El zionismo tuvo un origen afín a la ideología colonialista europea de fines del siglo XIX que no ha variado y que se resume en dos grandes conceptos: Israel es un baluarte de la civilización occidental ante la amenaza del Islam y la negación, primero, de la existencia de un pueblo palestino y, después, la necesidad de expulsarlo del territorio que reclama como donación de un dios. Golda Meir fue probablemente la última en sostener públicamente que no existía un pueblo palestino precisamente cuando crecía incontenible la OLP. Poco después, Itzhak Rabin pretendió, a costa de su vida,  tímida y muy preeliminarmente salvar la contradicción entre la aceptación de la existencia de un estado palestino y el pretendido papel de bastión civilizatorio de Israel. Desde entonces el país ha descendido a una ultraderecha en todos los niveles de la sociedad que confina a los palestinos a un régimen de separación o apartheid, de violencia, acoso, abuso, represión y discriminación permanentes para forzarlos a salir del país, al tiempo que inventa amenazas externas para desviar la atención mundial de las condiciones de los palestinos. Un ejemplo de la derechización de la población israelí a niveles que, por su influencia política e impunidad real, probablemente no se ven en ningún otro país del mundo, es la que se describe en este artículo y que, más que  constituir una amenaza para el gobierno de Netanyahu, presagia un escalón más en descenso al infierno.

The New Face of Jewish Terror

A growing radical fringe is taking aim at Palestinians — and the Israeli government.

• BY SHIRA RUBIN
• AUGUST 20, 2015

MITZPE KRAMIM, West Bank — Gilboa Marmerstein says that her life is a “daily struggle.” The 16-year-old is awaiting the day when her family will move out of their trailer, which lacks insulation, much less a connection to cable television, and build a permanent home. When I met Marmerstein recently in her living room, she wore jean shorts and a messy bun. In between discussing what it’s like to live at an outpost above the rolling hills of the Jordan Valley, she spent her time chasing her seven younger siblings. In some ways, she is an average Israeli teenager obsessed with her friends and her phone. But she spoke with gravity born of responsibility, both to family and to mission. Despite the struggle, she said, her life is also geula, salvation.

The 42 families of Mitzpe Kramim, which means “Lookout onto the Vineyards” in Hebrew, say that they wouldn’t give up the tranquil, family-oriented, and righteous lifestyle for anything, especially not a 2011 Israeli Supreme Court evacuation order that declared that the land on which they live is private Palestinian property. Marmerstein mocked the irrelevance of the court decision and said she believes that sooner or later, Jews from across Israel and the world will join her in Judea and Samaria — using the area’s biblical name.

The Israeli government backs most of the 500,000 Jews spread across roughly 100 settlements in the West Bank by providing them military protection and largely allowing them to continue construction without the necessary permits. But another estimated 100 unsanctioned hilltop outposts like Mitzpe Kramim have tested the state’s policy. Even though the Central Bureau of Statistics shows a surge of more than 200 percent in completed sanctioned housing construction in the first quarter of 2015 compared with the same period in 2014, Marmerstein and her neighbors feel betrayed by Israel’s government. Violent demonstrations have erupted in response to the occasional demolitions of illegal structures, neighborhoods, or entire outposts in the West Bank; in these demonstrations, settlers have hurled stones at police officers and soldiers, comparing them to the biblical conquerors who destroyed the sacred Jewish temples in ancient Jerusalem. They say the Israeli government is too shortsighted to recognize the community’s bravery in setting up camp on this patch of land on Israel’s last frontier.

“Israelis see us as house stealers, stone throwers, baby killers, but this is the most Israeli that you can be, really!”

“Israelis see us as house stealers, stone throwers, baby killers, but this is the most Israeli that you can be, really!” Marmerstein said.

In recent weeks, hard-line settlers like Marmerstein and her family have become a flashpoint in Israeli politics and society, leading to political condemnation — and backlash. Following the July 29 demolition of two buildings in the settlement of Beit El, a settlement just north of Ramallah, settler leaders presented the right-wing Jewish Home party, a member of the ruling coalition, with an ultimatum: Either pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approve further construction in the settlement or lose the settlers’ political support. In just a matter of hours, Netanyahu approved the construction of 300 homes in Beit El. But residents there and other hard-liners throughout the West Bank were unimpressed, claiming that the approval was part of a previous deal made in 2012 when the government evacuated another neighborhood in the settlement. “Anyway, we’re tired of these games,” said one Beit El resident. “We see that Bibi [Netanyahu] simply doesn’t have the faith needed to stand up for his ideals.”

