Angry Planet - Who picks up your trash when you live in the 'Islamic State?'

Episode Date: November 11, 2015

Many in the West think of the Islamic State as a loose collection of fighters -- rabble who kill, loot and burn. But the truth is more complex, though no less terrifying. Islamic State actually governs the territory it takes and it’s not terrible at it. The group levies taxes, teaches children and organizes garbage pickup.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. The psychological devastation happening to all of these children for whom that level of violence is as common as, you know, for us walking down the street and seeing a tactical devastation happening to all of these children for whom that level of violence is as common as, you know, for us walking down the street and seeing a tactical. taxi cab or something is just terrifying. It's an Islamic Milton organization that relies on suicide bombings and public executions

and even torture to keep people in line and grow its borders. It's also a functioning country of a kind, responsible for education and even taking care of the garbage. If you haven't guessed it this week on War College, we look at the so-called Islamic State and what it's like to live there. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College.

I'm Reuters Opinion Editor Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. Today we're talking with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Kevin Sullivan, and it's about his five-part series that he wrote for the Washington. Post, life in the Islamic State. Kevin, thank you for joining us today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me on. So you really wrote about Islamic State from a different point of view, as opposed to just the battles and the terror aspect. You sort of tried to give a window into what it's like to live there, how Islamic State functions as a state. Do you think you could sort of fill us in and give us an idea of what it's like, how big is it, how many people

live there, all that kind of good stuff? Well, you know, we have written a lot in the past year or so, like everyone has, about why people go there, who they are, you know, what motivates them to go. We've written about families in the United States and in Europe and teenagers who go, people who go with their entire families. And, you know, it's become pretty clear that people aren't going to join an army. They're going to join a society. They're going because they're thinking that they're moving to an Islamist paradise. You know, their propaganda that the Islamic State puts out is really second to nobody's. incredibly good and they make it sound like that this place is a family-friendly paradise

where Muslims who are used to feeling persecuted to having their religion ridiculed, you know, too often in the United States and in Europe can go and they can live in a place where their religion is revered and where venerated and where people respect them for, you know, how conservative religiously that they are. At least that's what the propaganda is telling them. So we did all that and we finally decided to try to answer the question for ourselves, what do they really find when they get there? And we wanted to think about simple questions of basic daily life. What do you eat?

What food is in the market? Where do your kids go to school? Is it possible to get medical care? Can you get water? Do you have electricity? Are things expensive? Do you feel safe? Are there courts?

Do people pick up the trash? And we started out a few months ago asking people these questions. And as you might imagine, the hardest part of this is actually finding the people to talk because, you know, as a journalist, you just can't go in there. I mean, I realize this is a minority view, but I actually like my head. And, you know, I didn't really relish trying to sneak in there. And, I mean, it just doesn't work. So we very painstakingly, you know, withheld from our reporters in the region,

there were a half a dozen other reporters who helped me on this project, we would figure out, okay, how are we going to get to people who live inside this caliphate? We're talking about a very big area. It's about the size of the U.K. It's straddles Syria and Iraq. A lot of it, just like the stereotype, a lot of it is desert, right? A lot of it's desert, but a lot of it is just sort of, you know, it's suburbia is the wrong word, but, you know, these are just cities and towns

and where people have been living, you know, for a long, long time, living just kind of reasonably normal lives. Now, in the past few years, obviously, in both countries, things have been completely upended by war, but nothing like what these people saw when the Islamic State came along. And, you know, the estimates are all over the map, but I think most people agree it's probably five or six or seven or eight million people who live in the territory that's now controlled by these militants.

So for us, the trick was how to reach them. So, you know, there's a guy who, there's an Iraqi guy who works in our Baghdad bureau, and, you know, he had a cousin who had a friend who had a sister-in-law, who had an uncle whose best friend's school chum, you know, was somebody who lived in Mosul and might be willing to talk to us. And, you know, kind of over and over and over again, we just kept trying these different routes until we ended up with probably about 40 people talk to us. sometimes on the phone, sometimes by Skype.

