The Daily - The Daily Presents “Caliphate,” Chapter 4

Episode Date: May 12, 2018

The New York Times has introduced a documentary audio series that follows Rukmini Callimachi, who covers terrorism for The Times, on her quest to understand ISIS. Today, as a special episode of “The Daily,” we offer Chapter 4 of “Caliphate,” in which a new recruit proves his worth and gets invited to a secret meeting. For more information about the series, visit nytimes.com/caliphate.This episode includes disturbing language and scenes of graphic violence.

From The New York Times and the team that brought you The Daily, this is Caliphate. To be continued... Take me to the first execution. This was in June. At that time, they were celebrating a lot of all the victories we've had in Iraq, and we were reaching towards Mosul pretty fast. After that, Ramadi, then straight to Baghdad. But what happened was Abu Nimr tribe was a local tribe that stood against, they said

they stood against Islam, they stood against the state. So they killed the majority of them in Iraq and they brought back the important ones back into Syria and we were the ones who had to carry out their execution. They said, they told us that they're apostates from Iraq, Murtaddin.

To me, Murtaddin was like the worst thing in the world. That's a guy who just turned away from Islam. And they were being bought in to face punishment. They were being bought in for justice. Did you think that he really was? I mean, so the word Murtad means an apostate, right? But the members of this tribe, they were Sunni Muslims, right?

They were Sunni Muslims, yes. So their only crime was that they had contradicted ISIS. They stood up, they stopped us from getting to Baghdad. Okay, they stood in your way. They stood in our way. They wouldn't let us take over their city, their village. They wouldn't let us go any further city their village they wouldn't let us go

any further they stopped us they put they put up resistance that we didn't have to face that's what one of um one of the guys described it as they put they put they stood up against us when they didn't have to they could have always conformed to us and lived comfortably or you know live normally we didn't they didn't have to go through it, but they put themselves in that situation. They killed themselves. That's what they said. And you believe that? I believe that, yeah.

Chapter 4, Us Versus Them. Okay, so he's saying that it's June now. Yeah. Where is ISIS at this moment? In June of 2014, we are moments before the declaration of the caliphate. And we are right now on the cusp of ISIS becoming the group that we know it to be, to be on every page one, above the fold, on every newscast. And as I'm sitting there across from Huzaifa in the hotel room, there are two things that jump out at me when he says this. Number one is the us versus them and the heights

that ISIS takes it to. The Abu Nimr tribe is a Sunni tribe. This is the same sect as ISIS. These are the very people that ISIS calls Muslims and considers the citizens of their caliphate. But they have now been described as apostates, as Murtadine. Why? Because they stood up to ISIS. The very act of disagreeing with the Islamic State is essentially equivalent to disagreeing with God. And the second thing is, he properly identifies the crime that ISIS assigns to this group, and he's using the correct theological terms to refer to them. And that's something that is pretty in the weeds, right? Really specific. In addition to that, he says that leaders of the tribe were also kidnapped and taken back to Syria. And this is something that suggests insider knowledge.

How does ISIS prepare you to kill people? Is there anything? We had dolls. Yeah, we had dolls to practice on. We also have cutouts of ballistics gels. It would feel a lot like human. And inside the ballistics gels, they'd have sacks where major organs would be.

And then you could just slice, practice, behead, stab, and, you know, just practice. And then we'd also fire weapons into them to see what damage a bullet would do. So it kind of felt like what a medical student would do. This is something you learned in the training? Yeah. You had to know how to slice a head off. When it comes to the act of violence itself,

how is it, going into this, what is it that you know about how ISIS gets somebody like Huzaifa, who's kind of this awkward kid, and turns them into someone who can actually take a human life? Right. So what I know from reading the interrogation records of numerous ISIS suspects who were arrested on their way home and from interviewing ISIS members myself,

ISIS seems to have a series of steps that they take people through to essentially desensitize them to violence. So first of all, they practice on non-human entities. They use dolls, they use mannequins, they make them very lifelike. And then they put them on kitchen duty. The ISIS fighters are told to go and slaughter the chicken or slit the throat of the lamb that they're going to have for dinner.

The next step is a communal killing. In the group execution, there's some level of anonymity because you're one of several people who are doing this. And there's a camaraderie, I hate to say it, but there's a support system in the sense that you're all doing it together. You're all doing it on cue. There's something mechanical and automatic and communal, you know, about it. So describe to me what happened that day. So we have regular routine, wake up, prayed, breakfast, and they bought us out just before afternoon. He then says that this was done in the center of the city. They all went out to a public place.

