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By Scott Atran, Hoshang Waziri, and Richard Davis
Following the expulsion of ISIS from Mosul in Iraq and with the imminent fall of the de facto ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria, recent media reports suggest that ISIS fighters are defecting or surrendering by the hundreds and thousands. Last month, The Guardian reported that “hundreds of defectors” and “large numbers of militants and their families” in Syria were fleeing from the “divided and demoralized rump” of the so-called Islamic State. Earlier this month, a front-page headline in The New York Times proclaimed that in northern Iraq, “ISIS fighters, having pledged to fight or die, surrender en masse,” to Kurdish forces known as Peshmerga. The accompanying story was that in the first week of October: “After humiliating defeats, more than a thousand prisoners that had been identified as Islamic State…shock troops…put up no fight at all.” But this bullish appraisal of the collapse of ISIS’s fighting spirit, and of the moral convictions that sustain the will to fight, may be overly optimistic.
In fact, most people who fled ISIS-controlled areas did so because they were terrified of the oncoming Shia militias and Shia-dominated Iraqi government forces. Last month, when Iraqi forces liberated the eastern sector of al-Sharqat (located north of Tikrit), it wasn’t only ISIS fighters who fled Hawijah. Those from families who had a member in ISIS, even if dead, also ran. Many internally displaced Sunni Arabs, who we interviewed, told us that they left their homes and risked passing through Iraqi army and Shia militia lines to reach the Peshmerga because “they are also Sunni” and “they don’t want to kill us.”
Although there is evidence of local ISIS forces abandoning the fight and running from advancing Iraqi army and Shia militia forces (sometimes spearheaded by Iran’s Quds force, special units of Revolutionary Guards responsible for extraterritorial operations), ISIS’s foreign volunteers are much more likely to fight to the death or melt away in the hope of fighting another day, whether in the Middle East or in their home countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Thus, except for one Egyptian, no foreign fighters had recently passed through the main screening center for those fleeing ISIS territory. The center was run by the Kurdish Intelligence Service (Asaysh), under control of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in the town of Dibis, about 30 kilometers north of the city of Hawijah. (This center was a main source of information for the New York Times story.)
On October 16, KDP forces withdrew with the remaining 80 to 100 detainees, ranging in age from 10 to 70, as Iraq army and Shia militia forces entered Dibis during their ongoing offensive to reassert authority over Kirkuk and the nearby oil fields. This was the Iraqi government’s response to the overwhelming vote for independence from Iraq organized in late September by the Kurdish Regional Government. The center had carried out security checks of all families fleeing nearby ISIS territory. The head of the center, Captain Ali Muhammad Syan, said that 7500 to 8000 people were screened since the start of operations to retake Hawijah on September 21, including men, women, and children. He claimed that nearly all of these people had links to ISIS, mostly through family connections, but many were not actual combatants. ISIS functioned as a state, Captain Syan said, and ran services requiring the work of many people, such as the health department, courts, agriculture, policing, and so on.
One detainee was a tired-looking bearded man in his mid-twenties. He said he was from Hawijah and pledged allegiance to ISIS “for only two months, my father pressured me to leave.” When asked what were the consequences of leaving ISIS, he replied that he was punished with imprisonment for 20 days. A Kurdish security officer said the young man was lying because he had worked for eight months in an ISIS oil refinery and “you can’t work in those places unless you are committed to ISIS.” But there was no evidence that the detainee fought with ISIS. According to that young man, foreign fighters were much more committed to ISIS than the people who had passed through the screening center because “they believed in the cause, that’s what they came for, and they were willing to die for what they came for.” He also said that ISIS fighters received a monthly salary of 63,000 Iraqi dinars (about 50 U.S. dollars), and 105,000 if married (83 dollars), whereas Iraqi army and Peshmerga soldiers receive about ten times those amounts, indicating that ISIS fighters don’t fight just for pay.
