June 27, 2021 • 28 mins
ISIS, IS, ISIL, Daesh – what is this organisation actually called, and why does its name matter? Is it still active and how much do we need to worry about it? In Taking Apart Terror’s first episode, an expert panel guides Adnan Sarwar through the basics of this group: its name, its structure, what it’s trying to do. So that when we see news about a bombing or terror attack, we can react in a way which doesn’t actually help the bad guys.
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Episode Transcript
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Adnan Sarwar (00:00):
Before we begin, this is a podcast about terrorism, which
means we do talk about acts of terror and extreme
violence, sometimes in quite a lot of detail. So you
might find some of the following material upsetting. Hello, I'm
Adnan Sarwar and this is Taking Apart Terror. Could this
(00:21):
be you?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Does ISIS still control any territory?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
How do terrorists judge whether an act of terrorism is effective
or not?
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Are there any women in ISIS?
Speaker 5 (00:29):
I want to know if terrorists get paid.
Speaker 6 (00:31):
Does ISIS run like a company?
Speaker 5 (00:32):
And called Daesh. Are these names just made up by people?
Speaker 7 (00:35):
Is ISIS actually still a thing?
Adnan Sarwar (00:40):
Terrorism, it's not subject to be taken lightly. Of course,
it isn't, but it is a subject that often seems
very tricky to grasp. When was the last time you
saw a news item that involved footage of a hot,
dusty war zone somewhere with men in scarves, holding guns,
sitting on the back of a pickup truck, and you
just kind of tuned out? Because if you're honest, a
(01:03):
long time ago, you lost track of who is who
and what is actually going on out there. And, anyway,
hasn't always been sorted out? So that's what we setting
out to do with this podcast. We are, literally, taking
apart terror, starting from scratch, answering some very basic questions
(01:23):
and some less basic ones filling in some of the
gaps, so that when things do happen, we've got a
better chance of understanding why they're important. As we go
through this series, we'll look at all aspects of how
terrorist organizations, ISIS and Daesh in particular operate. What motivates
them? What are they trying to do and how are
(01:44):
they doing it? So who am I, anyway? I was
a soldier in the British army and I served in the
Iraq War, which is one of the reasons we're all
here talking about this today. My time in the military
was all about the war on terror. People look at
me as a soldier and think that I know everything about it
and I don't, because I was a very small part
(02:05):
of this huge operation. And I've got lots of questions
about this as well. In this first episode, we're trying
to explain some of the terms we've probably all heard,
but we don't really know the meaning of. We're aiming
to understand them better. So we all get what we're
talking about when we go into things in more depth
as this series goes along. Helping me to do that
(02:28):
explaining this time are three people who you're going to
hear quite a lot from in this podcast. Dr. Nadia
Oweidat is an assistant professor at Kansas State University, who has
done extensive research into all aspects of Islamic extremism and counter-
terrorism strategies, as well as being a leading authority on
the evolution of Islamic thought and ideas. Welcome, Nadia.
Nadia Oweidat (02:51):
Hi, how are you?
Adnan Sarwar (02:52):
And we also have Dr. Shiraz Maher, who is the
director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation
at King's College London. His book, Salafi- jihadism, The History
of an Idea, and I'm not just saying this because I'm
reading it, and it is excellent. It's really helping me
understand this subject. The Guardian described it as one of
the best books to understand modern terrorism. Hello, Shiraz.
Shiraz Maher (03:15):
Hi.
Adnan Sarwar (03:16):
And we have Omar Mohammed, who is a historian who
was working at the University of Mosul when ISIS seized
the city in 2014. For the next three years under
the title Mosul Eye, he risked his life to report
to the world and the atrocities that he was seeing
there. He was one of the few reliable sources of
information. He once said of that time, " All I could
(03:39):
see was blood." He now lives and works in Paris,
unable to return home, but is still dedicated to helping his
native city recover and to spreading the word about what
happened there. Hello, Omar.
Omar Mohammed (03:51):
Hello, Adnan.
Adnan Sarwar (03:52):
Omar, I wanted to ask you, and it's quite sensitive, but
Mosul was the center of where a lot of the
atrocities and the levels of violence were coming out. And it was because of
people like you, citizen journalists, who were showing the world
what was actually going on. That phrase that you put
in there, " All I could see was blood." I don't
(04:13):
know if people could relate to that. What were the acts
of terror.
Omar Mohammed (04:16):
What I'm going to describe, Adnan, is things I have
seen myself and for the sake of recording and documenting
the history, I forced myself to see. What I have
seen is people being beheaded in the daylight, in the
(04:37):
middle of the streets, young people, including children, being forced
together to watch the beheading of a man. I have
seen women being stoned to death by Daesh. They were
accused by Daesh of adultery. I have seen a young
(04:59):
person, his hand was cut off because he was accused
of stealing, during the hunger time, when the city was
starving. I have seen people being thrown off high building,
because they were accused by Daesh of being LGBTQ. I have seen
(05:19):
men, all elderlies, being lashed in the middle of the
street and their dignity was put under the shoes of
the heroes of Daesh. I have seen women running during the
day, because the Daesh was chasing them and Daesh was
playing this game of execution, telling them if you can
(05:40):
make it you'll survive. And then they run in a
circle, because their mind is confused. They don't know what
they were doing. This woman, her mind was confused that
she thought she was escaping, but she was running in
a circle and then she fell down and they executed
her. That's what Daesh was doing on daily basis. And
(06:03):
that's why it's reality when I say, " All I could
see is blood."
Adnan Sarwar (06:09):
Omar, thank you for reminding us, if we needed reminding.
