Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Podcast

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

In spring and summer 2016, the Caliphate struck around the world at venues frequented by Westerners. Three American college students were killed during a siege at an upscale restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a favorite haunt of Westerners. The ringleader was young, university-educated, and raised in a well-to-do home. Caliphate operatives demanded that captives recite verses from the Koran to save their lives. This was a pass/fail test. Those who failed were stabbed or shot and lay dead or dying on the floor of the Holey Artisan Bakery in the diplomatic zone. The ringleader’s father wept, “That’s not my son, that’s not my son. He was full of humanity.” There is overwhelming rejection of suicide attacks in Western Muslim communities, but more than a few support them.
 
            In many Muslim countries, once seen as embracing modernity, support for the Caliphate and suicide operations is growing. Tunisia is one such country, and it is profiled below.
 
Profile Twenty-Six: Tunisia—On the Beach
 
“If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.” Islamic proverb
 
“How could a place of such beauty, of relaxation and happiness, be turned into such a scene of brutality and destruction?” Then British Home Secretary Theresa May
 
            Tunisia is a popular vacation destination for Europeans. Only 600 miles from Italy, it has an educated but highly unemployed workforce. For Britons, there is sun, gardens, birds, flowers, and turquoise water. For the culturally minded, there are historic sites and ancient Roman treasures. But Tunisia has also produced over 3,000 volunteers for the Islamic State. The country has been transformed from a model of progressive secularism into a center of radicalism.39 Cities are marked by youth unemployment or underemployment. Some work in the tourist trade, and others are students with free time. One was Seifeddine Rezgui.
 
The Shooting Starts
 
            Seifeddine Rezgui was a twenty-three-year-old student who pledged allegiance to the State. In his youth, he enjoyed breakdancing and later switched to kung fu, which he practiced often. To those who knew him, he seemed content and smiled frequently. For this reason, he went unnoticed as he rented a lair to plan a killing spree. From his safe house near popular resorts, Rezgui could walk near the Marhaba Hotel and mingle among European guests to plan his attack. He would later return, this time with an assault weapon, to walk along the shoreline of a Tunisian resort and kill Westerners. Ambling from the beach to the pool to the lobby, he sprayed fire at anyone who looked European. He did so as an operative for the State and with apparent merriment. By the end of his spree, he had shot dead thirty-eight foreigners, thirty of whom were British.
 
            Rezgui decided who would live and who would die. One young woman spoke Arabic to him and convinced him she was a fellow Muslim. The killer chuckled, “You go away.” A Briton recalled, “He was laughing and joking around, like a normal guy.” Rezgui walked up to a local mechanic and said with a smile, “I don’t want to kill you. I want to hit tourists.” The survivors recounted the panic, the running, and the gunshots. Some people went to their rooms to barricade themselves. As with the Florida killer a year later, his Tunisian counterpart laughed and smiled as he shot his victims.
 
            There were heroes on the beach that day. A sixty-one-year-old man pounded the beach, searching for survivors and rendering aid amid periodic gunfire. He used towels to bandage those with gunshot wounds. A British nurse wanted to help, but she couldn’t. She had been shot in both legs. Sarah Wilson recounts how her fiancé, Matthew, took bullets for her: “Matthew put himself in front of me, then he was hit, he moved, and the man shot him again.” Matthew lived, but not Rezgui, the killer. A police officer shot the murderer as he knelt, praying. Rezgui stumbled, and a shop owner threw terracotta tiles onto his head. A police officer fired a coup de grâce into his skull.
 
            The Caliphate claimed the massacre was an “attack upon the nests of fornication, vice and disbelief in God . . . worse is to follow.” The State’s supporters chuckled about the butchery and posted morbidly sarcastic comments on their tweets. But most Britons were somber. A national moment of silence was held in the House of Commons, and royalty and commoners alike took part.
 
This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to continue listening to other chapters. The book is available online or at major bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World," will be available for purchase in early spring 2026. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.  

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon - Chapter Eight Podcast Three

In the Name of Humanity
This is the Syria of 2015, where anyone who is upwardly mobile is now also westwardly mobile.
 
            Many Westerners were moved by the human dimension of the migration crisis. Commercial and social media captured some of the pain. A Swedish journalist found a love poem, protected in a plastic bag and washed up on the shore of a Greek island. Many rickety boats coming from the Middle East capsized, and the poem may have been part of the flotsam. Translated from Arabic, some lines read, “My Rose, I promise you, I will love you till the last minute of my life . . . will not let anything separate us . . . I promise you.” The fates of the author and his beloved Rose are unknown as of this writing.
 
            Particularly stirring was a photograph of a drowned little boy washed up on a Turkish shore in September 2014. This image touched the heartstrings of the world. Alan (sometimes spelled Ayan) Kurdi was three years old and dressed in Western clothing. Some of the boy’s family drowned with him. His father, Abdullah, pleaded to the world, “My message is I’d like the whole world to open its doors to Syrians.” His voice opened the doors of Europe.
 
            European celebrities and intellectuals tended to be more sympathetic to migrants than others. Academy Award-winning actress Emma Thompson blamed racism, saying that if the refugees were white, the British would feel “quite differently about it.” In London, after the curtain fell on a performance of Hamlet, Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the Dane, delivered an impassioned soliloquy against the “utter disgrace of the British government!”
 
Festung Europa
 
The Belgians, like the British security services before 7/7, believed that if they allowed Islamism to gestate at home, the terrorists would spare the country that had given them sanctuary. That fallacy now lies on the scrapheap of ideas where it always belonged.
 
Editorial from the Spectator
 
            Attitudinal surveys reveal growing European panic about the Islamic State and concern about the rising tide of migration. By June 2016, three out of four respondents to a survey viewed migrants as a “significant” threat. Self-identified conservatives tended to see migration as a greater crisis than self-identified liberals.
 
While many in Europe’s chattering classes have welcomed Middle Easterners to their continent, others are less hospitable. Tabloid journalists and ordinary Europeans are not persuaded that there is a human right to move to a particular country and become a citizen. This was, in part, reflected in the British vote to leave the European Union.
 
            Many Europeans do not want any more Middle Eastern refugees. Katie Hopkins of the British Daily Mail proposed launching a fleet of “gun ships” to stop the armada of refugees from reaching British shores. In that spirit, Rod Liddie of the Sun mocks “lefties” who bleat, “They [the migrants] are human beings! Let them in.” But Liddie rejoins that there are “7 billion people in the world. They would not all fit in Britain.”
 
