Bringing much-needed context to ISIL’s extreme violence and inhumanity

A new book deftly explains how ISIL’s network gained from Saddam Hussein’s demise in Iraq and how Bashar Al Assad has nurtured it in Syria.

When gruesome images of ISIL killings splash on the front pages and television screens – as they did this week with the murder of the first coalition pilot to be shot down – there is an instinctive revulsion towards the madness of the group and a wish to dismiss them as fantatics and butchers.

For analysts and policy-makers, one of the toughest challenges has been actually to understand the barbarity of the group in the context of its goals, to see the method in the madness. Hassan and Weiss’s book makes a valuable contribution to this debate.

The authors recognise that ISIL has both religious and political roots. The book explains in fascinating detail how ISIL’s religious indoctrination takes place in towns and cities under ISIL occupation. But that veneer of religion cannot hide a hard kernel of politics. In the end, the guiding principles of the group, whose slogans declare they are “remaining and expanding”, is political, from the choice of which tribal groups to attack and which to cooperate with, to the savage killings conducted in the full glare of the media. The politics comes first and the religious element justifies it.

All politics is local and the authors do a good job of looking at small towns and villages and how ISIL persuade, cajole and threaten local leaders and small communities first. These local dynamics matter greatly to the bigger picture, particularly in areas such as eastern Syria where close-knit tribal links carry considerable weight.

There is also a useful focus on the personalities that have shaped the conflict. The authors start with a thumbnail sketch of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and his early days among the Afghan-Arabs in Pakistan during the days of the Soviet invasion. But they also focus on lesser-known figures, such as Abu Ayyub Al Masri, the leader of a precursor militant group to ISIL, and their relationships. These relationships, in a tumultuous shadow world of arms smuggling and terrorism, turn out to matter a great deal.

But it is impossible to understand ISIL without understanding the political context in which they have arisen. To their credit, the authors do not ignore the wider political context: the Iraq war and the catastrophic decisions made in its aftermath, the political context of post-Saddam Iraq and the back-room deals that carved up ministries in favour of particular sects, the effect of the grinding civil war in Syria, the competition for money and weapons by various groups opposed to the Assad regime in Damascus, and, in particular, the scramble for influence by Iran in the countries of the Levant.

It is these four elements that come together to explain the rise of ISIL. The political and the religious, the local and the global. Hassan and Weiss pull these pieces together, laying them out in digestible chapters for readers and in doing so, they have written a book that even specialists will find informative and revealing.

Faisal Al Yafai is a columnist for The National.