Angry Planet - One phrase from Saudi clerics could begin the end of Islamic State

Episode Date: November 19, 2015

The recent terror attacks in Paris shook the world and put the focus back on Islamic State. This week on War College, we talk with American Special Operations intelligence veteran Malcolm Nance. Nance literally wrote the textbook on Iraq’s terrorists and is the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project.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. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. Hello, this is Jason Fields, the host of War College. After the Paris attacks last week, we wanted to talk to an expert about how to stop Islamic State. So we reached out to Malcolm Nance.

He's a former intelligence operative with decades of experience in the Middle East. Our discussion leads to some unexpected conclusions. If you're a regular listener to War College, you know we do our best with the audio quality, but being a topical show, sometimes we book our guests on short notice. You may hear some background noise at points this week, but I hope you'll agree it's worth it. Now, here's one informed view on how to destroy Islamic State. Hello and welcome to a special supplementary edition of War College. I'm Reuters Opinion Editor Jason Fields.

And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War is Boring. We're talking today with Malcolm Nance. Nance is an American Special Operations Veteran, Counterterrorism Expert, author of the book The Terrorists of Iraq, which was just updated last December, and the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project, a non-partisan think tank that studies extremist groups. Malcolm, thank you so much for joining us on short notice. It's my pleasure to be here. So after the horrible events in Paris on Friday, where hundreds and hundreds of people

were injured and 127 killed, I think there's really one question on a lot of people's minds right now, and that's how does the West defeat Islamic State? To answer that question, you have to break this down into components. first you have to answer some fundamentals, and you actually have to face some fundamental truths. Where did the Islamic State come from? What is it? What is it comprised of?

How can those components that comprise the Islamic State be broken down? So even though you hear politicians all the time making sound bites saying, well, just beat them, how do we beat, like that journalist asked yesterday, how do we defeat these bastards? How do we beat these bastards? For people who are actual practitioners or who have actually gone to war, such as myself, this is not the kind of question that you take lightly. It is certainly not the kind of question that you take in a period of passion, no matter how serious the subject, even as serious

as an attack like 9-11. So what is the Islamic State? Let me go into that first, if you don't mind. Sure, sure, absolutely. I found certainly speaking to the media all this week that there is this how can I put it, a sort of effect that appears to have permeated itself throughout the news media and certainly the journalists that I've talked to. And it's quite surprising. And that effect is there is a case of amnesia going on about just exactly what has been happening in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa for the last quarter century. ISIS is the fifth generation of Al Qaeda, let's just put it that way.

There have been terrorist attacks of this magnitude in Europe before. There was a subway bombing in Madrid in 2004 that killed 191 people, and it was carried out by Al Qaeda. There were the subway and bus bombings that were carried out in London in 2005, ended up killing 52 people that was carried out by Al Qaeda. There have been run-and-gun attacks planned and executed by al-Qaeda and its affiliates all throughout the world. There have been a few incidents in Europe. There were bombings, terrorist, double-suicide bombings of aircraft over Russia that killed almost 200 passengers that were carried out by Chechen Islamic separatists linked to al-Qaeda. So, you know, these incidents have happened before.

Just earlier this year, we had the Charlie Abdo attacks. But soon after that, we had the attacks on tourists in Susa, Tunisia, killed 38 civilians. 30 of them were British, who at that time declared war on ISIS, because they believed that the government were actually part of the Islamic State in Libya. Then the worst part of this amnesia is that every day in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, in Libya, in Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, there are mass murders of this scale being carried out. Just the day before these attacks, there was a bombing. Actually, it was supposed to have been a quadruple suicide bombing, turned into a double suicide bombing.

They captured the third bomber, and another vest, that was carried out in Beirut. So we don't respond to these attacks in the way that we should. and even worse, we tend to completely forget any attack that occurred more than six months in the past. France has been subjected to terrorism for a very long time. I mean, as a matter of fact, the French Revolution is, you know, where the phrase la terrorism originated. During the 19th century, the anarchist and the gunpowderers and the dynamiters, they used to do

bombings in the 1970s you had Axon Direct, right? In the Red Brigade. Action Direct would have running gun battles with the French police throughout Paris and other cities and bomb relentlessly. Same during the Algerian

Civil War, War of Independence. So these incidents have happened before. And then people tend to forget about 9-11. So there has been a terrorist group of this magnitude. And ISIS is the next generation. of that terrorist group.