Although most men who passed through the center likely were not ISIS fighters, ISIS did compel many local males to become foot soldiers. ISIS was fighting a land war, defending vast territories and governing multitudes, and so drafted into their ranks a constant stream of local men regardless of religious zeal or commitment to the Caliphate. By contrast, many frontline combatants against ISIS told us, ISIS’s “foreign fighters don’t surrender and don’t give up even if the battle is lost.” As one Kurdish soldier related who was commended for his bravery at Kudilah, site of the first battle in the offensive to retake Mosul:
They were coming at us with all of their hearts, with full commitment to their beliefs. It was much more vicious than Fallujah or Ramadi. “Death or victory, The Islamic State is enduring and expanding! We will behead all you infidels and apostates.”’ They would not retreat until our reinforcements overwhelmed them, and then seven inghamasi (suicide “plungers”) blew themselves up to cover the retreat. Daesh fights to die.
In interviews we conducted in Kirkuk with captured local ISIS fighters before the fall of Mosul, the men recounted growing up in the failed Iraqi state after the American invasion in 2003: a hellish world of guerrilla war, disrupted families, constant fear and utter lack of hope. They saw Iran and the Shia as their greatest enemy but they also believed that America enabled the majority Shia to oppress the Arab Sunni to destroy their religion and community. When we asked the prisoners: “What is Islam?” They answered: “My life.” Yet it was clear that they knew little about the Quran, or Islamic history, other than what they’d heard from Islamic State propaganda. For them, the cause of religion was fused with the vision of a caliphate — a joining of political and religious rule — that eliminated non-believers.
After U.S.-backed coalition forces retook Mosul in July, we conducted interviews and psychological experiments with some 80 Sunni Arab men, age 18 to 30, in internally displaced camps in Khazer and Debaga, respectively located east and south of Mosul. All of those people who we’ve interviewed and run experiments with, and who lived under ISIS rule in Mosul, Tel Afar, Hawijah and vicinity, told us that they and nearly everyone else from the region’s Sunni Arab population initially welcomed the Islamic State. They referred to it as a glorious “Revolution” (al-Thawra) devoted to implementing Allah’s rule (Sharia), and to supporting the Sunni people (ahlu al Sunnah) who had been oppressed by Shia and Alawite regimes in Iraq and Syria.
Here’s a typical 20-year-old’s assessment of the first four to six months of ISIS rule: “There was freedom to move anywhere, no identity cards, no checkpoints. The Iraqi army used to humiliate us at checkpoints and take money to let people pass. [ISIS] let young people feel freedom. They rebuilt bridges and schools.” Indeed, in our meetings with the British Government’s Daesh Task Force in 2015, the evidence of a small but significant improvement of the standard of living in Mosul under ISIS rule was causing concern for those in the coalition trying to undermine ISIS’s success with “hearts and minds.”
“But then [ISIS] lied,” continued the young man. “They told everyone that there would be a general amnesty, that there would be no punishment for people who followed Sharia. Then they broke their promises. They would dig into people’s past, they killed former army officers and police and anyone with an important position in the [former] government, first terrifying them, then taking money from them, later executing them.”
A local Iraqi who was married to the daughter of a local ISIS leader in Mosul described matters this way:
[ISIS] came based on the idea of building an Islamic nation, to serve the people and eliminate oppression. But the lower leadership didn’t do well implementing these orders, the wrong people in the wrong positions. Iraqi fighters were the worst, full of hypocrisy. But the foreign fighters were much more loyal to their cause and to each other. They were honest in trying to implement Sharia, they sacrificed their lives. Their leaders wore suicide belts walking in the streets without bodyguards.... The Afghans and Turks were the most loyal. Turkey helped [ISIS], also Saudi Arabia [others said Qatar]. Betrayals, disloyalty, and backstabbing came from local Iraqis.
For some interviewees, once ISIS performed public executions in earnest and started killing other Sunni Arabs, such as former Iraqi officers and members of the Sufi insurgent group (Jayh Rijal al-tariqa Naqshbandia) that had fought alongside ISIS in June 2014 to take Mosul, then ISIS revealed its true nature—inherently mendacious and murderous. But for others we interviewed, ISIS’s resort to killings and increasingly brutal behavior (executing and crucifying people who failed to go to sharia rehabilitation courses if they had some stain from their past; mistreating Mosque Imams who didn’t tow the ISIS line, and so on) was because of “pressure on them from coalition attacks and airstrikes.”
