Original subtitles

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NARRATOR: When a society collapses into anarchy and violence,

civilians inevitably take matters into their own hands.

They form armed militias.

They put up checkpoints and roadblocks.

They kill or expel anyone in the area who might threaten

their grip on power.

Hussein, bring the rocket.

NARRATOR: In that kind of environment,

radical ideologies are almost guaranteed to take hold.

Radicalism depends on desperation.

It depends on grievance.

And it then provides its own harsh answers to the

corruption and the violence that afflict much of the world.

.

Fakhoury! Fakhoury died.

NARRATOR: People will always turn to radicalism once they

have exhausted every other option.

.

NARRATOR: They have to.

Their very survival is at stake.

.

I'm one of the freedom boys in Daraa.

We watched the protests and calls for freedom in Egypt and Tunisia.

So we wrote this by ourselves. Nobody told us to write this.

We wrote this: "Your turn next, doctor ."

The next day, in the morning, the security forces were in school.

Some kids told them who wrote the graffiti.

They said,"Who told you to write this?" And then they took all my friends.

The next day, they came at 4 a.m. and took me from home, in front of my family.

"We are coming. Down with the regime."

I was 15 years old, I was young.

They took me and tortured me. There were many methods of torture.

They used electric rods and hung us up on the wall.

We were just kids and they detained and tortured us.

Imagine what they do to adults.

When we heard the kids were being tortured...

...we decided to go to the head of security, to solve this problem.

Atef Najib received us with insults and humiliation.

PROTESTORS: Down with Atef Najib!

Down with Atef Najib!

At first it wasn't a revolutionary movement.

They weren't calling for the fall of the regime or the

execution of the president.

Get our children out of prison!

It was very simple.

"We want our children to be released."

They were calling for dignity,

which is important in a country where people were used

to being humiliated and pushed around.

.

It's really remarkable the degree to which corruption

has played an important role in driving a variety of

security crises that had been breaking out in the last

five to ten years.

Every single one of the Arab Spring revolutions was

explicitly an anti-corruption revolution.

These were countries run by extremely sophisticated and

successful criminal organizations.

The people who are paid to uphold the law are the

very ones violating it.

It's humiliating.

Tunisia catches fire.

Libya catches fire.

Egypt catches fire.

Bashar al-Assad looks at that and says,

"I'll be damned."

So he was willing to respond to peaceful demonstrations

with maximal use of force.

.

.

.

Get a car!

Get a car!

The bet that he made was "There's, at this point,

no compromising with this movement so if

I wanna stay in power, I have to absolutely take it to the limit."

.

Very quickly we got into this cycle of protests

that were met by gunfire which led to funerals the next day.

.

The funerals became bigger protests.

The demands, then, began to get bigger.

Social justice and freedom, an end to corruption.

The regime responded again with more and more violence.

ZAIDOUN : I participated in demonstrations and I was

detained twice afterwards.

In that jail, I witnessed at least the death of 80 people

who died just because of the conditions.

There was no oxygen, there was no medicine.

There was no space for you.

You can't sleep. There's no sleep.

Wardens did not have to beat us.

We used to do it to each other.

You know, just like a couple of rats put in a

small, small, small space, and we were,

we were just biting each other.

It is a factory of terrorism.

You would go inside as an ordinary person and leave as a terrorist.

The people demand the downfall of the regime.

I was almost 16, 17 when the revolution started.

I wanted to do something.

I mean, I wanted to participate in demonstrations.

I wanted these things to stop.

.

That night, I tried to prevent them.

I told them you are young and we don't know yet how will the

regime behave against you.

I was afraid they will shoot.

They will shoot.

.

I tried, but they insisted so I told them

"Okay, I will be in front of you.

I will be the first, but you have to follow my instructions."

.

They're attacking.

.

If God gave me 1,000 years to live,

I will never forget that sound.

.

When you see such sufferings,

there is no childhood.

So many of my friends were killed.

And this is the hardest thing, hardest thing, you know.

Before, we wanted many things,

we wanted to change, but now we just want peace,

you know, for, stop killing children, I mean.

Stop killing innocent people.

Mr. President, Human Rights Watch,

for example, 30th of January this year,

has said that forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad

"Have deliberately and viciously attacked civilians in

opposition-held areas using indiscriminate weapons."

No, there's no indiscriminate weapons.

When you, when you shoot, you aim,

and when you shoot, when you aim you aim at terrorists in

order to protect civilians.

Again, if you're talking about casualty, that's war.

You cannot have war without casualty.

.

.

The regime wanted a war.

This sounds strange.

Why on earth would any regime,

or government, or state provoke a war against itself?

May God curse you Bashar!

You're a dog and scum!

.

The regime knew very well that it couldn't survive

a genuine reform process.

If there was a real reform process,

one thing would lead to another.

There would, there would be more and more transparency,

more and more crimes would be exposed,

and in the end, at best, the president and his top officers

would have ended up in prison stripped of their stolen wealth.

They thought that in a military conflict, in a war,

they could win because they had done it before.

Under Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar in 1982,

they used artillery, they used aerial bombardment,

they probably used chemical weapons,

and they killed somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 people,

and the memory of that terror kept the Syrian people

silent until 2011.

.

I owned a shop.

And I owned a car.

I was living well.

I was happy.

But Bashar al-Assad did not let anyone enjoy Syria.

As soon as people rose up and said, "Down with Assad"...

He started his airstrikes and fought everyone.

"It's me or I wipe out the country."

From the first day of the revolution, they wrote on the walls...

"It's Assad or we burn up the country."

This is the dining room.

We're having dinner now, thanks to God.

.

As you see, this is our food supply.

This is breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Damn you, Bashar al-Assad.

Do you like Bashar al-Assad?

Nah.

Why?

Because he is bombing us.

-Because he is bombing us? -Yeah.

Because he's a dog!

You don't like him either?

No.

.

Daddy, is the plane bombing?

Yes, it's bombing.

Mom.

Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid, sweetie.

.

Dad, I want to sleep next to you.

Don't be afraid, don't be afraid.

Come here!

My eldest son is now seven years old.

He didn't go to nursery school.

He never opened a book or learned the alphabet.

