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The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State by [William McCants]

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William Faizi McCants

The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State Kindle Edition

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Based almost entirely on primary sources in Arabic--including ancient religious texts and secret al-Qaeda and Islamic State letters that few have seen--William McCants's The ISIS Apocalypse explores how religious fervor, strategic calculation, and doomsday prophecy shaped the Islamic State's past and foreshadow its dark future.

The Islamic State is one of the most lethal and successful jihadist groups in modern history, surpassing even al-Qaeda. Thousands of its followers have marched across Syria and Iraq, subjugating millions, enslaving women, beheading captives, and daring anyone to stop them. Thousands more have spread terror beyond the Middle East under the Islamic State's black flag.

How did the Islamic State attract so many followers and conquer so much land? By being more ruthless, more apocalyptic, and more devoted to state-building than its competitors. The shrewd leaders of the Islamic State combined two of the most powerful yet contradictory ideas in Islam-the return of the Islamic Empire and the end of the world-into a mission and a message that shapes its strategy and inspires its army of zealous fighters. They have defied conventional thinking about how to wage wars and win recruits. Even if the Islamic State is defeated, jihadist terrorism will never be the same.

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258 pages
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St. Martin's Press
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September 22, 2015
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1384 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

**One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Must-Read Books on the Evolution of Terrorism in the Middle East**'

**One of ABC News's Books of the Year in 2015**

“Excellent” ―Aatish Taseer, The New York Times

"The story [of Zarqawi's rise] is well told by William McCants in his excellent new book, The Isis Apocalypse" ―David Ignatius, The Atlantic

“Every policymaker and any concerned citizen who wants to understand the rise of ISIS should read this insightful and essential book by one of our greatest scholars of Islamist movements.” ―Lawrence Wright, author, THIRTEEN DAYS IN SEPTEMBER: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David and LOOMING TOWER: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

“It's hard to imagine anything more alien or revolting than the brutality of the Islamic State. Yet Will McCants's ISIS Apocalypse is lucid, thoughtful and illuminating on the group, its history, ideology and personalities. McCants understands every nuance of the religious concepts that drive the ISIS leadership, and he does a masterful job of explicating them and laying out the group's strategy. This is much the best work yet on the Islamic State.” ―Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism (2009-2012)

“No one knows more about ISIS's doomsday theology than Will McCants. McCants listens to the group with uncommon care and subtlety, and policymakers need to read this book to understand ISIS's origins and plans.” ―Graeme Wood, Edward R. Murrow Fellow, The Council on Foreign Relations Contributing editor, The Atlantic Lecturer in political science, Yale University

"An excellent account of how ISIS came into being...As to the future, McCants wonders if IS’s grotesque brutality will prove its undoing. Not necessarily. Up to a point, he argues, brutality works" --The Economist

About the Author

William McCants directs the project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. He is adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University and a former U.S. State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. McCants has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00V38KC1A
Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press (September 22, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 22, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1384 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 258 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1250080908

Best Sellers Rank: #750,908 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #46 in History of Syria
- #99 in Syria History
- #333 in Terrorism (Kindle Store)

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William Faizi McCants

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I direct the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. I also teach at Johns Hopkins University and was a senior adviser for countering violent extremism at the U.S. Department of State. By training I'm a historian and by kismet I'm a think tanker.

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A FINE HISTORY AND ANALYSIS OF ISIS

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 12, 2019

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Author William McCants wrote in the Preface to the new edition of this 2015 book, “Though reluctant to use the future tense when writing the book, I ventured my own predictions about the fortunes of the Islamic State. I anticipated its government in Syria and Iraq would collapse and its ‘provinces’ abroad would multiply and spread. Both are proving true… It was obvious to anyone who has watched how capably the Islamic State capitalizes on the chaos roiling the region. If I am right that the Islamic State pushed to expand its territory and terror network in response to Western nations attacking its lands in Syria and Iraq, then we should anticipate more expansion to compensate for fresh setbacks on the battlefield… The more the United States and its allies succeed in destroying the Islamic State’s government, the more terrorism it will face.” (Pg. xiii-xiv)