For some of us, this is a distant thing, this terrorist
activity, but for many people like you, this was very
close and very terrible and very personal. You'd lived this.
That makes it even more important for us, here, that
(06:30):
we understand what happened and what is going on. Because
that way we're more likely to engage with and support
possible solutions to this. So let's start unpacking this whole
subject. Let's start with the names. We hear so many
of them. ISIS, Islamic State, IS, ISIL, Daesh. What is this
(06:52):
group called? And what should we call them? Shiraz, could
you start with this?
Shiraz Maher (06:56):
They have had all these different names and that speaks
to the complex nature of the movement, and the various arguments of legitimacy
or not. So I hate it when people refer to
it as the Islamic State. That, in and of itself, makes the value judgment
that we recognize it as an Islamic State if we
talk about it in the English. If I do use
(07:17):
that term, I use it as a noun in the
way that you would use the word Al- Qaeda. So
you would say Islamic State did this rather than the
Islamic State.
Adnan Sarwar (07:27):
Okay. So that's Islamic State taken care of, but where
does the name Daesh come from? Nadia, can you tell us more about that?
Nadia Oweidat (07:32):
So they referred to themselves as the Islamic State (tanẓīm)
al- Dawlah. But actually ISIS, in fact, encountered a
lot of resistance. And one way that resistance showed itself
is through humor. Tyranny hates humor. And one way that
the resistance made fun of them is to, basically, take
(07:54):
the abbreviation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
in Arabic and turn it into something that sounds ridiculous.
It's like imagine calling one dictator by this silly name.
And Daesh sounds so ridiculous, it's resisting by humor.
Omar Mohammed (08:12):
I think, although the term Daesh did come from a
good party, it came from the Syria region. But I still
believe that it's important to call them Daesh for many
reasons. First, they hate the name and we want to
tell them what they hate. Second, it give us a
(08:33):
very big and wide space to deprive Daesh from the
resources that it depends on. And here I am referring
to what Daesh had claimed to be the protector of, which
is the Sunni Islam or the Islam that Daesh claimed to
be representing. As we always say, language matters and concepts
(08:58):
matters. The conceptual history is very important. Start a separate
conversation with the Muslims. Their religion have been hijacked by
Daesh itself in order to separate them and isolate them from what they
claimed to be defending.
Adnan Sarwar (09:15):
Omar, you make a great point to that Muslims have
to understand this. And I think a lot of people
in the West believe that Muslims know everything about their
own religion. And I don't know everything about Islam and
people ask me questions about terrorism and I'm completely lost.
Omar Mohammed (09:31):
If I may add, Adnan, it's also important to use
this name, not just for the reasons I mentioned, but
it's also because, in Mosul people were killed because they
used this.
Adnan Sarwar (09:44):
So it's an act of remembrance for those people?
Omar Mohammed (09:46):
Exactly. ( silence)
Adnan Sarwar (09:57):
All right. Let's talk about where this organization actually came
from. Lots of people blame the invasion of Iraq in
2003, that's the war that I was involved in, personally,
for creating Daesh. There was a vacuum after the allies
left, which they filled. That's the way the story goes.
But, obviously, Islamic extremism existed way before that. None of
(10:19):
us can forget 9/ 11. And we know a little
bit about Al- Qaeda. Were Daesh new, or were they
a splinter group from the organizations that already existed?
Shiraz Maher (10:29):
Yeah, I think it's worth assessing, really, the last two decades of
the war on terror, or the war on terror years,
to try and contextualize that question of where does Daesh
come from? If you imagine on September the 11th, when
the attacks take place in the United States, and George
Bush comes out and the world is looking to him
(10:50):
to make sense of what has just happened. And he
talks about this group that may be a few people
have heard of Al- Qaeda and this character that, again,
some people may have heard of Osama bin Laden. And
we're talking about one organization that has a fairly hierarchical
structure. And there's a secondary group that pops onto our
radar called the Taliban. And the Taliban are these guys out
(11:12):
in Afghanistan who are hosting Al- Qaeda, but don't have
direct involvement in 9/ 11. And so these are two
new organizational terms that enter the popular consciousness of the world
and of the West in particular. But I think there's
a case to be made that from the moment we
go into Iraq in 2003, we're already at that point
(11:34):
seeing the splintering of the jihad movement. And so once
you've got Al- Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Reyan al- Zarkazi,
who's their number two or their man on the ground
in this particular theater, I think it's quite clear from
the way that al- Zarkazi was acting, that he already began
to, essentially, recalibrate the balance of power within the global
(11:55):
jihad movement and was already rendering both Osama bin Laden
and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second in command of the organization, into
irrelevance. And in that sense of Al- Qaeda is operating
as a sort of a localized movement, then this particular
chapter, the chapter that's in Iraq, is already becoming fairly
(12:16):
independent at that time. That's important, because it begins to
strike out on its own. And in doing so, the
seeds, the genesis for Daesh, then, are sewn already.
Adnan Sarwar (12:28):
Okay. So it goes from Afghanistan, goes from Al- Qaeda,
goes to Iraq, goes to a group there. And then
the instability that came after the war. And then this other
group forms called Daesh. Is that right?
Omar Mohammed (12:41):
When we speak about terrorism or the rise of terrorism,
I don't totally agree to connect it just as a
response to recent events happened in the Middle East. If
we really need to discuss the real issue, we really
need to start an honest, long- term debate of two
(13:03):
concepts in Islam, jihad and caliphate. We are speaking about
regarding the caliphate about a 14th- century- old the Promise,
a prophecy from the prophet and the tool that is
supposed to bring this caliphate to life, which is jihad.
