This World s12e06 Episode Script
World's Richest Terror Army
A small army of fanatical Jihadists has seized 15,000 square miles of territory and shocked the world with its violence and brutality.
ISIL is a terrorist organisation the likes of which we have never seen before.
The so-called Islamic State, IS, has now amassed a huge army and rules over eight million people.
It is not just barbarians haphazardly using terror.
Terror was at the heart of IS's blueprint, mapped out in a most unlikely place.
These extremists were basically running a terrorist training university in our own detention facilities.
Their master plan was a potent mix of religious fanaticism and extreme violence.
We face a greater terrorist threat today than at any time since 9/11.
And for the first time on television, a senior leader of IS reveals where its vast wealth comes from.
Could we remove Abu Hajjar's blindfold, is that OK? April 22nd, 2015 This is the front line in the war against the so-called Islamic State.
I'm in Northern Iraq where Kurdish Peshmerga forces are fighting IS.
IS controls almost a third of Iraq and this is the eastern border of its territory.
The General of the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters here is taking me to their front line.
This is the very front of the Peshmerga front line.
They've taken over this house and are based on the roof.
IS fighters have taken on the Kurdish Peshmerga and swept aside the Iraqi National Army with its 175,000 troops and 40 billion investment.
To show just how close we are to the Islamic State's front-line, if you look over there, you can see the black flag of the Islamic State and it's only about 200 metres away.
The self-styled Islamic State has also seized a third of Syria, pushing back President Assad's army, 175,000 strong.
And it's defying the might of the world's most formidable fighting machine the US air force.
Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! So how did a small group of militants defeat and push back some of the world's biggest and best-equipped armies? I travelled to Baghdad to try and find out how IS has become the world's richest terror army.
Iraq's equivalent of the FBI now holds a prisoner who could help unlock IS's secrets.
This is the man who ran the so-called Islamic State's finances.
He'd previously fought with al-Qaeda against the American occupation.
His name is Abu Hajjar.
This is the first TV interview with a senior member of the IS leadership.
Could we remove Abu Hajjar's blindfold? Is that OK? And what about the handcuffs? Can we take the handcuffs The handcuffs have to stay on.
Why did you join the Islamic State? Did you have to swear an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State? Why did you decide to talk to your interrogators? Were you tortured? After Abu Hajjar was persuaded to talk, he revealed the secrets of the organization.
He has intimate knowledge of IS and knows where the money comes from.
They extort the money the way any Mafia would extort businesses.
They operate in a particular territory and if businesses and if individuals want to be able to continue unmolested, they need to pay a certain a certain tax, if you will, of extortion to ISIL.
What happens if the person from whom the money is demanded refuses to pay? Extortion provides IS with a sustainable income, raising hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
But it has many different ways of raising cash.
One of them is robbing banks.
When just a few thousand IS fighters seized Iraq's second city, Mosul, they're reported to have lifted nearly half a billion dollars from the vaults of its banks raids they've replicated right across the region.
But there's an even more eye-watering source of cash.
I arranged a secret meeting with a man from north eastern Syria involved in IS's most lucrative stream of income.
Oil is extracted from the ground, it's loaded into trucks and there are a variety of businessmen, middle men, brokers and dealers who are involved in moving the oil.
And they're using traditional smuggling routes that have existed for decades, if not centuries.
Smugglers are using ingenious ways of shipping the oil out of IS territory, even though it's surrounded by enemies.
Barrels floated down rivers.
Oil pumped hundreds of metres across the border to waiting tankers.
And IS makes sure it takes its cut from the network of smugglers.
Right, we clear? Clear.
- On the left.
- Coming left.
The US-led coalition has carried out around 200 bombing raids on IS oil fields and refineries.
- Cleared.
- All right.
Stop.
Steady platform.
Firing.
But we've been told that IS has been recruiting experts to keep the wells and refineries running.
Hundreds of primitive home-made refineries are now scattered across the region.
They boil the crude oil to produce fuel at a barrel a time.
Despite all the airstrikes, the US Treasury estimates that IS is still making around US $2 million a week by smuggling oil.
But what is even more astonishing is the identity of one of the Islamic State's secret business partners the last customer you would ever expect.
Oil is being smuggled in all directions.
Frankly, much of it goes to the Assad regime.
Are you saying the Assad regime is buying oil from its enemy, the Islamic State? Absolutely.
Cheap oil, which ISIL offers, makes for strange bedfellows.
And what's more, we've been told of a remarkable trade off, with IS sending natural gas to the Assad regime and the regime supplying IS with electricity.
The Syrian government told us it is absolutely untrue and it has never bought oil or gas from IS.
Nevertheless, oil provides IS with by far its biggest source of income.
It's estimated that the money raised from the rich fields it has seized in Iraq and Syria The Syrian border's just 30 miles over there.
runs into hundred of millions of dollars in cash.
And despite all the airstrikes, the oil money continues to flow in.
A few hours' drive from the oilfields of Northern Iraq, there's an even more extraordinary source of wealth for IS.
It lies along the banks of the River Euphrates that once watered the birthplace of modern civilisation.
Here are countless world heritage sites, harbouring priceless relics.
The world looked on in horror as IS set about obliterating the legacy of ancient civilisations.
Like the Khmer Rouge in Year Zero, their goal to create this utopia is to eradicate everything from what Islam calls "the Jahiliyyah", the time of ignorance before the prophet.
In Northern Syria, also in much of Iraq, the ISIL are bulldozing, destroying ancient sites simply to get rid of any trace of any other culture.
This is what IS wants the world to see.
But secretly, with breathtaking hypocrisy, it has turned ancient artefacts into a huge money-making machine.
To find out how IS cashes in I met someone who's risked his life monitoring ancient sites deep in the heart of IS-occupied Syria.
What kind of things would they expect to find there? IS has experts who know it was a ritual of the Romans to bury their dead with the tools for the afterlife.
They know that these items are very valuable.
IS is not just destroying antiquities, it's looting them.
You can see the digging and the damage that's been caused.
You see the tracks of the bulldozer.
You can see the tracks here.
Armies of looters are regulated by the Islamic State.
They first have to buy a permit to dig and then have any find valued by IS assessors.
IS take a 20% tax of the object's value.
Then they smuggle the artefacts across the border.
These precious artefacts are smuggled across the Turkish/Syrian border.
Here, you can buy anything you want.
On the black market, one ancient mosaic can fetch tens of thousands of dollars.
Many of the looted antiquities end up in the Gulf states.
Much of the rest heads for the hungry markets of the West.
