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NY Times, June 17 2015
Offering Services, ISIS Digs In Deeper in Seized Territories
By BEN HUBBARD
ERBIL, Iraq — In northern Syria, the jihadists of the Islamic State have
fixed power lines, dug sewage systems and painted sidewalks. In Raqqa,
they search markets and slaughterhouses for expired food and sick
animals. Farther south, in Deir al-Zour, they have imposed taxes on
farmers and shopkeepers and fined men for wearing short beards.
The group runs regular buses across the border with Iraq to Mosul, where
it publicly kills captives and trains children for guerrilla war. Last
month, it reopened a luxury hotel in the city and offered three free
nights to newlyweds, meals included.
A year after the Islamic State seized Mosul, and 10 months after the
United States and its allies began a campaign of airstrikes against it,
the jihadist group continues to dig in, stitching itself deeper into the
fabric of the communities it controls.
In vast areas of Syria and Iraq with shattered ties to national
governments, the jihadists have worked to fill the void, according to
interviews with residents from areas in Syria and Iraq ruled by the
Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The group is offering
reliable, if harsh, security; providing jobs in decimated economies; and
projecting a rare sense of order in a region overwhelmed by conflict.
With no political solutions in sight for the wars that have allowed the
group to thrive, little has prevented the jihadists from deepening their
roots in ways that will make them even harder to dislodge.
“As a way of life, people got used to it,” said a laborer from Raqqa who
had earned good money painting the group’s new offices in the city.
If you followed the rules, the jihadists left you alone, he said,
although he wished life were more peaceful.
“It is not our life, all the violence and fighting and death,” he said,
speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others from areas run by
the Islamic State, so as not to anger the jihadists. “But they got rid
of the tyranny of the Arab rulers.”
In the process, the Islamic State’s administration has ballooned. The
group has issued declarations banning dynamite fishing and Apple
products, pressuring teachers to work in its schools, offering rewards
for the killing of Jordanian fighter pilots and advising wounded
residents not to travel to Turkey for prosthetic limbs because the
Islamic State now makes them at home, according to jihadist documents
compiled by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
The Islamic State’s territory now stretches across hundreds of miles,
from the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria into central Iraq, where it shares
a volatile border with the Kurds in the north and approaches Baghdad in
the south. Much of that area is sparsely populated desert, but the group
has millions of people under its charge, as well as archaeological
sites, a hydroelectric dam and oil fields that help finance its operations.
The Islamic State differs from jihadist groups like Al Qaeda in its
drive to establish a Sunni Muslim state governed by an extreme version
of Islam.
Its method of seizing territory seeks to lay the groundwork for this by
prompting a “geographic cleansing,” according to Hassan Abu Hanieh, a
Jordanian expert on Islamist groups. Enemies — like government soldiers,
the police and those who do not fit in, such as minorities or elites —
flee or are killed. What remains are mostly Sunni Arabs who try to
continue their lives with little disruption.
The Islamic State works to co-opt them through the “management of
chaos,” providing services otherwise lacking in wartime, Mr. Abu Hanieh
said. “People may not be with the organization’s ideology, but the group
has been able to give some stability, punish thieves and put in place a
legal system,” he said. “In general, the normal people want no more than
that.”
Many residents have become dependent on the Islamic State’s services,
Mr. Tamimi said.
“The end effect of this is that the Islamic State entrenches itself and
becomes very difficult to get rid of,” he said. “Are you going to bomb
the schools in the towns they run and deny the people access to any
education whatsoever?”
To enhance their staying power, the jihadists have focused on children,
revamping curriculums and indoctrinating teachers.
Islamic State propaganda videos released online often show children
planting bombs to kill Iraqi security forces, cheering for Islamic State
convoys and watching executions. One recent video showed young boys in
black masks learning to fight, do an army crawl and carry out ambushes
with automatic weapons.
“The biggest threat we have is that the children have a new curriculum
that is very extremist,” said a Kurdish security official who monitors
the Islamic State from northern Iraq. “This is a ticking time bomb for
the future.”
One former real estate agent said that even though he hated the
jihadists, he had managed to survive the changes in Raqqa. He tore the
stereo out of his car so the jihadists could not accuse him of listening
to forbidden music, but he still does so at home, quietly. He buys
cigarettes from smugglers who sell only to people they know, since
jihadists punish smoking as a crime.
“This is like heroin for them,” the real estate agent said, enjoying a
pack during a recent trip to Turkey.
He does not criticize the jihadists at home for fear that his 8-year-old
son will repeat what he says in public, endangering the family. But his
son hears things elsewhere, he said, “and now sometimes I hear him
defending ISIS.”
Some adults said living under the Islamic State had changed their views.
“If you had asked me before the revolution, I would have said I wanted
to be the richest person, with houses and cars,” another Raqqa resident
said. “But after we sat with their religious teachers, we changed our
way of thinking.”
He was considering whether to join the group, he said, and knew he would
marry and raise his children in Raqqa so they could learn “the true
religion.”
The dynamics of Islamic State rule differ from place to place. In Mosul,
food is plentiful, but the jihadists restrict people who try to leave
the city, making relatives vouch for them and arresting the family
members if the travelers do not return.
Life is easier in Raqqa, where residents regularly cross the Turkish
border, returning with goods and cash earned outside.
Locals suffer more around Deir al-Zour, where the Islamic State fought
for nearly a year to subdue local tribes and rebel groups in battles
that killed more than 1,000 people.
Bad blood from the fighting persists, and Islamic State fighters are
still ambushed regularly, activists said. The Islamic State has
responded with public executions and heavy taxes on harvests, phone
lines, water and electricity.
“Their policy is to make people hungry while they pay their fighters so
that becoming one of them is the only way to live and eat,” one activist
said.
An activist with the group DeirEzzor24 said one of his cousins had
joined the Islamic State, earning $100 per month, plus $100 for his
parents and $40 each for his siblings, a strategy aimed at winning over
the whole family.
In an audio message released last month, the leader of the Islamic
State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, renewed his call for Muslims to join the
group. He said those outside it were “homeless” and “humiliated,” while
Islamic State residents lived “with might and honor, secure by God’s
bounty alone.”
Residents of Islamic State areas did not describe easy lives, but some
wanted the jihadists to stay, reflecting the deep political failures in
their countries.
Many now living under the Islamic State in Syria suffered under both
President Bashar al-Assad and the rebels who chased out his forces,
leaving them with no alternative to the jihadists.
And many Sunnis in Iraq trust the Islamic State more than the Shiite-led
government in Baghdad and the militias it has used to fight the jihadists.
“Now there is more security and freedom, no arrests, no harassment, no
concrete barriers and no checkpoints where we used to spend hours to get
into the city,” said Mohamed al-Dulaimi of the jihadist-controlled city
of Falluja, Iraq.
“What will happen if the militias enter Falluja?” he asked. “We will
take our guns and fight them, not because we are ISIS, but because the
militias will kill us all.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon; Karam Shoumali
from Istanbul; and Omar Al-Jawoshy from Baghdad.
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