They are not separated. They work alongside each other. This
(13:26):
promise has been manipulated by terrorist groups many times.
Adnan Sarwar (13:32):
All right. Let's explore this for a moment. Jihad is
a term we hear a lot about, but we don't
really understand it. I didn't even understand it. When I
was growing up in the mosque, jihad was about this
inner struggle to be good. But at the same time,
we also had the mujahideen in Afghanistan talking about your head. And
now whenever we hear about it, it's in the context
(13:53):
of referring to these extremists and their war against the
West. So it's a term that's been used in lots
of different ways. Omar, can you explain what the term
jihad actually is and why it's changed?
Omar Mohammed (14:06):
Yeah. It's not what is jihad, Adnan, it's who has
the authority in Islam in our time to define what
jihad is? Because in certain times in Islamic history, we
know that the prophet was the first one to define
what jihad is. And then there was an authority, there
(14:27):
was a system, there was political Islam, there was people
who can define what jihad is. It became much more
peaceful concept. It was deprived from the meaning of violence,
et cetera. But then the crISIS of authority over Islam growing.
If we find the answer of who has authority in
(14:48):
Islam, then the concept of jihad is already solved.
Nadia Oweidat (14:53):
May I actually add, though, so we can say, " Oh, jihad is
only internal struggle," but that was not what happened in
history. That is not what the prophet himself did. The
prophet himself did not do internal jihad. He waged dozens
of conquests, conquest of very rich empires, the Byzantine empire,
(15:15):
the Sasanian Empire, and people who are extremely extremists know
this. They know history. The person who started Al- Qaeda
had a PhD in Sharia. He taught both in Saudi
and at the University of Jordan. The head of ISIS
has a PhD in Sharia. So there are a lot
of things about the Islamic conquest that were less than
(15:35):
savory and extremists love that history of dominance. They love
that history of conquering the world. That is a glorious history.
Adnan Sarwar (15:46):
Nadia, you've mentioned Sharia law, and that's another term that
many people will have heard and not really understand. A
lot of us think now, it's this extremist version of
justice and punishment, like Omar was talking earlier, about cutting
people's hands off and women being executed for adultery. Can
you explain a bit more about where Sharia comes from
(16:07):
and why it's still being used by groups like Daesh?
Nadia Oweidat (16:10):
So, basically, humans evolve and readjust. If you look at
how we punish people in the medieval times or in
the Dark Ages, there's an enormous evolution. But Sharia law
came out of seventh century Arabia. So it's quite austere. It's
quite harsh. And in modern days, it's quite brutal and
(16:33):
barbaric, honestly. Again, to cut people's hands and it's not
even effective. If you cut people's hands, you just end
up with more mutilated people. You don't end up with
less crime.
Omar Mohammed (16:44):
I totally agree with what Nadia is saying. It's our history,
yes. For those who do not know history, there was
a point when all of these concepts were put on
hold. What Daesh want us to believe is that there
is only one side of the story of Islam, which
is the violence that they want to present. (silence)
Adnan Sarwar (17:17):
Shiraz, we were talking earlier about Afghanistan and Iraq, okay, and
we stopped there. But where are we talking about now,
the geography? Which parts of the world are involved?
Shiraz Maher (17:28):
Coming back to looking at the war on terror years
these last two decades and, in fact, what you've seen
is a splintering of the threats. You've seen a proliferation,
now, of different groups in West Africa, in the Horn of Africa, Sub-
Saharan Africa, Yemen, in the Levant, in AfPak. Again, many
(17:49):
groups, more groups than ever, operating in Pakistan as well.
So what links Boko Haram to Daesh, to Al- Qaeda
in Yemen to the Pakistani Taliban, for example? I think there
is a case to be said that, look, all of
these groups, yes, they subscribed to this broad notion of
(18:10):
jihad, such as the belief in the (hiraf) of
as Islamic State, but they also responding to local dynamics,
this notion that jihad has gotten glocal as it were.
There's a global resonance and impulse around a lot of
this, but what you find is that there is a
highly localized set of trends and characteristics as well, that
(18:31):
are fueling and giving shape and contours to the way
these groups are operating in their immediate localities.
Adnan Sarwar (18:39):
So let's talk about motivations for a bit. What do
Daesh actually want when they carry out acts of terror?
As I understand it, they want to create this caliphate,
this idea of a Muslim state run by a caliph
or direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. But, Nadia, is
that the whole reason?
Nadia Oweidat (18:58):
One fabulous book about this subject is Inside Terrorism, by
Bruce Hoffman, world- renowned terrorism authority on the subject way
before 9/ 11, Bruce Hoffman defines terrorism, essentially acts of
violence to achieve a political goal. I'm oversimplifying it. But
it is important to stress here the political goal, because,
(19:22):
again, ISIS wants to establish a state. They do not
see that Islam can prosper without a state. And that
that state, it has to be governed by their version
of Syria that is directly from the divine. So it
is superior. I really want to stress that the reason
(19:43):
why young people buy this is because there's a lot
of support and a lot of religious leaders that advanced
this claim that, basically, the Salafi version is the real
version. Whereas a lot of liberal Muslims, they don't have
as much platform.