Yet, nearly all interviewees indicated that throughout their time under ISIS rule they saw a clear difference between the foreign fighters’ commitment to comrades and the cause of the Caliphate and the locals’ lack of commitment. These observations somewhat complement what Yazidis who were taken from Sinjar to Tel Afar told us. They claimed that the foreign fighters, as terrible as they might be, were the true believers; whereas local ISIS fighters and supporters were simply brutal opportunists after Yazidi lands and possessions: “The people [local Arabs of Sinjar and Zummar] many of whom we knew from before and never had any trouble with, were far more cruel and cowardly,” said one Yazidi woman whose husband’s limbs were roped to cars and ripped from his torso when he objected to his daughter being carted off to slavery. “The foreigners stood back but controlled what was happening, and then took the young girls away.”
Many of the Sunni Arab militia commanders we met, who are currently fighting with the Iraqi army and Peshmerga in the U.S.-led coalition, also acknowledge initially welcoming ISIS. These commanders, often tribal elites, only changed sides when ISIS turned to class warfare, inciting less privileged tribesmen and neighbors to seize the elite’s possessions and destroy their privileges and even attempt to take their lives. Now many of the dispossessed elites and their kinsmen want blood revenge. Thus, an even greater threat than the Shia to the post-ISIS Sunni Arab community may come from the internal divisions that are tearing apart local tribes and families.
The latest turn in this maze of conflict has also violently revived the traditional rivalry between the somewhat pro-American Peshmerga of the KDP and the somewhat pro-Iranian Peshmerga of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which had fought a civil war in the mid-1990s. Ranj Talaban, a senior PUK official accused the KDP of “arming ISIS detainees, dressed in Peshmerga clothes, who have just launched a multi-pronged attack on ISF [Iraq security forces] in Dibis.” This, after KDP officials accused the PUK of treason in conspiring with Baghdad to abandon positions to the ISF without firing a shot. The apparent aim would be to ensure that the PUK remains the sole Kurdish shareholder in Kirkuk as the city and oil fields revert to the situation before June 2014, when the Iraqi army fled south from the ISIS onslaught and Peshmerga forces moved in to take the city.
Our multidisciplinary and multinational team of researchers has been working on the frontlines of the fight with ISIS since the beginning of 2015, most recently in collaboration with the Carnegie Corporation to enhance policymakers’ access to field-based social science. In our research with frontline combatants In Iraq, we developed a set of psychological measures to measure willingness to make costly sacrifices for causes and comrades, including fighting and dying (published last month in Nature Human Behaviour). Using the same measures in our follow-up research with people coming out from under ISIS rule we find that although ISIS has now lost almost all Sunni Arab lands in Iraq, ISIS has imbued the present generation of young Sunni Arabs with its most sacred value, measured in terms of willingness to fight and die for it: namely, strict belief in Sharia as the only way to salvage and govern society. They described strict Sharia as God’s guarantee of justice and freedom, and the only way to eliminate oppression and corruption. And many believe that ISIS’s foreign fighters have truly fought for this.
“If Sharia were implemented in a just and right way,” said one young man from Debaga camp, “all problems and disagreements will go away. There will be peace and justice and no one can insult anyone. Sharia is not the rule of humans but God’s.” By contrast, the people we interviewed and tested almost invariably associated democracy with human weakness and perfidy, and with the heartfelt experience of living under a Shia majority whose election at American instigation brought only tyranny instead of tolerance. “Democracy leads directly to wars and distrust among people,” lamented another young man from Khazer camp, “I don’t want it. To be free to do whatever you want will lead to many problems and corruption in society.” In fact, without the laborious development of the institutions that underpin democratic governance of the kind that took Europe and America more than two centuries to foster (tolerance of minorities and their ideas, equal justice before the law, free press, right to peacefully assemble and oppose, and so on), democracy may not be very good at dealing with tribal and confessional conflicts (any more than in family matters). “America wants to impose democracy only to divide the Sunni people; [ISIS] gave us hope with Sharia.”
ISIS may have lost its state, the Caliphate, but it hasn’t necessarily lost the allegiance of Sunni Arabs in the region to its core values, especially faith in strict Sharia law. Neither have the underlying conditions of political and confessional conflict that caused people to initially embrace ISIS appreciably changed. Unless those conditions do change in the direction of mutual tolerance, and those core values can be reconfigured to accommodate that change, the specter of ISIS will likely endure.
Scott Atran, Hoshang Waziri, and Richard Davis are researchers at Artis International and at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflicts at the University of Oxford.
