The ISIS Solution Read online

  The ISIS Solution

  How Unconventional Thinking and Special Operations Can Eliminate Radical Islam

  Brandon Webb, Jack Murphy, Peter Nealen, and the Editors of SOFREP.com

  St. Martin’s Press

  New York

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors’ copyright, please notify the publisher at http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1. The Establishment of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS)

  Chapter 2. A Forensic Look at the ISIS Organizational Structure

  Chapter 3. Unconventional Solutions Past and Present

  Chapter 4. Large-Scale Military Action Against ISIS

  Chapter 5. Our Conclusion

  Chapter 6. Bonus: What You and Your Friends Can Do to Combat ISIS

  Appendix: The Military-Industrial Complex and State of U.S. Special Operations

  Notes

  SOFREP e-books from St. Martin's Press

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  It always seems impossible until it’s done.

  —Nelson Mandela

  Introduction

  American foreign policy strategies in a post-9/11 world have been opaque at best, and recently the “unhinged” plan is playing out on the world stage in countries like Libya, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Ukraine. If you ask average Americans on the street what our strategy is to defeat Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, or any other fracture of radical Islam, it is likely that you will get different answers from everyone. Any good strategy in an organization, even big government, can be easily understood and is widely known by the people in the organization, in this case, the American public. Ask people at Apple what their company stands for and what the company strategy is, and chances are you’ll get straight, unified, and coherent answers. This is the problem with American government, and the bureaucracy that surrounds it today, and it crosses party lines.

  Barack Obama and Joe Biden will responsibly end the war in Iraq so that we can renew our military strength, dedicate more resources to the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and invest in our economy at home. The Obama-Biden plan will help us succeed in Iraq by transitioning to Iraqi control of their country.—The Obama-Biden Plan, Change.gov1

  Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.—2009 Nobel Committee Statement2

  The irony of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is also not lost on the editors of SOFREP.com. While his predecessor admittedly did him no favors with the lack of planning post–Iraq invasion, Obama’s supporters cannot ignore that he has waged a secret war across the globe that has led to destabilization in states like Libya, and civil war in Iraq and Syria. The president’s supporters have to deal with the harsh reality that if there were a Nobel War Prize, Obama would be a clear choice for the nomination today.

  The president recently announced that we don’t have a strategy for dealing with ISIS.

  It’s too soon to say what steps the United States will take against ISIS in Syria. “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse,” Obama told reporters during a White House news briefing. “We don’t have a strategy yet.”—CNN, September 4, 20143

  If we have been in a war against terror for more than a decade and still don’t have solid strategies for dealing with radical terrorism, then what have we really been doing the last thirteen years? It’s a good question to ask yourself, and at least the president was telling the truth when he said we don’t have a strategy for ISIS.

  Crescent Map (World History Maps: Patterns of Interaction)

  Introduction to ISIS

  The Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, known derogatorily as “Daash” among its adversaries in Iraq, did not form in a vacuum. It was founded in 2003 as Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Group of Monotheism and Jihad), by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian, and in October 2004, Zarqawi pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, renaming the organization Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn or, more simply, Al Qaeda in Iraq. Under this moniker, the group fought Coalition forces and Iraqi Security Forces for the bulk of the American occupation phase of the war.

  In October 2006, the group renamed itself again, this time as the Islamic State in Iraq, under Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri. As ISI, the group was still the primary Al Qaeda affiliate in the region, and it was instrumental in forming and deploying Jabhat al-Nusra, which was formally founded as Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.

  In 2013, ISI renamed itself yet again, as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant) and, in so doing, declared that it held overall command over Jabhat al-Nusra. The resulting feud, although arbitrated by Al Qaeda’s emir, Ayman al Zawahiri, has still not been resolved.

  Fertile Crescent, 1914 (Le Monde Diplomatique)

  Just as the organization itself has not come out of a vacuum, its strategy and tactics have not developed in a vacuum, either. There is a consistency in its approach going back to the days of Zarqawi.

  So who or what is ISIS or IS? It can be argued that Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) are one in the same—both organizations spring from the same radical interpretation of Islam, and they are closely connected in many ways. This is not a group to be defeated in a traditional sense; it’s an ideology that has gained massive popularity in the Middle East and beyond. If the Islamic State goes unchecked, it will not be long before the IS shows up on America’s doorstep. In fact, in many ways it already has, we just haven’t seen the effects yet.

  We are in your state We are in your Cities We are in your streets You are our goals anywhere.—#AmessagefromISIStoUS, Twitter4

  Polarization, religious bias, and public opinion influence the halls of power in American politics. Making decisions based on bias and popular opinion (what do the polls tell us?) is not leadership and is large problem with our current government. The War on Terror has never been bigger than it is today.