It's just that they just stated and manifested themselves out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq during the Iraq invasion after 2003. And that's where this all came from. So now that we understand that this group is Al-Qaeda Gen 5, and I don't know if you want me to give you the other four genes,

but generations, but Al-Qaeda Generation 5 is al-Qaeda in Iraq, their central organizational hub that was part of the Iraq insurgency that fought the United States from 2003 to 2011. So this group is certainly not a new group. Now, you don't have to believe me. Just believe the Central Intelligence Agency.

Just believe every other intelligence agency more because that is the official policy position of the United States government. This group was almost defeated in 2010. The Sahwa campaign, and I personally knew, the gentleman who did. designed the Sahwa campaign, a guy by the name Army Captain Travis Petraquan, Arabic linguist, who unfortunately was killed in a suicide bombing. The Sahwa campaign damaged Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and it literally took away most of the former regime loyalist terrorists in Iraq, because they were the people who were fighting the United States government in bulk and allowed us to use intelligence processes in a nearly invigorated Iraqi army to,

really almost crush al-Qaeda by 2010. Then with our withdrawal and political mistakes by the government of Iraq managed to make just enough errors to where many of those people who had joined us decided to leave and cast their lot in with this Sunnah group and create a Sunnah terrorist mega-group. And at the time, they were called ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq. I mean, al-Qaeda in Iraq was called al-Qaeda in Iraq. Then it changed its name as the Mujahideen Shura Council.

Then it changed its name to, you know, the Islamic State of Iraq. And then it changed its name to in 2011. When they sent a brigade of their soldiers, their terrorists to Syria, called the Jebat al-Nusur. Then they took the title, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, you know, of Shams or Syria, as we simply call it today. So it is a continuum. I take issue with a lot of journalists who have written books recently that say, well, this all started, and the originator of this group was Abu Musab Zarqawi. And that started when he came to Iraq with, you know, Tohid Weljihad, his terrorist group from Jordan. Not true. All of this is ideologically and operationally groups that have started in 1988 in Pashawa, Pakistan, with Osama bin Laden. And there is no sunlight between any group that has a different name that adheres to this ideology and fights these and fights this jihad.

There is no sunlight. The only difference now, and you hear the press law, oh, there's ISIS has left Al Qaeda. ISIS is worse than Al Qaeda. No, ISIS is Al Qaeda. But they just decided that, you know, old men in the, you know, in the Hindu Kush, hiding in a cave, can't lead a jihad that will carve out a khani. that will carve out a caliphate throughout the entire Middle East. So they accelerated Osama bin Laden's plans, which were always part of the strategy. Bin Laden created many ISISis everywhere.

If you look back, they had the al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb. Jia was a form of this, the group Islamic Algerian, right? The armed Islamic group. Right, about 200,000 people, wasn't it? Yes, yeah. There's about 200,000. Ideologically identical. They, you know, and of course,

Jia had political factors which played into it, you know, overthrowing the elections, taking away all of their, you know, popular governmental support. So it was right for, you know, this type of spontaneous, ideologically driven Islamic jihad. But it was all bin Laden's philosophy

that he developed in 1988, Bashar, or Pakistan. And we are seeing literally, Osama bin Laden fighting from the grave today. Because you can kill the man, but you can't kill the ideology. I think one thing that people, I don't know if it's a misperception, but one thought right now is that there is an actual country of a kind that's been set up inside Syria and Iraq,

and therefore it's a firm target that can be hit and then destroyed. One could say that, but what we have is really a pseudo-state of captured villages. Let me point something out to you, captured cities in towns as well. But let me point something out to you. This is not the first time that Al-Qaeda tried to seize terrain. In June of 2004, we called it the mini-jahd the mini-jahd of 2004. When Al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time tried to seize simultaneously six cities in Iraq, including Mosul. What they did was they just suddenly appeared in all these towns, and they just started

