Interviews with Dr. Ronald Boyd-MacMillan, Director of Global Strategy and Research for Global Christian Relief.
RBM is one of the world’s experts at reading the world through the lens of Christian persecution trends. His book, Faith that Endures: The Essential Guide to the Persecuted Church was the first comprehensive text on how to understand, support, and learn from the persecuted church in the world today. He is pioneering high level courses that strengthen believers under pressure and is creating through GCR new research instruments that uniquely capture the dynamics of religious persecution around the world today. This includes the recently launched Violent Incidents Database.
We spoke to him on the upcoming tenth anniversary of the Islamic State’s capture of the northern Iraqi town, Mosul, on June 10th, 2014.
Why is June 10th, 2014, such an important date?
It was the date that the dreaded Islamic State, which formed a barbarous Caliphate in southern Syria that appalled the world, came back to the country of their origin and marched into Mosul – Iraq’s second biggest city and the key to the oil riches of the country. The manner of their “victory” was what really astonished everyone. There were 60,000 troops in the city ready to repulse them, part of an Iraqi army of 350,000 on which US$41billion had been spent. The Islamic State approached with 1300 fighters, and in three days all 60,000 troops had fled, following their commander who was first to desert. It was made clear that Iraq was utterly tribal. The Sunni tribes in the north welcomed Islamic State because they were so fed up with the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, which was spectacularly corrupt and had been making up for decades of repression of Shias under Saddam’s regime. It bathed the Islamic State in an aura of invincibility, and they were quick to crow on social media of their victories. I remember a young Christian blurting out from inside the besieged city, “Their God must be stronger than ours because no one can stop them.” It was all very Old Testament.
What happened next became very well-known too.
Yes, there was terrible bloodletting. The Yazidi community fled, but were often overtaken, the men slaughtered, and the women given to the fighters. And around 100,000 Christians from the Nineveh plain had to flee to the comparative safety of northern Kurdistan. Many were killed, but most were given the chance to convert or go after being robbed of all their valuables. The optics live long in one’s mind. Remember those pictures of dozens of young military cadets from the Iraqi army being lined up in front of pits and gunned down by whooping Islamic State executioners? It recalled those grainy pictures of Jews lined up in front of pits by the SS and shot in the Second World War. It played out a barbarism we thought we had left behind. It made us face afresh the reality of human evil.
Ten years on, how many Christians are back?
Less than half. How do you return to a city where the neighbor who hated you now lives in your house? Or to your village where everything was bulldozed flat? Also, since Christians have been living in cities like Irbil for ten years, they have built a new life. Younger people especially have no wish to return, having little connection to what was home to their parents and grandparents. And then there are those who have emigrated, and who can blame them? I remember speaking to leaders who begged us, “Don’t make it easy for us to leave.” But often they have relatives that sponsor them, and who are we to say, “Stay in the Middle East and just deal with the fact that your children will always be at risk from violence!” It is their call.
Back up and tell us who Islamic State were and where they came from?
It started in Iraq in 2006, and was a militia made up of former Iraqi government employees, who had been dismissed by US authorities. The problem was these people were numerous, well-armed, competent, and desperate. But initially it was not strongly Islamic. This changed after a few years and it initially aligned itself with Al Qaeda, calling itself Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) and took advantage of the Syrian conflict erupting in 2011 to move its operational center across the border. There was a total vacuum in that region. No one wanted to engage them. The embattled Syrian President Assad left them alone to show the West, “This is what you get when you won’t back me.” The big regional powers of Iran and Saudi Arabia found the buffer zone that ISIS formed between them quite useful. Turkey traded oil with them. They made Raqqah their administrative center, and expanded their territory, and with their new leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (who emerged in 2010) proclaimed a Caliphate when they crossed into northern Iraq.
Why did they become so well known?