He explains, “I am going to take you on a tour of the Islamic State. We will explore its origins, meet its leaders, boo its fans, and cheer its detractors. You will read its propaganda, study its strategies, eavesdrop on its internal debates, and follow its tweets… I will explain its obscure allusions to Islamic history and theology so you can understand the ways the Islamic State uses and abuses Islam… its extreme brutality defies the convention al jihadist playbook. We’re used to thinking of al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama bin Laden as the baddest of the bad, but the Islamic State is worse… the Islamic State’s members… stir messianic fervor rather then suppress it. They want God’s kingdom now rather than later. This is not Bin Laden’s jihad.” (Pg. 2-3)

He observes, “the Islamic State was destined to fall out with al-Qaeda from the start. Al-Qaeda… wanted to build popular Muslim support before declaring the caliphate. The Islamic State wanted to impose a caliphate regardless of what the masses thought. The dispute that divided parent from child was there from the Islamic State’s conception.” (Pg. 7) Later, he adds, “It is a major taboo in Islam to kill a fellow Muslim. But the Islamic State argued that those who defied its rules were apostates or rebels so it could kill them without blame.” (Pg. 34)

He notes, “The jihadist discussion boards were … friendly territory for the Islamic State and its predecessor al-Qaeda in Iraq, where they had pioneered the distribution of propaganda. They opted for snuff films rather then al-Qaeda’s usual pedantry… Extreme violence attracted eyeballs to the propaganda, and … decentralized distribution kept it online. The Islamic State would use many of the same techniques a few years later to recruit on Twitter.” (Pg. 43)

He comments, “just as the flag of the Islamic State was trampled underfoot in Iraq, jihadist fanboys and al-Qaeda’s own affiliates began to lift it up, keeping the dream of the caliphate alive during a bleak period… preceding the chaos of the Arab Spring, which would renew the fortunes of the global jihadist movement.” (Pg. 45)

He points out, “all the al-Qaeda affiliates failed to create durable governments. The jihadists could interpret the failure as proof that al-Qaeda’ leaders were right all along. Had the affiliates hewed more closely to the hearts-and-minds strategy advocated by Bin Laden… they would have succeeded… But the jihadists could also interpret the failures as proof that the al-Qaeda affiliates hadn’t been brutal enough… that’s pretty much what the Islamic State would decide, although it would do better than it had in its first attempt at providing government services and co-opting the tribes.” (Pg. 68-69)

He summarizes, “the Islamic State consolidated its hold over eastern Syria… Its strategy of going it alone to capture and control territory may have alienated everyone, but it had paid off. The Islamic State now had a vast war chest… and President Assad had turned a blind eye, happy to see the Islamic State threaten his domestic and foreign enemies as long as it didn’t threaten him… Thousands of fighters left… other rebel groups to join the Islamic State. Some wanted to play for the winning team, some believed it was doing God’s work, some saw it as the Sunnis’ only hope… and some just wanted to make a little money… The Islamic State welcomed them all.” (Pg. 98)

He states, “the Islamic State had the money, fighters, weapons, and land to make a plausible case that it was the caliphate reborn. It helped that its caliph had more religious training than any political leaders in the Muslim world. Most Sunni Muslims may have rejected the Islamic State as a travesty and a sham, but they could not easily dismiss it as a joke when it declared itself a caliphate in 2014. The Islamic State was too powerful.” (Pg. 123) He adds, “The Islamic State had once been an object in what NOT to do. Its critics… attributed its defeat in 2008 to its brutality, zealotry, and arrogant belief that it was a state. But by 2014, those were the very qualities that made the Islamic State so successful. While other rebel groups worked together to overthrow governments, the State was busy creating its own.” (Pg. 126)

He points out, “the Islamic State has deliberately provoked the anger of Muslims and non-Muslims alike with its online videos of outrageous and carefully choreographed violence. It showcases the beheading of prisoners … and dumps enemy soldiers in mass graves while the camera is rolling. The State revels in gore and wants everyone to know it. And yet it has been remarkably successful at recruiting fighters, capturing land, and subduing its subjects, and creating a state. Why? Because violence and gore work.” (Pg. 148) Later, he adds, “The hands of thieves were severed, adulterers were stoned, bandits were shot and crucified, all in full pubic view. The Islamic State’s harsh punishments subdued the locals as effectively as massacring its enemies had.” (Pg. 152)

