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

Salafist Dystopia: Life in the State   “ISIS is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust.”  V. S. Naipaul, March 2015   Introduction               Earlier chapters detailed the Caliphate’s geography, philosophy, origins, and support base. They surveyed tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the West and observed the lures of the Caliphate. This chapter returns to Mesopotamia and walks the besieged streets of Raqqa, Mosul, and other Caliphate towns to examine the lifestyles of those under the sway of the Islamic State. Daily Life “We are afraid to leave our house—they are degrading Islam.” Maisaa, Raqqa resident “It looked so beautiful the sisters and I joked around and called it the New York City of Syria. Umm Haritha, Raqqa resident   This is what daily life is like. You wake up in the morning and if you don’t hear the sound of shelling, or a jet breaking the sound barrier, you feel like it could be a good day.”   Abu Hadi, a resident of Raqqa, 2015               Westerners who travel to Planet Caliphate find lifestyles very different from those they knew at home. With its bodies strewn in the streets, sex-slave auctions, public executions, random beatings, and deteriorated infrastructure, Raqqa is unlike anything most Europeans could imagine. Circumstances are often worse in rural areas because there are few public services. Like something out of the Black Death of medieval Europe, rotting corpses are a common sight, and there is a constant reek of the dead in the streets. Some of the conditions are so vile that Caliphate cadre leave, if only temporarily, the towns they conquered because of the stench of decaying corpses.               The Caliphate is often very open about its killings. In the twentieth century, some states used the fog of war to hide their butcheries. Behind the doors of Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison or the gates of German concentration camps, Nazis and Communists veiled some of their slaughters. Not so the Caliphate. Its leaders bask in their flamboyant cruelty, regularly filming beheadings, shootings, stonings, and other methods of murder, including throwing people off buildings and setting them on fire. From spring 2014 to spring 2016, the Caliphate executed over 4,000 people and often made little attempt to hide the acts.               In some parts of the Caliphate, public killings have a circuslike atmosphere. Young boys, sometimes barely taller than the rifles they wield, shoot other boys at point-blank range to the applause of their Caliphate leaders. Smiling, handicapped men in wheelchairs fire into groups of young men accused of spying, in a disturbing promotion of the Caliphate’s value of “equal opportunity,” according to Human Rights Watch.               Some infamous centers of brutality have developed their own sobriquets. Raqqa’s central square has become known as Hell Square, which is where the State publicly executes people.   There was a celebrity torturer, known as “the Bulldozer” or “the Monster,” who administered Caliphate justice until he was captured. He boasted a fan club of admiring boys and young men. A mammoth of a man, he was the dean of the Caliphate’s “Chopping Committee.” He amputated hands or feet, sometimes both, and even heads. In April 2016, he killed a man accused of being a magician. The Bulldozer was caught in June 2016, tossed half-naked into the back of a truck, and hauled away by Syrian forces.               There was another pinup killer in the Caliphate, who, like the Bulldozer, enjoyed celebrity and had a short shelf life. The photogenic Caliphate killer known as the Desert Lion is profiled below.   Profile Eighteen: Abu Waheeb—The Lion of the Desert             Shaker Wahib, also known as Abu Waheeb, was a heartless man, dead at thirty, who lived his short life in rage. Born in 1986, the former computer science student savored the brutality he inflicted as a Caliphate leader. He basked in the heroic image his den of Caliphate cubs held of him. He was a tough jihadist, and by his mid-twenties, he had been arrested by US authorities in Iraq. As part of al-Qaeda, he was captured by US forces in 2006. Later, he escaped from a high-security prison to become a leader in the Islamic State.               He became a local celebrity in 2013 when he was photographed interrogating three Syrian lorry drivers by the side of the road. Seemingly spontaneously, he shot them in the back of the head, and viewers began to speculate as to why. Unlike other State soldiers, he often showed his face. He challenged Western fighters to kill him. This vanity, like Jihadi John’s, ultimately proved self-destructive.               Waheeb was al-Baghdadi’s personal assistant, and both survived a U.S. drone attack in Nineveh. But in May 2016, his luck ran out. The Pentagon confirmed he had been killed. A U.S. Department of Defense spokesperson said, “On May 6, a coalition airstrike targeted Abu Waheeb. . . . It is dangerous to be an ISIL leader in Iraq and Syria nowadays.”