Then things got really ugly. On July 31, unidentified attackers firebombed a home in the West Bank Palestinian village of Duma. An 18-month-old baby, Ali Dawabsheh, and his father, Saad, were killed. On the walls of the Dawabsheh family home, arsonists left graffiti that read, “Long Live the Messiah” and “Revenge!” No one has been apprehended for the attack, but Israeli law enforcement officials and politicians blamed “Jewish terrorists.” Netanyahu condemned the act as “heinous” and promised to bring the arsonists to justice. President Reuven Rivlin wrote on his Facebook page that “Flames have engulfed our country. Flames of violence, flames of hatred, flames of false, distorted and twisted beliefs.”

Most believe the attacks were carried out by the radical right. It could have been the “hilltop youth,” the mostly teenagers and young families who, to varying degrees, refuse the authority of the state and live strict Torah-based lifestyles on what they see as a Zionist frontier. Also suspects are “price taggers,” a related group that has vowed to exact a “price” in the form of attacks on Palestinian properties or people every time Israel works to curb Jewish expansion in the West Bank. While the various groups differ on strategy, they share a common desire to cleanse Israel of non-Jews. At the more radical outposts, only “Jewish labor” is permitted, on the notion that only Jews can imbue the vineyards, soil, and the walls of the homes with Jewish character and therefore prepare the land and the people for the arrival of the Jewish Messiah.

While only dozens of hilltop youth are estimated to exist in the depths of the Palestinian-ruled sections of the West Bank, Israeli security forces haveidentified around 100 extremists who they believe have been involved in attacks against Palestinians, both from the West Bank and from Israeli cities. These extremists are distinguished by their knit yarmulkes, long sidelocks, and straggly beards, a look fitting their Jewish-hippy counterculture based on an organic connection with the land of the West Bank rather than the “rotten” materialism of mainstream Israel.

Small communities like Mitzpe Kramim have become breeding grounds for the growing “hilltop youth” movement. Marmerstein told me she doesn’t condone violence like the attack in Duma, but she identifies with the frustration and motives behind fringe militant groups and insists that Jews need to do whatever is necessary to defend their God-given right to the land. “This is our home, of course,” she said. “And, besides, the Arabs have more than 18 countries. What are they doing here at all?”

“Jewish terror” is not new to Israel. In one of the most infamous incidents, the Irgun, a militant Zionist group, set off a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing 91 people. But, says Shlomo Fischer, a sociology professor and expert on Jewish extremism, the modern incarnation is younger and more religious, uniting an eclectic group of fringe outcasts around an identity of “romantic religious nationalism.”

The movement dates back to 1967, when Israel captured and occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in a six-day war that many saw as imbued with messianic promise. Today, the loosely organized movement appeals to many marginalized youth and yeshiva dropouts by offering an “authentic” countercultural experience, says Fischer, who compares the recruitment strategy and sense of identity to extremist Islamist groups like the Islamic State. “You feel like you are able to connect with some sort of purpose, some sort of ideology that you’d never heard of,” an anonymous former hilltop youth activist told Israel’s Channel 2. He said that hilltop activists recruit at information booths throughout Israeli cities and are usually able to attract teenagers as young as 14, some 80 or 90 percent of whom come from broken homes.

The groups also feed on what settlers say is a passionate and widespread disappointment with what is seen as a traitorous government. In 1993, the Israeli government signed the Oslo Accords, in which it officially committed to freezing settlement expansion. (Since then, settlements nonetheless have expanded drastically.) While some settlements, especially those closer to Israel’s recognized borders, are fully established and treated as part of Israel, outposts like Mitzpe Kramim are seen by the state as an obstacle to peace.

