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The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson (2013)

Caado la gooyaa car alle ayey leedahay
(‘The abandonment of tradition calls forth the wrath of Allah’, Somali proverb, quoted in The World’s Most Dangerous Place, page 398)

James Fergusson worked on this book with help from a grant from the Airey Neave Trust, a charity whose objective is to promote research ‘designed to make a discernible impact and to contribute in a practical way to the struggle against international terrorist activity’ (p.447). So at least one of the book’s aims is to provide a background to, and history of, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

But it also explains something else, which isn’t immediately obvious, which is that the book is in two halves and only the first half (parts one and two) are set in Somalia (part one in and around Mogadishu, part two further afield, in Puntland and Somaliland). The entire second half of the book (part three) is not set in the most dangerous place in the world at all, but in the West, first in London, then in Minnesota, then back in London again.

This makes it different from your average reporting-from-Africa book because Fergusson is less reporting from Africa than investigating a problem (Somali Islamic extremism) which has both an African dimension (obviously) and, less obviously, ramifications for the Somali diaspora in the West.

So the title is a little misleading because over a third of the text is not from the most dangerous place in the world but from West London and the American Mid-West and, although he meets lots of politicians, soldiers and locals in Somalia, it is in London and Minneapolis (and, right at the end of the book, in France) that he has his longest and most thought-provoking conversations with Somali emigrants.

Contents

The locations, dates and themes of the book are conveniently indicated by its chapter titles:

Part 1: Living on the Line

  1. An African Stalingrad: the war against al-Shabaab (Hawl Wadaag district, Mogadishu, March 2011)
  2. At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war (By Aden Adde International Airport, March 2011)
  3. The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  4. Aden’s story (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  5. The failure of Somali politics (Villa Somalia presidential complex, March 2011)
  6. What makes al-Shabaab tick? (Hodan District, June 2011)
  7. The famine (Badbaado refugee camp, Dharkenly district, June to July 2011)

Part 2: Nomad’s Land

  1. In the court of King Farole (Garowe, Puntland, August 2011)
  2. Galkacyo: Pirateville (Galmudug, August 2011)
  3. Hargeisa Nights (Hargeisa, Somaliland, July 2011)
  4. How to start a border war (Taleh, Sool, June 2011)

Part 3: The Diaspora

  1. The Somali youth time-bomb (London, July 2011)
  2. The missing of Minneapolis (Twin Cities, Minnesota, September 2011)
  3. ‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’ (London, February 2012)
  4. Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab? (Besançon to Nairobi, March to June 2012)

Postscript to the paperback edition (Edinburgh, November 2013)

Fergusson’s enduring interest in Islamic affairs

Prior to a spell working with the UN, Fergusson was a journalist with a special interest in Muslim affairs, reporting from Algeria, Bosnia and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After serving in several administrative positions (press spokesman for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, 1998 to 2000) Fergusson returned to journalism and wrote a run of factual books including:

  • A Million Bullets (2008), a critique of Britain’s military engagement in Afghanistan
  • Taliban – Unknown Enemy (2010), a plea for greater engagement with Nato’s Afghan enemy

This present book follows on from those two, evidence of his long-term engagement with Islamic warriors and terrorism. As Fergusson says in his introduction, it was triggered by the rise of al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. Members of al-Shabaab came from the same kind of poor, neglected societies as the Taliban, and some of its leaders had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, so it felt like a natural progression to move from covering an Islamic insurgency in one country (Afghanistan) to a closely connected new one (al-Shabaab in Somalia).

Out of date

This book is, alas, 10 years old. A lot of its predictions i.e. that Somalia was turning a corner, the peace deal might stick etc, turned out to be hooey. Somalia now (2023) has an official government but continues to be mired in violence. Al-Shabaab are still there, killing people.

Why do I keep reading these out-of-date books? Well, a) because they’re cheap and the most up-to-date books about these countries are in hardback and very expensive, but b) because there aren’t that many popular journalistic accounts of these countries and conflicts available.

Fergusson’s book is very people-focused. It goes long on the people he meets and interview and hangs out with and gets to know, from as many walks of life as he can, from as many parts of the country as he can. I really liked Paul Kenyon’s book, ‘Dictatorland’, because it includes interviews and whatnot in it, but each chapter is focused on just one country, and pared back to give you the essential info. Fergusson’s is much more chatty, diffuse and long, at 464 pages including index.

Somalilands

It’s important to understand that ethnic Somalis live scattered across five countries, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia and northern Kenya, and that, during the colonial era, there were no fewer than three colonies named Somaliland. At the north-west was the small French colony of French Somaliland. This won its independence from France in 1977 and called itself Djibouti. Next door to it was British Somaliland and, in the territory containing the actual Horn of Africa and then round to the south, was Italian Somaliland.

British Somaliland was granted independence in June 1960, with the name of Somaliland, and promptly united with the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. However, at the overthrow of the Somali dictator Siad Barre in May 1991, representatives of the leading clans and Somali National Movement proclaimed Somaliland an independent state. Almost no other states accepts it as an independent nation; the West, the United Nations etc all regard it as an autonomous province of Somalia.

Spanning the actual Horn of Africa is another statelet, the province of Puntland, which has its own elections, assembly, prime minister and president, but remains a part of Somalia. Spanning the Horn, Puntland is the epicentre of Somali piracy, as Fergusson discovers when he goes to meet the president, and then is introduced to actual pirates via local fixers and contacts.

As to the Somalis across the border in Ethiopia, in 1977 Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre, invaded the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in a bid to claim it and its ethnic Somali population for Somalia, but was badly defeated by the (Marxist) Ethiopian regime, backed by the Soviet Union.

Tension between the two neighbours remains. In 2006 Ethiopia, with the backing of the US, invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union. This, as you would expect, triggered a wave of Somali patriotism, which the newly formed al-Shabaab exploited to the full. The war lasted from 2006 till 2009 when Ethiopia withdrew, having thoroughly destabilised Somalia, yet again.

