Life Under Isis
The everyday reality of living in the
Islamic 'Caliphate' with its 7th Century
laws, very modern methods and merciless
violence
By Patrick Cockburn
March 16, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Independent" -
It is one of the strangest states ever
created. The Islamic State wants to
force all humanity to believe in its
vision of a religious and social utopia
existing in the first days of Islam.
Women are to be treated as chattels,
forbidden to leave the house unless they
are accompanied by a male relative.
People deemed to be pagans, like the
Yazidis, can be bought and sold as
slaves. Punishments such as beheadings,
amputations and flogging become the
norm. All those not pledging allegiance
to the caliphate declared by its leader,
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on 29 June last
year are considered enemies.
The rest of the world
has watched with fascinated horror
over the past eight months as Isis,
which calls itself Islamic State,
imposed its rule over a vast area in
northern Iraq and eastern Syria
inhabited by six million people.
Highly publicised atrocities or acts
of destruction, such as burning to
death a Jordanian pilot,
decapitating prisoners and
destroying the remains of ancient
cities, are deliberately staged as
demonstrations of strength and acts
of defiance. For a movement whose
tenets are supposedly drawn from the
religious norms of the 7th century
CE, Isis has a very modern and
manipulative approach to dominating
the news agenda by means of
attention-grabbing PR stunts in
which merciless violence plays a
central role.
These are not the acts of
a weird but beleaguered cult, but of a
powerful state and war machine. In swift
succession last year, its fighters inflicted
defeats on the Iraqi army, the Iraqi Kurdish
Peshmerga, the Syrian army and Syrian
rebels. They staged a 134-day siege of the
Syrian-Kurdish city of Kobani and withstood
700 US air strikes targeting the small urban
area where they were concentrated before
finally being forced to pull back. The
caliphate’s opponents deny it is a real
state, but it is surprisingly well organised,
capable of raising taxes, imposing
conscription and even controlling rents.
Isis may be regarded with
appalled fascination by most people, but
conditions inside its territory remain a
frightening mystery to the outside world.
This is scarcely surprising, because it
imprisons and frequently murders local and
foreign journalists who report on its
activities. Despite these difficulties, The
Independent has tried to build up a complete
picture of what life is like inside the
Islamic State by interviewing people who
have recently lived in Sunni Arab cities
like Mosul and Fallujah that are held – or,
in the case of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar
province, 80 per cent held – by Isis.
Christians, Yazidis,
Shabak and Shia, persecuted by Isis as
heretics or idolaters, fled or were killed
last year, so almost all of those
interviewed are Sunni Arabs living in Iraq,
with the exception of some Kurds still
living in Mosul.
The aim of the
investigation is to find out what it is like
to live in the Islamic State. A great range
of questions need to be answered. Do people
support, oppose or have mixed feelings about
Isis rule and, if so, why? What is it like
to live in a place where a wife appearing on
the street without the niqab, a cloth
covering the head and face, will be told to
fetch her husband, who will then be given 40
lashes? How do foreign fighters behave? What
is the reaction of local people to demands
by Isis that unmarried women should wed its
fighters? More prosaically, what do people
eat, drink and cook, and how do they obtain
electricity? The answers to these and many
other questions show instances of savage
brutality, but also a picture of the Islamic
State battling to provide some basic
services and food at low prices.
A point to
emphasise is that none of those interviewed,
even those who detest it, expect Isis to go
out of business soon, although it is coming
under increasingly effective pressure from
its many enemies. These include the US,
Iran, the Iraqi army, Shia militias, Iraqi
Kurdish Peshmerga, Syrian Kurds and the
Syrian army, to name only the main
protagonists. Anti-Isis forces are beginning
to win significant victories on the
battlefield and the odds are heavily stacked
against the Islamic State. Over the past
week some 20,000 Shia militiamen, 3,000
Iraqi security forces, 200 defence ministry
commandos and 1,000 Sunni tribesmen have
been fighting their way into Tikrit, Saddam
Hussein’s home town.
“The numbers are
overwhelming,” said General Martin Dempsey,
Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff,
claiming that there are only “hundreds” of
Isis fighters pitted against this massive
pro-government force, although other reports
suggest it may be closer to 1,000.
