The Everyday Horrors of the Islamic State

[Valin]

Spiegel Online‎:

Uwe Buse and Katrin Kuntz

July 1 2015

 

In late June, images made their way around the world of four men as they were locked in a car and killed with a rocket-propelled grenade. They showed seven men, chained together with explosive necklaces, as they were blown up. And they provided evidence that five men had been locked in a metal cage and lowered into the water to drown. As we learned last week, 16 men in total were murdered in these brutal ways. We know this because the executioners with the group calling itself "Islamic State" wanted to film their victims as they were dying.

 

The films, carefully staged and distributed using all modern channels, seem to be coming directly from hell. The men who see themselves as the new caliphs are performing an unparalleled dance of death, complete with the kinds of horrors once depicted by painter Hieronymus Bosch -- only these killers and executioners are anything but fiction. In Syria and along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq today, where human civilization once began, it is not some nightmarish fictional characters at work, but real players in contemporary history with a megalomaniacal agenda. And instead of covering up their murders, they are doing the opposite -- inviting the rest of the world to look on, proud of a brutality that knows no bounds and is both part of their military strategy and an instrument of oppression.

 

The Islamic State is both fact and fiction at the same time. It has clearly created a propaganda bubble, but it also represents a new social order in places where it has come into power. The "caliphate" was proclaimed about a year ago, and the older group ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) has become IS, often referred to as Da'ish in the Arab world. But all of these names refer to the same thing: a militant movement with its origins partly in the Iraqi prison camps run by the Americans, which grew into al-Qaida in Iraq and now, as IS, is claiming territory for a new state, territory captured by former top figures in the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein.

 

In truth, the Islamic State is nothing but a claim. On closer inspection, it is merely an irregular occupation regime without a cohesive country to call its own. IS controls cities, such as Raqqa, Ramadi and Mosul, and it has infiltrated and now controls villages in Syria and Iraq. But there is also a paucity of verifiable facts.

 

Any reporter who dared to enter Raqqa to investigate the situation there would be in the kind of mortal danger that no reputable news organization can justify. Those who go there anyway, like former German lawmaker and author Jürgen Todenhöfer -- whose new book "Inside IS - 10 Days in the 'Islamic State'" is currently at the top of the SPIEGEL non-fiction bestseller list -- are at the mercy of their hosts and are only permitted to ask subservient questions. But there are other paths into the sinister realm, access through back doors and the underground. For example, not all telecommunications lines have been disconnected yet, and it is sometimes still possible to communicate by phone, Skype or text message.

 

Courageous Efforts

 

Most importantly, there are groups of committed people who have made a point of documenting all IS activities, both virtual and tangible. There is opposition in the occupied areas, and there are courageous individuals who are determined, despite danger to life and limb, to keep the hope of a different life alive and, in the meantime, to use sound, images and text to record everyday life under IS. It is because of these people that SPIEGEL is able to provide the insights into daily life under IS that are described in this article.

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