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Islamic State in Iraq (ISIS)

Introduction

ISIS, also going by the name ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), is an extremist jihadist group with an ideology of taking over the world through violent means. They call themselves caliphate, and they assume to have religious authority over all Muslims in the world. According to CNN, ISIS started as al Qaida but was later expelled from the group. The group wants to implement sharia law established in the ancient past (Simcox, 2017). The group uses extreme violence to pass across its ideologies of sharia law through torture, public executions, and terrorist attacks carried out on many innocents across the world. The group uses modern tools such as social media, radio stations, and television stations to pass their ideologies, politics, propaganda, and religious fundamentalism (Simcox, 2017).

Their leader is from its inception in 2010 was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi until his death in October 2019. After his death, the group announced a new leader going by the name Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. During his rain, Baghdadi oversaw the control of an army of over 300,000 soldiers spread across 18 countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and some African countries such as Egypt and Somalia (Esfandiary & Tabatabai, 2017). The group operates on an annual budget of over $ 1 billion and is worth over $ 3 billion. Most of their financing comes from illegal activities such as drug and human trafficking, sale of illegal weapons, money laundering, and ransoms from kidnapping. Some of the funding comes from the sale of oil and natural gas from their countries. Some of their financings even come from legitimate businesses that they run across the world (Lyausheva et al.,2019).

Their military consists of over 300,000 soldiers, and its army expanded exponentially during their takeover of Syria and Iraq. The group controls massive territories in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. Their army possesses weapons ranging from IEDs, car bombs, grenades, and lately, they have ventured into bioweapons that have been used in Iraq and Syria (Mahat-Shamir et al., 2018). According to the Harvard institute study of terrorist warfare, the group is led by a strong military command structure that is metrics-driven. That means the group is coherent and unified with a commanded leadership structure from top to bottom. The top comprises of former military officers who have experience and skill in running an army (Mahat-Shamir et al.,2018).

They have many soldiers living a normal life in foreign countries, and they are only called upon when they are needed. This kind of army is known as the sleeper cells, and they are the most dangerous because they may even be your relative, but you will never know. They are the ones who are used to carry out foreign attacks because they are the least suspected members of the group. Their modes of attacks include improvised explosive devices (IEDs) made by the group's engineers and deployed in specific places. They also use suicide bombers who target particular people or groups of people. In extreme cases, the group will use chemical weapons to target many people (Gomes & Mikhael, 2018). According to Al Jazeera, the group has ventured into biological warfare where they weaponize dangerous diseases such as anthrax, Ebola, and even common cold and make it highly contagious with an ability to kill within a short period.

The terrorist group plans an attack on US soil in the coming future. The group leaders set up the plan, and it has been on-going for a few years. The attack was planned to be executed during the coming presidential elections to target as many individuals as possible who went to the polling stations. The plan initially felt a threat with the coronavirus pandemic, and the leaders were afraid that the elections would be canceled due to the virus. The government decided to carry on with the polls despite the on-going Covid-19 pandemic, and so that meant the plan was also on. The first thing that was supposed to be done was to look for a way to get the financing needed to carry out the attack. The group organized many kidnappings of foreign European nationals intending to get a huge ransom for their release (Spencer, 2016). They also stepped up their illegal activities such as money laundering, drug trafficking, and weapons selling pump up their finances for the attack. The leaders also had to meet and ask their sympathizers to finance them as they had a huge attack coming, and they needed all the help they could get.

The group's next thing was to get their friends and supporters in high government positions to pull strings for them, such as providing a safe passage for their drugs, weapons, and soldiers who carried out those activities safely across borders. Those in corporate positions provided the much-needed supplies such as food, shelter, and means of transportation. They had set a huge target, and they needed to achieve their target, so everyone was called upon to try and help in the activities, except those at the sleeper cell positions (Byman, 2016).

When their plan's financing was complete, the terrorist group's next goal was securing the weapons they needed for the attack. The kind of weapons they needed for the attack was expensive, rare, and very hard to get, so again they had to sort their friends' help, only this time from the medical world. They wanted to secure the most dangerous diseases that ever existed and weaponize them. The only problem is they were kept in a secure laboratory in Geneva. The laboratory was inaccessible as it was heavily guarded 24/7, and they had no inside person to help them access the diseases. The group, therefore, went with their second-best option, a Chinese laboratory in Shenzhen. They had two radicals working as top scientists at the laboratory who had helped them secure the biological weapons used in Syria and Iraq (Banic, 2016). They did not have what they needed, the Ebola virus, but they had the next best thing, samples of the bubonic plague that wiped out almost half of Europe in the 17th century. It was a small sample, so they needed to mass-produce the weapon, which meant they needed a facility.

