Angry Planet - ISIS-K Is Coming For the Taliban

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

The idea of terrorism as a franchise isn’t new, maybe, but nobody’s done it better than Islamic State. Most Americans thought the fight against ISIS was over with the fall of Raqqa. But on August 26, at least 169 Afghans and 13 US troops were killed in Kabul by a group calling itself ISIS-K. Islamic State, apparently, lives on.Joby Warrick of the Washington Post joins us to talk about ISIS - how it started and what it is now. Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. Most Americans thought the fight against ISIS was over with the fall of Raqa, but on August 26, at least 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops were killed in Kabul by a group calling itself ISIS K. Islamic State apparently lives on. Joby Warwick of the Washington Post joins us to talk about ISIS, how it started and what it is now. And he's actually been on the show before, and we're glad to have him back again. So thanks very much for being with us. Hey, Jason, great to be back.

a book, actually, a few years ago, called Black Flags, The Rise of ISIS. So I think you're probably the right person to ask this question. What's the great centralizing idea behind Islamic State? Well, thank you again for having me. And this is such an important topic. I mean, right now, particularly as we're trying to contemplate what happens next in Afghanistan and ISIS is one of the players there. So it is important to understand what they're about. And really, they have two great ideas, I think. And one is that you're more likely to attract followers if you give them something tangible to fight for. In the case of the Islamic State, it was the creation of this caliphate. It was kind of a proto idea within the organization for a long time. But then in 2014, they declared a caliphate.

And, you know, it's an idea that doesn't just appeal to radicals and to sort of hardcore jihadist, but it's sort of the idea of a Muslim holy land, a land that's ruled by Islamic law, has brought appeal across the Islamic world, including with educated people living in countries where they feel that their rulers are oppressive or corrupt. So the idea of this pure state that's going, hearkening back to the early days of the religion, is really attractive. And the second great idea, it's just a little bit counterintuitive for us, at least, but it's the idea that extreme graphic violence is a great draw for your fanatical base, at least, for people who are really into your thing. If you show to the world that you are brutal, that you do things like

cut people's heads off and crucify people, your radical core eats this up. They think it's the greatest, especially if you're doing it against their enemies. If you can be handed an American or a Shiite or somebody that they all mutually hate, then they're applauding and cheering you on. And that material becomes kind of your calling card. It's very attractive. The problem is that both these ideas also carry the seeds of destruction for ISIS because if you have a physical caliphate, you also have a fixed address and we know where to find you and you suddenly have to fight a conventional war and not just an insurgency from the shadows. And the other thing is the extreme violence repels the rest of us. And the reason, I think, more than anything else that we went into to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq

was because all these horrible images that Americans were seeing on their TV with people, Americans and Brits being beheaded, it repelled us. And it just shocked us to the degree that we wanted to stamp these guys out. So it became their downfall as well as their kind of great idea. One of the things you briefly mentioned is that Islamic State looks at Shiites as one of the great enemies, too. Is that different from other Islamic organizations? I seem to remember from your book that it was one of the things that made them even more extreme. Absolutely. And if you think about the al-Qaeda experience. Osama bin Laden actually went to pains to make sure that he didn't antagonize Shiites. He didn't really see, they saw them as heretics. They weren't, you know,

they weren't true believers in the sense that Sunni Muslims were. And just refreshing our, you know, our listeners, you know, understanding of this are two great branches of Islam, which is the Shiites, which you mostly think of as in Iran, you know, there are a lot of them Syria and other places in Iraq, certainly. And the Sunnis, which is sort of the, the dominant strain in the rest of the Gulf, for example. And so, you know, Osama bin Laden was a Sunni. The ISIS folks are radical Sunnis. But the ISIS decided that the Shiites were enemies that had to be wiped out. And when they started to really gain power in Iraq, the message that resonated with Iraqis was we're going out, not just, we're going out, not just after the

Americans, but the Shiites, your real enemy, the folks who are your neighbors that we truly hate, the ones that are going to be oppressing you because they're now in power for the first time in Iraq for many decades. And so that message was a big draw for ISIS. Other jihadi groups look at it as probably not so helpful because you're alienating a big chunk of your potential support and just creating problems for yourself. But that's really what ISIS was about. Was there an ISIS before Zarqawi, Musab al-Sarqawi? So before, you know, we don't have to think far back. in our memory of the fight in Iraq, there was an insurgency that developed there pretty quickly.

