Why Isis fights
speck on a vast agricultural plain between the Turkish border and the deserts of Iraq, which
hardly seemed likely to shape the fate of nations. A weathered sign at its entrance said 4,000
people lived there, most of whom appeared to have left by 2013, driven out over time by a lack
of work – and lately by insurrection. For the first three years of Syria’s civil war, the arrival of a
strange car would lure bored children to the town’s otherwise empty streets, scattering cats and
chickens as they scampered after it. Little else moved, The Guardian Newspaper said.
Dabiq’s few remaining men worked on the odd building project: a half-finished mosque, a
humble house for one local who had just returned after 10 years labouring in Lebanon, or a
fence for the shrine that was the town’s only showpiece – the tomb of Sulayman ibn Abd al-
Malik. The Ummayad caliph was buried under a mound of earth in 717, which over many
centuries had somehow grown into a small hill. The war was happening elsewhere, it seemed.
That was until the jihadists of Islamic State (Isis) arrived in early 2014, an event that the Dabiq
elders had feared from the moment the war began – and which the new arrivals had anticipated
for much longer. To the foreigners, and the leaders of the new militant juggernaut who were
beckoning them, the war had by then entered a new phase that would transform the tussle for
power in Syria into something far more grand and important. For them, the conflict that was
slicing the country apart was not merely, as the Syrian opposition had seen it, a modern struggle
between a ruthless state and a restive underclass. The jihadis instead saw themselves at the
vanguard of a war that many among them believed had been preordained in the formative days
of Islam. One of the earliest sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – a hadith – mentions Dabiq as
the location of a fateful showdown between Christians and Muslims which will be a precursor to
the apocalypse. According to another prophecy, this confrontation will come after a period of
truce between Muslims and Christians, during which Muslims – and only puritanical Sunnis fit
the definition – would fight an undefined enemy, which in northern Syria today is deemed to be
“Persians”.
“The Hour will not be established until the Romans [Christians] land at Dabiq,” the hadith says.
“Then an army from Medina of the best people on the earth at that time will leave for them …
So they will fight them. Then one third of [the fighters] will flee; Allah will never forgive them.
One third will be killed; they will be the best martyrs with Allah. And one third will conquer
them; they will never be afflicted with sorrow. Then they will conquer Constantinople.”
The jihadis started to arrive in the summer of 2012, more than one year into Syria’s war, which
had by then started to tip in favour of a ramshackle opposition that was locked into ousting
Bashar al-Assad at all costs. Over the following six months, the foreigners came from all points
of the globe, gradually asserting their will over opposition groups that were failing to press
home their early gains on the battlefield and offered no convincing plan for the type of society
that would eventually emerge from Syria’s ruins
One man in Dabiq recalled to me the day that the war for the north was lost to the jihadis. “They
came in a column of trucks one day early last year. They said nothing. They just set themselves
up at the mosque,” he said in May 2014. “Now everyone knows where Dabiq is. We are why
they are destroying the whole region.”
“We know about the prophecy, of course we do,” another Dabiq local told me, sitting on the
concrete floor of his home in late 2013. “But we are hoping that it is just legend. God willing
they will leave us alone.” The man’s faith was misplaced. Within three months, Isis had set up a
command post among rows of concrete homes, and was sending hundreds of its fighters and
their families to relocate there.
It is told largely by five men with whom I have spoken, at some length, over the past four years,
inside Syria and Iraq. Their motivations are similar, but in some cases they are diverse and
contradictory. All of them draw at least some inspiration from the prophecy of an epochal
confrontation in Dabiq; they see themselves as underdogs, fired by a sense of divine mission.