  Americans need to wake from their deep slumber and notice that they have been manipulated to choose sides, conservative or liberal, right or left, and that this has been done by our own leadership and with the mainstream press feeding off it like sharks in bloodied seawater—it’s news entertainment at its finest in the twenty-first century.

  The Internet is a powerful tool to pressure the system for change. In the last part of this book we tell you how to start using it for good. Americans need to embrace independent and optimistic thought leaders, people who get stuff done (doers, not talkers), and crash through the brick walls of bureaucracy. Reject decisions based on popular sentiment and question reactionary strategies.

  The Objectives of This Book

  This book has two goals: to introduce and explain ISIS, and to present new definitive thinking with the ultimate goal of making radical Islam—radicalism of any sort, for that matter—out of fashion. We need to make it not cool.

  There’s a saying in the Special Operations community: “Don’t complain about something unless you are prepared to present solutions to the problem.” The editors of SOFREP.com are not here to complain; we are here to offer real strategies when current leadership presents reactionary solutions based on popularity and traditional methods
. These traditional methods have failed, and the proof is in the rise of ISIS itself. Have we defeated Al Qaeda yet?

  More air strikes from U.S. naval warships will not win people over to a new way of looking at America and the free world. America must cross a new bridge in order to change its way of thinking toward foreign policy and dealing with radical Islam. Our current strategy, led by George W. Bush and carried forward by Barack Obama, has produced a stalemate on the global chessboard with the Islamic State (IS) and radical Islam.

  If we don’t design and plan our own future, it will be designed for us—the same way ISIS has been designing and defining its future in the Middle East in a post-American Iraq.

  If the world has learned one thing since September 11, 2001, it’s that tolerance and peace cannot be achieved with the current approach to radical Islamic ideology, which promotes change through violent terror. This book presents new thinking on the issue. We don’t claim to hold all the answers, but we are prepared to lead a conversation toward new and unconventional strategic thought that is focused on long-term solutions to wipe out violent terror as a popular movement.

  Chapter 1. The Establishment of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS)

  ISIS (Vali Nasr)

  Strategy is the overall plan of action to achieve a measurable goal. It is the series of actions on a theater-wide scale that contribute to victory or defeat. While ISIS has released several documents and videos giving some ideas of its strategy, even more can be determined by examining their targets, their actions in multiple spectrums of warfare, politics, and information, and their history.

  ISIS has stated its goals in several places, including the recent propaganda video Flames of War. At the beginning of Flames, the narrator states that ISIS is “a mission that would herald the return to the khilafah [caliphate] and revive the creed of tawheed [monotheism/Islam]. It was the establishment of the Islamic State nourished by the blood of the truthful mujahideen to unite the ummah [referring to the entire Islamic religion] on one calling, one banner, one leader.”5

  The goal of pretty much every violent Islamist group has been the establishment of an Islamic State. This was a stated goal of AQI before it became ISIS, and before it declared itself actually to have achieved the goal of creating such a state in 2014, when it changed its name again to simply the Islamic State, and declared Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to be “Caliph Ibrahim,” a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. (Although the man behind the kunyah [alias] of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is believed to have been born in Samarra, not Baghdad.)

  From 2003 to 2012, AQI/ISI was unable to go head-to-head with the conventional Coalition forces in Iraq. As a result, their strategy was limited by their logistics and available combat power. They attacked Coalition forces with mostly indirect fires and improvised explosive devices, while simultaneously attacking infrastructure, conducting terror operations to dissuade the populace from supporting the Coalition-backed Iraqi government and to demonstrate the inadequacy of both that government and the Coalition forces to keep them safe, and attacking the Iraqi Security Forces and government officials in order to break down the government’s resistance by way of terror and assassination.

  Improvised explosive devices (a fancy term for what had been called “bombs” for decades of terrorist attacks up until 2003 Iraq) began appearing, targeting American and British vehicles, shortly after the collapse of Saddam’s Iraqi Army. Initially constructed primarily from the leftover military munitions that Saddam’s people had cached all over the country, they were effective terror weapons that had a similar effect on Coalition forces as the booby traps employed by the Vietcong in Vietnam in the 1960s and early ’70s. In fact, some of them were set up identically; a report from 1967 described a landing zone near Da Nang that the Viet Cong had sown with 155mm artillery shells to be detonated by command wire. Most of the early IEDs were more 155mm artillery shells set off on command by simple electrical detonators, triggered by an insurgent watching from nearby.

  The IEDs, coupled with mortar and rocket attacks, all of which could be placed and triggered easily, followed by the emplacers and triggermen getting away quickly and unencumbered, were designed to wear down the occupying forces. Without the combat power to defeat an adversary in a stand-up fight, the militant turns to bleeding him slowly. It is a death by a thousand cuts, with each cut being a dead or maimed soldier or Marine.