When Fergusson goes to America to explore the largest Somali community there, sited, incongruously enough, in wintry Minneapolis, he finds a lot of anger at how America supported Ethiopia in invading their country, and at the three years of fighting which left Mogadishu even more destroyed and displaced hundreds of thousands. All things considered, it seems to have been a very bad move.

So, the complex colonial heritage of badly conceived administrative regions has been a central contributor to Somalia’s collapse.

Somalia’s clans

Somali culture is dogged by its clan system. Every single Somali is born into a clan, sub-clan and sub-sub-clan, and these have been at war with each other forever. There are an estimated 140 clans, sub-clans, and sub-sub-clans, but there are five major clans which sit at the top of the tree:

  • Hawiye, 25%
  • Isaaq, 22%
  • Darod, 20%
  • Rahanweyn, 17%
  • Dir, 7%

This map gives a good sense of how the Somali people and clans spill over the borders imposed by European colonialism and inherited by modern states.

(However, in London Fergusson interviews the founder of the Anti-Tribalism Movement, and makes the point that the younger generation of Westernised Somalis consciously reject the tribalism of their elders and tradition, p.379.)

The Somali civil war

Nobody agrees exactly when the Somali Civil War started. It grew out of resistance to the military junta which came to power in 1969, and came to be dominated by General Siad Barre, resistance which grew during the later 1980s. Numerous rebel groups formed, generally structured around Somalia’s very strong clan structure. The Siad Barre regime fell in 1991 and no central authority replaced it, instead the start of a multi-sided civil war.

In the chaos of civil war, during the 1990s, local Islamic courts were established amid the chaos to enforce basic law and order. When warlords attacked them, they united in around 2000 to form the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Although fractious and disagreeing among themselves, the Islamic courts offered pretty much the last remaining source of authority and justice in a ruined society.

In 2006 ICU forces defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the US and established a period of peace and security for the first time in a generation. This was wrecked after just six months when Ethiopian forces, backed by the US, invaded, leading to the 2006 to 2009 civil war. As a result of the war, much of the leadership fled abroad, leaving the youthful and most zealous members, who set up the party they called al-Shabaab, ‘the Youth’. These called for jihad against the Ethiopian invaders and their US sponsors, and this cry was answered not only inside the country but by small numbers of young men in the West’s Somali diaspora, notably in the UK and USA.

In 2009 a former chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, became president of Somalia and replaced the Transitional Government with the Federal Government of Somalia. In 2012, the country adopted a new constitution that declared Somalia an Islamic state with Sharia as its primary source of law.

Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab, also known as Ash-Shabaab, Hizb al-Shabaab, and the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations (PRM). In Arabic, al-Shabaab simply means ‘the youth’ so Hizb al-Shabaab simply means ‘the Party of Youth’.

Numerous interviewees tell Fergusson that al-Shabaab’s mindset, dogmatic Islamism and violence are alien to Somali traditions. Somalis have traditionally been Sufis, a peaceful, spiritual version of Islam. They reverence their saints and build shrines to them. It is well-known that the top rank of al-Shabaab is dominated by foreigners, hard-liners from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi, who impose a brutally puritanical version of Islam. For example, in areas they hold al-Shabaab has embarked on programmes of blowing up shrines to Somali Sufi saints, to the horror of the locals; but their punishments are so extreme and violent that no-one dare speak out. Fergusson meets many Somalis who says Islam is a religion of peace and forgiveness and so al-Shabaab, with its doctrine of unrelenting violence and vengefulness, are not Muslims.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb or AQIM is an Islamist militant offshoot of al-Qaeda Central that is engaged in an insurgency campaign in the Maghreb and Sahel regions. AQIM raises money by kidnapping for ransom and is estimated to have raised more than $50 million in the last decade.

Osama bin Laden put off a closer alliance with al-Shabaab. But after his assassination in May 2011, his successor as leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahari, agreed to a merger between Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda (p.128).

Islam, identity and purpose

Fergusson cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, making a related and broader point:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens, citizens of states so obviously failed and impoverished compared to the wonderlands of the West which they can see via the internet or in the astonishing wealth of UN and Western and aid agency staff, fabulously well fed, living in air-conditioned bases and hotels, swanning round in their big white land cruisers like new imperialists.

Militant Islam offers a source of identity and self-respect in the face of all the batterings young men are subject to in these kinds of impoverished chaotic societies.

This long book contains contributions from numerous interviewees about why Islamic terrorism arises, flourishes and spreads, but this is an important one of them.

The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)

Fergusson’s narrative opens in March 2011. A UN-approved force raised by the African Union is fighting its way through Mogadishu, trying to restore order. Most of the soldiers came from the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). They were fighting for the Transitional Federal Government or TFG, which was established in 2004. The AU mission as a whole was called the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Fighting had been fierce. AMISOM’s casualty rates were worse than those of NATO in Afghanistan.

Fergusson is effectively a guest of AMISOM, and stays in an air-conditioned portakabin on the military base at Mogadishu airport (p.37).

The problem of young men

Early on Fergusson makes a profound point which is relevant to all developing countries, to some extent all states. In his opinion, the problem with all these (developing) countries is what to do with the young men.

‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do about our young men,’ [says an elderly man, Abdulkarim, who’s been injured by a stray bullet]…Abdulkarim was expressing the despair of a patriarchal society that had lost all control of its successor generation. With the traditional bonds broken, the young men were rudderless, and now, exploited by foreigners and misled by extremists, their mad and endless violence was slowly destroying Somalia…(p.64)

Their corrupt dictators have run failing or rentier states with little interest or understanding of how to invest across all sectors of their economies in order to grow and develop them but people have kept on breeding at rates appropriate to pre-industrial societies. Lots of babies who grow up into lots and lots of unemployed young men hanging round on street corners.