Shiraz Maher (20:02):
I think we need to try and understand. What's motivating them. If
you look again at Daesh, for example, I think that's a
really good example of an organization that proved itself to
be hostage to ideology. If you look at the reality
of what was happening in 2014, '15 and '16, it was the
most powerful actor on the ground in terms of in
(20:23):
Syria and Iraq. The local forces were not going to be
able to reclaim that territory from it. And you had
a U. S. administration under Obama that was doing absolutely
everything to not get involved. And so the way to
absolutely ensure your demise is to continue to attack the
French, the Germans, the Belgiums, to continue to provoke the
(20:45):
west and to behead Americans on TV, such as James
Foley, which then obligates a U. S. President to act
in their name. But this spoke to the blind and
almost euphoric sense of ideological zealor that Daesh had underwrite
in the movement, that they believed this really was the
end of days, and that this really was hastening the
(21:08):
notion of Yawm al- Qiyāmah, the final day of account. And
this is important because simultaneously the Daesh project is a
contradictory. On the one hand, in the temporal world, it
is constructive. It's attempting to establish this state, and to
expand there and so on (foreign language) . Yet , at the
(21:28):
same time, what it's also seeking to do is to
use that as a vehicle to hasten the end of
time. So its philosophical goal is actually quite a destructive one.
Omar Mohammed (21:38):
I still remember when I attended the first meeting inside
the university, when they brought all the teaching staff and
the administrative staff, I still remember the phrase he said.
He said, " I want this education system to produce only
one thing, a fighter." That's what they were doing. That's
(22:01):
what they were doing inside the orphanage house. Young children,
orphans, seven years old or eight years old, they were
taking to the training camps. They were trained of how to
use the weapon, how to behead other people. That's the
kind of society they wanted to establish, a society completely
(22:25):
based on fear, a society completely based on violence, because
they made it clear it's either us or the blood.
Nadia Oweidat (22:37):
Omar, you mention something really important, which is how much
they value education. They know that unless you educate these
kids to be murders, they're not going to naturally be
this brutal to stone another human being to death, to
kill an elderly, to terrorize a woman. You need to
(22:58):
educate them on these ideas. And unless we have a
competing education, unless we equip every young kid with ability
to critique and ability to value, again, liberal values that
respect individual sovereignty, there'll be a lot more groups with
various names. It doesn't matter, because it's about education. ( silence)
Adnan Sarwar (23:30):
What I've got from this conversation is that this was
an organization, called Daesh, that had an extremely violent birth and
it's still influencing. And it's around the world. It's still
a very violent, relevant organization. So the question is,
should we still be scared of Daesh?
Shiraz Maher (23:51):
I think we should be vigilant. The structural issues in
both Syria and Iraq that led to and allowed for the
dramatic rise of Daesh in the first place are still
there and have been accentuated by years and years of
war. And, therefore, until we address those issues, grievance narratives,
(24:13):
desperation, exploitation, a sense of hopelessness about the future, these
are all the kinds of things that a radical group
like Daesh needs in order to perpetuate itself and its
movement. Then you could see a revanchist campaign being launched
by this organization. And I'll finish with one final point.
(24:35):
We have seen the wrapping up and the collapse of
the territorial acquisitions of Daesh across both Syria and Iraq.
And now we have this pretty unprecedented situation in which
tens of thousands of men and women aligned with the
group and children who were, unfortunately, born within it or
(24:56):
are taken to it by their parents, are being held
in northeastern Syria in detention centers, which are not particularly
secure. So there needs to be a lasting solution here
in terms of what we do about those detainees to
ensure that they don't become active once again.
Nadia Oweidat (25:14):
I think we should absolutely continue to wage, if you
would, the war of ideas. I know there's been a
lot of rhetoric, but not real action. And we really
need to be more serious about doing actions that are
connected directly to ideas. And that includes, like my colleague
Omar says, we already have seen an embodiment of what
(25:37):
a successful extremist state looks like. And, I dare say,
99.9% of Muslims do not want it, do not want
to live in it. So we need to really exploit
what that was like as hard as it is, as
brutal as it is, to really inform the wider Muslim
public of what it actually looked like. All of these
things that are in direct conflict with their values.
Adnan Sarwar (26:02):
Yeah. Omar, you lived under Daesh when they were at
their absolute peak. Do you think there's a real threat
that there'll be back at that kind of scale again?
Omar Mohammed (26:11):
I don't believe that they will manage to have another
opportunity like they did in 2014. I think this is
done for them. There is something very important that we
should always insist on referring to and mentioning. The damage
that Daesh did to the Sunni community that Daesh claimed it
(26:31):
protected, no one has ever managed to do such damage
and harm to the Sunni communities like Daesh did. Second,
in the cities that were from Daesh. The bigger question now
is the restimization of the so- called jihad. The ideology of
Daesh is no more something that the people can easily
(26:54):
buy. It might give Daesh another opportunity if we neglect
the spirit of the people who did not only witness
the terror, who were suffering from this terror. So, yes,
Daesh doesn't have that ability again, but is it a threat?
Yes, it's still a threat.
Adnan Sarwar (27:13):
We'll definitely be picking up on a lot of these
things later on in the series. It's helped me get
somewhere a bit different with my thinking and .my understanding of this so thank
you. Thank you. Shukran. Shukran. Shukran, (foreign language) . Thank you very
much. That is it for this first edition of Taking
Apart Terror. I'd like to thank Omar Mohammed and Nadia
(27:35):
Oweidat and Shiraz Maher for helping this answered the question,
is ISIS still a thing? Yeah, it is. And now
we know a lot more about what kind of thing.
Search for is wherever you get your podcasts and click
subscribe, so you'll never miss an episode. In the course
of this series, we are going to go into every
aspect of what these extremists do, how they're funded, how they communicate,
(27:57):
the role of women, as well as what the world
is trying to do to stop them and how we
get past the devastation they cause. By the end of
this, you really will know so much more about one
of the most significant threats in the world today. I'm
Adnan Sarwar And I look forward to speaking to you
next time, as we unravel how Daesh is organized and
how it operates. Thank you for joining me. Goodbye.
