ISIS Quotes

“Все тоталитарные режимы выстраивают свою идеологию на мифах, стирающих национальные границы, - даже те, что возникают на почве национализма, а потом, задним числом, оправдывают насильственное присоединение чужих земель”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“revanchism.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Like any government, it seeks to retain a monopoly on violence.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“The location for al-Baghdadi’s sermon on June 28, 2014, was thus carefully chosen. He was not only paying homage to ISIS’s founding father, al-Zarqawi, but also implicitly heralding the reunification of Aleppo and Mosul under the black banner of the restored Islamic caliphate.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“In ISIS, Abdelaziz discovered new things about himself. He learned that he was violent, brutal, and determined. He beheaded enemies. He kept a Yazidi girl in his house as a sabiyya,”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Repeatedly between 2000 and 2001, the al-Qaeda leader had asked al-Zarqawi to return to Kandahar and make bayat—or pledge allegiance—which was the sine qua non for full al-Qaeda enlistment.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Al-Zarqawi also had a much more promiscuous definition of kuffar (“unbelievers”), which he took to include all the Shia and any fellow Sunnis who did not abide by a strict Salafist covenant. Bin Laden had never drawn a bull’s-eye on these categories before, no doubt for filial reasons: his own mother was a Syrian Alawite, or a member of the offshoot of the Shia sect.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Bin Laden’s mentor at the time was also one of Hayatabad’s leading Islamist theoreticians, a Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam, who in 1984 had published a book that became a manifesto for the Afghan mujahidin. It argued that Muslims had both an individual and communal obligation to expel conquering or occupying armies from their sacred lands.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“It was in the mosque that al-Zarqawi first discovered Salafism, a doctrine that in its contemporary form advocates a return to theological purity and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Salafists deem Western-style democracy and modernity not only fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam, but the main pollutants of the Arab civilization,”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“One of the main recruitment centers and organizing hubs for ISIS is prisons. Whether by accident or design, jailhouses in the Middle East have served for years as virtual terror academies, where known extremists can congregate, plot, organize, and hone their leadership skills “inside the wire,” and most ominously recruit a new generation of fighters. ISIS is a terrorist organization,”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Salafists deem Western-style democracy and modernity not only fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam, but the main pollutants of the Arab civilization, which after World War I stagnated under the illegitimate and “apostate” regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“For a year or so following his flight from Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi was based in Iran and northern Iraq, although he traveled throughout the region.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“For a year or so following his flight from Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi was based in Iran and northern Iraq, although he traveled throughout the region. He”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Before ISIS controlled eastern Syria, an oil well produced around thirty thousand barrels per day, and each barrel sold for two thousand Syrian pounds—eleven dollars at the current exchange rate. Local families that worked in refineries would make two hundred liras (a little more than one dollar) on each barrel they refined primitively. After ISIS took over, a barrel of oil became cheaper because it fixed the price”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“As we’ve examined, the anti-American insurgency in Iraq drew its strength from Sunni revanchism. One way to view Baathism historically is as one among many exponents of Sunni political power. It competed in its heyday with pan-Arab nationalism, as expounded by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Islamism of Sayyed Qutb’s Brotherhood, and the Salafist-Jihadism of bin Laden. Indeed, the Islamic Faith Campaign was meant to preempt Salafism’s usurpation of Baathism. Today, the secular socialist ideology is in a tenuous state of coexistence and competition with the caliphate-building takfirism of ISIS.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Hours earlier, before the ISIS raid, Fares’s Media Center broadcast a radio program featuring Syrian women discussing their recent divorces. All too much for the takfiris, who abducted six of Fares’s employees (they were released two hours later) and stole or smashed the center’s computers and broadcasting equipment. “The reason Kafranbel became important is because it’s been persistently and consistently supporting the revolution in all of its aspects—whether it’s the nonviolent revolution or the armed revolution or the humanitarian and civil society work,” Fares told us. “The regime, when we would say something in opposition to them, they’d shell us. ISIS, when we made a drawing against them—the first in June of this year—they wanted to attack us, so they came and raided the Media Center. At the end of the day, they’re both the same. They’re both tyrants.” (Not long after this interview, which took place as Fares was touring the United States, ISIS tried to assassinate him in Idlib. He was shot several times but recovered from his injuries.)”