Sebastian Gorka - Why We Fight - Why We Fight - Defeating America's Enemies - With No Apologies

Wherever al-Qaeda operated after 9/11, it never did so as a true insurgency. Instead it maintained its identity as a globally ambitious and operational terrorist organization. Even when it collaborated with a local insurgency, as in Somalia and Afghanistan, it did so parasitically. True insurgencies, like al-Shabaab and the Taliban, have a mass base of support and so many fighters that they can operate openly in daylight, capture territory, and hold it. Regular terrorist groups are by nature much smaller. Lacking a mass base of support, they must operate covertly. They hide in safehouses when inactive or plotting. They rapidly execute an attack and return immediately to their hiding place. An insurgency, on the other hand, functions as a quasi-military force. It can muster recruits and deploy them in formation, not just to attack, but to exercise lasting control over the territory it captures. For the insurgent, violence is but one tool with which to challenge government writ. For the terrorist organization, which has no true military capacity, violence is reduced to a means of coercion; a messaging platform for intimidation.

Al-Qaeda was never a true insurgency. Even in Afghanistan and Somalia, where it was linked to an insurgency, it never recruited its own mass base of support, piggy-backing instead on pre-existing insurgencies such as the Taliban and al-Shabaab. ISIS became all the more impressive because it took no shortcuts to quasi-statehood. ISIS wasn’t just another terrorist group perched upon another pre-existing insurgency. It didn’t have to borrow its fighters from another, older threat group. ISIS recruited its own mass base of fighters—more than eighty thousand in a few years. ISIS become more powerful than al-Qaeda because it grew into a true insurgency, the first modern insurgency of its kind.

One characteristic unites all modern insurgent groups. Be it Mao Zedong in China after World War II or the FARC in Colombia in the 1980s, and whatever its ideology, they all share a proximate goal: the defeat and displacement of the government they are fighting. Mao wanted to defeat and replace the nationalists and establish a Marxist China. The FARC wanted to defeat and replace the Hispanic elite of Bogotá and establish a Bolivarian people’s republic. Whether they were in Asia, Latin America, Africa, or Europe, insurgents were classically set on replacing just one regime: the regime with which they were at war. The Islamic State was far more ambitious.

Having built its own insurgent base with tens of thousands of fighters, ISIS went on to distinguish itself in four important ways. First, it managed to capture city after city in Iraq, Syria, and Libya; the first insurgency to control land in multiple countries in one region. On top of that success, it spread into West Africa, where Boko Haram, the Nigerian jihadi group, swore bayat , the Arabic pledge of allegiance, to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State. Boko Haram was accepted into the new “caliphate” under al-Baghdadi’s leadership and changed its name to the West Africa Province of the Islamic State, meaning that any territory under its control was a de facto part of the sovereign Islamic State. Never before had an insurgency captured and held land in multiple nations of multiple regions. In this case, the Middle East and North and West Africa.

Second, the Islamic State became the richest threat group of its type ever seen. Unclassified government estimates put its income at two to four million dollars per day, which accord with the Financial Times ’ estimate that ISIS achieved an “insurgent GDP” of five hundred million dollars. Considering that the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington cost al-Qaeda only five hundred thousand dollars, [2] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report , July 22, 2004, p. 172. ISIS had advanced to a completely different league from its progenitor’s. It was in no way a “JV team,” as President Obama would have had us believe.

Third, the Islamic State was incredibly impressive at mobilizing jihadist fighters. In the first nine months of its renewed operations in Iraq, ISIS managed to recruit nine thousand fighters. In the past few years, it has recruited more than eighty-five thousand men, at least thirty-five thousand of whom have come from outside Iraq and Syria. Given that al-Qaeda, operating as the Arab Services Bureau for Mujahideen, recruited only fifty-five thousand fighters during the entire Afghan war of 1979–1989, ISIS has proved itself a far more impressive—and deadlier—organization than al-Qaeda.

The fourth, and most important, way in which the Islamic State truly stands out is by ruling a substantial territory. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the rebirth of the caliphate—the theocratic Islamic empire—from the Grand Mosque of Mosul on June 29, 2014, and proceeded to exercise true control over a population of more than six million in a territory larger than Great Britain, he achieved what no other jihadist group had in the past ninety years.

Here it is crucial to remember that the caliphate is not just the fabulist whim of religious extremists, but a political and religious reality that reigned for more than a thousand years. Established in Mecca and based over the centuries in Damascus, Baghdad, and Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), the caliphate existed until just a hundred years ago in the form of the Ottoman Empire. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, head of the new Republic of Turkey, which supplanted the empire after World War I, was intent on secularizing his nation and officially dissolved the caliphate in 1924. Jihadists have been trying to bring it back ever since, starting with the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Hundreds of extremist organizations, including al-Qaeda, sprang up over the next nine decades with the express purpose of undoing what Atatürk had decreed. Yet, every one of them failed. The Muslim Brotherhood won the presidency of Egypt in 2011, but it tried to Islamize the nation too rapidly and blatantly, provoking a military coup and the restoration of secular rule in 2013.

The question is, how exactly did ISIS succeed where all the other jihadist groups had failed? American forces under the command of President Trump may have managed in 2017 to dismantle the new caliphate in short order, but it could be rebuilt elsewhere. Will a post-ISIS group succeed in a new region, such as Africa or Asia? The answer to how ISIS built its Islamic State is twofold, and we must understand it if we are to vanquish the Global Jihadist Movement and prevent its next insurgency.

The first of ISIS’s secrets was leveraging a religious narrative, specifically an eschatological one that portrays its holy war as the “final jihad” before the end times. Abu Bakr used Islamic prophecies that the final judgment will be preceded by a series of mighty conflicts, the last of which will take place in the land of al-Sham—“Greater Syria,” or Mesopotamia—the birthplace of ISIS. Thus, the message to all who were inspired by the jihadi attacks on and after 9/11 and who wanted to guarantee eternal salvation for themselves as mujaheed , jihadi martyrs, was incredibly powerful:

“We are fighting and winning in a jihad on the territory that you have been told is the site of the very Last Jihad. You will have no opportunity to be a holy warrior after this jihad, for we are on al-Sham, and this is the last war against the infidel before Judgement Day. Come now or not at all.”

This is how Abu Bakr and ISIS managed to recruit tens of thousands of fighters so rapidly and inspired dozens and dozens of attacks in the United States and Europe.

The second secret of ISIS’s success has to do with an Egyptian jihadi theorist of irregular warfare.