(In his book The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński says that in West Africa these unemployed hopeless young men are called bayaye. He uses the example of Samuel Doe, president of Liberia from 1986 to September 1990, who started life as an unemployed peasant without a future, who trekked from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food and a purpose:

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński, page 244)

Mind you, when I googled bayaye one of the first results is from the Oxford Dictionary of African politics, which defines it as: ‘A Bantu term that has come to refer to idle youth or ‘street thugs’ in Uganda, i.e. people who are unemployed and can be seen hanging out on street corners’. So it looks like a commonly used term across central Africa. )

The West tries to broker peace deals, to oversee ‘democratic’ elections and continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and all the aid adverts you ever see will feature either young children, girls and women because these are the sentimental, wallet-opening faces of poverty. But no development in any Third World country can take place until you stop the fighting. And the fighting won’t stop until you give unemployed, aimless young men roles and goals which give them more dignity, self-worth and camaraderie than joining an Islamic militia.

Somalia had always been riven by clan rivalry and warfare. But over the years a system had evolved of controlling and limiting the violence, known as xeer, an ancient and sophisticated system of customary laws traditionally administered by the elders of rival clans who would meet and agree compromises and solutions to disputes and feuds. The dictator Siad Barre deliberately ran down this system while promoting his socialist revolution, thus helping to eliminate ancient ways of controlling or moderating clan violence.

In the old days, said Aden, the young men of al-Shabaab would have been brought into line by their elders and betters. The problem was that the war had destroyed that system. ‘It is not possible to convene a council of elders because there are no elders,’ he said (p.90)

Fergusson makes a striking visit to a camp for reformed or defecting al-Shabaab fighters. He expects to find ideologically hardened fanatics so is taken aback to encounter a group of boys, 15, 16 and 17 year olds, who lark around and take the mickey, pulling faces and giving sarcastic answers, like any other gang of unruly lads.

Everywhere he goes Fergusson sees ‘unemployed young men one saw in every Somali town, hanging about on street corners’ (p.220). The bayaye.

A criminologist named Daniel LeDouceur explains that the entire situation in Somalia needs to be seen through the prism of gang culture and gang psychology: the clans are really extended gangs; the pirates are formed in gangs; the people smugglers (across the Red Sea to Yemen) work in gangs; and al-Shabaab is really another congeries of gangs. So the solution is not ‘democracy’ etc etc, but the same approach to solving gang culture anywhere, which is to give young men, the bayaye, meaningful work and prospects (p.146).

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money.’
(Abdi-Osman who tried life as a pirate before being recruited to al-Shabaab, p.147)

Poverty

Poverty is one cause. Recruits to al-Shabaab, like recruits to the Taliban in Afghanistan, were attracted by the simple promise of pay; no matter the risks, it was better than being utterly unemployed and penniless. When the famine hits in spring 2011, Fergusson comes across three lads who were in a school classroom when an al-Shabaab recruiter asked for volunteers and stuck up their hands. ‘Why?’ Fergusson asks. Because they were paid a piece of fruit per day. That’s all it took (p.176).

Or the extended story told by Dahir Kadiye of the family who make $48 from each sheep they sell which will feed the family for three weeks, or a million dollars from one successful pirate hostage which will mean the entire family of eight never has to work again (p.401).

Ignorance

No schools and a very primitive nomad existence for the majority of the population explain the high levels of illiteracy and ignorance. (The literacy rate in Somali adults is currently estimated to be 40%.)

The root problem he [AMONO Chief Medical Officer, Colonel James Kiyungo] thought, was lack of education. ‘The fighters here learn to read the Koran, but they have no skills. There are no carpenters, no cooks, no plumbers – only the gun.’ (p.69)

Ignorant boys are easily led, specially by glamorous older boys with guns and money, and food.

The poverty and ignorance of the young which fuelled the insurgency were genuine grievances and had to be addressed. (p.178)

In fact this theme forms Fergusson’s conclusion. We need to address the problem of bored, rootless, alienated young men if we are to address al-Shabaab and militant Islam more generally, to address it in its heartlands before its violence spreads to Muslim diasporas in the West.

In Western cities, as in the Horn of Africa, sustained engagement with Somalia’s young men is the key to a better future for us all. (p.21)

Mohamed Alin

Somali politicians recognise and try to address the issue. Fergusson meets Mohamed Alin, who had returned from exile in Northolt, Middlesex, to make himself president of the self-declared autonomous region of Galmudug, a small statelet on the border between south Somalia and Puntland in the north. Alin explains that he wants to properly fund schools ‘to educate young men about the perils of piracy’, with skills training to provide livelihoods such as carpentry, electrical engineering and so on (p.226).

But such a thing requires, above all, peace, law and order: security; and then, proper funding, which has to come from abroad. And any link in the fragile chain of requirements can be sabotaged at any moment by outbreaks of clan or Islamic violence.

Thus peace remains elusive, aid donors are reluctant to give money which will disappear in corruption, and so ‘piracy’ remains a viable career for thousands and thousands of young Somali men, many of whom travel hundreds of kilometres from the drought-stricken, famine-stricken interior on the promise of rich pickings which will allow them to splash the cash, buy fancy cars, live high on the hog, take a wife and generally be a man (p.233).

Somalis in Britain

The book includes a long, deeply scary chapter about Somalis in Britain. No-one knows how many Somalis there are in Britain, maybe as many as 200,000. They have a lot of social problems. Only half of Somalis have any qualifications and only 3% have a higher education qualification. With the result that unemployment among Somalis runs at 40%, the highest of any immigrant community (p.299).

What scares various experts, educators, and Somali community leaders Fergusson speaks to is Somalis’ hyper-violence, ‘feral’ behaviour according to a teacher in a state school a third of whose pupils are Somali (p.304). Hundreds are permanently excluded from the education system because of bad behaviour and violence (p.306).

Evidence that Somali gangs have trounced white or Jamaican gangs in immigrant hotspots (Southall, Leytonstone). Some of this is down to having experienced hyper-violence in Somalia before immigrating (p.322). Many lack the restraining influence of a father (pages 306, 319) – ‘the specific Somali problem of paternal absenteeism’ (p.374). (In Minneapolis Fergusson discovers that 90% of the young men who’ve absconded to fight in Somalia grew up in fatherless households, pages 336, 348).