To find out the extent of the looting business, I went to the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.
So we are looking at an image of Dura-Europos.
This is an archaeological site in Syria.
It's a classical site, it's from the Roman period, about 3rd century AD.
It's known as the Pompeii of the Desert, because it has some of the best-preserved wall paintings.
Dr.
Katharyn Hanson has been using satellite imagery to monitor the scale of the destruction.
What has happened to Dura-Europos? Dura-Europos has been really heavily hit by looting.
That's the before and then this is the most recent image of Dura.
What you're looking at is Swiss cheese.
This is a moonscape.
Each one of these pinpricks is a looters pit.
What are they looking for? Stuff you can sell.
So they're going to go for things like tablets that have cuneiform on them, they're going to go for pieces of jewellery.
People are looking to sell mosaics and coins.
The thing that is frustrating is that it is happening because there is an international market that will purchase these things.
And that international art black market could be funding IS to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year.
IS is now looting on an industrial scale.
Another rich source of income for IS involves the complicity of countries around the world.
Hussam al-Ahmed is a photographer who was working in Syria with a French journalist, Nicolas Henin.
They found themselves on the wrong side of the front line and they were stopped by IS fighters.
Hussam was allowed to go, but the two French journalists were kidnapped.
What did you think was going to happen to them? The Islamic State has taken its treatment of hostages to sickening new depths with beheadings and burning a prisoner alive.
But the French journalists were lucky.
After ten months of often brutal treatment, they were released.
Rumours spread that a ransom had been paid.
Who do you think paid the money? Who paid the ransom? But the French Government denies it.
The French Government says it never paid any ransom.
Have you any idea how much money was paid for their release? The French are alleged to have paid US $18 million for the release of four French journalists, including Nicolas Henin.
But there's a brutal message for those who don't pay up.
This British man has to pay the price.
Britain and America refused.
Their hostages were slaughtered, including the British aid workers Alan Henning and David Haines, beheaded, it is thought, by so-called Jihadi John, Mohammed Emwazi from London.
But it's clear IS has extracted huge amounts of money from ransoms.
It's one of the primary sources of income.
Are governments paying ransoms? The American government doesn't pay ransoms, the British government is committed to not paying ransoms.
Somebody is.
I'm sure there's governments around the world that have paid ransoms.
In Europe? In all around the world.
According to a UN estimate, this blood money is thought to have raised around 40 million for IS last year.
But we've uncovered the most astonishing of all the sources of funding.
The Iraqi government has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars, in cash, into Iraq's second city, Mosul, under IS control since last summer.
This money, they send it to Kirkuk and then some representatives, so-called government workers, they go and pick it up in trucks and take it to Mosul and Salahuddin, for distribution to the workers.
Thousands of workers living under IS control have been paid salaries by the Iraqi government.
- They pick it up in trucks? - Yeah, exactly.
That's the way the money is moved, because there's no cheques or anything like this, it's cash.
- It's all in cash? - Yes.
It must be hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Hundreds of millions? - A month.
Every month.
Yes.
It's thought IS takes its cut, as it does with everything else.
It's unbelievable.
This money goes into the hands of the enemy, the very enemy you are supposed to be fighting.
We asked the Iraqi Government to comment.
The Governor of Mosul told us that money has been paid to civil servants in the city electronically, but insists the payments have now stopped because IS was creaming off the cash.
Oil, antiquities, ransoms, theft and extortion have made the Islamic State the richest terror army in history.
It's managed to amass a war chest of a staggering US $2 billion.
Managing such a huge mountain of money is a complex task.
The US Treasury is trying to stop IS's funding and disrupt its ability to use the money.
It's a major operation for them to maintain a financial system, it's a major operation for them to try to maintain some sort of central financial management.
I've worked to make sure that the territory in which ISIL operates is completely cut-off from the international financial system.
But IS is thwarting the best efforts of the world's most powerful state because it runs a cash economy.
Major General al-Maksousi, the head of Iraqi police intelligence, showed me the secret documents seized when Abu Hajjar was arrested.
Part of Abu Hajjar's job, until his arrest last summer, was to distribute the cash.
How much money would you normally carry? And what currency was the money in? US dollars.
IS has managed to establish and fund a huge army of up to 50,000 core fighters.
Around a fifth are foreign, the rest come from Syria and Iraq.
How much would an Iraqi fighter be paid in US dollars? How much money would a foreign fighter receive as a wage? And the families of suicide bombers the so-called martyrs, are compensated, too.
IS fighters are paid only a fraction of what Iraqi soldiers are paid.
But most don't fight for the money, but out of fanatical religious conviction.
It's this that makes them such a formidable force.
It's not just its vast wealth that sets IS apart.
It also runs a meticulous organisation, as was revealed in a remarkable intelligence coup last year.
It began when Abu Hajjar identified the hideout in Mosul of a senior IS military commander.
Last June, just days before Mosul fell to IS, a specialist anti-terrorist unit swooped in and confronted Bilawi in his safe house.
When they searched al-Bilawi's house, they uncovered 127 memory sticks, a treasure trove of intelligence about the inner-most workings of IS.
They're like the documents that were found with Bin Laden.
The most important ones are about the arrival of Arab and other foreign fighters.
They include their names, country of origin, who recruited them, details of their specialisation, whether they're a suicide bomber, a fighter, or a reservist.
There are also detailed inventories of military warehouses, the number and types of weapons, the types of munitions.
There are also assassination hit lists.
Despite the killing of al-Bilawi, the head of IS's military operations in Iraq, the setback did not halt the meteoric rise of the Islamic State.
Just a few days later, IS showed its resilience and military expertise by capturing Iraq's second city, Mosul.
So where did IS spring from and what was the foundation of its formidable organization? The irony is that, in the deserts of southern Iraq, America inadvertently helped create it.
In the wake of the American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, opposition to the occupation grew.
Thousands of suspected insurgents were swept up into a vast American military detention centre.
It was called Camp Bucca.
Watch your heads! Detainees weren't locked up in cells, but were herded into compounds, 1,000 to each.
The guards patrolled outside the wire.
Riots often erupted.
Watch out! Oh, that's a big one! Be decisive on what you shoot.
Everybody is shooting over the top of each other, across each other.
What kind of shit is that? It was here that the seeds of IS were sown.
This former Camp Bucca detainee saw how IS's predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was able to spread its message through the compounds.
We did get reports from detainees inside and they would say, "The Imam, or whoever, is using this and they're teaching things, they're teaching radical beliefs and they're saying we should rise up against the Americans.