fighting everywhere. We called it at the time in Iraq, because I was in Iraq, mini-tete. Okay? And because it was a micro-teteenth offensive, like in Vietnam War, where they thought they would just, boom, halas, we're here, where the Mujahideen, Raqaeda in Iraq, follow us. And nobody followed them. And the U.S. Army was standing, you know, there and beat them to a pulp. It lasted for 24 hours, and then they disappeared. And at the time, we thought that was a test. Okay. This was a test run for mini jihad, mini revolution, to see if they were actually capable of seizing towns. And then, of course, they were still embedded in Fallujah at that time until November of that year. So another opportunity that they had for that, they've repeatedly, over the entire insurgency, seized cities, held them, cut deals with.

with the tribes and then let them go. Ramadi and Fallujah have gone back and forth into the control of AQI and then ISI and now ISIS. Because those towns and cities were always former regime loyalist, Ba'athist. And once the US invaded, they had nothing. And they fought us with their lead group, the Jashul Mujahideen, right?

The Mujahideen army, which was just the Bath party and the loyalists who lived in Anbar province, and all the rest. So they had an interest because this was their home to consistently fight us until the Sahwa campaign in 2007, 2008. Then they tried to cut the deal with the government and tried to get funds and resources into those provinces. And then Noreal Maliki just ignored them, diss them, and they lost all their jobs. And the only person that was hiring at that time was a group called the Islamic State of Iraq. And they threw their lot in with them. And they and created the mega group that was, if you will,

a combination of al-Qaeda in Iraq almost being extinguished and every other Iraqi insurgent, Sunnah insurgent, joining them and creating this mega-terrorist group called the Islamic State of Iraq, then Syria. Some coalition will take this territory back from them. But, Nalcom, you're saying that that doesn't defeat the underlying problem, right, which is the ideology. In Iraq, it's more than the ideology.

All of those provinces, which were seized last June, they were always in ISIS as pop. Because they are the Sunnah tribes of Iraq. They are the Sunnah governors of Iraq. So they have joined. They have now a blood bond with ISIS. They are ISIS now. All you can do is displace the combat elements of ISIS. But the women, the children, the men who live there, they're all still, you know, they are either going to transform into a Sunnah political group that no longer espouses ISIS ideology or they've bought into it over the last two or three years, three years for the most part.

And they are now ISIS and they believe the ideology. We won't find that out until we displace them. But when we displace them, we're going to be displacing with Shia and Kurds. and a very, very few Sunnah forces that create militias. And they're going to be the power player. But you haven't gotten rid of the people, much less the ideology. Okay, so you're saying that the West is going to continue to rely on arming different groups, the Shia militia, the Kurds, and dropping bombs from above,

regardless of this round of attacks of power? Yes, because we really, unless... unless we can displace them on the ground, we really have no option. You know, the president is, I wouldn't even use the word hamstrung. This is where the president is going to have to be unless he intends to invade Iraq again. Yeah. And I mean, you know, bring in, and I don't mean 10,000 troops. You hear these calls for 20,000 troops.

20,000 combatant troops has to have a three-to-one footprint. So whatever goes in there, if you say you want to bring in four brigades, for example, And you want to, you know, just reintroduce them out of Taji, out of, you know, Al-Assad. And then you want them to go and retake with the Iraqi security forces, Fallujah, or Ramadi, which is half taken. And then move your way on to Al-Qaeda and then up into Mosul. You're talking, essentially, going back to 2004 with the battles that we had in Fallujah, you know. And you still have people who will then fade away into the desert. Well, you know, how did we get this?

I mean, you know, we fought 90, we fought a 30,000 man commando force, the Saddam Fedellín in the first two weeks of the war. They disappeared on April 14th to a man, all zh, gone. So where did they go? Well, they went home. They went to Fallujah, Ramadi, Al-Qaim, and they carried out the post-war insurgency. plan that Saddam had organized before the invasion and became the Jashal-Mudahedin, while other people were becoming al-Qaeda in Iraq. So those people have the ability to go home and take off their hat and burn the black flag.