Since the collapse of the peace process in 2000, however, Israel has also been divided by a fierce debate over the future of the country’s identity, pitting the country’s status as a Jewish nation-state against its espoused principles of democracy and pluralism. Politicians on the right have increasingly framed events in religious terms, concluding that a solution relies on the state’s ability to elevate its “Jewish” qualities — such as West Bank settlement as a means of reclaiming a biblical promise — over its democratic qualities, such as granting full civil rights to the 1.7 million Palestinians who live within its borders. As the conflict has dragged on, hard-line pro-settler support for “Greater Israel” has gained currency to the extent that Jewish presence in the West Bank has been increasingly understood as critical in terms of both ideology and security. Today, Israel’s Knesset is as conservative and religiously oriented as it has ever been in the country’s history. Anti-Arab,anti-refugee, and homophobic comments are common.

And, yet, the prevailing atmosphere among the settlers is that of persecution.

“We have been exposed to a terror attack on Judaism from the representatives of the state of Israel,” radical right-wing activist Meir Ettingerwrote on his blog this month, describing tensions between the settlers and the state as a “culture war.” A high-profile hilltop youth and yeshiva dropout in his early 20s, he is also the grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose ultranationalist Kach party was banned in Israel on counts of racism and incitement and listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. “As the Shin Bet [Israel’s internal security service] repeats in our ears, ‘Jewish terror, Jewish terror, Jewish terror’ and at the same time ‘contains’ the firebombs or stones thrown daily by Arabs [at Jews], so grow the numbers of Jews who know that the hands of those in charge of their protection are covered with the blood of those murdered,” wrote Ettinger.

Ettinger was arrested on Aug. 3 along with nine other ultranationalist activists and was placed under administrative detention, a controversial policy usually reserved for Palestinians under which suspects are denied the right to a trial or informed of official charges because they are deemed terrorists. Ettinger’s underground organization, known as “The Revolt,” encourages widespread anarchy by way of attacks on Palestinian Muslims and Christians, so that the righteous can pave the way toward reviving the “Jewish kingdom,” according to Ettinger’s blog. The group’s manifesto, released for publication by the Shin Bet, claims that “it is much cheaper and quicker to destroy the state and then rebuild than it would be to fix it” and includes instructions on securing Molotov cocktails and maintaining silence during police interrogations.

The hard-line settler community responded to Ettinger’s arrest with further attacks and escalated hostility toward the state. On Aug. 13, price taggerstorched a tent belonging to a Palestinian Bedouin family, leaving on a nearby rock the phrase “administrative revenge” in reference to the process of administrative detention under which Ettinger had been placed.

Chaya Shmidov, a 28-year-old teacher in a sapphire blue dress and matching hat, told me recently that state discrimination against religious Jews is endemic. She recalled a friend who had demonstrated against government demolitions of a settlement being attacked with tear gas by the army and police responsible for overseeing the operation, and then being jailed for days. “How do I feel about it? How do you want me to feel about it?” she said.

“We hope that one day the state will recognize us properly and say, ‘Wow, these people are truly self-sacrificing.’”

“We hope that one day the state will recognize us properly and say, ‘Wow, these people are truly self-sacrificing.’” Shmidov lives in Ahiya, an illegal outpost some 20 miles north of Ramallah, comprising dozens of wooden homes and caravans.

Shmidov told me that in July her neighbor, Aviya Morris, visited the Temple Mount and in a clash with Muslims screamed at them, “Mohammed is a pig!” — causing the police to immediately intervene and arrest her. “While they were screaming at Aviya, ‘Itbah al-Yahud’ — ‘Slaughter the Jews’ — and ‘Allahu akbar,’ she just got a little annoyed, and she was the one who was arrested!”

Morris’s husband, Raphael, 20, said that since the Duma attack, Israeli security forces have installed a surveillance balloon in the area to watch the settlers and are posted “all throughout the roads of Judea and Samaria all the time, waiting to catch us.” Raphael Morris admitted that he had been involved in “incidents” against Palestinians, though he wouldn’t specify what kind.

A particularly sore subject for Raphael Morris and his fellow ideologues is the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. In one of Israel’s most controversial missions, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the unilateral disengagement on the argument that the thousands of Israeli troops needed to guard Gaza’s Jewish settlements posed a security threat that also worked to devalue the democratic value of the state. In emotional scenes that the Israeli media is remembering this month on the 10-year anniversary of the disengagement, the Israeli army evacuated some 8,500 Jewish settlers from the Gush Katif bloc of Gaza, some by force, leaving behind razed homes. Morris and those like him still refer to it as “the expulsion.”