It called itself Al-Qaeda in Iraq. And it was essentially described itself as a franchise of the original Al-Qaeda. That was a really loose relationship. And it became even looser as time went on when Al-Qaeda essentially disowned them and thought they were a little bit too extreme for them. But this is where they really organized as a sort of a Sunni organization of Iraqi-I, Sunnis, you know, former military officials, intelligence officials from the Iraqi government, run by this band of essentially foreign jihadists, principally this guy named Zarkawi, who turned out to be this very charismatic, you know, very important leader who brought this

organization from really nothing to becoming a huge threat to the American presence. All the, you know, the terrible attacks on U.S. troops, a lot of them happened from the Shiites out in places is like, you know, in the populated areas around Baghdad, but the rest of it was really led by Sunnis and particularly this character's Akali. But he walked into a situation that already existed. He was kind of the godfather. Yes. So his organization became al-Qaeda in Iraq.

And it was his idea. And if we can talk about him a little bit, what made him unique. If you think about sort of the personality of the Islamic State, as we know it, it is a mirror image of this one individual whose name was Abu Masab al-Zarqawi. He's a Jordanian. He was sort of a foreign fighter who came to Iraq, just as Iraq was being invaded in 2003. And he was, what's interesting about him, you think about a lot of the sort of the jihadi leaders that are familiar to us, like Osama bin Azawahiri are educated people. Zawahari is a medical doctor. Osama bin Laden was an engineer. So Kaui was this kind of street thud. He didn't finish high school. He used drugs, alcohol,

He had tattoos. He was essentially a brutal, vicious thug who then becomes radicalized and gets religion. And Islamic State becomes reflection of his character, personality, the viciousness, the brutality, and also the ignorance. This is kind of an interesting point. It gets refined over the lifespan of his organization. But Zarqawi's thing is he didn't understand the Quran very well because he couldn't read that well. And so when he wanted to do something, he didn't worry about the theology. of it very much. Is it okay to attack and kill Shiites? Well, Zarqawe thought so, and so he did. And so

whatever he thought, it was all right to do. And so there's this sense so that you can be a kind of almost heretical in your tactics and your practices, but it's okay because, you know, you can find some imam someplace that will say this, it's all right to do this as a good Muslim. And that was his MO. He sent you doing things that were blatantly against the Quran. But he got away with it anyway because he just did. He didn't know any better and that was just his followers. And a lot of them, the people that were with him were just people of the street, you know, common ordinary thugs who were in prison with him. And they became the core of his organization and it had a very different personality and characters than some of the

other groups like Al-Qaeda that we know very well. So you mentioned prison briefly. He, you were saying, and you said he was a thugs. Talk a little bit about his life in Jordan before he came to Iraq and prominence. So here's a guy that as a kid would do things like cut other students with razor blades. I mean, that kind of level of pathology that he was just a really brutal, nasty kid. His family became so worried about him that they kind of added intervention and they were able to get him to go to a local mosque and he joined a men's group. And within that group, he saw other people beginning to head off to Afghanistan to fight the,

you know, fight the communist, fight against the Soviet. and, you know, in support the Mujahideens or this Muslim army. That's what became his transformation. He goes off and becomes a holy warrior. And suddenly all those terrible pathologies that he had become important. It's great if you're like cold-blooded killer, if you're out, you know, trying to fight communists. And so that becomes the sort of transformation for him.

And he becomes, it goes from being this thuggish kid to being a thuggish fighter with, you know, military experience. And then the war ends for him, because. Afghanistan is, you know, the Soviets have left. It's a different situation. He goes back home, goes back to Jordan, which is kind of a sleepy, peaceful place. And he tries to recreate the jihadist experience there. And he gangs up with some of his old, you know, comrades who've been in Afghanistan with them. And they start trying to plot and plan things they can do, you know, little ways to attack symbols of the West. And they do things like attacking liquor stores and

blowing them up. In one case, they got the idea to attack a pornographic theater in Amman. And one of the guys got this idea. We'll just, we'll go in there, we'll send a kid with a bomb, we'll leave the bomb and we'll blow up this house of iniquity. So the kid goes in to watch this porno film. The movie starts. He becomes completely engrossed. He forgets all about his bomb, which blows up at his feet.