He summarizes and concludes, “The international coalition … can… support proxies to fight against the Islamic State… The coalition should provide air cover and intelligence to Sunni tribal militias and rebel groups that fight against the Islamic State… the coalition should consider arming them with light weaponry…If you think all of that sounds a lot like the coalition’s current military strategy, you’re right. It’s not a great plan, but it’s the best option at the moment. I’m confident that the Islamic State’s government in Syria and Iraq will crumble. No modern jihadist has provoked international intervention and survived…. The question is how will the jihadists evaluate the demise of the Islamic State? Will it prove to then that Bin Laden was right? Or will it prove that the State just needed to double down on its strategy? … there’s no obvious answer to the question…” (Pg. 157-158)

This book will be of great interest to those studying the Islamic State, and terrorist movements.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 23, 2015

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ISIS Apocalypse by Will McCants could not be more topical. Just last week ISIS talking heads intoned their intentions to attack various capitals, including Rome. “Ah hah!” I said to myself. “That’s right out of the main prophesy. It’s in the McCants book!” While dumb-founded Italian security personnel went scrambling after terrorist cells that may well not exist, they would have been better served to search in ancient parchments for the deeper meaning of the threat. For it turns out that the intellectual/ideological basis for the ISIS vision is driven by a sincerely-held belief in a myth structure developed in medieval times. The central myth is that of a final battle between the forces of good (purist Islamists) and the forces of evil (everyone else), the outcome of which will usher in the End of Days.

This End of Days thinking—the apocalyptic world view—renders trivial the means of bringing it about: The exquisitely filmed and widely broadcast torture-murder of large numbers of opponents and innocent civilians. Far from fearing the opprobrium of the West, they welcome it. Indeed, it is precisely what they want: An army of infidels rolling into Syria (al-Sham in the prophesies) for the Final Battle that leads to the Final Hour. President Obama’s refusal to take the bait has led to some very scorching criticism of late, but I can’t help wondering how many of the critics have even a faint idea of what drives ISIS and why they have attracted such a large following.

McCants, a Brookings think-tanker conversant with medieval Arabic, is about as expert as one could find in the West on the subject of Islamic end-times thinking. Yet his cogent analysis traces the rise of ISIS from around 2005 to mid-2015, and clearly explicates their troubled relationship with our more familiar nemesis, Al Qaeda. Although nominally having allegiance to Al Qaeda (at least initially), and through Al Qaeda to Mulla Omar, “commander of the faithful” among the Taliban of Afghanistan/Waziristan, the leaders of ISIS set a course of their own around 2006 and brought the wrath of God down on their heads.

Something that is easy to forget is that the early incarnations of ISIS (in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Mali) were shattered by US and allied military opposition in 2007-2010, with many if not most of its key leaders killed and its forces scattered. In intercepted messages between ISIS leaders and Bin Laden (and his partner/successor Zawahiri), this was precisely what Al Qaeder predicted would happen, and it drove them absolutely bananas.

The key issue was the proclamation of a Caliphate—an Islamic state that combines all temporal and spiritual authority. Bin Laden was clear, based on his own experience and observations, that a Caliphate cannot sustain until the groundwork has been done. Thus, you must start by winning the hearts and minds of the people you would rule, not try to terrify them into submission. You need to leave tribes alone to avoid blood feuds from ruining your plans for stability. You need to apply Shari’a law and its strict (and bloody) punishments leniently (at least at first) until the people have come to a point of religious purity where they will accept it. Finally, if you plan to form a state, you must accept that in the Arab world, the people expect the state to guaranty the basics of life: Food, water, medicine and (hopefully) electricity.

As McCants points out, if you didn’t know that Bin Laden was a world-renowned terrorist, you’d think he was a director of AID.

And here are three more things about ISIS I didn’t know: The current leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has a PhD in Islamic studies. Islamic scholarship is very important to these guys (and Al Qaeda too), so if you think disputing them in theological argument will be easy, you are mistaken. They may be murderous in the extreme, but stupid they are not.

Second, there is virtually no difference between the ISIS understanding of Islam and that of the Wahabists who dominate legal thought in Saudi Arabia. Good to keep in mind if you think our Saudi allies have anything against the ISIS ideology.

Third, the current ISIS leadership no longer play up the emergence of the Mahdi—“the rightly guided one” who will play a Savior role. Instead, the focus is on the Caliphate as an institution, not a Mahdi as a personal savior. To the degree that some ISIS scholars point to a coming a savior, the one they name is none other than Jesus. Shocked? Well, I was.

Anyway, to Al Qaeda’s immense consternation, a reborn ISIS did it all backwards and succeeded anyway (at least so far). ISIS in many ways has marginalized Al Qaeda—the child eating the father—and there is an excellent chance that the forces and militias formerly loyal to Al Qaeda will throw in with ISIS. Many have already.