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Whatever the perversion or barbarity, ISIS has a ready-made justification. The salability of its dark vision cannot be underestimated. Recently, the US State Department created a Twitter account called “Think Again Turn Away.” It tweets photographs of ISIS atrocities and casualties and links to news stories describing them. It also engages with pro-ISIS accounts, in effect trolling them. Thus, in opposition to @OperationJihad, who wrote to no one in particular, quoting a jihadist anthem, “We have nothing to achieve in this world, except martyrdom, [i]n the mountains we will be buried and snow will be our shroud,” the State Department rejoined: “Much more honorable to give a Syrian child a pair of boots than drive him from his home into snow w/your quest for death.” @OperationJihad didn’t bother to reply.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“The Iraq War upset the balance of power in the region in Iran’s favor,” Emma Sky, the former adviser to the US military, told us. “It is common in the Arab world to hear talk of secret deals between Iran and the United States, and laments that the US ‘gave Iraq to Iran.’ ” This geopolitical perception, Sky said, accounts for one of the primary reasons that Sunnis have been attracted to ISIS.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“It didn’t bode well for the new premier’s tenure that in one of his first press conferences he advocated a strategic partnership between the United States and Iran in combating ISIS—a partnership that many Sunnis believed started in 2003. “The American approach us to leave Iraq to the Iraqis,” Sami al-Askari, a former Iraqi MP and senior advisor to al-Maliki, told Reuters. “The Iranians don’t say leave Iraq to the Iraqis. They say leave Iraq to us.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Also, as it came to be exposed later, some FSA-affiliated groups engaged in theft and robbery and claimed the Assad forces were behind it. As time went by, however, lawlessness became more pronounced and a major source of grievance for the local communities. Some FSA factions opted to leave the front lines and busy themselves with moneymaking activities in their areas. Factionalism, profit-making, and incompetence started to alienate people.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Contrary to numerous claims in the Western press that suggest that al-Baghdadi was released from Bucca in 2009, when it was shuttered, he actually served only a single yearlong stint in the internment facility, in 2004. “He was visiting a friend of his in Fallujah named Nessayif Numan Nessayif,” al-Hashimi recalled to us. “With him was another man, Abdul Wahed al-Semayyir. The US Army intelligence arrested all of them. Baghdadi was not the target—it was Nessayif. He was arrested on January 31, 2004, and was released on December 6, 2004. He was never arrested again after that. Everything to the contrary is incorrect.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“David Petraeus, when he became the top US general in Iraq, got to know Suleimani quite well, referring to the master spy as “evil” and mulling whether or not to tell President Bush that “Iran is, in fact, waging war on the United States in Iraq, with all of the US public and governmental responses that could come from that revelation.” For Petraeus, Iran had “gone beyond merely striving for influence in Iraq and could be creating proxies to actively fight us, thinking that they [could] keep us distracted while they [tried] to build WMD and set up [the Mahdi Army] to act like Lebanese Hezbollah in Iraq.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“Amman’s own file on the state sponsorship of al-Zarqawi’s terrorist activities during the lead-up to the Iraq War stood in marked contrast to what Powell had presented earlier. It wasn’t Baghdad America should have been looking at, the Jordanians said; it was Tehran. A high-level GID source told the Atlantic magazine in 2006: “We know Zarqawi better than he knows himself. And I can assure you that he never had any links to Saddam. Iran is quite a different matter. The Iranians have a policy: they want to control Iraq. And part of this policy has been to support Zarqawi, tactically but not strategically. . . .In the beginning they gave him automatic weapons, uniforms, military equipment, when he was with the army of Ansar al-Islam. Now they essentially just turn a blind eye to his activities, and to those of al-Qaeda generally. The Iranians see Iraq as a fight against the Americans, and overall, they’ll get rid of Zarqawi and all of his people once the Americans are out.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

“But the question was also a strange one, because the United States has been at war with ISIS for the better part of a decade under its various incarnations, first as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), then the Mujahidin Advisory Council, and then the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). It was as if the Vietcong had returned under a different banner and laid siege to a third of Southeast Asia in 1985, only to be marveled at and sensationalized as a surprising and unknown guerrilla insurgency by everyone from the Reagan administration to CNN. If ever there was a familiar foe, ISIS was it.”
― Michael Weiss, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror