiting those free-speech principles to advance their terrorist campaign.

“ISIS has been confronting us with these really inhumane and atrocious images, and there are some people who believe if you type ‘jihad’ or ‘ISIS’ on YouTube, you should get no results,” Victoria Grand, Google’s director of policy strategy, told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “We don’t believe that should be the case. Actually, a lot of the results you see on YouTube are educational about the origins of the group, educating people about the dangers and violence. But the goal here is how do you strike a balance between enabling people to discuss and access information about ISIS, but also not become the distribution channel for their propaganda?”

Some lawmakers and government officials say the companies are not going far enough.

“They are being exploited by terrorists,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin said in a recent interview. “I think there is recognition now that there is a problem, and so we’re starting to see people at the companies address additional resources. But more needs to be done because we’re still seeing the threat, and the threat is increasing, not decreasing.

U.S. technology companies “are being exploited by terrorists,” says Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin, who was interviewed last month at the Justice Department in Washington. (Brittany Greeson/The Washington Post)

“It’s not a problem just here in the United States. I think they’re hearing it from governments and customers from throughout the world.”

A field analysis in May by the Department of Homeland Security warns that the Islamic State’s use of social media is broadening the terrorist group’s reach.

“ISIL leverages social media to propagate its message and benefits from thousands of organized supporters globally online, primarily on Twitter, who seek to legitimize its actions while burnishing an image of strength and power,” according to the analysis. “The influence is underscored by the large number of reports stemming from social media postings.”

In Europe, some governments are requiring social-media companies to block or remove terror-related posts.

Earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill that would require social-media companies to alert federal authorities when they become aware of terrorist-related content on their sites. The bill is designed to provide law enforcement agencies with information about potential terror plots. It would not require firms to monitor any users or their communications.

Putting more pressure on the social-media companies, a U.N. panel last month called on the firms to respond to accusations that their sites are being exploited by the Islamic State and other groups.

In the United States, government regulation of speech, regardless of how offensive or hateful, is generally held to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The social-media companies — each with its own culture, mission and philosophy — have been governing how and when to block or remove terror-related content.

The revelations of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about U.S. government surveillance have also made the tech companies wary of cooperating with Washington.

Facebook has been the most aggressive of the large social-media companies when it comes to taking down terror-related content. The company has adopted a zero tolerance policy and, unlike other social-media companies, proactively removes posts related to terrorist organizations. Facebook also relies on its users to alert the company to posts that promote or celebrate terrorism and hires screeners to review content that might violate its standards.

“We don’t allow praise or support of terror groups or terror acts, anything that’s done by these groups and their members,” said Monika Bickert, a former federal prosecutor who heads global policy management for Facebook.

Of all the large social-media companies, Twitter has been the most outspoken about protecting freedom of speech on its platform. Still, the company recently updated its abuse policy, stating that users may not threaten or promote terrorism.

“Twitter continues to strongly support freedom of expression and diverse perspectives,” according to a statement by a Twitter official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of recent death threats against employees by Islamic State supporters. “But it also has clear rules governing what is permissible. . . . The use of Twitter by violent extremist groups to threaten horrific acts of depravity and violence is of grave concern and against our policies, period.”

Another challenge for the companies: It is often difficult to distinguish between communiques from terrorist groups and posts by news organizations and legitimate users. Internet freedom advocates also note that much of what groups such as the Islamic State are posting can be seen as part of the historical record — even though many of the photographs and videos are horrific.

They point to the memorable 1968 Associated Press photograph of South Vietnam’s national police commander shooting a suspected Viet Cong fighter in the head on a Saigon street. They wonder how that Pulitzer Prize-winning image, which came to symbolize the chaos and brutality of the Vietnam War, would be handled in the age of social media and modern digital warfare.

“You want to live in a world where people have access to news — in other words, documentary evidence of what is actually happening,” said Andrew McLaughlin, a former Google executive and chief U.S. technology officer who now is a partner in the tech and media start-up firm Betaworks in New York. “And an ISIS video of hostages being beheaded is both an act of propaganda and is itself a fact. And so if you’re a platform, you don’t want to suppress the facts. On the other hand, you don’t want to participate in advancing propaganda.

“And there is the conundrum.”

‘Pure evil’

Before the rise of social media, many of the three dozen video and audio messages Osama bin Laden issued before his death were recorded in remote locations, smuggled out by couriers, and aired on what was then a largely unknown television station based in Qatar called Al Jazeera. Weeks could pass between the time when bin Laden spoke and when he was heard.

Al-Qaeda operatives communicated through password-protected forums and message boards on the Internet. Access was tightly controlled.

“It was a different time,” said Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, which tracks online communications of terrorist organizations. “The jihadi groups decided what could be posted and released. Twitter became the way around the forums. It became the Wild West of jihad.”

Before his death, bin Laden had come to recognize the revolution that followed the launch of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006.

“The wide-scale spread of jihadist ideology, especially on the Internet, and the tremendous number of young people who frequent the Jihadist Web sites [are] a major achievement for jihad,” bin Laden wrote in a May 2010 letter that was later found by U.S. Special Operations forces inside his Pakistan compound.

Al-Shabab, a militant group in Somalia allied with al-Qaeda, became one of the first terrorist organizations to use Twitter for both propaganda and command and control during an attack, according to terrorism analysts. The group set up Twitter accounts under al-Shabab’s media wing, called HMS Press.

In September 2013, al-Shabab attracted worldwide attention when it live-tweeted a terror attack it carried out at the upscale Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.

“What Kenyans are witnessing at #Westgate is retributive justice for crimes committed by their military, albeit minuscule in nature,” HMS Press tweeted. A short time later, the group posted another tweet: “Since our last contact, the Mujahideen inside the mall confirmed to @HMS_Press that they killed over 100 Kenyan kuffar & battle is ongoing.”

In the end, more than 60 people were killed and an additional 175 wounded. Twitter took down those accounts that day, marking one of the first times the company removed material posted by a terrorist organization. But al-Shabab quickly created new Twitter accounts under different names — illustrating both the utility of the platform and the difficulty of policing it.

The attack and how it played out in real time inspired terrorists around the world.

“We must make every effort to reach out to Muslims both through new media like Facebook and Twitter,” Adam Gadahn, an American-born al-Qaeda propagandist, proclaimed in a 2013 interview. (In January, he was killed in a U.S. strike.)

The Islamic State has gone on to make Twitter one of its most important tools.

FBI Director James B. Comey testified to Congress this month about how the Islamic State is reaching out through Twitter to about 21,000 English-language followers. The group’s message, he said, is, “Come to the so-called caliphate and live the life of some sort of glory or something; and if you can’t come, kill somebody where you are; kill somebody in uniform; kill anybody; if you can cut their head off, great; videotape it; do it, do it, do it.” He described it as “a devil on their shoulder all day long, saying: Kill, kill, kill, kill.”

Comey also said that Twitter has become “particularly aggressive at shutting down and trying to stop ISIL-related sites. I think it led ISIL to threaten to kill their CEO, which helped them understand the problem in a better way.”

Others are not convinced.

“Twitter is providing a communication device, a loudspeaker for ISIS,” said Mark Wallace, a former U.S. ambassador who now runs the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit group that tracks terrorists and attempts to disrupt their online activities. “If you are promoting violence and a call to violence, you are providing material support. Twitter should be part of the solution. If not, they are part of the problem.”

At a Constitution Project dinner in April honoring Twitter for its leadership on First Amendment issues, Colin Crowell, the firm’s head of global public policy, acknowledged that Twitter has hosted “painful content” and content reflecting “terrorism, government repression” on its site. But, he said, “it is also a place where people can find . . . information, conversation and where empathy can be shared.”

The “key thing,” he said, “for us at Twitter is to recognize our role as the provider of this open platform for free expression . . . to recognize that that speech is not our own.”

It is “precisely because it’s not our own content that we feel we have a duty to respect and to defend those voices on the platform,” Crowell said. “The platform of any debate is neutral. The platform doesn’t take sides.”

In August 2014, the Islamic State uploaded a video on YouTube and other sites showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley.

A succession of other videotaped beheadings of Americans and Britons followed — Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, David Haines, Alan Henning — as well as the immolation of the Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh and the mass killings of Syrians, Kurds and Coptic Christians, among others.

Each slaying became a carefully orchestrated and slickly produced event.

“Pure evil,” President Obama called Kassig’s beheading.

For Facebook, the killings marked a turning point. The company made it easier for its 1.4 billion users — the largest in the world — to report content from suspected terrorist groups, and it began to aggressively remove their posts. The company also deployed teams of people around the world to review content that had been flagged as terrorist-related to determine whether the posts were in fact from terrorist groups in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

Facebook has banned terror-related content from its pages for more than five years. In March, the company updated its community standards, explicitly prohibiting posts that praise or celebrate terrorist organizations and their leaders.

Bickert, Facebook’s policy chief, said posts flagged by users are examined by “operations teams” of content reviewers stationed in four offices around the world.

“We want to make sure we’re keeping our community safe, and we’re not a tool for propaganda,” Bickert said. “On the other hand, we can see that people are . . . talking about ISIS and are concerned about ISIS, in part, because they’ve seen this imagery and it makes it very real to people. So none of these issues are easy.”

‘Good luck’

France’s interior minister was still reeling from the Jan. 7 terror attack on the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo when he attended a White House counterterrorism summit in February.

The Islamic State and al-Qaeda had turned the Paris attack that left 12 dead into a propaganda coup. The groups boasted about the killings on social media, transmitting images that included the fatal shooting of a police officer as he lay wounded on a sidewalk, raising his arm in surrender.

While in Washington, the French official, Bernard Cazeneuve, had lunch with then-U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Cazeneuve told Holder that he was planning to meet with executives of social-media companies in Silicon Valley the following day, hoping to persuade them to stop terrorists from using their sites for propaganda, recruitment and operational planning.

According to a French official, Cazeneuve asked Holder whether he had any advice before he left for California.

“Good luck,” the attorney general said.

Cazeneuve arrived in California on Feb. 20, where he met with executives of several social-media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“We needed to have the help of the companies,” said a French official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the trip on the record. “How could we work [together] much faster and quicker?”

The official said the meeting with Facebook went well. The company’s vice president vowed that Facebook would continue to take down terror-related content from the site.

At Google, the French officials met with public policy and legal executives, who said they had been removing terror-related posts and would continue to do so; YouTube users flag about 100,000 posts each day that are suspected of being in violation of the company’s terms of service.

Google officials also noted that the airing of the Charlie Hebdo video on YouTube was the subject of intense debate inside the company. In the end, company officials decided to leave the video up, on the grounds that it was newsworthy and had become part of the historical record. The video has since been deleted from YouTube’s channel in France at the request of French officials.

The French minister’s meeting with Twitter did not go well.

“It was our most difficult meeting,” the French official said. “The minister showed pictures of the Paris attack that were sent out on Twitter, including the execution of the police officer,” he recalled. “He was very graphic in his explanation. They had a lengthy explanation that it was not easy. We argued that child pornography is being taken down. They said their algorithms were not as easy to set up to find jihadi information. You need a bunch of people to review the material.”

The meeting ended “with no specific commitments” from Twitter, the official said.

The Twitter official said the firm does not comment on private meetings with government officials. “We have a strong working relationship with French law enforcement that predates the Charlie Hebdo attack,” he said.

In April, an Islamic State supporter in Somalia called for a Charlie Hebdo-style attack in the United States. The post inspired two men to try to attack a Garland, Tex., event where cartoonists were drawing the prophet Muhammad, according to Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorists’ online communications.

“Once you start using Twitter you start to understand how powerful it is, and that is why ISIS is taking advantage of it,” says Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorists’ online communications. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

The men were gunned down by security teams before they could open fire, but Katz said the attack could have ended very differently.

“Once you start using Twitter, you start to understand how powerful it is, and that is why ISIS is taking advantage of it,” Katz said. “Twitter must understand that they have to be responsible for the kind of information that they disseminate.”

No quick fixes

Confronting the Islamic State online and removing its material is a constant challenge, computer scientists say. Lawmakers, government officials and terrorism experts frequently cite social-media companies’ efforts to rid their sites of child pornography. If they can remove that content, why can’t they screen out tweets and posts from terror groups?

From a computer science standpoint, solving the child pornography problem was relatively straightforward. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children maintains a database of thousands of photographs of child pornography, images that are frequently downloaded by pedophiles and traded over the Internet. Using software called Microsoft PhotoDNA, images are scanned and identified using unique digital markers.

