What Living Under ISIS Taught Me About Extremism

Welcome back to Existential Threats from the Restless Politics, in which we are exploring the really big shattering issues of our time. We're going through many of them. We're looking at AI, we're looking at nuclear proliferation. But today, I want to get into something that would have been, after 9-11 and for almost 15 years, the most obvious one of the biggest existential threats that anybody spoke about, which was terrorism. And indeed, we used to believe that 9-11 changed everything. These enormous $4 trillion wars, for example, unfolded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some might argue that the entire rules-based international order was reshaped around this idea. And to take us through this question of whether it was an invented threat, a real threat, something that's still relevant today, I have with me Umar Mohammed. Now, Umar Mohammed is somebody that many listeners will have come across because he very courageously, in Mosul, after it was captured by the Islamic State, by ISIS in 2014, people remember this was the moment where the Islamic State created a caliphate stretching across the Iraqi-Syrian border. Few hundred men in pickup trucks drove away three divisions of the Iraqi army, and they set up this murderous caliphate. And Umar was living in Mosul at the time and began very courageously, anonymously reporting from the ground as Mosul Eye. And he's now brought together a book reflecting on that experience. So you've described this rather remarkable, uh, ancient civilization, which was, had remarkably open borders, was quite tolerant, had conventions of government and interpretation. And then suddenly you woke up in June 2014 to find yourself facing a very, very different kind of people and a very different kind of government. Can you explain, you know, maybe to younger listeners who don't remember this, exactly what happened? Umar Mohammed: June 2014, is one of the darkest chapters of history in the history of Mosul and the history of humanity. On that day, which was the fifth of June, in fact, and I have described this because I still remember it, because it's a memory that keeps coming back to me. That night, a group of over 300 very well equipped and armed men attacked the city of Mosul. And they took aim at the city in less than 24 hours. That city that was inhabited for over 7,000 years was now controlled by a group that was determined to destroy everything that had lived in the 7,000 years before. They called themselves the Islamic State. They said, we are the Islamic State and we are here to rule. And they distributed in the third day of their occupation, a document, they called it the constitution of the city. In that document, they clearly described what they were going to do. And in one of the articles, it is the article 16, they said, you have lived under all the rules before us, you have tried the two republics, you have tried the monarchy, you have tried everything before us. Now is the time that you live under the rightful governance, which is the Islamic State. And of course, the 15 articles explains how they are going to govern, which is exactly what they applied. It's the rule of death, the rule of destruction, the rule of replacing history, the rule of starting what they call it, day zero in history. That's what they are. That's what they did. Many of them were Iraqis, speaking the same tongue as we did. Others were foreigners. There were Americans, there were French, there were British, there were Belgians. And can I interrupt here? Because this is really interesting, I think, for listeners. We think a lot about extremism, particularly Islamist extremism, in terms of what are the conditions that cause it. And we often try to look at social and economic conditions. But the strange thing about ISIS, this Islamic State terrorist group, is that every time you felt you could generalize and say, you know, these people come from poverty, you know, for example, somebody comes from Yemen, suddenly you would find somebody coming from the US, which is quite a wealthy society, or if you said, this is driven by inequality, you know, maybe Britain is too unequal society, then you'd meet the same people. You'd meet someone who comes from Denmark or Sweden, which is a more equal society. It was a very, very, or, you know, this is a crisis of European modernity, and then you meet somebody who's come from a rapidly growing economy in Indonesia, for example. So it was very difficult, I think, to generalize about people's economic background, the societies they'd come from, even their educational level. There were doctors, there were engineers, and then there were very poorly educated people. Anyway. Back over to you, maybe, to tell us a little bit more about this. You explained this very well, because one of the issues of dealing with extremism is generalization. We cannot generalize. It is not the same source. It is not the same story. It is not the same condition. These people were coming from geographically diverse countries. We had people who joined from the Maghreb, Morocco, throughout, across the Orient, all of that dream of, what Abdel Nasser once preached about, that the Arab unity is unified now. Now the only unity that brought those people together was them believing in something called the Caliphate. And it was preached to them on multiple platforms. However, the shock was, all of a sudden, people we knew, people we were familiar with, the grocer we were buying our groceries from, the driver whom we saw on the street every day, or the one who used to drive the bus that would take professors, students to the university, a doctor who treated our patients, or someone who was no one, all of a sudden, they are now in control of the city. They are now, have been declared, and they declare themselves members of the Islamic State. That is the shock, because everyone, and I say that was the shock, not because it is difficult for a person to join a terrorist organization. But the shock was that everyone started asking