The Daily - The Daily Presents “Caliphate,” Chapter 8

Episode Date: June 9, 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 8 of “Caliphate,” in which Rukmini finds a trove of secret documents that lead her to the mother of an ISIS official. 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. Um, can I get you to tell us what day it is and what we're up to? It's Sunday, July 9th. We slept in what appears to be an abandoned villa here on the outskirts of western Mosul as we wait for our in-bed with the counterterrorism division of the Iraqi security force. with the counter-terrorism division of the Iraqi security force.

And we were supposed to take off at 8. We're now sitting in the armored car that they provided for us, but the armored car is not turning on. And so we have a gaggle of men that are pouring over the hood, trying to figure out how to get this car started. There's a rumor that it may just be out of gas. There's a rumor that it just may be out of gas. Great. Great. Look, is it just out of diesel?

Chapter 8, The Briefcase. Eventually, after several hours, we get a working car. Time to go? So we suit up. We put on our flak jackets, we put on our helmets. I've got several trash bags. It's me and you again, huh? — Of course. — We're with the elite counterterrorism force of the Iraqi army.

We have their permission to go and collect documents. — What's the plan? — This is very dangerous. — And we've told them that we're specifically trying to get to one building. — The airstrike's still there, and there's a risk of the snipers as well. But it's unclear if it's going to be safe enough to go there. So there's a sniper risk, and they're planning an airstrike?

Yes. In fact, they've warned us that we're driving into an active war zone. So are we now inside Mosul? No, this is Mosul. This is western Mosul. This is the main road leading from Mosul to Baghdad. There's huge chunks missing on the road. Are those airstrikes?

Yeah. They're all airstrikes or VBATs. Hawk, could you describe what you see? You're shaking your head. What do you mean? Yeah. I mean, yeah. I'm speechless. As you can see, it's like just cars that was left of to be known as cars and debris and rubble everywhere.

I can't tell where I am right now. This is my city. I don't know where I'm at now. This is my city. I don't know where I'm at. You don't even recognize it? No. It's not recognizable. We got into the city. I think I'm going to go out as well. Okay, so we'll get out.

We got out of the car. I think I'm going to go out as well. Okay, so we'll get out. We got out of the car. Yeah. What do you see? So we're parked on a narrow street in western Mosul. The houses all around us have been destroyed. The windows have been blasted out. Coils of rebar.

The gates and windows of the shops are warped from whatever blast they experienced. We just opened the doors to the car and immediately you could smell the stench of dead bodies. We can't see them, but you can smell them. So next we went to, I don't even know how to describe it. It's kind of like a makeshift base. Basically the closest military position to where we were trying to go. And inside there were all of these young military men? They were actually all from the CTS,

the Counterterrorism Service. Right. And they're the people that we're embedded with, so they invited us in. And you started talking with some of them? Yeah. Send Khadim in his rank, please. The commanders all have the same sort of phone

and sort of iPad that has a map. Where is ISIS? That's ISIS. This thing. Hang on, of iPad that has a map. Where is ISIS? That's ISIS. This thing. That shows in great detail where the friendly forces are and where ISIS is. So this is where we are? So the building we were aiming for was actually a church. This is the place that I knew had been the headquarters of the Hizb.

The religious police, the same unit that Huzaifa used to be a member of. And the Hizb building? And... The Hizb building is right here. It's at that point... This one. You see? ...that Hawk recognized the scenery, and he went, oh, my God, we're actually here. Have these buildings been cleared? No, it's all clear.

So the officer who was in charge of this forward base... Did he say that he's going to try to find us something? He's going to try to find us an escort to go to the Hizb ut-Balad. Yes. He assigned a couple of Iraqi soldiers to escort us as we were going to go into these buildings to look for documents. If I speak about meters, it would be like 400 to 500 meters. It would have been, I think, a couple of minutes walking

if there was a road. They're walking in each other's footsteps, just like they were trained. But we had to clamber over all of this rubble. Manny and Hawk and I climbing over what looks like used to be a taxi. We were walking on top of doorways, poking through windows, curving around the pillars of homes that had buckled. Rukmini's now climbing over pieces of what was once a tin roof, I believe.

Hey, Smoke, you see this? Holy shit. So on this walk that we took towards the church, it became very apparent just how close we were in proximity to the front lines. I mean, in a way, hearing those sounds was reassuring to me because it just signaled that we were where we needed to be. What are you doing right now? I'm trying to get out some trash bags.