            With resignation, Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, a survivor of Auschwitz, predicted Europe’s end because of liberalism, which he called “childish and suicidal.” Having lived through the Nazi era, he lamented and feared the end of democracy. He bemoaned the idea that “the doors are wide open for Islam.” Former Briton Niall Ferguson, a Harvard professor, said Europe had “opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith” and whose views are “not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies.” Former Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that British voters backed a vote to leave the European Union because people believe the country has “no control” over its borders.
 
            France, home to persistent and spectacular attacks, saw national concern about Islamic extremism more than double between 2005 and 2015. There was a surge in concern in other Western countries, probably reflecting the rise in Islamist-driven attacks. Interestingly, Russia saw a significant decline in concern about Islamic extremism.
            According to a different poll, conducted by Pew Polling in spring 2016, there was a significant increase in “unfavorable views of Muslims.”
 
            The Washington-based Pew Research Center found that the share of people who believed “refugees will increase the likelihood of terrorism in our country” was 46 percent in France, 52 percent in Britain, 61 percent in Germany, 71 percent in Poland, and 76 percent in Hungary.
 
“Raqqa Scatter,” Refugees, and Infiltrators
 
            Many European security and intelligence personnel agree that it is easy for the State to infiltrate its forces into Europe. As elements of the State are driven from large towns and cities, such as Raqqa, its soldiers scatter and, often, desperately seek to leave the Middle East. They can buy Syrian identity documents that allow them to hide among refugees.
Anecdotes highlight the dangers of accommodating those who crawl ashore, including Ahmad al Mohammad. He was fed and clothed by French Médecins Sans Frontières volunteers, who wished him bon voyage on his trip to Paris. In November 2015, al Mohammad detonated himself as a suicide bomber in that city while his coconspirators killed targets in a nightclub and on the streets.
 
European leaders have tightened security at transportation and public venues. However, determined Caliphate militants remain effective, as demonstrated by the June 2016 attack on Istanbul. By international standards, that airport was well protected. However, there were glaring vulnerabilities in both physical protective measures—such as barriers, gates, and fences—and in the human security element. Vetting guards, many of whom are foreign-born and most of whom earn meager wages, has proved very difficult. In France, eighty-two of the people hired for security posts during the soccer championship were on French terror watch lists. One of the men responsible for beheading a French priest in 2016 had worked at a French airport as a luggage handler. He “easily” passed employment security checks.
 
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Eight Podcast One

The Caliphate Abroad, Part One: The Anglo-Saxons
            Earlier chapters examined why Westerners are drawn to and sometimes repulsed by life in the Caliphate. Chapters 8 and 9 will return to Europe to provide more detail on Muslim–non-Muslim relations in selected countries. These chapters will expand on the Caliphate-related themes presented earlier, including social divisions, recruitment, support bases, cell formation, and the political environment in selected European countries and the United States. The Anglo-Saxon countries are Britain, Germany, and the United States. The French-speaking countries are France and Belgium.
 
The Deluge
 
            The influx of migrants and refugees into Europe and the United States created opportunities for the Caliphate. In the West, reports of the Caliphate’s troops disguising themselves as refugees and migrants became central national security concerns in 2015 and 2016. Thousands of migrants moved north across the continent and encamped in the “jungle refugee centers” in Calais and other French coastal cities. Many hoped to brave the choppy English Channel for a new home in Britain. After the Florida, Istanbul, and Nice attacks, the great migration became a dominant issue in Europe and in the American presidential election year of 2016.
 
            In April 2016, soon after the Brussels attack, a survey found that respondents in nine out of ten European countries described the Caliphate as a “major threat.” At the time, migrants were streaming from the Middle East, North Africa, and Eurasia by the hundreds of thousands. Many Europeans saw this as the gravest threat to European harmony since the Cold War and the greatest menace to social cohesion since the ethnic shifts and cleansing in the post–World War II period.    Some Europeans used biblical metaphors, including the “great flood,” to describe the current migration. British commentators looked to history, citing the French invasion of England 1,000 years earlier. Continentals drew on imagery of the Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns, using vastly exaggerated and alarmist historical analogies that reflect the unease some Europeans feel with their new nationals.
 
Social services throughout Europe were inundated with demands they could not meet. Federal and local authorities needed to innovate to provide shelter for individuals, families, and entire Middle Eastern neighborhoods now transported to Europe. Police forces were strained, and some felt hampered by the inability to communicate in a common language or by customs that were distinctly non-European. There were simply not enough officers, prosecutors, prison guards, or prison space to cope. For example, police in the German city of Keil allegedly collectively stopped pursuing cases in which refugees were caught shoplifting because it was too much work to prosecute them.
 
            Greece, the entry point for many migrants, faced daunting and morbid problems in 2015, as nearly 90 percent of migrants arrived on Greek soil as their point of entry into Europe. Pope Francis praised the Greek people for their kindness to “the cradle of civilization, the heart of humanity.” But many Greeks found it hard to cope. The island of Lesbos, of Greek myth, was inundated with migrants, some of whom died there. The mayor explained that there was no room left in the main cemetery to bury anyone.
 
            Bodies that washed ashore in Greece were identified by “cadaver number.” On the small island of Samos, the body of a short-haired boy wearing a black shirt and jeans was tagged “Cadaver #4” in January 2016. It belonged to a young Syrian named Yamen, who, like so many others, had drowned at sea. His cousins, aunts, and uncles survived the journey to Europe and Canada and searched for Yamen. His uncle flew from Montreal to bring the boy to Canada for burial in a family plot.
 
Northern Bound—”Just Wait”
 
“It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.” A Caliphate leader, referring to the migration to Europe, 2015
 
            The route through the Greek islands was the most frequently used entry point for the million-plus migrants in 2015 and 2016. Passage through the Balkans was dubbed “Jihadist highways.” The head of France’s internal intelligence service confirmed that the Islamic State was using migrant routes through the Balkans to infiltrate Europe. European security services were strained as they tried to monitor migrants and migratory patterns. From Greece, migrants often headed north, hoping to reach wealthier states, primarily Germany, France, and Britain. Some had immigrated because they were destitute and desperate. Others came to improve their lives and those of their families. Others came to emulate Muhammad’s hijrah, the journey from Mecca to Medina. Some came to infiltrate, plan attacks, and kill. Greek officials uncovered locations in Athens where Caliphate operatives would stay before dispersing to France, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, and Germany. They would be provisioned in these safe houses and given contact information for their destinations.
 
            In February 2015, the Caliphate claimed it would infiltrate thousands of its followers among the migrants. According to one source, in September 2015, 4,000 Islamic State Jihadis had already entered Europe. A Caliphate leader said, “These Muslims were going to Europe in the service of that caliphate. They are going like refugees. Just wait.”
 