And then when I thought we felt like we had kind of a critical mass, I actually went to Jordan to the Oz Rock refugee camp, which is in northern Jordan, near the border. And I was there a couple of years ago, and it's really, it's 40 miles out in the desert. There's absolutely nothing around out there. And there was nobody there two years ago, and now there are 20,000 people.

So, you know, we went to the office. It's run by the UNHCR, and we went. We went to their office and said, we would like to see your records about who's arrived here in the past couple of weeks from these places, from Raqa, from Darlesor, and the other places that we know are controlled by ISIS. And they'd say, okay, well, you've got to go see this family there in block six, road 47, hut number six. And you go and bang on the door, and people we found were more than happy to talk to us.

So it was just, you know, over, just took a very, very long time to put all this material together. For non-journalists, I just would like to point out, I mean, this is really a major effort. Talking to that many people, that's a big deal, even if you were doing it domestically. And I mean, so what you guys put into it is huge, just not a small-scale project. I mean, I just think it's worth pointing that out. It's part of a series that we're doing called Confronting the Caliphate, where we're looking at a lot of these things. And it has been a major effort. We've spent a lot of money, I suppose,

and a lot of hours and people's time putting these stories together because it's important. And we feel like if we're not doing these stories, why are we in business? So luckily, we still work at a place where, you know, the Post is still willing to invest in this kind of reporting, which I love makes me very happy. So, Kevin, what kind of government would you say is in the Caliphate? How would you describe it? Is it a theocracy? More like a religious thugocracy. One thing that's a little bit counterintuitive about these guys is that they're really not half bad at governance in many places.

I mean, you hear a lot of people complain, but you hear a lot of people say particularly in terms of their honesty, people would say before in Syria and Iraq, under the old guys, if you wanted to get anything done, you had to bribe somebody. You had to, if you showed up with enough cash, you'd get your pothole filled or whatever it was. But these guys don't, you know, they have kind of a kind of a, code. It's upside down backwards and perverted, but they do have some kind of a code that says they're not going to take bribes.

They're actually providing services that are not all that bad. You know, people have a lot of, I didn't meet anyone who said they preferred living under the Islamic State, but I met a lot of people who said the Islamic State government was actually more efficient than some of the things that they had seen in Iraq and Syria before that. Now, part of that is just kind of good old-fashioned sectarian rivalry because the government in Baghdad is largely Shiite. These people are largely Sunni, and they say that, you know, the Sunni Islamic State treated them better than the Shiite federal government, you know, central government in Baghdad ever did. So this stuff is just fantastically complicated, which is why we tried so hard to whittle it down to things that anybody could relate to. you know, how people live their daily lives. Well, so how does, like, let's say, a Sunni man live his life,

if there's ever such thing as an average life there? He's probably unemployed because a lot of, you know, imagine, you know, there were a lot of factories. There was a lot of light manufacturing that went on in these areas. And so whatever that was that they were producing, a lot of it relied on raw materials that were brought in from, say, from Turkey. And now, you know, the area between Turkey, those supply routes are just shut off because there's a war going on there. So a lot of these factories simply went out of business.

And they went out of business also because the Islamic State is a very, you know, they're tax crazy. They love to tax people, tax just about everything. And a lot of people just simply, business owners simply couldn't afford it. They were terrified of violating some Islamic State rule that they hadn't thought of. And so, you know, it's had the effect of leaving many, many, many people unemployed. And that, in turn, has driven, you know, you do hear a lot of people saying, well, you know, these people have a lot of support. The Islamic State has been able to draw a lot of people to their side

and they're working for them, fighting with them. And in my experience, talking to the people we talk to, that's largely a function of economic desperation. If you're an unemployed man in Raqa and you have five children and you have absolutely no way to feed them, and food prices have tripled, and propane gas is so expensive that you're now cooking on scraps of wood