We're about to go into the building. Finally, we got to the church. Could you just tell me real quick before we walk in what sort of things you're hoping to find? We know that they kept careful, very detailed and meticulous records of the people they arrested and the Sharia punishments that they meted out against them. And obviously that would just be the gold mine if we're able to find that. The second we walked in, even though it was destroyed,

I knew right away that this had been an ISIS base. This is the ISIS weekly newsletter. They had graffitied the pillars and other walls with the word Baqiyah. What does that mean? Baqiyah wa tatamadat, which means remaining and expanding. And this is their slogan. This is, think of it as ISIS forever. Bunch of computers, hard drives yanked out.

We found... Well, this way, just to warn you, there's a couple of dead ISIS. They're right in the door, and they're rotten. We found two bodies that the Iraqi military said were dead ISIS fighters. Yeah, to get past them, we're going to have to walk over their bodies. Seriously walk over them? Yeah. I mean, I hate to sound clinical about this,

but to me it was one more confirmation that we're in the right place. This is a place that ISIS fighters were in, that they protected, and that they died for. So, searching for documents, what's the first thing that you're looking for? So I'm looking for the areas that are related to papers. I'm looking for furniture, desks, filing cabinets, shelves, closets. I'm looking on the floors.

Hey, Hawk. I wanted to ask Major Hassan if it's possible to pick up that backpack that's over there. We saw a pink backpack. Is it possible to pick up that backpack that's over there? We saw a pink backpack. Is it safe? It's a pink bag that has a kitten on it, and it's filled with C4, which is the explosive that they use in their homemade rockets. The backpack is still... Don't bring it over. In that same area, there were shell casings, remnants of weaponry.

Off to the side, there was a hole in the ground that looked like it was a tunnel. We know that ISIS uses tunnels as a way to go underneath a building and come out into another one so that they avoid detection from the air. Hawk has found an old sword. And we found one of the swords that they used for executions, right?

This sword used to behead people. Yes? We were actually able to pick it up and hold it. Now it's not. That was a surreal feeling. Yeah. Rukmini, can you describe what you're doing? I'm looking at a notebook here.

I'm wondering if I have the courage to pick it up. And then we started to find the remnants of their documents. And you, on the ground, you picked up a torn piece of paper. It was from the letterhead of the Hizb. I don't see anything with me. We found... We saw folders in there. Several binders.

That were labeled the one on Hizb, which means the Ministry of the Religious Police. And this stamp that you found says the same thing. This is the stamp. On their spine, the binders had the logo of the Hizb. So... They weren't the right place, but it's been searched. But the binders were empty logo of the Hizb ut- So- They weren't the right place to have been searched. But the binders were empty. Where are we going?

What this place looked like was the scene of a crime that had already been searched. I don't know who searched it before us. Did ISIS come through here and take away all of these records because they knew that they would reveal the accounting of the various war crimes they committed? Was it another security force that was here before the one that we were with? But no matter what, the records that I was looking for, they were gone. Still gunfire. It's definitely a foreigner.

And at a certain point, people were starting to feel nervous about how much time we had spent in this area, that we had exposed ourselves for too long. I could go. Saying I could go. I was definitely one of those people who was feeling nervous. So we began to walk back, and two of our colleagues have already walked off and you and I and

Hawk are walking in a smaller little group a little bit further behind and suddenly Hawk calls out because he recognized that off to the side of the church, I hadn't even noticed it, there was a cluster of buildings and he recognized them because he had worked as a translator for American forces. He was outed by a neighbor, and he was hauled off to see one of the Qadis, the religious judge in this building, who threw him in jail for basically, I think, a night. So the desk was here.

As I entered, there was a desk. There was another cushion here. And so we managed to make our way through, you know, the debris there. And we entered the room. That's what he wears. He used to wear this. This is the judge's robe. He put like a gown over his head. And the Qadi's robes were still hanging.

The robe that he was wearing when he was judging people like Haq. Haq remembers sitting in that very chair. You wrote my name on the laptop. If the laptop is still here, I would have seen, you would have seen my name. We go through his desk. We see that the drawers have already been pulled out. And Hawk just took off and ended up going

into kind of the next set of rooms and the next set of rooms. How many more buildings do you want to look at? And suddenly, he came walking out wow look at this with a briefcase. He was patting it down to try to get the dust off of it and he unzipped the main zipper and suddenly I saw IDs, financial reports, receipts, and I recognized very quickly the Islamic State logo on those papers. Just enough to realize that this was something really significant. I remember this moment because it actually was so hot and we had been out in the sun for so long that the cable on my microphone was melting.