Before we begin, this is a podcast about terrorism, which
means we do talk about acts of terror and extreme
violence, sometimes in quite a lot of detail. So you
might find some of the following material upsetting. Hello, I'm
Adnan Sarwar and this is Taking Apart Terror. Could this
(00:21):
be you?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Does ISIS still control any territory?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
How do terrorists judge whether an act of terrorism is effective
or not?
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Are there any women in ISIS?
Speaker 5 (00:29):
I want to know if terrorists get paid.
Speaker 6 (00:31):
Does ISIS run like a company?
Speaker 5 (00:32):
And called Daesh. Are these names just made up by people?
Speaker 7 (00:35):
Is ISIS actually still a thing?
Adnan Sarwar (00:40):
Terrorism, it's not subject to be taken lightly. Of course,
it isn't, but it is a subject that often seems
very tricky to grasp. When was the last time you
saw a news item that involved footage of a hot,
dusty war zone somewhere with men in scarves, holding guns,
sitting on the back of a pickup truck, and you
just kind of tuned out? Because if you're honest, a
(01:03):
long time ago, you lost track of who is who
and what is actually going on out there. And, anyway,
hasn't always been sorted out? So that's what we setting
out to do with this podcast. We are, literally, taking
apart terror, starting from scratch, answering some very basic questions
(01:23):
and some less basic ones filling in some of the
gaps, so that when things do happen, we've got a
better chance of understanding why they're important. As we go
through this series, we'll look at all aspects of how
terrorist organizations, ISIS and Daesh in particular operate. What motivates
them? What are they trying to do and how are
(01:44):
they doing it? So who am I, anyway? I was
a soldier in the British army and I served in the
Iraq War, which is one of the reasons we're all
here talking about this today. My time in the military
was all about the war on terror. People look at
me as a soldier and think that I know everything about it
and I don't, because I was a very small part
(02:05):
of this huge operation. And I've got lots of questions
about this as well. In this first episode, we're trying
to explain some of the terms we've probably all heard,
but we don't really know the meaning of. We're aiming
to understand them better. So we all get what we're
talking about when we go into things in more depth
as this series goes along. Helping me to do that
(02:28):
explaining this time are three people who you're going to
hear quite a lot from in this podcast. Dr. Nadia
Oweidat is an assistant professor at Kansas State University, who has
done extensive research into all aspects of Islamic extremism and counter-
terrorism strategies, as well as being a leading authority on
the evolution of Islamic thought and ideas. Welcome, Nadia.
Nadia Oweidat (02:51):
Hi, how are you?
Adnan Sarwar (02:52):
And we also have Dr. Shiraz Maher, who is the
director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation
at King's College London. His book, Salafi- jihadism, The History
of an Idea, and I'm not just saying this because I'm
reading it, and it is excellent. It's really helping me
understand this subject. The Guardian described it as one of
the best books to understand modern terrorism. Hello, Shiraz.
Shiraz Maher (03:15):
Hi.
Adnan Sarwar (03:16):
And we have Omar Mohammed, who is a historian who
was working at the University of Mosul when ISIS seized
the city in 2014. For the next three years under
the title Mosul Eye, he risked his life to report
to the world and the atrocities that he was seeing
there. He was one of the few reliable sources of
information. He once said of that time, " All I could
(03:39):
see was blood." He now lives and works in Paris,
unable to return home, but is still dedicated to helping his
native city recover and to spreading the word about what
happened there. Hello, Omar.
Omar Mohammed (03:51):
Hello, Adnan.
Adnan Sarwar (03:52):
Omar, I wanted to ask you, and it's quite sensitive, but
Mosul was the center of where a lot of the
atrocities and the levels of violence were coming out. And it was because of
people like you, citizen journalists, who were showing the world
what was actually going on. That phrase that you put
in there, " All I could see was blood." I don't
(04:13):
know if people could relate to that. What were the acts
of terror.
Omar Mohammed (04:16):
What I'm going to describe, Adnan, is things I have
seen myself and for the sake of recording and documenting
the history, I forced myself to see. What I have
seen is people being beheaded in the daylight, in the
(04:37):
middle of the streets, young people, including children, being forced
together to watch the beheading of a man. I have
seen women being stoned to death by Daesh. They were
accused by Daesh of adultery. I have seen a young
(04:59):
person, his hand was cut off because he was accused
of stealing, during the hunger time, when the city was
starving. I have seen people being thrown off high building,
because they were accused by Daesh of being LGBTQ. I have seen
(05:19):
men, all elderlies, being lashed in the middle of the
street and their dignity was put under the shoes of
the heroes of Daesh. I have seen women running during the
day, because the Daesh was chasing them and Daesh was
playing this game of execution, telling them if you can
(05:40):
make it you'll survive. And then they run in a
circle, because their mind is confused. They don't know what
they were doing. This woman, her mind was confused that
she thought she was escaping, but she was running in
a circle and then she fell down and they executed
her. That's what Daesh was doing on daily basis. And
(06:03):
that's why it's reality when I say, " All I could
see is blood."
Adnan Sarwar (06:09):
Omar, thank you for reminding us, if we needed reminding.
For some of us, this is a distant thing, this terrorist
activity, but for many people like you, this was very
close and very terrible and very personal. You'd lived this.