Mothers are failing to discipline their sons (p.307). It doesn’t help that many of these mums can’t read, write or speak English. This feeds into lack of educational achievement and a cycle of alienation and violence. According to a community worker, young Somali men are harder to reach than any other ethnic group, and often this is because they are just thick – stupid, uneducated, violent and proud of it (p.322). Fergusson comes to think it is a distinctive Somali trait, to be pig-headedly obstinate, even at your own expense (p.340)

Some Somali young men, raised in the UK, have travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab and become suicide bombers. Fergusson expresses the concern that homegrown Somalis will carry out terrorist attacks like the 7/7 bombings. In fact, of the major terrorist attacks carried out since the publication of his book, none involved Somalis:

  • 22 March 2017: Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old black Briton, drove a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge, injuring more than 50 people, four of them fatally, crashed the car into the perimeter fence of Westminster Palace grounds, ran into New Palace Yard where he fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer before being shot dead by an armed police officer. Five dead.
  • 22 May 2017: the Manchester Arena bombing carried out by Salman Abedi, a British citizen of Libyan descent, killing 22 people and injuring 1,017.
  • 3 June 2017: three men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then attacked shoppers at Borough Market with carving knives, killing eight people and injuring 48. All three attackers were shot dead by armed police. They were: Khuram Shazad Butt, a Pakistan-born British citizen; Rachid Redouane, a failed asylum seeker of Libyan or Moroccan origin; Youssef Zaghba, an immigrant with joint Italian/Moroccan nationality.

No Somalis.

Foreign aid

In the 1990s an estimated 80% of foreign aid to Somalia never reached its intended recipients, being stolen by corrupt officials or warlords. In 2010 an estimated 50% of foreign aid was being stolen by contractors, warlords or al-Shabaab (p.170).

Somali snippets

Somalia’s most famous novelist is Nurrudin Farah (p.31).

The very first novel to be published in the Somali language was ‘Ignorance is the Enemy of Love’ by Faarax M.J. Cawl, as recently as 1972 (p.269).

Somalis refer to the civil war period as Burburki meaning, simply, ‘the destruction’.

Everyone in Somalia chews qat which releases a substance which affects the brain like amphetamine i.e. gives you a speedy buzz (p.39).

Warriors of all varieties drove ‘technicals’, the nickname of pick-up trucks with a massive anti-aircraft gun bolted to the back of its load bay. Apparently, ‘the technical’ was invented in Somalia (p.135), although the idea of bolting heavy machine guns on to light trucks actually goes back to the Second World War, according to this article about technicals in The Conversation.

Western contractors nicknamed Somalis ‘skinnies’ (p.161).

Vivid description of Somali piracy (pages 213 to 233).

The ‘Somali rose’ is the nickname for the shreds of plastic that snag on the thorn bushes that grow in all the country’s abandoned urban spaces (p.224).

gaalo is the Somali word for white person or Westerner.

Grim account of female genital mutilation in the Somali community (pages 234 to 238).

Sayid Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan (1856 to 1920), a Somali religious, military and political leader who headed the Somali Dervish movement in a twenty-year struggle against British, Italian, and Ethiopian power in Somalia. Referred to as simply the Sayyid, he is often considered the father figure of Somali nationalism. Fergusson gives a biography of the great man, along with excerpts from his improbable epic poem on the death of a British officer, on a trip to the ruins of his garrison fortress at Toolah (pages 258 to 264).

The importation, distribution and consumption of qat or khat, chewing whose leaves cause stimulation, loss of appetite and mild euphoria (pages 367 to 377). marfish is Somali for qat-chewing den (p.368).

P.S. Black Hawk Down

The Battle of Mogadishu took place nearly 20 years before Fergusson arrived in Somalia. It’s the name given to the ill-fated attempt by American special forces to seize warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, who they blamed for an attack on UN forces, on 3 October 1993. During the attempted abduction of Aidid, two US helicopters were shot down and the marooned soldiers were quickly surrounded by mobs and militias. American reinforcements went in with overwhelming force to rescue their boys, leaving an estimated 700 Somalis dead, but despite their efforts, 18 Americans were killed and some of their bodies dragged through the streets, amid cheering crowds. Home-made footage of these chaotic bloody scenes was widely broadcast with two consequences:

1. President Clinton was horrified and ordered the termination of US involvement in Somalia. Reluctance to risk footage of American boys being treated the same way underlay America’s extreme reluctance to get involved in the Rwandan genocide, which commenced just 6 months later, in April 1994, at exactly the same time that the last US forces were withdrawing from Somalia.

2. In 1999 journalist Mark Bowden published a forensic account of the disaster, titled ‘Black Hawk Down’, and in December 2001 a movie of the book was released, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring an all-star cast. Fergusson talks to people who, at the time of his visit 10 years after the movie release, claim the film had a very negative impact on the image of Somalis, painting them all as fanatical psychopaths, a charge also made by Somali community groups in the US who objected to the way not a single Somali was consulted about the script or filming, and not a single Somali actor appears in it.

Credit

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson was published by Bantam Press in 2013. References are to the 2014 Black Swan paperback edition.

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ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger (2015)

Asymmetrical warfare is defined by asymmetry. Any terrorist ideology that can attract five recruits and the contents of their bank accounts can make headlines for months. A terrorist group with twenty recruits and half a million dollars can make headlines for years.
(ISIS: State of Terror, page 191)

ISIS is the crack cocaine of violent extremism, all of the elements that make it so alluring and addictive purified into crystal form. (p.235)

This book comes highly recommended as ‘a timely account’ and ‘the most important account’ of ISIS, but suffers from the same shortcoming as half the other books I’ve been reading about the Iraq-Afghanistan-al Qaeda turmoil, which is that it’s way out of date. My fault, obviously, not theirs.

It contains an admirably detailed chronology but it only goes up to November 2014. At many points, the authors say things like, ‘At the time of writing it looks like ISIS will…’, ‘It looks like ISIS might…’ expand and hold more territory, or maybe buckle after sustained attack by the US and its allies…they don’t know.