They gathered people for this. And they told us that we're going to stand in this certain formation. And according to his telling. And the guys are going to be in front of us. One shot clean to the head. Just finish them off. What he was about to do was something he was going to do with the people he considered his brothers. These are the people that he trained with, that he had every meal with, every one of the five daily prayers, the people that he slept in the same dorms with.

And now they are taking a human life and they're going to do this together. And then what happened is a few hours, a couple of hours later, a few hours later, they bought in these old men. They had blue uniforms on. They were like jumpsuits, full uniform, blue color, navy blue, you could say. They were blindfolded and handcuffed, roped behind their hands. And they just came in in a line and sat in front of us. And they bring them out in a single file and make each prisoner kneel in front of each executioner. No emotions on them.

They looked like animals to me at that point. He was facing you? No, he was facing the other way, but when he came in, he was normal. Like, he accepted his fate kind of type thing. And then they're supposed to wait? The guy in the distance in front of us would give us a cue. For a signal.

And then he'd just say, fire. At first, you know, you have to bring yourself to do it. You're like, okay, if I'm finally killing someone now, this is maybe the next step to being a frontline fighter. And I already had some goals for being a frontline fighter. I'm like, okay, so this is, I guess, the next stepping stone for me. And the interesting thing is that Josefa has this moment where he's standing behind the man

that he's about to execute. And for a second, it looks like the social pressure might actually not work. You start slow. You're like, okay, just slowly you can do this. This, don't worry, he's, you're killing him for a reason. This is justified. You can do this. You're not going to be held accountable.

In Huzaif's telling, he can't pull the trigger. You bring yourself to do it. You're like, okay, now, now, but you can't bring the pressure. And it's at this moment when he looks down. They look like regular good Muslims. They had their beards. And realizes he's just a guy. They were old and they were tribal guys. Slowly you can do this. You're killing him for a reason. This is justified.

You can do this. You're not going to be held accountable. They put themselves in that situation. They killed themselves. And you kind of just have to close your eyes and do it. And just shoot. After you pulled that trigger, does he just fall?

You feel the pressure from the gun and everything and you've, I guess you feel bits coming back at you from his head, I guess. Then they fall forward, and when it calms down so you can see where the damage is and everything. Did you knock? I peeked, yeah, but I just kept looking down at his feet. I didn't want to look at his head. I peeked, yeah.

But I just kept looking down at his feet. I didn't want to look at his head. And then I kept thinking, we killed them. Like they were middle-aged men. And I'm just a kid. Did you guys have to pick up the bodies, or did somebody else do that? No, that was, someone else came and did that. There was a truck, a large truck, and just gathered them and took them away. But we had to load them up, you know, get them piled from that line into, like, I guess, a pile.

And then you just put them in a pile and you turn around and went back to your place? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we were told to take a break for a bit. We'd go back, take the day off. I threw up a lot that day. I couldn't get the smell of that stale, irony, bloody smell off of my hand. I kept smelling it. Was there any emotional training as a part of this?

Yeah. They said that, you know, it's going to be hard for you guys. They said first time it's going to affect you a lot. You're going to be sad. You're going to be sick. And you might even faint from the blood. But what you have to do is you just have to drink down those emotions. Remember you're doing this for God. Remember you're carrying out what it says in the Quran and what you have to, what your duty is as a Muslim. And you, I mean, you didn't question that. I didn't, no. I didn't question that. After that, I called in a few days sick. Like I just told him I'm sick. I can't go out. I'm sick and this and that. So the way Josefa tells it is that he's in his dorm

and he's been given this R&R time. You know, while I did that, while I was at home, this is when they started coming in. Then a commander comes to see him. It was a Libyan guy. He was a pretty big commander. And he's like, so he asked me what you want to do. He says, you can't be police for a long time.

Come on, you're a muhajir. You immigrated to these lands. Like, I know I wanted to be a frontline fighter. I heard of Rayat al-Tawheed. That's a British battalion. What's it called? A British battalion, Rayat al-Tawheed. Rayat al-Tawheed, okay.

Yeah. But he's like, how about you instead recruit people, your family, friends come in here, live under the Khilafah. Why don't you start recruiting? We need North Americans. And we need them to come in and fight for us. But we also need them to go back. There's a seminar coming up. Come attend that. And do you remember roughly when this happens?

