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

Mundanity, Fear, and Misery               Life in the Caliphate is tedious and dangerous. Well-paying jobs, scarce across the Caliphate’s territory, are often unattainable for those unconnected to the leadership. For most residents, life is marked by mundanity, fear, and misery. Basic services—electricity, waste management, potable water, and road repair—are unreliable. In the villages, electricity can be cut for an entire week. Only the wealthiest or most well-connected cadre have sustained access to private generators, and after 2015 the price of petrol became out of reach for most residents. 2015. For most households, basic services and medical supplies are scarce. As in other failed states, women wait in long lines for food, and men walk the streets in search of employment, taking whatever is offered.               The State feeds and houses its own. Depending on cash flow, most of its soldiers earn several hundred dollars each month. They are paid more for each wife, child, and slave. Teachers’ salaries range from seventy-five to ninety dollars, barely enough to buy a family's bread for a month. But most teachers, other than religious instructors, are unemployed. Others have lost hope. Many civil servants, who lost their positions after 2014, have fallen into destitution. Some have turned to subsistence farming to feed their families. Some men have despaired of work and commiserate with each other in cafés, where they chat, read the papers, and network for jobs.               The rules for socializing at cafés have changed under the Caliphate. Historically a staple of Middle East popular culture, the café is a very male environment, filled with burbling water pipes, songs from the radio or television, and smiling men telling jokes and stories. No longer. Under the State, the water pipes were pulled, as were all forms of tobacco. If caught by the morality police, a smoker will be flogged, up to forty lashes. After a second offense, he will be whipped again and imprisoned. The third time results in imprisonment and a crippling fine. For café owners, the Caliphate is bad for business. One owner explained, “No customers come in. They do not enjoy a cup of coffee if they can’t smoke a cigarette with it.” There are also shortages of coffee and food, and most music is forbidden.               Without smoking or sipping coffee, there is little to do in cafés beyond chatting and watching television. Soccer has been popular in the Middle East for decades, and men and boys would gather in cafés to cheer their teams, but this now poses hazards. In May 2016, in the small town of Balad in northern Iraq, Caliphate assassins burst into a café and shot at least fourteen Real Madrid fans dead while shouting that soccer is un-Islamic. Local police caught one of the culprits, and locals burned him alive. Two weeks later, Islamic State killers struck again, killing men in a café watching soccer. The Islamic State then went after the players themselves. The soccer stars were well known and well liked, but in July 2016, the State gathered a crowd of children and beheaded these local sports heroes in front of their weeping fans.   Bureaucrats in Black               Though gainful employment is hard to find for most residents of Mosul or Raqqa, there is no shortage of bureaucrats. The Caliphate’s economic model is unique among terrorist organizations. One European observer opined that the Caliphate was a functioning state because it had “an administration, infrastructures, an education system, and a complaints bureau.” A Paris-based think tank estimated the State’s wealth at $2.2 billion in 2015.               The State’s ownership of land, natural resources, and control of human capital give it a revenue stream, and the Caliphate cadre serve as administrators and managers. They issue and inspect numerous permits required to obtain basic goods, rent apartments, obtain medical care, and access transportation. The religious police are ubiquitous. Pedestrians are stopped and forced to present identification; these are usually shakedowns. Civil servants extort money from passersby to help fund State operations and to provide themselves with some spending money. Some of these civil servants speak French, English, German, or other European languages. This is because some are Western Jihadis.               Bureaucrats were busy and creative in the early, victorious years, raising money for the State and paying themselves a livable salary. An early source of income was a “repentance” fee from those unconnected to the Caliphate. In 2015, the new conquerors imposed a one-time tax on those they deemed insufficiently Islamic. If they paid and repented, they were issued a repentance card. If they didn’t, they were beaten or killed. Some individuals and families who paid a smuggler's fee of several hundred dollars were able to leave.               By spring 2016, the Islamic State had lost about 30 percent of the revenue it had collected in 2015 because oil sites had been bombed. Many people with taxable income in 2015 were much poorer a year later. However, bureaucrats continue to tax anyone and anything they can. They stop truck drivers for tax enforcement and impose a tax on anyone installing new satellite dishes or repairing broken ones. They stop men on the street and force them to recite the Koran; those who fail the test are fined or beaten. Sometimes they are shot.               Some entrepreneurs trade in slaves on the internet. The most attractive virgins are auctioned to the highest bidders. Non-Muslim women have been awarded prizes in Koran-memorization competitions in Syria. Non-Muslim women arriving at the jail are given two choices: convert to Islam or refuse and be subjected to rape, slavery, and slow death. Women aged 20 to 30 are more prized and can fetch $84 for a bottle of high-end single-malt Scotch. A girl can be sold and resold by five or six different men. The phrase “smelling the girls” is slang for determining whether their hymens are intact. In a report by the British newspaper The Independent, surgery is forced on sex slaves to restore their virginity after every rape. Many of the captives try to kill themselves, and some succeed.               Among the most notorious of the civil services is the all-women’s al-Khansaa unit, named for a bard of the first generation of Muslims. Tumadir bint Amr, or al-Khansaa, was Muhammad’s favorite poet. Today, her name lives on in the al-Khansaa (often spelled Al-Khansaa or Al-Khansa) women’s unit. It was formed in early 2014 to expose men who dressed as women to escape.               Today, they enforce a morality code for women. Al-Khansaa’s mission has expanded to include operating brothels and prisons and recruiting women to join the Caliphate’s ranks. There are many Western fighters in al-Khansaa. British women work as “recruiting sergeants” for the State. Its leadership in 2015 and 2016 was heavily British.               Women are terrified of brigade members who can stop, frisk, and beat any woman they choose. They sometimes inflict collective punishment. Some Al-Khansaa members operate covertly, moving between different shopping stands and waiting lines to listen in on conversations that might reveal hostility to the State. To keep Yazidi slaves sexually available, the State forces abortions. When birth-control pills are available, the prettier Yazidi sex slaves are forced to take them.