This is irritating because, in a sense, the most interesting thing about ISIS was the international campaign to extirpate it which only got underway in 2014/15 as this book was being finalised and published. Well, more fool me for buying a book which is nearly ten years old, although I can’t find anything more recent on Amazon.

ISIS

As usual, it’s easiest to go to Wikipedia for the basic facts:

The Islamic State (IS; as of 2014), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; in 2013) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a transnational militant Islamist terrorist group and former unrecognized quasi-state that follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. It was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and gained global prominence in 2014, when it drove Iraqi security forces out of key cities during the Anbar campaign, which was followed by its capture of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Sinjar massacre. The organization significantly influenced the course of the Syrian civil war when it announced its expansion into Syria in mid-2013 and began conducting ground attacks against both Syrian government forces and Syrian opposition militias. By the end of 2015, it held an area that contained an estimated eight to twelve million people and stretched from western Iraq to eastern Syria, where it enforced its interpretation of Islamic law. ISIL was estimated at the time to have an annual budget of more than US$1 billion (much derived from control of oil revenue from captured refineries) and more than 30,000 fighters.

The authors start by giving a straightforward chronological account of the rise of Islamic State out of its predecessor organisation, al Qaeda in Iraq (up to the time of writing, in late 2014). Then they go back and retread the same path or narrative but focusing on particular themes, such as the role of foreign fighters and of women; chapters on ISIS’s use of promotional videos and social media; on the complicated struggle to win over followers of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, not only in the Arab heartland but further afield in the Maghreb and North Africa. They have a chapter on the long-term psychological aims of ISIS, which they consider is to produce a society of dehumanised psychopaths, which partly explains their conscious policy of training child soldiers, forcing them to witness beheadings and whip or shoot prisoners. There is a very interesting chapter about how ISIS’s belief that it is operating in the end time before an apocalyptic Final Battle underpins all aspects of its worldview. And the book concludes with some suggestions about how we in ‘the West’ should manage and contain ISIS.

Names

The group grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). When it formally asserted its independence in 2013 it was under an Arabic name which can be translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). ISIS was the version picked up by most western media outlets, maybe because it has a certain zip and cachet as a word.

In June 2014 the group proclaimed itself to be a worldwide caliphate, a restoration of transnational Islamic rule, and began referring to itself as the Islamic State (IS) and this is the position and the name it retains to the present day. However, the authors, after some discussion, decided to use the earlier name, ISIS for two reasons: a) it is familiar from lots of press coverage b) it is challenging, and silly, in English, to continually write sentences which include ‘IS is…’ ISIS is an easier acronym to manage: ‘ISIS is, ISIS was’ etc.

ISIS leaders

1. ISIS was ‘founded’ by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and led by him until his death in an American air strike in 2006. In fact this history is deeply contested, as the group Zarqawi founds was called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and, in 2004, after he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, he was appointed chief of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In other words, he was killed before an organisation specifically named ISIS came into being. It is analysts and commentators who claim that the doctrines he practiced in AQI and its extremist policies of a) attacking other Muslims b) in particular attacking Shia Muslims and shrines c) attacking Western operations previously all considered off-limits e.g the United Nations and aid charities – these policies were disapproved of by bin Laden and others in al Qaeda Central but proved attractive and mobilising for the cadres of extremist Sunni jihadists who went on to form ISIS.

2. Zarqawi’s role was taken by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the militant groups Mujahideen Shura Council and its successor, the Islamic State of Iraq, until he, too, was killed in an American missile strike in 2010.

3. He was succeeded by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is recorded as the second Emir or prince of the Islamic State of Iraq from 2010 to 2013. In 2014 ISIS declared the existence of an actual state, the Caliphate, which governed a large part of eastern Syria and western Iraq, and Baghdadi was declared first caliph of this Islamic State, which he ruled until he blew himself up during an American raid in October 2019.

4. A week later IS’s media outlets announced that the new caliph was Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. For a while there was debate about whether this person actually existed or was a fictional front man hurriedly invented by IS leadership. Having lost almost all the territory they held at their maximum reach, in 2016, ISIS were reduced to traditional insurgent attacks, but made significant advances through partner groups in Africa; new branches were opened in Congo and Mozambique. On 3 February 2022, al-Qurashi killed himself and members of his family by triggering a large bomb during a raid by the US Joint Special Operations Command.

In May 2022 ISIL’s West Africa Province said that it had killed 20 Nigerian Christian men in Borno State in a mass execution as a retaliation for al-Qurashi’s assassination. And so it goes on forever, the ideology of massacre, murder and vengeance.

5. Replaced by the third caliph of Islamic State, Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, as confirmed by Al-Furqan Media foundation, Islamic State’s primary media outlet, 10 March 2022. As usual there was a lot of mystery about his true name and identity. In November 2022 it was confirmed that he killed himself by detonating a suicide vest during an operation carried out by former Free Syrian Army rebels.

6. He was replaced in November 2022 by the fourth caliph, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi. There are now some 40 IS provinces i.e. regional operations, throughout the Middle East and far into Africa. On 30 April 2023 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization had tracked down and killed Abu al-Hussein the previous day, on 29 April, but this has not been confirmed by the US, who we tend to trust more, nor confirmed by ISIS itself. Schrödinger’s caliph…

The differences between al Qaeda and ISIS

According to the authors the fundamental difference with al Qaeda was that the latter was an elite intellectual movement (pages 55, 192), whereas ISIS set out to be a popular mass movement. Al Qaeda was a sect or cult; they made joining it very difficult, starting with being difficult to track it down or contact it, then you had to go through tests or proofs of fitness. ISIS’s approach was diametrically opposite: it set out to create a utopian new society and advertised for as many members and volunteers  as possible (p.73). ISIS made promotional videos and posted messages on twitter and Instagram. Muslim equivalents of the old Lord Kitchener poster, ‘Your country needs you’. The ISIS message was:

You have a place here, if you want it, and we’ll put you to work on this exciting project just as soon as you show up (p.73)

ISIS’s brand, its offering, was a unique combination of extreme violence – horror violence – with promises of a new life and a new world. al Qaeda had a lofty spiritual goal of eventually reaching a new Islamic world at some point far over the horizon. In this respect, its entire worldview was fundamentally defeatist (p.195). ISIS, in its blunt and practical way, declared the brave new world was here and now (pages 118, 195).