So, but again, this is just us speaking about Iraq. On the other hand, Syria was, you know, they were al-Qaeda and Iraq's complete and total logistical base of operations in Safe Haven. as run by the Syrian intelligence agencies of Bashar al-Assad. And so of course, they knew where to go in Syria. They knew that Raqa was always their logistics hub and that Syrians would be giving them weapons and equipment to attack the Americans.

So when they became the Islamic State of Iraq as an organizational change, and then the Syrian rebellion knocked down all those structures, well, it's just a question of getting into your Toyota, driving from your safe haven in Enbar province, going to places like Dera Zauer and Raka and just taking what you want and carve out your state. And it's a brilliant plan because technically, if you look at this, if you remove the ideology from this, ISIS has created a Sunnah megastate, which if they take Damascus, could be a Sunna nation

that could be equal the Kurds to the east, the Shia to the east, to the southeast, the little bit of Shia to the southwest and be on the doorstep of Israel with all the weapons and equipment of the Assad regime. And that's what ISIS was fighting for, a Sunnah state that even people who don't agree with them in the Sunnah community could understand both ethnically, tribally, and through a religious dogma. But on top of that, they placed this layer of ideological insanity, which I view as cultism. If you put everybody then at Israel's door, which of course is, I mean, in a sense,

I mean, I think that's what B.B. Netanyahu has been trying to tell the world for a while, right? No. No? Turkey and Israel are, they are so focused on what they view as their immediate threat. For Turkey, it's the PKK, and nothing else. If it's got the word Kurd in it, they want to kill it. And then allowing, almost tacitly, ISIS to flow back and forth through there and not understand that this is not just a terrorist state. It's a terrorist state that is eventually coming for you.

ISIS is expeditionary in the sense that, you know, they believe ideologically that they are of the marching armies in contemporary with the Prophet Muhammad, that they're the guys with the black flags, you know, on the horses and camels. They call them itinerant Islamic knights who go around and who are out to spread Islam, just as Islam was spread in the first few centuries. So they view Turkey as just the next major target. But Turkey views the PKK is their number one priority, even though they're actually holding ISIS off. And the suicide bombings that occurred in Istanbul that killed 100 people that the media isn't talking about, that was just a few weeks ago, were the strike that everyone in my community had been waiting for.

We said ISIS would overplay their hands, and the Turkish would suddenly go, wait a minute, you mean they're not good guys? you know they're not Kurds so we have to kill them too Israel on the other hand is so absolutely death focused on the Palestinians

and keeping the foot on the neck of the Palestinians and raging about Iran that they have no clue and the funny thing is I've been trying to publish this article for the last two months I just haven't been able to finish it called the coming ISIS Israeli war

and they don't understand that ISIS ideologically is a seriously virulent vector. And if it infiltrates Palestine, you've got a new game on your hands. You won't be able to keep those people down. I mean, if the young men of Palestine starts actually buying into that cultic belief, then, you know, they'll just gang rush army checkpoints, you know. They won't care how many of them get killed. It's an honor to die as quickly as possible so long as you kill somebody else. Israel shouldn't be worrying about rockets. Israel should be worrying about Gaza becoming the next haven that ISIS doesn't ideologically infect Palestine.

Because at that point, Israel would be begging Hamas to assist them in getting rid of this thing. These two nations, they are more concerned about the wolf at the door than the dagger at their throat. Again, how do we defeat this ideology, or can we? Is it just something that has to be weathered like a storm? No, no, no. I wrote an entire book about how to defeat the ideology in 2010. It's funny because just this last year, people have started discussing, what is the ideology of these groups?