Yeah, this was in July. So according to him, around a month after the execution. Frontline fighters came in and took up our positions. Fighters come and take over the position that he had held. Checkpoints and this and that. And he and the other members of the Hizb ut, the religious police, are trucked to a place outside of Aleppo. 70 or 75 trucks. And they go inside of a building.

I think it was a government building. And it is there that he suddenly looks around and sees people from all over the world. And there was a lot. There was Australians there. There was British nationals, Belgians, French. From Asia, from North America, from Europe. There was also Central Asian, a couple of Americans, two or three other Canadians. Sitting on the floor?

Yeah, we were sitting on the floor, and up there they had, like, just on the wall, a projection of Google Maps and, you know, the battlefield map and everything. They put Google Maps to show what? To show how possible attacks could be carried out. So what is this meeting that he's attending? Okay, he says it's a meeting of the Amniyat. So we all went to the seminar and this was held by the Amniyat al-Khalji.

Which is essentially the secret service of ISIS. But he doesn't just say the Amniyat, he says Amniyat al-Khalji. Amniyat al-Khalji, which is their external operations. The Amniyat al-Khalji is essentially the body inside the Secret Service of ISIS that is dedicated to carrying out attacks overseas. This is the group that we believe was behind the Paris attack, the Brussels attack, the Bordeaux Museum attack in Tunisia, maybe even the Bangladeshi attack.

And when you say that they carried out the Paris attacks, what does that look like? So the Paris attack... November 13th, 10 ISIS operatives attacked Paris. ...was led by 10 attackers. Right now we're learning more about the suspects behind the deadly Paris attack that left 129 innocent people dead.

One was a French extremist known to the authorities. They were mostly foreign fighters, Belgian and French nationals. The documents show their journey began in Raqqa, Syria. Who traveled to Syria, went through all of the steps that Huzaifa has elucidated for us, the training camps, graduating to actually carrying out real executions, and then were sent on a mission to attack Europe. Greece says this man arrived on its shores claiming to be a refugee.

Coming back through Turkey to Greece, Greece into Eastern Europe. They traveled the same refugee route as thousands of people from war-torn countries. They then went to Belgium and they spent several months in safe houses there where they collected the equipment that they needed. The explosives used in the Paris attacks require an experienced bomb maker. They built the bombs that they were going to use in their suicide belts. They collected the automatic weapons that they were going to use. And then, November 13th, 2015, they set out in three units.

One hit the Stade de France. Another one. At around the same time, in central Paris, gunmen began opening fire on diners, in cafes and restaurants. Shooting as many people as they could before blowing themselves up. And the final group. The worst of the carnage happened at the Bataclan Theater. Went inside the Bataclan concert hall and carried out the carnage there. And you're saying that each step, transportation, safe housing.

Yeah, communication to transportation, to the location of safe houses, to the tactics that they were going to use, to the formations they were going to go in, to the assignments they had that night. We believe that it was this unit inside ISIS that organized all of that. They said they had a lot of people coming in. Europe was a piece of cake to send people back. And he's there with them. French embassy was giving away passports to these guys, like water. Yeah, that's what they said that it's easy.

And at this point, they tell them that they're all set for France. Europe in general, they're doing well. The work is just getting you to North America. That's where we need people going back. We need North Americans going back. And then at that point, the presenter turns to the North Americans in the room. And they say... They had an envisionment for something as spectacular as 9-11.

They want to outdo Al-Qaeda, make their mark. That they have something specific and spectacular that they want to do in this region. They were just telling us examples, showing us examples of how these things could be carried out. When it comes to the details of the attack, he didn't have them. And that's because he said this was an informational meeting

where the purpose was to teach them how such an attack could be carried out. And to do that, they started to show them pictures of monuments. They gave us ideas of where we could get into restricted areas. There's color coding. There's graphics. One green line would be going in, red line would be going out. They would map out possible escape routes and routes to get there.

There's descriptions of tactics. And what they are for us who aren't familiar with it. And there's a lot of talk and brainstorming about targets. And then they would tell us the type of attacks we can do. Doing shooting attacks. Concerts, schools. Cyber attacks. And the thing that they consider to be the cream of the cream.

