Original subtitles

MUSIC

GUNFIRE

They have taken a central position on the world stage.

They call themselves The Islamic State.

They claim religious, political and

military authority over all Muslims.

In reality, they are a tiny

minority of the Muslim population.

I have traveled in the Muslim World for over fifty years

and have experienced the love and kindness of its people.

Now, everyday we read about new atrocities perpetrated by ISIS;

they target innocent people; killing, enslaving

and torturing in the name of religion.

The group is a Frankenstein phenomenon,

born of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

and carry on the work of peace.

We now have more than 1.3 million

killed civilians across the Middle East

and more than one hundred thousand

international terrorist,

instead of some hundreds, before

the beginning of he war on terror.

Our wars have been a terror breeding program.

EXPLOSION

In mid 2014 ISIS cut all communications

with foreign journalists,

while I still had an open line to the organization.

RINGING

For several months I spoke at length with Abu Qatada.

His previous name was Christian.

He s German to the core and a leading

figure in the IS propaganda machine.

This is a guarantee of safety for ürgen Todenöfer

and his team,

so that he can travel safely in the territories of

the Islamic State with his traveling companions.

The soldiers of the Islamic State will

respect this guarantee and allow him

free and safe passage until he has

fulfilled his mission and left once again.

My name is ürgen Todenöfer. I was the first Western

reporter to enter ISIS territory and come out alive.

My son Frédéric joined me with a camera.

This is the story our journey.

Northern Aleppo, Syria.

We are taken to a registration center for new recruits.

This French speaking fighter, who refuses to

be filmed, is responsible for new arrivals.

Between fifty and sixty will turn up

at this particular center today.

After a series interviews, the officer decides

how these men will serve in the organization.

We saw people from all over the world.

From Sweden, France, The United States.

There was a guy from the Caribbean.

Very good looking, very charming, stylish,

Ray Ban glasses.

And I said what are you doing here?

What have you done before?

He said I was just admitted at

the Court of my country I asked him

Are you going to fight or are you going to

work in the administration as a lawyer?

he said I m going to do what the Calif is asking.

First night in Raqqah.

Gun and artillery fire breaks out.

IS fighters celebrate the conquest of

an important zone near the airport of Der-E-Zor.

When we arrived in Raqqah we found out immediately

that the boss of our IS commando was the driver.

He was always masked. He was a guy from the UK,

probably from London, and he tried to dominate us.

We have strong suspicions that our

masked driver was Mohammad Emwasi,

also known as Jihadi John,

the executioner of reporter James Foley.

There were many indications.

His direct contact with foreign hostages,

his insistence to have one of the hostages hand us

a letter for Prime Minister David Cameron, on camera,

his peculiar way of speech, his London accent

will result in the bloodshed of your people.

Back home our suspicions were strengthened as we got online

and heard his real voice, reversed

engineered by the Anonymous Network.

will result in the bloodshed of your people.

It sounded just like our driver.

And we had some requests and he didn t accept the requests.

They took all our electronic devices.

We were even not allowed to go to the balcony.

Of course we went to the balcony and we

saw what was happening in the streets,

but we weren t allowed to go out into Raqqah.

This guy, the driver, had an incredible

tone, a way of speaking I couldn t accept.

So it was hard at the beginning but, from Raqqah, our visit

in the so called Islamic State started to be successful.

We cross the former Syria-Iraq border, which

the Islamic State has reduced to rubble.

Our masked English driver is visibly angry.

For the entire six hour journey, he refuses to speak to us.

Tell him he's not being filmed. He's masked

anyway. And he's a fighter who isn't scared.

MUSIC

On first glance, life in Mosul seems completely normal,

if you forget that, behind us,

there are armed IS fighters at all times.

One of the IS guys tells us

the Shia are gone and the fish is back.

A bad anc cruel joke

When considering how many Shia have been killed in Mosul.

For the mostly Sunni population here in

Mosul, life under the Shia government

has been so bad in recent years, that

the IS is viewed as a lesser evil.

CALLING FOR PRAYER

Time for Friday prayers.