My book was called An Enta Al-Qaeda. You can buy it on Amazon for like three bucks. But, you know, it was, it was, something that I had been putting together for almost eight years. I started writing it in Iraq, because when I wrote the terrorist of Iraq, that was operational, strategy tactics, bombs, guns, and helicopter rides. But on the other side of it, as a Middle East intelligence officer,

I need to know what's motivating these guys. We had a young Christian woman from Charlewa in Belgium, this should sound familiar, who joined her husband in Iraq in 2000. 2006, I believe, Muriel de Gak was her name. And they did, at that time, a new tactic that we hadn't seen. So I started documenting this tactic and put it in the book called Husband and Wife Suicide Bombs.

And they were real married couples. We've got at least three or four incidents where the husband and the wife would do their, you know, honey, I love you video. And they would show them in their suicide cars and doing the Tahit one finger, you know, know there's one God symbol like ISIS does right now. And then they would do the video team showing them driving off into a police station and blowing up. And she blew herself up in Bakuba.

The question at the time for us was, what made her do that? What made her leave Shalwa? All right. Come here. Was it just loyalty to her husband? Join al-Qaeda in Iraq in what they called the Sisters Brigade at the time. And jump into a car and do a husband and wife. you know, SV bed bombing.

Well, you know, when I was step back in history again, pre-9-11, I ran an organization called the Advanced Terrorism Abduction and Hostage Survival School in Coronado, California. It was part of the Navy Sear School. It was initially designed to be a terrorism survival school for Tier 1 operators who were operating as what we said at elbow length to terrorists, Al-Qaeda terrorists. in Europe, mainly Europe, and in the Balkans. Got to be a very popular school that started in 1997. As a matter of fact, our first class day was on the day of the Kenya and Tanzania bombing.

Yeah. So at that school, we did deep dives into motivational ideology. What is it that gets them to do this? And we knew that there was this, what we called the GJM, the global jihad movement. And we had all of the, we had cassette tapes from Osama bin Laden. We had pamphlets. That was his, you know, his Facebook.

That was his Twitter was to send out cassette tapes and do all these pamphlets. And up in Pakistan, they would print, you know, little books for a dollar and for a dollar for like 10 cents. And, you know, later on, I went to Pakistan in 2001 and I collected a lot of this material. And these guys were everything. was religiously ideologically motivated. Everything. So, but ISIS and al-Qaeda's ideology is one step beyond religion.

It's, it's, they, they actually have corrupted Islam to the point where they require you to believe that there are seven pillars to Islam. We all know there's five pillars, right? Right. They add from a book that was written by an Egyptian called Abu Farage, there's absent obligations. And this has always been sort of like this cult thing that had popped up five times before in Islamic history where they said, no, two more obligations every Muslim have, and everyone in our group

will adhere to the seven pillars. You will have jihad, all right, the lesser struggle of holy war, to change the earth, to bring back the Mahdi and bring about the apocalypse. Okay? And then you must die in that jihad. Martyrdom, Shahid, is an obligation that everyone who is within our group must meet.

Until, in this struggle, until such time as the world is Muslim and the Mahdi comes back and he fights Jesus in the Battle of, you know, Dejao to rid the world of the Antichrist and then everyone goes home happy. So they believed this. They believed this from the very beginning. And Osama bin Laden was a key adherent to that, which is how he got Ayman al-Zawahari to come from Egypt and bring his terrorist group over with him to really operationalize this al-Qaeda and its ideology. And this is why 9-11 happens.

You know, you hear academics every once in a while who literally have zero operational intelligence experience. I mean, I've had these people try to kill me. I've survived suicide bombings. I've been in gun battles. I've fought the terror war. I've been in these missions since 1991. And I've had people say, no, Al-Qaeda believes in the far enemy, attacking the far enemy,

and ISIS believes in attacking the near enemy. And it's like, there's a goal here. No, they all believe in attacking everybody. Bin Laden truly believed that we were in a clash of civil war. and that Islam had defeated the Soviet Union in through Afghanistan. He truly believed that in his heart of hearts. And once he did that, and he had that conference in 1988 with Abdullah Azam, the guy who met Ronald Reagan, who went around the United States, recruiting for the mujahideen.