Every time a new image is uploaded onto a site, a company can run it against the database, which compares the digital markers. Anything that matches is deleted and, by federal law, reported to the national center and then to law enforcement agencies.

Many social-media companies, including Twitter and Facebook, rely on the software, which can recognize images in still photos, but not videos.

Flagging terror-related content is more complex — but not impossible, computer scientists say.

Hany Farid, a Dartmouth computer science professor who co-developed Microsoft PhotoDNA, said the software is licensed to the national center solely to identify images of child pornography. But he said the software could be used to flag terror-related propaganda. For example, the software could identify a photograph of Foley, the American journalist, allowing companies to catch images of his beheading before they appear on their sites.

“The technology is extremely powerful, but it’s also limited,” Farid said. “You can only find images that you’ve already found before.”

Social-media companies also could download images of the Islamic State’s black flag, an image frequently displayed on the group’s propaganda posts and communiques, and create “hash values,” or digital fingerprints, of the images to search for them online, computer scientists say.

But while social-media companies could use such techniques to detect every post with an Islamic State flag, not all of those posts would necessarily have come from the terrorist group. A journalist could have tweeted out a link containing material from the Islamic State, or a government agency or think tank could have issued a report about the group that contains an image of the flag.

The sheer volume of the content on social-media sites also poses a challenge, computer scientists said. Twitter has 302 million active users who send out 500 million tweets a day. YouTube has more than 1 billion users. Every minute of every day, they upload more than 300 hours of video.

“There is a long history of government asking technology companies to do things they can’t do. They say America has put a man on the moon. Why can’t the companies do this?” said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. “People treat computers like magic boxes. There is no silver bullet here. Companies are going to be reluctant to roll out technology that is going to have a high rate of false positives.”

Whac-a-Mole

As the more established social-media companies become more aggressive in monitoring and removing terror-related content, groups such as the Islamic State are also migrating to lesser-known sites, where they can share their messages and videos. The sites include Instagram, Tumblr and Soundcloud, according to terror experts.

One of the sites, the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco, has been around for nearly 20 years.

The archive was founded in 1996 to provide the public with free access to millions of documents and videos and clips and Web pages — almost anything that has been on the Web. It is probably best known for its Wayback Machine. So far, it has captured and stored nearly 150 billion Web pages.

In the past year, the Islamic State has created several accounts on the archive and has been using the site to host video and audio productions, online magazines and radio broadcasts, according to terrorism experts.

Internet Archive’s office manager, Chris Butler, told The Post that his organization is removing videos of beheadings and executions whenever it becomes aware of them, either during routine maintenance of the site or after outside complaints.

But unlike sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the archive does not have a flagging mechanism. Butler said the group is working on a system that will enable users to help identify and report problematic content.

“We do our best with a very small team and no lawyers on staff, and have nowhere near the budget of larger commercial sites handling similar quantities of content to us, like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook,” Butler said.

Twitter has recently stepped up efforts to remove terrorist accounts. In April, it took down 10,000 accounts over two days. That has led security researchers such as Daniel Cuthbert to lament the loss of what he saw as a valuable source of intelligence.

Cuthbert, chief operating officer of Sensepost, a cybersecurity firm, supports removal of videos of beheadings and other content that “glorifies ISIS.” But he said he has lost a window into conversations between Islamic State members, supporters and potential recruits.

“I no longer have the ability to see who the key people are in ISIS when it comes to a social-media campaign, and how they’re tweeting, who they’re tweeting to, and how many are British nationals who may be getting groomed,” said Cuthbert, who is based in London.

After Twitter conducted the mass takedown, Cuthbert requested access to Twitter’s “firehose” — its entire stream of tweets. But a Twitter employee denied his request, citing concerns that he was sharing the material with law enforcement.

“We have certain sensitivities with use cases that look at individuals in an investigative manner, especially when insights from that investigation are directly delivered to law enforcement or government agencies to be acted upon,” the employee said in an e-mail to Cuthbert, which he shared with The Post.

The FBI’s Comey told reporters “there’s actually a discussion within the counterterrorism community” as to whether it is better to shut the accounts down or keep them up so they can be tracked for intelligence purposes. “I can see the pros and cons on both sides. But it’s an issue that’s live,” he said.

Counterterrorism officials say the constantly evolving social-media landscape is providing more places for groups such as the Islamic State to hide in cyberspace. Finding and shutting down sites and accounts is starting to resemble a carnival game of Whac-a-Mole, they say. As soon as one site or account is taken down, another pops up. As soon as one platform starts aggressively monitoring terrorist content, militants migrate to another.

Worse, investigators and terrorism analysts fear that the Islamic State and other terrorist groups are moving beyond public-facing social-media platforms for recruitment, increasingly relying on encrypted sites where their communications can continue largely undetected.

Comey recently said he is concerned that the Islamic State will use Twitter or another popular social-media platform to make contact with followers before “steering them off of Twitter to an encrypted form of communication.’’

John D. Cohen served as a former top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security. He said counterintelligence officials have traditionally searched for the proverbial needle in a haystack when trying to identify terrorists and their plots. The explosion of social-media sites, he said, has complicated the search beyond compare.

“The haystack is the entire country now,” Cohen said. “Anywhere there’s a troubled soul on the Internet and a potential Twitter follower, that haystack extends. We’re looking for needles. But here’s the hard part: Increasingly, the needles are invisible to us.”

Video: Tracking the Islamic State’s propaganda machine

Islamic State appears to be fraying from within

By Liz Sly
March 8, 2015

BEIRUT — The Islamic State appears to be starting to fray from within, as dissent, defections and setbacks on the battlefield sap the group’s strength and erode its aura of invincibility among those living under its despotic rule.

Reports of rising tensions between foreign and local fighters, aggressive and increasingly unsuccessful attempts to recruit local citizens for the front lines, and a growing incidence of guerrilla attacks against Islamic State targets suggest the militants are struggling to sustain their carefully cultivated image as a fearsome fighting force drawing Muslims together under the umbrella of a utopian Islamic state.

The anecdotal reports, drawn from activists and residents of areas under Islamic State control, don’t offer any indication that the group faces an immediate challenge to its stranglehold over the mostly Sunni provinces of eastern Syria and western Iraq that form the backbone of its self-proclaimed caliphate. Battlefield reversals have come mostly on the fringes of its territory, while organized opposition remains unlikely as long as viable alternatives are lacking and the fear of vicious retribution remains high, Syrians, Iraqis and analysts say.

The bigger threat to the Islamic State’s capacity to endure, however, may come from within, as its grandiose promises collide with realities on the ground, said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

“The key challenge facing ISIS right now is more internal than external,” she said, using another term for the group. “We’re seeing basically a failure of the central tenet of ISIS ideology, which is to unify people of different origins under the caliphate. This is not working on the ground. It is making them less effective in governing and less effective in military operations.”

Most striking are the growing signs of friction between the foreigners lured by its state-building experiment and local recruits, who have grown resentful of the preferential treatment meted out to the expatriates, including higher salaries and better living conditions.

Foreign fighters get to live in the cities, where coalition airstrikes are relatively rare because of the risk of civilian casualties, while Syrian fighters are required to serve in rural outposts more vulnerable to attacks, said an activist who opposes the Islamic State and lives in the town of Abu Kamal on Syria’s border with Iraq. The activist spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Shootouts have erupted on several occasions on the streets of the town, including one last week between foreign fighters and Syrians who refused an order by a Kuwaiti commander to deploy to the front lines in Iraq, the activist said. The Syrian faction, under the command of Saddam Jamal, a former Free Syrian Army leader, remains in the town, keeping a tense and wary distance from the faction led by the Kuwaiti, he said.

In an incident in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in January, local allies battled a group made up mostly of Chechens after the foreigners decided to head back to Syria, according to Hassan al-Dulaimi, a retired police general who works with tribal fighters aligned against the Islamic State. “The Iraqis feared they were being abandoned,” he said.

There have been signs, too, that some foreign jihadists are growing disillusioned, with activists in the Syrian provinces of Deir al-Zour and Raqqa describing several instances in which foreigners have sought local help to escape across the border to Turkey. The bodies of between 30 and 40 men, many of whom appeared to be Asian, were found last month in the Raqqa town of Tabqa. They are thought to be the remains of a group of jihadist fighters who tried to flee but were caught, according to the activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which monitors Islamic State activities.

New restrictions on travel in and out of areas controlled by the Islamic State have been imposed in recent weeks, including a prohibition on truck drivers transporting men without permission, the activist group says. Public executions, a core component of Islamic State discipline, have in recent weeks been extended to about 120 of the group’s own members, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Some were accused of spying and one of smoking, but suspicions are widespread that most were simply fighters caught trying to flee.

Meanwhile, territorial losses in northern Syria and elsewhere in Iraq are contributing to the sense that the group that stunned the world with its triumphant sweep through Iraq and Syria last summer is now not only on the defensive but also struggling to find a coherent strategy to confront the multiple forces ranged against it.

The Islamic State is battling major offensives waged on at least three fronts — by Kurds in northern Syria, Kurds in northern Iraq and the combined force of Iraqi army and Shiite militia fighters advancing on the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. Islamic State fighters have also been expanding into eastern areas of the Syrian provinces of Homs and Damascus, but the incremental advances there aren’t as spectacular as its conquests last year.

Most of the setbacks have come in non-Sunni areas, such as the Kurdish enclave around Kobane or the mixed province of Diyala in eastern Iraq, where the Islamic State’s territorial ambitions may have been doomed by the absence of allies on the ground.

A far bigger test of the Islamic State’s military capabilities is the battle underway for control of Tikrit, the Sunni home town of Saddam Hussein. As the ethnic and sectarian sentiments driving the fight for territory harden across Syria and Iraq, a victory for the overwhelmingly Shiite forces would also test the ability of non-Sunni groups to retain hold over conquered Sunni territories, analysts say.

The Islamic State’s losses in terms of land and blood have been fairly substantial, including the loss of hundreds of villages around the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria, near the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar and in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala.

The battles appear to have taken a high toll on the group’s strength, estimated at about 20,000 foreigners alongside an unknown number of Iraqis and Syrians. The Pentagon claimed last week that coalition airstrikes have killed 8,500 fighters, though that figure can’t be confirmed.

Syrians say the bloodshed is deterring the recruitment of local citizens who were clamoring a few months ago for the opportunity to earn salaries by joining the only new source of employment available.

Increasingly, the Islamic State is recruiting fighters among children and teens who remain more vulnerable than older adults to the group’s propaganda, said a businessman living in Raqqa who last week paid condolences to family friends whose 15-year-old son had been killed on the front line.

The parents didn’t know he had gone to fight and learned of his death from a neighbor just days after he had disappeared from home, recalled the businessman, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety.

Intensified efforts to persuade Syrians to go to the front lines in Iraq include offers of up to $800 a month in salary, according to Ahmed Mhidi, who arrived in Turkey two weeks ago from the Syrian city of Deir al-Zour and is setting up an opposition group called DZGraph. The offer has won few takers, he said.

The Islamic State “was never popular, but people supported them because they were scared or they needed money,” he said. “Now people want nothing to do with them, and if the Islamic State puts pressure on them, they just flee.”

The province of Deir al-Zour, bordering Iraq, appears to be where opposition to the Islamic State is hardening the most. Small-scale attacks involving ambushes of Islamic State patrols or checkpoints are on the rise — including one that killed 12 members of a feared police group Sunday.

Foreigners continue to volunteer, streaming across the Turkish border into the Islamic State’s self-styled capital of Raqqa, according to residents there. The city’s population has been swelled by thousands of Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Africans. Upon arrival they are given cars and apartments, and they mill about among the city’s cafes and markets, lending a cosmopolitan air to streets where foreigners once were rare, according to Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, the pseudonym of one of the founders of the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently group, who now lives in Turkey.

Many of the foreigners show little inclination to travel to the front lines, he said. “They just want to live in the Islamic State,” he said. “They didn’t come to fight.”

How useful they would be to the Islamic State’s military efforts is also in question, said the Carnegie Middle East Center’s Khatib.

“Ultimately, they are only attracting people on the margins of society, without much education or useful skills,” she said. “It’s not exactly bolstering their military capability.”