            Several European Union member states, particularly in Eastern Europe, constructed temporary fences. Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, Romania, and Croatia erected barriers. However, once migrants entered Europe, it was highly unlikely they would be deported; at one point in 2016, the European Union deported only seven migrants per day. Many deportation-bound migrants claimed sudden, unrecognizable illnesses that prevented them from flying. They could stay. The EU counterterrorism chief conceded that it was “relatively easy” to enter the European Union amid the sea of refugees. Enter they did.
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Seven Podcast Three

 Crusade!—The West Fights Back
 
            This chapter now moves to the Western fight against the Caliphate in the Middle East. Western states and individuals fight the Islamic State with both nonviolent and violent means.
 
Western-Led Nonviolent Resistance
 
            Some Westerners travel to Mesopotamia in the name of humanity. They seek to ease the suffering of refugees. NGOs help feed, shelter, and provide medical care to the dispossessed. Just as some Westerners are drawn to the Caliphate to serve and kill in the name of Jihad, Western humanitarians are drawn to the Middle East to relieve, feed, heal, and nurture. One of these was Kayla Mueller.
 
Profile Twenty-Five: Kayla Mueller—“I Find God in the Suffering’s Eyes”
 
            By all accounts, she was a loving, spiritual, and kind woman. She was trusting, perhaps too trusting. Kayla Mueller grew up in Prescott, Arizona, and after college devoted herself to helping the less fortunate. She said she was doing God’s work. In a letter to her parents, she wrote, “I find God in the suffering’s eyes reflected in mine.” She helped HIV/AIDS patients and volunteered at a women’s shelter.
 
            Kayla traveled the world to ease the suffering of the downtrodden. This took her to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey. “For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal.” She and her boyfriend were kidnapped in August 2013 after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria. Leaders of what would become the Islamic State sentenced her to life in prison in retaliation for the imprisonment of an American of Pakistani descent who had tried to join the Taliban. The United States refused to swap the women.
 
            Kayla became the sex slave of the Caliphate’s leader. Abu Bakr announced that he had “married her,” and Kayla’s parents wept. Her mother countered, “Kayla did not marry this man. He took her to his room and he abused her, and she came back crying.” Kayla was allowed to write a few letters to her parents, in which she pleaded for their forgiveness. She begged them to forgive “the suffering I have put you all through . . . in the end, the only one you really have is God.”
 
            In February 201, President Obama announced that Kayla had been murdered. The Islamic State claimed that she was killed by an errant US bomb, but this is almost certainly a lie. Al-Baghdadi may have grown tired of her and had her killed. As of this writing, there are no exact details, but a Yazidi sex slave who later escaped had shared a cell with Kayla and had firsthand knowledge of Kayla’s murder. The Yazidi girl also shared another memory of Kayla—that she had eaten very little in her captivity. Instead, she gave what little food she had to the Yazidi girls. Why? “[Kayla] didn’t want us to be hungry.”
 
Kinetic Operations—“Harvesting Jihadis”
 
            Several Western countries have made war on the State and continue to do so through drone warfare and elite teams of special operators. There are Western hunter-killer teams that partner with Iraqi forces. One observer quoted a British officer as saying, “It is now time to harvest the Jihadis.” Some Western civilians have tried to do so in the service of Kurdish forces. As in the Spanish Civil War, they come from all over the Western world to fight for cause and comrades. The Lions of Rojava, a Kurdish organization, helps foreigners join up with anti-State fighting units.
 
            According to one source, 108 Americans had fought against the State as of summer 2016. “These volunteers paid their own way to the war zone and usually returned home when their funds ran out.” They were drawn to fight the State because of the killing of Christians, the general atrocities, and the lure of battle for a good cause. Some veterans had nostalgia for the camaraderie of prior military service.
 
            Canadian Dillon Hillier, a veteran of the Canadian military and the son of a politician, became a minor celebrity in his homeland, earning the moniker “Canadian Peshmerga.” Reece Harding of Queensland, Australia, nicknamed “Surfie,” could not abide what he saw as Western inaction. A fellow surfer described Harding as having a spark of humanity. “Everybody liked him.” Leaving his surfing days behind, the handsome, blond, twenty-three-year-old man told his parents he needed a short break. In fact, he left to fight with the Kurds and was killed by a landmine. His comrades posted a tribute to him on Facebook. The next day, they called his father in Australia to share the tragic news.
 
            Richard Jansen, a Dutch sniper older than Surfie, left a comfortable home like the Australian to fight with the Kurds. In the Netherlands, he worked as a bodyguard for 10 years. He wanted to fight Jihadis in Europe but couldn’t. So he traveled to Turkey to fight with the Kurds. Jansen found Syria a target-rich environment and claims to have killed forty State fighters. On Dutch television, he seemed to relish the memories of killing the enemy. “These are not people. It is prize shooting at the carnival.” The “carnival” ended for Jansen when he was wounded in combat and sent to a medical clinic in Germany.
 
            The German-born Ivana Hoffmann was the first foreign woman to die alongside Kurds. She joined a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party at an early age. Her parents were black South Africans, and she said she wanted to fight for internationalism. Ivana was killed on the eve of International Women’s Day in March 2015. She was not forgotten in Germany, and several thousand friends and supporters carried red banners in Duisburg in her memory. She was nineteen years old.
 
            Thirtysomething Canadian-Israeli Gill Rosenberg fought among the ranks of the Peshmerga forces, becoming the first foreign woman to do so. Rosenberg explained, “We Jews always say of the Holocaust, never again. In my opinion, that’s true not only for the Jews, but for all mankind.” Thirty-six-year-old Keith Broomfield of Massachusetts, like Rosenberg, had a strong religious identity, though in a different religion. Keith was a devout Baptist who had had a difficult youth. He heard a calling to fight with the Kurds and stop the State’s slaughter. The New Englander had no contacts and knew it was “a crazy thing to do.” His father stated that his son was led by the Lord to the battle lines. He did so, where he fought and fell.
 
            An energetic senior citizen, Alan Brooke was desperate to join Kurdish forces, but the sixty-two-year-old retired archaeologist was told to return to his seventy-one-year-old wife in England. Undeterred as of 2016, he said, “I intend to go back. I can’t think of a better way to use my pension. My wife is fully supportive.”
            Some other fighters are highly idiosyncratic, and British character actor Michael Enright is among them. After basic training with the Kurds, he made himself useful as a photographer, documenting the brutality of the Caliphate’s war. He took risks. His comrades in arms do not doubt his enthusiasm, but some question his stability. Reportedly, he suffers from emotional aberrations that are sometimes very melodramatic. “It’s gotten to the point where I just want to absolutely annihilate them and kill them on sight.”
 