And he said, these fighters must go home, destabilize their governments, and create many Islamic Emirates. He called them emirates at the time, principalities. And Abdullah-Azan was like, nope, we're done, bye, let's all go home. Abdullahizan blew up a month later, going to mosque with him and his sons. And suddenly, Al-Qaeda took all, all of the Afghan Arabs, joined Al-Qaeda, those who didn't go home. And very few didn't go home. And that was how you created this ideology.

Okay, so now that we've created it, you still want to get on the defunuch. I think this conversation is very important because I think it addresses the ideology, which is something I think a lot of people don't do. I think that you're, you know, you operations are important. They're part of it, but I think fighting this idea that they're perpetuating, this death cult, this perverted Islam, as you as you call it, is important and needs to be addressed. I think that's where you win the larger war against this thing. Well, those of us in the community, the intelligence community, who are real Arabists, okay? There are a lot of people who were brought into this who don't understand the Middle East, who don't speak Arabic, who really are just not part of the mindset of understanding your enemy. You can't even start thinking about solutions until you know.

the entire historical basis, the religious basis, the cultural basis, and the tribal basis, and the human factor dynamics that bring all this together, that drives a suicide car bomb through my office door, for example, and leaves a guy's rear torso on my doorstep, which happened. Or flies, you know, the 19 men fly airplanes into a building and mass murder 3,000 of our citizens. Absolutely. You can shoot them all day. look, I trained as a sniper. I've deployed.

I've used, you know, I've put a lot of Mark 262 ammunition downrange. You know, and I understand that. I can pull a bullet through a man. That's easy. Kinetics are always easy. J-Dams are even cheaper to use. We use them by the bunch every day. But I cannot kill his ideology.

I can't kill an idea. And that's the solution. And now I'm going to give you your answer. The entire motivating basis of ISIS and Al-Qaeda is their belief that they are fighting this apocalyptic battle, which they are going to defeat Western civilization, and they are going to spread Islam throughout the world to return the Mahdi, their savior. And Jesus, by the way, the prophet Jesus comes back and defeat the Antichrist and create the anti-Christ and create. a world that is completely Islamic for God until the end of times. Right? Right.

That's their ideology. Everybody agrees to that. Now, now in the last year, suddenly everybody's hearing about it, but they could have read my book five years ago. So we understand that now. That's where their mindset is. Muslims believe this because it's the exact same thing that's written in the Quran. It's just a question of it's less intensity and it's more the corruption.

of what those words say. I mean, we've had people in the United States and in the Western world who, in the year 2000, I was called to do some analysis on an FBI project, which was tracking Americans who had gone to Israel to commit terrorism to bring about the end of times. And it happens. We have people who are trying to breed purple cows

because the sign of a purple cow or a red cow is a sign of the end of times. We had this couple that went to the Tome of the Ruffalo. in Jerusalem and tried to blow it up at the millennium in order to incite a holy war between Israel and Palestine so that Jesus could come back. So these thoughts aren't unheard of in the West. You know, you just, you know, we ascribe them to people who are crazy, right? Right. Apocalyptic thinking doesn't know any... Right, has no religious boundaries. So the same goes here. However, ISIS and Al-Qaeda. The intelligence community calls it Al-Qaedaism.

Bin Laden himself called it the victorious denomination ideology. And I call it the cult of jihad. And the cult of jihad is the fifth manifestation of a major cult in Islamic history. The first one was a group called the Chihuaharic in the eighth century. And the Chihuaharaj literally split Islam into two, nine terrorists who survived a battle. between Khalif Ali and their leadership split Islam in two by assassinating Khalif Ali. The Chihuaharic believed in everything that Al-Qaeda and ISIS believes. They required Hidra, which is emigrating, which means leaving your family, going into isolation