The terrorist group built a large laboratory in the remote areas of Afghanistan Mountains, where the temperatures and location were ideal for production. They managed to kidnap several scientists from Iraq who used to work in the chemical factories for their former leader Saddam Hussein. For the next few years, that was what the group focused on. There had been rumors circulating of an impending attack, but then things went quiet for a long time. The production of weaponized bubonic plague took a long time, and it was very expensive to produce as the equipment was not easy to get.

When the weapons production was done, they were repacked into small canisters to keep the guns at a stable state. The leaders then planned to have the canisters packaged and shipped to the United States, their main target. It would be difficult as the border patrols and the immigration were on high alert (Lyausheva et al.,2019). The leaders had to be called again, and a meeting was held to decide how the weapons could be shipped into the United States.

They decided that taking all the weapons together would be difficult, so they set up different ways of getting weapons into the country. Some of them were going to enter the country through Canada, others through the Mexican border with illegal drugs, and some would enter the country through customs with China's shipments. They had to create a decoy to throw a bone to Homeland security to throw them off their scent. So they devised a plan and had their soldiers get into the country with a private plane that was to fly under the radar from Mexico. The aircraft was the one that was supposed to get into the country with illegal drugs and some of the weapons. They made sure that they kept it discreet, but homeland security was to be tipped at the last moment. Those arrested would go to prison, but their families would be well compensated for their sacrifices.

When the weapons got into the country, they had to be taken to a warehouse where they were repackaged into smaller canisters that could easily be carried to the sleeper cells' homes. At this moment, the sleeper cells were activated, and instructions were issued on how they would carry out the plan. Each sleeper cell would receive a canister, which they would keep safe for some time. An engineer would then come and show them how the weapons will be released days before the attack (Esfandiary & Tabatabai, 2017). Some of the canisters would be attached to detonation devices and IEDs and be removed where the crowds were large.

Each sleeper agent would behave normally until the time of the detonation. They had all been synchronized to detonate their devices at the same time. Every sleeper agent knew they were expected to die with the rest of the people, and they were ready to sacrifice their lives for the good of the cause. A total of 750 sleeper agents were prepared to attack different states (Mahat-Shamir et al.,2018). Since the election would get huge media coverage across all the nations, the attacks would likewise get huge media coverage with a huge panic to follow after the attacks. All was set; the election date is what the terrorist group called ISIS was waiting for.

Conclusion

The Islamic State in Iraq (ISIS) is a terrorist group that has rained havoc and caused great misery and death worldwide. When the group tried to take over Syria and Iran, it caused one of the most devastating wars in the modern era. The number of people displaced because of the war was in millions, and those dead in hundreds of thousands in not millions too. They have carried out many attacks in several countries, including the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, leaving dead bodies and devastation in their aftermaths. They follow their extremist idea of an Islamic world, and they want to liberate the world through war. The group is one of the most dangerous extremist groups, and the world has come together to try and fight the group. Several countries even participated in the Syrian war, where they tried to stop the terrorist from taking over the country. Although we still have a long way to go in the fight against terrorism, every individual should help fight this terrorist group that has caused misery to the world. We are all supposed to be careful and on the lookout to avoid getting harmed by this group because we don't know when and where they will strike next.

References

Banic, B. (2016). There Is No Islam in ISIS’Islamic State.

Byman, D. (2016). ISIS goes global: Fight the Islamic state by targeting its affiliates. Foreign Affairs, 95(2), 76-85.

Esfandiary, D., & Tabatabai, A. M. (2017). A comparative study of US and Iranian counter-ISIS strategies. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 40(6), 455-469.

Gomes, A. D. T., & Mikhael, M. M. (2018). Terror or Terrorism? Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Comparative Perspective. Brazilian Political Science Review, 12(1).

Lyausheva, S., Karabulatova, I., Zhade, Z., & Ilyinova, N. (2018). THE ISLAMIC UMMAH OF RUSSIA AND ISIS: ISLAMIC RADICALISM IN THE TURKIC-SPEAKING REGIONS. Central Asia & the Caucasus (14046091), 19(1).

Mahat-Shamir, M., Hoffman, Y., Pitcho-Prelorentzos, S., Hamama-Raz, Y., Lavenda, O., Ring, L., ... & Ben-Ezra, M. (2018). Truck attack: Fear of ISIS and reminder of truck attacks in Europe as associated with psychological distress and PTSD symptoms. Psychiatry research, 267, 306-312.

Simcox, R. (2017). European Islamist Plots and Attacks Since 2014, and how the US Can Help Prevent Them. Heritage Foundation.

Spencer, A. N. (2016). The hidden face of terrorism: An analysis of the women in Islamic State. Journal of Strategic Security, 9(3), 74-98.