He never saw a school.

He's heard that there are schools.

And that there are books.

But he hasn't seen them.

Daddy, daddy.

Yes, my love.

.

Honestly, I'm about to explode.

I can't express what's happening inside of me.

I have to smile against my will so the kids don't get scared.

.

I'm announcing that I'm defecting with some factions from Bashar's brute army.

I was an officer in the Syrian Arab army.

.... with the rank of colonel.

We had no choice.

We either kill our family and our people...

...or split from the regime's army and join the blessed revolution.

REPORTER : Pictures have emerged today apparently

showing members of the Syrian army defecting to

join protesters in the City of Homs.

ROBIN : You have a growing number of local volunteers and

a growing number of military defectors who were joining

together to form into hundreds of self-defense militias which

eventually all came together under the umbrella titled,

"The Free Syrian Army."

May the peace, mercy and blessings of Allah be with you.

We are announcing the formation of the Free Syrian Army ...

...to cooperate together with the people to attain freedom and dignity...

...to remove the regime, and protect the Syrian revolution.

AHMED : These groups the FSA had in Aleppo at that time

were really helpful.

Once in Salaheddin, I was demonstrating in there.

.

.

People start just falling on the ground that,

from shooting from the regime.

They closed the road on us.

.

We're unable to reach the victims!

.

And then, like out of nothing,

like angels, somebody shoot the thugs and they fell and

they were able to escape.

We're al-Farouk troop from the Free Syrian Army.

We came on the date November 5th, 2011...

...to protect the peaceful protesters and peaceful civilians, in Baba Omar city.

.

The FSA rose spontaneously ...

to defend demonstrations and defenseless people.

So it has no ideology except to topple Bashar al-Assad's regime.

So people can regain their freedom and their dignity.

To have democratic government and a secular country.

And for justice to prevail in the country.

-Takbir! -Allahu Akbar!

The propaganda of the regime was

"We are not confronted with a local revolution of people who demand rights.

No, we are confronted with a foreign-funded jihadi movement."

Actually, a lot of the jihadists were released by

the Syrian Regime in the very early stage of the conflict.

There was an amnesty which allowed a lot of people with

very nasty records to be freed from custody in Syria.

It was a strategy of survival.

The regime thought enough people in the outside

world would be scared away from the revolution by the

size of these bearded, working-class men with Kalashnikovs

and they were right.

And America, in 2011, 2012, they were saying,

"We can't allow weapons to go into Syria.

We can't send the democrats, the nationalists of the Free Army weapons,

because some of those weapons might get into

the hands of Islamist extremists."

In the absence of a major international effort to

build a army to oppose the Assad regime,

a lot of private individuals in the Gulf began to fund

armed groups on the ground inside of Syria.

FSA was a fantastic media labeled term,

but there was no central authority,

no one could command anyone,

no one could have a one unity on a frontline.

I would go to a village, it has five, six militias.

I would come few months later,

they have multiplied into 50, 60 because forming a militia

became a way of getting money.

The amount of money, the amount of ammunition,

the amount of weapons pumped into that conflict totally

destroyed the revolution and turned it into the dynamics of Civil War.

Tawhid front in Aleppo has been founded.

To unite all troops, and its military work under Tawhid front.

Praise be to God.

We announce, as a group of defected officers and soldiers...

...as revolutionaries...

...the formation of the Gond Al-Harmayn front.

We will brutally defeat...

...whoever violates innocent civilians...

...regardless of their background or religion.

.

Early in the war, ISIS wasn't present.

There was a very diverse landscape.

So a lot of the Bosnians, and the Tunisians,

and the Libyans, the more extreme kind of elements of

those groups came under "El Muhadrim."

El Muhadrim means the immigrants,

the foreign fighters.

These groups fought alongside each other around Aleppo.

There were huge numbers of dead victims in one of the demonstrations.

So we decided to enter the city of Aleppo...

...and liberate it to protect these demonstrations...

...and to protect the people from the attacks of this regime.

Fighters came 3:00 in the morning,

sneaked inside Aleppo.

Nobody knew they were coming.

There were just, like, in every corner,

you could see one fighter.

.

And then in the morning, two tanks started shooting this neighborhood.

.

The FSA started shooting it.

They had only this RPG and it was not enough for that tank.

The second day, three tanks came.

.

They destroyed the first one and then they destroyed the last one.

So the one in the middle, just, like,

surrendered himself.

Allahu akbar!

The FSA takes over a tank and drives it in the heart of Aleppo City!

Allahu akbar!

Allahu akbar!

In the same day, when all this happened,

most of the people left Aleppo and they went to the countryside.

.

I left my house in Aleppo with my children, with our clothes, not alone.

I was one of the lucky ones for leaving with my kids.

Some people lost their children while leaving.

I still remember the situation.

I'm thinking of a word to describe it.

It's something indescribable.

A plane can come at any time and you might die.

And then they bury you and that's it. You're gone.

Do you fear death?

No, we aren't afraid of dying. We're afraid for the kids.

When they see their mother afraid...

...they get scared like her.

It's a normal occurrence now.

It's a gloomy situation.

When the plane approaches, we raise the TV volume...

...or one of us gets louder, so that no one gets scared.

.

.

Hanano military base was the biggest military base

for Assad Regime in Aleppo City.

So when the FSA took half of the city,

they decided to attack this military base.

.

.

.

We're coming to your palace next, Bashar.

And we'll step on your head.

Wait for us.

In this military base, there were thousands of weapons,

warehouses full of weapons.

So many groups, people I know, friends,

were going to Hanano military base and they were

just taking weapons.

In less than one week, we liberated around 70% of Aleppo City.

And with very basic, light weapons and very small resources.

.

Then the bombardments started.

Day and night nonstop.

.

Come on. Let's go.

.

We are heading toward the area of the bombing.

Move toward the western neighborhood and check if there are bombs around you.

The suffering in this city doesn't stop.

The Civil Defense are young volunteers.

It was a really primitive idea.

Just to help people who were bombed...

...while they went to get bread for their families.

If they are alive, we rescue them.

If they are dead, we return them to their family.

Where are my kids?

Where are my kids?

Where are my kids?

