This second phase was the “mainstreaming” of al-Qaeda’s cause within the Muslim world. The terrorist organization becomes a broader ideological movement, the vanguard for a political effort to reawaken millions of followers of Islam and return them to the foundations of their faith. This phase is primarily accomplished through propaganda broadcasts around the world and with tactical battlefield victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq in particular, which the United States invades in March 2003, is to become “the center for all global operations, with an army set up there and bases established in other Arabic states.”
More and more Muslims are recruited to join the cause, and other like-minded terrorist organizations pledge bayat, or allegiance, to bin Laden.
• Phase III: Arising and Standing Up (2007–2010)
The fight expands from Iraq and the assault begins on neighboring Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Israel, where secular and anti-Islamic governments reign. Special priority would be placed on Syria, Hussein reported.
• Phase IV: Collapse (2010–2013)
Revolution begins to sweep the Middle East, and the infidel governments, such as Egypt’s, begin to fall. These hated regimes are to be swept away by popular revolts.
“The creeping loss of the regimes’ power will lead to a steady growth in strength within al-Qaida,” wrote Hussein. Attacks continue against the United States, with a special emphasis on cyberattacks to target America’s economic might.
• Phase V: Caliphate (2013–2016)
An Islamic state will be formally declared. The West will begin to lose much of its will to fight, allowing al-Qaeda and its allies to re-create the Caliphate for the first time in nine decades. Because Western resistance is so limited, the Caliphate will grow over time in strength and territory. It is the first step in replacing the world order of sovereign nation-states with a new world order divided between the Caliphate and Muslim community of believers (dar al-Islam) and the unbelievers (dar al-harb), or house of war.
• Phase VI: Total Confrontation (2016–2019)
The shocking rise of the Caliphate will “instigate the fight between the believers and non-believers.” This, in the terrorists’ view, will be the West’s final, dying breath to confront the growing Islamic armies. The West will muster all of its technological capabilities and advantages to destroy the Caliphate and the many thousands of Muslims who have volunteered to fight on its behalf.
• Phase VII: Definitive Victory (2020)
The Caliphate will triumph over the West. The stunning victory will convince the many millions of Muslims who had remained on the fence to join the Islamic state. One and a half billion Muslims strong, the Caliphate will be the world’s lone superpower.
Does this all sound absurd? Well, consider that, as of 2015, a decade after the plan was first published by Hussein, the first five phases have been right on schedule.
Phases I and II: The Invasion of Iraq and the Management of Savagery
Al-Qaeda believes that they successfully induced America to invade Iraq in 2003, an event they used to their full advantage to sap the morale, resources, and lives of the most powerful nation of the world. The Iraq War also conveniently removed the major counterweight to the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein. Toppling Saddam set off a wave of events and instability that gave rise to the Caliphate, which currently calls the western half of Iraq home.
Al-Qaeda’s leadership has long believed that the road to a Caliphate runs through Baghdad. In 2003, Iraq became a training ground for al-Qaeda and ground zero for the newly forming alliances between the leadership of the terrorist group in Pakistan (Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) and a particularly psychopathic recruit, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had traveled to Baghdad after fleeing U.S. bombing in Afghanistan in 2001. Zarqawi founded al-Qaeda in Iraq and began a merciless campaign against U.S. forces and America’s Iraqi Shia allies.
In 2005, Zawahiri wrote a letter to Zarqawi with his marching orders: “The establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the prophet will not be achieved except through jihad against the apostate rulers and their removal.”
To do so, they believed, would require the unleashing of brutality not witnessed since the days of the Third Reich. In 2004, a book titled The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Ummah Will Pass, by Abu Bakr Naji, began circulating in jihadist circles. Western counterterrorism experts dubbed it “the Mein Kampf of jihad”—and for good reason: Naji served as the terrorists’ leading intellectual and moral compass.
The Management of Savagery advised al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers to create as much “savagery” and murder as possible so that the world descends into chaos. To Naji’s thinking, chaos would ensure that the colonial borders created by the Sykes-Picot Agreement would disappear as governments prove unable to control their populations and impose their secular, ungodly laws. Rebellions would take place across the Muslim world, and no Western power, least of all the United States, would be able to do a thing about it. With continuous attacks bruising and bloodying the world’s superpower, America would lose its “aura of invincibility.”
In the chaos, Naji argued, a new Caliphate could emerge. “If we succeed in the management of this savagery, that stage—by the permission of God—will be a bridge to the Islamic state which has been awaited since the fall of the caliphate,” Naji wrote, a decade before the Islamic State officially was declared. “If we fail—we seek refuge with God from that—it does not mean an end of the matter. Rather, this failure will lead to an increase in savagery.”
Naji drew on the example of the first two caliphs after the death of Muhammad to justify his brutal tactics. They “burned (people) with fire, even though it is odious, because they knew the effect of rough violence in times of need.” The massacre of other Muslims was commonplace in the years after Muhammad’s death. “Dragging the masses into the battle requires more actions which will inflame opposition and which will make people enter into the battle, willing or unwilling. . . . We must make this battle very violent, such that death is a heartbeat away.”