  The steady attrition, regardless of how high the actual body count was served a moral and political purpose beyond simply killing kufars (infidels). The insurgents believed—and history has generally shown them to be right—that the steady diet of funerals and missing limbs would turn the distant American populace against the war. While Islamist propaganda tends to paint the Western reluctance to continue in the face of such casualties as softness and cowardice, their leadership likely didn’t care, as long as it worked to drive Coalition forces out of the country.

  Not all IEDs were necessarily aimed at Coalition forces. Markets, government buildings, and Shi’a mosques were all considered valid targets to the AQI bombers. In fact, AQI began such a focused campaign of violence aimed at Iraqi Shi’a that the organization was rebuked by Osama bin Laden himself, who remonstrated that the Shi’a were still brother Muslims. While it is likely that this was largely due to an apparent alliance of convenience with Iran (most of the components for explosively formed penetrators that were used in IEDs in Iraq increasingly around 2006–2007 came from Iran, and Zarqawi had actually worked out of Tehran for a time), the hatred between radical Sunni and Shi’a has not abated much since the initial split.

  In fact, in early 2004, an Al Qaeda operative by the name of Hassan Ghul was captured on the Iraq-Iran border, bearing a letter from Zarqawi to Al Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan, proposing the instigation of a Sunni-Shi’a civil war to forestall elections in Iraq.6 It is apparent that the organization has maintained that antipathy to the Shi’a; even after the immediate goal of creating enough instability to frustrate the Coalition powers, their determination to fight the Shi’a has only hardened, to the point that certain Salafist clerics in 2013 declared that the Shi’a are worse than infidels. How this fits in with the group’s overall strategy will become clear later.

  Infrastructure was another major target during the occupation, with oil pipelines being hit repeatedly during late 2004. This had the dual purpose of hampering the fuel-intensive operations of the Coalition as well as contributing to the insecurity of the country and its income. The attacks spiked again in late 2005.

  But it wasn’t just the oil infrastructure that was targeted. Water plants were sabotaged, and the electrical grid—already fragile, as anyone who patrolled through the Iraqi countryside at the time could attest—came under attack on multiple occasions, often coinciding with elections. Again, all these attacks increasingly disrupted everyday life, demoralized those of the populace that still cooperated with the Coalition and the Iraqi government, and further undermined the government. If the Iraqi Security Forces couldn’t secure vital infrastructure, why back them?

  Finally, there were the attacks on the government and Iraqi Security Forces directly, usually through ambush, IEDs, and assassinations. Violence tended to increase near elections, with judges, politicians, and police chiefs being special targets, but constant low-level attacks on any ISF continued regardless. In late 2005, a company of Iraqi Army soldiers, having left their weapons in their armory, headed home on leave in a bus. The bus was ambushed and all the soldiers killed. Just like the rest of the terror and harassment attacks, this had a purpose beyond just killing people for wearing the IA uniform; it served as a warning to anyone who would work for the Coalition or the Iraqi government.

  It would be disingenuous to attribute all of the Iraqi insurgency to AQI. At the time, there were a great many splinter organizations laying bombs and running ambushes. How much interplay there was among all the various insurgent groups is hard to say, and many of them still fought among themselves, especially between the Su
nni and Shi’a groups. However, while Coalition forces remained in Iraq, the various groups still had a common cause: expel the Westerners from Iraq. This was the primary focus for AQI as well as the Shi’a Sadrist militias and the various other Islamist organizations on both sides of the sectarian divide.

  Following the rise of the Sawha militias in Anbar province, AQI’s activity dwindled. Its attempt at governing in the Sunni Triangle backfired, as the tribal leaders rapidly became disillusioned with their heavy-handedness and turned against them. (The beginning of the “Awakening” actually had even more to do with disrespect shown toward the same tribal leaders by the Salafists than just with their restrictive laws. Even though the tribes might not mind strict sharia—in fact, some might welcome it, especially when faced with the increasingly obvious corruption and sectarian/tribal favoritism coming from Baghdad—the blatant disrespect shown by the murder of Sheikh Abu Jassim and the subsequent refusal to allow his burial was the breaking point.) The killing of Zarqawi by a U.S. air strike in 2006 also caused the group to restructure, and the Islamic State in Iraq was born. However, while the tactics were changing, and the pressure from the Iraqi government, Coalition forces, and the Sawha militias was driving the group farther underground, the strategy remained the same. It is possible that some of the reduction in violence was due to a perception that U.S. departure was imminent; there had been a great deal of political rhetoric in the United States for years about an “exit strategy,” and presidential candidates were already debating staying or pulling out. Although it comes from Afghanistan, the saying, “The Americans have the watches, but we have the time,” applies. All the insurgent really has to do is outwait the occupier.