on an open fire in your backyard. You have electricity for an hour or a day, and life is just sinking fast, and you're terrified about your children, you may well take a job as a functionary, as a clerk or something with the Islamic State, and some people will actually pick up arms. You know, for a lot of young men, I talked to a kid who was, I think he was 18 or 19 years old,

and he said he could probably think of, you know, 50 of his friends who had joined the Islamic State. And basically he said, because it was really cool. They got to carry guns. And it was really kind of exciting for them. And there was nothing else going on. They had no chance of getting a job or, you know, finding a wife or because everything was upside down. But it was really cool that they got to go fight. So, you know, it's a tough life.

Kevin, I had kind of an odd question. Going back to the taxes, I remember the title of one of your articles is where the taxman carries a whip. And I was wondering if the tax system there, if you know, is it simple? Are the laws easy to follow? I mean, are they well posted? Everyone kind of knows what they're supposed to do and how much everything costs, or is it constantly changing? I think the tax thing is a little bit murky. You know, like fishing regulations.

They've posted very lengthy fishing regulations. fishing regulations. No more shall you drop dynamite into the water and kill the fish, and no more shall you electrocute the fish. They have very clear-cut regulations about garbage pickup in different cities. But on the tax question, it seems to be, and this is one of the things that drove people a little bit crazy on top of, you know, the constant beheadings and all the other things were going on. The tax stuff was a little bit murky. People felt it was arbitrary. I met a woman who had a small farm, they grew wheat, and she said that they were so poor that even the Assad regime would just not even bother taxing them. They knew that they were subsistence farmers and what they grew they needed to survive.

Well, the Islamic State has come along, and they now take, off the top, they take 10% of anything of their crop, and they take 10% of any profit that they make from selling, you know, whatever part that they don't eat. And the woman said, you know, this just isn't fair. I mean, it's not like at least Assad understood that I couldn't afford to pay this, but these knuckleheads come and, you know, take all my money. And so it's very, it's tricky. And Islam, the way moderate Muslims understand it, and the way all Muslims understand it, is a very charitable religion.

I mean, charity is one of the central pillars of that religion, and you're supposed to donate a certain amount of your net worth or your income every year. and people generally always followed this. It wasn't coerced. It wasn't forced. It was just something that people did. So you'd go give your, you'd go donate to some charity that you liked. Well, the Islamic State has decided that they are going to collect this money themselves.

So your, your zakat, your tax goes directly to them. And they're using it to pay their fighters who pay no tax. So it's just, it's a, it's a really vicious system in terms of the economy. Right, and I guess the cot is also used, I mean, to help, it's like not quite welfare, but I mean, it's actually supposed to help provide social benefits like welfare, right? It's a lot like welfare. And when you give this money, you know, you're helping the people who need it the most. And quarantine accounts of everybody we talk to, and you do have to remember that, you know, we were talking to people who had fled. So clearly they have an extra grind.

Maybe there's another narrative to this. I really can't imagine that, but the people we talked to said that there were a lot of people who were literally starving. Organizations that existed before the Islamic State showed up to help the poor have simply disappeared, and the Islamic State isn't doing the job. They're so, you know, I think they're frankly worried about their own survival. They have to pay their fighters. They have to pay for the huge war effort that's going on. And I think, you know, the Islamic charity is secondary on their list of priorities.

So what's life like for women then? It's constant fear is what I got. If you read the Islamic State literature on the role of women, and they put out this great manifesto earlier this year that talks about the role of women and girls, basically they are, you know, they're there for men's pleasure, and they're there to produce children, the Cubs, you know, the next generation of fighters. And beyond that, as an organization, they don't have a whole lot of use for women. The Islamic State literature says that girls as young as nine are eligible to be married up.