In fact, according to Naji, there is mercy in all of this barbarism:
Some may be surprised when we say that the religious practice of jihad despite the blood, corpses, and limbs which encompass it and the killing and fighting which its practice entails is among the most blessed acts of worship for the servants. . . . Jihad is the most merciful of the methods for all created things and the most sparing of the spilling of blood.
The shocking violence of beheadings, crucifixions, and murder of women and children is anything but senseless. It is purposeful: necessary to strike fear and create a lasting psychological effect that the Caliphate is inevitable and its followers are willing to stop at nothing to impose it.
Zarqawi implemented Naji’s barbaric vision with ruthless efficiency. Before he became the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda as a whole was responsible for the deaths of around 3,200 people worldwide. In just two years, Zarqawi’s group was responsible for the deaths of twice that many people in Iraq alone.
Iraq is also where al-Qaeda transitioned from a small terrorist group into a broader social movement. With Zarqawi, and his senior lieutenant, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (who would go on to become the first caliph), the beginnings of what would become ISIS had formed.
Phases I and II were successfully completed, right on schedule.
Phases III and IV: Arab Spring, Arab Winter, and the Syrian Civil War
As Zarqawi and his followers forced Iraq into the depths of chaos, al-Qaeda’s strategy to stoke a global civil war that could lay the foundations for a new Caliphate began to take shape.
One ripe target was Egypt. Ever since the more extreme offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Egypt’s moderate president, Anwar Sadat, in 1981, they have kept their eye on the prize: the final takeover of the most populous and culturally significant nation in the Arab world. It took nearly a quarter of a century, but in 2011 unrest led to
the toppling of Egypt’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak. He was thrown into prison and the Muslim Brotherhood swept into power.
This was the culmination of what became known here in the West as “the Arab Spring.” In one telling of it, the Arab Spring began when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself ablaze to protest the lack of individual rights in his country. This allegedly led to a sweeping movement where some, but not all, protesters demanded democracy and political freedom. At the time, Barack Obama and neoconservatives alike heralded the triumph of freedom. What followed, they wanted us to believe, would be a mass democratic movement across the Middle East, the very embodiment of the human aspiration to be free.
That, of course, is not at all what happened. And this rosy view was not in any way representative of what was going on at the time.
What the Arab Spring was really about was the ascendance of Islamic supremacy, with Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood using the euphoria to take power. Calls for democracy are “just the train we board to reach our destination,” according to Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Democracy, at least where it’s been tried in Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and Egypt, has led only to the election of undemocratic strongmen and Islamist parties that see democracy as a temporary step toward sharia. The truth is that freedom has a different meaning for most Muslims in the Middle East than it does for the rest of us. In the Islamic tradition, freedom, or hurriyah, is freedom from man-made laws. “We want to free all people from being slaves of men and make them slaves to Allah,” explained Abu Abdullah, one of the leaders of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamist political party with thousands of members worldwide.
“Democracy” in the Islamic world, simply put, isn’t really democracy—it’s Islamic supremacy led by rulers, not representatives. Leaders of Islamic “democracies” are there to interpret and execute God’s law. As Middle Eastern historian Bernard Lewis wrote in 1954:
[T]he political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy. . . . [It] was authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law.
Islamism cannot coexist with freedom in any meaningful way. Votes may be held, and constitutions may be written, but societies that insist on a truly Islamic foundation for their political authority do not allow for straying from what’s demanded by the Quran and Hadith. As Egypt’s leading Muslim Brotherhood scholar, Sheikh Qaradawi, said, “Legislation belongs to God, and we only fill in the blanks.”
Put simply, there is the truth as revealed by Islam—and there is everything else. God’s truth necessarily suppresses free expression and free will, and gives way to a totalitarianism in which no democracy deserving of the name can function in a meaningful way. It’s little wonder why the “mass democratic uprisings” of the Arab Spring withered on the vine and now lie dormant in the bitter winter that has swept from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.
Al-Qaeda and its Sunni Islamist allies not only toppled the most important secular government in the region in Egypt; they also successfully provoked a civil war in Syria against dictator Bashar al-Assad, who belongs to the Alawite (non-Sunni) majority. Syria, as explained earlier, is home to Dabiq, a place viewed by many Muslims as the location of the final battle between the forces of Islam and the infidels. Just as important, it is the doorstep to toppling Jordan and Israel, one good reason why there was a “special focus” on Syria in Phase III of al-Qaeda’s twenty-year plan.
In 2011, Assad’s opposition was a hodgepodge that included some secularists and reformers who were quickly outgunned, killed, or sent into exile. Those who remained were the hard-core Salafist Islamist holdouts and al-Qaeda affiliates, many of whom were combat-hardened veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These groups were themselves divided, with various smaller groups, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and the Yarmouk Brigade, all vying for influence.