" There was definitely a concern that, by bringing all these detainees in together, that we had created kind of a pressure cooker for these radical ideologies.
But the pressure in the compounds was about to get much worse.
Faced with the dramatic escalation of violence outside, the American General David Petraeus led the so-called "surge", adding thousands more troops.
The surge was needed because of course, the situation in Iraq was very, very desperate.
The country was on the verge of a Civil War, if it wasn't already in the early stages of it.
It was literally on fire.
It was about to go up in smoke.
It had to be done.
Thousands more young and embittered Iraqis were swept up into Camp Bucca.
But General Petraeus knew a price was being paid.
These extremists were basically running a terrorist training university or at least a radicalisation school in our own detention facilities.
The self-styled leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was one of the internees.
And he wasn't the only one.
How many of al-Baghdadi's aides were interned at Camp Bucca? The tightly-knit leadership of IS was formed here, including its Military Commander in Iraq, Abdul Rahman al-Bilawi, and it's Head of Finance, Abu Hajjar.
And it was in Camp Bucca that the future leadership of IS learned the lessons of the past and formulated the blueprint for the future.
What's more, the fanatical jihadi leaders were joined by battle-hardened former military commanders from Saddam Hussein's regime.
They basically gave a vision, gave a structure to the passion of the jihadists.
That was the oil and fire that created the Islamic State today.
We had the worst of the worst.
There were thousands of individuals who went through Camp Bucca.
In fact, I'd stopped release of detainees because I felt that we were actually releasing individuals that were more radical than they were when they entered.
In 2011, when America finally withdrew, there was hope for the future.
Camp Bucca was to be made into a business park.
On handover day, one American investor was full of optimism.
One of the greatest days of my life was to be at Camp Bucca on the day that it was handed over.
I can still picture the American flag coming down and the Iraqi flag going up at the same time.
It was the first American facility to get handed over to the Iraqis for commercial reasons, to participate in the growth and birth of.
in the rebirth of this country.
This gift from the American people is a demonstration of our continued commitment to Iraq's future and our enduring partnership with the Iraqi people.
Incredibly, the new Iraqi government now chose to empty Camp Bucca and release thousands of radicalised prisoners, eager to join a new jihad.
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! The seeds of the so-called Islamic State may have been sown in Iraq, but it was the bloody chaos of the Syrian civil war that enabled IS to flourish.
Syria gave them the fertile ground to regroup, to reorganise, to get money, to get weapons, to get training.
And to recreate themselves in the shape that we see today, the Islamic State.
The key to understanding IS is that it is a Sunni organisation incubated in the bitter sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam.
Not just in Syria but also in Iraq.
Allahu Akbar! After America's withdrawal from Iraq, the newly-elected Shia-dominated government was meant to share power with the Sunni minority, but instead it turned on them.
Leading Sunni politicians were forced into exile.
Even Iraq's Sunni Vice President was accused of terrorism.
He still lives under sentence of death.
I am not the first Sunni politician who has been systematically targeted on a sectarian basis.
Anti-government protests were ruthlessly suppressed by the government's Shia-dominated security forces.
Scores of Sunnis were shot dead.
We lost hope.
My people has all the justification to be angry.
Sunni anger proved fertile ground for even more recruits for IS.
Sunni communities, they were unsure they could rely either on the Iraqi Police or the Iraqi Military.
Some of them regarded Islamic State as a potential source of security.
Many young people are daily joining forces with ISIS, and they are expanding.
IS has become notorious for its shocking use of violence.
It's not just the beheadings.
Whole villages have been massacred.
Women cast into slavery.
The slaughter is not random.
It is deliberate and calculated.
They in fact, in some ways, copied Genghis Khan and the Mongol approach to military conquest.
You create an absolute fear, deliberately in your enemies, and the first time you come to a village, you kill everyone, the dogs, the cats, everything, destroy it down to the ground.
But ironically, IS is also marketing the seductive image of an Islamic Utopia-- a paradise on Earth designed to attract impressionable young Muslims.
It is not just barbarians haphazardly using terror.
It's used deliberately and with intentionality, but behind that, there is an ideology.
What ISIS are trying to do is to try and take people who have felt oppressed under the system, and take them into a universal idea of statehood which is based on simple belonging.
IS seeks to replicate the 7th century Caliphate, the Islamic empire that was to unite Muslims right across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.
For IS's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers, strict Sharia law is at its heart.
IS believes it has a religious duty to wipe out rival faiths, including millions of the minority Shia Muslims.
They have regarded the Shia as non-Muslim.
They have regarded them as apostate.
- Infidels? - Infidels.
And it has been a key part of their ideology that the Shia must be destroyed, killed.
The mass slaughter of Shia prisoners by Sunni IS fighters helped turn the sectarian gulf into a bloody chasm.
And even Shia mosques are reduced to rubble and dust.
The extreme savagery of IS is also used to suppress the eight million people living within its borders.
The Turkish checkpoint at Kilis is the door to Syria and IS, where its citizens are hidden from view and silenced through fear.
One remarkable young woman managed to get out to tell us what life is like in the Islamic State's self-styled capital, Raqqa.
IS has stripped women of all their freedom.
They said we must cover the whole face.
This is all forced on us by IS so that nothing at all of a woman is revealed.
Women are banned from doing most jobs, they are forced to stay at home, and not allowed to travel without a man accompanying them.
Any infringement of this strict code is harshly punished by the hisbah, or religious police.
Sometimes people get whipped.
After that, many people began to fear IS.
They have even forbidden smoking.
What happens if a man is caught smoking? Sometimes, inside the religious police building, they'll heat up a metal skewer, and put it in his mouth.
The worst feeling is to witness other people killed in front of you.
Alongside this brutality, there are also strong incentives to sign up to the so-called state.
If you are a member of IS, then they give you gas, petrol and bread.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of simple-minded people who say, "Yes, I'll join them.
Better to take the things they offer than die of hunger.
" This is how they force people to support them.
Ironically, IS's savage ideology has also proved a powerful magnet to extremists from all over the world.
Most come from nearby Muslim countries.
Around 2,000 young Jordanians are thought to have joined jihadi groups in Syria.
The militant Sunni cleric, Abu Sayyaf, is proud of the part he played.
I was one of those who encouraged people to fight in Syria.
It's the duty of every Muslim, to support their fellow Muslim brothers anywhere on Earth if they suffer injustice.
He shares IS's fundamental ideology that there is religious justification for targeting infidels, even when they're Muslims.