They prefer martyrdom. Is where the person goes in, does as much killing as they can, and then is killed in a standoff with police. Martyrdom is the highest level you can attain. And for them, it's the most honorable thing you can do. How were you feeling hearing all this? I didn't like it. I didn't like the fact that we're going into their land and killing them. In my mind, the Khilafat was something that

should be regional. Why interfere with all these other countries? I didn't like the fact that we're sacrificing fighters. Why don't we just keep our vision here? Rukmini, why don't they just focus on the state and build up the state the way Huzeyfa wants? Why attack the West? Okay, so you have to understand that ISIS is working on several different levels. Their first goal is what you just said. It's the establishment of an Islamic state. It's in their name.

So their goal is to create their own proto-state, their own nation, which happens to be headquartered in Iraq and Syria. But they don't plan to end there. The caliphate is supposed to spread to a number of major places. They're supposed to take over the city of Rome. They're supposed to take over Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. They're even supposed to take over Jerusalem. But there are some ISIS fighters that have gone even further, where their aim seems to be global domination. At one point, I even saw ISIS fanboys, as we call them, sympathizers, putting out a map of the world where they had the black flag of ISIS over every single country.

And one of the flags was, I remember, it was planted on Greenland. I remember thinking, wow, that's really bold, man, if you're going to take ISIS to Greenland. Attacking the non-believers in their territories is a collective duty. And this desire of theirs. Now we're talking about attacking them in their land. It comes down to prophecy. Rasulullah says the war between the Muslims and the Romans never ceased to exist. And who are the Romans?

The prophecy is that this end of times battle is set into motion after Roman troops set foot in a little place in Syria called Dabiq. When I say the Romans, I'm translating Ar-Rum. Now, Aulaki and their ideological leaders... Ar-Rum, in the Arabic sense, means European people. They explain that Rome, back then, back when the scripture was written, it actually meant Westerner. So it's not limited to a political entity or geographical entity. Therefore, Europe and its extensions would fall under Ar-Rum.

The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, they are going to be your opponent and your enemy as long as you're living on the face of the earth. So they're looking for this clash with Western civilization. Jihad is a mandatory call. And they're looking for ways to incite it. Till none remains in the world but a Muslim, or one who has submitted to Muslims. or one who has submitted to Muslims. How long did the seminar go on for?

Like three hours, around. Three hours, and then they bus you back? No, three hours, and we just slept. And we had rooms, houses given to us, in groups of 20s. We'd stay the night there, and then we'd be back in Manbij. And most of the guys that were there were kind of like me.

They hadn't been on the front. Had not been. Had not been on the front. So when you went back after the three-hour presentation and you go back to sleep, what was the conversation like? It was like, I guess, regular guy stuff. We'd just talk about, except that would be the overshadow of the conversation would be what we just heard. So he tells us that he leaves this meeting.

And in his telling of it, he's feeling uncomfortable with what has happened. I was against it, but I just kept quiet as a listener type of thing. But in the next beat, he then describes how he and his buds go back to their dorm. Me and some guys, we'd just be talking about these big landmarks in the world and okay, how cool would it be? You're talking about major landmarks to blow up? Yeah, to attack, to blow up. And they just started fantasizing about... I talked about like NSA and'd talk about the White House. Blowing up the White House, carrying out the next 9-11,

attacking a senator's office. Even the monument. I'd even talk about, like, candidates, cabinet members or senators type of thing. And we were just, like, daydreaming, kind of. And they're talking about it in this kind of giddy, fantasy kind of way. Scenes of carnage at six different locations across Paris. But remember, it is this very group that has shown us time and again that they can turn these fantasies into reality.

Deadly explosions at a packed sports stadium, machine guns at a rock concert. He appears to have followed from almost exactly to AT the instructions that ISIS has put out. Police say as many as 40 hostages are still being held inside a restaurant. The ISIS-affiliated news agency is reporting that these gunmen are Islamic State commandos. ISIS set up an intricate logistical support system for these terrorist cells throughout Europe. Today, officials disclosed he had been planning an attack for nearly a year. For the next couple months, you'll be hearing Caliphate unfold on the daily every Saturday,

with Chapter 5 coming next Saturday, May 19th. We're also releasing Caliphate as a standalone series, and we're publishing new episodes on Thursday afternoons, two days before you'll hear them on the daily. So if you want to listen early, you can subscribe to the series by searching for Caliphate on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen. And for Time subscribers, we're making episodes available a full week early. So if you're a subscriber, Chapter 5 is available right now at nytimes.com slash caliphate. That's nytimes.com slash c-a-l-i-p-h-a-t-e.

If you've been looking for a reason to subscribe, now might be a good time.