He sees Gush Katif as a cautionary tale that Israel can and will uproot its own people. And he believes that a similar process is now taking place in the West Bank with small-scale demolitions of hilltop settlements, though few expect the government to repeat the “mistake” of complete withdrawal from the territory. Morris said he is more determined than ever to fortify the settlement enterprise and to “find a solution to the conflict by expanding settlements here, slowly, slowly.”

It’s a common theme among settlers in the West Bank that they are a protective buffer between Israel and Palestinian terrorism. But in the end, they see their community’s essential justification as drawing from religion, not security or politics. “It is even written in the Torah that the Jews would be spread throughout the world and then will return back home to Eretz Israel,” Miriam Schwartz, a 40-year-old settler from Uruguay in a long floral skirt who was holding her toddler, told me as we waited under a hot late-summer sun above the Jordan Valley. We were standing at a bus stop that doubles as a pickup point for Israeli hitchhikers. The green station was covered in graffiti reading, “Kahane lives,” “Death to Arabs,” and “Price Tag.”

A woman going Schwartz’s way invited her, her daughter, and three others to pile into her car. The driver promptly requested that one of the passengers read a travel-sized laminated copy of the “Prayer for the Road,” a Jewish prayer asking for a safe journey, typically recited at the start of a flight, boat journey — or long car ride. “This prayer is especially important,” said the driver, booking it full speed along a winding road toward Jerusalem. “These days, we only have God to help us.”

Este artículo ofrece un significativo complemento al publicado hace unos días en México Internacional bajo e título The Mystery Of ISIS. Su autor, Nafeez Ahmed, es un destacado profesor e investigador palestino y su artículo fue publicado en Insurge Intelligence el 14 de agosto de 2015.

por Dr. Nafeez Ahmed

En su  número  fechado el 13 de agosto de 2015, la revista norteamericana New York Review of Books incluye un análisis del ISIS, basado en la reseña de dos libros publicados recientemente sobre el movimiento conocido como el Estado Islámico, su obscuro origen, su inexplicable crecimiento, su confusa ideología, su errática política, sus siniestras alianzas, contactos y financiamientos provenientes de diferentes países, grupos y personas y sus brutales masacres y asesinatos. Una notable omisión, como se observará, es el análisis de la relevancia de las vastas redes de inteligencia y operatividad de Estados Unidos, Arabia Saudita, Turquía y otros países del Golfo en la resiliencia de ISIS.  El autor. un antiguo fincionario de la OTAN, ha preferido mantener e  anonimato. Por su valor como análisis introductorio a este fenómeno. México Internacional lo reproduce íntegro.

The Mystery of ISIS

Anonymous

AUGUST 13, 2015

The author has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country. We respect the writer’s reasons for anonymity. 

—The Editors of New York Review of Books

anonymous_1-081315.jpg
Reuters

Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.

The rise of Ahmad Fadhil—or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable. The year 2003, in which he began his operations in Iraq, seemed to many part of a mundane and unheroic age of Internet start-ups and a slowly expanding system of global trade. Despite the US-led invasion of Iraq that year, the borders of Syria and Iraq were stable. Secular Arab nationalism appeared to have triumphed over the older forces of tribe and religion. Different religious communities—Yezidis, Shabaks, Christians, Kaka’is, Shias, and Sunnis—continued to live alongside one another, as they had for a millennium or more. Iraqis and Syrians had better incomes, education, health systems, and infrastructure, and an apparently more positive future, than most citizens of the developing world. Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter all these historical institutions, and—defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth—create a mini empire?
The story is relatively easy to narrate, but much more difficult to understand. It begins in 1989, when Zarqawi, inspired by his Islamic self-help class, traveled from Jordan to “do jihad” in Afghanistan. Over the next decade he fought in the Afghan civil war, organized terrorist attacks in Jordan, spent years in a Jordanian jail, and returned—with al-Qaeda help—to set up a training camp in Herat in western Afghanistan. He was driven out of Afghanistan by the US-led invasion of 2001, but helped back onto his feet by the Iranian government. Then, in 2003—with the assistance of Saddam loyalists—he set up an insurgency network in Iraq. By targeting Shias and their most holy sites, he was able to turn an insurgency against US troops into a Shia–Sunni civil war.