My kids were in the building!

Hey guys! A second airplane!

.

.

Lift her up.

Lift her up.

.

.

NARRATOR: One of the problems with letting a Civil War

go on too long is that more and more people get involved.

.

It's a little bit like a bar fight where all of a sudden,

everyone's jumped in and is throwing chairs at each other.

Syria became a Civil War in response to the violence of

the government.

Eventually, Iran got involved through Hezbollah to support

the Assad regime.

The Kurds got involved.

Turkey got involved.

The Arab Gulf States got involved.

Eventually, all the world powers and all the regional

powers had some investment in the War in Syria and in many

cases were actively involved in the fighting.

.

Once you get in a proxy fight,

so many people have such huge interests in the outcome that

it's almost impossible to stop.

.

Obviously, this is a very tough issue.

I have indicated repeatedly that President Al-Assad has

lost legitimacy, that he needs to step down.

So far, he hasn't gotten the message and instead

has doubled down in violence on his own people.

I have, at this point,

not ordered military engagement in the situation,

but we have been very clear that a red line

for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical

weapons moving around or being utilized.

That would change my calculus.

That would change...

When he said that, a lot of Syrian revolutionaries

were very upset because it seems to be saying that,

"Look, you can use scud missiles,

you can shoot them down in the street,

.

you can use warplanes.

Anything is fine except chemical weapons."

Let me tell you one thing.

When you kill people with barrel bombs or chemicals, what is the difference?

You are killing people.

Why do you think about chemicals when you don't think about barrel bombs?

Thousands and thousands of barrel bombs every day.

Just only today 40 barrel bombs. Where's Obama?

ROBIN : Then, of course, he did use chemical weapons.

We're in one of the eastern parts of Ghouta.

They're all civilians, they're all civilians, they're all kids.

There's a woman who died with her husband and kids.

They died because of the regime's chemical attack.

Because of chemical gas, and particularly Sarin gas.

They're all unknown. They're marked with a number on their forehead.

This woman is looking for her dead child.

Over here.

She found her. Lord have mercy.

He killed 1,450 people in five hours,

in the suburbs of Damascus.

Men, women, and children, choking to death.

President of the United States called

Lindsey Graham and me over to the Oval Office.

Looked us in the eye and said,

"They've crossed the line. I'm gonna attack.

I'm gonna degrade Bashar al-Assad,

I'm gonna upgrade the capabilities of the Free Syrian Army

and I'm gonna reverse the momentum on the battlefield."

We emphasized to...

We walked out and there was the usual cameras and said,

"We're with the President all the way."

Obama... he had a problem.

Am I 100% sure that it was the regime?

If not, I won't take the risk.

And secondly, if I do take the risk...

...to intervene...

...where, how, and to whose benefit?

We, the French...

...the British...

...and the Americans...

...we started preparing, this was in August 2013...

...a big reaction against Bashar...

But at the last moment, when everything was ready...

...a few hours before the intervention, President Obama told us...

...that in the end he'd thought it through...

...and didn't wish to follow through with the operation against Bashar.

I'm sitting in my office and there on CNN,

the President has decided not to...

My fellow Americans.

Tonight I wanna talk to you about Syria.

That wasn't just disillusioning to me and Lindsey Graham.

The Saudis had planes on the runway when they

found out watching CNN.

Because we cannot resolve someone else's

Civil War through force.

The red line disappeared.

There were thousands of defections in that week.

Thousands of soldiers and, and officers who'd be loyal to

the regime, hadn't dared to jump,

they thought now it's going to change because the Americans

are going to get involved and they defected in that week,

but nothing happened.

The moderate opposition...

...felt completely betrayed.

They said,"There is an opportunity to weaken Bashar and no one seizes it."

Quite a few fighters in Syria,

quite a few revolutionary fighters said,

"Look, we're never going to get help from the West.

This guy can do anything he wants.

He can kill us all with any weapons that he can find,

in any way he chooses and the West is never going to come to our aid."

.

.

Syria is just a small triangle that is hardly

visible on the world map.

You will see that this triangle is just like the

heart of the world and if this crisis is not solved,

believe me, everyone in the world will suffer.

In 2011, The Syrian Civil War begins to take root.

At the same time, the American military finishes its

withdrawal from Iraq.

So, the Islamic state has more freedom of action in Iraq

and they begin to look to Syria as a place to give

themselves some strategic depth.

In Syria, it looks like ISIS is a creation of

Bashar al-Assad.

It's a creation of his scorched earth policy.

Assad had in effect an undeclared non-aggression pact with ISIS.

And even today, when ISIS and the Free Army are fighting each other,

Assad will come and bomb the Free Army.

Originally, the Islamic State was related to al-Qaeda.

When they split from al-Qaeda, it wasn't because of different doctrines.

They split from al-Qaeda because of political legitimacy...

...and just how to deal with the frontlines.

So, they are two sides of the same coin.

It's a cancer that exists.

The Islamic World knows it exists.

The rest of the world now sees it,

feels it, is bleeding because of it.

Is terrorized because of it.

It's not 30,000 guys in Syria.

The Islamic State is a global problem.

In its beginning it's an Iraqi organization,

but what they had for Syria was a blueprint,

a very detailed plan, step A, B, C, D,

how to colonize a foreign country.

The first phase was training camps where they form a hybrid

army from the incoming people from Tunisia,

Egypt, Daghestan, Germany who didn't even have one common language.

Praise Allah who provided us with these acts of worship- immigration and jihad.

These brothers immigrated recently and they're now in the training camp.

It's an absolutely loyal army with no local affiliations.

And then, locally to know who is who in the respective villages,

they started to open Da'wah offices, missionary offices.

And they did so in many, many places.

In Tal Rifaat, in Mar'a, in al-Dana, in Mayadin,

in Deir ez-Zor, in Manbij.

And so, slowly, slowly, slowly,

they knew exactly what is the composition of this community.

Whom we could buy, whom we have to kill?

First, they did this secretly.

Then, only, once they felt powerful enough,

they would, with lightning stroke,

take over a particular village.

.

.

.

.

Daesh came in with such a force, it was scary.

Religious practice started immediately.

