“ISIS has learned from that and has formed a structure that can survive the losses of leaders by giving midlevel commanders a degree of autonomy,” the diplomat said. In that structure, the overall operation would not be immediately affected if Mr. Baghdadi were wounded or killed, he said.
.. It is unclear who would replace Mr. Baghdadi as the self-declared caliph if he died, a Kurdish official said. But the official said it could not be Mr. Afri, assuming he is alive, because he is an ethnic Turkmen, and the caliph must be an Arab from the Quraysh tribe of the Prophet Muhammad, as Mr. Baghdadi claims to be.
.. But other analysts said that Mr. Baghdadi’s religious credibility was more significant than any operational prowess.
“Baghdadi is to a certain extent a religious figurehead designed to grant an aura of religious legitimacy and respectability to the group’s operations, while the real power brokers are a core of former military and intelligence officials,” said Matthew Henman, managing editor of IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center.
Could ISIS Exist Without Islam?
“But I want to answer a slightly different question, which is: If Islam did not exist … would a group like ISIS, with all the other realities as they are, exist today and do the same things?”
“My answer to that hypothetical question is a resounding yes.” Discussing global terrorism at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mogahed, who formerly led research on Muslims with the polling organization Gallup, said that extremist groups all over the world commit the same kinds of violence using what she called “the local social currency” to justify it. “That is sometimes Christianity. That is sometimes Judaism. That is sometimes Buddhism. And it is sometimes secular ideologies. So a world without Islam would still have a group like ISIS—they would just be called something else that may be less catchy.”
.. It’s not, she said, the group’s interpretation of Islamic texts that drives its brutality—it’s the group’s desired brutality driving its interpretation of the texts. “We start at the violence we want to conduct, and we convince ourselves that this is the correct way to interpret the texts,” she said.
Islamic Scripture Is Not the Problem
As with the Protestant Reformation, there is a conservative reform movement in Islam today that competes with the liberal reformers. Foremost among the conservatives are the ultraconservative Salafists—Islam’s Puritans. They want to scrape off all the foreign accretions, such as Greek philosophy, that have attached themselves to Islam over the centuries and go back to a supposedly pure version of the faith. One big reason the conservative reformers have won the day so far is that some governments, especially the wealthy states of the Persian Gulf, have sponsored the ultraconservatives. Because rich Muslim governments have put their thumbs on the conservative side of the scale, Hirsi Ali wants the United States and other Western countries to do the same on the liberal side.
.. Still, imagine the U.S. government managed to navigate a thicket of laws and find its Muslim Martin Luther. His or her cause is going to suffer greatly in the arena of Muslim public opinion if it is revealed that the wildly unpopular United States is bankrolling it—a secret that will not last long in the era of WikiLeaks.
.. Westerners often fail to understand how all this blithe government meddling in other people’s religions comes off or why it’s so flawed, so it’s helpful to conduct the following thought experiment. Suppose Saudi Arabia felt threatened by evangelical Christianity because of its anti-Islamic tone, its influence over Republican politicians, and its pro-Israel slant. Rather than promote more positive images of Islam, ingratiate themselves with Republican politicians, and compete with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Saudis decide to fund evangelicals who are working to reform Christianity in ways that fit the Saudis’ agenda. Because that agenda goes against the grain of contemporary evangelical culture, the Saudis will probably not find a reformer who is popular among evangelicals. And because most Saudis don’t know a thing about American evangelical culture, they will have a tough time figuring out who can get the job done. Still, Saudi Arabia has plenty of money, so they assume it’s just a matter of spending enough on books, events, television shows, and so forth. Would they succeed?
..Al Qaeda hasn’t polled well ever since it started killing its coreligionists—in Jordan, after the head of al Qaeda’s branch in Iraq ordered the bombing of hotels in Amman, support for the group fell, from 56 percent in 2003 to 11 percent in 2011—and the Islamic State is even less popular.
ISIS Forces That Now Control Ramadi Are Ex-Baathist Saddam Loyalists
.. what few appear to grasp is that ISIS’s May offensive has given Ramadi back to its former owners — the ex-Baathist Sunni terrorists known as the Former Regime Loyalists. The FRLs, as they’re called, were Saddam Hussein’s most ardent followers, the same fighters whom the United States fought non-stop for eight years. Their resurgence has implications not just for the United States but for ISIS itself. For while these forces may fly the ISIS flag today, their ultimate plans for Iraq are quite different than those of the “caliphate.”
.. The FRLs wanted to establish conditions for a neo-Baathist political coup similar to what was pulled off in the 1960s. AQI (now ISIS) and other Iraqi Islamic groups sought the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in Iraq.
In light of this history, it is reasonable to surmise that the ex-Baathists flying the ISIS flag today are covertly working to undermine ISIS’s caliphate and eventually achieve their own political goals. The FRLs may be allowing ISIS to do the hard work of fighting and carving out a Sunni-dominated tribal nation from Damascus to Fallujah to Mosul. Once that geographic goal has been achieved, it should not take much to depose the caliph and eliminate ISIS.