So say you live in one of these towns or villages that the Islamic State has taken over, the last thing you do is let your nine, ten teenage girls out on the street because they can easily be picked up and people said that they'd be arrested on some pretext. Like you don't have the proper, you know, male escort or you're not wearing your clothing the right way or something. And they would end up at this detention center for women. And from there, people said, you know, a lot of women and girls would go in there. We'd never see them again because they would be married off to some fighter very quickly. So I talked to several people.

And again, you know, we tried to, we tried not to pick the freak show stories. We tried not to pick the things that seemed like real outliers just to be sensational. We were trying to get a sense of what it's really like for people. And we heard over and over and over again from mothers, who said, I didn't let my daughter out of the house for a year. People wouldn't go outside because they were afraid. There's also Islamic State literature that talks about the processes that, you know, women who go there voluntarily.

So there's two different worlds, really. There are the people who want to be there, who come from all over the world and want to go there and fight. And then there are the people who simply woke up one more. and found that they're found their world taken over by the Islamic State. And the single women who would come from from Europe or from other parts of the Arab world would go there and they would, they'd be put in kind of a, like a dormitory, which essentially served as a place that was a kind of assembly line for wives.

I mean, men would come and they would meet these women and they would choose one to marry. And, you know, somebody said to me, you know, you'd meet in the morning, you'd be engaged by evening. For women who find themselves suddenly taken over by the Islamic State, I think is one of constant terror. And I think for women who have come from around the world to join them, some of them are true believers, and some of them, I'm sure, couldn't possibly be happier than they are there. But I think for a lot of them, it's a life of disappointment. They get there, and the place simply doesn't match the propaganda. Right. And that's something I wanted to talk about as well. you write a lot about the propaganda in your pieces.

And in the West, most of what we think of when we see this propaganda is the beheadings and the burning videos. But that's only part of it. You write about the Ferris Wheels and Cotton Candy. I was wondering if you could describe some of that for us. If you go to our project, we actually have put up some clips from some of this video. And it's really remarkable. Again, remember that a lot of these towns were fully functioning places. This isn't just some outpost in the desert built by the Islamic State.

These are real cities and towns. And in Raqa, there is a park that has a ferris wheel and, you know, tilt a whirl and great carnival rides. And the Islamic State propagandists have done a great job going in there and taking some really beautiful HD video of families playing and cotton candy. And there's meat grilling, you know, over the fire. and it just looks like the kind of place you'd love to go to. And they put this stuff out on the internet, and people who, you know, you're a teenager sitting in Chicago or Denver or Minneapolis, and you're sort of intrigued by the Islamic State, you think maybe I'll go there,

and you look at that and you think, well, that's better than where I live. That's fun. I can't wait to go, I can't wait to go live there. So it's very, very, it's very sophisticated propaganda. They also have, they use children a lot. You'll see young boys who are standing up giving these sort of religious sermons. And they're usually doing it in a park or something. They're doing it live in front of a live audience.

And the value is twofold. Partly they're preaching to the people who are actually standing in front of them, trying to get them to, you know, come over to our side and really support us or fight with us. And partly, they know that this is being filmed and it's going to be put out on the internet. for distribution to, you know, so many people we're learning, you know, tens and tens and tens of thousands of people who are out there curious about the Islamic State. And they're seeing this propaganda and it's terrifying because it's so effective. We were talking a little bit about the light manufacturing in the Islamic State and how a

lot of that's gone away. I was curious what the economy is like now and if you think it's sustainable? No, I don't think it is. I mean, I think, you know, there are a lot of people who run small, small shops. I think that's the main business that goes on there now, and a lot of it is, you know, we know that Islamic State makes a lot of money from kidnapping, from extortion. You know, they set up customs roadblocks. I mean, people who try to bring goods into the Islamic State, they're allowed in, depending, but they pay a tax. And, you know, the same way they would, you know,

bringing goods into the United States, you pay a customs duty. And so they raise money that way. They also make a lot of money selling antiquities and oil. You know, they refine oil and sell it. And so their economy is really kind of a black market economy. You know, it's small, local, hand-to-hand commerce and it's black market. And it's hard to imagine that that's sustainable in the long term. I mean, a lot of their money comes from taxing people, except for the fact that they're doing this at that gunpoint and that a certain.