Summary
 
            The Caliphate has ordered killings throughout the West. Some of its cadres have traveled from Europe to the Middle East and back. Others have pledged fealty to the State and killed on its behalf. Westerners have traveled to the Middle East to fight with the Kurds against the State.
 
            In June 2016, an American killed forty-nine people at a gay nightclub. He paused after a few volleys to pledge allegiance to the Caliphate. He was killed, but other Islamic State operatives plan to attack Westerners. Non-Muslims, particularly those high on the State’s enemies list, have taken note. After the Florida attacks, many American gays are worried.
 
            Some public intellectuals and politicians dismiss the charge that the Caliphate-directed or -inspired attacks are driven by Islam. They warn against backlashes against Muslims and the continued need to partner with Muslim leaders to suppress radicalism. A seventeen-year-old New Yorker explained, “Islam is all about peace. In Ramadan, we don’t even curse. You’re not supposed to do anything bad.”92 But, increasingly, many Westerners see this and similar statements as tortured apologetics. They see the State’s attacks as Islam—pure and simple.
 
 
 
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Seven Podcast Two

Welcome to an excerpt from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. It was published by Indiana University Press in Bloomington and Indianapolis. This reading is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This reading continues with Chapter Seven and, particularly, the ISIS-inspired killing in California. In that attack, a husband-and-wife pair of ISIS supporters murdered health inspectors in San Bernardino. After they killed fourteen and wounded far more, they went on Facebook to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. How the Caliphate was involved was debated hotly after that 2015 killing.
 
Whose Fault?
 
            The killing ignited the long-familiar debate on gun control. President Obama wanted to tighten gun-control laws to “make it harder for [terrorists] to kill.” Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, blamed America’s “deadly fetish” with firearms. This claim was rubbished by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA’s Chris Cox countered that the weapons used were illegal in California. Laws banning high-capacity magazines in assault weapons were already on the books. A letter to the Washington Post opined, “The reason these laws didn’t prevent Wednesday’s shooting is that gun control does not stop evil.”
Campaigning for president, Hillary Clinton did not blame the Caliphate; she blamed the NRA.
 
            Others point to a workplace dispute that preceded the shooting. University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole blamed “someone going postal over his work situation.” But others rejoined that there are daily, sometimes bitter, disputes at work, almost none of which lead to mass murder.
 
            Professor Steven Salaita blamed American “political violence . . . endemic to the United States.” A Columbia University professor underscored the American and Western “Islamophobia and the wanton cruelty of imperialist warfare, [and] the colonial occupation and domination of other people’s homeland.” This was echoed by the Los Angeles executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Hussam Ayloush, who added that the United States supports the “dictatorships” and “coups” that “push people over the edge.” For this reason, according to the CAIR spokesperson, “We [Americans] are partly responsible.”
 
            The argument over gun control would reemerge with vigor after the Florida killing of June 2016. But in winter 2015, residents of San Bernardino tried to heal their community. Several high school girls wore hijabs in solidarity with Islamic students. A seventeen-year-old Muslim girl, Zarifeh Shalabi, was voted prom queen at Summit High School. Her non-Muslim friends passed out colorful scarves and balloons on which were written, “Don’t be a baddie, vote for the hijabi.” Her friends celebrated: “I feel like we have something to teach the rest of the country. It makes me really proud.”
 
Three Views of Caliphate-Inspired Killings
 
            In response to the multiple murders and the high death count in the name of the Caliphate, Western journalists, politicians, intellectuals, and civil servants often placed the attacks in one of three categories. First, the attacks were not related to Islam; second, the attacks were driven by a distorted view of Islam; third, the attacks were an expression of Islamic mandates. The debate continues.
 
View One—The Attacks Were Not Islamic
 
            Some in the West hold that political violence perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam is not and cannot be authentically Islamic. If Islam is a religion of peace, just as Judaism and Christianity are religions of peace, those who commit violence in its name have warped the religion’s meaning. In this view, the perpetrators are fueled with a rage unconnected to any religion. Even when perpetrators roar “Allahu Akbar” or bellow praises for the Caliphate, these proclamations are dismissed as empty or misguided rhetoric.
 
            Those who hold this view emphasize the perpetrator's emotional instability or anger. For example, in Le Mans, France, police arrested a Muslim who was tearing down Christmas decorations from the city center. The perpetrator then tried to grab a police officer’s weapon while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” Prosecutors declared him mentally ill and had him hospitalized. In Dijon, France, a man yelling “Allahu Akbar” ran over a pedestrian. French prosecutors said, “This is absolutely not an act of terrorism.” Rather, it was a “long-lasting and severe psychological disorder.”  In Bavaria, Germany, a man stabbed four people at a train station while he was yelling “Allahu Akbar.” The Bavarian interior minister said the incident was probably not political but an expression of mental illness. There are many similar cases.
 
            This happens in the United States, too. In November 2015, a student at the Merced campus of the University of California, Faisal Mohammed, stabbed four of his fellow students and was, in turn, shot dead. Police found a printout of the Caliphate’s black flag in his possession. But the county sheriff claimed that Mohammed’s religion had nothing to do with his stabbing spree. Rather, he was angry at rejection. The sheriff compared Mohammed’s references to Allah to a Christian who comes to Jesus.
 
View Two—A Twisted View of Islam
 
            The first view is that the attacks were unrelated to Islam and likely driven by mental illness or anger management issues. The second view is that Caliphate-connected violence results from a twisted view of Islam. For example, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a young and attractive engineer, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, went on a shooting spree, leaving four Marines and a sailor dead. In his words, these were symbols of American power. Before the killing started, he texted a friend: “Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, then I have declared war against him.” Vice President Joe Biden called this the act of a “perverted jihadist.”
 
View Three—The Attacks Are Driven by Islam
 
            The third view of Caliphate-related attacks is that they are a pure expression of Islam. This view takes the killers and the Caliphate at their word. Many of the Caliphate-associated killers declared loudly, openly, and repeatedly their allegiance to the Caliphate and their belief in Jihad. In one case, a would-be pro-Caliphate killer repeatedly stated his intentions before and after his failed murder attempt. He was Abdul Shaheed, formerly known as Edward Archer.
 
            Shaheed was well known at the local mosque, had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and studied Arabic. He pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State and was determined to assassinate a police officer in a show of solidarity. But his thirteen-shot blast into officer Jesse Hartnett only wounded his victim, who then returned fire and winged the Jihadi.
 
