Thomas Wictor

Today I heard former British Prime Minister Tony Blair say that the 2003 invasion of Iraq “gave rise” to the Islamic State. Later on Twitter, a Jew-hater told me that Israel and Saudi Arabia created the Islamic State. And British Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted that the Islamic State isn’t Muslim. All of these statements are incorrect. Know your enemy.

The Islamic State was founded in 1999 by Jordanian career criminal and terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He called the group Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Organization for Monotheism and Jihad) or JTJ. Zarqawi set up JTJ in Herat, Afghanistan, with money provided by Osama bin Laden. JTJ was originally created to overthrow King Abdullah II of Jordan. Zarqawi used the rationale of apostasy to justify killing any Muslim who disagreed with him. In reality he was simply a psychopath.

Zarqawi killed because he loved it. His religious views are irrelevant. Though he committed mass murder in the name of Islam, he relished gore, suffering, pain, and control. Spreading Islam was his stated goal, but his motivation was slaughter. He was almost certainly a sexual psychopath. Murder turned him on.

From 1999 to the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi traveled around Iran, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, and Sunni Iraq, making jihadist contacts and raising his profile. By September of 2003, Zarqawi was a household name, due to his car-bomb attacks and his invention of the beheading video that showed the victim in an orange jumpsuit. The Islamic State continues both traditions to this day.

In October of 2004, Zarqawi pledged an oath of religious allegiance (baya) to Osama bin Laden and renamed JTJ the Organization of Jihad’s Base in Mesopotamia (Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn), also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

AQI became the most successful of the many insurgent groups in Iraq. In July of 2005, al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri sent Zarqawi a letter outlining a plan to spread conflict throughout the Middle East, establish an Islamic caliphate, and attack Israel. According to Zawahiri, the state of Israel was founded strictly to prevent a Muslim caliphate.

Thus we see that as early as ten years ago, the future Islamic State already had plans to destroy Israel.

Also in 2005 Zawahiri demanded that Zarqawi stop his savagery and enforcement of sharia-or-death. Of course Zarqawi ignored these commands, since he lived to murder and mutilate. However, in January of 2006 Zarqawi agreed to Zawahiri’s order that AQI merge with several smaller terrorist groups and form the Mujahedin Shura Council (Majlis Shura al-Mujahedin) or MSC. Though part of MSC, AQI remained a separate entity.

On June 7, 2006, the US Air Force dropped two 500-lb bombs on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s head. He lived for a few minutes after special forces found him, but his lungs had popped, so he went off to his great reward short of breath.

The men at the scene said he was afraid and kept trying to crawl away. Like most jihadists, he was a swaggering stud when murdering the defenseless, but armed soldiers who knew what they were doing made him flee as fast as he could.

A quick aside.

Do you know why the victims in Islamic State murder videos seem so calm? It’s because the terrorists convince them that they won’t be hurt. They go through multiple dry runs of the murders, promising that it’s all propaganda, and then they kill the person without warning. Today I watched video of a Syrian airman being run over by a tank. He actually jumped in front of the tank treads when the vehicle went off course, so that tells me that he thought the tank would stop. I don’t recommend you watch the video. The only good thing about it is that several of the terrorists show their faces. They won’t be alive for much longer.

In Iraq, Zarqawi’s men kidnapped the mayor of a small town and promised they wouldn’t hurt him. When they took him out into the desert, one of the terrorists leaned his gun up against the car so that he could urinate. The mayor snatched up the rifle and shot all of the terrorists. Then he reloaded and killed them. After that, he walked several miles to a US Marine base and brought the marines back to the scene. The marines laughed themselves sick.

“It was a total Chuck Norris move,” one of the marines said.

The mayor was given asylum in the US. I won’t use his name.

So Zarqawi became a former terrorist in the best way possible. On October 12, 2005, MSC united with three smaller terrorist groups and six Sunni tribes to form the Mutayibeen Coalition. Under Zarqawi, AQI in Anbar Province would enter a town, find the tribal chief, and murder one of his children in front of him. That was how Zarqawi introduced himself. Zarqawi’s AQI successor Abu Ayyub al-Masri appealed to the Sunni tribes’ religious sensibilities and was thus more successful.