number of people in these areas actually believe in, you know, the religious philosophy of these people. It's hard to imagine that it's really sustainable in the long term. You really make it sound religious thugocracy, I think, is a really great word for it. You make it sound almost like a mafia type situation. It's as if the mafia has moved into an area and completely taken it over. It is. You know, again, people throw around the word Nazi way too much, and I don't mean to draw a direct parallel here at all. But, you know, this is like a, it's like a, it's an occupied land is what it is. It's a place where you have an occupying force who gets the best of everything.

They get, you know, they are, they take over houses of any, they take, they take anything they want. They take your houses, they take your hotels, they take whatever it is, they take over your business. They tax you. They take all the best food. And then you have the occupied who are second-class citizens, and they are expected to follow very strict rules enforced by the occupiers and enforced mercilessly. And if they don't, they die, or their families die, or something terrible happens to them. So it really is run on fear.

Now, again, this is not to see. say that there aren't people there who don't think these guys are wonderful. There are. I mean, there simply are. People we interviewed would tell us they were surprised by how many people actually went over and fought with them or worked with them. Again, a lot of it out of economic desperation, but certainly you're going to find a certain number of people. These are conservative societies to begin with, and these guys are, you know, they're a freakish degree more fundamental than other people. But, you know, it's still, it's not, for a lot of people is not that much of a leap. They can they can live with it and they think it's better than

what they were getting from Assad or they think it's better than what they were getting from the government in Baghdad. There are people who who follow them but it's you know largely rulers and rules occupiers and occupied. If people do join them are they welcomed? I think so. I think they need all the help they can get. I never heard anybody say well my brother tried to join them but he couldn't pass the physical or you know you just you just don't hear that. I mean I think they're They're more than willing to stick a gun in your hand and send you out to the front if you're willing to do it. So one question I had is the only name that most of us know is Al-Baghdadi. Is there any indication of his personal footprint in governance?

That's a good question. And I have to admit, I didn't hear his name come from the mouths of too many people. It's really, it's the system. I mean, they all know, I mean, they all know who runs the system. But there really is an equivalent of a ministry of education and a ministry of justice and a ministry of health. I mean, they actually have these things and they have tried to create, you know, a lot of them are kind of provincially based, but there is a structure and it comes from Baghdadi. And he has been, I hate to give him a compliment, but he has been smart or efficient or something in the way that he has set these things up because they understand that the only way they can occupy is if they have an effective occupying force. And that's why they spend so much time with propaganda.

That's why they spend so much time, you know, going around and trying to make friends. So, you know, Baghdaddy himself, I didn't hear about, you know, there aren't, you know, pictures of him all or people don't. say, you know, for the love of Baghdadi, you know, it's really more their version of their religion and they're much more concerned with God than they are with Baghdaddy. Well, so where did they get the expertise to build a civil state? I mean, are there engineers and civil engineers who are part of the caliphate at the top levels? These guys advertise for engineers. They advertise for people with experience in oil or high. They advertise for architects and, you know, they're out there on social media in their own publications

looking for professionals because, you know, when they first showed up, it was the people who had the means and who were sort of clever and saw the big picture who ran first. I mean, a lot of doctors were the first people out of town when the Islamic State showed up and lawyers. So it's left a void there for professional people, and they've worked incredibly hard to fill that void. They're bringing a lot of people back to fill these jobs so that they can create a society. But again, it's a perverse thing. They have a ministry of education, but they've closed almost all the schools. I talked to a young man who graduated from university in Damascus in 2012.

