By Peter Bergen and Emily Schneider
October 20, 2014 -- Updated 1228 GMT (2028 HKT)
An explosion rocks Kobani, Syria,
during a reported car-bomb attack by ISIS militants on Monday, October
20. Civil war has destabilized Syria and created an opening for the
militant group, which is also advancing in Iraq as it seeks to create an
Islamic caliphate in the region.
The ISIS terror threat
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STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- ISIS has published four issues of online magazine detailing its aims
- Peter Bergen says the group is stressing its territorial ambitions and sectarian approach
- Unlike al Qaeda, which recruits terrorists vs. the West, ISIS wants to be a state, he says
- Bergen: ISIS is focused on sustaining and extending its insurgencies in Syria and Iraq
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America
and professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author
of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to
Abbottabad." Emily Schneider is a research associate at New America.
(CNN) -- ISIS is looking to take over a good chunk
of the Middle East -- if not the entire Muslim world. At least, that's
the message the terrorist movement is sending in its English online
magazine, Dabiq.
In Dabiq's first issue,
which debuted in early July, the magazine declared that a "new era has
arrived" for Muslims. Photographs in the webzine of ISIS militants in
American armored vehicles rolling through Iraq seemed to buttress that
claim.
Graphic photos of dead
soldiers from Iraqi forces litter the pages of each of the issues of
Dabiq, and articles detail skirmishes across Iraq and Syria.
Peter Bergen
Emily Schneider
Each issue of the
magazine -- there have been four so far, appearing at roughly monthly
intervals -- starts with a foreword that contains an inspirational
message for readers, before diving into longer pieces that extol the
virtues of ISIS and provide updates on the group's military campaign.
ISIS members fervently believe that they have established a true
"caliphate" in the areas that they control, a supposed distant echo of
the perfect Islamic rule of the Prophet Mohammed and his immediate
successors in the seventh century.
Overall, the magazine is
quite religious in tone. Excerpts from rulings by Muslim scholars are
included in every issue, as are religious rationales for the actions of
ISIS.
In the most recent issue,
an ISIS writer reasoned that capturing women from the Yazidis, an Iraqi
minority group, to use as sex slaves was acceptable under ISIS' version
of Sharia law, since the Yazidis are polytheists, a great heresy in
Islam. Showing some convoluted logic, the ISIS writer also asserted that
enslaving Yazidi women is a good way to stop adultery, since a man
having sex with a concubine is legal under ISIS' interpretation of
Islamic law, but sexual relations outside of marriage with free women
are forbidden.
On GPS: Does ISIS threaten the West?
The magazines are also,
unsurprisingly, highly sectarian, repeatedly showing images of Shia
shrines and tombs that have been blown up by ISIS, a organization made
up of members of the Sunni sect. ISIS believes these sites to be
idolatrous. Iraqi Army soldiers -- who are generally Shia -- are
referred to as "apostates" and graphic photos of their executions by
ISIS fighters are a staple of the magazine.
Other articles aim to
reassure readers that ISIS, which in June renamed itself the Islamic
State, is an actual state that provides social services and reconstructs
critical infrastructure. The magazine asserts that administrators
govern towns after the main ISIS fighting force moves on and the most
recent issue of Dabiq includes photos with captions showing "services
for Muslims," including street cleaning, electricity repairs, care homes
for the elderly and cancer treatment centers for children.
The first issue of Dabiq
even had a sort of classified ad for "all Muslim doctors, engineers,
scholars, and specialists" to come and join ISIS.
The most recent
installment of Dabiq asserts that two new wilayat, or provinces, had
been established in the region where the Syrian-Iraqi border had once
been. The magazine describes the new provinces as a successful step in
"eliminating any remaining traces of the kufri, nationalistic borders."
Pictures of a military parade celebrating the announcement accompany the
article, along with pictures of a well-staffed checkpoint, a bustling
marketplace, and ISIS police patrolling the area.
In many ways Dabiq is
not a new phenomenon. Osama bin Laden's Service Office during the 1980s
Afghan war against the Soviets produced a similar magazine, Jihad, which
was widely available around the Muslim world, was translated into many
languages and was principally a fund-raising and recruiting tool
designed to encourage young Muslim men to travel to Afghanistan and
neighboring Pakistan to support the Afghan jihad.
More recently, al Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula from its headquarters in Yemen has been
publishing Inspire, another well-produced online magazine. Inspire,
published for the past four years, clearly served as something of a
model for Dabiq. Both are well laid out and feature graphics and photos
prominently.
The Dabiq feature titled
"In the Words of the Enemy," where a helpful quote from an official or
analyst from the West is included, is a direct copy of an Inspire
feature. Dabiq's most recent issue features a portion of U.S. Secretary
of Defense Chuck Hagel's testimony before the Senate Armed Services
Committee in which he discussed how much of a threat ISIS is to the
United States.
But the two webzines
share few similarities beyond that. Inspire was very much focused on
recruiting lone-wolf jihadists and inspiring homegrown extremism in the
West, but Dabiq includes only a few vague sentences about carrying out
attacks in the West.
Where Inspire included
instructions on bomb-making and building weapons to carry our attacks in
the West, Dabiq focuses almost entirely on the actions of ISIS in Iraq
and Syria and encourages followers to join the jihad there. In the third
issue of Dabiq an ISIS writer asserts, "This life of jihad is not
possible until you pack and move to the Khilafah," meaning to leave your
home and travel to ISIS' areas of control in Iraq and Syria.
The purpose of the Dabiq
webzine is quite different from Inspire: It is to encourage and
perpetuate ISIS' successful insurgencies in Iraq and Syria, not to
foster homegrown extremism or lone-wolf attacks in the West.
That's about the only good news that one can glean from Dabiq.
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