The fall of Tikrit would
be a serious reverse for the Islamic State,
though it is easy to exaggerate its impact.
Isis claims that its victories are divinely
inspired, but it has never felt duty-bound
to fight to the last man and bullet for its
every stronghold. It describes its strategy
of fluid manoeuvre as “moving like a serpent
between the rocks”. Long a purely guerrilla
force, it is at its most effective when it
launches unexpected attacks using a deadly
cocktail of well-tried tactics such suicide
bombers, IEDs and snipers. These are
accompanied by well-made films of atrocities
broadcast over the internet and social
media, directed at frightening and
demoralising its enemies.
Isis may be retreating,
but it can afford to do so, since last year
it seized an area larger than Great Britain.
Its strength is not just military or
geographical but political – and this is a
point raised by many of those interviewed.
The dislike and fear that many Sunni Arabs
feel for Isis is balanced and often
outweighed by similar feelings towards Iraqi
government forces. At the heart of the
problem is the fact that last year Isis
seized the leadership of the Sunni Arab
communities in Iraq and Syria through its
military victories.
So far no credible Sunni
alternative to Isis has emerged. An assault
by Iraqi government, Shia militia or Kurdish
Peshmerga on Mosul would probably be
resisted by the Sunni Arabs as an attack on
their community as a whole.
“The Kurds cannot fight
for Mosul alone because they are not Arabs,”
says Fuad Hussein, chief of staff of Kurdish
President Massoud Barzani. “And I don’t
think the Shia militias would be willing to
fight there; and in any case, local people
would not accept them.”
If no alternative to Isis
emerges for the Sunni to rally to, then all
the six million or so Sunni Arabs in Iraq
may be targeted as Isis supporters,
regardless of their real sympathies. In the
long term, Isis could turn out to be the
gravedigger of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq,
where they are 20 per cent of the
population, by stoking the hostility of the
other 80 per cent of Iraqis, who are Shia or
Kurds.
The Islamic State was
declared in the weeks after the capture of
Mosul, Iraq’s second city, by Isis on 10
June 2014. It was only then that countries
around the world began to wake up to the
fact that Isis posed a serious threat to
them all. Reorganised under Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi in 2010 after the death of the
previous leader, Isis took advantage of the
Syrian uprising of 2011 to expand its forces
and resume widespread guerrilla warfare.
Sunni protests against mounting repression
by the Baghdad government transmuted into
armed resistance. In the first half of 2014
Isis defeated five Iraqi divisions, a third
of the Iraqi army, to take over most of the
giant Anbar province. A crucial success came
when Isis-led forces seized the city of
Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, on 3
January 2014 and the Iraqi army failed to
win it back. This was the first time that
Isis had ruled a large population centre and
it is important to understand how it behaved
and how and why this behaviour became more
extreme as Isis consolidated its authority.
The stories of two men, Abbas (generally
known as Abu Mohammed) and Omar Abu Ali, who
come from the militant Sunni strongholds of
Fallujah and the nearby town of al-Karmah,
explain graphically what happened during
those first crucial months when Isis was in
power.
Abbas is a 53-year-old
Sunni farmer from Fallujah. He recalls the
joyous day when Isis first entered the city:
“At the beginning… we were so happy and
called it ‘the Islamic Conquest’. Most of
the people were offering them feasts and
warmly welcoming their chief fighters.”
Isis told people in
Fallujah that it had come to set up an
Islamic state, and at first this was not too
onerous. A Sharia Board of Authority was
established to resolve local problems. Abbas
says that “everything was going well until
Isis also took Mosul. Then restrictions on
our people increased. At the mosques, local
imams started to be replaced by people from
other Arab states or Afghanistan. During the
first six months of Isis rule, the movement
had encouraged people to go to the mosque,
but after the capture of Mosul it became
obligatory and anybody who violated the rule
received 40 lashes.” A committee of
community leaders protested to Isis and
received an interesting reply: “The answer
was that, even at the time of the Prophet
Mohamed, laws were not strict at the
beginning and alcoholic drinks were allowed
in the first three years of Islamic rule.”
Only after Islamic rule had become strongly
entrenched were stricter rules enforced. So
it had been in the 7th century and so it
would be 1,400 years later in Fallujah.