I don't know how he pulled that off, but he did. and he was from a small town outside of Raka, and he was very interested in education, and he saw the chaos in his country, and he wanted to get kids back in school. So he went to this kind of shell of a school that was in his neighborhood, and he reopened it, and he went around the neighborhood, and he talked to all the parents,

and he ended up getting kind of 50 kids, boys and girls, who were coming for lessons, and he was running this with the help of one or two other people, and, you know, it was their own little stand against all the chaos, you know, all of the fighting that was going on in their country. Well, then the Islamic States showed up, and they took over the town. The first thing they did was to shut down that school and any other schools that were still open. I don't think there were too many. So this guy said he kind of worked up his courage and he went to the quote, Ministry of Education, and that consisted of a very large Saudi guy with a big beard.

and he went to this Saudi guy and said, you know, this is what I'm doing, I want to, I want to reopen this school, may I have your blessing to do it, can I open the school? And the guy said, sure, no problem. You can teach if you want to. You can teach boys and boys only. You can do it in the mosque and only in the mosque, and you will stick to our curriculum, which is religious studies only. And he said, you know, thanks but no thanks. And he said to me, I wanted to educate them. I didn't want to brainwash them. So he, you know, the school closed, and those kids have no education opportunities at all.

So it just extends the misery of this into the next generation and the generation after that. I mean, I guess in that way, it's very similar to the Taliban, right? I mean, the madrasas where they only get religious education and nothing else. Yeah, no, I was in after. Afghanistan and right after 9-11 and in 2001 and you know you talk to people there and the

stories are remarkably similar. I remember talking to an Afghan taxi driver back then who said that he, you know, they, I don't know, they accused him of being some kind of a spy in which he certainly wasn't, which is very, which is what the Islamic State does too. They're obsessed by spies. So they cut off his his left hand and his right foot, which is just what they did. Of course, they did it publicly in the stadium. And this guy was a taxi driver. You know, tried driving a taxi without your left hand and your right foot. But this was the kind of brutal, merciless, public humiliation and violent torture that the Taliban was so well known for that the Islamic State has taken even much further. Do you see any reason to hope for any of the people

who are part of the Islamic State at this point or under that regime? You know, you always want to remain hopeful and you always want to think that human beings and human spirit can overcome an awful lot. But it is very hard to talk to the people that we talk to and hear the words that come out of their mouths and hear their stories and have any real hope that this could ever be normal again. I mean, obviously at some point it has to be, but I just don't know what that's going to look like. And I think that, especially when you talk to people about their children, we talked to a woman in Mosul, and she said that she talked about the violence that her children had seen. They were driving along in the car one day, and they came upon, you know, a beheading in process, because that's just how they do it.

The Islamic State likes to, you know, when they met out there, their justice, they like to do it as publicly as possible, because fear is one of the great controllers. They use fear to control the population. And this woman said that she was in her car with her child. It was six or seven years old, and she's covering his eyes so he doesn't see the beheading going on. But she said it's crazy because they'd seen so much of it. They see it all the time. And the psychological devastation happening to all of these children for whom that level of violence is as common as, you know, for us walking down the street and seeing a taxi cab or something,

is just terrifying, and it makes this a multi-generational problem, because those kids who grow up with that much violence in their lives, it's really hard to imagine them how they're going to view the world when they get a little bit older. Again, you have to remain hopeful, and history is filled with countries that have recovered from terrible things, and hopefully that will happen here, but it's really hard to be an optimist

after immersing in this for a few months and listening to all these stories. Well, I guess we'll just have to stop there without finding a ray of hope. Kevin. Sorry about that. No, it's okay. Well, so we've been talking with Kevin Sullivan of Washington Post. We're going to put a link to your series along with the podcast and the show notes. And it's fantastic.

I mean, we were only able to get to a small portion of it in our conversation here. So, Kevin, thank you very, very much. Thanks very much for the interest. I mean, it's important that people hear about this stuff. Next time on War College. They called it the drone papers, but in the documents they provided, drones are actually only a small part of the operations that they uncovered. In Djibouti, there were more manned aircraft than drones.