Individually, each man painted a distinct portrait of his reasons for joining a movement that is
fast causing the collapse of an order that has bound the region together for centuries, and
posing a direct challenge to all the Middle East’s current forms of governance, threatening
autocracies, monarchies and quasi-democracies alike. Dabiq, which has been essentially
inaccessible to journalists since that conversation, is now one of three main focal points of the
war the group is waging on the region. Raqqa in eastern Syria is Isis’s strategic hub, and Mosul in
Iraq is its greatest conquest. But Dabiq is the place that allows the group to underpin its
rampage with theology. In the eyes of Isis, the reference to the town in Islamic teachings gives
the group’s rampage an incontestable mandate – a powerful thing to table when you’re trying
to impose a new world order. And it appears to be working. To the estimated 20,000 foreigners
who have travelled to join the so-called Islamic caliphate, declared last June by the Isis leader
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the symbolism of Dabiq is one of the jihadis’ most alluring calling cards.
The group has even named its online magazine in the town’s honour.
Islamic State have threatened my father, seized my house, killed our animals and stolen our war
Many of Dabiq’s new residents have taken prominent roles in the legions of Arab and western
Muslims who have helped turn Isis into the potent and terrifying ideological force that it now
represents. “They’ve moved into our homes,” said a fighter from the Islamic Front, a
conservative grouping of the armed Syrian opposition that is opposed to Isis. Like all other Dabiq
locals, he feared the jihadis in their midst and would only speak openly with the protection of a
nom de guerre. “They have threatened my father, seized my house, killed our animals and
stolen our war,” he said. “Our fight with them is as big as it is with the regime.”
By mid-2015, Dabiq itself was draped in the group’s iconography, black flags flying above all its
mosques and civic buildings. Many of its homes have been painted with the familiar black
backdrop and white Islamic creed that Isis uses as its calling card. Columns of fighters come and
go from the town, the population of which has more than doubled since Isis took over. Nearly all
the locals have left, however, surrendering their vegetable farms to the marauders, who dress in
ankle-length gelabiyas and eschew most of the trappings of modern life. Many wear
ammunition belts around their chests. Most carry weapons. The tomb of Sulayman ibn Abd al-
Malik has been destroyed, as have all other graves not considered modest enough. Save for the
utility trucks, generators and modern weapons, everything else in town now has the feel of 7th-
century frugality.
* * *
This is the story of why men from all over the world have chosen to fight in a brutal and
apocalyptic war; of what drew them to the battlefields of Iraq and Syria; and of what has kept
many of them there as Europe and the west have scrambled to stem the flow, first of their own
nationals fleeing to join Isis and now of millions of refugees fleeing the other way.
It is told largely by five men with whom I have spoken, at some length, over the past four years,
inside Syria and Iraq. Their motivations are similar, but in some cases they are diverse and
contradictory. All of them draw at least some inspiration from the prophecy of an epochal
confrontation in Dabiq; they see themselves as underdogs, fired by a sense of divine mission.
Individually, each man painted a distinct portrait of his reasons for joining a movement that is
fast causing the collapse of an order that has bound the region together for centuries, and
posing a direct challenge to all the Middle East’s current forms of governance, threatening
autocracies, monarchies and quasi-democracies alike.
All of these men believed that by travelling to fight for the caliphate, they were standard-
bearers of their faith. They also felt sure they were acting to restore Islam to its lost glories –
and had a sense of privilege and pride that their generation was the one that had been chosen
to right the wrongs of the past. These sentiments are shared by many others I have met: two
senior Isis members who have been captured by Iraqi forces and are now facing death
sentences; a Syria-based Tunisian fighter who believes his duty is to obey the orders of his
superiors with unswerving servility; and even one former member of a mainstream rebel militia,
who joined the ranks of his jihadi foes when he realised the battle was turning in their favour.
But they also had myriad other reasons for joining the terror group that had little to do with
their understanding of Islamic scripture or any sense of holy war. Some saw themselves as
victims of oppression, others as sons of dispossessed families. Another thought of himself as a
cultural warrior, not a holy warrior: he argued that joining the jihad was an entirely practical
obligation, necessary to restore the caliphate and bring on the prophecy of the end times.
Few were untouched by a yearning for the collective memory of the early centuries of Islam,
alongside contemporary grievances about a humiliating loss of power at the hands of the west
in recent years. By late 2014, they were all fighting under the banner of the most radical and
dangerous jihadi group to have formed in the past 30 years. And Dabiq was now ground zero for
their struggle.