Al Qaeda worked on the premise, familiar to us from the revolutionary Marxist terrorists of the 1970s (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades in Italy) that the masses are slumbering in a sleep of ignorance (p.55). If only you can wake them from their conformist slumber with acts of sufficient outrage and transgression, they would suddenly wake from their slumber, realise that the terrorists were right and that they need to throw off the shallow western consumer capitalist culture which exploits them, overcome their oppressors and institute a new communist/Islamic utopia.

Same here. al Qaeda thought the right kind of terrorist outrage would trigger a mass awakening of the Muslim masses who would suddenly realise that Osama bin Laden was right, the infidel needed to be kicked out of Muslim lands and a new, purified Islamic rule established. But ISIS thought they had achieved that, in the huge swathe of territory they captured 2014 to 2016.

Stern and Berger have a fascinating chapter describing the development of ISIS’s management of traditional and social media. Again, they contrast the very different subject matter and tone between al Qaeda and ISIS productions. al Qaeda’s rhetoric was all about Muslim powerlessness and victimhood. bin Laden lamented how Muslim lands were crushed and downtrodden, in the grip of corrupt leaders in hock to Western powers, the infidel. It was a discourse stemming from the apparently complete grip Western-backed leaders held over the Muslim world, and al Qaeda’s embattled, isolated resistance to that grip (p.108).

By complete contrast, ISIS came to prominence on the waves of chaos and social collapse triggered by the Arab Spring. Suddenly all these immoveable old regimes were collapsing like dominoes. Anything seemed possible. So ISIS’s rhetoric, messaging, videos and social media all reflect exuberant confidence that the world is changing and this is their moment (p.114). The overarching theme of ISIS propaganda was: ‘We are strong and we are winning’ (p.112).

The multiple appeals of ISIS

There are multiple appeals to this way of thinking. One of the most practical is the reality that the transformative event the organisation promises is never actually going to happen and so membership of then organisation is, in a sense, a job for life. The naive utopian dream of transforming the world is the gift that keeps on giving; since the transformed world will never arrive, you’ll just have to keep organising, fund raising and carrying out atrocities. Forever.

This leads to the second appeal, which is that such crusades obviously provide its members with a number of psychological rewards and comforts. Your life acquires a messianic meaning. You acquire a family, the brothers you never had and a wise and all-seeing father figure. You are among like-minded people whose clarity and conviction answers all your anxieties about life (p.82).

And you are working towards a Better World. If, in order to get to this Just, Fair and Peaceful World, you have to kidnap, rape, torture, murder and behead some people, well a) the boss told you to b) the extremity of the acts reinforces the high stakes you’re playing for: the future of the world is in your hands. Also c) such extreme acts bond you with the people you carried them out with; once you’ve beheaded someone with your own hands there’s no going back. And d) such acts show the world that you’re serious, this is the real thing, you’re not backing down until you have built The New World.

All this goes to explain why a disproportionate number of ISIS fighters are foreign i.e. don’t come from its heartlands in Iraq and then Syria. It’s been known for thousands of years that a convert to a religion or cause is usually more zealous and committed than someone born and bred into it. Same here. According to researcher Thomas Hegghammer a) the atrocities recorded on videos which are then distributed i.e. ritual beheadings, are disproportionately carried out by foreign fighters. The text mentions ‘Jihadi John’, real name Mohammed Emwazi, born in Kuwait but raised in London. He became such a notorious figure that he has his own, surprisingly long Wikipedia entry, and was hunted by both the US and UK governments until assassinated in a drone strike.

Plus another, simpler explanation – toxic masculinity:

The ultraviolence served multiple purposes. In addition to intimidating its enemies on the ground… ultraviolence sold well with the target demographic of foreign fighters – angry, maladjusted young men whose blood stirred at images of grisly beheadings and the crucifixion of so-called apostates. (p.72)

Some young men just like fighting. Some yearn for the thrill of killing and risking being killed. Others want the trappings of being a ‘warrior’, not least the sex slaves ISIS took wherever it captured, particularly among Iraq’s Yazidi minority (p.194). Some are criminals looking for opportunities for loot. Some are just psychopaths.

So Stern and Berger’s account fits ISIS neatly not only into the matrix of Islamic terror groups, but also among the wider context of terrorist groups around the world over the last 50 years or so. They define terrorism as having two aspects:

1. Terrorism is deliberately aimed at civilians or non-combatants; this puts it outside all definitions of ‘just war’ in most religious traditions, starting with the Islamic tradition itself.

2. Terrorism is designed to be dramatic in order to achieve propaganda ends; in the case of Islamic terrorism in order to:

a) create fear and dread in the wider target population (‘the hostages should be liquidated in the most terrifying manner which will send fear into the hearts of the enemy’, p.122)

b) wake passive Muslim communities in their host nations from their slumber; to ignite ‘the deadly tinderbox fizzing just beneath the surface of every western country’ (p.97)

Internecine Muslim killing

Mainstream Islam seeks to live in peace with non-believers. Radical or jihadist sects take a more binary approach, believing all infidels or unbelievers can be freely tortured and murdered, for exemplary and propaganda purposes.

But the authors also tell us that recent Islamic theorists have developed the handy notion of takfir which is the pronouncement that a Muslim is no longer a Muslim but an unbeliever i.e. any Muslims who don’t agree with your beliefs aren’t, in fact, real Muslims, and so can also be killed.

This conceptualisation feels like a rationalisation, or extension of, something which already existed in the sweaty world of Islamic jihadi / insurgency / radical politics, which is the notable tendency of Islamic radicals to kill each other. ISIS’s beheadings of Western hostages received a lot of publicity because they were intended to; they were well-produced videos of the killings, very effectively distributed them across social media and the internet, and Western media picked them up and rebroadcast them, exactly as ISIS intended.