I mean, prayer, torture, imposition of Sharia law.

God blessed us with this victory...

...taking over the city of Manbij....

...from the Free Syrian Army.

May God damn all of them.

May God bless us with the opportunity to behead them.

Today, we went to Manbij and saw the heads of two men hung in the square.

-Today? -Yes.

Oh my God.

Were they old?

They were young. 18 or 20 years old.

And there was a man in a cage. He was howling like a dog.

Why?

They say nobody is put in the cage except for dogs.

What did he do? Was he smoking or what?

He was smoking and they beat him.

All the Syrians will have their turns. We'll all be put in the cages and will howl.

ISIS MILITANT: We advise everyone... We advise everyone...

...to fear and respect God.

Be careful with your tongue.

You might say a word that would bring you into hell for 70 years.

Don't listen to them!

I swear to God I didn't do it.

Oh God!

I swear to God I didn't do it!

God is great!

So the beheadings were the horror that silenced people.

Because if you protested, you'd be hung up for three or four days.

They gather everyone and force them to watch it.

So they witness the beheadings...

...and the victims hang for three days in a public square in high traffic areas.

So everyone gets terrified.

If you do anything, this is what happens to you.

For me, Christian, Armenian, Jewish... no problem.

They do their thing, and I do mine.

This is our religion.

You can't just call someone an infidel and behead them.

I teach my children that our religion is one of forgiveness.

I mean, I don't want my son to be strict.

It became scary. Imagine you're at a mosque...

...if an ISIS member entered, everyone gets scared.

If you argue or anything, you might get beheaded.

What they're doing is saying this system is so rotten,

it's so thoroughly rotten that the only way

to improve it is by fire and blood.

.

The public display of horrific violence against

individuals is something which goes way back in history and

every culture has done it at some time or,

or the other.

In Britain, they used to hang, draw, and quarter.

In China, they were dragged into the street and beaten to death.

In France, women who had slept with German soldiers,

had their hair cut off and were beaten in the streets,

stripped naked and paraded.

In the United States, people would take their wives and

their children along to the lynching of the black man and

then they'd stand there and smile and have their

photograph taken next to his corpse.

This display of public violence was seen as a

necessary part of government in order to send the message

out into society.

"We can do anything we like with you.

Don't resist us because we have total power to do the

most horrific things and there's nothing you can do about it."

NARRATOR: All societies are blind to their own violence.

From the use of napalm in Vietnam,

to the bombing of German cities,

to the use of nuclear weapons in Japan,

The United States has killed far more civilians than

ISIS ever could.

In World War II alone, Allied forces are thought to have

killed around one million civilians.

We're focused on the wrongdoing of other groups.

It's an adaptive trait that's probably hardwired into the

brain because it has survival value.

Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists.

NARRATOR: It allows us to demonize the enemy who we may

have to fight and to avoid the moral conflict that comes with killing.

.

When the United States invaded Iraq,

they killed tens of thousands of innocent people.

You can't do that and imagine there won't be consequences.

By early 2003, the majority of Iraqis were happy

to see the back of Saddam Hussein.

.

There is excitement, there is hope,

there is a degree of anxiety.

I remember two days after the fall of Baghdad,

people were talking about, "Why are the Americans aggressive?"

"Why are they pointing their guns at the people in the street?"

Saddam had committed massacres within the society,

enormous levels of violence, but you couldn't see it.

Within the American occupation,

violence is televised.

Pictures of the Americans putting bags on the head of

people and sitting them behind barbed wire,

forcing people to be naked, humiliating people.

The loss of their credibility was enormous,

they could have paved the Iraqi roads in gold and still

they can do the humiliation of Abu Ghraib.

There was a burning American armored vehicle in Haifa street in Baghdad.

As I'm walking I hear, see two small helicopters.

They fire a rocket into the crowd that was celebrating

around the burning vehicle.

.

I run towards the scene and I see this circle with a young boy

stunned, missing leg, a pool of blood and some liquids.

Other people scattered in the middle.

They're not screaming, they're not wailing,

the injured people are silent, the silence of shock.

The helicopters come again, they fire another rocket

into the crowd.

I'm trying to be as thin as the curb, you know,

and then you realize there is people left in

the middle of the road.

There's this guy who was injured in the first attack

and then was hit again.

He raises himself, he looks around,

he falls, stretches his arm,

and still waits.

No one can help him, no one can do anything.

The helicopters were gone, but everyone was mortified with fear.

Violence by the end of 2003, early 2004,

is a normal fact of society.

When you see body parts in the street,

when you see pieces of flesh hanging from a tree,

when you see children killed because they were playing in

the middle of the road, I don't think there is

difference in horror between seeing children just being hit

by an American rocket with their limbs scattered,

with their, with their legs oozing these fluids in the

middle of the street of Baghdad and seeing someone,

you know, executed by ISIS.

You don't equate the two parties,

but from the perspective of someone who lost his leg or lost his father,

there is no good violence and bad violence.

It is very important for people to understand just

how much what is happening in Syria today is related to what

happened in Iraq over a decade ago.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a Sunni ruled country with

both the Kurdish and the Shia majority that suffered very

significantly at the hands of that Sunni dominance.

Whether you agree or not with the military intervention,

the main failures were not the military intervention.

It's the de-ba'athification of the country which

completely marginalized the Sunni population.

I am today establishing an Iraqi De-Ba'athification Council.

I was an occupation commander with all of the

responsibilities that went along with that,

which essentially meant running part of Iraq,

firing the Ba'ath party, casting them on the ash heap of history,

created tens of thousands of Iraqis,

including the most educated and,

and influential in various Sunni-Arab communities

especially, whose incentive now was to oppose the new Iraq

rather than to support it.

Huge mistake.

It didn't make sense to do this kind of wide-scaled

de-ba'athification when within Iraq itself,

if you wanted to be a teacher, you wanna get a job,

you had to join the Ba'ath Party.

So, you know, you, it's, it's a little bit like the de-nazi-fication.

You, not everyone was, you know,

part of shaping a repressive regime that suppressed

everybody else.

When the Sunni Arabs found out...

...that the moderates among them were being targeted...

What are their chances in life?