On October 15, 2006, MSC and the Mutayibeen Coalition announced the formation of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), with Abu Omar al-Baghdadi as its leader.

Although AQI head Abu Ayyub al-Masri pledged baya to al-Baghdadi, these oaths are personal. They don’t require the entire organization to follow suit. Therefore al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was never actually subservient to the Islamic State.

ISI controlled six Sunni governorates in Iraq. Because ISI was so brutal, it created the Sunni backlash called the Awakening. This movement coupled with with the American Troop Surge of 2007 virtually destroyed ISI. By 2008 ISI described itself as being in a state of “extraordinary crisis.” Both Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi were killed in a joint American-Iraqi operation on April 18, 2010.

On May 16, 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became the new head of ISI.

Baghdadi rebuilt ISI using former Ba’athist military and intelligence officers who’d served Saddam Hussein. The conventional wisdom is that Saddam Hussein was secular, but in reality he underwent a religious conversion in 1989 and created a hybrid of Ba’athist national socialism and Salafism. He established the Saddam Fedayeen and trained an estimated 40,000 Islamist terrorists in three Iraqi camps.

In August of 2011, Baghdadi sent Iraqi and Syrian members of ISI to fight Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Assad is also a Ba’athist, which proves that the Iraqis who Baghdadi recruited are not secular nationalists, as so many “experts” insist. By January of 2012, a powerful ISI-affiliated group called Jabhat al-Nusra li Ahl as-Sham or Jabhat al-Nusra (the al-Nusra Front) had formed, under the command of Abu Muhammad al-Julani.

President Obama withdrew the last American combat troops from Iraq on December 18, 2011, and in June of 2012, ISI resumed the campaign of car bombings that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had pioneered.

In July of 2012, al-Baghdadi announced in an audio statement that ISI had returned to the strongholds from which US troops and the Sons of Iraq had driven them in 2007 and 2008.

Like his predecessor Zarqawi, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a psychopath who won’t listen. On April 8, 2013, he declared that the al-Nusra Front had merged with ISI to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS), also called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The commander of the al-Nusra Front denied the merger, and al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri prohibited it. Baghdadi ignored both and claimed that al-Nusra was now subordinate to ISIS.

In October of 2013, Ayman Zawahiri ordered the dissolution of ISIS and appointed the al-Nursra Front as the official al-Qaeda representative in Syria. Four months later, in January of 2014, al-Qaeda cut all ties with ISIS. Almost half a year of fighting, allying, betraying, fighting, and allying followed. The al-Nusra Front, Bashar al-Assad, and ISIL attacked and didn’t attack each other, depending on the day.

Then on June 29, 2014, ISIS proclaimed itself a global caliphate. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became Caliph Ibrahim, and ISIS adopted the name the Islamic State (ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah).

Oh, and despite what Muslims, western leaders, and Jew-haters say…

Members of the Islamic State are Muslims. They’re evil Muslims, but they’re Muslims. I have relatives who are murderers. Does that make me a murderer?

The Islamic State supports itself through extortion and taxes. It has almost no overhead and takes in $1 million per day.

Here’s who to blame for the rise of the Islamic state.

a. The Islamic State.

b. Muslims and others who provided material support.

c. Iraqi politicians, who squandered their chance at democracy by being corrupt and brutal.

d. President Obama, who deliberately sabotaged a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with Iraq that would’ve allowed the US to keep combat troops there.

e. The Iraqi military, which ran from tiny groups of terrorists and abandoned massive amounts of heavy weaponry.

f. The American electorate, which can’t be bothered to inform itself on life-and-death issues.

The Islamic State will be destroyed. Israel, her Arab allies, and extremely brave men and women from Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and Europe will smash it into the ground. I said this before, but you need to let it sink in.

From May 4 to July 14, 2015, fifteen Presidential Guardsmen from the United Arab Emirates fought about 40,000 enemy in Aden, Yemen. The Guardsmen suffered no casualties. They used Javelin antitank guided missiles (ATGMs) as their main weapon.

That was fifteen soldiers. What happens when 200,000 such men and women take off the gloves?

A bedtime lullaby for the Islamic State.