Do you approve of the Islamic State executing Shia prisoners? The truth is that this is a battle, and it's the Shia who started the war.
Only when the Shia took control of Iraq and directed their arrows at the Sunni people, and began to take revenge, was there a reaction by the Sunnis.
If a person has suffered injustice, then he has the right to defend himself.
And this is what the Sunni people have done.
And he warns the West not to continue its attacks on the Islamic State and Sunni Muslims.
If you don't want the Muslim people to attack you, you must ask your own governments to leave the coalition, in order to avoid attacks on Britain or other Western countries.
It is you who are attacking! What sort of reaction do you expect? It's estimated more than 12,000 foreign fighters have joined the holy war in Syria.
That's already more than travelled to fight in Afghanistan.
IS's meticulous organisation has enabled thousands of new recruits to cross the border undetected and enlist.
And more are on the way.
Well over 600 young British Muslims are believed to have left, seduced by IS's propaganda and facilitated by its well-oiled machine.
My journey finally brought me home to see why so many are drawn to leave.
Luton is no stranger to Islamist extremism and the lure of jihad.
Its Islamic Centre is all too aware of the compulsive attraction of IS, and is trying to stop young men and women being drawn to it.
The so-called Islamic State is everywhere, all over social media, sophisticated propaganda.
They have so much at their fingertips.
We're dealing with a highly emotional generation of Muslims growing up, coupled with anger and frustration, then when you see somebody going against the grain, or somebody standing up against the West, it becomes attractive.
It's like a romance for them.
The appeal is, "Come here, we'll give you a gun, we'll give you ammunition, you can get your own back.
" This is the face of British jihad.
Imran Khawaja grew up in Southall, West London.
This is what we are using.
Big machines.
Big boys, big machines.
At the age of 27, Khawaja left for Syria early last year and joined a propaganda arm of the Islamic State.
He was part of IS's pervasive presence on social media-- the cutting edge of its strategy to attract new recruits.
ISIL uses thousands of Twitter accounts.
Some people allege 30,000 over the past year.
It uses Facebook, it uses Tumblr, it uses a very wide range of different platforms to get its message across.
I think it's made an enormous difference.
ISIL is really the first terrorist organisation that has fully adopted the range of tools and techniques that are available on social media.
IS may embrace a 7th century ideology but it has eagerly embraced 21st century social media technology.
Allahu Akbar! - What is your name? - I am a Muslim.
It wants to show potential recruits that they can still enjoy all the comforts of home, as shown on YouTube.
This is the room where the Mujahideen sleep.
You've just got your little basic stuff.
You've got your Hollister.
You can't leave those things behind! IS is posting a phenomenal 90,000 messages a day, from down-home images to encouragement to kill.
We will not stop fighting, we will not put down our weapons until we reach your lands And it was on Twitter that Imran Khawaja's death was formally announced.
But British intelligence soon discovered he'd faked it.
It looks like he wanted to come back to this country and saw that as a way of throwing the security services off the scent.
Concerns about the threat from returning jihadis were highlighted when Khawaja came back by a circuitous route-- via Serbia.
He was arrested at Dover.
Last February, he was sentenced to 12 years for terrorist offences in Syria.
At his trial, he expressed remorse.
But Khawaja had previously posted on social media a photo of himself holding the severed heads of IS victims.
Do you think that remorse was genuine? I'm sceptical.
Why are you sceptical? Last minute remorse is never that impressive.
Do you think he was planning an attack? I wouldn't rule it out.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, where 12 people were shot dead, was a chilling illustration of the growing threat from radical jihadists.
Islamic State has been very clear that one of its priorities now, and a priority not just for the people in Syria and Iraq, but for people in this country, is to attack this state, this country, British people.
They are trying to do two things.
The first is to direct terrorist operations against us, but they're also trying to inspire people to conduct attacks of their own accord.
We are making more arrests than we've ever made before.
It's pretty much one a day now.
We're seeing the biggest step change in the threat, in its nature and scale, that we've seen since 9/11.
Last year, the police arrested six times as many terrorist suspects linked to Syria as the year before.
I think it's already clear that individuals from European countries, including the UK, have gone to Syria, have been further radicalised and then have returned home with new skills and weapons and explosives and tactics.
But there are those, even from the British intelligence community, who question the nature and scale of the threat to the UK.
There is a certain threat.
I'm talking about proportionality, not about saying there's no threats.
All of the actions we see coming from ISIS-- the killings, the beheadings, the burning of the pilot-- is to bring what they would call crusader boots on the ground.
Why? To fulfill the prophecy, that the final battle before redemption would take place in a village, Dabiq, close to Aleppo, and that in that battle, the crusaders would be defeated and redemption would happen.
Such is the apocalyptic vision that sustains IS.
That's very different from saying that, you know, they're about to invade the homeland, or as some people were saying, that we're going to see ISIS flags flying in the Vatican Square in Rome.
Isn't there a danger in exaggerating the threat that the West faces? There can be a danger in exaggerating the threat.
I don't think I've exaggerated the threat.
I think again, it is a very clear threat.
IS's uncompromising ideology, which is the same as Osama Bin Laden's, has taken wings.
We have a threat that goes all the way from the western shore of Africa, from Nigeria to South East Asia.
We have thousands and thousands of individuals who believe and who adhere to the ideas of Osama Bin Laden.
We have social media that's motivating individuals to come from all over the world and join a jihad.
We have Bin Ladenism on steroids.
The fate of the self-styled Islamic State will be decided not just on the battlefield, but in its ability to finance its state.
It may have vast resources but the demands on them are vast too.
They are not providing the basic needs of the population and the areas in which they operate.
They are not providing food, they are not providing electricity.
They're interested in terrorism, they're interested in war, they're interested in the savagery that they're wreaking on the region.
I don't think the Islamic State is here to stay.
The so-called Islamic State does indeed have access to a very substantial amount of money.
But while it's sufficient to pay for a terrorist enterprise, it is not sufficient to be a state, and this will be one of the Achilles heels.
Do you think there will come a time when the Islamic State runs out of money? IS faces increasing military pressure.
It's lost Kobane, Tikrit and over a quarter of its territory in Iraq.
But even if IS is defeated on the battlefield, its destruction may scatter the seeds of jihad not just through the entire region, but globally, making the threat all the greater.
The moment the hammer goes down on them, they're going to spread all over the place, and they had been recruiting thousands and thousands of foreigners.
This is very dangerous.
We have to be very careful in developing a strategy to fight the ideology.
A strategy to not only dismantle and degrade the Islamic state, but dismantle and degrade the incubating factors that feeds into creating entities like the Islamic State.