Their only choice is to turn to extremism and violence. And that's what happened.

The Sunnis were oppressed by the Americans,

by the Shi'a government of Iraq.

ISIS comes and promises liberation,

promises the end of that, promises bringing back the

Sunni's pride that they've lost from 2003 and bringing

them back into control.

Some ISIS leaders had been in Saddam's army. They were in the Baath Party.

Most of the people from the Baath Party ended up fighting with the Islamic State.

If you called something Ba'athi nobody would follow,

but once they discovered,

"Hey, if you, if we say that we fight in the name of Islam,

in the name of Jihad against the foreign occupiers,

we have something that resonates."

If you want security, then fear Allah.

If you want sustenance, then fear Allah.

If you want a noble life, then fear Allah.

And perform jihad to seek God's path.

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.

Their propaganda owes a lot to Hollywood action films

and to computer games that kids grow up on these days.

ISIS knows that if they make a high production video shot

from various angles, if they get a white guy,

put him in a Guantanamo style orange jumpsuit,

they get a child or an English speaker to cut his head off

with a knife, they know that that night,

maybe the film will not be shown on mainstream TV,

but they know that the story of the film will be headline

news everywhere in the world.

There is breaking news tonight of a chilling new

ISIS propaganda video.

REPORTER : The men believed to be Syrian were shackled and

dressed in jumpsuits.

REPORTER : The video shows the Egyptian prisoners being marched

onto a beach by militants dressed in black

then the prisoners are beheaded brutally.

Nobody will be talking about Assad on the same day he

may have incinerated 100 people in barrel bombs,

but we don't see those people dying.

We've, nobody has made a high-production video of it

and followed it up with a threat to the West.

.

It's very effective at striking fear into the hearts

of their enemies because the prospect of being captured by

these people is too horrific to contemplate.

Melody was the identity of the Facebook account I created...

...to follow the escalating jihadist propaganda.

I had about a hundred virtual friends on that Facebook account.

And so, if I become Melody again... I was observing a lot, but not interacting.

I can't see you that well.

I can hear you well but I see you so so.

Until the moment when a high-ranking Daesh soldier...

...started talking to me one night on Facebook.

In a very simple way... like any two teens would meet on Facebook.

This was someone who had cut his teeth during the first US invasion of Iraq.

And before that, he had been fighting jihad in Afghanistan.

So I knew that I was dealing with someone fervent...

...who, after a long time with al-Qaeda...

...had decided to join ISIS.

Look at me. Here, Allah makes it easy for me every day.

Apartments... I have plenty of apartments whenever I want.

I have cars whenever I want.

If I want money, I can get it whenever I want. You get it?

It's not a struggle anymore.

The way they use social media sites like

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and messenger services is so

incredibly sophisticated.

They have a type of member that only engage in online Jihad.

This is the place where they spread the ideology,

where they recruit.

You know, 6900 Westerns have gone to join.

So, you know, it's not an insignificant number.

Some of these kids who are joining, you know,

they're leading pretty humdrum lives in

Belgium, France, London, United States,

and they're joining ISIS and

they're part of something bigger than themselves and it's exciting.

If you're the type of girl that leaves, as we've unfortunately witnessed a lot...

...because she thinks she will marry a hero...

...a warrior, someone that's strong...

...a figure that never shows fear.

They simply tell that girl that she will get married to a super jihadist.

I assure you that if I was really Melody, if I was really a 20 year old girl...

...if I was really living a chaotic or unstable type of life...

I would have left for Syria like that.

In 15 days.

I was not familiar with how the Islamic State

thinks about Islam .

It's not the real Islam.

They tell them ...

"You're joining to help Muslims..."

"... to serve Islam..."

"... because God is asking you to..."

It's pure brainwashing.

They do it to anyone who wants to come here.

And unfortunately, with some of them, it really works.

Can I ask you a question?

Go ahead, I'm listening.

Do you know how many infidels you've killed?

Sincerely, I've done some damage.

The men who run the Islamic State are rough men.

For all of its pretense to be a religious organization,

uh, and all its quotation of scripture,

when you look at how they behave as an organization,

um, in many ways, uh, it resembles, uh,

the rough and tumble politics of a criminal organization.

They put hits out on people, they extort people,

raising millions of dollars a year by these activities.

Daesh interfered in every aspect of life...

...in all the areas that it overtook.

I have olive trees.

There are individual taxes.

I am not allowed to pick my own olives unless I get proof of payment...

...from the Islamic State.

They went into an area and the first thing they

would do is the flour mill, the bakery,

the concrete factory has to be taken without damage immediately.

They thought about, "What do we need to maintain the

infrastructure of this area?"

If you're a car dealer, they enforce taxes on car dealers.

Or if you own a building, they calculate your income and take taxes out of it.

If it's worth 3 or 4 million lire, the Islamic State will get a percentage.

They don't leave anything alone without making a profit from it.

For example, for the,

from a policeman and soldiers on the Iraqi side,

they told him, "You're an infidel."

Theoretically, you have to die,

but you can buy a "forgiveness card."

The forgiveness card and the money you have paid for it shows

that you are repenting and every checkpoint will know if

you show them the forgiveness card that you have been forgiven.

So everybody bought for $400 a forgiveness card.

A few months later, the decree came out and,

"Oh, the forgiveness cards have expired."

You can buy a new one, but it costs a bit more.

So everything, everything is costly.

The vast majority of the Syrian people see,

um, ISIS as a foreign occupation force.

In January 2014, the Free Army,

the Islamic Front Militias, and Al-Qaeda,

all of them declared war on ISIS.

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This is Al-Rai city which is now liberated from the dirt of ISIS. God is great.

All of our fighting teams fought in the battle.

.

They kicked ISIS out of the whole of Western Syria

out of Latakia, Idlib, out of Aleppo,

but then in Iraq, because the Iraqi state had become

so dysfunctional because the Sunni Arabs in Iraq had become

so alienated, they welcomed these people back in,

or some of them did.

They started their blitzkrieg in Iraq,

taking over Mosul, Tikrit, Shirgat, Hawija.

And they managed to overrun the weapon depots of about

four Iraqi army divisions.