and only living in communities of their followers, and Takfir, which is the right to declare any Muslim, a non-Muslim, and kill him on the spot. Mass murder of women and children. It was policy amongst the Chowaraj because they wanted no bloodlines to survive in order to come after them. And they believed that they were Takfir anyway. They were all Khafer. So they would kill everyone they encountered. That was not of them. As a matter of fact, the Syrians and the Saudis derisively refer to ISIS as the Chowaraj right now, right? They call them this, this first, you know, the first century Islam cult. The second cult was the Karamata, who started out raiding Hodge pilgrimages because they called the Hajj idolatry. And then they got so upset when they got

their tribute cut off by the Khalifa out of Baghdad that they went to Mecca and destroyed the city of Mecca, destroyed the Kaaba, killed everyone who was there on pilgrimage, threw their bodies into the well of Zem-Zem, and stole the meteorite that was inside the Kaaba. That's the second Islamic cult. The third Islamic cult was the Madis in Sudan. Winston Churchill fought against this group. guy, Muhammad Ahmed was so cultish. He changed the shahada from there's no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger to there's no God but God and I am the successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Okay? And then finally you have the Utebist of 1979 who thought that one of their members was the Mahdi. And so they seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in order to bring about the

apocalypse and declare this man the Mahdi. And the Saudis, they ended up killing several hundred people. The Saudis had to use nerve gas with quickly anointed, newly minted French pilots as Muslims in order to allow them to fly over the Grand Mosque and drop nerve gas in it. By the way, that group, the Uteidus from 1979, almost all of their surviving adherents, joined al-Qaeda. And the brother-in-law of one of the leaders who survived, who wasn't beheaded, beheaded 86 of them, was in prison with al-Madisi, who is believed, who is commonly called the Al-Qaeda's Islamic philosopher. And he was the leader who inspired Abu Musab Zarqawi, who led Al-Qaeda in Iraq. So Al-Qaedaism, or, as I call it, the cult of jihad, is the fifth manifestation of a virul of. corruptive cult in Islam.

And if you look at the way that they attack, Muslims, they are almost anti-Islamic, much less un-Islam. Okay. So... So you have to... So now, when you listen to people in the West, they say, oh, well, Islam is the problem.

All right, you have your Pam Gellers, you have your Rita Katz's and your Ankhoters, you know, your Anders Bering Breivik. And these people believe that Islam is the problem. When, in fact, Islam is now faced with an existential threat. These groups think that all Muslims, traditional Islam, all of its policies of tolerance, respect, art, culture, and jurisprudence since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, since 632 is corrupt, illegal, and un-Islamic, and they intend to wipe

it out. And Islamic State, if you look at it, is just them, implements. implementing that policy. And that's what they fully intend for the Muslim world. And they're not shy about saying it. It's in every document that they put out. And technically they have a join us or die ideological belief. And they fully intend to convert the rest of the Muslim world to this ideology. Where we have to help is that we have to expose this ideology. Muslims know it, but they're confused about what. what it is. And you know, declaring a person a non-Muslim is a very difficult thing in Islam. They believe that no matter how misguided you are, you can be brought back to Islam. The Saudis put together a rehabilitation program for members of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. You know, in the 2000s, while we were fighting in Iraq, the Saudis had a three-year civil war that killed thousands of Saudis citizens.

Al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula went wild around Saudi Arabia. It was like that movie, The Kingdom. The Kingdom was not a joke. It just wasn't involving Americans on that level. They were taking Americans hostage. They were executing Filipinos, beheading Indians as polytheists. But the Saudis were engaged in a full-scale civil war. And the Saudis were capturing these guys and trying to rehabilitate them.

And what they would do is they would get the imams to convince these people. that they had left Islam and that they were acting in shatania in devilishment, so to speak, and that they had become cultist and that their soul would not be clean unless they gave this up and then denounce the rest.

It worked a little bit, but of course they also threw like, you know, new Toyota Corolla at a house and a wife and gave them this support structure. And it worked a little bit and their rehabilitation process is good, but they have a very high recidivism rate.

Because these people so buy into the ideology that they can never let it go. They believe that their souls are married to this belief system and that they must die in order to get themselves up to their rewards. So unless we assist the Muslim world in doing this link breaking, the link between ISIS and Islam, and literally call this thing out, as an Islamic cult and educate people that, you know, there are cult.