The kid loses both his legs, but survives and anybody else is hurt. But these are the kinds of stunts that Zarqawi was doing in the early 2000s. And then he gets arrested. There's, you know, the Jordanians are not going to tolerate this kind of crap. So they arrest Zarqawi in his entire gang. They put the ball in jail. They're afraid of this contagion that this sort of these jihadist ideas will spread. So they isolate them.

They put them in a separate prison way out in the south of Jordan. And he probably would have disappeared forever except in the king of Jordan. King Hussein dies in 1999. And there's a general amnesty that's granted for these prisoners around the country. and Zarkawi and his entire group are freed in 1999 because of this sort of random event that takes place. And so off he goes back to Afghanistan to sort of create his own jihadist group. And you can sort of trace his rise from there on into Iraq and to everything that comes after, including the creation of Al-Qaeda and Iraq and the Islamic. What was it then made people follow him? I mean,

you talked about the violence being attractive. You talked about, you know, in the brutality. But, I mean, was he a really charismatic guy? I mean, could he, did he speak in some sort of way that was inspirational? It's really interesting. And if I opened the book, there was a prolog, but sort of the opening chapter, you get insight into that because sort of starts rolling inside this prison that I was describing, this sort of desolate place in the desert where these jihadists are sent. And there's a young doctor who goes in and is, you know, just doing his medical service for this. community of prisoners. And I was able to interview him. And so you see this early Zarkawi through his eyes because he goes day after day, he treats them in, he gets to see this guy.

And what emerges is this almost Rasputin-like character who has just a personal magnetism that, as the doctor describes it and discovers, he can command people with his eyes. He has this kind of presence and sort of a brutal personality that just is dominant in this prison environment. He's seen as having all this credibility and credentials because he fought in Afghanistan. He's a street tough. He's a real kind of man of the people. He doesn't say a lot. He's not a big speaker, but he just commands, you know, a huge devoted following within this prison.

And this group of people around him then become the core of his organization. and they're all absolutely devoted to him as leader. And then you see this charismatic Jordanian with no education, with no great military training, go on to a place like Iraq, which is a foreign country, and create that same kind of almost this mythical sense of this incredibly powerful charismatic man who commands the movement. And that's what makes him so successful as a jihadist leader.

Was he really good at his job? And by his job, I mean, you know, to expand the influence of Islamic State to take on the enemies of Islam as you saw them. I mean, was he actually an effective fighter and did the organization prosper under him? He was in a couple of ways. One was this image building because after a while it becomes pretty clear that part of the secret of Al-Qaeda in Iraq is the personality of Zarqawi. And so he learns to kind of milk that.

And you see, you know, just to contrast, you see, you know, the Osama bin Laden, we know from this period from the early 2000s is this old man with a beard reading really boring sermons on on a video, you know, and it's not very attractive. Here is Sarkawi who was young. He's got kind of, you know, he's got like Nike sneakers and kind of a ninja black outfit and a du rag and he fires a machine gun from the hip. He does really outrageous things like kidnapping an American in 2004 and beheading him on videotape of a video that just goes around the world and it's kind of this moment where when Americans see these kinds of images and start thinking, what are we doing here in this country? So part of it is his own image that he portrays.

And even though he's not educated himself, he brings in people who understand how to message, how to communicate in the modern age, how to use these new things like YouTube and just, you know, broadband is just really becoming popular in parts of the world. And so how do you take advantage of that to get your message out? And so part of his success was communicating to not just radicalize his base there in Iraq, but to reach people who think the same way around the world and encourage them to come to Iraq to join him. And people did. I mean, how large did his group get to be while he was still alive? So there are tens of thousands. The numbers are a little bit squishy, but it was a huge number of foreigners. We see that to a greater

degree later on when ISIS takes over Syria and parts of Iraq. But for him, there was this steady flow of fighters from Europe, from other parts of the Middle East, crossing the Syrian border into Iraq to join his forces. And so he went from being, you know, a small Iraqi-based organization to really having an international presence. That, again, was what made him a menace and made him a real danger, not just to the Iraqis, but to the American occupiers. What was it like to live inside of his Islamic State? He was, you know, it's kind of a mixed bag, because he's, you know, it's kind of a mixed bag, because if you're one of his followers, you can live quite well. But because he does have this thuggish pedigree, one of the characteristics of al-Qaeda in Iraq and later of ISIS is that

they behave like criminals. They, you know, they extort local businesses. They demand taxes from people. If you don't follow the rules, you're likely to be, you know, thrown into one of their prisons or more likely just executed on the spot. So the brutality about it, there's a thuggishness about the operation. But again, And folks who kind of support that, we think that these people are fighting the Americans and the Shiites for them, you know, for Sunnis. He's a hero figure. And so he does have a following, particularly among some of the Sunni tribes in Western Iraq and the Anbar province area. Eventually, the United States put him on the top of the hit list. Is that right? Absolutely.