So why is it working for ISIS this time, starting around 2010-2011, when they failed so miserably before? The short answer, according to McCants, is that this time they were left alone. The Shi’a-dominated government of Iraq under Prime Minister Maliki had effectively lost control of Iraq’s Sunni provinces, and there was no US military presence to haul his chestnuts out of the fire this time. (Recall that Maliki was so anxious for the Americans to leave—and leave him a free hand—that he had refused to negotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed us to stay (even if we had wanted to).)

The breakdown of central authority left a power vacuum filled by a variety of self-appointed Sunni militia groups, but these proved to be little more than armed thugs imposing protection taxes but providing no protection. (Nor trash collection, water and power supply, medical care or food, when it and came to that.) Next to them, ISIS was seen as a relief. The one lesson ISIS took from Al Qaeda’s playbook was to try to provide at least rudimentary public services. Chopping the hands off thieves struck the local merchants as all to the good--and the apostles of ISIS most assuredly did not come across as corrupt banditos in their own right. They definitely showed some good government chops, so to say.

The second big break ISIS got was the civil war in Syria, a war that left the (largely Sunni) Syrian hinterland ungoverned. The disparate, disorganized and fractious rebel groups in that region were unable or unwilling to fight sustained battles against the central government forces under Bashar Al-Assad, which made it excruciatingly difficult for the West in general and the US in particular to find reliable recipients of US military aid. The only group that really pushed the battle forward was the Nusra Front, and they were allies of Al Qaeda. For his part, Al-Assad was (and is) only too happy to let ISIS do his Sunni-on-Sunni dirty work. Truly a foreign policy problem from Hell from the US standpoint.

The third big break ISIS got was the Arab Spring, a movement of popular revolutions that unhinged government after government but which led not to a birth of a new Arab freedom but chaos and further economic dislocation. Disaffected youth (and not just youth) hears a resonance in these End Time prophesies as their world has turned upside down. Utopianism has a strong appeal to the marginalized and disaffected, whether it’s the weird Bible thumping of a Jim Jones or a restoration of a more pure and primitive society as preached by Pol Pot. When the Utopians are heavily armed, the myth plays out exactly one way—the dubious peace of mass slaughter and unburied death.

So what is to be done? None of the choices are especially attractive, but McCants shows (in a few paragraphs) why most of the obvious ones won’t work. The best hope probably lies in helping proxies prosecute the fight, but it will be long and arduous. Moreover, the Caliphate may be defeated (and I believe it will be), but the jihadists drawn to it will still be around to give it another try when the opportunity presents itself.

To his great credit, McCants avoids pointing the finger of blame at the many political actors on whose watch many terrible things have happened. McCants remains singularly fair-minded, dispassionate and analytical throughout—a refreshing respite from the avalanche of drivel that passes for a national discourse in this day and age.

Finally, I will add for my own part, that the neocon shibboleth, We don’t do nation-building, must be seen as among the most disastrous brain failures in the history of American foreign policy. Nation-building is precisely what the ISIS Caliphate is about, and we ignore that inconvenient obligation to our peril.

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Felicity

it isnt as up to date as I would like as events have since changed the current media and ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 21, 2016

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interesting book on the rise of ISIS, it isnt as up to date as I would like as events have since changed the current media and international reaction to ISIS, but in relation to a snapshot in time of the period covered and also an intricate detailing of the rise of ISIS (including how and why the flag came about, ironically via photoshop) it is well worth a read.

2 people found this helpful

Ann

Intelligent, deeply researched and eminently readable.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 11, 2016

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Riverting and informative book If you want to know about the rise and and internal workings of ISIS this is the best book I have read.

nelhelen

Interesting but challenging hook.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 15, 2018

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I found this book informative and challenging as I had so much to learn.

Emma

Great read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 18, 2016

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Really enjoyed this book. Gives a good but brief overview of events surrounding ISIS and how they came to be.

Amazon Customer

A fascinating and informative book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 21, 2015

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A fascinating exploration of how apocalyptic theology has shaped the Islamic State from the inception of Zarqawi's Jama'at al Tawhid wal-Jihad to al Baghdadi's Islamic State. The explanation of how ISIS's strategy evolved between 2007 and 2014 was also highly informative. Highly recommend for anyone.

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