Graphic: Foreign fighters flow to Syria

‘Jihadi John’: Islamic State killer is identified as Londoner Mohammed Emwazi

By Souad Mekhennet and Adam Goldman
February 26, 2015

Video: The story of the man who became the face of the Islamic State

LONDON — The world knows him as “Jihadi John,” the masked man with a British accent who has beheaded several hostages held by the Islamic State and who taunts audiences in videos circulated widely online.

But his real name, according to friends and others familiar with his case, is Mohammed Emwazi, a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and to have later joined the Islamic State, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolize.

“I have no doubt that Mohammed is Jihadi John,” said one of Emwazi’s close friends who identified him in an interview with The Washington Post. “He was like a brother to me. . . . I am sure it is him.”

A representative of a British human rights group who had been in contact with Emwazi before he left for Syria also said he believed Emwazi was Jihadi John, a moniker given to him by some of the hostages he once held.

“There was an extremely strong resemblance,” Asim Qureshi, research director at the rights group, CAGE, said when shown one of the videos and asked to confirm whether Emwazi could be “Jihadi John.”

“This is making me feel fairly certain that this is the same person,” Qureshi added.

Authorities have used a variety of investigative techniques, including voice analysis and interviews with former hostages, to try to identify Jihadi John. James B. Comey, the director of the FBI, said in September — only a month after the Briton was seen in a video killing American journalist James Foley — that officials believed they had succeeded.

Nevertheless, the identity of Jihadi John has remained shrouded in secrecy. Since Foley’s killing, he has appeared in a series of videos documenting the gruesome killings of other hostages, including four other Westerners, some of whom he personally beheaded.

In each, he is dressed in all black, a balaclava covering all but his eyes and the ridge of his nose. He wears a holster under his left arm.

A spokeswoman for the British Embassy in Washington said: “Our prime minister has been clear that we want all those who have committed murder on behalf of ISIL to face justice for the appalling acts carried out. There is an ongoing police investigation into the murder of hostages by ISIL in Syria. It is not appropriate for the government to comment on any part of it while this continues.” ISIL is another name for the Islamic State.

U.S. officials declined to comment for this report. Emwazi’s family declined a request for an interview, citing legal advice.

The Kuwaiti-born Emwazi, in his mid-20s, appears to have left little trail on social media or elsewhere online. Those who knew him say he was polite and had a penchant for wearing stylish clothes while adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith. He had a beard and was mindful of making eye contact with women, friends said.

He was raised in a middle-class neighborhood in London and on occasion prayed at a mosque in Greenwich.

The friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, believe that Emwazi started to radicalize after a planned safari in Tanzania following his graduation from the University of Westminster.

Video: How The Post identified Jihadi John

Emwazi and two friends — a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man, Abu Talib — never made it on the trip. Once they landed in Dar es Salaam, in May 2009, they were detained by police and held overnight. It’s unclear whether the reason for the detention was made clear to the three, but they were eventually deported.

Emwazi flew to Amsterdam, where he claimed that an officer from MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, accused him of trying to reach Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab operates in the southern part of the country, according to e-mails that he sent to Qureshi and that were provided to The Post.

Emwazi denied the accusation and claimed that MI5 representatives had tried to recruit him. But a former hostage said Jihadi John was obsessed with Somalia and made his captives watch videos about al-Shabab, which is allied with al-Qaeda.

The episode was described in the Independent, a British newspaper, which identified Emwazi as Muhammad ibn Muazzam.

Emwazi and his friends were allowed to return to Britain, where he met with Qureshi in the fall of 2009 to discuss what had happened. “Mohammed was quite incensed by his treatment, that he had been very unfairly treated,” Qureshi said.

Shortly afterward, Emwazi decided to move to his birthplace, Kuwait, where he landed a job working for a computer company, according to the e-mails he wrote to Qureshi. He came back to London twice, the second time to finalize his wedding plans to a woman in Kuwait.

In June 2010, however, counterterrorism officials in Britain detained him again — this time fingerprinting him and searching his belongings. When he tried to fly back to Kuwait the next day, he was prevented from doing so.

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a June 2010 e-mail to Qureshi. But now “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”

Nearly four months later, when a court in New York sentenced Aafia Siddiqui, an al-Qaeda operative convicted for the attempted murder of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan, Emwazi expressed sympathy for her, saying he had “heard the upsetting news regarding our sister. . . . This should only keep us firmer towards fighting for freedom and justice!!!”

In the interview, Qureshi said he last heard from Emwazi in January 2012, when Emwazi sent him an e-mail seeking advice.

“This is a young man who was ready to exhaust every single kind of avenue within the machinery of the state to bring a change for his personal situation,” Qureshi said. In the end, he felt “actions were taken to criminalize him and he had no way to do something against these actions.”

Close friends of Emwazi’s also said his situation in London had made him desperate to leave the country. It’s unclear exactly when he reached Syria or how.

One friend said he believed Emwazi wanted to travel to Saudi Arabia to teach English in 2012 but was unsuccessful. Soon afterward, the friend said, he was gone.

“He was upset and wanted to start a life elsewhere,” one of the friends said. “He at some stage reached the point where he was really just trying to find another way to get out.”

Once in Syria, Emwazi contacted his family and at least one of his friends. It’s unclear what he told them about his activities there.

A former hostage who was debriefed by officials upon release said that Jihadi John was part of a team guarding Western captives at a prison in Idlib, Syria, in 2013. The hostages nicknamed the facility “the box.” Emwazi was joined by two other men with British accents, including one who was dubbed “George.” A former hostage said Emwazi participated in the waterboarding of four Western hostages.

Former hostages described George as the leader of the trio. Jihadi John, they said, was quiet and intelligent. “He was the most deliberate,” a former hostage said.

Beginning in early 2014, the hostages were moved to a prison in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, where they were visited often by the trio. They appeared to have taken on more powerful roles within the Islamic State.

About the same time, Qureshi said, he sent an e-mail to Emwazi.

“I was wondering if you could send me your number,” he wrote. “Inshallah [God willing] it will be good to catch up.”

There was no response.

French Muslims caught between Islamophobia and extremism

By Griff Witte
March 22, 2015

Najim Hakem, 25, an habitant of the Cité du Park housing project, in the suburbs of Paris, said racism is worsening. “You turn on the TV, and all you see is bad publicity about Muslims.” (Sarah Caron/ Polaris for The Washington Post)

VINCENNES, France — This city’s first Muslim doctor doesn’t look Muslim.

Or at least, he doesn’t look or act how people expect a Muslim should. Fair-skinned and clean-shaven, he goes about his rounds listening to classical music; a copy of Voltaire’s “Treatise on Tolerance” is nestled on his desk.

Sometimes his patients forget who he is.

“I’m disgusted by Muslim people,” a patient of 10 years recently confided. “They shouldn’t be here.”

France, another casually mentioned, is only for “the true French people.”

“You can’t see in my face that I’m Muslim,” said Karim Bessalem, who has been living in this country for half his life, having escaped the strife of his native Algeria 25 years ago. “People don’t have any problems saying such things in front of me.”

That’s especially true now, more than two months after men acting in the name of Islam gunned down 17 people in attacks that traumatized the nation. For many of France’s 5 million Muslims — the largest Islamic population in Western Europe — the killings have left them feeling trapped in a vortex, battered both by rising Islamophobia and growing radicalism in their own communities.

The twin forces feed on each other, building in tandem. Together they represent a lingering and potentially devastating counterpoint to the millions who marched in cities across France on the Sunday after the attacks in a solemn and powerful defense of the nation’s core ideals — liberty, equality and fraternity.

Neither anti-Muslim bias nor Islamist extremism is obvious here in Vincennes. Although four of the victims from January’s killings died just a short walk from Bessalem’s office in an assault on a popular kosher grocery store, this leafy and affluent city on Paris’s eastern fringe has long been considered a model of peaceful coexistence. In the aftermath of the attack, city residents say, the bonds among Muslims, Jews and Christians have grown ever tighter.

And yet, as Bessalem has learned, the sentiment behind a recent dramatic spike in Islamophobic acts across France has a quiet home here, too. Meanwhile, the virus of Islamist extremism lurks just beyond the city line, finding recruits in a bleak housing development where impressionable and isolated young men have succumbed to the call of holy war.

“There was always racism toward immigrants. But now the extremists on all sides are using the atmosphere after these attacks to build permanent conflict between communities,” said Abdallah Zakri, head of France’s National Observatory Against Islamophobia.

In January, the month of the attacks, Zakri’s group recorded 214 separate acts of anti-Muslim behavior — more than it documented in all of 2014. The offenses included physical assaults, threats to eradicate Muslims from France and pigs’ heads dropped on mosque doorsteps.

The behavior subsided last month as French police stepped up protection of Islamic sites. But Islamophobic attitudes remain relatively common in France, with 27 percent saying in a recent Pew Research Center survey that they have an unfavorable view of Muslims — nearly triple the number who say the same about Jews.

Derai Imam of the Al-Islah mosque and the rector Lakhdar Taddani, having a chat before prayers on March 20 in Montreuil, Paris. (Sara Caron/Polaris for The Washington Post)

A world away

Attacks such as the one on the kosher market have prompted some French Jews to plan their departures. Record numbers are leaving for Israel amid fears that even the deployment of troops to guard synagogues and schools will not be enough to protect the community from an anti-Semitic onslaught.

There’s no sign of a similar exodus among French Muslims, many of whom are recent immigrants from North and West Africa.

But the sense of alienation that French Muslims feel from their country is undeniable, with widespread complaints of discrimination in the workplace, profiling by police and scapegoating by the media and politicians.

“There’s more and more racism every day in France,” said Najim Hakem, a 25-year-old son of Algerian immigrants. “You turn on the TV and all you see is bad publicity about Muslims.”

Hakem grew up in a high-rise that overlooks Vincennes, just two miles in distance yet a world away. Instead of graceful boulevards and trendy cafes, Hakem is surrounded by empty expanses of concrete and crowds of young men who, like him, struggle to find work in a sluggish economy.

Being Muslim, he said, doesn’t make it any easier.

“After work, if you go out with colleagues and say that you don’t drink alcohol or eat pork, people are going to say, ‘I don’t like this guy,’ ” said Hakem, who studied human resources in college but has been able to find only short-term contract jobs in the years since.

In the absence of other options, young people from the area turn to crime.

“If you don’t deal,” said Hakem, tall, bearded and sporting a black Mickey Mouse sweatshirt one recent sunny day, “you don’t eat.”

Lately, criminality has become a gateway to something more ominous. In both the Paris attacks and in last month’s killings in Copenhagen — all ostensibly motivated by religion — the assailants were notable less for their piety than for their previous run-ins with the law on drug, weapons and assault charges.

Those who have fallen under the spell of radical Islam in Hakem’s neighborhood fit a similar profile.

At least three have gone to Syria to fight, he said, part of an estimated total of 1,200 across France — the highest of any country in Europe.

“They’re people who were into drugs and alcohol. They didn’t know anything about the Koran,” Hakem said. “One of them went because he was dumped by his girlfriend. He was depressed and didn’t know what to do with his life. So he went to war.”

‘The problem is justice’

At a nearby mosque — a converted warehouse that overflows with congregants on Fridays — the rector said he needs to remain ever-vigilant for “intruders” who try to seduce wayward youths with the promise of identity and belonging through extreme religiosity.

“They say, ‘Why don’t you wear the beard? It would look great on you,’ ” said Lakhdar Taddani, a suit-and-tie-attired 69-year-old who immigrated to France from Morocco in the early 1970s. “I’m as scared of what these extremists are doing as any other Frenchman. It’s breaking my heart.”

The mosque, Taddani said, is a key part of the solution, a community force that can dispel the myths propagated endlessly online by the Islamic State and its supporters.

Not everyone sees it that way, however. France’s far-right National Front party has capitalized on anti-Muslim sentiment — and fed it — with calls to shutter mosques and deport their leaders if they carry the whiff of radicalism.

The party finished a strong second in local elections Sunday, early results and exit polls showed, and its leader, Marine Le Pen, has gone from fringe candidate to prospective president in a contest due in 2017. The party’s hard-line stance on immigrants broadly, and on Muslims in particular, is seen as a critical factor in its success.

“Not every Muslim is a terrorist, thank God,” said Gilles Parmentier, a blue-eyed 21-year-old university student who is running for Vincennes’s regional council on a National Front ticket. “But every terrorist is a Muslim.”