Shopkeepers shut their blinds and close their stores.

As we walk through the market,

Abu Qatada attributes this devotion

to the ISIS grip on Mosul.

The mosque gets so crowded, that people lay their

coats and scarves so they can pray on the street.

I have to admit however, that we didn t

feel very comfortable during the sermon.

MUSIC

Our next stop is the Central Court of Mosul, where we hope to

find out how the new laws of the IS are being implemented.

As a former judge myself,

I requested an interview with a judge.

We recorded with him for almost an hour, but our

masked English driver deleted most of our footage.

The judge told us all former judges and court workers had

been executed, while he studied law at a local mosque.

Do you speak English?

And the end I asked him, would there be any

executions or amputations during the next days.

And I didn t say I d want to see an execution

or an amputation, I only wanted to know.

Abu Qatada said: If you want to see an amputation or

an execution, that s no problem, I can do that for you!

Do you want a Shia or do you want a Kurd?

I will do it for you .

You know he said this with a smile on his face.

And if a guy from the media department can say

I will make the amputation or the execution for

you , then it mean that there is no justice, that

the laws of this Islamic State are just a joke.

I was not only shocked, it made me extremely sad.

Because I knew so much about this man, about Abu Qatada.

I know how he was when he was young

And he was completely different.

We drive to the mosque where Abu Bakr al Baghdadi

made his first appearance five months earlier.

Its leaning minaret makes the tower

of Pisa look positively vertical.

For the first time in over fifty years

I m prevented from entering a mosque.

One of our escorts walks in with Frederic s camera.

The streets are being patrolled by

different kinds of police forces.

Is this ISIS police? Or just police?

Religious law and order seems to be the key concern.

It is puzzling to meet a terrorist Chief of Police,

dressed in US army gear, looted from Iraqi soldiers.

If you catch a thief, how long will it take

until his hand is cut off? How many days?

His message is official and opaque, but it becomes clear

just how firm the IS grip is on the local population.

Was he stealing something? Or fighting?

The man in the next cell was arrested for

possession of sleeping pills and anti-depressants.

For sleep...

It s not allowed? But if he is sick ?

No, no, no! No sick!

No sick.

It can be hard to understand what constitutes a crime

in a puritan and totalitarian regime. Will

the people of Mosul accept this situation, if the IS can t

deliver on its promise of security and prosperity?

MUSIC

This former Iraqi army base is currently in the hands of ISIS.

The fighter outside the base has an American M16 assault riffle.

Did you participate in a fight?

How old are you?

How old?

And you?

And how much are you paid? Do you

get money when you are fighting?

And you are the boss.

Minutes after we enter the army base, we spot an American plane.

The fighters tell us our visit will be cut short.

We are not allowed to film the secret prisons

hidden under the hills of this base.

Instead, we are shown a tank graveyard.

This is what is left of the Iraqi army in Mosul.

What the IS had no use for has been abandoned or destroyed.

On our way to the city gates, we suddenly stop at a roundabout.

A Kurdish soldier is being led to us.

Before the interview, the prisoner thanks us for our time.

You are Kurdish.

His voice catches.

I want to stop the interview when a drone is spotted.

I shake his hand long and hard.

They put a bag over his head and drive him to a secret location.

MUSIC

We continue our drive to the outskirts of town,

where we interview a front line ISIS fighter.

He should look at me.

You were one of the first fighters who

entered Mosul. Is that correct? In August?

How many people were you?

Only three hundred?

How can you explain that with less than three hundred

people, twenty-four thousand people were running away?

How do you explain that?

What is your name?

As usual, I wanted to shake hands, but he refused.

He said: You have a guarantee, here in the Islamic State.

So you will survive here. But you will go back to Germany.

And we will come to Germany.

We will search you, we will find you and we will kill you.

I have had enough of the so-called Islamic State.

I am saturated by their rhetoric.

I have heard them speak in the name of all Muslim people.

Still, from my understanding,

they don't represent Islam at all.

It is strange to see people going

through their day in a war zone,

and then watching IS propaganda as their evening entertainment.