They were drowning in weapons,

they couldn't even take all the weapons with them and

burned some of them.

But now, they were a full-fledged army with

Humvees, with strikers, with tanks.

They captured all the money in the banks in the

North of Iraq and they used this money and the weapons to

surge back into Syria.

And they took large parts of the country.

It was the peak of their power.

And they used this moment to declare the Caliphate.

This is our caliphate in all its glory, remaining and expanding.

It was established in June 2014.

Its leader, from the tribe of Horesh, is Sheikh Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Its territory is already greater than Britain's...

It's eight times the size of Belgium...

...and 30 times the size of Qatar.

We are men honored with Islam, who climbed its peaks to perform jihad...

...answering the call to unite under one flag.

NARRATOR: Only a few centuries after the birth of Christ,

the Muslim world started expanding.

They were at the forefront of the arts,

of the sciences, of astronomy.

They really were the center of knowledge in the world.

.

NARRATOR: There's a real yearning to return to those

days of glory, understandably.

They have been enduring enormous oppression by

dictators that are often propped up by the West and

completely dominated by Western technology and Western culture.

Part of what ISIS is doing is trying to regain the former

glory of the caliphate and of the worldwide dominance that

Muslim society enjoyed many, many centuries ago.

Reports from Iraq today say the ISIS army and other

Sunni Muslim forces captured another major target.

It is the oil refinery in Baiji that produces one-third of Iraq fuel...

Isis militants have seized a major oil field in Syria.

Uh, the field produces 75,000 barrels of oil a day.

It's the latest...

.

From the early days of the conflict,

gaining territory control over areas that have energy

infrastructure were of primary focus because they give revenue,

but they also give semblance of a state to be

able to provide natural resources,

electricity, fuel, cooking oil.

All those things is what a government does.

They had people that were able to handle the expertise part.

There are enough Syrians in the local areas that have been

working on these oil fields for decades.

And while they controlled a relatively smaller portion of

the overall Syrian territory, they controlled an

overwhelming percentage of the oil and gas infrastructure and fields.

Based on our research,

we came up with a number of 45,000 barrels a day.

You are looking at a ceiling of roughly $2 million a day

income for Daesh.

Who are the buyers?

How do thousands of barrels of oil cross borders?

How do they get bought and sold?

And there's a currency exchange...

..so there must be some international and intelligence collusion.

There were columns of trucks that were leaving.

Those trucks had to be going somewhere!

Well, it's very controversial.

Some say they were heading to Turkey.

The Turks dispute that.

Some were even saying that it was a pipeline!

It wasn't a simple convoy of trucks.

But an oil pipeline.

Daesh is a different beast.

Daesh has a whole portfolio of financial resources and of course,

the smuggling of crude oil is just a part of this portfolio.

This portfolio also include weapons trafficking,

uh, human trafficking, smuggling,

and of course, antiquities.

Looting of antiquities in the region,

not just in Syria, in the region as a whole,

is a time-honored tradition.

In times of hardship, what do people do?

They find alternative sources of income.

And so now, they just start to loot at will.

.

BUYER: 55 thousand dollars for both?

For two.

No one else from Europe has seen them.

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The Islamic State institutionalized the process of looting.

They made it part of the state.

Anyone who wants to excavate must go to the office of antiquities...

...and request a permit for excavation.

If they find anything, they have to pay 20% to the Islamic State.

As the looting process became more and more sophisticated,

they would issue permits to allow people

to bring in heavy machinery.

They established auctions in which to sell these looted items.

History be damned, get me more material,

more cuneiform tablets, more cylinder seals.

More anything.

More is just more.

More means more money.

From Syria alone, ISIS was making tens of millions of dollars.

While tens of millions of dollars may not mean much to you,

how much does an IED cost?

How much is a 7.62 mm bullets?

How much do 50 of those bullets go for?

How much does an AK-47 cost?

How much is an RPG?

How many RPGs can you buy with $1 million?

ISIS sees cultural heritage as an exploitable resource.

And so for them, they will loot what they can sell,

but one of the primary uses has been propaganda.

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Once you destroy the cultural heritage of a people,

you are in fact attacking and destroying their cultural identity.

Once you destroy their cultural identity,

it's but a short step to destroy and eradicate

the people themselves.

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They lined up the people.

"Those of you who are Yazidis to this side..."

"...and those who are not on this side."

Those who said "Yazidi" were all killed.

All men. They were all murdered.

And they took the women with them.

It was a tragic scene.

The idea of killing people in such a manner...

...that only Jews suffered by the hands of Nazis in the past.

As a result, 5000 people were martyred or are missing.

And 5,877 girls, sisters and kids were kidnapped.

REPORTER : Tens of thousands of people from the

Yazidi religious minority fled to this mountain ridge to escape

ISIS militants who recently captured the nearby town of Sinjar.

Please, Mr. Speaker, my people are being slaughtered

just like all Iraqis were slaughtered.

The Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Turkmens, and Shabak were slaughtered.

And today, the Yazidis are being slaughtered.

For 48 hours, 30,000 families have been besieged on Sinjar Mountain.

Without water. Without food. They are dying.

The Kurdish regional government made it a

huge international outcry that we have tens of thousands of

Yazidis thirsty and starved to death on this mountain.

It was like you are touched, the biblical maze of Masada.

People on the mountain, 50 degrees, in hot summer

without water, and all the jihadists sitting

around the mountains waiting to kill everybody.

You had old conflicts, old hatreds between the Yazidis

from Sinjar and the Sunni's ultra-loyalists to Saddam.

They were keen to make clear that this area will never be

inhabited by Yazidis again.

.

NARRATOR: One of their slogans is

"We the jihadists, we love death more than you in the West love life."

A lot of people think that that means that they're psychotic.

Only crazy people would act like that.

But there is no way to fight people who frame their

struggle in those terms without also taking into

account some kind of social and historical justice.

Music is illicit for them, but nasheeds are allowed

since they don't use instruments.

The nasheeds are religious songs that in most cases are incitement to murder.

And they listen to them from morning to night.

People that come back talk about how nasheeds galvanized them.

And I think that they contribute to it.

It's just like the French national anthem helped galvanize troops...