They became the orchestrators of the ultimate horror show of the time. It was all about the gore. They threw suspected gay people off public towers, executed hundreds in front of cameras, enslaved women without qualm. It was choregraphed barbarism because they were brilliant at publicity. They were posting YouTube videos while Al Qaeda sent cassettes out of caves in Afghanistan. They celebrated the violence, and used it to create terror, “We are coming to shed your blood.” Over 30,000 young people from around the world flocked to join them, drawn by the bloodlust and the seeming invincible success of it all. A young man in the UK told me at the time, “It’s the first caliphate for hundreds of years, so it shows that our God is strong…we want to be part of that.” An Egyptian man calmly told me on a plane in 2015, “Well, I want to change the world as a jihadist, so there is only one destination for me…Islamic State.” The West got scared, not only by the new combination of fearful violence and sophisticated publicity, but that young Muslims in their own societies would be radicalized to rise and commit atrocities in their home countries. For Islamic extremists, nothing convinces like success.
Can we learn anything now about their rise?
Eli Wiesel was once asked, “How do you stop a Hitler?.” He answered, “Before they become Hitler.” The vital lesson is to stop a vacuum in society opening up. A vacuum really is a situation where the forces of moderation fail to maintain stability, and when moderates fail then extremists’ triumph, because it becomes so much easier for them to capture the culture.
But they began to be beaten back?
After their Mosul triumph the US began Operation Inherent Resolve in October 2014 with the objective of destroying ISIS as a state. This used US (and other Western) air power in support of local ground troops. In Syria most of these were provided by Kurdish groups. In Iraq it was a combination of Kurds and Shia militias, many of whom were supported by Iran. It’s a rare example of Iran and the US being on the same side and had only happened before in Afghanistan in 2001-2002. It took a while but by 2017 they were destroyed as a state. The myth that they were great fighters was exposed as more rhetoric than reality. But getting them out of Mosul took months of close fighting and left much of that grand city in ruins. Many leaders fled and were killed in special operations afterwards. Al-Baghdadi detonated his suicide vest in October 2019 when US troops entered the tunnels he was hiding in. Gruesome to the last, he took the lives of two of his young children in the explosion.
Are they finished then?
Sort of. There is some evidence of regrouping up in the hills in northern Iraq. There’s no chance though of them forming a state again. But a more lasting effect was that many of them fled south to sub-Saharan Africa and lent money and expertise to the burgeoning Islamic extremist movements there.
What expertise do they have?
They are experts in running a criminal enterprise. Jihadist movements always need money. These people are experts in kidnapping, drug running, arms smuggling, extortion of local populations. Any racket, they are all over it. And these jihadist movements must have money to recruit. In sub-Saharan Africa there is a huge youth bulge, with millions of young men in the age group 17-24 without education or jobs, and so often the only way they can earn a salary and have a family is to join one of these extremist movements. Ten years ago, there were five or so major jihadi movements in the Sahel. Now there are over twenty. Its massively destabilizing. It also helps that Libya is a warlord state awash with arms, so these groups are never likely to run out of ammunition.
Was the West right to be so frightened of Islamic State looking back?
The West got one thing right and one thing wrong. They were right to realize the vast symbolic power of the Islamic State which was out of all proportion to its size. The video-game generation came to the fore, creating the most attractive jihadist propaganda ever seen. Sadly, it has set a high standard in jihadi recruitment. But the thing people got wrong I think was that – and we said this at the time – the Islamic State was always going to be a ten-year phenomenon, but Islamic extremism has deeper roots and will last for decades. These roots are still in place. Alas, the Islamic State was more blip than trend.
What are those roots?