Without that, I think the future is going to be very dark.
ISIL is a terrorist organisation the likes of which we have never seen before.
The so-called Islamic State, IS, has now amassed a huge army and rules over eight million people.
It is not just barbarians haphazardly using terror.
Terror was at the heart of IS's blueprint, mapped out in a most unlikely place.
These extremists were basically running a terrorist training university in our own detention facilities.
Their master plan was a potent mix of religious fanaticism and extreme violence.
We face a greater terrorist threat today than at any time since 9/11.
And for the first time on television, a senior leader of IS reveals where its vast wealth comes from.
Could we remove Abu Hajjar's blindfold, is that OK? April 22nd, 2015 This is the front line in the war against the so-called Islamic State.
I'm in Northern Iraq where Kurdish Peshmerga forces are fighting IS.
IS controls almost a third of Iraq and this is the eastern border of its territory.
The General of the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters here is taking me to their front line.
This is the very front of the Peshmerga front line.
They've taken over this house and are based on the roof.
IS fighters have taken on the Kurdish Peshmerga and swept aside the Iraqi National Army with its 175,000 troops and 40 billion investment.
To show just how close we are to the Islamic State's front-line, if you look over there, you can see the black flag of the Islamic State and it's only about 200 metres away.
The self-styled Islamic State has also seized a third of Syria, pushing back President Assad's army, 175,000 strong.
And it's defying the might of the world's most formidable fighting machine the US air force.
Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! So how did a small group of militants defeat and push back some of the world's biggest and best-equipped armies? I travelled to Baghdad to try and find out how IS has become the world's richest terror army.
Iraq's equivalent of the FBI now holds a prisoner who could help unlock IS's secrets.
This is the man who ran the so-called Islamic State's finances.
He'd previously fought with al-Qaeda against the American occupation.
His name is Abu Hajjar.
This is the first TV interview with a senior member of the IS leadership.
Could we remove Abu Hajjar's blindfold? Is that OK? And what about the handcuffs? Can we take the handcuffs The handcuffs have to stay on.
Why did you join the Islamic State? Did you have to swear an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State? Why did you decide to talk to your interrogators? Were you tortured? After Abu Hajjar was persuaded to talk, he revealed the secrets of the organization.
He has intimate knowledge of IS and knows where the money comes from.
They extort the money the way any Mafia would extort businesses.
They operate in a particular territory and if businesses and if individuals want to be able to continue unmolested, they need to pay a certain a certain tax, if you will, of extortion to ISIL.
What happens if the person from whom the money is demanded refuses to pay? Extortion provides IS with a sustainable income, raising hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
But it has many different ways of raising cash.
One of them is robbing banks.
When just a few thousand IS fighters seized Iraq's second city, Mosul, they're reported to have lifted nearly half a billion dollars from the vaults of its banks raids they've replicated right across the region.
But there's an even more eye-watering source of cash.
I arranged a secret meeting with a man from north eastern Syria involved in IS's most lucrative stream of income.
Oil is extracted from the ground, it's loaded into trucks and there are a variety of businessmen, middle men, brokers and dealers who are involved in moving the oil.
And they're using traditional smuggling routes that have existed for decades, if not centuries.
Smugglers are using ingenious ways of shipping the oil out of IS territory, even though it's surrounded by enemies.
Barrels floated down rivers.
Oil pumped hundreds of metres across the border to waiting tankers.
And IS makes sure it takes its cut from the network of smugglers.
Right, we clear? Clear.
- On the left.
- Coming left.
The US-led coalition has carried out around 200 bombing raids on IS oil fields and refineries.
- Cleared.
- All right.
Stop.
Steady platform.
Firing.
But we've been told that IS has been recruiting experts to keep the wells and refineries running.
Hundreds of primitive home-made refineries are now scattered across the region.
They boil the crude oil to produce fuel at a barrel a time.
Despite all the airstrikes, the US Treasury estimates that IS is still making around US $2 million a week by smuggling oil.
But what is even more astonishing is the identity of one of the Islamic State's secret business partners the last customer you would ever expect.
Oil is being smuggled in all directions.
Frankly, much of it goes to the Assad regime.
Are you saying the Assad regime is buying oil from its enemy, the Islamic State? Absolutely.
Cheap oil, which ISIL offers, makes for strange bedfellows.
And what's more, we've been told of a remarkable trade off, with IS sending natural gas to the Assad regime and the regime supplying IS with electricity.
The Syrian government told us it is absolutely untrue and it has never bought oil or gas from IS.
Nevertheless, oil provides IS with by far its biggest source of income.
It's estimated that the money raised from the rich fields it has seized in Iraq and Syria The Syrian border's just 30 miles over there.
runs into hundred of millions of dollars in cash.
And despite all the airstrikes, the oil money continues to flow in.
A few hours' drive from the oilfields of Northern Iraq, there's an even more extraordinary source of wealth for IS.
It lies along the banks of the River Euphrates that once watered the birthplace of modern civilisation.
Here are countless world heritage sites, harbouring priceless relics.
The world looked on in horror as IS set about obliterating the legacy of ancient civilisations.
Like the Khmer Rouge in Year Zero, their goal to create this utopia is to eradicate everything from what Islam calls "the Jahiliyyah", the time of ignorance before the prophet.
In Northern Syria, also in much of Iraq, the ISIL are bulldozing, destroying ancient sites simply to get rid of any trace of any other culture.
This is what IS wants the world to see.
But secretly, with breathtaking hypocrisy, it has turned ancient artefacts into a huge money-making machine.
To find out how IS cashes in I met someone who's risked his life monitoring ancient sites deep in the heart of IS-occupied Syria.
What kind of things would they expect to find there? IS has experts who know it was a ritual of the Romans to bury their dead with the tools for the afterlife.
They know that these items are very valuable.
IS is not just destroying antiquities, it's looting them.
You can see the digging and the damage that's been caused.
You see the tracks of the bulldozer.
You can see the tracks here.
Armies of looters are regulated by the Islamic State.
They first have to buy a permit to dig and then have any find valued by IS assessors.
IS take a 20% tax of the object's value.
Then they smuggle the artefacts across the border.
These precious artefacts are smuggled across the Turkish/Syrian border.
Here, you can buy anything you want.
On the black market, one ancient mosaic can fetch tens of thousands of dollars.
Many of the looted antiquities end up in the Gulf states.
Much of the rest heads for the hungry markets of the West.
To find out the extent of the looting business, I went to the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.
So we are looking at an image of Dura-Europos.