Parmentier said France needs to slash immigration to the bare minimum and encourage even skilled workers in poor nations such as Algeria to stay home. “Algeria needs doctors,” he said. “They should develop their own countries.”

That wasn’t an option for Bessalem, the Vincennes doctor who left his native Algeria because of a war that had its roots in French colonialism — the history of which France has been deeply reluctant to confront.

Coming to France a quarter-century ago allowed Bessalem to launch a successful practice — one he shares today with two other doctors, one Jewish and the other Catholic. But he’s acutely aware that young Muslims growing up now in some of the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods that ring Vincennes may not have the same opportunities.

“French Muslims are really lucky to be living in a free country, one where you’re allowed to follow any religion you want,” he said. “But the problem is justice. When you don’t have justice, people will react.”

The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.

By Liz Sly
April 4, 2015

SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.

Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading.

In Syria, local “emirs” are typically shadowed by a deputy who is Iraqi and makes the real decisions, said Abu Hamza, who fled to Turkey last summer after growing disillusioned with the group. He uses a pseudonym because he fears for his safety.

“All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans,” he said. “But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines.”

The public profile of the foreign jihadists frequently obscures the Islamic State’s roots in the bloody recent history of Iraq, its brutal excesses as much a symptom as a cause of the country’s woes.

The raw cruelty of Hussein’s Baathist regime, the disbandment of the Iraqi army after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the subsequent insurgency and the marginalization of Sunni Iraqis by the Shiite-dominated government all are intertwined with the Islamic State’s ascent, said Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.”

“A lot of people think of the Islamic State as a terrorist group, and it’s not useful,” Hassan said. “It is a terrorist group, but it is more than that. It is a homegrown Iraqi insurgency, and it is organic to Iraq.”

The de-Baathification law promulgated by L. Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns.

The U.S. military failed in the early years to recognize the role the disbanded Baathist officers would eventually come to play in the extremist group, eclipsing the foreign fighters whom American officials preferred to blame, said Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the National Defense University who served as an adviser to top generals in Iraq and describes the links between Baathists and the Islamic State in his book, “Iraq After America.”

The U.S. military always knew that the former Baathist officers had joined other insurgent groups and were giving tactical support to the Al Qaeda in Iraq affiliate, the precursor to the Islamic State, he said. But American officials didn’t anticipate that they would become not only adjuncts to al-Qaeda, but core members of the jihadist group.

“We might have been able to come up with ways to head off the fusion, the completion of the Iraqization process,” he said. The former officers were probably not reconcilable, “but it was the labeling of them as irrelevant that was the mistake.”

Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, the former officers became more than relevant. They were instrumental in the group’s rebirth from the defeats inflicted on insurgents by the U.S. military, which is now back in Iraq bombing many of the same men it had already fought twice before.

Shared traits

At first glance, the secularist dogma of Hussein’s tyrannical Baath Party seems at odds with the Islamic State’s harsh interpretation of the Islamic laws it purports to uphold.

But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Hussein dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today.

Like the Islamic State, Hussein’s Baath Party also regarded itself as a transnational movement, forming branches in countries across the Middle East and running training camps for foreign volunteers from across the Arab world.

By the time U.S. troops invaded in 2003, Hussein had begun to tilt toward a more religious approach to governance, making the transition from Baathist to Islamist ideology less improbable for some of the disenfranchised Iraqi officers, said Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor who is researching the ties at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

With the launch of the Iraqi dictator’s Faith Campaign in 1994, strict Islamic precepts were introduced. The words “God is Great” were inscribed on the Iraqi flag. Amputations were decreed for theft. Former Baathist officers recall friends who suddenly stopped drinking, started praying and embraced the deeply conservative form of Islam known as Salafism in the years preceding the U.S. invasion.

In the last two years of Hussein’s rule, a campaign of beheadings, mainly targeting women suspected of prostitution and carried out by his elite Fedayeen unit, killed more than 200 people, human rights groups reported at the time.

The brutality deployed by the Islamic State today recalls the bloodthirstiness of some of those Fedayeen, said Hassan. Promotional videos from the Hussein era include scenes resembling those broadcast today by the Islamic State, showing the Fedayeen training, marching in black masks, practicing the art of decapitation and in one instance eating a live dog.

Some of those Baathists became early recruits to the al-Qaeda affiliate established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Palestinian Jordanian fighter who is regarded as the progenitor of the current Islamic State, said Hisham al Hashemi, an Iraqi analyst who advises the Iraqi government and has relatives who served in the Iraqi military under Hussein. Other Iraqis were radicalized at Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq where thousands of ordinary citizens were detained and intermingled with jihadists.

Zarqawi kept the former Baathists at a distance, because he distrusted their secular outlook, according to Hashim, the professor.

It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers.

Tasked with rebuilding the greatly weakened insurgent organization after 2010, Baghdadi embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the former officers, drawing on the vast pool of men who had either remained unemployed or had joined other, less extremist insurgent groups.

Some of them had fought against al-Qaeda after changing sides and aligning with the American-backed Awakening movement during the surge of troops in 2007. When U.S. troops withdrew and the Iraqi government abandoned the Awakening fighters, the Islamic State was the only surviving option for those who felt betrayed and wanted to change sides again, said Brian Fishman, who researched the group in Iraq for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and is now a fellow with the New America Foundation.

Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after U.S. troops left in 2011 by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the U.S. military.

Among them was Brig. Gen. Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by U.S. troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, the capital of the long restive province of Anbar.

Within months of the American departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans.

“The crisis of ISIS didn’t happen by chance,” Dulaimi said in an interview in Baghdad, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “It was the result of an accumulation of problems created by the Americans and the [Iraqi] government.”

He cited the case of a close friend, a former intelligence officer in Baghdad who was fired in 2003 and struggled for many years to make a living. He now serves as the Islamic State’s wali, or leader, in the Anbar town of Hit, Dulaimi said.

“I last saw him in 2009. He complained that he was very poor. He is an old friend, so I gave him some money,” he recalled. “He was fixable. If someone had given him a job and a salary, he wouldn’t have joined the Islamic State.

“There are hundreds, thousands like him,” he added. “The people in charge of military operations in the Islamic State were the best officers in the former Iraqi army, and that is why the Islamic State beats us in intelligence and on the battlefield.”

The Islamic State’s seizure of territory was also smoothed by the Maliki government’s broader persecution of the Sunni minority, which intensified after U.S. troops withdrew and left many ordinary Sunnis willing to welcome the extremists as an alternative to the often brutal Iraqi security forces.

But it was the influx of Baathist officers into the ranks of the Islamic State itself that propelled its fresh military victories, said Hashem. By 2013, Baghdadi had surrounded himself with former officers, who oversaw the Islamic State’s expansion in Syria and drove the offensives in Iraq.

Some of Baghdadi’s closest aides, including Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, his deputy in Iraq, and Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, one of his top military commanders in Syria, both of them former Iraqi officers, have since reportedly been killed — though Dulaimi suspects that many feign their own deaths in order to evade detection, making its current leadership difficult to discern.

Any gaps however are filled by former officers, sustaining the Iraqi influence at the group’s core, even as its ranks are swelled by arriving foreigners, said Hassan.

Fearing infiltration and spies, the leadership insulates itself from the foreign fighters and the regular Syrian and Iraqi fighters through elaborate networks of intermediaries frequently drawn from the old Iraqi intelligence agencies, he said.

“They introduced the Baathist mind-set of secrecy as well as its skills,” he said.

The masked man who ordered the detention of Abu Hamza was one of a group of feared security officers who circulate within the Islamic State, monitoring its members for signs of dissent, the Syrian recalled.

“They are the eyes and ears of Daesh’s security, and they are very powerful,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

Abu Hamza was released from jail after agreeing to fall into line with the other commanders, he said. But the experience contributed to his disillusionment with the group.

The foreign fighters he served alongside were “good Muslims,” he said. But he is less sure about the Iraqi leaders.

“They pray and they fast and you can’t be an emir without praying, but inside I don’t think they believe it much,” he said. “The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam.

“They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.”

‘They want to run Iraq’

Whether the former Baathists adhere to the Islamic State’s ideology is a matter of debate. Hashim suspects many of them do not.

“One could still argue that it’s a tactical alliance,” he said. “A lot of these Baathists are not interested in ISIS running Iraq. They want to run Iraq. A lot of them view the jihadists with this Leninist mind-set that they’re useful idiots who we can use to rise to power.”

Rayburn questions whether even some of the foreign volunteers realize the extent to which they are being drawn into Iraq’s morass. Some of the fiercest battles being waged today in Iraq are for control of communities and neighborhoods that have been hotly contested among Iraqis for years, before the extremists appeared.

“You have fighters coming from across the globe to fight these local political battles that the global jihad can’t possibly have a stake in.”

Former Baathist officers who served alongside some of those now fighting with the Islamic State believe it is the other way around. Rather than the Baathists using the jihadists to return to power, it is the jihadists who have exploited the desperation of the disbanded officers, according to a former general who commanded Iraqi troops during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety in Irbil, the capital of the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan, where he now resides.

The ex-Baathists could be lured away, if they were offered alternatives and hope for the future, he said.

“The Americans bear the biggest responsibility. When they dismantled the army what did they expect those men to do?” he asked. “They were out in the cold with nothing to do and there was only one way out for them to put food on the table.”

When U.S. officials demobilized the Baathist army, “they didn’t de-Baathify people’s minds, they just took away their jobs,” he said.

There are former Baathists with other insurgent groups who might be persuaded to switch sides, said Hassan, citing the example of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, usually referred to by its Arabic acronym JRTN. They welcomed the Islamic State during its sweep through northern Iraq last summer, but the groups have since fallen out.

But most of the Baathists who actually joined the Islamic State are now likely to have themselves become radicalized, either in prison or on the battlefield, he said.

“Even if you didn’t walk in with that vision you might walk out with it, after five years of hard fighting,” said Fishman, of the New America Foundation. “They have been through brutal things that are going to shape their vision in a really dramatic way.”

In campaign against terrorism, U.S. enters period of pessimism and gloom

By Greg Miller
March 7, 2015

U.S. counterterrorism officials and experts, never known for their sunny dispositions, have entered a period of particular gloom.

In congressional testimony recently, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. went beyond the usual litany of threats to say that terrorism trend lines were worse “than at any other point in history.”

Maj. Gen. Michael Nagata, commander of U.S. Special Operations forces in the Middle East, told participants on a counterterrorism strategy call that he regarded the Islamic State as a greater menace than al-Qaeda ever was.

Speaking at a New York police terrorism conference, Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, said he had come to doubt that he would live to see the end of al-Qaeda and its spawn. “This is long term,” he said. “My children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation will still be fighting this fight.”

The assessments reflect a pessimism that has descended on the U.S. counterterrorism community over the past year amid a series of discouraging developments. Among them are the growth of the Islamic State, the ongoing influx of foreign fighters into Syria, the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Yemen and the downward spiral of Libya’s security situation. The latest complication came Saturday, when the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria carried out a series of suicide bombings and reportedly declared its allegiance to the Islamic State.

Unlike the waves of anxiety that accompanied the emergence of new terrorist plots over the past decade, the latest shift in mood seems more deep-seated. U.S. officials depict a bewildering landscape in which al-Qaeda and the brand of Islamist militancy it inspired have not only survived 14 years of intense counterterrorism operations but have also spread.

Officials emphasize that their campaign has accomplished critical goals. In particular, most officials and experts now see the risk of a Sept. 11-scale attack as infinitesimal, beyond the reach of al-Qaeda and its scattered affiliates.

Still, the adjusted outlook contrasts sharply with the surge of optimism that followed the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and the dawn of the Arab Spring, which was initially seen as a political awakening across the Middle East that might render al-Qaeda and its archaic ideology irrelevant.

Within months of bin Laden’s death, then-Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he was convinced “that we’re within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” President Obama echoed that view in subsequent years by saying that al-Qaeda was on “a path to defeat” and, more recently, that the then-nascent Islamic State was analogous to a junior varsity sports team.

Such upbeat characterizations have all but evaporated.

By its nature, counterterrorism work is an enterprise that induces pessimism, one that is focused on fending off catastrophe and involves dwelling on worst-case scenarios. There are prominent dissenting voices who argue that the level of alarm now is out of proportion to the threat — as misplaced as the spike in confidence that preceded it.