* * *
In February 2013, I was a few miles from the Turkish border, standing on a road outside a
government office that rebel fighters had just commandeered as a base, and inspecting the
ruins of a Syrian army tank that had been destroyed in a battle a few days earlier. The rebels
who had taken the office warned me that the building next door had been occupied by
foreigners who had crossed the border to fight in Syria. Isis had not yet formed, but the men I
could see inside that building, darting between the windows and the stairwells, would join the
group when it raised its colours several months later.
By early 2013, foreign fighters from around the world were converging in the rolling hills of the
Jebel al-Akrad region of north-western Syria, 200 miles west of Dabiq. The men had
commandeered homes of Alawite families who had been forced to flee from their path. The
jihadis had taken refuge among elements of the Free Syrian Army, who in the weeks prior had
pushed the Syrian army south towards the regime stronghold of Latakia. As I looked at the tank,
one of these foreigners walked down a small hill towards where I stood on the road, with a
Kalashnikov strapped across his chest and menace in his stride. He asked for my identification,
which he refused to return. I asked him what had caused him to leave his life and travel to Syria.
“Omar and Ali – is that your question?” came his enigmatic reply. “Omar” is traditionally a Sunni
name; “Ali” is identified with Shia Islam. The fighter, who called himself Abu Muhammad, had
immediately made the sectarian nature of his cause clear, and I soon learned that he and the
other jihadis occupying the formerly Alawite houses nearby had erased any signs of iconography
from their walls, painting them over with graffiti touting the superiority of Sunni Islam.
A 30-year-old Lebanese national, Abu Muhammad had four wives, 10 children and an American
education, and he was now trying to detain me on suspicion of being a spy. “There are reasons
for us fighting now,” he said in perfect English. “All of this was destined to happen.”
After an uneasy standoff on the road, where we were soon joined by armed members of the
rebel group that was hosting me, Abu Muhammad calculated that taking me hostage would
perhaps be unwise. So he invited me for tea instead, and we settled into plastic chairs under the
house his group was using as a base. We talked more about his belief that those who lived in a
western economy, earned a wage, paid taxes and took part in a community life that was not
Islamic were just as deviant as those who had renounced their faith. For him, there was no room
for compromise on what made a person worthy of an afterlife, or eternal damnation.
“This will be a war against a powerful enemy,” he said. “And the Muslims will win. You are here
on a humanitarian mission, so you can leave. But don’t stay long.” I did not, but over the next 18
months, in five more trips to northern Syria, I witnessed the relentless rise of the jihadis in Idlib
and Aleppo provinces. They steadily captured swaths of land in both provinces, particularly in
the countryside, imposing their will with an increasing ruthlessness and defying the writ of the
other rebel units, who had their guns trained on Assad’s army, and wanted a new nation-state
to rise from whatever was left of Syria. The jihadis saw Assad as part of the problem, but they
had a bigger goal – and that meant subjugating the rebel cause. Wherever they were able, they
were transforming the battle for Syria’s destiny from a fight against one type of tyranny into
nihilistic chaos.
By the time another young jihadi, Abu Issa, was freed from Aleppo’s central prison in late 2011,
the Trojan horse act that was Isis was well under way – fuelled by Turkey’s porous borders, the
savagery of the Syrian regime, feckless attempts to organise opposition fighters into a cohesive
force, and the release of militant prisoners like himself. A Syrian with historical links to the
group’s earliest incarnation, al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Issa was released along with dozens of men
like him as part of an amnesty given by Assad to Islamist detainees, which was touted by the
regime as a reconciliation with men who had long fought against them.
Most of the accused al-Qaida men had been in the infamous Syrian prison system for many
years before the uprising against Assad began. “We were in the worst dungeons in Syria,” said
Abu Issa, who was a member of the various forerunners of Isis, and fought against the US army
in 2004 and 2005 before fleeing Baghdad in 2006. “If you were charged with our crimes, you
were sent to Political Security prison, Saydnaya in Damascus or Air Force Intelligence in Aleppo.