The microphone was going in and out and I was fidgeting with it as you guys were over there talking. And then it was in this moment that the New York Times push alert came through. The New York Times just said the Iraqi government claimed that Mosul has been taken. Saying that the Iraqi government was claiming victory in Mosul. Right. Can you just explain what you're doing as you do it? So we're putting a towel down because there's going to be a lot of crap that is in this trash bag of stuff that we're bringing out. It's really dirty. Okay, so you and Hawk and I, we get back to our hotel in a safe part of Iraq. I need you guys to take off your shoes. We grab one of the garbage bags

with some of the stuff that we've gotten in Mosul, including this briefcase. Right. Can you just walk me through, like, what are the steps that you take next? Sure. So we put on surgical gloves. Thanks, man.

And we empty out the contents of the garbage bag. Oh, God, it smells bad. How would you describe that smell? How would you describe it? It's like what you would smell if you were in an airstrike and a building was falling around you. And we start making piles. Okay, we're going to make a pile of important and unimportant, okay?

What we're seeing right away is... I think this must be the zakat that this person's paying. Okay, we're going to make a pile of important and unimportant, okay? What we're seeing right away is... I think this must be the zakat that this person's paying. Yeah. Important. There are books of receipts. Good guys. There are financial reports. They are so honest.

Yeah. They're taking receipts, motherfuckers. There are memos. This is some notes. Ooh, how exciting. There are letters on ISIS stationery between different ministries of ISIS. And this is like Attorney General. Having detailed discussions about aspects of the economy.

This is very new. This is basically evidence of a bunch of departments I didn't know existed. There are people's IDs. Keys. I have so many ISIS keys. There are CD-ROMs. And eventually everything that we have is going to be translated, and the best part is going to be sent to specialists who are going to help us mine every bit of the information we have gotten. Can you tell me how you feel right now?

I'm feeling really excited. I'm feeling, like, giddy, you know? I will admit that I have never felt more like a detective finding clues. Like on ISIS CSI, right? You know, when I'm holding these documents, the thing that's never far from my mind is that if we hadn't retrieved these very papers from the rubble, they very likely would have been destroyed and would have been lost forever. I'm sorry to slow you down, but will you just describe what the bag looks like? So it's a black laptop bag. So when it comes to the briefcase specifically, what made it so special? Each pocket at a time.

So the documents we're pulling out of the briefcase... He's like some kind of accountant or something. ...help confirm and flesh out the reporting I've already been doing up until this point. How can you just describe how it looks? It looks really organized. I mean, this is like Excel, Excel kind of worksheet, spreadsheet. And that is that ISIS is a self-sustaining organism when it comes to its own finances. Much like the United States makes money from a million different sources, so too ISIS had a diversified portfolio. They were making money from the fields that they taxed, from the seeds

that they sold to people, from the flour that went to mills, from the traders who were being taxed as they were moving flour from one city to another, and from the merchants who stocked those commodities who had to pay income taxes once a year. And why is that specifically important to know? So one of the major ways that America and European governments tried to combat terrorism since 9-11 was to try to starve these groups of cash. In the early years of Al-Qaeda, the way they did this is they would look for their external donors and they would freeze their bank accounts. But there are no major donors in the ecosystem that is ISIS because the group is self-financed. There's no bank

account in Saudi Arabia that you can freeze that would have any meaningful impact on the ledger of the Islamic State. There's not even a single source of weapons that you can cut off because according to one of the other documents we found in the briefcase... The Faculty of Military Manufacturing and Development. Oh my God. Oh my God, this is amazing. They had a division inside of their military that was dedicated to the manufacturing of weaponry. I'm kissing this piece of paper. I'm kissing this piece of paper.

The piece of paper that Hawk will only touch with gloves you just kissed. Okay, we're going to create a very important pile. We're going to put that. Yeah, so basically this is indicating that within the Islamic State, there's a unit that is dedicated to manufacturing and developing weaponry.

We've assumed that this is there because they're doing them in such a uniform fashion. But this is it, finally, you know? This is a group that was hell-bent on being independent, on being self-sufficient, on relying on no one. This guy, the owner of this bag. And in this briefcase. Some guy, some head guy, some big guy, big shot. We found transactions totaling $19 million.

We actually took the time to add up the receipts and invoices that we found inside, and that's what we came up with. $19 million, right? So we knew that whoever owned this briefcase had to be important. Like a high-up, like a general or something like that. Not a general. A bureaucrat. General or something like that. Not a general, a bureaucrat. So unlike the United States, which went into Iraq in 2003 and immediately dissolved the Ba'athist state of Saddam Hussein,

and essentially threw all of these people, these administrators, into unemployment and created the conditions that eventually led to the rise of terror groups in Iraq. ISIS did the exact opposite. They came to Mosul and they built their state on the back of the one that already existed. And so the civil servants who had worked in the Ministry of Agriculture and the Department of Sanitation and the Electricity Division, they kept doing the same job that they had done before. To Brother Abu Haq, sorry, this guy. So we know that whoever it was who owned this briefcase, they worked as a bureaucrat. That's right.