In the Sunni world, there are two, and they have not receded in strength. The first is Saudi Arabia’s funding of its extreme fundamentalist 18th century version of Islam, called Wahhabism, which imposes sharia law, relegates women to second-class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as heretics and apostates to be persecuted along with Christians and Jews. The ideologies of al Qaeda and ISIS draw a great deal from it. Plus Saudi Arabia promotes this version of Islam around the world with its Petro-dollar billions. Travel around Indonesia and sub-Saharan Africa, and you see their mosques erected and their preachers trained and set in place, all promoting this sectarian version of Islam. The second tap root – and this gets overlooked quite easily – is the role of the Pakistan Intelligence Services in supporting Taliban type movements, especially in Asia. I once sent a person undercover to infiltrate a jihadi group. They were sent first to Saudi to get money and learn the doctrines. Then sent to Pakistan to learn the tactics of building a movement, making bombs, and handling weapons of assassination. Both countries are designated Countries of Particular Concern by the US State Department, but although sanctions are supposed to be applied, they are not due to Presidential discretion. But as long as these two tap roots remain in place, Islamic extremism of a Sunni variety will remain a major destabilizing factor in the world we must live in. People need to guard against thinking because ISIS is vanquished, the threat of Islamic militancy has receded. And Bin Laden always said that to create a Caliphate would be a major tactical mistake in any case.
Why was that?
Bin Laden taught that the goal of Al Qaeda was to form a global Islamic state, and that this would be accomplished through the numerical growth of suitably radicalized Muslim communities and nations. Of course, he approved of violence and sponsored it, but he saw a Muslim world coming primarily through demography. He cautioned that if you try to form a Caliphate, you will have to defend a territory against local and world powers that will soon muster overwhelming force to wipe you out. Events proved him correct. That’s when Al Baghdadi split from him. That and the question of killing other Muslims. ISIS taught that any Muslim who was not a supporter of the Caliphate was an infidel and should be killed.
Does the horror of ISIS live on? And how did Christians react?
There were some very high-profile martyrs and stories. Kayla Mueller was a 25-year-old Christian from Arizona who had joined a Syrian friend in Doctors Without Borders. She was captured and subject to repeated rape from al-Baghdadi himself before being killed after eighteen months in 2015. About eighteen Westerners were taken prisoner by ISIS, and the best known was another American, James Foley, a journalist who was captured in November 2012. He was a Christian and had converted to Islam during his captivity, though it is difficult to know what to read into that. His horrific beheading beamed live on social media in August of 2014. It shocked the world but prompted one of the most astonishing acts of Christian forgiveness from his parents. His mother later launched the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to advocate for American hostages held abroad and to promote safety for aspiring journalists. It was interesting. ISIS was front page news, and Western Christians for the period were able to make a direct connection from the headlines everyone was reading to the need to remember and pray for the plight of persecuted Christians (and other groups). A higher level of atrocity in, for example, Northern Nigeria today, does not seem to elicit the same outpouring.
Why is that?
I suspect it’s something very basic and no one is to blame, but the reality is that the antics of Islamic State had the potential to affect everyone. It impinged on the average Westerner’s lived world. I knew a family who had lost their son who sneaked off to fight for them. And everyone was worried that the videos the Islamic state was making could maybe lead to their neighbor’s child radicalizing themselves and turn violent in their own neighborhood. The killings of Christians in Northern Nigeria do not impinge on our lived world to the same extent, except perhaps if you live in Europe where you know that illegal migration is partly driven by the violence in these regions.
Looking back finally from today, what sticks in your mind and heart?
I look forward to writing up the ongoing story better. Many Muslims turned to Christianity, sickened by the violence and churches grew remarkably. Some centuries long antagonisms between ancient denominations were buried in the prayer movements formed. And there were amazing local heroes that risked all to free local prisoners from the hands of ISIS. One man I knew sprang two hundred and thirty-two prisoners. We cannot tell his story yet, but it represents a level of Christian “derring-do” that will inspire generations.
Two images stick in my mind though. One was a group Christians in an ancient Orthodox church bricking up a secret room in their church to conceal their collection of ancient scripture and commentary manuscripts. I’ve handled those texts. Thick, bound on vellum, and hand copied. Some dated back to the 9th century. I would have loved to have been there as the wall was dismantled and the scriptures handed back out to willing hands. The other image is that Islamic State left a booby-trapped Bible in one of the churches in Mosul. What sick mind boobytraps a Bible? It proves to me there is an evil madness in these movements that can only be understood in terms of the dark forces Jesus warned us about in the Gospels.