...at that time in France.

I imagine it was the same type of idealism during the French Revolution.

They leave convinced that they're participating in an historic moment.

Now, we'll spread weapons to everyone who wants to join the fighting.

-The Islamic State! -Will remain!

-The Islamic State! -Will remain!

Do you the people of Islam vow to God to sacrifice your life?

God is great!

.

The decision was taken three days ago.

Jihad became mandatory for all 18 to 40 year olds.

Let's leave.

I went to the smuggler ten times.

Everyday he's not available or that road is closed.

If you want to die, take this road.

If you want to die, let's go.

Do you want to go die, sweetie?

-No. -No?

You are dying here too. Bashar al-Assad is barrel bombing us.

We are dying here and we'd die there.

Why do you want to leave?

Because all of my friends have already left.

Where did they go?

To Germany and Turkey.

I went to the smuggler with my kids and squatted at his place.

When he came and saw the kids, he got scared.

He said,"There's no way I can smuggle you!"

"You have little kids. If someone cries or if anyone talks at the border..."

"...they'll shoot you and arrest me right away."

I told him,"I'm not leaving until you smuggle me out.

When we arrived at the border, I was terrified.

My wife started shaking.

I started reciting verses from the Quran. I prayed.

It took about 15 minutes.

During those 15 minutes, I felt like I died 100,000 times.

Our objective is clear.

We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL through a

comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.

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ISIS had not anticipated this reaction

because when two months prior, they had overrun Mosul.

Obama's reaction was basically,

"Oh, we should do something about it."

But nothing happened.

Once the Americans started to attack the Islamic State,

ISIS needed to react somehow.

So it was a message for the U.S.

We are willing to lay down our blood on this soil.

So try, try to come.

I will kill every single soldier, bismillah.

We will chop off the heads of the Americans,

chop off the heads of the French,

chop off the heads of...

NARRATOR: Every war is a form of dialogue between the

warring parties and all actions are a form of communication.

.

When President Obama decided to bomb ISIS forces,

he was communicating to ISIS that we were not gonna

stand by and let anything happen.

And ISIS needed to be communicating to the West that

they could not be messed with.

Today, your military air force is

attacking us daily in Iraq.

So any attempts by you, Obama,

to deny the Muslims their rights of living in safety

under the Islamic caliphate will result in the bloodshed

of your people.

NARRATOR: As a result, ISIS cut off James Foley's head.

That didn't stop the bombing, so they kept cutting off heads

and we kept bombing.

I'm back, Obama, because of your arrogant

foreign policy towards the Islamic State.

You, Obama, have yet again, for your actions,

killed yet another American citizen.

We will stick to the very clear strategy that we have.

To help make sure the Kurds get the arms they need

to fight off, uh, these brutal, uh,

extremist militants.

This British man has to pay the price for your promise,

Cameron, to arm the Peshmerga against the Islamic State.

Your evil alliance with America will only

accelerate your destruction.

ISIS won't quit today.

They're keeping at it.

Since morning, they've been saying their Allah Akbars.

Do we know when operations begin?

Tomorrow.

You mean it's that close?

That's right. We begin tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we're going to start shelling the area in grids.

Our operation should last four days.

First, they shell each grid for us and then we attack on foot.

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Oh, ISIS, we hail from the town of Dhi Qar.

We have no fear of your suicide bombs, nor your bullets and guns.

Now true warriors have entered the fray and cowards are running away.

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In the name of the Prophet Mohammed, you are all victors.

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Wait!

You're all doing everything wrong.

Come back and spread out.

.

Cut that rope.

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This is the center of Jurf al-Sakhar.

.

Bravo for this victory!

PETER : The long-term prognosis of ISIS is not great

because they made a world of enemies.

That is not a winning strategy.

Napoleon was the greatest general of the modern era but

he fought everybody.

So everybody, then, coalesced to get rid of him.

ISIS is making the same mistake.

We're in the center of Jurf al-Sakhar right now.

The entire town is liberated.

And we're advancing further ahead.

PETER : They're already suffering the consequences.

They keep losing territory.

Basically the whole world is ganged up against them.

Russia has always been consistently fighting against terrorism in all its forms.

.

We noticed that the first series of Russian strikes...

It was mostly hitting...

...the moderate opposition and very little ISIS.

Putin didn't go into Syria to fight ISIS.

If that was the case, he would've fought ISIS.

80% of the bombing was on non-ISIS targets.

.

I see what looks like the future now and that is a

very influential Russia with a Bashar Assad that is able to

at least control the areas of Syria that are of most

importance to him.

The Assad regime and lately Russia, too,

have been bombing not just militia formations on the ground,

they've been bombing bakeries, schools, hospitals.

Because the people can't defend themselves from this

aerial bombardment, it's absolute hell on Earth.

Assad wants those in the middle to be eliminated so the

choice is either him or ISIS.

We didn't see any army, not the U.S. or others, stand up against Russia...

...or ask them to stop killing Muslim children.

We see that the ones being killed right now are kids, women and elders.

As they love their children, women, and mothers in their countries...

...so we also love our children, women, and mothers in Syria.

Double standards are a huge mistake.

You see daily, we, women fight against an enemy that does not respect women.

We refuse to let them kill our women and children.

We protect them and we save them.

And we restore law and order.

There is no difference between a man and a woman in Kurdish militia.

We are all comrades of each other. That's unique.

We fight together, work together, strive together.

We are together on one team.

We are seen as playing a major role and never less.

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Airstrikes will begin and then we'll lead the ground force.

There aren't that many left. We just need to finish them.

It's ISIS.

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I killed him.

Earlier today, I sniped them from there. The bullets buzzed over, as we hit them.

Yes. One died and two were injured.

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The airstrikes are killing about 1,000 ISIS members

every month, and rationing down the oil,

and getting rid of some of their money.

That is really going to impact them.

If you control several million people and you're

taxing them for pretty much everything they do.

That's all the money.

So every time they lose a big city which is several hundred thousand people,

that's several hundred thousand people they can't tax.

The morale of ISIS soldiers is certainly not good right now.

Because of their defeats and how they've been losing territory on the frontline.

They've had to retreat a lot.