Zarqawi was killed by a US air strike in 2006. But his movement improbably survived the full force of the 170,000-strong, $100 billion a year US troop surge. In 2011, after the US withdrawal, the new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, expanded into Syria and reestablished a presence in northwest Iraq. In June 2014 the movement took Mosul—Iraq’s second-largest city—and in May 2015 the Iraqi city of Ramadi and the Syrian city of Palmyra, and its affiliates took the airport in Sirte, Libya. Today, thirty countries, including Nigeria, Libya, and the Philippines, have groups that claim to be part of the movement.

Although the movement has changed its name seven times and has had four leaders, it continues to treat Zarqawi as its founder, and to propagate most of his original beliefs and techniques of terror. The New York Times refers to it as “the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.” Zarqawi also called it “Army of the Levant,” “Monotheism and Jihad,” “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and “Mujihadeen Shura Council.” (A movement known for its marketing has rarely cared about consistent branding.) I will simplify the many changes of name and leadership by referring to it throughout as “ISIS,” although it has of course evolved during its fifteen years of existence.

The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise—the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters—fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.

Emma Sky’s book The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq,1 for example, a deft, nuanced, and often funny account of her years as a civilian official in Iraq between 2003 and 2010, illustrates the mounting Sunni anger in Iraq. She shows how US policies such as de-Baathification in 2003 began the alienation of Sunnis, and how this was exacerbated by the atrocities committed by Shia militias in 2006 (fifty bodies a day were left on the streets of Baghdad, killed by power drills inserted in their skulls). She explains the often imaginative steps that were taken to regain the trust of the Sunni communities during the surge of 2007, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s alienation of those communities again after the US withdrawal in 2011 through his imprisonment of Sunni leaders, his discrimination and brutality, and the disbanding of Sunni militias.

But many other insurgent groups, quite different from ISIS, often seemed to have been in a much stronger position to have become the dominant vehicles of “Sunni anger.” Sunnis in Iraq initially had minimal sympathy with Zarqawi’s death cult and with his movement’s imposition of early medieval social codes. Most were horrified when Zarqawi blew up the UN headquarters in Baghdad; when he released a film in which he personally sawed off the head of an American civilian; when he blew up the great Shia shrine at Samarra and killed hundreds of Iraqi children. After he mounted three simultaneous bomb attacks against Jordanian hotels—killing sixty civilians at a wedding party—the senior leaders of his Jordanian tribe and his own brother signed a public letter disowning him. The Guardian was only echoing the conventional wisdom when it concluded in Zarqawi’s obituary: “Ultimately, his brutality tarnished any aura, offered little but nihilism and repelled Muslims worldwide.”

Other insurgent groups also often seemed more effective. In 2003, for example, secular Baathists were more numerous, better equipped, better organized, and more experienced military commanders; in 2009, the militia of the “Sunni Awakening” had much better resources and its armed movement was more deeply rooted locally. In 2011, the Free Syrian Army, including former officers of the Assad regime, was a much more plausible leader of resistance in Syria; and so in 2013 was the more extremist militia Jabhat-al-Nusra. Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss show in ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, for example, that al-Nusra formed far closer links to tribal groups in East Syria—even marrying its fighters to tribal women.

Such groups have sometimes blamed their collapse and lack of success, and ISIS’s rise, on lack of resources. The Free Syrian Army, for example has long insisted that it would have been able to supplant ISIS if its leaders had received more money and weapons from foreign states. And the Sunni Awakening leaders in Iraq argue that they lost control of their communities only because the Baghdad government ceased to pay their salaries. But there is no evidence that ISIS initially received more cash or guns than these groups; rather the reverse.

Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s account suggests that much of the early support for the ISIS movement was limited because it was inspired by ideologues who themselves despised Zarqawi and his followers. The al-Qaeda cash that launched Zarqawi in 1999, for example, was, in their words, “a pittance compared to what al-Qaeda was financially capable of disbursing.” The fact that it didn’t give him more reflected bin Laden’s horror at Zarqawi’s killing of Shias (bin Laden’s mother was Shia) and his distaste for Zarqawi’s tattoos.