            Despite Shaheed’s declaration of fealty to the State, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney said, “This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers. This has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.” But the perpetrator contradicted the mayor and was emphatic that his motives had everything to do with Islam. Under arrest, he explained to investigating officers, “I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic State, and that’s why I did what I did.” Shaheed, in his view, could not have been clearer about his motives.
 
Despite Shaheed’s declaration of fealty to the State, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney said, “This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers. This has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.” But the perpetrator contradicted the mayor and was emphatic that his motives had everything to do with Islam. Under arrest, he explained to investigating officers, “I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic State, and that’s why I did what I did.” Shaheed, in his view, could not have been clearer about his motives.
 
This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West – Black Flag over Babylon. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to continue listening to other chapters. The book is available online or at major bookstores worldwide. Also, Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World," will be available for purchase in early spring 2026. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Seven Podcast One

The Killing Floor
 
Killing floor: “That part of the slaughterhouse where animals are killed.”
 
“I want to do an Islamic Bonnie and Clyde on the kaffir.” Bridget Namoa, Australian convert to Islam, 2016
 
Introduction
 
            By 2015, the Caliphate’s long, lethal arm had reached well beyond Mesopotamia. Its cells and lone operatives plotted in European cities and suburbs. A sleepy Southern California town, a Tunisian beach filled with British vacationers, a hip Parisian nightclub, a watering hole for Orlando’s gay community, the French Riviera, the squares, streets, and haunts of London—all these venues, and others, became slaughter pens for the State. The first part of this chapter will discuss the Caliphate’s killing in the West and in places frequented by Westerners. The second part will discuss some Westerners who have gone to the Middle East to fight their enemy—the Islamic State.
 
Killing on the Homefront—Westerners Make Sense of the Violence
 
            From its inception, the Caliphate encouraged its followers to kill non-Muslim Westerners. Some adherents did so, proclaiming their solidarity with the State. The killings became so frequent that the carnage lost its shock value. The Caliphate innovated and escalated the level of violence. The State’s death list is long. Occasionally, Jews were targeted, as in Copenhagen and Paris, because Islamists hate Jews in particular. Many killings were random, but some were deeply personal. A blonde Danish teenager murdered her mother after watching the Caliphate’s beheadings of British hostages. Only fifteen years old when she savaged her mother with a large kitchen knife, she was a convert to Islam.
 
            Most of the State’s victims had little or no interest in politics and simply wanted to live fulfilling, joyful lives. Many were killed by chance. They could not have known their lives were in danger. One case among hundreds is Nohemi Gonzalez. The Mexican American was studying design in Paris, and her boyfriend missed his “little firecracker,” as he called her. Dining with friends at a Parisian bistro, she was killed in a bomb blast on November 13, 2015. Dead at twenty-three, the “little firecracker” was the only known American killed in the Caliphate’s Paris attack that day. Like many similar victims, she had fatally bad luck. Had she finished her meal an hour earlier, she would likely be alive today in Los Angeles.
 
            In August 2016, a Norwegian citizen of Somali descent who had moved to Britain went on a stabbing spree in Russell Square, London. One of the victims was a sixty-year-old American woman whose husband was a psychology professor at Florida State University. She and three others—an Israeli woman, an Australian woman, and an American man—were stabbed. Only she died.
 
            Often, the killings are directed. In the hills of San Bernardino, a husband-and-wife pair of Caliphate-supporting killers left their baby with family and then went to a well-attended Christmas party, where they shot at anything that moved. They killed fourteen fellow workers. The Caliphate was delighted and called the killers, both of whom were slain in a police shootout, “lions [who] made us proud. They are still alive.” This is what happened.
 
Pofile Twenty-Three: San Bernardino—“Cry Me a River”
 
            Two-hundred-year-old San Bernardino is a small city located in the hills of Southern California. It is not particularly chic or famous. Gene Hackman, the two-time Oscar-winning actor, was born there. Julie London, whose song “Cry Me a River” made her a famous torch singer in the 1950s, grew up there. San Bernardino is the first major town on Route 66 in California, reached from the east. A famous song invited Americans to “get your kicks on Route 66.” Many listened. San Bernardino was the gateway for millions of Americans beginning a new life in California, the Golden State.
 
            San Bernardino was also home to Syed Farook and Tashfeen Melik, a married couple with a baby daughter. Syed Farook was born in the United States and turned to Islam with fervor. A county food inspector, he spent much of his free time in the mosque, memorizing the Koran. He described himself on a dating website as enjoying “working on vintage and modern cars, reading and . . . target practice with younger sister and friends.” The target practice would prove useful later.
 
            His lonely-hearts ad landed him a wife, Tashfeen Malik. They married in August 2014 and had a baby girl. Tashfeen Malik was born in Saudi Arabia to a middle-class Pakistani family. She studied pharmacology but was deeply religious, exploring Islam with passion at night. Most of her neighbors did not know her at all, and she did not mix with men outside her family. She was almost always veiled when outside the house.
 
            Few people outside of the family knew the depth of hatred the husband and wife held for the United States. But they made their presence known on December 2, 2015. They dropped off their baby with relatives, explaining that they had a doctor’s appointment. They had no such appointment. The couple drove to the San Bernardino County Health Department with heavy firepower. They discharged up to seventy-five assault-rifle rounds into a crowd of workers, some of whom had worked with Farook. They killed fourteen, taking them completely by surprise.
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Neighbors—“Forgive Them”
“Let believers not take for friends and allies infidels rather than believers: and whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.” Koran 3:28
            The Caliphate’s conquest of Mesopotamian cities and towns has tested Christian–Muslim relations. Many Christians did not understand how tenuous their peaceful associations were with their Muslim nationals. Families had grown up together, and children studied and played together. They thought they were friends. But soon after the Caliphate took control, some Muslim neighbors very quickly partnered with State operatives to harass Christians and take their property. A Christian man explained that the most vicious of the Jihadis were not the “Bosnians, Arabs, and even Americans and British fighters”; they were their neighbors. Other Muslim neighbors joined the State and killed or chased away Christians from their homes.
            Often, Christians have nowhere to go. One explained, “Our neighbors and other people threatened us. But . . . where would we go? Christians have no support in Iraq.” A Christian woman from Mosul recalled the murder of her daughter, who died in her arms. According to the mother’s account, her girl’s dying words were, “Forgive them.”
 