You could not even speak to the guards there. It was just brutality and fear.”
But several months before Abu Issa was released, he and a large group of other jihadis were
moved from their isolation cells elsewhere in the country and flown to Aleppo’s main prison,
where they enjoyed a more communal and comfortable life. “It was like a hotel,” he said. “We
couldn’t believe it. There were cigarettes, blankets, anything you wanted. You could even get
girls.” Soon the detainees were puzzled by another prison oddity, the arrival of university
students who had been arrested in Aleppo for protesting against the Assad regime.
“They were kids with posters and they were being sent to prison with the jihadis,” he said. “One
of them was a communist and he talked about his views to everyone. There was a guy from al-
Qaida in the prison and he was usually very polite but he got angry with this guy. He said if he
saw him again he would kill him.” Abu Issa and the other Islamist detainees soon formed the
view that they had been moved to the Aleppo prison for a reason – to instil a harder ideological
line into the university students, who back then were at the vanguard of the uprising in Syria’s
largest city.
On the same day that Abu Issa and many of his friends were released, the Lebanese
government, which is supported by Damascus, also freed more than 70 jihadis, many of whom
had been convicted of terrorism offences and were serving lengthy terms. The release puzzled
western officials in Beirut who had been monitoring the fates of many of the accused jihadis in
Lebanon’s jails for more than four years. Some had been directly linked to a deadly jihadi
uprising in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in July 2007, which led to 190 Lebanese
soldiers being killed in battle and much of the camp destroyed. The claim that the Syrian regime
aided the rise of extremism to splinter the opposition and reaffirm its own narrative that the
war was all about terrorism in the first place has been widely repeated throughout the past five
years. It is a central grievance of the mainstream opposition in Syria’s north, which says it lost
more than 1,500 of its men ousting Isis from Idlib and Aleppo in early 2014. At the same time as
the opposition was fighting the jihadis, the Syrian regime, which did not intervene, was able to
advance around the city for the first time in the war. “There was no other reason for Salafi
jihadis to be in that jail, and for the students to be with us,” said Abu Issa, who now lives in exile
in Turkey. “They wanted them to be radicalised. If this stayed as a street protest, it would have
toppled [the regime] within months, and they knew it.”
Among the jihadis, there was initially no talk about why they were being freed, Abu Issa said.
Just relief to have somehow made it out of a system that had swallowed other accused
terrorists for decades. “Nobody wanted to acknowledge it, at first,” he said. “But in time
everyone knew what was happening. There were some very important terrorists freed that day.
They did what was expected of them and went straight to join the fight against the regime. That
was the first moment when the war stopped being about civil rights.”
* * *
By early 2013, the jihadis had also set up boot camps just inside the Syrian border; several of
which were within two miles of the main crossings from Turkey. A Saudi fighter named Gosowan
ran the camps from the nearby town of Azaz. New recruits were given 30 days’ basic training
and intensive Qur’anic lessons, then sent to the front lines. A huge Turkish flag, around the size
of a two-storey building, flew over the nearby border post.
Abu Ismael said he was one of many Iraqis who had travelled to Syria. For him, and others like
him, the civil war was an extension of the same fault line over which Iraq had been torn in two
between 2005 and 2007 – a power struggle between vanquished Sunnis and ascendant Shias.
Though the battle lines were drawn on a very modern political rivalry, Abu Ismael told me he
believed they were rooted in the historical split between the sects that had taken place in
Mesopotamia more than a thousand years earlier. “There are around 50 Iraqis in each area of
northern Syria. Perhaps more,” he said. “It was not difficult to get here and it is not hard to find
other mujahideen. We can fight where we want to and when we want to. And God willing we
will prevail.”