And so just briefly, how did he meet his end? Yeah. So it became a imperative. for the Americans. And just looking back at the statements made all the way up to the White House, everybody was concerned about Sarkawa. We had to find Sarkawi. We had to stop this guy, stop his movement, but stop the man in charge. And so we put a lot of effort in defining it. Starting in 2004, you know, in 2005, this sort of search increases. But Sarkawi's really good. He's got good operational security. He moves around a lot. He's got a group that protects him. So he was just AWOL for years. And sometimes he would get close.

close. We would show up in a town right after he'd left and we'd find some of his things. But then in 2006, we got this big break. We were able to discover this spiritual advisor that he had, this man that he'd met with occasionally. Once we identified this man, we were able to follow him through surveillance to a meeting where Sarkeye comes out of a safe house and greets the man in person so we knew that he's inside his house. And then a couple of planes swoop over. It dropped some pretty big bombs on his safe house. He survives it briefly, and there's this moment where some special forces teams arrive at the scene of this bombing, and they help pull this body of this leader out of the rubble, and he opens his eyes and he looks at them. There's this moment of recognition while he's lying

on the ground, bleeding, knowing that he's been had and knowing who got him, and he died on that moment. His body was taken to a compound, and I talked to Stanley McChrystal, the general, the former, or the leader of special forces in Iraq, who had this moment of just being there in the room with the body of this man that he had tried so long to get, and there he was. But that wasn't the end of the movement. It went into a long slide, and we can talk about that. But it was a major blow to take off the head of the snake in this case,

because he was so important and his ideas were so powerful to many people. It's interesting, though, because it's just what you said, right? I mean, it didn't end with him. I mean, it was the head of the snake, except it was more like the head of a hydra. I mean, you know, another head grew back. I'm curious, yeah, what were the next steps for Islamic State and how did it evolve? I mean, more importantly, how it evolved.

So there was a period about... Right. So there's this period about two years of steady decline after Zarqawi left. And it wasn't just because of his death, but we actually got pretty good at finding the bad guys. There's people like Stanley McChrystal, who's... who's a major character in the book that I did, who really decided to step up the tempo of these kind of counterterrorism operations, take the gloves off to, you know,

when we pulled off a raid on a safe house and captured guys or killed guys, there was this immediate effort to seize the, you know, so the pocket litter, as they call it, you know, cell phones, notes, maps, whatever they could find. And that same night, they would go out again and using that, information, go after another safe house. And that tempo accelerated and continued for day after day. And eventually, the leadership was wiped out. The organization would appoint a new figurehead. There were two in succession that were killed pretty close to one another. It was a job with a very

short lifespan, because if you were the leader of this organization, which changed his name, by the way, went from al-Qaeda and Iraq to becoming something called the Islamic State of Iraq, later on to become the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is ISIS, which was under heavy pressure to it gets to the point that the members are complaining to one another. And I have this moment where the wife of one of the leaders is complaining. You're saying that we're a state, we're living in a desert for goodness sake. We're reduced to rags. We don't have enough to eat.

And so it got really dire. And around 2008, you know, the CIA was pretty confident that operationally this group was finished. But then history intervenes again. 2010, Americans are out of Iraq. And once we got out, they were able to come back. And they were able to come back not just because the Americans had left, but because there was a really repressive Shiite-led government in Baghdad that began to very deliberately and openly persecute, mistreat the Sunni minority. And suddenly the Sunni chiefs are looking around for somebody who can help them. And there's this little military faction that's called the Islamic State of Iraq that's more than happy to kind of be the vanguard and start