Less well known was the time, effort and expense Islamic radicals have devoted to murdering each other. It’s one of the main revelations of this book. In the field, different Islamic fighters attack each other and fight battles. Individual Islamic leaders are targeted and assassinated and sometimes entire meetings of senior leaders. In this respect, many Islamic radical groups do the West’s work for them, which is nice.

Seen from another angle, the internecine bloodshed of these squabbling jihadist groups is just another version of the sectarian violence which erupted all across Iraq after the American invasion, above all of the profound and poisonous enmity between Shia and Sunni Muslims which emerged from the shadow of Saddam to wreck Iraq. And these are both examples of the tendency of Muslim, certainly Arab Muslim countries, to contain seething sectarian animosities just waiting to boil over into civil war: before our modern tribulations came the prolonged civil war in Lebanon and the murderous civil war in Algeria. Now we have social collapse and civil war in Libya, the terrible conflict in Syria, and the under-reported war in Yemen. How these Muslims hate each other.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni movements. ISIS follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. This appears to mean that, in order to create their Islamic paradise, they have to intimidate, terrorise and kill as many Shi’a Muslims as possible, as well as carrying out attacks on their mosques and holy places, witness the 2006 ISIS attacks on the Al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shi’a Islam, in Samarra, 80 miles from Baghdad (p.25). This succeeded in triggering reprisal attacks by Sunnis and helping to precipitate the Iraqi civil war (p.25). ISIS propaganda films included accounts of Shi’a death squads killing Sunni Muslims, turncoats from ISIS tell stories of being brainwashed with endless stories of Shi’a evil-doing…which, of course, then justified massacring as many Shi’as as possible. (p.107)

In its publications and in countless videos ISIS extolled the virtues of killing the rafidah (a derogatory term for Shi’a Muslims) and nusayri (a derogatory term for Alawites, members of a sect of Shi’a Islam practiced by members of the Syrian regime). (p.116)

Paradise can, it appears, only be attained by wiping out most of humanity – the whole of ‘the West’, obviously; all other countries or cultures which practice any religion apart from Islam, natch; all Shi’a Muslims, of course, (p.230), all other minority Muslim groups (Alawites, Sufis), plus any Sunni Muslims who disagree with anything ISIS say and can now be rendered unmuslim by the simple process of takfir.

ISIS aims to cleanse the world of all that disagree with its ideology. (p.233)

It is, then, standard genocidal millenarianism. Set out to kill almost the entire world population in order to make the world ‘pure’. And when, as a result of your indiscriminate use of barbaric violence, you’ve alienated the entire world against you – not to worry, the very fact that everyone rallies against you fact is one more proof that you and your brothers alone possess The Truth and are part of a small elite of Truth-knowers and Holy Warriors which the entire world wants to smother.

And so it is that these people become trapped in the paranoid, self-confirming death spiral of the millenarian cult.

The end of the world

Most educated people know that our word Armageddon derives from its use in the Bible’s Book of Revelations and is supposed to be the site of the Last Battle before the End of the World. The word is a Latinisation of the Hebrew‎ Har Məgīddō where Har means mountain and Megiddo means place of crowds.

But I hadn’t heard about Dabiq. Dabiq is a small town in northern Syria near the border with Turkey. It features heavily in traditional Islamic end-times prophecy which predicts that it is here that Muslim forces will defeat ‘Rome’, which modern interpreters take to be ‘the West’, before going on to conquer Constantinople (p.220). Like the Book of Revelation, conceived and written millennia ago, when the configuration of forces and powers was drastically different, but twisted by modern interpreters to suit their current policies.

Anyway, so central was the place and concept and resonance of Dabiq to ISIS that when they established a multi-language magazine to promote their cause, they called it Dabiq (p.119). The authors not only mention this but quote from various editions of Dabiq. And the magazine was first published just a month or so after ISIS captured the actual town of Dabiq (p.224).

This leads into an entire chapter explaining the various Islamic prophecies about the end of the world. Some of these include the institution of slavery, especially sexual slavery, as well as intensified war between the Muslim sects. Seen in this light ISIS’s deliberate inflammation of Sunni-Shia sectarianism in Iraq has an eschatological purpose i.e. it is consciously designed to bring about the End Times.

All of which is set against the over-heated and hysterical atmosphere created by 9/11 and then the American invasion of Iraq. Both the al Qaeda and ISIS leadership have paid close attention to end time prophecies and, of course, their propagandists proudly claim to be striking the first blows in the Final Battle which will lead up to the arrival of the Mahdi and the End of Days.

Except that none of this will happen. The jihadists will just carry on beheading Western hostages, carrying out random atrocities in Africa and, above all, killing lots of Muslims in the name of their common God.

The authors make one important point. Because these warriors are living in the End Times and fighting the Final Battle between cosmic forces of Good and Evil normal moral rules do not apply. Millenarian groups are the most likely to carry out acts of barbarity because they have passed beyond the realms of normal human morality (p.225).

This chapter, Chapter 10: The Coming Final Battle, is arguably the most enjoyable of the book. It presents a useful summary of modern thinking about apocalyptic and millenarian movements, listing their attributes, quoting experts on the subject on the appeal of their psychology, and then assessing how many of these attributes apply to either al Qaeda or ISIS.

For example, it offers fascinating interpretations of the beheading videos which brought ISIS notoriety in the West. There are at least three motives or meanings:

  1. The beheadings are designed to create fear and terror in western countries out of all proportion to ISIS’s actual capacities.
  2. The beheadings are meant to goad western powers i.e. America, into another invasion, this time of Syria, which will a) spread even more chaos across the region, thus allowing ISIS to flourish b) comply with millenarian prophecies that the ‘crusaders’ will return to Muslim lands once again and be finally, definitively defeated.
  3. Then there’s just the simple explanation that the people carrying out the beheadings really are psychopaths and sadists.