In early 2012, I met another man, called Abu Ahmed, who had also come through the furnace of
the Iraqi insurgency, similarly drawn into militancy by the belief that Sunnis had suffered a
devastating loss of power in the wake of the American invasion. He had been affiliated with the
group from its earliest days – and described to me how they had organised themselves during
the US occupation of Iraq, using the Camp Bucca prison as an incubator for the decade of terror
that was to follow. “By 2010, [the insurgency in Iraq] wasn’t working out,” he said. “But then we
became energised again.”
It was the second half of 2012 in Syria, when Iraqis like Abu Ismael came to join the fight, that
had been critical for Isis, Abu Ahmed later told me: these were the months that pulled together
all that the forerunners of the group had tried, and failed, to achieve in the prior 10 years.
“There were some who had lost hope, others who had drifted away,” he said. “But now it was
coming together. People that had scattered were now being drawn back in.”
Some Iraqi veterans had been fighting with regular opposition units in Syria, others were in
Syrian prisons. Yet more had grown up and moved on. And others, like Abu Ahmed, had
disavowed much of the dogma associated with Isis and dreaded the inevitable call from the men
who led the now revitalised group. The reunion was a match of competing motivations, much
like the arrival of the new crop of fighters.
On every flight I took on one of the two routes from May 2012 to May 2014, there were at least
five jihadis on board
By April 2013, the number of Iraqis fighting in Syria had reached at least 5,000 and was growing
daily. Iraqi veterans of the fight against the US occupation, and the sectarian war against the
Shias, had crossed the border and were taking leadership positions in a new group that would
soon subsume the most organised and capable jihadi outfit in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. Throughout
that year, newcomers in jihadi battle dress were regular features, both in the war zones along
the Turkish border, and on flights from Istanbul to Gaziantep or Antakya, the two main staging
posts for fighters wanting to cross into Syria.
On every flight I took on one of the two routes from May 2012 to May 2014, there were at least
five jihadis on board, clearly on their way to join the fight. Most refused to sit near women;
some had Qur’anic recitations as ringtones; and none were shy about where they were going.
They got on and off the plane with no trouble and, according to drivers who were sent to meet
them, usually headed straight from the airport to the border. “I took four guys one week and
two the next,” Suleiman Cenar, a taxi driver based in Antakya, told me in September 2013.
“They knew the GPS coordinates of where they wanted to go. I dropped them by the side of the
road and they walked through the forest with their belongings.”
Central to its growth was the arrival some months earlier of an elderly man with a grey beard
who set up home in the nondescript northern Syrian town of Tal Rifaat. The newcomer’s name
was Samer al-Khlifawi. He arrived with a wife and a blueprint for how to run a security state that
he had learned from his days as a colonel in Saddam Hussein’s air force. Khlifawi, like every
other member of Saddam’s armed forces, lost his job, his pension, and any chance of
meaningful employment after US viceroy Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi military and outlawed
the Ba’ath party, to which many of its members – especially its senior officers – belonged.
In the years immediately following his sacking, Khlifawi, along with dozens of other Ba’athists,
steadily got organising. Some joined the anti-US insurgency, which at that point was forming
more or less along Islamic lines. Others, like him, formed their own networks and established
bonds with Ba’athists in Syria, who offered refuge and helped with supply lines. By about 2007
the Islamist groups, among them Salafist jihadi outfits such as al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), had allied
with some of the Ba’athists – an alliance that would never have been possible under Saddam,
who saw organised jihadis as one of the biggest threats to his rule.
The bond gave the jihadis a tactical guile and the Ba’athists a military muscle that neither could
have boasted without the other. As AQI, then the Islamic State of Iraq, and now Isis evolved, this
bond has been central to nearly all of their achievements. And Khlifawi, who had managed to
stay underground for nearly a decade after the fall of Baghdad, was increasingly front and
centre.