That makes it even more important for us, here, that
(06:30):
we understand what happened and what is going on. Because
that way we're more likely to engage with and support
possible solutions to this. So let's start unpacking this whole
subject. Let's start with the names. We hear so many
of them. ISIS, Islamic State, IS, ISIL, Daesh. What is this
(06:52):
group called? And what should we call them? Shiraz, could
you start with this?
Shiraz Maher (06:56):
They have had all these different names and that speaks
to the complex nature of the movement, and the various arguments of legitimacy
or not. So I hate it when people refer to
it as the Islamic State. That, in and of itself, makes the value judgment
that we recognize it as an Islamic State if we
talk about it in the English. If I do use
(07:17):
that term, I use it as a noun in the
way that you would use the word Al- Qaeda. So
you would say Islamic State did this rather than the
Islamic State.
Adnan Sarwar (07:27):
Okay. So that's Islamic State taken care of, but where
does the name Daesh come from? Nadia, can you tell us more about that?
Nadia Oweidat (07:32):
So they referred to themselves as the Islamic State (tanẓīm)
al- Dawlah. But actually ISIS, in fact, encountered a
lot of resistance. And one way that resistance showed itself
is through humor. Tyranny hates humor. And one way that
the resistance made fun of them is to, basically, take
(07:54):
the abbreviation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
in Arabic and turn it into something that sounds ridiculous.
It's like imagine calling one dictator by this silly name.
And Daesh sounds so ridiculous, it's resisting by humor.
Omar Mohammed (08:12):
I think, although the term Daesh did come from a
good party, it came from the Syria region. But I still
believe that it's important to call them Daesh for many
reasons. First, they hate the name and we want to
tell them what they hate. Second, it give us a
(08:33):
very big and wide space to deprive Daesh from the
resources that it depends on. And here I am referring
to what Daesh had claimed to be the protector of, which
is the Sunni Islam or the Islam that Daesh claimed to
be representing. As we always say, language matters and concepts
(08:58):
matters. The conceptual history is very important. Start a separate
conversation with the Muslims. Their religion have been hijacked by
Daesh itself in order to separate them and isolate them from what they
claimed to be defending.
Adnan Sarwar (09:15):
Omar, you make a great point to that Muslims have
to understand this. And I think a lot of people
in the West believe that Muslims know everything about their
own religion. And I don't know everything about Islam and
people ask me questions about terrorism and I'm completely lost.
Omar Mohammed (09:31):
If I may add, Adnan, it's also important to use
this name, not just for the reasons I mentioned, but
it's also because, in Mosul people were killed because they
used this.
Adnan Sarwar (09:44):
So it's an act of remembrance for those people?
Omar Mohammed (09:46):
Exactly. ( silence)
Adnan Sarwar (09:57):
All right. Let's talk about where this organization actually came
from. Lots of people blame the invasion of Iraq in
2003, that's the war that I was involved in, personally,
for creating Daesh. There was a vacuum after the allies
left, which they filled. That's the way the story goes.
But, obviously, Islamic extremism existed way before that. None of
(10:19):
us can forget 9/ 11. And we know a little
bit about Al- Qaeda. Were Daesh new, or were they
a splinter group from the organizations that already existed?
Shiraz Maher (10:29):
Yeah, I think it's worth assessing, really, the last two decades of
the war on terror, or the war on terror years,
to try and contextualize that question of where does Daesh
come from? If you imagine on September the 11th, when
the attacks take place in the United States, and George
Bush comes out and the world is looking to him
(10:50):
to make sense of what has just happened. And he
talks about this group that may be a few people
have heard of Al- Qaeda and this character that, again,
some people may have heard of Osama bin Laden. And
we're talking about one organization that has a fairly hierarchical
structure. And there's a secondary group that pops onto our
radar called the Taliban. And the Taliban are these guys out
(11:12):
in Afghanistan who are hosting Al- Qaeda, but don't have
direct involvement in 9/ 11. And so these are two
new organizational terms that enter the popular consciousness of the world
and of the West in particular. But I think there's
a case to be made that from the moment we
go into Iraq in 2003, we're already at that point
(11:34):
seeing the splintering of the jihad movement. And so once
you've got Al- Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Reyan al- Zarkazi,
who's their number two or their man on the ground
in this particular theater, I think it's quite clear from
the way that al- Zarkazi was acting, that he already began
to, essentially, recalibrate the balance of power within the global
(11:55):
jihad movement and was already rendering both Osama bin Laden
and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second in command of the organization, into
irrelevance. And in that sense of Al- Qaeda is operating
as a sort of a localized movement, then this particular
chapter, the chapter that's in Iraq, is already becoming fairly
(12:16):
independent at that time. That's important, because it begins to
strike out on its own. And in doing so, the
seeds, the genesis for Daesh, then, are sewn already.
Adnan Sarwar (12:28):
Okay. So it goes from Afghanistan, goes from Al- Qaeda,
goes to Iraq, goes to a group there. And then
the instability that came after the war. And then this other
group forms called Daesh. Is that right?
Omar Mohammed (12:41):
When we speak about terrorism or the rise of terrorism,
I don't totally agree to connect it just as a
response to recent events happened in the Middle East. If
we really need to discuss the real issue, we really
need to start an honest, long- term debate of two
(13:03):
concepts in Islam, jihad and caliphate. We are speaking about
regarding the caliphate about a 14th- century- old the Promise,
a prophecy from the prophet and the tool that is
supposed to bring this caliphate to life, which is jihad.
They are not separated. They work alongside each other. This
(13:26):
promise has been manipulated by terrorist groups many times.