This is an archaeological site in Syria.
It's a classical site, it's from the Roman period, about 3rd century AD.
It's known as the Pompeii of the Desert, because it has some of the best-preserved wall paintings.
Dr.
Katharyn Hanson has been using satellite imagery to monitor the scale of the destruction.
What has happened to Dura-Europos? Dura-Europos has been really heavily hit by looting.
That's the before and then this is the most recent image of Dura.
What you're looking at is Swiss cheese.
This is a moonscape.
Each one of these pinpricks is a looters pit.
What are they looking for? Stuff you can sell.
So they're going to go for things like tablets that have cuneiform on them, they're going to go for pieces of jewellery.
People are looking to sell mosaics and coins.
The thing that is frustrating is that it is happening because there is an international market that will purchase these things.
And that international art black market could be funding IS to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year.
IS is now looting on an industrial scale.
Another rich source of income for IS involves the complicity of countries around the world.
Hussam al-Ahmed is a photographer who was working in Syria with a French journalist, Nicolas Henin.
They found themselves on the wrong side of the front line and they were stopped by IS fighters.
Hussam was allowed to go, but the two French journalists were kidnapped.
What did you think was going to happen to them? The Islamic State has taken its treatment of hostages to sickening new depths with beheadings and burning a prisoner alive.
But the French journalists were lucky.
After ten months of often brutal treatment, they were released.
Rumours spread that a ransom had been paid.
Who do you think paid the money? Who paid the ransom? But the French Government denies it.
The French Government says it never paid any ransom.
Have you any idea how much money was paid for their release? The French are alleged to have paid US $18 million for the release of four French journalists, including Nicolas Henin.
But there's a brutal message for those who don't pay up.
This British man has to pay the price.
Britain and America refused.
Their hostages were slaughtered, including the British aid workers Alan Henning and David Haines, beheaded, it is thought, by so-called Jihadi John, Mohammed Emwazi from London.
But it's clear IS has extracted huge amounts of money from ransoms.
It's one of the primary sources of income.
Are governments paying ransoms? The American government doesn't pay ransoms, the British government is committed to not paying ransoms.
Somebody is.
I'm sure there's governments around the world that have paid ransoms.
In Europe? In all around the world.
According to a UN estimate, this blood money is thought to have raised around 40 million for IS last year.
But we've uncovered the most astonishing of all the sources of funding.
The Iraqi government has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars, in cash, into Iraq's second city, Mosul, under IS control since last summer.
This money, they send it to Kirkuk and then some representatives, so-called government workers, they go and pick it up in trucks and take it to Mosul and Salahuddin, for distribution to the workers.
Thousands of workers living under IS control have been paid salaries by the Iraqi government.
- They pick it up in trucks? - Yeah, exactly.
That's the way the money is moved, because there's no cheques or anything like this, it's cash.
- It's all in cash? - Yes.
It must be hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Hundreds of millions? - A month.
Every month.
Yes.
It's thought IS takes its cut, as it does with everything else.
It's unbelievable.
This money goes into the hands of the enemy, the very enemy you are supposed to be fighting.
We asked the Iraqi Government to comment.
The Governor of Mosul told us that money has been paid to civil servants in the city electronically, but insists the payments have now stopped because IS was creaming off the cash.
Oil, antiquities, ransoms, theft and extortion have made the Islamic State the richest terror army in history.
It's managed to amass a war chest of a staggering US $2 billion.
Managing such a huge mountain of money is a complex task.
The US Treasury is trying to stop IS's funding and disrupt its ability to use the money.
It's a major operation for them to maintain a financial system, it's a major operation for them to try to maintain some sort of central financial management.
I've worked to make sure that the territory in which ISIL operates is completely cut-off from the international financial system.
But IS is thwarting the best efforts of the world's most powerful state because it runs a cash economy.
Major General al-Maksousi, the head of Iraqi police intelligence, showed me the secret documents seized when Abu Hajjar was arrested.
Part of Abu Hajjar's job, until his arrest last summer, was to distribute the cash.
How much money would you normally carry? And what currency was the money in? US dollars.
IS has managed to establish and fund a huge army of up to 50,000 core fighters.
Around a fifth are foreign, the rest come from Syria and Iraq.
How much would an Iraqi fighter be paid in US dollars? How much money would a foreign fighter receive as a wage? And the families of suicide bombers the so-called martyrs, are compensated, too.
IS fighters are paid only a fraction of what Iraqi soldiers are paid.
But most don't fight for the money, but out of fanatical religious conviction.
It's this that makes them such a formidable force.
It's not just its vast wealth that sets IS apart.
It also runs a meticulous organisation, as was revealed in a remarkable intelligence coup last year.
It began when Abu Hajjar identified the hideout in Mosul of a senior IS military commander.
Last June, just days before Mosul fell to IS, a specialist anti-terrorist unit swooped in and confronted Bilawi in his safe house.
When they searched al-Bilawi's house, they uncovered 127 memory sticks, a treasure trove of intelligence about the inner-most workings of IS.
They're like the documents that were found with Bin Laden.
The most important ones are about the arrival of Arab and other foreign fighters.
They include their names, country of origin, who recruited them, details of their specialisation, whether they're a suicide bomber, a fighter, or a reservist.
There are also detailed inventories of military warehouses, the number and types of weapons, the types of munitions.
There are also assassination hit lists.
Despite the killing of al-Bilawi, the head of IS's military operations in Iraq, the setback did not halt the meteoric rise of the Islamic State.
Just a few days later, IS showed its resilience and military expertise by capturing Iraq's second city, Mosul.
So where did IS spring from and what was the foundation of its formidable organization? The irony is that, in the deserts of southern Iraq, America inadvertently helped create it.
In the wake of the American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, opposition to the occupation grew.
Thousands of suspected insurgents were swept up into a vast American military detention centre.
It was called Camp Bucca.
Watch your heads! Detainees weren't locked up in cells, but were herded into compounds, 1,000 to each.
The guards patrolled outside the wire.
Riots often erupted.
Watch out! Oh, that's a big one! Be decisive on what you shoot.
Everybody is shooting over the top of each other, across each other.
What kind of shit is that? It was here that the seeds of IS were sown.
This former Camp Bucca detainee saw how IS's predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was able to spread its message through the compounds.
We did get reports from detainees inside and they would say, "The Imam, or whoever, is using this and they're teaching things, they're teaching radical beliefs and they're saying we should rise up against the Americans.
" There was definitely a concern that, by bringing all these detainees in together, that we had created kind of a pressure cooker for these radical ideologies.