And beyond that, what we're able to figure out from looking at the papers. See, it's all the same name. Is that the person's name is Abu Dura. We're seeing paper after paper signed with this name. But that doesn't actually help us identify who this human being is because Abu Dura is a codename. It's a kunya, it's a nondegar. And the whole purpose of having a kunya is to hide the identity of the person who's using it. But in the briefcase, in one of the folds of the briefcase, we pulled out a color Xerox of an ID belonging to a man named Yasser Issa. You see his picture.

It's a man with a receding hairline, with a bulbous nose, bushy eyebrows, and kind of a Saddam Hussein-style mustache. And we then pull out the marriage certificate of Yasser Issa. Important. I'm putting this in important. But finally, the document that we pull out that seals the deal is Yasser Issa's pledge of allegiance to ISIS. I'm going to put that in important. We see that in 2014, not long after Mosul fell,

in Mosul, he pledges allegiance to the Islamic State. It has his full name, and it says that his kunya, or his nondegar, is Abu Jara. So we now know, Yasser Issa is Abu Jara.

Okay? And Abu Jara is the administrator of the trade division. So now you know his job title. Now we know his job title. You've got his merit. So you've got his real name. We've got his real name. You know his wife's name. you know his job title. Oh, now we know his job title. You've got his merit. So you've got his real name. We've got his real name.

You know his wife's name. We know his wife's name. You know his title. Hang on, let's put that. Maybe we can find this guy. Okay. What do you do next? Right.

So now that we have all this information, we're looking for somebody who might have interacted with him. And in the briefcase, we found a whole bunch of documents from local mills in northern Iraq, and especially from the Mosul area. And so Haq and I ended up driving from mill to mill, trying to find people who might remember a man named Abu Jarrah.

And the employees of the mills and the silos and the granaries, the very people who had dealt with ISIS leadership, they recognized his name. And they knew him specifically as one of ISIS's money men. He was a person who was deputed by ISIS to come and collect cash. They said he was very taciturn, really kind of just business as always.

And one of the people who interacted the most with him, he said... Oh, a laptop. A solar laptop. A laptop? A laptop and a briefcase. Amazing. He always had a black laptop briefcase with him. So on his ID, there's a couple of clues that led us to be able to identify his address. It lists the name of his parents, his mother and his father.

And crucially, it lists his tribal affiliation. He's from the Al-Aswadi tribe, which is an important tribe from central Iraq. Al-Aswadi tribe, which is an important tribe from central Iraq. Using those clues, we were able, through our colleagues in the Baghdad Bureau, to track down his family in a suburb of Samarra. So this was after I'd already flown back to the States, when you and Hawk and our bureau manager, Abumallek, you guys actually went to the house of the owner of the briefcase. Right.

He used to what? He used to do it? So we walk in and first of all, it had all of the trappings of this aristocratic house. of the trappings of this aristocratic house. It's enormous high ceilings, chandelier in every single room, beautiful tapestries in this enormous, like, banquet hall sort of space. He said what? He said that's the guy. Who's there?

Saad Issa Hassan Ali Al-Azwar. And he's the older brother or younger? It's the family of the owner of the briefcase. It's his uncle, it's his brothers, it's several of his cousins. Basically a lot of men. And they immediately begin playing on that. They raise their voices. They're angry at our suggestion that Abu Jarrah was a member of ISIS.

And they say to us, how can this even be possible? This is the scion of an important family. He had all of his needs taken care of. He had no need for money. Why is it you think they would be pointing to their money in this way? There's almost an accepted hypothesis. I would call it a cliche or even a meme that members of ISIS have joined for material gain. They did it for the money.

