On a crisp spring day in March, in the northern city of Sulaymaniyah, I met Abu Islam, a senior ISIS leader nicknamed the Ghost of ISIS by Iraqi intelligence for his elusiveness. He was escorted into a small office with faux-wood paneling and no windows at the Special Forces Security Compound in Kurdistan. His hands were manacled in front of him; he was blindfolded by a dark hood pulled over his loose black Shirley Temple curls. Long sought by the Iraqi government, Abu Islam was notorious for running clandestine cells of suicide bombers—some of whom were as young as twelve—and carrying out covert terrorist operations beyond the Islamic State’s borders. Having had a few years of religious training, he was also tasked with teaching the unique ISIS version of Islam to new fighters. Still in his mid-twenties, Abu Islam rose to become the ISIS “emir” of Iraq’s oil-rich province of Kirkuk.
Abu Islam’s capture, in October, was one of the most important in the campaign to defeat the Islamic State. Most of the ISIS élite have fled or been killed since Iraq launched its most ambitious military offensive, late last year, to retake Mosul. “He’s a guy we chased for more than two years,” Lahur Talabany, the head of Kurdistan’s Zanyari intelligence service, told me. “To pick him up and realize that we finally got him, it was a big catch for us.”
Over the past three years, I’ve covered ISIS from Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, and at the Syrian border. In four decades covering the Middle East, I’ve interviewed the leaders of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the rank-and-file of many other militant groups. ISIS, which has kidnapped and beheaded journalists, has been the hardest rebel group to cover. In Sulaymaniyah, courtesy of the Kurdish intelligence service, I got access to Abu Islam and, separately, to a second ISIS fighter who admitted to committing a series of rapes and murders in the course of two years.
I sat at a desk across from Abu Islam, a nom de guerre, as he recounted his misadventures with chilling nonchalance. He initially gazed downward, refusing to look at me, an unveiled, non-Muslim female. His real name is Mazan Nazhan Ahmed al-Obeidi. Unlike most foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State, the majority of Iraq’s homegrown militants came from villages and farms, intelligence officials told me. Abu Islam was born in 1989 in the village of Rashad, southwest of Kirkuk. In June, 2014, after the ISIS army blitzed across the border from Syria into Iraq, he became one of its early recruits.
“I was a student in a Sharia college,” he told me. “I was following ISIS on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter. I loved what they were doing.” He was married, with a pregnant wife, when he left home to join ISIS. He did not see his wife, or his daughter, Aisha, until after he was captured. His captors allowed the family visit to soften him up for interrogation.
“Every man has a weak point,” a Special Forces officer, who asked not to be identified, told me. During the two-year manhunt, he had questioned members of Abu Islam’s extended family. “I personally have been to his house. I saw his wife when she was pregnant. I saw her when she gave birth. And I saw her when the child was a year old.”
In the ISIS underground, Abu Islam told me, he ran nine sleeper cells inside Kirkuk. “I was not important,” he insisted, more than once. Yet he admitted to staking out targets—vulnerable public sites, Iraqi military installations, and mosques where Muslims opposed to ISIS congregated— and plotting how and where to plant roadside explosives to kill soldiers and civilians. “And assassinations,” he said, almost as an afterthought, “that was part of the job as well.” As he described the choreography of a military jihad—which he compared to playing chess—he began to look me in the eye. He seemed emboldened by recounting the powers he once wielded.
I could not independently confirm much of what he told me in the interview, which took place in the presence of two Kurdish intelligence officials. The Iraqi media has written about him as a senior ISIS emir. One suicide bomber—a fifteen-year-old boy named Mahmoud Ahmed, who was later captured—described Abu Islam’s influence. The boy was dispatched, wearing a suicide belt hidden under a Barcelona soccer shirt, to bomb an Iraqi stadium last year. "When I reached the target … when I saw the young kids, I knew it was wrong immediately,” Ahmed told Britain’s Sky News, in December. He left the stadium and returned to his handler, who said, “ ‘Go straight back.’ I told him, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘This is an order from Abu Islam.’ ” The boy went back to the stadium, where he was intercepted by Iraqi security forces. His belt bomb was dismantled as he wept.
The Islamic State is on the verge of losing Mosul, where its forty-six-year-old chieftain, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the ISIS caliphate, in 2014. Mosul is the largest city under ISIS control. Its loss would leave only small pockets of land under the group's control in Iraq, although it still holds chunks of Syria. I asked Abu Islam what he thinks today of Baghdadi, who is on the run.
“I do not agree with his policies now,” he said. “If he wanted to establish an Islamic State, he could have done it in a different way. His policy was wrong—the killing, the terrorizing, all these ways.”
Yet he had recognized Baghdadi as his leader until he was captured? I asked.
“Yes, he was my leader, my caliph,” he replied. “If I was still there, I would have stayed there."
“Maybe it is failing right now,” he added, “but the rise of the Islamic State is still going to happen, because it’s a must. God has said so in the Book. Sharia law, or the caliph, must rule on Earth. Maybe not in our time. Maybe in another hundred years.”