Their case hinges on the degraded capabilities of al-Qaeda and the limited agenda of the Islamic State, which has been far more focused on securing territory in the Middle East than launching transnational plots.

“There are people who are alarmed and bewildered. There are also a lot of experts who don’t think this is the end of the world,” said Daniel Benjamin, a Dartmouth College professor who formerly served as the top counterterrorism official at the State Department. “More people have thrown in their lot with the extremists than has been the case before. But the numbers are relatively small, and our own security is much less imperiled than has been claimed.”

Paul Pillar, the former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, argued in articles last year that concern over Syria and Iraq had reached a state of panic that had more to do with the psychological scars of 9/11 and the wars that followed than any truly existential danger.

“Everyone should take a deep breath,” Pillar wrote.

Still, other veteran analysts known for their equanimity sound increasingly grim. Even if the near-term prospect of a major attack in the United States or Europe is slim, they argue, elements of risk are accumulating rapidly.

“You’ve got a much bigger counterterrorism problem than you had a few years ago,” said John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA. Terrorist groups “have never had territory of this magnitude. Never had this much money. Never this much access to Western passport holders. Never had the narrative they have now.”

In this case, “narrative” is a broad term for the appeal of the Islamic State. The group, which broke off from al-Qaeda, has exploited the civil war in Syria to amass territory and declare itself a new caliphate. At the same time, its battlefield success and abundant presence on social media have helped it challenge if not eclipse al-Qaeda as a brand.

Even months of U.S.-led airstrikes have failed to diminish the flow of fighters into Syria. Clapper testified last month that more than 20,000 foreign fighters have entered Syria, including at least 3,400 from the West — “a pool of operatives who potentially have access to the United States.”

Many counterterrorism officials are equally worried about those who embrace the Islamic State’s ideology without leaving for the war. Attacks in Boston, Paris and elsewhere in recent years underscore the extraordinary difficulty of detecting plots with no active links to groups overseas.

Some also see significant cause for continued concern about al-Qaeda, even in its diminished state. A decade of drone strikes has depleted its upper ranks and deprived it of the resources and space that most experts believe are needed for it to orchestrate the sort of sophisticated, multi-stage, mass-casualty attack that was its signature. But smaller-bore plots may still be within reach.

At the New York terrorism conference, Morell said that while “no terrorist group currently has the capability to conduct a 9/11-style attack,” there are at least three al-Qaeda nodes that could stage attacks that could kill hundreds of people. Among them are al-Qaeda’s core in Pakistan, the group’s affiliate in Yemen and a more recently formed satellite in Syria known as the Khorasan Group.

“I would not be surprised if one of these groups were able to bring down an airliner in the U.S. tomorrow,” Morell said, emphasizing that the terrorist entity that has drawn the most attention — the Islamic State — “is not one of these groups.”

Al-Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen is still seen as the group’s most dangerous affiliate. The danger had seemed increasingly dormant, but the recent overthrow of the Yemeni government forced the CIA to withdraw many of its operatives and derailed a counterterrorism partnership that Obama had described as a model.

In congressional testimony last month, Clapper ranked terrorism third on his list of security concerns — behind cyberthreats and counterintelligence — although he indicated that the order could change if the Islamic State turned its focus against the United States.

At one point, Clapper was asked whether he stood by his assertion that the country was beset by more crises and threats that at any other time in his 50-year career. “Yes, sir,” he said, “and if I’m here next year, I’ll probably say it again.”

U.S. launches secret drone campaign to hunt Islamic State leaders in Syria

By Greg Miller
September 1, 2015

The CIA and U.S. Special Operations forces have launched a secret campaign to hunt terrorism suspects in Syria as part of a targeted killing program that is run separately from the broader U.S. military offensive against the Islamic State, U.S. officials said.

The CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) are flying drones over Syria in a collaboration responsible for several recent strikes against senior Islamic State operatives, the officials said. Among those killed was a British militant thought to be an architect of the terrorist group’s effort to use social media to incite attacks in the United States, the officials said.

The clandestine program represents a significant escalation of the CIA’s involvement in the war in Syria, enlisting the agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) against a militant group that many officials believe has eclipsed al-Qaeda as a threat.

Although the CTC has been given an expanded role in identifying and locating senior Islamic State figures, U.S. officials said the strikes are being carried out exclusively by JSOC. The officials said the program is aimed at terrorism suspects deemed “high-value targets.”

“These people are being identified and targeted through a separate effort,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with the operation, referring to the British militant, Junaid Hussain, and others killed in a recent weeks. Spokesmen for the CIA and the U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees JSOC, declined to comment. Other officials would discuss the program only on the condition of anonymity.

The decision to enlist the CIA and JSOC reflects rising anxiety among U.S. counterterrorism officials about the danger the Islamic State poses, as well as frustration with the failure of conventional strikes to degrade the group’s strength.

Against that backdrop, the Obama administration has turned again to two of its preferred weapons against terrorist groups: the CTC, which pioneered the use of armed drones and led the search for Osama bin Laden, and JSOC, which includes the elite commando unit that carried out the raid that killed the al-Qaeda chief.

The new adversary, however, poses different challenges. Unlike al-Qaeda, the Islamic State has extensive territory, a seemingly endless stream of recruits, and a deep roster of senior operatives, many of whom served in the military of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

The officials said the program so far accounts for only a handful of strikes, a tiny fraction of the more than 2,450 conducted in Syria over the past year. That broader U.S.-led assault, which also includes an additional 4,000 strikes in Iraq, has relied on conventional bombs to dislodge the Islamic State from territory it has seized.

The involvement of the CIA complicates one of President Obama’s remaining counterterrorism policy goals of gradually reversing the agency’s evolution from spy service to paramilitary force. Last year, Obama signaled his intent to have the agency cede control of drone strikes to the Defense Department and return the spy service’s focus to more traditional categories of espionage.

Instead, Syria is a new front in a spreading campaign of secret operations and drone strikes that encompasses Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and parts of North Africa.

Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said that Obama remains committed to increasing the transparency of counterterrorism operations by “turning to the U.S. military to take the lead and to provide information to the public.” But he said the effort will be “carried out in a manner that does not degrade our ability to leverage the full range of counterterrorism capabilities.”

He declined to comment on operations in Syria.

The White House had sought in recent months to revive its plan to shift control of drone operations to the Pentagon, but encountered renewed opposition on Capitol Hill. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee responded with a classified letter warning against any effort to reduce the CIA’s role in tracking terrorists.

Senior members of the House intelligence and armed services panels — concerned about preserving their jurisdictions over strikes and the right to be notified — also wrote to express reservations.

Faced with those obstacles, administration officials now see the hybrid approach in Syria as a possible way to salvage at least part of Obama’s plan. The agency will remain deeply involved in “finding and fixing” terrorism targets in collaboration with JSOC but will leave the “finish” to the military, at least in Syria, officials said, using insider terms for the strike sequence.

U.S. officials said there is no plan to impose that template in Pakistan or Yemen, where the agency operates fleets of armed drones largely autonomously. But officials said the cooperation between the CIA and JSOC in Syria is increasingly viewed as a model that could be employed in future conflicts.

The CIA and JSOC program, officials said, is aimed primarily at leadership figures in the Islamic State as well as operatives suspected of being involved in efforts to build a terrorist network beyond the borders of its declared caliphate. Al-Qaeda militants also are approved targets.

Hussain, the 21-year-old British militant killed last month, was moved toward the top of the target list after being linked to one of two gunmen killed in Garland, Tex., this year after opening fire at a cartoon contest that invited participants to draw pictures of the prophet Muhammad.

Hussain is not known to have been directly involved in the Islamic State’s gruesome beheadings of Western hostages or other violence. The decision to kill him makes clear that even militants involved only in the Islamic State’s media efforts are regarded as legitimate U.S. military targets.

In the past, the Obama administration has stressed that it was not targeting terrorism suspects involved only in propaganda. When Anwar al-Awlaki, an American cleric, was killed in Yemen in 2011, officials emphasized that he had become directly involved in terrorist operations.

A senior administration official said that Hussain “was more than a propagandist. He was actively involved in recruiting [Islamic State] sympathizers in the West to carry out attacks, and he was specifically focused on orchestrating operations targeting U.S. service members as well as government officials.”

Hussain was tracked in part by monitoring his online activities, according to officials who said that the British government had been consulted on the decision to make him a target.

The strike was among several recent pinpoint attacks distinct from ongoing bombing runs that have inflicted heavy damage but rarely dealt specific blows to the Islamic State leadership ranks.

As part of the Syria buildup, the CIA and JSOC have pulled drone aircraft and personnel from other regions, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the reduced pace of the agency’s drone campaign against al-Qaeda have freed up resources. The CIA is flying drones only over Syria, not in Iraq, where the Islamic State also has a significant presence.

All of the strikes in Syria are being carried out under the military’s post-9/11 authority to pursue al-Qaeda, officials said, rather than a presidential directive or “finding” issued to the CIA. The restriction means that armed CIA drones can be fired only if they are operating under JSOC authority.

Some U.S. officials indicated that the agency drones were armed while others contested that and said they were for intelligence gathering only and were not carrying munitions.

But U.S. officials said that the collaboration between the two has been streamlined in ways that allow them to work side by side on targeting decisions and all but eliminate delays in executing strikes.

The CIA and JSOC continue to have separate drone operations centers, at Langley, Va. and Fort Bragg, N.C., respectively. But each has sent representatives to the other’s facility, officials said, and both can watch each other’s video feeds.

The cooperation is in contrast to the friction and turf battles that have surfaced between the CIA and JSOC in other conflict zones, particularly Yemen, where each operates a fleet of armed drones, relying on separate streams of intelligence and lethal authorities.

JSOC officials were angered by what they perceived as CIA second-guessing after a 2013 strike on a wedding caravan in Yemen killed civilians and led to a long suspension of JSOC’s authority to launch attacks.

The outcome only added to the skepticism among senior lawmakers that the Pentagon was capable of taking over drone operations from the CIA. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been the most vocal critic of the idea, saying in 2013 that she has seen the CIA “exercise patience and discretion specifically to prevent collateral damage” and that she “would really have to be convinced that the military would carry it out that well.”

The agency had to confront its own devastating failure earlier this year when a strike in Pakistan killed two Western civilians who had been taken hostage by al-Qaeda. The agency did not realize that U.S. citizen Warren Weinstein and an Italian aid worker were being held at the targeted compound.

The White House attempted to reinvigorate the initiative earlier this summer by dispatching Lisa Monaco, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, to Capitol Hill in an effort to change lawmakers’ minds. The administration abandoned talk of a “transition” of the program and sought to depict it as an “integration” of CIA and JSOC capabilities, officials said.

But key lawmakers remained unswayed, according to U.S. officials who said that Congress has twice in the past two years inserted language in spending bills to restrict funding for any move to take armed drones away from the CIA.

“Congressional concerns have slowed our ability to make these changes,” another senior administration official said in a statement provided to The Washington Post. The official emphasized that Obama never envisioned ending the CIA’s involvement in tracking terrorists, saying that “the U.S. military and the intelligence community both play unique and indispensable roles.”

U.S. officials said the expanded CIA and JSOC efforts in Syria are part of a broader mobilization involving every major U.S. spy service. The National Security Agency has been tasked with penetrating the communications networks of the Islamic State, a group that has exploited Twitter and other social media platforms to broadcast propaganda and attract recruits.

Syria remains a “denied” area for the CIA, meaning that it has no established presence in the country. Nor are there any acknowledged U.S. military personnel, although Delta Force operators launched an overnight raid into the country in May, killing an Islamic State leader known as Abu Sayyaf and capturing his wife.

The team also made off with computers and other devices that officials said have provided valuable insight into the Islamic State’s structure, leadership and finances. Using intelligence from that raid and other sources, the CIA and JSOC have compiled a list of targets over the past year, officials said.

The effort came as CIA Director John Brennan announced a major overhaul of the agency using the CTC — which surged in size and influence after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — as a model for other parts of the organization. Brennan also appointed a new chief of the center, who is considered easier to get along with than the gaunt, chain-smoking officer he replaced.

Both organizations have access to multiple airstrips in the Middle East that could serve as bases for armed drones.

The CIA has long-standing ties to the Jordanian intelligence service and operates clandestine bases in that country where the agency has trained and armed thousands of fighters sent back into Syria’s civil war.