fighting back and back against the Shiites. And that was the start of their resurrection in 2012, 2013. And they went from that tiny little group to, I mean, they were enormously successful. I mean, it's hard to know exactly what we're talking about, you know, a short time ago, but it feels like forever ago. Yeah. If you know what I mean? So much has happened since then. But can you, I mean, how big did they get? I mean, what did success look like for? Yeah. It's a great question because if it was a very short period of time, but what they managed to accomplish is just phenomenal when you think back on what took place between 2012 and 2013. And what happened was Arab Spring. So you've got this core starting of the Islamic States,

starting to reemerge in Iraq because of essentially the ethnic and religious tensions in that country. But then on top of that, you have these little revolutions breaking out across the Middle East, particularly right next door in Syria. A lot of these Islamic State guys have roots in Syria anyway. They see a civil war emerging in Syria next door and they say, gosh, what a great opportunity for us. We can become the dominant players in that environment. So they start sending their little first just a few emissaries. They sent a guy named Juliani, not Giuliani, but Giuliani, who then became the head of something called Al-Nusufront, the Al-Qaeda group inside Syria and that wasn't doing well enough for them so they formed their own ISIS cell there

and that it got bigger and bigger because these guys know how to fight. They know how to attract foreign fighters from other places. They had all the weapons they needed. And so in a very short period, you get this small group becoming the most powerful, militarily powerful, but also largest single military movement inside Syria in the civil war. And once they're able to control territory, which they did pretty quickly, starting in eastern Syria, then spreading across a big chunk of northern and western Iraq. Then they've got resources that a terrorist group could only dream about. Suddenly, you've got a terrorist organization that has, within its borders of its little empire, universities, factories, military bases, endless amounts of military equipment,

and wealth. They had banks. They went into, you know, the first national bank of Mosul and essentially cleared the place out. So they had more currency and gold bullies. and then they even knew what to do with. So they went within two years from being this kind of beat up fragment of a terrorist movement inside Iraq to becoming really the most powerful, well-equipped terrorist movement of all time. There's so many things that just pop into my head from that, honestly. There's the piece that I wrote. This was my favorite piece I've ever written. I was at Reuters at the time that Mosul fell.

And you had Islamic State driving around in U.S. vehicles, including American tanks. and I worked out how much it would cost to blow up an American tank with an American fighter bomber. So a tank, M1 Abrams, was apparently about $6 million at the time per tank, and it cost something about $2 million to blow it up. Wow. Back there. Jay damn bombs and the cost of flight time and, you know, people's salaries and anyway. Yeah.

I mean, so that's just, when you think about the American enterprise, just how crazy things got. The other thought that I have is, you know, this is a little off the charts, and maybe we'll, we can cut this out. But other countries have been formed this way. We didn't necessarily call them terrorists, but I mean, if you look back in history, groups of armed men have come, taking territory and eventually, you know, survived as kingdoms. But that's not what happened with Islamic State. They did not survive. How did they collapse? And then let's talk about what came from that.

Because that's the whole reason we're having this conversation. It's not something is still left. But anyway, what happened next? And you're absolutely right. There are multiple instances that you can point to in which countries were born the same way, with essentially military-led rebellions, taking over territory, having a loyal following. you know, legitimacy of governance. It might have happened for Islamic State that way. In fact, there were, I was a period of time when American officials are watching the fall of these

great swaths of territory and thinking, you know, we're just going to have to negotiate with these guys. They're almost unstoppable. We could try to kind of draw a line and say, you can't go past here, but, you know, maybe we're just going to have to live with the fact that there's Islamic State. But their problem was they're so white-hot, so radical, in their views and in their tactics, that they managed to alienate and anger everybody around them. So everybody looks at them as an enemy. The Jordanians are scared of them. There's sort of the Assad regime in Syria that doesn't want them around.

There's a complicated history to that. But the Iraqis, you know, the West, everybody is upset with these people. So in the end, they just antagonized so many people that they just had to be annihilated in some way. And then once that happens, you have this extraordinary cult. that forms. I mean, you think about, it wasn't just the coalition of the willing like we saw in the FD Iraq invasion, where it's really the Americans of the Brits and a few others who are sending token forces. This was like an international worldwide movement that everybody's contributing troops and planes and money to the destruction of this organization. And we had local

troops who were willing to do the fighting, you know, the Iraqis and also Kurds and Syrians in some cases. And so we had kind of an army. And it was inevitable that they were going to fall. As soon as this comes together as early as late 2014, so the writing is on the wall that these groups, this group will ultimately be driven from its caliphate. It's not going to hold territory. That's not the end of them. Exactly. So then what happens is, you know, we managed to drive them out of their holdings, their land holdings, but the group doesn't really go away. And the estimates are really all over the place. There's some controversy about them. But the Pentagon made an estimate that 30 to 40,000 trained fighters are still out there. And they essentially just went home, went underground.