Although the Iranians gave Zarqawi medical aid and safe haven when he was a fugitive in 2002, he soon lost their sympathy by sending his own father-in-law in a suicide vest to kill Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, Iran’s senior political representative in Iraq, and by blowing up one of the most sacred Shia shrines. And although ISIS has relied for more than a decade on the technical skills of the Baathists and the Sufi Iraqi general Izzat al-Douri, who controlled an underground Baathist militia after the fall of Saddam, this relationship has been strained. (The movement makes no secret of its contempt for Sufism, its destruction of Sufi shrines, or its abhorrence of everything that Baathist secular Arab nationalists espouse.)

Nor has the leadership of ISIS been particularly attractive, high-minded, or competent—although some allowance should be made for the understandable revulsion of the biographers. Mary-Anne Weaver, in a 2006 Atlantic article, describes Zarqawi as “barely literate,” “a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp.” Weiss and Hassan call him an “intellectual lightweight.” Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger in ISIS: The State of Terror say this “thug-turned-terrorist” and “mediocre student…arrived in Afghanistan as a zero.” Weaver describes his “botched operation[s]” in Jordan and his use of a “hapless would-be bomber.” Stern and Berger explain that bin Laden and his followers did not like him because they “were mostly members of an intellectual educated elite, while Zarqawi was a barely educated ruffian with an attitude.”

If writers have much less to say about the current leader, al-Baghdadi, this is because his biography, as Weiss and Hassan concede, “still hovers not far above the level of rumor or speculation, some of it driven, in fact, by competing jihadist propagandists.”

Nor is ISIS’s distinctive approach to insurgency—from holding territory to fighting regular armies—an obvious advantage. Lawrence of Arabia advised that insurgents must be like a mist—everywhere and nowhere—never trying to hold ground or wasting lives in battles with regular armies. Chairman Mao insisted that guerrillas should be fish who swam in the sea of the local population. Such views are the logical corollaries of “asymmetric warfare” in which a smaller, apparently weaker group—like ISIS—confronts a powerful adversary such as the US and Iraqi militaries. This is confirmed by US Army studies of more than forty historical insurgencies, which suggest again and again that holding ground, fighting pitched battles, and alienating the cultural and religious sensibilities of the local population are fatal.

But such tactics are exactly part of ISIS’s explicit strategy. Zarqawi lost thousands of fighters trying to hold Fallujah in 2004. He wasted the lives of his suicide bombers in constant small attacks and—by imposing the most draconian punishments and obscurantist social codes—outraged the Sunni communities that he claimed to represent. ISIS fighters are now clearly attracted by the movement’s ability to control territory in such places as Mosul—as an interview in Yalda Hakim’s recent BBC documentary Mosul: Living with Islamic State confirms. But it is not clear that this tactic—although alluring, and at the moment associated with success—has become any less risky.

The movement’s behavior, however, has not become less reckless or tactically bizarre since Zarqawi’s death. One US estimate by Larry Schweikart suggested that 40,000 insurgents had been killed, about 200,000 wounded, and 20,000 captured before the US even launched the surge in 2006. By June 2010, General Ray Odierno claimed that 80 percent of the movement’s top forty-two leaders had been killed or captured, with only eight remaining at large. But after the US left in 2011, instead of rebuilding its networks in Iraq, the battered remnants chose to launch an invasion of Syria, and took on not just the regime, but also the well-established Free Syrian Army. It attacked the movement’s Syrian branch—Jabhat-al-Nusra—when it broke away. It enraged al-Qaeda in 2014 by killing al-Qaeda’s senior emissary in the region. It deliberately provoked tens of thousands of Shia militiamen to join the fight on the side of the Syrian regime, and then challenged the Iranian Quds force by advancing on Baghdad.

Next, already struggling against these new enemies, the movement opened another front in August 2014 by attacking Kurdistan, driving the Kurdish forces—who had hitherto stayed out of the battle—to retaliate. It beheaded the American journalist James Foley and the British aid worker David Haines, thereby bringing in the US and UK. It enraged Japan by demanding hundreds of millions of dollars for a hostage who was already dead. It finished 2014 by mounting a suicidal attack on Kobane in Syria, in the face of over six hundred US air strikes, losing many thousands of ISIS fighters and gaining no ground. When, as recently as April, the movement lost Tikrit and seemed to be declining, the explanation appeared obvious. Analysts were on the verge of concluding that ISIS had lost because it was reckless, abhorrent, over-extended, fighting on too many fronts, with no real local support, unable to translate terrorism into a popular program, inevitably outmatched by regular armies.

