Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Five Podcast Six

  Cruelty Was Not in Their Nature               A final reason Westerners want to come home is the realization that they are not emotionally suited for the cruelty of the State. Some Western Jihadis relish the brutality they inflict on their enemies. Sadists are comfortable in the Caliphate today. But many people cannot witness this cruelty without becoming traumatized. The reality of war is not what they expected.               The State requires recruits to prove allegiance by hurting people. Some eagerly do so. One Caliphate supporter was prepared to kill humans by slitting the throats of rabbits. Later, he would stab to death a French police officer and his wife in Paris in the summer of 2016.               Many recruits realize that killing people would be too difficult. In the words of one recruit, “They told us, ‘When you capture someone, you will behead them.’ But as for me, I have never even beheaded a chicken. It is not easy . . . I can’t do that.” A New Yorker who joined and then left the State in 2016 warned his fellow Americans to “avoid the worst decision” he ever made. “I did see severed heads placed on spiked poles . . . I just blocked them out.” Some beheadings are shown on the Caliphate-produced snuff films with names such as “Harvest of the Apostates.”             Sadism has its own dark humor in the Islamic State. A deserter described a prank at a water well in a small town called Hute. State security personnel would take blindfolded prisoners and tell them that they were free to leave but not to remove the blindfold until they had been walking for a few minutes. When the prisoners took a few steps forward, they would fall into a deep well, to the laughing delight of Caliphate spectators. They would die quickly or slowly. “It smells horrible because of all the corpses inside the well. I know that over 300 people were thrown into that well.”             For many Western recruits, there is first an initial shock, followed by the numbing effect created by constant carnage, and sometimes feelings of guilt.  One woman cannot escape the memory of the pained expressions on the faces of women whom she hurt. She is remorseful that she served in al-Khansaa, an all-women religious enforcement brigade, and that she harmed people in enforcing virtue. She flogged women, sometimes delivering sixty lashes, for failed escape attempts. Wearing inappropriate clothes brought forty hits. “What upset me most was lashing old women when they weren’t wearing the proper clothes.” She said, “We’d lash them and humiliate them.”               Al-Khansaa militants disfigure women by pouring acid on their faces. There is also a dehumanization of girls and women that many Westerners have not experienced. Among the most horrific illustrations is the sexual slave market, which splits mothers from daughters. Girls are priced according to their attractiveness. Then they are raped and discarded.  A Syrian woman, racked by guilt for her earlier support of the State, warned, “The Caliphate is not what you think it is. Women are whipped, sold, and stoned. Corpses are on display publicly for weeks.”             Sometimes it is difficult to know the truth. Those who are arrested upon return have every incentive to downplay their militancy and emphasize their compassion. A twenty-five-year-old German joined the Caliphate and then slipped back into Germany, where he was betrayed to the police. He confessed his service for the State, but said that he never took the oath of loyalty and that he only fired a single round in combat, which was aimed at an empty building. German prosecutors could not prove that he had hurt anyone in the Middle East. Had he done so, it is not likely that he would have volunteered the information and risked a stiffer prison sentence.               Some Westerners escape the Caliphate. One British escapee explained, from hiding in Turkey, that she feared for her life every day. She was convinced that the State is tracking her down as a traitor. “I am a young girl. I want to live my life. I want to travel, go to cafes, meet friends like any normal girl.” Another said, “This is not the 1001 Nights.”   Summary             Psychological and social drivers will continue to attract and repel Westerners. Those who are sadistic or driven to kill non-Muslims will find ample opportunities to do so in the Caliphate. For women who want to perform the sexual Jihad, there will be men available in Syria and Iraq. But many Western women will find life in the Caliphate onerous. Shukee Begum, a thirty-three-year-old British mother and university graduate, warns of the “gangster kind of mentality among the single women there.” She explained that the Caliphate was not “my cup of tea.” By summer 2016, the State responded to the Western flight by burying defectors alive, burning them to death, shooting them, or being macabrely creative with their killing skills.               But some Westerners are elated with their new lives in the Caliphate, finding the prestige, power, and camaraderie that eluded them in the West. In Raqqa, a young woman phoned her European mother, who was weeping at the other end of the line, and said that she had not traveled to Syria just to return to Europe. She was at home in the Caliphate and there to stay.