But towards the end of the book, they offer a fourth interpretation: this is that the beheadings enact the great psychological simplification that the beheaders have undergone: they now live in an End Time world of extreme black and white, us and them, good and evil. So the videos are designed to trigger an equally simplistic response in their viewers, making viewers so angry that they themselves resort to the same psychologically basic binary of good and evil.

In other words, they were designed to erase the sophistication and complexity of modern western thought, to trigger the same simple-minded binary good guys-bad guys dichotomy that characterised Bush and Blair’s response to 9/11.

But, the authors warn, we shouldn’t let ourselves be brought down to their level, not just of barbarism, but of simple-mindedness. The world is a complex place, societies are complex thing, people are complex animals and multi-levelled complex problems like Iraq or Syria require immensely subtle, complex and thought-through solutions.

Using good guy-bad guy rhetoric like Bush and Blair did is a failure of the sophistication and intellect we pride ourselves on, but this isn’t just a rhetorical analysis. It led us into simplistic thinking (invade – overthrow dictator – install democracy – leave grateful nation) which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the immense complexity of the situation on the ground. ISIS want us to do that again. We mustn’t.

ISIS and social media

Immensely knowledgeable though the book is, it has, in my opinion, a central weakness. The longest chapter in the book (Chapter 7: The Electronic Brigades) is a detailed analysis of al Qaeda and ISIS’s use of social media, particularly Facebook but especially Twitter. I found this very tedious – ISIS use social media much like everyone else, to publish videos and share propaganda material, no real surprise – but the chapter is clearly so long because one of the authors, J.M. Berger is, apparently, a real expert in this area and, they tell us, was commissioned by Google Ideas to carry out research into ISIS supporters and Twitter (p.171).

So this explains why this chapter is so long and contains so many detailed stats about ISIS social media users and followers. But the thirty pages of this account boil down to a repetitive and boring iteration of the basic problem facing the owners of Twitter which is how far the principle of free speech should let Twitter users publish highly inflammatory and homicidal content. The chapter includes lots of really boring facts about al Qaeda and ISIS’s twitter accounts and social media stars and how many accounts were suspended or cancelled and the various strategies jihadis resorted to to try and hang onto accounts etc etc. It feels exactly like an academic report prepared for a big corporation which has been tweaked and re-versioned to become the chapter of a book.

Then, at the very end of the main body of the book, is a chapter which offers the authors’ thoughts about the way forward for the West in tackling ISIS and this also is mainly concerned with a detailed look at how to counter ISIS’s messaging on social media, repeating many of the ideas already laid out at boring length in chapter 7. They list five goals ISIS have in their social media strategy and how we in the West can counter all five.

Anyway, my point is that, all this focus on the minutiae of ISIS’s twitter accounts comes at the expense of a military analysis of ISIS. There is nothing anywhere in the book about how ISIS came to be such a successful military operation. ISIS didn’t manage to overrun a large part of Syria and Iraq, eventually controlling a third of Iraq’s territory and seizing the hugely important city of Mosul, just by being good at social media.

This book is very interesting on what you could call the cultural aspects of ISIS, about jihadi psychology, the psychology of terrorism and millenarian cults, good at giving extended comparisons of its radical worldview with that of its progenitor al Qaeda, and much more.

But it is a complete blank when it comes to explaining how this ragtag outfit of extremists and sadists was transformed into such a very effective fighting machine. There is nothing about its military campaigns, no analysis of its military strategy or tactics, no account of any battle or fighting at all.

And, having been published in 2015, no account at all of the military campaign undertaken by the US and other Western allies to extirpate it. For the entire military side of the story you’ll have to look elsewhere.

American comedy

The United States had invested $25 billion in training and equipping the Iraqi army over the course of eight years. That investment evaporated in the blink of an eye as Iraqi soldiers turned tail and fled in the face of ISIS’s assault on Mosul. (p.45)

Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, fell soon after Mosul. At many stops along its march, ISIS captured US-supplied military equipment from fleeing Iraqi soldiers, which they trumpeted with photos on social media. (p.46)

Money well spent, then.

American chaos

The American invasion of Iraq created chaos, insurgency, ethnic division and civil war throughout Iraq, which then spilled into neighbouring Syria when it experienced its failed Arab Spring rebellion in 2011.

This catastrophic environment, the collapse of these two societies into chaotic violence, also explains the difference between al Qaeda and ISIS because it made the apocalyptic, millenarian, end-time beliefs espoused by the latter seem much more plausible.

Wikipedia quotes from William McCants’ book, ‘The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State’:

‘References to the End Times fill Islamic State propaganda. It’s a big selling point with foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today [Iraq and Syria] lend credibility to the prophecies. The Islamic State has stoked the apocalyptic fire…For Bin Laden’s generation, the apocalypse wasn’t a great recruiting pitch. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and tyranny than against the Antichrist. Today, though, the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense than before.’

So… America is directly responsible for creating the super-chaos which raged across Iraq and amid which new types of extreme jihadi terrorism were able to develop and flourish. Also from Wikipedia:

According to Iraqis, Syrians, and analysts who study the group, almost all of ISIL’s leaders – including the members of its military and security committees and the majority of its emirs and princes – are former Iraqi military and intelligence officers, specifically former members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath government who lost their jobs and pensions in the de-Ba’athification process after that regime was overthrown.

The former Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the US State Department, David Kilcullen, has said that: ‘There undeniably would be no Isis if we had not invaded Iraq.’ (Wikipedia)

Or as Stern and Berger put it:

The rise of ISIS is to some extent the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. (p.238)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, with fine moral ideals and high-sounding rhetoric about freedom and justice and democracy (see the speeches of George Bush and Tony Blair). Stern and Berger sum up the message of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan in one pithy sentence:

The only thing worse than a brutal dictatorship is no state at all (p.237)

Or Islamic State.

Credit

ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger was published by William Collins in 2015. References are to the 2016 paperback edition, with an additional afterword.

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Posted by Simon on November 1, 2023

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