Level Four—Life for Yazidis, a House of Pain
“These men are not human. They only think of death, killing.”   Recollections of a Yazidi captive
            Of all social and religious cohorts, Yazidis have the worst quality of life. The Caliphate declared this religious minority to be devil worshippers. Yazidis constantly fear for their lives and sometimes pray for death. Men and boys have been randomly killed, taken from their homes, and sometimes conscripted to fight for the Caliphate. Women and girls are often sold as slaves, particularly sex slaves. They live in brothels, houses of pain. They hold a status comparable to that held by Slavs in Nazi-occupied Europe. International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who defends Yazidi women, said, “We know that systematic rapes have taken place, and that they are still taking place. And yet no one is being held to account.” An escaped Yazidi girl said, “Every day I died 100 times over. Not just once. Every hour I died, every hour. . . . From the beating, from the misery, from the torture.”
            If Yazidi girls are sexual fodder for the Caliphate, the boys are seen as potential fighters or suicide operators. They drill their dogma into children’s minds. One Yazidi mother, whose husband was shot by the State and who later escaped the Caliphate, explained that her nine-year-old son did not want to leave. He wanted to stay in the Caliphate. “My son’s brain was changed,” said the mother.
 
By summer 2016, as Iraqi forces dislodged the Caliphate from towns and cities, they sometimes had to protect the Yazidi dead as well as the living. The Yazidi mass grave sites need to be guarded because they contain evidence for future war-crimes trials. But sometimes there is vengeance. According to one media account, a Caliphate commander was killed by his former Yazidi slave. He had offered her to his friends, and later she shot him. Some Yazidis can fight in military units, as profiled below.
Profile Twenty-One: Sisters of the Sun
 
“To Abu Bakr—I am the sister of the girls you captured, the daughter of the mothers you hold.” A Yazidi fighter in the Sun Brigade, 2015
            By 2015, some Yazidi women could mete out justice to their former tormentors. Fighting in a battalion operationally controlled by Kurdish forces, Yazidi women stand proud in the ranks of the “Sun Brigade.” It was organized by a Yazidi musician-turned-soldier and staffed with Yazidi women, many of whose friends and relatives were kidnapped by the Caliphate.
 
            Most of the Sun ladies were between eighteen and thirty, and many had never held a gun before joining the brigade. In their better, younger years, they were students, teachers, and cooks. Some were wives or sweethearts. Then came the Caliphate and the killing. By midsummer 2016, Yazidi women and girls were fighting.
            A Sun leader said of Yazidis, “Women were throwing their children from the mountains and then jumping themselves because it was a faster way to die. Our hands were all tied. We couldn’t do anything about it.” Now they can. Today, their hands hold weapons. “We are Yazidi. We are women. You will never be able to take away our honor. . . . We will liberate our homeland.” Another said, “We will wipe you out.”
 
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Podcast Three

Entertainment in the Caliphate
 
            Muslims have enjoyed music for centuries, relishing folk, religious, popular, and foreign songs. But the State outlawed most music. Soon after their conquest, State operatives confiscated or destroyed musical instruments. They also killed musicians. Some musicians have sold or hidden their instruments, too terrified to play them. A celebrated local musician, Ahmad, entertained refugees by pulling his piano in a wagon from one refugee camp to another to deliver his “concerts in the ruins.” Some found relief, if only fleeting, in his piano playing and lighthearted singing. But the State set his prized piano on fire. He said, “They burned it on my birthday.”
 
            Others pay higher prices for enjoying a song. A fifteen-year-old boy was arrested in central Mosul for listening to “Western music” at his father’s grocery store. He was publicly beheaded. There are some exceptions to the ban on music. The music of Cat Stevens, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, who became Yusuf Islam, is allowed. Nasheeds are songs that praise Allah and are sung without instrumental accompaniment. They are allowed, particularly if they promote the Caliphate.
Generation Caliphate—Child Care and Education in the Islamic State
“They told us we want to make an army to open Rome, and we will control the West and America.”  Taha Jalo Murada boy in Raqqa
 
“They arrive here as children and quickly turn into killing machines.” Commentary on boys’ education in Raqqa
            The State views today’s children as tomorrow’s iron-souled leaders. This parallels the Nazis’ Hitler Youth and the Soviets’ Young Pioneers. The Caliphate grooms Generation Z to serve as a shock force to conquer the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe. The boys are raised to obey even the harshest and most dangerous orders without hesitation.
 
            Education for boys is very strict, particularly for those abducted from Yazidi or Christian households. They are taught how to behead men by first practicing on dolls. They are deprived of sleep and edible food. A boy explained, “We were given dirty food—rice and beans [and] sometimes soup, but it had worms in it.” They have no opportunity to fraternize without supervision.
 
            The slightest infraction—being late for prayers, failing to handle weapons correctly—would result in a beating, as recounted by thirteen-year-old Taha, a boy who was grabbed from his Yazidi family. He was constantly terrified and beaten with sticks. Some boys of Taha’s age have been sent on suicide missions with bombs strapped around their waist. Taha explained, “We did not get enough training, but they said in the future you will fight for Jihad.”
 
            Primary and secondary education is strikingly different from that in Europe. The State canceled all classes except religious studies. The State decided that basic principles of science are un-Islamic because they declare that there are physical rules of the universe that do not change.70 This is considered sacrilegious. Any equations that are connected to moneylending are forbidden. The Caliphate promotes works by Islamic scholar Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of Wahhabism; Muhammad’s hadiths and biography; Quranic sciences; Islamic jurisprudence; and the Islamic doctrine. For the more secular-minded parents, home study has become popular.
 
Profile Nineteen: Profiles in Killing
 
            Death is an ever-present part of daily life in the Islamic State. Many have watched the deaths of family members, friends, neighbors, and work and schoolmates. It has become part of the common culture, as during the Great Plague in Europe and the Thirty Years' War. The Caliphate has captured international headlines for both the frequency and cruelty of its death sentences. They justify the killings by reference to Islamic mandates.
 
Beheadings
 
            In some Western civilizations, beheading was, according to the epoch, a noble way to die. Hanging was reserved for the lowborn. In Britain, bluebloods condemned to die were often, though not always, beheaded. As late as 1977, the guillotine was still being used in France. In America’s colonial era, severed heads of criminals were sometimes displayed on Boston Common.  Beheading also has a place in Islam’s early history. In 680 in Karbala, central Iraq, Muhammad’s favorite grandson, Hussein bin Ali, had his head chopped off by the soldiers of the Caliph.  In fact, Muslim history is rife with beheadings. Legendary Muslim warrior Saladin ordered the heads removed from 230 Knights Templar in 1187; Turkish invaders beheaded 800 martyrs in Otranto, Italy, in 1480.
 