Adnan Sarwar (13:32):
All right. Let's explore this for a moment. Jihad is
a term we hear a lot about, but we don't
really understand it. I didn't even understand it. When I
was growing up in the mosque, jihad was about this
inner struggle to be good. But at the same time,
we also had the mujahideen in Afghanistan talking about your head. And
now whenever we hear about it, it's in the context
(13:53):
of referring to these extremists and their war against the
West. So it's a term that's been used in lots
of different ways. Omar, can you explain what the term
jihad actually is and why it's changed?
Omar Mohammed (14:06):
Yeah. It's not what is jihad, Adnan, it's who has
the authority in Islam in our time to define what
jihad is? Because in certain times in Islamic history, we
know that the prophet was the first one to define
what jihad is. And then there was an authority, there
(14:27):
was a system, there was political Islam, there was people
who can define what jihad is. It became much more
peaceful concept. It was deprived from the meaning of violence,
et cetera. But then the crISIS of authority over Islam growing.
If we find the answer of who has authority in
(14:48):
Islam, then the concept of jihad is already solved.
Nadia Oweidat (14:53):
May I actually add, though, so we can say, " Oh, jihad is
only internal struggle," but that was not what happened in
history. That is not what the prophet himself did. The
prophet himself did not do internal jihad. He waged dozens
of conquests, conquest of very rich empires, the Byzantine empire,
(15:15):
the Sasanian Empire, and people who are extremely extremists know
this. They know history. The person who started Al- Qaeda
had a PhD in Sharia. He taught both in Saudi
and at the University of Jordan. The head of ISIS
has a PhD in Sharia. So there are a lot
of things about the Islamic conquest that were less than
(15:35):
savory and extremists love that history of dominance. They love
that history of conquering the world. That is a glorious history.
Adnan Sarwar (15:46):
Nadia, you've mentioned Sharia law, and that's another term that
many people will have heard and not really understand. A
lot of us think now, it's this extremist version of
justice and punishment, like Omar was talking earlier, about cutting
people's hands off and women being executed for adultery. Can
you explain a bit more about where Sharia comes from
(16:07):
and why it's still being used by groups like Daesh?
Nadia Oweidat (16:10):
So, basically, humans evolve and readjust. If you look at
how we punish people in the medieval times or in
the Dark Ages, there's an enormous evolution. But Sharia law
came out of seventh century Arabia. So it's quite austere. It's
quite harsh. And in modern days, it's quite brutal and
(16:33):
barbaric, honestly. Again, to cut people's hands and it's not
even effective. If you cut people's hands, you just end
up with more mutilated people. You don't end up with
less crime.
Omar Mohammed (16:44):
I totally agree with what Nadia is saying. It's our history,
yes. For those who do not know history, there was
a point when all of these concepts were put on
hold. What Daesh want us to believe is that there
is only one side of the story of Islam, which
is the violence that they want to present. (silence)
Adnan Sarwar (17:17):
Shiraz, we were talking earlier about Afghanistan and Iraq, okay, and
we stopped there. But where are we talking about now,
the geography? Which parts of the world are involved?
Shiraz Maher (17:28):
Coming back to looking at the war on terror years
these last two decades and, in fact, what you've seen
is a splintering of the threats. You've seen a proliferation,
now, of different groups in West Africa, in the Horn of Africa, Sub-
Saharan Africa, Yemen, in the Levant, in AfPak. Again, many
(17:49):
groups, more groups than ever, operating in Pakistan as well.
So what links Boko Haram to Daesh, to Al- Qaeda
in Yemen to the Pakistani Taliban, for example? I think there
is a case to be said that, look, all of
these groups, yes, they subscribed to this broad notion of
(18:10):
jihad, such as the belief in the (hiraf) of
as Islamic State, but they also responding to local dynamics,
this notion that jihad has gotten glocal as it were.
There's a global resonance and impulse around a lot of
this, but what you find is that there is a
highly localized set of trends and characteristics as well, that
(18:31):
are fueling and giving shape and contours to the way
these groups are operating in their immediate localities.
Adnan Sarwar (18:39):
So let's talk about motivations for a bit. What do
Daesh actually want when they carry out acts of terror?
As I understand it, they want to create this caliphate,
this idea of a Muslim state run by a caliph
or direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. But, Nadia, is
that the whole reason?
Nadia Oweidat (18:58):
One fabulous book about this subject is Inside Terrorism, by
Bruce Hoffman, world- renowned terrorism authority on the subject way
before 9/ 11, Bruce Hoffman defines terrorism, essentially acts of
violence to achieve a political goal. I'm oversimplifying it. But
it is important to stress here the political goal, because,
(19:22):
again, ISIS wants to establish a state. They do not
see that Islam can prosper without a state. And that
that state, it has to be governed by their version
of Syria that is directly from the divine. So it
is superior. I really want to stress that the reason
(19:43):
why young people buy this is because there's a lot
of support and a lot of religious leaders that advanced
this claim that, basically, the Salafi version is the real
version. Whereas a lot of liberal Muslims, they don't have
as much platform.