The U.S. military and European allies operate fighter jets and other aircraft from the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, a highly secured compound that was used earlier this year by a Jordanian pilot who was captured by the Islamic State and burned alive.

The United States also flies drones from bases in Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, where the al-Udeid Air Base serves as the Middle East headquarters of the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Graphic: What a year of Islamic State terror looks like

An American family saved their son from joining the Islamic State. Now he might go to prison.

By Adam Goldman
September 6, 2015

The area around the neighborhood where Asher Abid Khan lives with his parents in Spring, Tex. Khan made a trip to Turkey, intending to cross the border into Syria , possibly intending to join the Islamic State, but decided against it and came back. The FBI charged Khan with conspiracy and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State. (Michael Stravato for The Washington Post)

SPRING, Tex. — Asher Abid Khan sat in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and considered his next move — forward to Syria and enlistment in the Islamic State, the militant group that had drawn him to the possibility of dying for Allah, or home to Texas and his bewildered family whose imploring messages were filling his voice mail.

The 19-year-old pulled out his phone and dialed.

“I want to come home,” Khan told his father, Mohammed Abid Khan, who sat huddled in his living room here with his wife and other children.

Hours later, without ever leaving the airport, Khan boarded a plane and flew home to this Houston suburb.

His family had saved him from an uncertain fate in Syria, but not legal jeopardy in the United States.

Fifteen months later, in May 2015, the FBI charged Khan with conspiracy and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State. Instead of life inside the caliphate, Khan, now faces up to 30 years in prison.

To his family and lawyer, Khan was a misguided and naive teen. Before flying to Turkey, in conversation with a friend on Facebook, according to court documents, Khan said: “I wana die as a Shaheed,” using the Arabic word for martyr. And he said he was “looking forward to dying in Allah’s cause and meeting Allah.”

But his defense attorney, Thomas Berg, said that Khan stepped back from an irrevocable decision and has since returned to a moderate path.

“He came home and did the right thing,” Berg said. “If the government was smart, they would exploit that. My kid could go to the mosques and talk about redemption.”

And, Berg said, if Khan is imprisoned, there is no incentive for the next young person having doubts about joining the Islamic State to turn around and come home. The government’s approach, he said, leaves no way back.

Berg would not let a reporter talk with his client.

To the FBI, Khan is an unknown risk, and one that is best mitigated through prosecution. The case is emblematic of the American approach to confronting the Islamic State. While some European countries have decided to treat young radicals returning from Syria as prodigals in need of a deradicalization program of counseling, education and employment, the United States treats Islamic State recruits, even those who make it no further than an airport, as terrorism suspects.

Since the United States designated the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as a terrorist organization in 2014, the FBI has made an arrest almost every week in connection with the group, many of them of young people who were radicalized online. More than 60 people have been charged with material support and other charges. Twelve of them have pleaded guilty, including a 17-year-old from Virginia who was sentenced to 11 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release and monitoring of his Internet activities.

FBI Director James B. Comey has called on Muslim families and religious leaders to work with the bureau to prevent young Americans from becoming radicalized, saying “our interests are aligned.”

“We just need to make sure that folks are understanding that this is a problem that’s everywhere and speaking up when they see something,” Comey said earlier this year.

But Khan’s case — and dozens more like it — is leaving some in the Muslim community with the impression that, for federal prosecutors and the FBI, there is no alternative to incarceration.

Mustafa Tameez, a community leader in Houston who has worked with the Departments of State and Homeland Security on countering violent extremism, said: “Nobody became a [special agent in charge] by giving a talk to parents about the dangers of getting recruited by a terrorist group. You make your bones by making a big arrest. We have to change the rewards system.”

He said that while some cases have to be prosecuted, the United States also has “to counter the extremist narrative and build capacity to protect these kids and keep them away from predators. We have to rethink our approach.”

U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said there are numerous cases in which agents have worked with families to prevent radicalization and criminal charges were avoided. The officials said there were indications — worrying, although not conclusive — that Khan had not shed his radical views after returning to the United States.

Khan told a friend months after he was back from Turkey to keep an open mind about the Islamic State, according to the FBI. The bureau also learned that concerns had surfaced at Khan’s mosque, where he was teaching seventh-grade Islamic studies on the weekend.

After Khan was arrested in May, M.J. Khan (no relation to the suspect), president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, received an e-mail, which was provided to The Washington Post, from one of the mosque’s religious leaders: “I was told that he has some ideological beliefs or sympathies towards certain groups that are unhealthy.”

LEFT: M.J. Khan, no relation to the accused, president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, received an e-mail questioning Asher Abid Khan’s ideological leanings. (Michael Stravato for The Washington Post). RIGHT: Masjid Al Salam, the mosque where the family of Asher Abid Khan prayed and where Khan taught seventh grade Islamic studies on weekends. (Michael Stravato for The Washington Post).

The FBI said that mosque members told agents that Khan believed that America was the “Dajjal,” or the Great Deceiver.

But Imran Moton, the Sunday-school principal, described Khan as a “perfect young kid” who followed an approved curriculum. He said nobody had ever said that Khan had expressed any sympathy for the Islamic State.

“Think of these charges as insurance,” said a senior U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing, referring to Khan. “We don’t know what he’s going to do. This guy may be on the path to deradicalization. We err on the side of caution.”

‘Where is ISIS?’

Asher Abid Khan’s parents came to the United States from Pakistan more than two decades ago, following a well-worn trail to Texas that many South Asian migrants had taken before them. They worked three jobs — at a gas station, a Pizza Hut and a Wal-Mart — to support their four children, all boys, who attended the local public schools. The Khan family prayed at Masjid Al Salam, a large and vibrant mosque that serves the area’s approximately 400,000 Muslims, the largest community in the state.

Among Khan’s friends at the mosque, as he neared graduation from high school, was a Mexican convert to Islam, Sixto Ramiro Garcia, who went by the name Abdullah Ali.

Together, Garcia and Khan began to watch radical videos online, according to court documents. Garcia posed with a black flag, later the symbol of the Islamic State, which a friend posted on Instagram.

Khan began to assert that women should be covered. At home, relations with his family became strained. He objected to his parents’ decisions to work at businesses that sold alcohol.

In October 2013, a few months after graduating from high school, Khan moved to Australia to live with his uncle’s family in Sydney. Before leaving, in a Facebook message to an old high school friend, Mais Suied, he wrote, “I hope Allah gives you the best in this life and the next!”

Khan enrolled at the Australian Institute of Professional Education and got a job at a 7-Eleven convenience store in Sydney.

According to court records, he also joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international political organization that seeks to create an Islamic caliphate.

Khan began exploring the possibility of traveling to Syria. He felt his “brothers and sisters” were being “raped, tortured and killed,” in Syria, according to court records.

He messaged Suied, an Iraqi whose family had moved in 2008 to Houston, according to Facebook messages reviewed by The Post:

In December 2013, he asked, “im thinking about going . . . do you know Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?” Baghdadi is the leader of the Islamic State.

“Nope,” replied Suied, 18.

Later, he asked her if a friend she mentioned was in the Islamic State.

“Nope, he’s Shia’a lmao.”

“Really?? LOL do you have anyone in ISIS,” Khan asked.

“Yea all my ramadi people which is my vousins lol they all are crazy haha.”

“Where is Isis do you know? Bc i might go early.”

“In floja [Fallujah] I think. [Unsure emoticon] cuz all sunni lives there.”

Suied said that Khan might have difficulty when he landed in Baghdad and suggested that Turkey might be a better entry point.

Traveling to Turkey

On Jan. 6, 2014, Khan contacted Garcia, 20, the Mexican convert, expressing his desire to go to Syria, according to court records. In Australia, Khan managed to get in touch with an Islamic State facilitator in Turkey named Mohammad, who had promised to get them across the border. In a message with another high school friend in the United States, who urged Khan to “wait a couple of years and see if [his] perspective changes,” Khan said she needed to understand his feelings.

Maybe there is a “better way to help out,” wrote the friend, Ifrah Farooq, back in Texas, but Khan was insistent.

On Feb. 23, Garcia flew to London from Houston. Khan took a flight from Australia to Malaysia the next day, with a later connection to Turkey.

When Khan landed in Kuala Lumpur, his parents had already learned from their Australian relatives that Khan was on the move, heading to the Turkish border with Syria. “We were scared,” Afroz, Khan’s mother, said in an interview.

The family left him a message saying his mother had been hospitalized — a lie, but one they hoped would turn him around.

“My parents are tipping bro,” Khan said in a message to Garcia. “I hers my moms in the hospital.”

“Dude, you can’t pull [expletive] like that, I didn’t come with that much cash, I have no connections I’ve got no clue, wtf,” Garcia responded.

Khan promised to continue on to Turkey, but he never hooked up with Garcia.

Once home, Khan didn’t say anything about wanting to travel to the Islamic State.

“Never, never,” his mother said. But Khan did eventually tell his parents that he never believed the story that his mother was sick.

A change in demeanor

Back in Houston, Khan had slipped into a new routine, taking classes at the University of Houston and working at Pizza Hut as a delivery driver — without having drawn the attention of the FBI for his aborted trip to Syria. He was circumspect with friends about where he had been.

One friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities surrounding the case, said that when he returned he seemed less strident about following the tenets of Islam.

“It was a change for the better,” the friend said.

Khan continued to follow Garcia on Facebook and receive updates from his friend. Garcia had messaged him almost immediately after Khan left Turkey that he had found the facilitator Mohammad in a border town called Antakya. An excited Khan e-mailed Farooq, according to court records and told her to keep Garcia in “your prayers.”

Garcia had sent Khan photographs of himself, including one with an AK-47 rifle. “That’s my baby,” Garcia messaged shortly after he entered Syria. “You can have one too if you’d like.”

In August 2014, when Garcia had joined the Islamic State, Khan cautioned: “make sure they are doing everything according to Islam you know, not killing innocent ppl and all that.”

Garcia’s absence had not gone unnoticed. Worried family members contacted the FBI, which opened an investigation.

A neighbor walks a dog in the Spring, Tex., neighborhood where Asher Abid Khan lives with his parents. (Michael Stravato for The Washington Post)

By October 2014, the FBI finally unearthed Khan’s connection to Garcia after obtaining a search warrant for the convert’s Facebook account, and Khan was placed under surveillance.

The FBI also suspected that Khan, who had applied for another visa for Australia, might be considering another effort to reach Syria.

His friend Garcia was now believed dead; somebody had used his Facebook account to message his family that he had died as a martyr.

On the morning of May 25, 2015, Khan was arrested at his house.

“Why are you here? What did we do wrong?” his mother asked agents as they searched the house.

Khan’s attorney, Berg — a former colonel in the Army Reserve, who has served at both Guantanamo Bay, where he helped set up the first military commissions, and in Afghanistan — dismissed the evidence against Khan as “a lot of talk and Facebook crap.”

Khan’s arrest had followed an attempted attack the same month on an event in Garland, Tex., where cartoonists drew the prophet Muhammad. His depiction is prohibited under Islam. The two attackers — Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi of Phoenix — were killed by police.

The FBI had arrested Simpson in 2010, charging him with lying about his plans to travel overseas to fight in Somalia. But a judge sentenced him to probation after concluding that the prosecutors had failed to prove he intended to travel overseas to wage violent jihad.

U.S. officials, drawing a parallel with the Simpson case, said they were concerned that Khan might one day decide to kill someone too.

“We don’t know what he is going to do in three years,” the senior law enforcement official said. “We’ll let the courts sort it out.”

“It is almost like playing Russian roulette,” said Andrew Arena, the former special agent in charge of the Detroit Field Office, which has a robust counterterrorism operation and a large Muslim population. “If you guess wrong, you got problems.”

But Arena cautioned: “You’re not going to arrest your way out of this problem.”

At a detention hearing for Khan in Houston, federal prosecutors opposed bail.

“There are no conditions the government foresees that would enable the safety of the homeland,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Carolyn Ferko.

A magistrate judge disagreed, placed Khan under house arrest and ordered him to wear an ankle bracelet so that his movements could be monitored.

Prosecutors appealed and told U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes that Khan wanted to die fighting in Syria. They also noted that he had recruited Garcia to fight with the Islamic State.

“A man devoted to become a martyr would not turn around,” said Hughes, who upheld the magistrate’s decision.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, hearing a further appeal from the government, affirmed Hughes’s decision. Khan’s trial is set for later this year.