themselves the question of, how did all of that happen? How didn't we, how we didn't know? How did it happen without us understanding that this person was a member of ISIS, and so on. Because this is probably the most difficult question for anyone to understand who's not lived through this. I mean, for example, we ask ourselves, why did so many apparently ordinary Germans become Nazis and participate in the Holocaust? And I see behind you, you've got books on Kosovo and the Serbs. I remember people saying in Bosnia, you know, it's crazy. Suddenly the guy that runs my local gym is now a war criminal with a, running a checkpoint, right? So what is, what is it that this suggests about human nature and their motivations? I mean, you didn't do it, right? I mean, you decided not to become part of this government. In fact, you wrote this very, very brave, critical blog opposing thing. But a lot of other people decided to cooperate and collaborate. What's going on there? What's happening? - There are two books that I've been reading recently. One is called "Hitler's Men" and the other is called "Living and Death." And they both come to. An understanding, not a conclusion, but an understanding is that there are two types of people when it comes to living under such authority, such as the Islamic State, the Nazis before, and there are other examples throughout the history. - Or the killing fields in Cambodia. - Yes, exactly. - Which is interesting because one of them is a traditional Christian state. One is a traditional Buddhist state. One is a traditional Islamic country. - So, so the question becomes is that. - It's also not one group. And I have seen multiple categories of how people join. So I. There are people who look into chaos as an opportunity. That is one of the earliest categories is that people saw the chaos. There was an opportunity in that chaos. They took the opportunity. And there are people who were completely disconnected from any political part of the equation itself. And the only thing about it for them is appealing politically, but economically, it was appealing. So they took the opportunity as well. explain what that means. These two examples you gave, let's imagine you're talking about the guy that ran the bakery or the driver or the professor or the bus driver. What exactly do you mean by seeing opportunities practically? Yeah, practically. Let's speak, for example, of economically speaking. I documented one of these stories. Someone saw an opportunity in the fact that now the Islamic State is in control of wider land, so he would benefit from the agriculture benefits that the Islamic State was giving. They took that opportunity, they collaborated with them, they provided the financials in order to get something good. They did not only benefit from the Islamic State, they created a mutual benefit. The second, which was also the very important one, during that time when the government cut the resources to the city, a new system emerged now that the access to oil is under ISIS. ISIS gave that access to those who want to run the business of oil. Hundreds of people, thousands probably, they created their own small refineries. Umar, I'm going to interrupt here again. I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but just to paint the picture. So we have the collaborators who are benefiting economically. Now take us back to really explaining what ISIS was doing negatively. I mean, what was wrong with this administration? The simple answer to that is the way the Islamic State committed the genocide against the Yazidis, enslaving their women, killing the men who refused to convert, and kidnapping them. Umar: Well, they were kidnapping the children, using them, transforming them into child soldiers. Some of them were used as suicide bombers, and the women were enslaved and sold in the market. So this is number one. Second, the way they marked our life when they put the letter "n" or "noon" in Arabic, and "noon" here is a reference to Nazareth, and Nazareth is a reference to Nazareth. And in Iraq, Christians do not like to be called "Nasara" because it carries a negative term. When they labeled every house in the city that this is a Christian and this is not, and then confiscated all of these properties and expelled the Christians. When they created something called the, what they call it, the Repentance Center. Umar: The Repentance Center. Asking everyone who works with the government to come to that center, to give the fees, and they will have to compensate ISIS for all the services they have served before ISIS becomes the ruler. And if you carry a gun, you have to give it to them. And then, many of them did not know, little did they know that by going willingly to these centers, they in fact enriched the database of Daesh because Daesh was seeking, umar: They were seeking more information about people they didn't know worked for the government. And then immediately after they committed a heinous massacre against 2,700 policemen in southern Mosul. And then you have the level of brutality against civilians. For example, the establishment of the daily and the weekly public execution. So they would, and I want to describe one of the scenes. Umar: They would bring someone who was doomed and sentenced to death because of what they call it. That person is, of course, their explanation is always a creative. That person is a spy. That person committed blasphemy and so on. And the list is very long because they created a list of punishments. This is what you should do. This is what you should not. If you do this, if you do one of the 10 or 12, I think, umar: crimes that they were listed by ISIS, then it's going to be execution. They put them in orange, bring them to the middle of the public square in the center of the city of Mosul. And theatrically, with all of these cameras, over four cameras, always recording that person and then behave him publicly. And of course, bringing all the people to watch. Umar: To hear the rest of my interview, sign up at TheRestIsPolitics.com. That's TheRestIsPolitics.com.