            Early in the Islamic State, beheading became popular, in part because it is often referenced in Sharia. In the Koran, Allah ordered his followers to smite the infidels’ necks. He said, in Koran 47:4, “When you meet those who disbelieve on the battlefield, smite at their necks until you have killed.” The Islamic State does this today. It also impales the severed heads of its enemies on spikes.
 
Stoning
 
“Even the monkeys practiced stoning.” From the Hadiths
 
            Stoning is part of Sharia. Caliphate leaders endorse this punishment. The caliph Omar, one of Muhammad’s closest companions, maintained that the punishment of stoning for adultery was originally in the Koran. He said, “Surely Allah’s Apostle carried out the penalty . . . and so did we after him.” One hadith discusses a group of monkeys stoning a female monkey to death for adultery. The most accepted hadith, al-Bukhari, has four references to death by stoning.
 
            In Sharia, adultery must be proven by four eyewitnesses to the actual act. But in the State, the legal standards are much lower. Sometimes gossip is sufficient evidence for the judges. Males to be stoned are buried to the waist, and women to the neck. After this is complete, a crowd pelts the condemned with rocks until the person dies. The condemned are tightly bound, and the soil around the hole into which they are placed is well compacted. According to Sharia, if the condemned can wrest themselves from the hole, they can live without punishment. Sometimes there are double stonings of unmarried couples found en flagrante.
 
Crucifixion
 
            For Western readers, crucifixions are associated with Romans, Jesus, and Spartacus. Like stoning, crucifixion is a dreadful way to die. The condemned is either tied or nailed to a cross, and death usually comes from suffocation. Emperor Constantine abolished it in the fourth century for its cruelty. The Islamic State brought it back to the Middle East in the twenty-first century.
 
            Sometimes crucifixion can be combined with other tortures. Passions often run high during Ramadan, and, in June 2016, the State reportedly whipped and then crucified three people for eating during the day.
 
Exotic Torture
 
            The Caliphate experiments with killing. For example, the State murdered five prisoners by locking them in a metal cage and lowering them into a swimming pool. Filmed in Mosul with expensive underwater cameras, a seven-minute-long video captured the terror and agony of the drowning men. The cages were lifted from the pool, revealing dead and nearly dead men foaming at the mouth. Other depraved deaths include bathing the doomed in acid.
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Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Six Podcast Three

Health Care—Deadly Medicine
            Westerners accustomed to European health care standards are often shocked by the primitive conditions in their new Middle Eastern home. By 2015, most of the Caliphate’s hospitals had fallen into disrepair. Citizens without money or influence receive the most rudimentary health care or none at all. In Raqqa, the hospital’s dialysis machines and incubators stopped working soon after the Caliphate’s conquest. Humanitarian aid was blocked from Raqqa because it came “from the infidels.”
 
            The Caliphate’s medicine is particularly agonizing for women giving birth. The State curtailed Caesarean operations, which it considers Western and effeminate. The clerics determined that Muslim women should be stoic enough to endure childbirth pains without modern medicine. Muhammad’s wives and daughters did not receive anesthesia or antibiotics, and they should serve as exemplars.
 
            Women doctors are terrified by al-Khansaa, and most have stopped treating patients at the larger hospitals in Raqqa. They are too scared of being whipped. After the clerics assumed control of the Raqqa National Hospital, only one female physician, Raheb, continued to practice there.
 
            With health care in chaos and resources insufficient, physicians help boost hospital funding. Some harvest organs from living or recently deceased individuals for sale on the black market. This is legal according to the State’s mullahs, as long as the organs come from non-Muslims or apostates. The Caliphate’s Fatwa Sixty-Eight declared that “the apostate’s life and organs don’t have to be respected and may be taken with impunity.”
 
            Health care administrators relieve their hospital’s overcrowding by killing some patients. For example, HIV-positive fighters have been ordered to carry out suicide attacks, freeing the State of its medical costs. If there is a shortage of blood, Christians and Yazidis are forced to give blood for transfusions. A Christian woman said, “They even take our girls’ and old women’s blood. They use it for their wounded ISIS fighters.” By summer 2016, State fighters in embattled Fallujah grabbed healthy-looking pedestrians off the streets or dragged them from their homes and forced them to give blood. This left some drained and dying in the city streets.
 
            Some of the medical services are healing; some are marginal; most are substandard; some are lethal. In the Caliphate, there is little room for “defectives.” For example, the Caliphate issued a fatwa to kill babies and children with Down’s syndrome. They were to be suffocated. Medical clinics can be death centers for enemies of the State. Hospitals sometimes lure State opponents in for care and then inject them with poisons. Some of the victims had no idea that they were on a list of enemies until they began to die.
 
            Some medical experiments resemble those conducted by the Germans during World War II. The Caliphate’s foreign fighters, particularly French, Tunisians, and Libyans, injected poisons into the veins of prisoners. One of the prison guards said that corpses taken out of these rooms “looked like skeletons, only an hour after being injected with the needles.”
 
            By summer 2016, Caliphate militants began injecting severely injured soldiers with potassium chloride. Leaders calculated that pictures of injured, disfigured, or maimed soldiers might lower morale.
 
Fashion in the Islamic State—Black Is the New Black
 
“God loves women who are covered.”  A placard in a street in Raqqa
 
            The Caliphate takes dress seriously. Men and women must appear the way the first generation of Muslims were believed to have looked. Men who can’t grow a beard need to improvise. “Nadhim,” a thirty-year-old taxi driver, despaired because skin rashes prevented him from growing a beard or moustache. Nadhim pleaded his case to the religious police, but, he moaned, “they didn’t care. . . . One of them told me I’d better stay at home if I shaved.” Men may not cut their hair, apply gel to it, or wear it in any style that resembles Western fashion.
 
            Still, men have more fashion freedom than women, who must always be covered in public. The tent-like niqab covers everything but the eyes, which must be covered with a veil. Schoolgirls must wear them, too. Most women find this suffocating. Only women may sell clothing to women. Women must not wear high heels. The few hair salons that remain open are required to black out images of women from the packaging of hair dye products.
 
            If women do not dress in accordance with the State’s morality codes, they are beaten and, sometimes, severely tortured. Morality police are unforgiving. A nineteen-year-old-woman was placed in a cage “with some skulls” to teach her a lesson about inappropriate dress. Women face particularly challenging obstacles should they require hospitalization, as even there they must remain completely clothed. An elderly woman suffering cardiac arrest was forbidden from removing any of her clothing, despite the pleas of attending nurses. She died.
 