The Obama administration saw little danger in the growing menace. In September 2013, they came within days of providing al-Qaeda with the world’s most advanced air force before public and congressional outcry forced them to reverse course.
The Syrian Civil War had created a vacuum in which ISIS could recruit, train, and kill, almost at will. All they needed next was a government.
Phases III and IV were complete, right on schedule.
Phase V: The Black Flag of the Caliphate and the Merging of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State
Five months after President Obama referred to ISIS as the JV team, they established the Islamic State and a Caliphate, a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East. Its capital is al-Raqqa in eastern Syria. Week by week, the Islamic State has taken more and more territory with impunity.
We are now in the midst of witnessing the merging of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. As we’ve already seen, before there was an Islamic State, there was ISIS, and before there was ISIS there was al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch. The Obama administration would prefer to keep al-Qaeda separate from the Islamic State so they can continue to boast about how they have “decimated” the terrorist group that struck us on 9/11. They would have us believe that “core al-Qaeda,” a narrow and misleading term meant to limit the group to its current leader, the aging Ayman al-Zawahiri, and his immediate inner circle in Pakistan, has little impact anymore.
But this cheerful appraisal of the situation misses the point that al-Qaeda has evolved from a terrorist organization to an ideological movement to which ISIS and dozens of other jihadi groups pledge allegiance. As left-wing journalist Patrick Cockburn, who has spent more time in Syria studying the rise of ISIS than any other Western journalist, wrote:
Al-Qa’ida’s name became primarily a rallying cry, a set of Islamic beliefs, centering on the creation of an Islamic state, the imposition of sharia, a return to Islamic customs, the subjugation of women, and the waging of holy war against other Muslims, notably the Shia, who are considered heretics worthy of death. . . . It has always been in the interest of the US and other governments that al-Qa’ida be viewed as having a command-and-control structure like a mini-Pentagon, or like the mafia in America. This is a comforting image for the public because organized groups, however demonic, can be tracked down and eliminated through imprisonment or death. More alarming is the reality of a movement whose adherents are self-recruited and can spring up anywhere.
In 2014, with the declaration of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda ideology and terrorist tactics went mainstream and were adopted by a quasi-government that controls and governs territory. Not coincidentally, this was exactly the plan al-Qaeda had outlined a decade earlier when it predicted that other terrorist groups would adopt its goals and that, by 2013, a new Islamic government would form a Caliphate under its banner.
Phase V was also successfully completed, right on schedule.
Phase VI: Total Confrontation
The Islamists believe we are currently in the sixth phase of their plan right now—a global conflict with the West that will bring about our last, dying gasps, while also expunging those Muslims who deny fundamentalist Islamic authority.
Al-Qaeda and ISIS have targeted for death thousands of Shia in Iraq, whom the Islamic State calls rafidah, a slur from early Islam that means “rejecters,” or people who deny legitimate Islamic authority. ISIS, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other Sunni nations of the Gulf are also aligning against the Shia in Iran.
Iran, meanwhile, is fighting back on behalf of the region’s Shia population, escalating the civil war within Islam to bloody proportions not seen in more than a millennium. Iran has created a vassal state with the neighboring government in Iraq, with its Shia soldiers and militias becoming the only effective fighting force against the Islamic State. Iran has funded rebellions of Shia minorities in Bahrain and Yemen to foment ins
tability. Iran, in short, is trying to re-create the Persian Empire, which was defeated by the first armies of Islam in the seventh century and became part of the Ummayad Caliphate.
While this vicious conflict within Islam is already well under way, few people in our government even seem to understand it. Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who was the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (before Republicans reclaimed Congress), was asked whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shia. He didn’t really know. “Predominantly—probably Shiite,” he responded. And Hezbollah in Lebanon? “Hezbollah, uh, Hezbollah . . . Why do you ask me these questions at 5 o’clock?” He later offered an explanation: “Speaking only for myself, it’s hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories.”
And yet perspective and categories are exactly what we need if we want to understand the war that is engulfing Islam and threatens to expand into a global war, annihilating Israel, and posing a dire threat to America and the West.
If there is a glimmer of hope in all of this bad news it is that the Sunni and Shia extremists hate each other almost as much as they hate Israel and the West. They are already killing each other in droves across Iraq and in places like Yemen where civil wars are breaking out. But here’s the thing: while they kill each other with AK-47s, RPGs, and suicide bombs for now, each side is seeking to be the first to get its hands on the ultimate prize: nuclear weapons. This is a nightmare scenario—one that could literally bring about the End Times in the form of a nuclear winter that engulfs the region, and possibly the world.
The U.S. government is not helping matters. Under the terms of a negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran, the United States will effectively bless Iran’s nuclear program in return for a normalization of relations between the two countries. To counter Iran, Saudi Arabia then made the “strategic decision” to acquire “off-the-shelf” atomic weapons from Pakistan.