They're parts of sort of central Iraq where there's concentrations of these people living in villages. And they continue to pop up. So we see this continuing insurgency in Syria. It ebbs and flows. You see months where they're really active and show they still have a lot of power. And then they get quiet for a while. So it's hard to really assess how strong they are at times. But they had this other, interesting idea, which is create franchises. It's not just about Iraq and Syria anymore. We can have an ISIS group in West Africa or in East Africa or in Mozambique or in, you know, Bangladesh. And so that is what sort of the legacy that we're dealing with now is they seeded all these other little mini ISIS groups. And those are the groups that we see rising and creating mayhem in different parts

of the world, including Afghanistan. It's funny you bring that up. This leads us to talking about ISIS K. I kind of wanted to ask a little bit of a multifaceted question here about this. So I had an interaction on Twitter as one does. I was writing some stuff about Afghanistan, you know, mentioned that ISIS K. And, you know, some blue check came back at me and said that ISIS K had been invented in the last couple months. And I was like, that's insane. If you've been, if you've been following any of this stuff at all, we've known about ISISK for a long time. Books are already out, etc. And they replied to me with a Google Trend screenshot where they had typed in ISIS. K into Google Trends. And it was only real in the last, you know, month since people were talking about

Afghanistan. And I thought that like that was just such a succinct and beautiful way to think about how Americans think about the war on terror and ISIS in general. I wanted to dip the tweet in carbonite. But anyway, why, what is ISIS K? Why are we hearing about it now? And why don't people seem to believe it's real? Yeah, man, it is because I ought to believe me. I get this, this kind of Twitter traffic too. And it just, you just want to bang your head against a wall. And just because Americans weren't talking about ISIS K, doesn't mean that it was kind of made up out of a whole cloth. It's just that we weren't paying attention. People weren't thinking about Afghanistan generally. If we thought about Afghanistan, we thought about the main group that was

there, which is the Taliban, the one that we've been slogging out with for so long. But this, you, ISIS, Khorasan, which is what the K stands for, Krasn being the sort of this ancient term describing geographically what's now Afghanistan, parts of what was Persia, but essentially this big area of South Asia. And they, you know, they have their roots in Pakistan. There were sort of groups that were alienated from the Taliban, but were so radical Islamists. And like a lot of the other that are part of the constellation of ISIS organizations, they glommed on to the brand. They thought, wow, we want to be part of ISIS. And the way you join ISIS with your little local organization,

is just to have a video and pledge loyalty to its leadership and its ideas. They did that. There was a group in West Africa that already existed that did that as well. And they became part of ISIS from what was once an insurgency that had other issues and fights. But it was, you know, a pain in the butt to the Taliban. They hated the Taliban, thought they were too moderate, thought they were too quick to compromise with the West, believe it or not. And so they went to war with the Taliban. And they're at war with them to do. day. They just over the weekend attacked a big mosque in Kabul right under the Taliban's nose. They're putting out videos every week showing their successes in trying to knock off Taliban checkpoints.

So they're a real organization and their intention is to defeat the Taliban. So now the Taliban's in power and it's got an economic crisis and it's got, wow, a little crazy fanatical Islamic insurgency that's nipping at its heels. So they're kind of the same situation the Americans were in for years. But they're quite really. real. Their power is, you know, in terms of their manpower ebbs and flows, I have a feeling they're going to do quite well now because there are a lot of people in Afghanistan that are going to be unhappy with the Taliban and they're going to want to sign up with a group that wants to defeat them. So we see that as our alternative. You've got the Taliban or you have the ultra Taliban? It just seems like not a lot of great options. That's our world. And then in Africa, you've got Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. And then you've got the ISIS groups, which are