Khan’s father said he had read the charges against his son but still didn’t understand what he did wrong. His son turned around, he said, and did the right thing.

“He doesn’t want to go to Syria,” the father said. “That’s what he told us. This is unfair. He did not do anything.”

Islamic State has increasingly hit soft targets outside of ‘caliphate’ borders

By Erin Cunningham
November 14, 2015

CAIRO – The coordinated attacks on diners and concertgoers across Paris on Friday appear to mark the Islamic State’s first major operation outside the Middle East, and to confirm the group’s adoption of global terror tactics to boost its profile and strike back at its enemies.

The group claimed credit for Friday’s attacks, which killed 129 people. President Francoise Hollande called the violence “an act of war” organized by Islamic State.

Until recently, the extremist movement was focused almost entirely on seizing territory on which to build its so-called caliphate, including in Iraq and Syria, where violent civil wars have left destabilizing security vacuums.

Its military gains won the extremists recruits from around the globe. Islamic State affiliates now control most of the Libyan coastal town of Sirte, in another region where state collapse has led to political chaos, and operate with relative freedom in the northern part of Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula.

In both areas, the militants carried out attacks but also attempted to establish some sort of rule, including the imposition of an extreme version of sharia law and the provision of basic services, similar to what it does in cities in Iraq and Syria.

But earlier this year, Islamic State loyalists began attacking soft targets outside of the borders of the “caliphate” — in Tunisia, Yemen, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The targets included a museum, a beach resort and worshipers at Shiite mosques. In Cairo, an Islamic State cell claimed a car bomb attack on an Italian consulate.

On Oct. 31, the group’s affiliate in Sinai asserted responsibility for the downing of a Russian airliner. The jihadists’ role in the crash has not been confirmed by investigators, but a number of European airlines halted flights to and from the Sharm el-Sheikh airport where the passenger jet had departed.

In the wake of the crash, international law professor and security expert at Cornell University, Jens David Ohlin said the Islamic State is “combining the bloodiest aspects of statehood and terrorism into one dangerous mess.”

A father’s futile struggle to save his son from what he would become: A Paris suicide bomber

By Yanan Wang
November 17, 2015

From a distance, Azzédine recognized his son’s smile. Then, as he got closer, he noticed the crutches, the cold demeanor. They were markers of a life of combat he didn’t understand, a life from which he tried desperately to save his child.

In a December 2014 article, French newspaper Le Monde recounted the heartbreaking journey of the 67-year-old French-Algerian salesman as he attempted to recover his son from the reins of the Islamic State. Though the article referred to his son using the pseudonym “Khader,” his true identity was revealed Monday as Samy Amimour — a 28-year-old French national who has been identified as one of three suicide bombers responsible for killing 80 in Paris’s Bataclan theater Friday.

Le Monde has republished the article in light of the announcement that Amimour was among the attackers. In it, his father, Azzédine, is given the pseudonym “Mohamed.”

The newspaper’s account tells the tale of a man who loses his son to forces outside his control and beyond his comprehension.

When he still lived with his parents in a northeastern Paris suburb, Samy worked as a bus driver. The mayor of Drancy, where Samy grew up, told another French newspaper Libération that he remembered the boy as “well-raised, very shy, athletic and clad in sportswear.”

At age 22, however, Samy’s radicalization began. He started frequenting a mosque, forbade his parents from watching television and demanded that his mother wear a veil.

In 2012, Samy was questioned by French officials about links to a network of terror sympathizers and a planned Yemen trip that never happened. Eventually, he moved to Syria and joined the Islamic State.

Azzédine worried that in Syria, his son would be killed by the soldiers of President Bashar al-Assad; in France, where several young jihadists had already been condemned, he feared that Samy would be put in prison.

His plan, then, was to meet Samy in Syria and convince him to start anew in Algeria.

Nothing unfolded as he thought it would.

Though he spoke with Samy via Skype at least once a month, Azzédine never grasped the power the Islamic State had over his son until he went to visit him without warning.

Determined to dissuade Samy from his violent path, Azzédine didn’t tell him he was coming until he reached the Turkish-Syrian border after flying from France to Istanbul. Though suspicious of his father’s intentions, Samy put him in touch with smugglers who brought him to Minbej, Syria, where the black flag of the Islamic State fluttered in the wind.

“You have come to fight despite your age!” Azzédine’s fellow travelers commended him at the end of a voyage that included gun-wielding militants and minefields.

But of course, his objectives were quite the opposite. He was there to take back one of the fighters who had become unrecognizable as the son he knew.

The meeting that Azzédine had anticipated for months was icy and brusque, a “failure.” Samy was coming from Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, and he was accompanied by another man who never left the two of them alone.

Samy didn’t bring his father to his residence, nor did he explain how he got hurt — the crutches — or if he fought in combat. That night, Azzédine handed him an envelope with a letter from Samy’s mother and 100 euros inside. Samy read the letter in a corner and returned the money, telling Azzédine that he had no need for it.

In an attempt to understand his son’s new life, Azzédine spoke with a few of his fellow fighters. They showed him gory videos of live killings that frightened him even further.

“I saw horrible images,” Azzédine told Le Monde. “I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Two or three days after his arrival in Syria, he left for Turkey with a heavy heart, and made it back to France without any trouble from immigration authorities. Azzédine traveled with a green-eyed Frenchwoman and her six-month-old baby.

“Her husband was getting ready to commit a suicide attack,” he recalled to Le Monde. “She seemed happy.”

Back at home, Azzédine realized that nothing had come of his trip. His son had escaped him. His wife, however, still guarded hope that Samy would one day leave the Islamic State.

“She wants to go back [to Syria] with me,” Azzédine said. “She thinks she might be able to convince him. I don’t want him to stay there for the rest of his life.”

That was last December. Now, there’s no more mystery about what Samy was doing with the Islamic State and what he was prepared to sacrifice. In a word, it was everything.

For the Islamic State, paroxysms of violence portend apocalypse

By Craig Whitlock and Ellen Nakashima
November 16, 2015

By claiming devastating attacks on French and Russian targets in recent days, the Islamic State has embraced what appears to be an irrational strategy: It has angered and provoked two military powers that had been reluctant to engage in an all-out war with the self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Vowing revenge, France has already responded with a flurry of airstrikes on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s capital in Syria. And Moscow may intensify its air campaign if it concludes that the Islamic State did, in fact, blow up a Russian airliner.

Expanding the conflict may seem like a self-destructive move. But to some analysts, it is squarely in keeping with what the group advertises as its overriding, apocalyptic mission: to lure the world’s unbelievers into Syria for a final, Armageddon-like battle.

In the short term, the Islamic State is almost certainly betting that it can survive a counterattack. Whatever losses the group may suffer will be far outweighed by the propaganda value of its newly proven ability to infiltrate other countries and kill hundreds of civilians, according to counterterrorism analysts and U.S. officials.

“The more the West strikes, the more people are killed [in Syria], it only builds into the narrative that the end is coming,” said Matthew Henman, managing editor of IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London.

He added that Islamic State leaders have already won bragging rights to say, “You can carry out all these cowardly airstrikes in the air, but we’ll come to your capital cities and we’ll kill large numbers of your civilians on the ground. And you cannot stop us from doing it.”

Others cautioned that it is difficult to ascertain the Islamic State’s strategic motives or what it might have been hoping to accomplish with the Paris attacks and the downing of the Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula.

The attacks could reflect a simple decision to “inflict pain” on France and Russia and deter them from further involvement in the region, said William McCants, an analyst at the Brookings Institution and the author of a new book, “The ISIS Apocalypse.” Or, conversely, it could mark an attempt to draw them deeper into the fight.

“It’s one of the hardest questions to answer,” he said. “It’s totally unclear. We don’t know their motivation or what is motivating the decision-making at the top of the organization.”

The Islamic State has attracted tens of thousands of fighters from other countries since it announced in June 2014 that it had established a caliphate — or a new Islamic empire — based in territory under its control in Syria and Iraq.

According to the group’s extremist ideology, the caliphate will eventually triumph in a great war against infidel forces, culminating in a final end-of-days battle in Dabiq, an obscure Syrian town near the northern city of Aleppo.

The group’s online propaganda magazine is titled “Dabiq.” Each edition features the same prophetic quote about how the conflict will unfold: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify — by Allah’s permission — until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.”

Wanting to avoid a repeat of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led to a long and bloody occupation, the White House has resisted sending large numbers of ground troops to fight the Islamic State. But the bombing attacks in Paris have increased pressure on the Obama administration to intervene more forcefully.

During a visit to Turkey on Monday, President Obama said the United States and its allies need to stick with their strategy of relying on airpower and friendly local forces to gradually roll back the Islamic State’s territorial gains.

“We play into the [Islamic State] narrative when we act as if they’re a state, and we use routine military tactics that are designed to fight a state that is attacking another state,” he told reporters at a news conference.

“The more we shrink that territory, the less they can pretend that they are somehow a functioning state, and the more it becomes apparent that they are simply a network of killers who are brutalizing local populations.”

In recent months, the Islamic State has seen the boundaries of its caliphate slowly recede as Kurdish and Iraqi forces — backed by U.S. airpower and military advisers — have retaken control of some key towns.

That loss of territory in Syria and Iraq has undermined the Islamic State’s legitimacy and increased pressure on the group to demonstrate its potency in other ways, U.S. officials said.

“It has not had that type of momentum inside of those two countries,” CIA Director John Brennan said Monday in Washington during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Which is why I think they are looking abroad now to have these spectacular attacks.”

Some analysts suggested that the Paris attacks reflect an acute and continuing need for the Islamic State to attract fresh recruits. Some U.S. officials have estimated that more than 20,000 Islamic State fighters have been killed over the past 15 months.

Until several months ago, the group had little trouble finding replacements as streams of volunteers poured into Iraq and Syria from other countries. But the group’s ability to attract fighters from some Western countries appears to have waned.

U.S. counterterrorism officials, for example, say that the number of Americans seeking to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State has declined since last year.

Looking ahead, however, the Islamic State will try to exploit the Paris bombings as a “tremendous” recruiting tool, said Daniel Byman, a Georgetown University professor and terrorism expert.

“If you are a young Muslim who is angered by the attacks on Sunnis in Syria, this is a group that is showing it’s fighting back by hitting [your] enemies,” he said. “You’re demonstrating your relevance over your rivals’. So your organization gets stronger because you can say you’re the defender of Muslims. You’re the state that’s responding to threats to the religious community.”

The Islamic State’s tactics can seem counterintuitive in other ways. The group advertises its brutality — it boasts about beheading captives, raping women and killing other Muslims — and shows little inclination to modify its ways to win popular support in the territory it controls.

Yet it would be a mistake to analyze the group’s apocalyptic ideology through the lens of Western rationality, said Matthew Levitt, head of the counterterrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“They don’t see being way too brutal as a bad thing,” he said. “Brutality is working for them. They don’t see taking over the world as overstretching. This is part of the divine mission.”

Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

Is it too late to solve the mess in the Middle East?

By Liz Sly
November 17, 2015

BAGHDAD — With the attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger plane, the Islamic State has declared war on the wider world, galvanizing new calls for an intensified global effort to defeat the emerging threat.

It may already be too late and too difficult, however, for any swift or easy solution to the tangled mess the Middle East has become in the four years since the Arab Spring plunged the region into turmoil.

What Jordan’s King Abdullah II referred to as a “third world war against humanity” has, more accurately, become a jumble of overlapping wars driven by conflicting agendas in which defeating the Islamic State is just one of a number of competing and often contradictory policy pursuits.

In those four years, four Arab states — Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen — have effectively collapsed. Civil wars are raging in all of them. World powers have lined up on different sides of those wars. And the chaos has given the heirs to the legacy of Osama bin Laden the greatest gift they could have hoped for: the gift of time and space.

Aided by the disinterest of a world wearied and wary after the failings of the Iraq war, an assortment of al-Qaeda veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers have moved into the vacuum left by the collapse of governments in Syria and Iraq and built themselves a proto-state. It can hardly be said to count as a real state, but it controls territory, raises taxes and maintains an army.

Any responses now “are very late in the game,” said Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The costs of inaction have accumulated, and we can’t undo the damage of the past four years.”

The Islamic State is finding new footholds in Egypt, Libya and Afghanistan as state control crumbles there, too, confronting the world with a vastly bigger challenge than it faced after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, said Bruce Riedel, who is also with the Brookings Institution.