Some analysts have, therefore, focused their explanations not on the movement’s often apparently self-defeating military strategy, but on its governance and revenue, its support from the population, and its reliance on tens of thousands of foreign fighters. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow of the Middle East Forum, has explained in recent blog posts how in some occupied cities such as Raqqa in Syria, the movement has created complicated civil service structures, taking control even of municipal waste departments. He describes the revenue it derives from local income and property taxes, and by leasing out former Iraqi and Syrian state offices to businesses. He shows how this has given ISIS a broad and reliable income base, which is only supplemented by the oil smuggling and the antiquity looting so well described by Nicolas Pelham in these pages.2

ISIS’s power is now reinforced by the staggering arsenal that the movement has taken from the fleeing Iraqi and Syrian army—including tanks, Humvees, and major artillery pieces. Reports from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Vice News over the last twelve months have shown that many Sunnis in Iraq and Syria now feel that ISIS is the only plausible guarantor of order and security in the civil war, and their only defense against brutal retribution from the Damascus and Baghdad governments.

But here too the evidence is confusing and contradictory. Yalda Hakim’s BBC documentary on Mosul makes rough brutality the secret of ISIS’s domination. In his book The Digital Caliphate, Abdel Bari Atwan, however, describes (in Malise Ruthven’s words) “a well-run organization that combines bureaucratic efficiency and military expertise with a sophisticated use of information technology.”3 Zaid Al-Ali, in his excellent account of Tikrit, talks about ISIS’s “incapacity to govern” and the total collapse of water supply, electricity, and schools, and ultimately population under its rule.4 “Explanations” that refer to resources and power are ultimately circular. The fact that the movement has been able to attract the apparent support, or acquiescence, of the local population, and control territory, local government revenue, oil, historical sites, and military bases, has been a result of the movement’s success and its monopoly of the insurgency. It is not a cause of it.

In ISIS: The State of Terror, Stern and Berger provide a fascinating analysis of the movement’s use of video and social media. They have tracked individual Twitter accounts, showing how users kept changing their Twitter handles, piggybacked on the World Cup by inserting images of beheadings into the soccer chat, and created new apps and automated bots to boost their numbers. Stern and Berger show that at least 45,000 pro-movement accounts were online in late 2014, and describe how their users attempted to circumvent Twitter administrators by changing their profile pictures from the movement’s flags to kittens. But this simply raises the more fundamental question of why the movement’s ideology and actions—however slickly produced and communicated—have had popular appeal in the first place.

Nor have there been any more satisfying explanations of what draws the 20,000 foreign fighters who have joined the movement. At first, the large number who came from Britain were blamed on the British government having made insufficient effort to assimilate immigrant communities; then France’s were blamed on the government pushing too hard for assimilation. But in truth, these new foreign fighters seemed to sprout from every conceivable political or economic system. They came from very poor countries (Yemen and Afghanistan) and from the wealthiest countries in the world (Norway and Qatar). Analysts who have argued that foreign fighters are created by social exclusion, poverty, or inequality should acknowledge that they emerge as much from the social democracies of Scandinavia as from monarchies (a thousand from Morocco), military states (Egypt), authoritarian democracies (Turkey), and liberal democracies (Canada). It didn’t seem to matter whether a government had freed thousands of Islamists (Iraq), or locked them up (Egypt), whether it refused to allow an Islamist party to win an election (Algeria) or allowed an Islamist party to be elected. Tunisia, which had the most successful transition from the Arab Spring to an elected Islamist government, nevertheless produced more foreign fighters than any other country.

Nor was the surge in foreign fighters driven by some recent change in domestic politics or in Islam. Nothing fundamental had shifted in the background of culture or religious belief between 2012, when there were almost none of these foreign fighters in Iraq, and 2014, when there were 20,000. The only change is that there was suddenly a territory available to attract and house them. If the movement had not seized Raqqa and Mosul, many of these men might well have simply continued to live out their lives with varying degrees of strain—as Normandy dairy farmers or council employees in Cardiff. We are left again with tautology—ISIS exists because it can exist—they are there because they’re there.