typically much more radical, much more crazy, much more fanatical. You know, if there's one thing that's kind of, you know, there's a bright side to any of this, and it's not a very bright side, is they all seem very focused on their local fights at the moment. There's less discussion of, let's go attack the United States somewhere. They might look for targets of opportunity, but they're all caught up in their old civil wars and struggles at the moment. We'll have to see how things shake out and what their intentions are after that. But yeah, it's amazing how many there are and how virulent this belief system turned out to be. So do you think we're going to see more and more groups declare themselves for Islamic

state or, I mean, have they reached some kind of peak? Hard to say, I think, you know, there is an interesting case study that's kind of going on right now in West Africa, where you actually had two groups competing to be the ISIS brand in West Africa. There's a group called Boko Haram. This is the one we've heard about, but the kids. kidnap school girls and their awful, vicious people. They pledged loyalty to the Islamic state. And this other group shows up that's called the Islamic State of West Africa. And the two

don't like each other at all. And they fight each other. They just, the I swap group, the West Africa group killed the leader of Boko Haram a few months ago and they're trying to recruit their members. So there's a lot of ebb and flow right now, a lot of kind of shifting of battle lines. And so it remains to be seen how strong and how permanent their presence are going to be in some of these places. But, you know, they do have territorial aspirations, at least in the case of West Africa. There's a group down in the Mozambique in that country and in the region around there that also want to claim a whole territory. So that's what gets really worried when they have not just a movement, but when they're able to control real estate. And that gives them a base of operations for, you know, launching even further.

out and doing something, you know, more dangerous. I think there's one thing, Jason, if I can just mention that's also dangerous about the Islamic State model was its ability to appeal to disaffected people anywhere in the world to join their cause just by committing an act of violence. Now, if you wanted to join al-Qaeda, it was really hard to do. You had to kind of pledge loyalty, but you had to be trained and you had to physically, in some cases, go to a place to to meet the leadership and become an al-Qaeda member. With Islamic State, you become an ISIS fighter just by blowing yourself up in a parking garage or at a bank or someplace like that.

So this idea of almost cloud sourcing jihad and letting anybody become part of the movement, just because they're mad at the world and they want to take out their personal frustrations in a violent attack on someone in a subway station or somewhere else. That is part of the legacy of ISIS. And that's, in a way, is what makes them uniquely dangerous. because anybody at any time can become ISIS and do some terrible thing, even if they're not instructed or are trained to do it. They just do it on their own initiative. So this is my last question unless Matthew has another, but al-Baghdadi, one of the

successors to Zarqawi has been killed a couple years ago, I guess now, because time is just passing in an accelerated fashion that I cannot explain. So is there a real successor? And, And does that person have any influence whatsoever over all of these groups that we've talked about when all it takes is that you kill someone and put up a black flag? So the organization is an interesting period. So they do have a leader. Baghdaddy was killed and this guy named Koreshi, who's another Iraqi, has kind of a long history with the group, is the head or that sort of caliph of the sonic state. He's an interesting character. He's apparently was a prison informant for the Americans back in the day when he was held.

as many of these guys were in prisons in Iraq at one point. And he was apparently sang like a bird and just ratted out all his friends, particularly the folks that he had beefs with. But that's part of his legacy. He's the guy in charge now. We don't hear much from him. But what does survive and what really holds this ISIS network together is kind of a media operation. So they have sort of a central magazine, a central daily news report.

you know, a media division that puts out videos. And they're kind of the mouthpiece for this worldwide network. And they spent a lot of time promoting what's going on in other parts of the world where they're affiliated. You might not hear very much about what they're doing in Syria because they don't have much of a presence there, but they'll put out a whole report about, wow, look what our affiliates doing in West Africa right now. And look, we just took over this coastal city in Mozambique, giving the sense that we're still in March, that the center of the universe is not necessarily the Middle East, but ISIS is prospering everywhere. And that message goes out to their followers around the world constantly. And it kind of gives them a sense of solidarity,

and of progress and of hope. And that seems to be the role of the central organization right now is to communicate and to inspire future followers, including people in some of these far-front places like Afghanistan that want to kind of raise the black banner and do some things in ISIS's name. So it sounds like whether or not we're paying attention to them, they still exist. Joby, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking us through this crazy world. Absolutely a pleasure. Jason, thank you so much for having me on. That's all for this week, Angry Planet fans. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please go to AngryPlanetpod.com or AngryPlanent.substack.com, where, for,

$9 a month, you get commercial-free versions of all the basic episodes and two bonus episodes a month. Again, that's at angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until now.