As soon as Khlifawi arrived in Tal Rifaat, he started laying down roots for Isis. His goal was to
establish systems and structures that would help Isis eventually take over the communities in
which people like him had arrived. Around 50 Iraqis, most trusted veterans of the insurgency
like Khlifawi, or in some cases their sons, were soon dispatched to Syria and given the job of
infiltrating the tribal and community life of their adopted homes. Khlifawi drew up documents,
which were later revealed by Christoph Reuter in Der Spiegel, that showed how he planned,
with clinical efficiency, to subvert the communities of the north. He encouraged the young Iraqis
to set up charities that would be used as fronts, to identify the most powerful tribes and clans
and to try to marry into them. Rival power bases were also to be pointed out – a precursor to
them being eliminated when the time was right. The communities who had accepted the
strangers as wayfarers wanting to help them did not see it coming.
“One day in January, they just raised a black flag,” said Abu Abdullah, an opposition fighter from
Tal Rifaat. “Nobody knew what to do.”
Within months, the pieces were sufficiently in place for Baghdadi to start his move. He
announced in April that Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida-aligned jihadi group, would be subsumed
by the newly named Isis. That same afternoon, Baghdadi’s men, most of them Iraqis like Abu
Ismael, rode into central Aleppo and kicked al-Nusra members out of their main base in the
city’s eye hospital. They then painted it black and took it over.
Across northern Syria, the scene was repeated with ruthless efficiency. It was the first of two
bold forays that demonstrated to the Syrian opposition and to the region that Isis had become
an organisation that matched its words with deeds. “That was a very important time for us,” I
was told by another Isis member, Abu Saleh. Now based in Falluja, he had grown up in Muslim
Brotherhood circles in Baghdad, and joined dozens of his friends in the west of the capital as the
anti-US insurgency grew after 2003. Once a street-smart and risk-taking youth, he had become a
true believer in what Isis was fighting for – though he freely admitted to me that his affection for
western trappings like cars, technology and weapons was sometimes difficult to reconcile with
the frugal ways his leaders demanded of him. But he too had been energised by the struggle
spilling across the border. “Things had not always gone well in Iraq,” he said. “There had been
mistakes. And we had to be patient. But now Syria had helped us revive ourselves. It would also
revive the caliphate.”
Shortly after Isis ousted Jabhat al-Nusra in April 2013, Abu Muhammad, the Lebanese fighter
who had tried to detain me in northern Syria, was killed while participating in an attack on a
regime air base near the Turkish border. He had foreshadowed his own death during our long
conversation two months earlier. “I want this more than you want life,” he had said. “This is our
destiny.
Abu Ahmed, with whom I remain in regular contact, became more involved with Isis from mid-
2013. He remains disaffected with the group, which he believes has strayed well beyond its
original remit of fighting the US army and defending Sunnis against their marginalisation in post-
Saddam Iraq. But even with his reluctance, he still believes that he too is helping to restore lost
glories – of both ancient Islamic civilisation and a more recent era of Sunni power – by fighting
against Iran and the Assad regime. “This is just a reality,” he said. “The Americans are working
with Iran against the Sunnis. This is not a conspiracy theory.”
Abu Ismael is now an emir in eastern Syria, having – perhaps unwittingly – played a key role in
the subjugation by Isis of much of the north. His remit has taken him to Hama and to Palmyra,
north-west of Damascus, where Isis fighters have systematically destroyed one of the most
important archaeological sites in the world, in their bid to revert the region to an Islamic year
zero.
In Falluja, Abu Saleh, the young jihadi from Baghdad, remains on the front lines, committed to a
cause that he insists is righteous. “All of this, the Iranian invasion, the Americans coming, the fall
of Baghdad and the rise of Dabiq, was predicted. We will not stop until we win in the name of
Allah.”
Abu Issa, meanwhile, is trying to make a living in Turkey. Many friends from his younger days in
the jihadi movement are still in regular contact with him, as are the men he spent prison time
with – an amalgam of Muslim Brotherhood types, men who dabbled with al-Qaida, others who
were drawn to fight by perceptions of injustice, and many more who, when they started
protesting in 2011, saw no other cause except having a voice in an inclusive government.
“Some of them became jihadis, just like the regime wanted,” Abu Issa told me. “But most faded
away and lost hope. It’s mostly the jihadis who have hope now. They have lots of themes to
believe in. And they choose which one suits them.”