The fighters are still faithful, he said: “The young guys over there—no matter what, no matter if they lose everything—that mentality is not going to go away, even if the caliph gets killed. If these forces keep on taking their territory away and they don’t have a city or something like that, it’s going to be like it was before—underground. It’s going to be even more dangerous. The attacks are going to get even worse. They’re going to be against nations worldwide.”
Abu Islam’s core beliefs have not changed, either. Shiites are not real Muslims, he told me, and must all be slaughtered. (There are almost two hundred million Shiites worldwide.) Christians and Jews, he added, have three choices: convert to Islam, pay a tax, or be killed. “Even in the Bible,” he told me, “Jesus said that all people must convert to Islam. The prophet Abraham, before Jesus, said that as well.” Gays and lesbians, he said, should be “thrown from the highest building or they get burned.”
Abu Islam was captured on October 23rd, after he’d led an offensive to seize Kirkuk two days earlier. The goal was to take the Kirkuk military base, capture the government center, and free hundreds of prisoners. He commanded a hundred and fifty men, supported by local sleeper cells. They drove deep into Kirkuk, taking control of the power station, several police bases, and tall buildings where they deployed snipers. They also took over the abandoned Snowbar Hotel, as well as the female dormitory of a Christian school. One girl, hiding under her bed, recounted afterward how she had been terrified when one fighter sat above her eating food raided from the kitchen. “We didn’t take a deep breath,” she told the Times. “All we could do is pray.”
Abu Islam’s team hoped to spark a local rebellion. All but a few of the fighters were wearing suicide vests. “Everyone came in with the idea of no capture,” he told me. “It was either kill or get killed.” In the end, Kurdish forces overwhelmed the ISIS forces; more than a hundred militants were killed, Iraqi officials told me. Abu Islam did not, however, set off his own explosive vest. “I saw all my friends get killed, all my guys,” he told me. “The first thing that came into my mind, because I didn’t execute it, blow myself up—I thought about my mother. It’s been three years since I’ve seen her. And I just didn’t want to die at the moment.”
He fled to a cousin’s empty home, and then sought refuge in another. His family, knowing he was on the run, turned him in. “As soon as he went to the area,” the Special Forces officer told me, “we started getting phone calls, ‘He’s here. He’s here. Come capture him.’ ”
Abu Islam is an ideologue, but other fighters are thugs, impoverished, or politically alienated. Abu Yasser—a towering twenty-one-year-old from Rubiah, a village outside Mosul—told me a woeful story about being raised by his grandmother, shunned by his father, who had another family, and being unable to find work beyond occasional help on his uncles’ farm. “The first thing was the money, my financial situation,” he said, when I asked why he joined ISIS. “I had nobody to advise me or guide me, and they kind of pulled me in and taught me. They gave me lessons. I felt like they were helping me.”
Abu Yasser, whose given name is Ammar Hamid Mahmoud Hussein, admitted, without shame, to atrocities. In August, 2014, he had been among the ISIS fighters who went into the Sinjar Mountains and slaughtered more than five thousand Yazidi men, then raped and enslaved thousands of women and girls. The massacre led the Obama Administration to launch its first airstrikes against ISIS, and to recommit the U.S. military to Iraq. (The United States now has some five thousand troops in Iraq, and hundreds in Syria. It spends more than twelve million dollars a day, on average, in airstrikes against ISIS.)
“We used to establish fake checkpoints, recognize them, take them to a certain spot and kill them,” Abu Yasser told me, about the massacre. “We just took them to a kind of ditch and killed them all, then left them.” It was a method employed repeatedly over the next two years against “Arabs, Sunnis, people against ISIS, or people who had money,” he said. He estimates that he murdered or was present for the killing of four hundred people.
He also confessed, with no regret, to repeated rapes. “At first, it was an order,” he told me, but then added, “We were young, we were not married, and we needed that.” The women often resisted. “We would tell them, ‘O.K., I am your husband, I am the owner of you,’ ” he said. “Sometimes they needed to be beaten to make them comply.” When Abu Yasser was dispatched to lead one of twenty sleeper cells in Baghdad, he was allowed to rape a woman after assassinating a male member of her family. The majority of his targets were Shiites, whom Sunnis view as heretics. “If we killed a guy, and we saw that he had a sister or mother, we could do whatever we wanted to them because they were Shiite,” he said. He spent almost a year in Baghdad, where he carried out assassinations, facilitated suicide bombers, and planted roadside explosive devices.
Abu Yasser, like Abu Islam, was captured in the failed Kirkuk offensive. Now he claims that he rejects the Islamic State. “I destroyed my life,” he told me. “When I was with them, I was only Muslim in name. I never knew how to actually pray, never knew the verses. I never knew anything about the Koran. They taught me the wrong way.” Most ISIS fighters, he complained, were motivated more by pills—such as Captagon, which produces a speed-like high and blocks pain, fear, and fatigue—than by ideology. Abu Yasser claimed that he never took pills, but did sneak liquor.
After Kurdish forces retook control of Kirkuk, Abu Yasser shed his weapons and body armor and tried to slip into a crowd that had assembled. Locals watching him walk away tipped off a Special Forces team. Abu Yasser was captured two blocks away. In the end, he, too, refused to die for ISIS.