“We have now been fighting al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda offshoots, which is what the Islamic State is, since 1998,” he said. “We now face an enemy that has more sanctuaries and operating space than ever before. The battlefield is now much larger than it was before.”

It is also more complicated. At no point has any world power made defeating the Islamic State a top priority, including the United States, said Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group. “Everyone’s using the Islamic State,” he said. It’s a diversion “from what’s really going on.”

For the Obama administration, avoiding entanglement in another Middle East war has been the foremost policy priority, followed closely by the pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran. There seems to be little doubt that the United States has soft-pedaled its Syria policy, ostensibly aimed at removing President Bashar al-
Assad, in order not to jeopardize the Iran deal, Hamid said.

Russian intervention in the region has been driven primarily by President Vladimir Putin’s desire to reassert Russia’s stature as a global power and shore up Assad’s regime, hence the focus on targeting U.S.-backed moderate rebels rather than the Islamic State in the earliest days of its intervention.

Saudi Arabia, America’s most powerful Arab ally, is preoccupied above all by the challenge posed by Iran and is expending its military energies on fighting the Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen.

Iran has prioritized the projection of its regional influence through Syria and Iraq to the Mediterranean, funding and arming proxy militias to defend its interests in Shiite-dominated areas of Iraq and to quell the anti-Assad rebellion mostly in the areas around Damascus, the Syrian capital.

And Turkey’s attention is focused mainly on its domestic Kurdish problem and on the perceived threat posed by the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish enclave along its border in northern Syria.

It seems unlikely that the Paris attacks will generate a more coherent international response, analysts say.

France has joined the United States and Russia in conducting airstrikes in Syria, raining bombs on the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa on two occasions since the bloodshed in Paris on Friday. On Tuesday, President François Hollande dispatched an aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean, where Russian warships are already deployed for a fight that has focused mostly on Syrian rebels fighting Assad — some of whom also have been supported by France.

Syrian activists with the group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which maintains a network of undercover reporters in Raqqa, say that the initial French strikes, at least, hit only empty buildings vacated by the militants in anticipation of retaliation.

Experience has already demonstrated that the Islamic State is unlikely to be defeated with airstrikes alone, and for now, there are few other alternatives on the horizon, Riedel said.

“The Islamic State can be degraded by air power, but in the end someone has to provide the infantry that goes in and takes Mosul and Raqqa and restores governance and rule of law, and I don’t see anyone offering that.”

In America, the Paris attacks have precipitated peripheral debates about whether the United States is waging war on Islam and the question of whether to admit Syrian refugees, rather than ways to address the wider problems of the Middle East.

Although there have been calls for more robust intervention, including boots on the ground, from some members of Congress, President Obama has made it clear that he thinks the current U.S. strategy is working.

And in recent days, there has been a spurt of progress on the ground. An alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters recaptured the eastern Syrian town of al-Hawl and dozens of surrounding villages. In northern Iraq, Kurdish fighters ejected the Islamic State from the town of Sinjar in 48 hours. The Iraqi army has made advances around Ramadi, the capital of the province of Anbar, which is now almost encircled.

The gains reflect a newly concerted effort to coordinate efforts among the diverse local forces fighting on the ground in order to pressure the Islamic State in multiple places at the same time, said Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State.

“We’re fighting them across the entire depth of the battlefield at once. We are synchronizing and aligning our support,” he said. “Each one of these gains is not necessarily compelling, but when you look at them simultaneously it’s very compelling.”

The gains nonetheless leave unaddressed the core problem confronting the region, which is the collapse of viable state structures in the Middle East and the absence of any immediately apparent alternative to Islamic State rule in the mostly Sunni areas it controls, said Robert Ford, former U.S. ambassador to Syria and now a fellow with the Middle East Institute.

Kurdish fighters have made most of the advances in Syria so far, but they are unlikely to succeed in retaking core Sunni strongholds such as Raqqa and other cities in the Sunni Arab territories that form the heart of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate.

“Kurds are never going to liberate Palmyra; Kurds are not going to clear the Islamic State out of Deir al-Zour,” he said. “Sunni Arabs are going to have to do that, and what Arab force is going to do that? Assad doesn’t have the forces; he can’t even take the suburbs of Damascus.”

Likewise in Iraq, Shiite militias and Iraqi Kurds have made most of the gains so far. The Iraqi army’s recent advances in Ramadi have isolated Fallujah, which has been under Islamic State control for nearly two years, leaving residents besieged and short of food.

Many residents “would like Daesh to be expelled,” said Issa al-Issawi, the mayor of Fallujah, who left the city when the Islamic State, also known as Daesh, overran it and is living in government-controlled territory. “But at the same time they have major concerns about what would happen next.”

Obama acknowledged the problem in justifying his reluctance to commit troops to the fight. “We can retake territory and as long as we leave troops there we can hold it, but that does not solve the underlying dynamic that is producing these extremist groups,” he told journalists in Turkey this week.

Progress is being made on standing up Arab forces to fight in both Iraq and Syria, said Warren, citing the creation of an Arab coalition in northern Syria and ongoing efforts to train Sunni fighters in Iraq. The three-to-five-year timeline for defeating the Islamic State offered by the administration when airstrikes were launched last year is still on track, he said. “Now it’s two to four years.”

That may be an optimistic assessment, analysts say. The networks and ideology generated by al-Qaeda survived more than a decade of American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and are likely to endure for at least another decade, Riedel said.

In the meantime, more attacks of the kind launched in Paris are to be expected, a message the Obama administration seems to be trying to convey.

“We’ve always said there’s a threat of these kind of attacks around the world until we’ve made more progress,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry told CNN in an interview Tuesday.

Article: How the growing web of conflict in Syria became a global problem

Is the United States safe from a Paris-style Islamic State attack?

By Adam Goldman
November 17, 2015

As France reels from a set of Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris last week that killed scores and wounded hundreds, Americans are wondering whether their own country is any safer.

“That’s an easy one,” said a former senior FBI official who until recently was deeply involved in terrorism operations. “Safer here than there? Yes. We are separated by an ocean. Without a doubt, we are safer here than over there.”

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the war on terrorism, making border crossings more secure, detecting plots and expanding the no-fly list from about a dozen people to roughly 47,000.

Tougher post-9/11 terrorism laws also ensure that the FBI and federal prosecutors can charge people with crimes that carry stiff sentences. In the past 18 months, the FBI has charged more than 60 people in connection with the Islamic State. Many could face years in prison if convicted, meaning the FBI won’t have to devote resources to tracking their movements.

In Europe, porous borders mean that hundreds of foreign fighters have slipped back into the continent from Iraq and Syria, overwhelming intelligence agencies trying to keep tabs on them. That appears to have been the case in the Paris attacks, where at least four of the possible nine attackers were known to European authorities. Another suspected key player in the plot fought in Syria and later returned to Europe, only to flee back to the Islamic State.

The number of Americans who have traveled to Iraq and Syria — or at least attempted to — is about 250, dramatically less than the estimated 4,500 who have left Europe. FBI officials aren’t taking the threat lightly, but they have expressed confidence that they have those U.S. individuals contained and that the remaining Americans in Syria won’t be returning to this country unless they are in handcuffs.

That assessment is echoed in a new report by the New America Foundation titled “ISIS in the West: The New Faces of Extremism.”

“Tracking the many foreign fighters from Western countries who have gone to Syria and have returned to the West poses a greater challenge, given their larger numbers, than tracking the handful of returning American fighters,” the report says.

But that doesn’t mean the United States is not vulnerable. The FBI, which is charged with fighting terrorism in this country, has struggled at times to keep pace with a metastasizing threat.

Because of limited resources, the FBI must constantly reevaluate which targets are a priority when it comes to closely following top-tier terrorism suspects. “It’s daunting,” said the former senior FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the bureau.

Many law enforcement officials also argue that it would be easier to do their jobs if U.S. tech firms made it possible for phones and apps to be wiretapped. It is not yet known whether the plotters of the Paris terrorist attacks used encrypted channels of communication, but experts say it is highly likely that they did.

Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney for Manhattan, who has been outspoken on how a lack of access to encrypted communications has hindered investigations, is expected to unveil a proposal on this topic Wednesday at a conference in New York. FBI Director James B. Comey also is to appear at the event. Last year, Comey called for legislation on encryption but later backed down when it became clear that Congress was hostile to the idea of aiding government surveillance.

Comey said recently that the FBI has about 900 cases involving homegrown violent extremists in every state. The vast majority of them, FBI officials say, are related to the Islamic State.

These, however, are a fraction of the approximately 10,000 terrorism cases the FBI has opened — many are overseas cases involving crimes against Americans, such as journalist James Foley, who was beheaded last year on video by Mohammed Emwazi, better known as “Jihadi John.” Authorities believe Emwazi was killed in a U.S. drone strike Thursday.

The FBI felt the Islamic State’s reach acutely earlier this year when it had to reassign hundreds of agents from its criminal division to deal with the Islamic State threat across the country.

“We had dozens of people,” Comey said recently at an event in Washington. “We had to find ways to incapacitate them, all popping up going to kill people.” When asked whether the bureau could sustain that pace without additional resources, he expressed doubt.

“If that were the new normal, that would be very stressful,” he said. “It’s a hard time for the bureau. Only on TV is it easy to follow people.”

The FBI is faced with guarding against two types of terrorist scenarios. In one, a plan is developed in the terrorist group’s stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, and foreign fighters, skilled in the use of weapons and explosives, return home and mount a large-scale attack. The FBI has been training with police departments across the country to respond to a terrorist attack similar to the one that took place in Mumbai in 2008, when a team of 10 militants killed 164 people.

Last month, dozens of FBI agents from the Washington field office, Fairfax County, Va., police officers and tactically trained fire department personnel descended on a large shopping mall afterhours at 10 p.m. and played out such an attack until 4 a.m. the next day.

But FBI officials believe that scenario is less likely to happen in the United States.

They say a more probable attack would involve individuals inspired by Islamic State propaganda to act on their own — people Comey has described as “unmoored,” “unpredictable” and “wingnuts.”

That second scenario has already happened. Among the many Americans the FBI has charged, some are accused of plotting — without direction from the Islamic State — to kill U.S. military personnel and detonate bombs in New York City.

The FBI said two men in Boston — including Usaamah Abdullah Rahim, 26 — and a third man in Rhode Island had discussed beheading Pamela Geller, an outspoken critic of Islam. They planned to kill her July 4, the FBI said.

When Rahim decided to act early, the FBI was monitoring his phone.

One of the FBI’s armed mobile surveillance teams confronted the knife-wielding Rahim and killed him.

“Luckily, we were covering that phone,” Comey has said.

In another incident, two Phoenix men, one of whom was under FBI investigation, tried to attack a prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Tex., which had been organized by Geller. Both men — Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi — were killed. Although the FBI did not know of their exact plans, officials say the field office should have reacted more quickly when it learned Simpson might be interested in going to the contest.

An FBI counterterrorism official described Garland as a failure on the front end and a success story on the back end. Given the inflammatory nature of the event, the FBI persuaded local police to increase the number of officers from a handful to more than 40. When Simpson arrived, he was vastly outgunned. Police were ready.

Months after the event, Comey said the bureau still had questions about what happened and the Islamic State’s role in the attack. Simpson had hundreds of exchanges with an Islamic State operative overseas, with the two communicating using end-to-end encryption.

“We don’t know even today what was said between the two of them,” Comey said. “We know they were in direct communication with him the day he left to go kill people in Garland, TX. This is an example of the problem that I call going dark.”

It’s not clear how the attacks in Paris will affect FBI operations in the United States and whether there will be an uptick in cases.

Comey said late last month that the pace had dropped a “little bit” since the summer, and so he moved FBI personnel back to their usual roles in the criminal division. He said that since July 1, the FBI had detected only six U.S. travelers trying to reach the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate. In the months before, the FBI was seeing far more than that.

Comey speculated that perhaps part of the Islamic State’s message urging Muslims to come to the caliphate was “becoming less effective.”

“Something interesting is going on that I don’t know enough about to tell you about with high confidence,” he said. “Something has happened that has flattened the curve.”

That was before Paris.

Graphic: The Islamic State’s suspected inroads into America

Video: Why the Islamic State propaganda arm is more important than its fighters

Ellen Nakashima and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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