Finally, a year ago, it seemed plausible to attach much of the blame for the rise of the movement to former Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki’s disastrous administration of Iraq. No longer. Over the last year, a new, more constructive, moderate, and inclusive leader, Haider al-Abadi, has been appointed prime minister; the Iraqi army has been restructured under a new Sunni minister of defense; the old generals have been removed; and foreign governments have competed to provide equipment and training. Some three thousand US advisers and trainers have appeared in Iraq. Formidable air strikes and detailed surveillance have been provided by the United States, the United Kingdom, and others. The Iranian Quds force, the Gulf states, and the Kurdish Peshmerga have joined the fight on the ground.

For all these reasons the movement was expected to be driven back and lose Mosul in 2015. Instead, in May, it captured Palmyra in Syria and—almost simultaneously—Ramadi, three hundred miles away in Iraq. In Ramadi, three hundred ISIS fighters drove out thousands of trained and heavily equipped Iraqi soldiers. The US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter observed:

The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight.
The movement now controls a “terrorist state” far more extensive and far more developed than anything that George W. Bush evoked at the height of the “Global War on Terror.” Then, the possibility of Sunni extremists taking over the Iraqi province of Anbar was used to justify a surge of 170,000 US troops and the expenditure of over $100 billion a year. Now, years after the surge, ISIS controls not only Anbar, but also Mosul and half of the territory of Syria. Its affiliates control large swaths of northern Nigeria and significant areas of Libya. Hundreds of thousands have now been killed and millions displaced; horrors unimaginable even to the Taliban—among them the reintroduction of forcible rape of minors and slavery—have been legitimized. And this catastrophe has not only dissolved the borders between Syria and Iraq, but provoked the forces that now fight the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen.

The clearest evidence that we do not understand this phenomenon is our consistent inability to predict—still less control—these developments. Who predicted that Zarqawi would grow in strength after the US destroyed his training camps in 2001? It seemed unlikely to almost everyone that the movement would regroup so quickly after his death in 2006, or again after the surge in 2007. We now know more and more facts about the movement and its members, but this did not prevent most analysts from believing as recently as two months ago that the defeats in Kobane and Tikrit had tipped the scales against the movement, and that it was unlikely to take Ramadi. We are missing something.

Part of the problem may be that commentators still prefer to focus on political, financial, and physical explanations, such as anti-Sunni discrimination, corruption, lack of government services in captured territories, and ISIS’s use of violence. Western audiences are, therefore, rarely forced to focus on ISIS’s bewildering ideological appeal. I was surprised when I saw that even a Syrian opponent of ISIS was deeply moved by a video showing how ISIS destroyed the “Sykes-Picot border” between Iraq and Syria, established since 1916, and how it went on to reunite divided tribes. I was intrigued by the condemnation issued by Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar—one of the most revered Sunni clerics in the world: “This group is Satanic—they should have their limbs amputated or they should be crucified.” I was taken aback by bin Laden’s elegy for Zarqawi: his “story will live forever with the stories of the nobles…. Even if we lost one of our greatest knights and princes, we are happy that we have found a symbol….”

But the “ideology” of ISIS is also an insufficient explanation. Al-Qaeda understood better than anyone the peculiar blend of Koranic verses, Arab nationalism, crusader history, poetic reference, sentimentalism, and horror that can animate and sustain such movements. But even its leaders thought that Zarqawi’s particular approach was irrational, culturally inappropriate, and unappealing. In 2005, for example, al-Qaeda leaders sent messages advising Zarqawi to stop publicizing his horrors. They used modern strategy jargon—“more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media”—and told him that the “lesson” of Afghanistan was that the Taliban had lost because they had relied—like Zarqawi—on too narrow a sectarian base. And the al-Qaeda leaders were not the only Salafi jihadists who assumed that their core supporters preferred serious religious teachings to snuff videos (just as al-Tayeb apparently assumed that an Islamist movement would not burn a Sunni Arab pilot alive in a cage).

Much of what ISIS has done clearly contradicts the moral intuitions and principles of many of its supporters. And we sense—through Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s careful interviews—that its supporters are at least partially aware of this contradiction. Again, we can list the different external groups that have provided funding and support to ISIS. But there are no logical connections of ideology, identity, or interests that should link Iran, the Taliban, and the Baathists to one another or to ISIS. Rather, each case suggests that institutions that are starkly divided in theology, politics, and culture perpetually improvise lethal and even self-defeating partnerships of convenience.

The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.