They were poor, they were shepherds, they were these kind of hapless people who had no other outlet and the big bad terrorist group comes along and basically buys them off. I have found that that hypothesis is mostly hollow and if you dig

even slightly below the surface, you'll find that people that joined did so because they had some ideological affinity for them. And he was employed by the directorate of the agriculture here in Samarab Samarab. Up to this point, they don't know that I have the records in my backpack showing exactly how Abu Jarrah joined this terror group. exactly how Abu Jarrah joined this terror group. And as I mentioned that, they begin to tell us a story that goes, I think, a long way to explaining why this young man

would have joined the Islamic State. The family describes to us that soon after the U.S. invasion in 2003, in the middle of the night, their door was beaten down by U.S. soldiers who came in with their muddy boots and dragged the elderly patriarch of the family, Abu Jarrah's grandfather, out of his bedroom and took him away to be questioned because of an IED that had gone

off on a nearby road. You're saying that they blamed him for masterminding it or something? They blamed the grandfather for having planted a landmine that took the lives of several U.S. Marines. As it turned out, he must not have been guilty because the family told us that he was released the next day. This is a wealthy, affluent family that is used to people kowtowing to them, that is used to people taking their shoes off when they come in, that is used to people kowtowing to them, that is used to people taking their shoes off when they come in, that is used to getting flattered, you know, getting gifts, getting talked to in a polite way. And this was an incredibly humiliating incident. And one of the details that stuck with the family that they told me about is the grandfather was actually an invalid. He walked with crutches. And when the

soldiers came in, they screamed at him to, you know, to follow them. He didn't understand what was going on. And as it was, he couldn't walk. And so they grabbed him by his arms and literally pulled him down the stairs and then up the driveway. The family remembers his feet bobbing and hitting the stairs as it was going down. And then seeing him dragged through the dirt up their inclined driveway as neighbors came out to gawk. Was Yasser a small boy when this happened? It was bad enough that the American commander in the area came and apologized to the family. And we got that account not just from the family, but also from the police station up the street.

So, at a certain point, we hear a woman's voice from the hallway. And it's explained to me that this is the mother of Abu Dhur.

She's very curious about what's happening because she understands that we're talking about her son. But because this is a conservative family, she did not feel that it was appropriate for her to join us. But she has her ear to the door and hears something that upsets her and suddenly she's yelling through the door. She's upset because she thinks we're accusing him. So what we did is Abu Malik invited the mother

to come with me and with him and Haq to a table that was essentially at the other end of this cavernous parlor. I've come all this way, not because I want to taint her son, but because I want to try to get the truth. Please tell her that, son. And we sat across from her

at this beautiful teak table covered in lace. I remember that there was a crystal bowl in the middle. And one by one, we started pulling out the documents. And then she started hitting her own face with her palm.

It's okay. It's okay. And then very soon after that, she started weeping. This is not how I brought him up. I know. I was scared. I was scared. I was scared that someone would come and wash the children. And they are criminals. I swear to God, I know them. I was afraid.

I was afraid that one of the people would wash his brain. And that was it. I was scared of my friend. of the people will wash his brain. And that was happening. I was afraid from the bad friends. She had concerns about the people he was hanging out with when ISIS took over. Before he left in 2014, did he show any extremist tendencies? And then the second thing she said is,

of all of my sons, he is the one who took the humiliation of his grandfather the worst. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell her, I cover ISIS. I don't know how many mothers I have spoken to, okay? Tell her it's not her fault, okay? Yeah.

And here is where you see the catch-22 of using military power to try to address terrorism. We know that the U.S. invasion created Abu Jarrah, created people like this young man who were humiliated, who were angry, and who turned that anger into affiliation with this terror group. And it's because of that very phenomenon that the Obama administration put off the eventual intervention

that only reached Mosul in the fall of 2016 because they wanted local forces to lead the fight. They didn't want to have U.S. troops on the ground, fearing that this would just perpetuate the cycle. But if you don't use military might, what you have is the rise of Mosul. So both avenues in different ways can lead to... The further spawning of this group. Right. The world is divided into the interventionist camp

and the pacifist camp. And what I have seen through my reporting is the intervention leads to the Abu Jarrahs. The non-intervention, leaving the Syrian civil war to drag on for years, leads to Abu Huzaifahs. So, where is Abu Jarrah now? I don't know.

I repeatedly asked the family where he is. And although they were very clear in saying that they knew that he's still alive, which led me to think that they must be talking to him, they were incredibly vague about his whereabouts now, going so far as to say that they have no contact with him, they're not sure where he's at, etc. I mean, for all I know, he could have been upstairs the whole time that we were talking. I mean, regardless of whether or not he really was upstairs, what we do know is that thousands of members, thousands, have managed to escape.

They shaved off their beards, they cut off their hair, they changed their clothes, they slipped into refugee camps, they managed to get back into Europe. And they're out there. But what we also know is that some of them were captured. Why are they tying his wrists? If you don't feel comfortable with them Do you think that's necessary, Huck? Yes For the next few weeks, you'll be hearing Caliphate unfold on The Daily every Saturday.

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

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.