The Saudis, they're funny. They won't use the word cult, Abad, in Arabic. They use the word deviant, OK? If you use deviant, it means you can be brought back. If you use the word cult, it means you have to kill these guys. You know, you're apostate. Abu Yachya al-Liby, an al-Qaeda theologian before we put a bomb on his head, actually gave us the keys

how do you, how to do this, how to break their organization. He taunted us with it because Al-Qaeda loves taunting people with things. And he said, there are six ways that you can break us, but you'll never do it. Number one, call us apostates and heretics, right? Number two, call us out for our personal betrayals of Islam. Number three, play up the atrocities that we do, especially amongst children. You know, when I read that, I thought, this guy is trying to do a religious confession. You know? Number four, get political groups to oppose us, Islamic political groups to oppose us. We fear them. And that's number four, number five. Go after individuals within the group who have left the group and who denounce us. They're definitely afraid of being denounced. And number six, ruin our link with Islam. Because if we are seen as un-Islamic,

As Iman al-Zawahiri literally said this in response to Libby's comment, we will be crushed in the shadows. Now, if you look at any other terrorist insurgency throughout the world, the Tupamarros, the FARC in Colombia, you'll see that all of these terrorist groups, rarely are they killed by military, destroyed by military force. They are almost always destroyed by the loss of the population's support, even their microscopic amount of support. And so if we go after their ideology, zero.

We go after it with all of Islam, and we do this on an international scale, letting the Muslims lead, they have to lead. All we can do is give them a bigger microphone. Then the water sellers of Raka will start fearing, you know, am I really going to go to heaven with these guys? Should I be selling them water? Are they cultists? You know, ISIS killed the Yazidis

because they believe that Yazidism has a touch of Zoroastrianism in them, and they believe that they worship Satan. And so, which is wrong, although I've heard that throughout my entire career in the Middle East. As a matter of fact, Saddam used Yazidi officers as torturers in order to torture his,

torment his captives. So they did that. That's why they had no qualms about cutting their heads off, mass murdering three or four thousand of them and selling and stealing and raking their women. No qualms whatsoever. These people are Satanist. So the same thing can be done to them.

You know, we dropped these leaflets with a picture of the al-Qaeda guy throwing a young kid into a meat grinder. And it was absolutely ridiculous. I laughed. I thought, you know, these guys are collecting these things to frame them. And it turns out they were. When, in fact, we should have the Saudis do our leaflet campaign. Where you just drop one word, you know, 20 million leaflets over the city of Raqa with one word on it, or one phrase, you are now apostates, right? Mm-hmm.

Coming from the Saudis, Arabic, the Islamic jurisprudence body. Next week, you are Shetania. You are now, you know, engaged with the devil. Don't just say it on Al Jazeera Arabic. You actually have to tell them. You actually have to introduce doubt into this system. And then, of course, every time you drop those leaflets, you do a massive bombing campaign of the city

just to make sure that you got your point across. But you have to literally cut their link. You have to get them to start thinking, perhaps I'm not engaged with Allah, perhaps I'm engaged with the other guy. I met Cory Booker. I went to his office. I was supposed to talk to his chief of staff

that gave me one of his junior staffers to talk about counter ideology. And as soon as I said this, he said, well, you're talking about us discussing Islam, so this conversation is over. I said, so let me get this straight, kid. I'm a multi-decade intelligence veteran for the Middle East telling you you have to get the Muslims to go after their Islam.

And you're telling me, we won't even discuss this amongst ourselves. In other words, ISIS can have Islam. And he said, well, we just won't discuss it. I said, okay, done. There's your problem right there. I've often thought that we don't talk about Islam and the ideology behind these people. And to separate them from it makes, that makes sense to me.

That needs to be part of the equation. Right. Well, okay, so thank you very much for giving us so much of your time. Yes, thank you so much. And helping us to really understand, you know, what's the situation. Thank you very much for listening to this week's show. We ran a little long, and it was a bit rough at times, but next time, we'll be back on our regular schedule and talking about drones.