It will probably continue like this.

I think the Islamic State will soon...

...weaken and weaken and weaken until it totally disappears.

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With our soul. With our blood. We sacrifice for you, Iraq!

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This it my brother?

-Ah, okay. -Let's park here in the middle.

Are you in the army?

Are you a soldier?

Wait up. I can't hear anything.

You're a soldier?

What did you say?

I was asking if you were a soldier.

-Huh? -You're a soldier? -Yes.

-You're from the Perignon barracks? -Yes.

That's good.

No, I'm not from Perignon. I'm close to Toulouse at Lougnon.

How many years have you been there?

Ten years.

-Ten years? -Yes.

Damn.

Lay down on your stomach.

Lay down on your stomach. I'm not kidding. Lay down on your stomach.

Lay down on your stomach. I'm not laying down on my stomach.

-Lay down on your stomach. -Go ahead. Shoot.

In the name of Allah.

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For the French jihadist community, it's the beginning of something.

I had talked to many French ISIS fighters...

At the time it was actually called ISIL.

As early as 2013, right when ISIS makes its presence in Syria official...

...they were all into a Mohammed Merah type of logic.

A terrorist logic.

Some youngsters have his picture up on the wall...

...like I had the poster of Jim Morrison above my bed when I was sixteen.

Well, they have Merah's.

He's the first one that dared to shoot people on the streets and claim it.

This new form of terrorism was introduced by

Al-Qaeda's ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri.

In his writings where he calls for a form of low cost terror,

many terror acts all over the place conducted

by the people that actually live there.

This is the conclusion that Abu Musab al-Suri draws.

The only jihad... the most efficient jihad...

...is what he calls "individual jihad."

Today, it's what we would call the lone wolf.

REPORTER : San Bernardino, California mass casualty situation.

A terror attack in the French City of Nice.

At least 80 people.

REPORTER : The 17-year-old used an axe and knife

to attack passengers.

A lone gunman called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS.

.

Oh my God.

If it is hard for you to immigrate to the Islamic State....

...God will reward you if you mimic...

...what our brother Mohammed Merah did.

Look for any method. Slaughter them with a knife.

Take their weapons. Go in their houses.

Slaughter them. Terrorize them.

God commanded us to attack his and our enemy.

This is what terrorists do.

They instill fear in societies.

If you instill fear in a society,

it comes at a big cost.

I mean, you see it in our political campaigns going on

today in the United States.

With some of the, you know, some of the comments that are

being made about various, parts of our society and what

to do about them.

You know, the whole issue of immigration is a big, big deal,

uh, and that's, that's playing out terribly in Europe.

This is Turkey. This is Turkey.

When we got out...

The joy! Indescribable.

Believe me, I was born again.

Thank God we escaped that evil territory and are entering the land of true Islam.

In Syria, you're afraid of the airplanes. You're afraid of ISIS fighters.

There are no playgrounds. No schools.

Just seeing the kids having psychological comfort makes me at ease.

They're just playing and I thought ISIS was coming.

The images of ISIS are still stuck in my head.

The summer of 2015, suddenly hundreds of thousands

of people came, Syrian refugees from Turkey.

There are a lot of extremely decent,

sophisticated, uh, people among the immigrants.

But you have also small time criminals and

infiltrators from ISIS.

A lot of people feel overwhelmed by what they

perceive as an invasion of Muslims threatening our way of life.

The Muslim people in Europe it's only around 5%

but in certain cities, for instance in Brussels,

one generation from now, the Muslim community will be the majority.

This has caused an enormous political backlash and

resurgence of right-wing movements.

The resources that are gonna be required to correct

some of these problems that we have,

refugees, displaced people around the world,

is, just the numbers are staggering.

We have to get back in there, stabilize that area to the

point where you can then tell all these people who would

rather live in their own homes,

you can tell them and they'll all come back.

Otherwise, the likelihood of a far greater conflict grows

higher and higher every day.

We came from Syria and we thought we were going directly...

...to the sea, and then to Greece and continue on our way.

I would like to go but I'm afraid of the sea.

I want to take them out of this situation.

...take them and secure their future there.

... not to kill them in the sea, I'm just scared of the sea.

Today marks ten days here looking for a smuggler.

And we keep spending money.

In a short time, we might not have enough money to go.

I don't know.

Let's hope God helps us find an honest smuggler.

That's a contradiction in terms - "honest" and"smuggler."

They're trafficking humans, how can they be honest?

I don't care, so long as he doesn't kill us at sea.

We should ask in these restaurants...

These guys are Syrian. Ask them if they know where the smugglers are.

May peace be upon you.

Look, I won't lie to you because my sister and brother are going with you.

Don't cheat us please.

Okay, listen brother. Four adults and two children ages eight and nine.

And six kids ranging from five years old to two months old.

The cars will pick you up at night and the boats will leave at dawn.

I'm not going to Greece.

I told you while we were still in Syria I won't go.

Right?

I didn't want any of this.

But you made me come here.

One big wave and that's it. My kids are gone.

Then, I'll end up with nothing.

All I have is my four children. I'm not going.

If we die at sea, we will die with our kids. We go together. No one left behind.

If we survive, we will live a good life.

NARRATOR: Any reasonable person would flee the

kind of fighting that we've seen in Syria.

They'd happily risk their lives to be smuggled

across the border.

They'd collect by the millions in neighboring

countries even living in squalid refugee camps.

Eventually, they'd make their way to the West to look for a

better life for their children.

People say "Look, it's not our problem."

Okay, it's not your problem but that doesn't mean you

won't be affected by it.

You can say that you don't actually care about human

suffering but the truth is that all violence and misery

eventually affect the entire world.

In that sense, there is no escaping the fact that we are

all part of the human race.

There is no escaping the fact that borders become irrelevant

once people start dying and societies begin to collapse.

How many hours to get there?

Hopefully an hour or less.

God protect the children please!

You see those mountains there? That's Greece.

.

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We're watching our memories.

It's our destiny to die.

So we will die with dignity.

We won't die while surrendering.

We will die standing.

I plan to remain here , despite the bombing.

I'll keep serving my country. No matter what happens, I am not leaving here.

This is my country.

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