Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Postcast Eight

Interspecies Predators—Psychopaths and Foreign Fighters

 

“I’m glad I’ve lived to see an enemy prepared to die for something other than their bank balance.” Ian Brady, infamous British Moors murderer, referring to the Caliphate, 2016

 

            Sometimes called “psychopaths,” sometimes “sociopaths,” and historically called “evil,” they are men and women without remorse. Though they are not necessarily mentally ill, they lack a conscience. Lacking empathy, they can harm, betray, or kill people, even family members. But there is no current expert consensus that Westerners who fight for the Caliphate are significantly more psychopathic than other cohorts.

 

            Nevertheless, many of the foreign fighters display several classic traits of the psychopath. They enjoy hurting people and lying about activities and conditions in the Islamic State. Some have poor behavioral skills and act impulsively. They were juvenile delinquents and indulgent in parasitic lifestyles in their Western homes. They have not shown remorse for their harm to others.

 

            There are also female sadists, some of whom capture headlines in European tabloids. Some display great pleasure in the suffering of non-Muslims, much like the Nazi concentration camp guards. These “emotional vampires” sometimes brag about killing non-Muslims and regale their online audience with the details of torture. It is difficult to explain this sadism exclusively in religious terms because they take ostentatious joy in torture. Nonetheless, they justify mass murder, rape, and enslavement with Koranic verses. As with their male counterparts, some of the women have fun chuckling about bloody beheadings, regretting only that they did not commit the murder themselves. The husband-and-wife San Bernardino couple who killed their coworkers and abandoned their young child relished the planning and execution of their killing spree.

 

            However, other Westerners who serve the Caliphate are not abnormally antisocial in the context of life in the Islamic State. They cooperate with their companions in the Caliphate. A psychopath would not likely risk death for a cause that did not directly benefit him or her. Psychopaths are driven only by advancing their personal interests. Further, many foreign fighters in the Caliphate are protective of their fellow soldiers. Some have exposed themselves to danger for the Islamic State. Some have been self-sacrificial. Many more have emotionally bonded with their comrades, and a psychopath would not. But there are some psychopaths in the Caliphate, and they are profiled below.

 

Profile Fourteen: Very Cruel Men

 

Mehdi Nemmouche

 

            If there was a club for sadists in the Caliphate, Mehdi Nemmouche would certainly be a prominent member. By his own account, he relished torture. Well known to French police authorities, Nemmouche had been in and out of prison much of his twenty-nine years. That is where he was radicalized. Some of his convictions were petty, such as driving without a license, but he was also sentenced for armed robbery, which landed him a five-year sentence. Sometime in early 2013, Nemmouche went to Syria to fight for the Jihad. He flourished there.

 

            He was more than a garden-variety thug-turned-Islamist. Nemmouche was particularly sadistic toward captives, even by the brutal standards of the Caliphate’s foreign legion. Nemmouche delighted in torturing European captives: “The torture went on all night, until prayers at dawn,” a French survivor wrote in Le Point magazine. “The howls of the prisoners alternated with shouts in French.” He is also supposed to have serenaded his captives with his own rendition of Charles Aznavour love songs.

 

            But at some point, Nemmouche fell from the favor of the Caliphate’s leaders. French criminologist Alain Bauer says, “ISIS did not like him at all.” Bauer compares him to Zacarias Moussaoui, sometimes called “the twentieth hijacker” from the 9/11 plot, who was so crazy that al Qaeda leadership didn’t know what to do with him. In June 2014, French police in Marseilles arrested Mehdi Nemmouche for mass murder. He was the primary suspect in the Brussels Jewish Museum attack of May 2014, in which three Jews were shot dead. Today, Nemmouche sits in prison.

 

Mohammed Emwazi

“I’ve seen it before, you all squirm like animals, like pigs.”  Mohammed Emwazi referring to beheadings

 

            Like Nemmouche, Kuwaiti-born Mohammed Emwazi enjoyed hurting people. He certainly displayed the classic signs of psychopathy: lack of empathy, grandiosity, glibness, and a need for power. He was sadistic by any standard, and it was he who cut off the heads of Western captives for a global audience on YouTube.

 

            Emwazi’s family moved to Britain when he was six years old. He was smart enough to complete a college degree in computer science, and his primary- and secondary-school teachers remember him as quiet, lonely, and quick to take offense. In high school, Emwazi underwent anger management therapy after fighting with fellow students, and when he drank he had difficulty controlling his temper. He found Islam and became a leader in an Islamist sleeper cell, “The London Boys” and he raised money for the Jihadis.

 

            If he was uncomfortable in Britain, he appears to have been at ease in Syria. A released hostage related that the British John Cantlie and American Jim Foley were forced to compose a song titled “Welcome to the Lovely Hotel Osama.” They sang it to the mocking delight of the three British Jihadis who guarded them most of the time. These three were collectively known as “the Beatles.” Mohamed Emwazi was dubbed “Jihadi John” after John Lennon. Another Jihadi, dubbed “George,” was particularly fond of the song: “George shouted, ‘Anyone who doesn’t know the words, I’ll kick to death.’” Another torturer was Najim Laachraoui. He would leave the Middle East and travel to Europe, where he would die in the Brussells airport attack in 2016, which killed thirty-two people and injured more than 300.

 

            Jihadi John enjoyed torturing other captives. The group’s twenty-three hostages suffered constant beatings and degradations, and one survivor likened their condition to that of former presidential aspirant Senator John McCain at the hands of the Vietnamese communists. They called their digs the “ISIS Hilton.”

 

            Emwazi fathered a son in Syria, who is entitled to British citizenship. But the boy will never know his father, who was “vaporized” in an air strike in November 2015. “Vaporized” is current slang for killing people through drone-launched munitions. Emwazi knew he was being hunted by British and US Special Forces. He knew that modern technology and first-rate policing revealed his identity, despite his camouflage. But in his skyscraping vanity, he repeatedly gave away his positions. A New York baseball cap, his signature piece of apparel, may have identified him to targeteers, according to one British tabloid.

 

            Two MQ-9 Reaper drones locked in on him and flashed the “Beatle’s” image to Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. As Emwazi got in a car at the Islamic courts, two Hellfire missiles exploded atop his car. Few were surprised when the twenty-seven-year-old former Londoner was “vaporized.” The State later eulogized him as an “honorable brother.” But a military spokesperson for the country that killed him had a different take: “This guy was a human animal, and killing him is probably making the world a better place.”

 

Summary

 

            Westerners will still be drawn to the Caliphate. There will always be a desire among the young to live in a perfect society—a utopia. However, the image of Raqqa as an Islamic utopia, or even a habitable environment, has been tarnished. Some will be driven by Jihad and will come to fight. Some, like Thundercat, will die in battle and, in the words of the Islamic State, be finally at peace with Allah.