With three cars and six armed escorts,

we pay a visit to a hospital.

As we see in the car park, apparently

the Islamic State is even issuing license plates.

The judge told me corruption is over.

The Chief of Police said there is no crime.

Perhaps the doctors will tell me they have eradicated disease

We meet a young doctor who doesn t want to be filmed.

He says he s from Europe, but no more.

I press him and he gets ready to talk.

We speak to three wounded men; two IS fighters

and one civilian.

What did you do before joining IS?

And why did you join ISIS? What was your motivation?

You were injured last Saturday by a drone attack?

He says it was drones, he doesn t

know, but he thinks they were Iraqi.

And there are also twenty citizens, all killed,

just citizens, and also too many injured, he says.

By the drones. By the drones.

I couldn t assess the accuracy of these

allegations, but independent sources have confirmed

multiple cases where civilians or civil infrastructure

have been targeted by coalition forces.

EXPLOSION

After fourteen year of War on Terror, we have more

than one hundred thousand international terrorists.

Some of them even have their own state.

The Islamic State is as big as UK.

MUSIC

EXPLOSION

EXPLOSION

Abu Qatada was deadly serious.

GUNFIRE

For the so-called Islamic State, one hundred

and thirty human lives are worthless.

The massacre at the Bataclan Music Hall,

brought home their sadism.

Look at this!

He looks very happy about killing somebody.

I am here to interview Shaykh Hamza Yusuf.

With his help, I want to clarify

things and put them into perspective.

He has studied Islam for over thirty years.

He is of the most widely respected and influential

Muslims scholars in the world. He s also an American.

Did ISIS try to kill you?

They issued that there would be a reward for somebody.

So you are a target.

I m a target. I gave a khutba, which a Friday sermon.

It s madness. Complete insanity.

And I think it just bothered them. Because my

argument was they had nothing to do with Islam.

These people have nothing to do with this religion!

This is literally a statistically

insignificant number of people,

and yet they are claiming that we represent the true Islam.

They don't represent my Islam. And they don't represent

the vast majority of Muslims around the world s Islam.

Making propaganda every day with their

brutality is, I think this is something new.

It creates a gross distortion in the minds of

Western people [when] that is all they see.

And also we re living in an age to use

a French philosopher the age of spectacle.

And so the more dramatic you can do something,

the more media attention it will get.

Some young people are attracted by the ideology of ISIS.

But what would you say, how many percent of

the Western Muslims are attracted by ISIS?

Well I mean, if you take your country for example,

there is about 5 million Muslims in Germany today.

What we know of, there is less than a thousand

[that] have gone to Iraq and Syria to fight.

So, if you just take those numbers, you are

dealing with .02 percent of the Muslim population.

It almost doesn't register statistically.

And yet if you watched German media,

you re going to assume that every

one of those 5 million German Muslims

is a potential terrorist.

Despite the fact that ISIS the state

has told people you have to come.

So people aren't obeying them.

The word for war, harb , in Arabic

is a negative term in the Koran.

Jihad does not mean war. Jihad means struggle .

The greater struggle is the struggle against the soul,

against the low qualities of the soul, and then

the lesser jihad is the struggle against enemies that are

trying to conquer your land or something like that.

The verse that gave permission to fight, which

is Surat al Hajj, the 22nd chapter of the Koran.

The verse actually says: permission is granted to

defend themselves because they have been fought.

And then it says: had it not been some people

defending other people, churches, synagogues,

temples and mosques where in God s name is

mentioned, much would've been destroyed.

And so the very reason for jihad was

to protect religious communities!

You would say only self-defence is allowed?

Self-defence is allowed in Islam.

But to rebel against because the idea is that

even a tyrannical government, is better than anarchy.

We thought maybe there were fireworks

or something related to the show.

And they were shooting everybody in a very calm way.

We're here in Paris, we re sitting in a café.

We feel safe.

But there's people that actually believe that they can

simply come, take a Visa, and they can disregard the laws.

In Islamic law if you come

into a land with a Visa, you re called

mu ahhad, which means you have

a contractual agreement to obey the laws.