But the pressure in the compounds was about to get much worse.
Faced with the dramatic escalation of violence outside, the American General David Petraeus led the so-called "surge", adding thousands more troops.
The surge was needed because of course, the situation in Iraq was very, very desperate.
The country was on the verge of a Civil War, if it wasn't already in the early stages of it.
It was literally on fire.
It was about to go up in smoke.
It had to be done.
Thousands more young and embittered Iraqis were swept up into Camp Bucca.
But General Petraeus knew a price was being paid.
These extremists were basically running a terrorist training university or at least a radicalisation school in our own detention facilities.
The self-styled leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was one of the internees.
And he wasn't the only one.
How many of al-Baghdadi's aides were interned at Camp Bucca? The tightly-knit leadership of IS was formed here, including its Military Commander in Iraq, Abdul Rahman al-Bilawi, and it's Head of Finance, Abu Hajjar.
And it was in Camp Bucca that the future leadership of IS learned the lessons of the past and formulated the blueprint for the future.
What's more, the fanatical jihadi leaders were joined by battle-hardened former military commanders from Saddam Hussein's regime.
They basically gave a vision, gave a structure to the passion of the jihadists.
That was the oil and fire that created the Islamic State today.
We had the worst of the worst.
There were thousands of individuals who went through Camp Bucca.
In fact, I'd stopped release of detainees because I felt that we were actually releasing individuals that were more radical than they were when they entered.
In 2011, when America finally withdrew, there was hope for the future.
Camp Bucca was to be made into a business park.
On handover day, one American investor was full of optimism.
One of the greatest days of my life was to be at Camp Bucca on the day that it was handed over.
I can still picture the American flag coming down and the Iraqi flag going up at the same time.
It was the first American facility to get handed over to the Iraqis for commercial reasons, to participate in the growth and birth of.
in the rebirth of this country.
This gift from the American people is a demonstration of our continued commitment to Iraq's future and our enduring partnership with the Iraqi people.
Incredibly, the new Iraqi government now chose to empty Camp Bucca and release thousands of radicalised prisoners, eager to join a new jihad.
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! The seeds of the so-called Islamic State may have been sown in Iraq, but it was the bloody chaos of the Syrian civil war that enabled IS to flourish.
Syria gave them the fertile ground to regroup, to reorganise, to get money, to get weapons, to get training.
And to recreate themselves in the shape that we see today, the Islamic State.
The key to understanding IS is that it is a Sunni organisation incubated in the bitter sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam.
Not just in Syria but also in Iraq.
Allahu Akbar! After America's withdrawal from Iraq, the newly-elected Shia-dominated government was meant to share power with the Sunni minority, but instead it turned on them.
Leading Sunni politicians were forced into exile.
Even Iraq's Sunni Vice President was accused of terrorism.
He still lives under sentence of death.
I am not the first Sunni politician who has been systematically targeted on a sectarian basis.
Anti-government protests were ruthlessly suppressed by the government's Shia-dominated security forces.
Scores of Sunnis were shot dead.
We lost hope.
My people has all the justification to be angry.
Sunni anger proved fertile ground for even more recruits for IS.
Sunni communities, they were unsure they could rely either on the Iraqi Police or the Iraqi Military.
Some of them regarded Islamic State as a potential source of security.
Many young people are daily joining forces with ISIS, and they are expanding.
IS has become notorious for its shocking use of violence.
It's not just the beheadings.
Whole villages have been massacred.
Women cast into slavery.
The slaughter is not random.
It is deliberate and calculated.
They in fact, in some ways, copied Genghis Khan and the Mongol approach to military conquest.
You create an absolute fear, deliberately in your enemies, and the first time you come to a village, you kill everyone, the dogs, the cats, everything, destroy it down to the ground.
But ironically, IS is also marketing the seductive image of an Islamic Utopia-- a paradise on Earth designed to attract impressionable young Muslims.
It is not just barbarians haphazardly using terror.
It's used deliberately and with intentionality, but behind that, there is an ideology.
What ISIS are trying to do is to try and take people who have felt oppressed under the system, and take them into a universal idea of statehood which is based on simple belonging.
IS seeks to replicate the 7th century Caliphate, the Islamic empire that was to unite Muslims right across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.
For IS's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers, strict Sharia law is at its heart.
IS believes it has a religious duty to wipe out rival faiths, including millions of the minority Shia Muslims.
They have regarded the Shia as non-Muslim.
They have regarded them as apostate.
- Infidels? - Infidels.
And it has been a key part of their ideology that the Shia must be destroyed, killed.
The mass slaughter of Shia prisoners by Sunni IS fighters helped turn the sectarian gulf into a bloody chasm.
And even Shia mosques are reduced to rubble and dust.
The extreme savagery of IS is also used to suppress the eight million people living within its borders.
The Turkish checkpoint at Kilis is the door to Syria and IS, where its citizens are hidden from view and silenced through fear.
One remarkable young woman managed to get out to tell us what life is like in the Islamic State's self-styled capital, Raqqa.
IS has stripped women of all their freedom.
They said we must cover the whole face.
This is all forced on us by IS so that nothing at all of a woman is revealed.
Women are banned from doing most jobs, they are forced to stay at home, and not allowed to travel without a man accompanying them.
Any infringement of this strict code is harshly punished by the hisbah, or religious police.
Sometimes people get whipped.
After that, many people began to fear IS.
They have even forbidden smoking.
What happens if a man is caught smoking? Sometimes, inside the religious police building, they'll heat up a metal skewer, and put it in his mouth.
The worst feeling is to witness other people killed in front of you.
Alongside this brutality, there are also strong incentives to sign up to the so-called state.
If you are a member of IS, then they give you gas, petrol and bread.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of simple-minded people who say, "Yes, I'll join them.
Better to take the things they offer than die of hunger.
" This is how they force people to support them.
Ironically, IS's savage ideology has also proved a powerful magnet to extremists from all over the world.
Most come from nearby Muslim countries.
Around 2,000 young Jordanians are thought to have joined jihadi groups in Syria.
The militant Sunni cleric, Abu Sayyaf, is proud of the part he played.
I was one of those who encouraged people to fight in Syria.
It's the duty of every Muslim, to support their fellow Muslim brothers anywhere on Earth if they suffer injustice.
He shares IS's fundamental ideology that there is religious justification for targeting infidels, even when they're Muslims.
Do you approve of the Islamic State executing Shia prisoners? The truth is that this is a battle, and it's the Shia who started the war.
