The Islamic State’s Plan For 2015

What’s next for the Islamic State in 2015? Clandestine domination, and exploiting America’s huge regional blind spots. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant organization (Da’ish in Arabic) is poised to spread its Islamist insurrection beyond its war for a Caliphate in Iraq and Syria into neighboring Jordan. It’s a nation which hosts millions of potential Da’ish sympathizers and is uniquely vulnerable to the organization’s insurrection methods of nikayah (terrorism) due to its enormous and long-standing Sunni refugee population and its bordering proximity to Iraq and Syria.

Nikayah is the first phase of the Da’ish’s armed revolution, and it’s currently playing out in Gaza and Lebanon where the Da’ish has found sympathetic, underrepresented Muslim populations who have conducted political violence under the Islamic State’s banner. What does this mean for us, exactly? While American forces are fighting Da’ish in Syria and Iraq, (where the Islamic State is engaged in its two other two phases of war tawahhush (savage attacks) and tamkin (the creation of a sovereign state)), the U.S. is neglecting to address the organization’s clandestine nikayah operations in places like Gaza, Lebanon and soon, perhaps, Jordan. So even if the Da’ish’s military is defeated by the American collation on the conventional battle field in Iraq and Syria, contingencies of operatives with dual-citizenship and foreign experience will find refuge within the other vulnerable nations in region and grow native insurgencies.

How do we know that Jordan’s next? The Da’ish has published numerous videos and other propaganda products in 2014, which target Jordan for its next border-breaking operation.

How do we know that Jordan’s next? The Da’ish has published numerous videos and other propaganda products in 2014, which target Jordan for its next border-breaking operation. And to Da’ish’s benefit, Jordan has approximately three and a half to four million refugees and asylum seekers form across the Middle East, most of which identify as Sunni. Even if these refugees are not practicing in faith, the Sunni identity still defines them as a pseudo ethnicity, because in large part they or their forefathers had to flee their homelands because of their Sunni identity. Despite Da’ish’s demonstrated rule-of-law brutality, a Sunni population suffering the chaos of refugee life might opt for the normalcy that comes with the organization’s strict brand of Sunni Islam. Out of this refugee population, if just one tenth of one percent is sympathetic to the Islamic State’s Sunni Arab national vision, then the organization’s operatives will be able to find safe haven, recruit, and grow a local population network of forty thousand active and passive agents.

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What’s more, Jordan is a place with enduring instability and simmering dissatisfaction with governance; the quintessential environment for jihadist to swoop in: It’s surrounded by collapsing nation-states and persistent civil wars, and has been inundated for decades with displaced peoples and refugees. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of 2014 Jordan has a total 1,438,440 refugees and asylum-seekers from Iraq and Syria. The majority of the refugees are in seven IDP permanent and transient camps scattered across northern Jordan and in Amman, the capital city, and work in menial low-income jobs, such as driving taxies. This vast population has a high concentration of disenfranchised, underserved Sunnis who were forced to flee their historical homelands, and who exist in a nation that is failing to provide basic needs for them. The Islamic State purports to represent this Sunni populace and could offer them an opportunity to take control of their futures by enabling a Sunni Caliphate revolution, which would include breaking Jordan’s twentieth century established national borders.

Jordan could also serve as a strategic foothold to achieve one of Da’ish’s key revolutionary goals: liberating Jerusalem. There are an estimated two million Palestinian refugees permanently housed in ten camps across Jordan and in Amman. The Palestinians have been perceived as second-class citizens to the native-born Jordanians since the late 1940s, unable to serve in most government functions, such as the military or police and the refugees are unable to vote.  The Da’ish has affiliated insurgency cells in Gaza and Lebanon and is poised to take its revolution to Israel.  So Palestinians  - in Jordan and Gaza – may enable this siege (and support Da’ish’s Sunni Calphiate vision and homegrown terrorism goals generally) so they can retake their claimed homeland. Engulfing Jordan with revolutionary chaos would enable Da’ish to establish and maintain a logistics corridor to support its nikayah operations, from its seat of power in Iraq and Eastern Syria to Israel’s border.

Engulfing Jordan with revolutionary chaos would enable Da’ish to establish and maintain a logistics corridor to support its nikayah operations, from its seat of power in Iraq and Eastern Syria to Israel’s border.

So how do we stop this metastasizing cancer? One key will be picking up on the warning signs that it’s spreading. One such indicator is graffiti. As the Da’ish radical ideology percolates throughout populations in vulnerable nations, the terrorism morphs dramatically from political dissonance and vandalism (like street art) to terrorism. In 2014, Da’ish-inspired Islamist graffiti artists have vandalized globally, from America’s heartland in Indiana to Washington DC and Australia, Italy, Kosovo, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, and India. All these locations house individuals who are wannabe operatives, and will break the law to express Islamist rhetoric. Regardless of the vandals’ motivations, whether they are jihadist or people tagging for shock value, the end result is the same -- images of their actions are diffused globally and stand to motivate others who are seeking inspriration. Such expressions can easily devolve into political mobilization with the added pressure of a security force crack down and or agitators. In the case of Da’ish this political mobilization will be violent, will appear chaotic and will be against soft civilian targets. According to Da’ish literature, the nikayah phase prescribes using brutality against local civilians and enemy government forces to create chaos that undermines the existing government’s monopoly over violence. This is the phase of ideological invasion. Political graffiti is a strong indicator that the political ideas are spreading. It’s also a propaganda tool to inspire others to wage covert vandalism, which we saw with the idolized Sprayman in Syria several months leading to the uprising turned civil war. In Syria, graffiti became the tipping point for a national security crack down that inspired the revolt.

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In Jordan, political dissent against the King or the state that includes Islamist and Da’ish rhetoric could spur the nation’s security forces to crack down on its citizens and send people to prison. A fifteen-year-old kid spray-painting the Da’ish logo on a wall in Amman Jordan could spark the next Islamist revolution. That means that in 2015, we must pay as close attention to the alleys and walls of Jordan as we do the people marching through the streets.