If you break those laws, you re a criminal.

And this is by consensus of Muslim scholars.

Do you think a Caliphate would be

a solution for the Muslim World?

No. Umar, the second Caliph, said that if anybody

claims to be a Caliph, don t take his allegiance.

Because Caliphate has to be an agreement of the Muslims.

I mean why can't I just declare a Caliphate?

Right now, I am the Caliph!

California comes from the Spanish word Khalifornia,

the land of the Caliph. This is historical fact.

California? Are you sure?

Yeah, the land of the Caliph.

So I will declare the Caliphate in California,

and Abu Bakr [al-Baghdadi] is not the Caliph.

I am the Caliph, so now everybody has to migrate

to California and take allegiance with me.

This is ridiculous, it s absurd. Who would accept that?

And I said this is anti-Islamic.

113 of the 114 surahs start with the words In the name of God

the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Where is your mercy?

What I ve seen, and again I want to hear

what you saw, because I wasn t there.

I like most people only see what s

being shown to me, but they have

released several things that have

indicated to me that they re cruel.

Benjamin Franklin said in his

autobiography that since the Prophet Muhammad

rebuked Khalid for mistreating prisoners,

no Muslim has ever mistreated prisoners.

So there s a founding father of America who

knew more about Islam than these people.

Because you can t kill a prisoner, and to behead these

journalists thank God you came back with your head.

Because several journalists didn t.

Foley's mother, she came out and just

begged for the mercy of her son.

And she said: I read the Koran, and I read

about the Prophet, and he was merciful.

Just show mercy to my son .

And I just felt it was so ironic that here is

a woman who is not a Muslim, and yet she had

a deeper understanding of the religion than

these people claiming to be the Caliphate.

Once they said: we have captured

3,500 people in Mosul, but we

have killed only 50 percent of them.

This was mercy, for the other 50 percent.

What a lot of people don't understand is;

there are many many verses in the Koran

about being forgiving,

and not being angry about what people say or attack you;

And the Prophet, when he moved to Medina,

the first thing he did was create

this pluralistic society where

the Jews had their religion, the Muslims had their religion

he made covenants with several different Christians.

These covenants are still in existence.

The churches that they have destroyed in Iraq;

they were there long before the Muslims.

The Christians in Iraq were there long

before the Muslims ever got there.

In the entire biography of the Prophet.

There is not one case where he forced

anybody to believe in his religion.

And he said God will give you with gentleness

what he will never give you with violence.

And so not to say Islam doesn t have a martial spirit,

it doesn t have the idea of self-defence, that s all true.

But at its essence it s a merciful thing.

So when there s no mercy in something, it s not Islamic.

How would you defeat ISIS?

ISIS is an ideological movement, and so it s ideas.

And those ideas have to be combated with ideas.

So you say we cannot bombard ideologies?

I think it's unjust, it s a moral to

bombard victims in this situation.

Most of which are civilians, women and children.

You have to bombard the young people with ideas. Really.

But you will not reach these fighters.

I think you'll reach some of them,

I think you'll reach some of them.

There s a group in Toronto that

were plotting this terrorist act.

They were arrested because of an informer.

They re all in prison.

I got a letter from one of them, who

was introduced to my tapes in prison.

And he was saying how ashamed he felt that he had disgraced

the religion of Islam, in this long letter to me.

And that he had been tricked and fooled by this ideology.

So a lot of these are young people that

have never been exposed to real Islam.

Shaykh Hamza is the kind of man I have met

for over fifty years in the Muslim world.

better to light one candle than curse

the darkness .

We have to illuminate ourselves, and help to illuminate others.

I mean this is really, I think

the essence of what makes us human.

This kind of integrity and good character is what

I hope will be passed on to our young generations.

MUSIC

It seems to be so easy to brainwash young people.

To tell them they re doing something

great in the Islamic State .

And to persuade them that they are fighting for Islam.

And they are fighting against Islam.

They are the worst enemies of Islam in our days.

For me the Islamic State has as much to do

with Islam as rape has to do with love.

Nothing.