Only when the Shia took control of Iraq and directed their arrows at the Sunni people, and began to take revenge, was there a reaction by the Sunnis.
If a person has suffered injustice, then he has the right to defend himself.
And this is what the Sunni people have done.
And he warns the West not to continue its attacks on the Islamic State and Sunni Muslims.
If you don't want the Muslim people to attack you, you must ask your own governments to leave the coalition, in order to avoid attacks on Britain or other Western countries.
It is you who are attacking! What sort of reaction do you expect? It's estimated more than 12,000 foreign fighters have joined the holy war in Syria.
That's already more than travelled to fight in Afghanistan.
IS's meticulous organisation has enabled thousands of new recruits to cross the border undetected and enlist.
And more are on the way.
Well over 600 young British Muslims are believed to have left, seduced by IS's propaganda and facilitated by its well-oiled machine.
My journey finally brought me home to see why so many are drawn to leave.
Luton is no stranger to Islamist extremism and the lure of jihad.
Its Islamic Centre is all too aware of the compulsive attraction of IS, and is trying to stop young men and women being drawn to it.
The so-called Islamic State is everywhere, all over social media, sophisticated propaganda.
They have so much at their fingertips.
We're dealing with a highly emotional generation of Muslims growing up, coupled with anger and frustration, then when you see somebody going against the grain, or somebody standing up against the West, it becomes attractive.
It's like a romance for them.
The appeal is, "Come here, we'll give you a gun, we'll give you ammunition, you can get your own back.
" This is the face of British jihad.
Imran Khawaja grew up in Southall, West London.
This is what we are using.
Big machines.
Big boys, big machines.
At the age of 27, Khawaja left for Syria early last year and joined a propaganda arm of the Islamic State.
He was part of IS's pervasive presence on social media-- the cutting edge of its strategy to attract new recruits.
ISIL uses thousands of Twitter accounts.
Some people allege 30,000 over the past year.
It uses Facebook, it uses Tumblr, it uses a very wide range of different platforms to get its message across.
I think it's made an enormous difference.
ISIL is really the first terrorist organisation that has fully adopted the range of tools and techniques that are available on social media.
IS may embrace a 7th century ideology but it has eagerly embraced 21st century social media technology.
Allahu Akbar! - What is your name? - I am a Muslim.
It wants to show potential recruits that they can still enjoy all the comforts of home, as shown on YouTube.
This is the room where the Mujahideen sleep.
You've just got your little basic stuff.
You've got your Hollister.
You can't leave those things behind! IS is posting a phenomenal 90,000 messages a day, from down-home images to encouragement to kill.
We will not stop fighting, we will not put down our weapons until we reach your lands And it was on Twitter that Imran Khawaja's death was formally announced.
But British intelligence soon discovered he'd faked it.
It looks like he wanted to come back to this country and saw that as a way of throwing the security services off the scent.
Concerns about the threat from returning jihadis were highlighted when Khawaja came back by a circuitous route-- via Serbia.
He was arrested at Dover.
Last February, he was sentenced to 12 years for terrorist offences in Syria.
At his trial, he expressed remorse.
But Khawaja had previously posted on social media a photo of himself holding the severed heads of IS victims.
Do you think that remorse was genuine? I'm sceptical.
Why are you sceptical? Last minute remorse is never that impressive.
Do you think he was planning an attack? I wouldn't rule it out.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, where 12 people were shot dead, was a chilling illustration of the growing threat from radical jihadists.
Islamic State has been very clear that one of its priorities now, and a priority not just for the people in Syria and Iraq, but for people in this country, is to attack this state, this country, British people.
They are trying to do two things.
The first is to direct terrorist operations against us, but they're also trying to inspire people to conduct attacks of their own accord.
We are making more arrests than we've ever made before.
It's pretty much one a day now.
We're seeing the biggest step change in the threat, in its nature and scale, that we've seen since 9/11.
Last year, the police arrested six times as many terrorist suspects linked to Syria as the year before.
I think it's already clear that individuals from European countries, including the UK, have gone to Syria, have been further radicalised and then have returned home with new skills and weapons and explosives and tactics.
But there are those, even from the British intelligence community, who question the nature and scale of the threat to the UK.
There is a certain threat.
I'm talking about proportionality, not about saying there's no threats.
All of the actions we see coming from ISIS-- the killings, the beheadings, the burning of the pilot-- is to bring what they would call crusader boots on the ground.
Why? To fulfill the prophecy, that the final battle before redemption would take place in a village, Dabiq, close to Aleppo, and that in that battle, the crusaders would be defeated and redemption would happen.
Such is the apocalyptic vision that sustains IS.
That's very different from saying that, you know, they're about to invade the homeland, or as some people were saying, that we're going to see ISIS flags flying in the Vatican Square in Rome.
Isn't there a danger in exaggerating the threat that the West faces? There can be a danger in exaggerating the threat.
I don't think I've exaggerated the threat.
I think again, it is a very clear threat.
IS's uncompromising ideology, which is the same as Osama Bin Laden's, has taken wings.
We have a threat that goes all the way from the western shore of Africa, from Nigeria to South East Asia.
We have thousands and thousands of individuals who believe and who adhere to the ideas of Osama Bin Laden.
We have social media that's motivating individuals to come from all over the world and join a jihad.
We have Bin Ladenism on steroids.
The fate of the self-styled Islamic State will be decided not just on the battlefield, but in its ability to finance its state.
It may have vast resources but the demands on them are vast too.
They are not providing the basic needs of the population and the areas in which they operate.
They are not providing food, they are not providing electricity.
They're interested in terrorism, they're interested in war, they're interested in the savagery that they're wreaking on the region.
I don't think the Islamic State is here to stay.
The so-called Islamic State does indeed have access to a very substantial amount of money.
But while it's sufficient to pay for a terrorist enterprise, it is not sufficient to be a state, and this will be one of the Achilles heels.
Do you think there will come a time when the Islamic State runs out of money? IS faces increasing military pressure.
It's lost Kobane, Tikrit and over a quarter of its territory in Iraq.
But even if IS is defeated on the battlefield, its destruction may scatter the seeds of jihad not just through the entire region, but globally, making the threat all the greater.
The moment the hammer goes down on them, they're going to spread all over the place, and they had been recruiting thousands and thousands of foreigners.
This is very dangerous.
We have to be very careful in developing a strategy to fight the ideology.
A strategy to not only dismantle and degrade the Islamic state, but dismantle and degrade the incubating factors that feeds into creating entities like the Islamic State.
Without that, I think the future is going to be very dark.