Shiraz Maher (20:02):
I think we need to try and understand. What's motivating them. If
you look again at Daesh, for example, I think that's a
really good example of an organization that proved itself to
be hostage to ideology. If you look at the reality
of what was happening in 2014, '15 and '16, it was the
most powerful actor on the ground in terms of in
(20:23):
Syria and Iraq. The local forces were not going to be
able to reclaim that territory from it. And you had
a U. S. administration under Obama that was doing absolutely
everything to not get involved. And so the way to
absolutely ensure your demise is to continue to attack the
French, the Germans, the Belgiums, to continue to provoke the
(20:45):
west and to behead Americans on TV, such as James
Foley, which then obligates a U. S. President to act
in their name. But this spoke to the blind and
almost euphoric sense of ideological zealor that Daesh had underwrite
in the movement, that they believed this really was the
end of days, and that this really was hastening the
(21:08):
notion of Yawm al- Qiyāmah, the final day of account. And
this is important because simultaneously the Daesh project is a
contradictory. On the one hand, in the temporal world, it
is constructive. It's attempting to establish this state, and to
expand there and so on (foreign language) . Yet , at the
(21:28):
same time, what it's also seeking to do is to
use that as a vehicle to hasten the end of
time. So its philosophical goal is actually quite a destructive one.
Omar Mohammed (21:38):
I still remember when I attended the first meeting inside
the university, when they brought all the teaching staff and
the administrative staff, I still remember the phrase he said.
He said, " I want this education system to produce only
one thing, a fighter." That's what they were doing. That's
(22:01):
what they were doing inside the orphanage house. Young children,
orphans, seven years old or eight years old, they were
taking to the training camps. They were trained of how to
use the weapon, how to behead other people. That's the
kind of society they wanted to establish, a society completely
(22:25):
based on fear, a society completely based on violence, because
they made it clear it's either us or the blood.
Nadia Oweidat (22:37):
Omar, you mention something really important, which is how much
they value education. They know that unless you educate these
kids to be murders, they're not going to naturally be
this brutal to stone another human being to death, to
kill an elderly, to terrorize a woman. You need to
(22:58):
educate them on these ideas. And unless we have a
competing education, unless we equip every young kid with ability
to critique and ability to value, again, liberal values that
respect individual sovereignty, there'll be a lot more groups with
various names. It doesn't matter, because it's about education. ( silence)
Adnan Sarwar (23:30):
What I've got from this conversation is that this was
an organization, called Daesh, that had an extremely violent birth and
it's still influencing. And it's around the world. It's still
a very violent, relevant organization. So the question is,
should we still be scared of Daesh?
Shiraz Maher (23:51):
I think we should be vigilant. The structural issues in
both Syria and Iraq that led to and allowed for the
dramatic rise of Daesh in the first place are still
there and have been accentuated by years and years of
war. And, therefore, until we address those issues, grievance narratives,
(24:13):
desperation, exploitation, a sense of hopelessness about the future, these
are all the kinds of things that a radical group
like Daesh needs in order to perpetuate itself and its
movement. Then you could see a revanchist campaign being launched
by this organization. And I'll finish with one final point.
(24:35):
We have seen the wrapping up and the collapse of
the territorial acquisitions of Daesh across both Syria and Iraq.
And now we have this pretty unprecedented situation in which
tens of thousands of men and women aligned with the
group and children who were, unfortunately, born within it or
(24:56):
are taken to it by their parents, are being held
in northeastern Syria in detention centers, which are not particularly
secure. So there needs to be a lasting solution here
in terms of what we do about those detainees to
ensure that they don't become active once again.
Nadia Oweidat (25:14):
I think we should absolutely continue to wage, if you
would, the war of ideas. I know there's been a
lot of rhetoric, but not real action. And we really
need to be more serious about doing actions that are
connected directly to ideas. And that includes, like my colleague
Omar says, we already have seen an embodiment of what
(25:37):
a successful extremist state looks like. And, I dare say,
99.9% of Muslims do not want it, do not want
to live in it. So we need to really exploit
what that was like as hard as it is, as
brutal as it is, to really inform the wider Muslim
public of what it actually looked like. All of these
things that are in direct conflict with their values.
Adnan Sarwar (26:02):
Yeah. Omar, you lived under Daesh when they were at
their absolute peak. Do you think there's a real threat
that there'll be back at that kind of scale again?
Omar Mohammed (26:11):
I don't believe that they will manage to have another
opportunity like they did in 2014. I think this is
done for them. There is something very important that we
should always insist on referring to and mentioning. The damage
that Daesh did to the Sunni community that Daesh claimed it
(26:31):
protected, no one has ever managed to do such damage
and harm to the Sunni communities like Daesh did. Second,
in the cities that were from Daesh. The bigger question now
is the restimization of the so- called jihad. The ideology of
Daesh is no more something that the people can easily
(26:54):
buy. It might give Daesh another opportunity if we neglect
the spirit of the people who did not only witness
the terror, who were suffering from this terror. So, yes,
Daesh doesn't have that ability again, but is it a threat?
Yes, it's still a threat.
Adnan Sarwar (27:13):
We'll definitely be picking up on a lot of these
things later on in the series. It's helped me get
somewhere a bit different with my thinking and .my understanding of this so thank
you. Thank you. Shukran. Shukran. Shukran, (foreign language) . Thank you very
much. That is it for this first edition of Taking
Apart Terror. I'd like to thank Omar Mohammed and Nadia
(27:35):
Oweidat and Shiraz Maher for helping this answered the question,
is ISIS still a thing? Yeah, it is. And now
we know a lot more about what kind of thing.
Search for is wherever you get your podcasts and click
subscribe, so you'll never miss an episode. In the course
of this series, we are going to go into every
aspect of what these extremists do, how they're funded, how they communicate,
(27:57):
the role of women, as well as what the world
is trying to do to stop them and how we
get past the devastation they cause. By the end of
this, you really will know so much more about one
of the most significant threats in the world today. I'm
Adnan Sarwar And I look forward to speaking to you
next time, as we unravel how Daesh is organized and
how it operates. Thank you for joining me. Goodbye.
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