We spotted him, my translator and I, when stopping off with our driver to inspect a one-story house in the Aleppo countryside that had narrowly escaped being hit overnight by a missile. That’s when we noticed him — a gaunt, tall, young man dressed in black with a neatly trimmed beard.
He seemed very self-possessed. There was a confidence in his crisp, soldierly movements as he examined the missile shards. He kept his distance from me, clearly not wanting to interact with a Westerner. I got the impression he viewed me as an infidel. And he was circumspect in conversation with my translator, changing the subject whenever asked about his militia affiliation.
He spoke with an Iraqi accent, and none of the local Free Syrian Army militiamen could throw light on his identity, although a couple hazarded he might be al Qaeda.
It was early 2013, and looking back later, I realized he wasn’t al Qaeda but an outlier of a new breed of jihadists that we had no idea was about to skew the uprising against Bashar Assad and roll out a medieval alternative universe that would gain worldwide notoriety. The enslavement of Yazidi women, distributed as sex toys for foreign fighters, was yet to come, as were the beheadings of the brave James Foley, Steve Sotloff, and other Westerners.
The Iraqi was one of dozens of scouts sent to reconnoiter and lay the groundwork for the Islamic State — more than a year before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi mounted the minbar of Mosul’s Great Mosque to declare himself “the emir of all Muslims everywhere.”
Now, in the wake of the overrunning by U.S.-backed, Kurdish-majority forces of the last sliver of the horrific territorial “caliphate,” I’ve been thinking back on ISIS’ unheralded beginnings in Syria. The infiltration in 2013 was insidious in the small, rural towns of northern Syria freshly liberated from Assad’s barbarity.
Internal ISIS documents unearthed later by Der Spiegel journalist Christoph Reuter shed light on the furtive early ISIS plotting and the group’s meticulous intelligence and surveillance work ahead of al-Baghdadi’s announcement. The documents demonstrated the crucial role played in ISIS’ emergence by former members of Saddam Hussein’s military and spy agencies, and they formed an unholy alliance with jihadist ideologues.
The caliphate is no more. And we have two U.S. administrations to thank for that — and, of course, the Syrian Kurds and allied Arab tribesmen who did the heavy lifting. As former British Defence Minister Michael Fallon noted on the eve of the overrunning of the last ISIS stronghold in eastern Syria, the crushing of the territorial caliphate is an example of successful Western intervention.
The strategy of shaping an anti-ISIS surrogate force and then of mentoring, supplying, and advising it was begun by former President Barack Obama and then continued by President Trump. Credit where credit is due. Despite the small investment in terms of American ground troops, never more than about 2,000, the strategy worked better than many had expected, including me.
The CIA had made such a mess of northern Syria with its off-and-on support for secular and moderate Islamist militias, that I couldn’t see the anti-ISIS strategy working. But it did.
The ISIS legacy will long be with us, though. Along with al Qaeda, the group changed the course of a legitimate uprising and opened the door for Iran and Russia to turn Assad into a satrap for their own regional agendas.
The legacy will also be in the shape of ISIS adherents who escaped … and those still to be recruited. The barbarity won’t be a deterrent for new recruits, alas. It wasn’t at the height of the caliphate.
In the Turkish town of Gaziantep, near the Syrian border, I once tried with a Syrian Islamist to dissuade a seemingly intelligent, 17-year-old Turkish boy, but one skillfully groomed by ISIS recruiters playing on the boy’s confusion and vulnerabilities, from joining the militant group. The Islamist argued on theological grounds, highlighting the warped jihadist interpretations of the Quran. I argued the more prosaic case of what life had to offer him if he finished school, went to university, carved out a career for himself, got married, and had a family.
I argued with him that no ideology could justify torturing people, beheading them, burning them alive. All to no avail. I learned later he’d joined up.
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