            Those girls and women who escape the Caliphate cast aside their raven-colored coverings as soon as they can. This is what happened in the summer of 2016, when the State was driven from some Syrian towns and villages. For the first time in years, they could show their faces in the street and wear whatever colors and styles of clothing they pleased. A nineteen-year-old northern woman freed from State-controlled Syria ripped off the khimar (a long hijab) she had been forced to wear for two years, proclaiming, “I felt liberated. . . . They made us wear it against our will, so I removed it that way to spite them.”

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Six Podcast Two

Mundanity, Fear, and Misery
 
            Life in the Caliphate is tedious and dangerous. Well-paying jobs, scarce across the Caliphate’s territory, are often unattainable for those unconnected to the leadership. For most residents, life is marked by mundanity, fear, and misery. Basic services—electricity, waste management, potable water, and road repair—are unreliable. In the villages, electricity can be cut for an entire week. Only the wealthiest or most well-connected cadre have sustained access to private generators, and after 2015 the price of petrol became out of reach for most residents. 2015. For most households, basic services and medical supplies are scarce. As in other failed states, women wait in long lines for food, and men walk the streets in search of employment, taking whatever is offered.
 
            The State feeds and houses its own. Depending on cash flow, most of its soldiers earn several hundred dollars each month. They are paid more for each wife, child, and slave. Teachers’ salaries range from seventy-five to ninety dollars, barely enough to buy a family's bread for a month. But most teachers, other than religious instructors, are unemployed. Others have lost hope. Many civil servants, who lost their positions after 2014, have fallen into destitution. Some have turned to subsistence farming to feed their families. Some men have despaired of work and commiserate with each other in cafés, where they chat, read the papers, and network for jobs.
 
            The rules for socializing at cafés have changed under the Caliphate. Historically a staple of Middle East popular culture, the café is a very male environment, filled with burbling water pipes, songs from the radio or television, and smiling men telling jokes and stories. No longer. Under the State, the water pipes were pulled, as were all forms of tobacco. If caught by the morality police, a smoker will be flogged, up to forty lashes. After a second offense, he will be whipped again and imprisoned. The third time results in imprisonment and a crippling fine. For café owners, the Caliphate is bad for business. One owner explained, “No customers come in. They do not enjoy a cup of coffee if they can’t smoke a cigarette with it.” There are also shortages of coffee and food, and most music is forbidden.
 
            Without smoking or sipping coffee, there is little to do in cafés beyond chatting and watching television. Soccer has been popular in the Middle East for decades, and men and boys would gather in cafés to cheer their teams, but this now poses hazards. In May 2016, in the small town of Balad in northern Iraq, Caliphate assassins burst into a café and shot at least fourteen Real Madrid fans dead while shouting that soccer is un-Islamic. Local police caught one of the culprits, and locals burned him alive. Two weeks later, Islamic State killers struck again, killing men in a café watching soccer. The Islamic State then went after the players themselves. The soccer stars were well known and well liked, but in July 2016, the State gathered a crowd of children and beheaded these local sports heroes in front of their weeping fans.
 
Bureaucrats in Black
 
            Though gainful employment is hard to find for most residents of Mosul or Raqqa, there is no shortage of bureaucrats. The Caliphate’s economic model is unique among terrorist organizations. One European observer opined that the Caliphate was a functioning state because it had “an administration, infrastructures, an education system, and a complaints bureau.” A Paris-based think tank estimated the State’s wealth at $2.2 billion in 2015.
 
            The State’s ownership of land, natural resources, and control of human capital give it a revenue stream, and the Caliphate cadre serve as administrators and managers. They issue and inspect numerous permits required to obtain basic goods, rent apartments, obtain medical care, and access transportation. The religious police are ubiquitous. Pedestrians are stopped and forced to present identification; these are usually shakedowns. Civil servants extort money from passersby to help fund State operations and to provide themselves with some spending money. Some of these civil servants speak French, English, German, or other European languages. This is because some are Western Jihadis.
 
            Bureaucrats were busy and creative in the early, victorious years, raising money for the State and paying themselves a livable salary. An early source of income was a “repentance” fee from those unconnected to the Caliphate. In 2015, the new conquerors imposed a one-time tax on those they deemed insufficiently Islamic. If they paid and repented, they were issued a repentance card. If they didn’t, they were beaten or killed. Some individuals and families who paid a smuggler's fee of several hundred dollars were able to leave.
 
            By spring 2016, the Islamic State had lost about 30 percent of the revenue it had collected in 2015 because oil sites had been bombed. Many people with taxable income in 2015 were much poorer a year later. However, bureaucrats continue to tax anyone and anything they can. They stop truck drivers for tax enforcement and impose a tax on anyone installing new satellite dishes or repairing broken ones. They stop men on the street and force them to recite the Koran; those who fail the test are fined or beaten. Sometimes they are shot.
 
            Some entrepreneurs trade in slaves on the internet. The most attractive virgins are auctioned to the highest bidders. Non-Muslim women have been awarded prizes in Koran-memorization competitions in Syria. Non-Muslim women arriving at the jail are given two choices: convert to Islam or refuse and be subjected to rape, slavery, and slow death. Women aged 20 to 30 are more prized and can fetch $84 for a bottle of high-end single-malt Scotch. A girl can be sold and resold by five or six different men. The phrase “smelling the girls” is slang for determining whether their hymens are intact. In a report by the British newspaper The Independent, surgery is forced on sex slaves to restore their virginity after every rape. Many of the captives try to kill themselves, and some succeed.
 
            Among the most notorious of the civil services is the all-women’s al-Khansaa unit, named for a bard of the first generation of Muslims. Tumadir bint Amr, or al-Khansaa, was Muhammad’s favorite poet. Today, her name lives on in the al-Khansaa (often spelled Al-Khansaa or Al-Khansa) women’s unit. It was formed in early 2014 to expose men who dressed as women to escape.
 
            Today, they enforce a morality code for women. Al-Khansaa’s mission has expanded to include operating brothels and prisons and recruiting women to join the Caliphate’s ranks. There are many Western fighters in al-Khansaa. British women work as “recruiting sergeants” for the State. Its leadership in 2015 and 2016 was heavily British.
 
            Women are terrified of brigade members who can stop, frisk, and beat any woman they choose. They sometimes inflict collective punishment. Some Al-Khansaa members operate covertly, moving between different shopping stands and waiting lines to listen in on conversations that might reveal hostility to the State. To keep Yazidi slaves sexually available, the State forces abortions. When birth-control pills are available, the prettier Yazidi sex slaves are forced to take them.