Abbas, a
conservative-minded community leader with
two sons and three daughters in Fallujah,
said he had no desire to leave the city
because all his extended family were there,
though daily life was tough and getting
tougher. As of this February, “people suffer
from lack of water and electricity which
they get from generators because the public
supply only operates three to five hours
every two days”. The price of cooking gas
has soared to the equivalent of £50 a
cylinder, so people have started to use wood
for cooking. Communications are difficult
because Isis blew up the mast for mobile
phones six months ago, but “some civilians
have managed to get satellite internet
lines”.
However, it was not harsh
living conditions but two issues affecting
his children that led Abbas to leave
Fallujah hurriedly on 2 January this year.
The first reason for flight was a new
conscription law under which every family
had to send one of their sons to be an Isis
fighter. Abbas did not want his son Mohamed
to be called up. (Previously, families could
avoid conscription by paying a heavy fine
but at the start of this year military
service in Isis-held areas became
obligatory.)
The second concerned one
of Abbas’s daughters. He says that one day
“a foreign fighter on the bazaar checkpoint
followed my daughter, who was shopping with
her mother, until they reached home. He
knocked on the door and asked to meet the
head of the house. I welcomed him and asked,
‘How I can help you?’ He said he wanted to
ask for my daughter’s hand. I refused his
request because it is the custom of our
tribe that we cannot give our daughters in
marriage to strangers. He was shocked by my
answer and later attempted to harass my
girls many times. I saw it was better to
leave.” Abbas is now in the Kurdistan
Regional Government area with his family. He
regrets that Isis did not stick with its
original moderate and popular policy before
the capture of Mosul, after which it started
to impose rules not mentioned in sharia.
Abbas says that “we need Isis to save us
from the government but that doesn’t mean
that we completely support them”. He recalls
how Isis prohibited cigarettes and
hubble-bubble pipes because they might
distract people from prayer, in addition to
banning Western-style haircuts, T-shirts
with English writing on them or images of
women. Women are not allowed to leave home
unaccompanied by a male relative. Abbas says
that “all this shocked us and made us leave
the city”.
A more cynical view is
held by Omar Abu Ali, a 45-year-old Sunni
Arab farmer from al-Karmah (also called
Garma) 10 miles north-east of Fallujah. He
has two sons and three daughters and he says
that, when Isis took over their town last
year, “my sons welcomed the rebels, but I
wasn’t that optimistic”. The arrival of Isis
did not improve the dire living conditions
in al-Kharmah and he didn’t take too
seriously the propaganda about how “the
soldiers of Allah would defeat [Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-] Maliki’s devils”. Still,
he agrees that many people in his town were
convinced by this, though his experience was
that Saddam Hussein, Maliki or Isis were
equally bad for the people of al-Kharmah:
“They turn our town into a battlefield and
we are the only losers.”
Al-Kharmah is close to the
front line with Baghdad and endures
conditions of semi-siege in which few
supplies can get through. A litre of petrol
costs £2.70 and a bag of flour more than
£65. Omar tried to buy as much bread as he
could store to last his family a week or
more “because even the bakeries were
suffering from lack of flour”. There was
constant bombardment and in February the
last water purification plant in town was
hit, though he is not clear if this was done
by artillery or US air strikes: “The town is
now in a horrible situation because of lack
of water.”
Omar spent five months
working for Isis, though it is not clear in
what capacity, his main purpose being to
prevent the conscription of his two sons
aged 14 and 16. Rockets and artillery shells
rained down on al-Karmah, though Omar says
they seldom hit Isis fighters because they
hid in civilian houses or in schools. “The
day I left a school was hit and many
children were killed,” he recalls.
He says US air strikes and
Iraqi army artillery “kill us along with
Isis fighters. There is no difference
between what they do and the mass killings
by Isis.” Omar had been trying to flee for
two months but did not have the money until
he managed to sell his furniture. He is now
staying outside Irbil, the Kurdish capital,
where his sons and daughters work on local
farms which “is at least better than staying
in al-Kharmah”.
He says the Americans,
Iraqi government and Isis have all brought
disaster and lists the wars that have
engulfed his home town in the past 10 years.
“All of them are killing us,” he says. “We
have no friends.”