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97–752PDF 2015

THE PARIS ATTACKS:

A STRATEGIC SHIFT BY ISIS?

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, 

NONPROLIFERATION, AND TRADE

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

DECEMBER 2, 2015

Serial No. 114–122

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/ or

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

(II)

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

EDWARD R. ROYCE, California, Chairman 

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey 

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida 

DANA ROHRABACHER, California 

STEVE CHABOT, Ohio 

JOE WILSON, South Carolina 

MICHAEL T. MCCAUL, Texas 

TED POE, Texas 

MATT SALMON, Arizona 

DARRELL E. ISSA, California 

TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania 

JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina 

MO BROOKS, Alabama 

PAUL COOK, California 

RANDY K. WEBER SR., Texas 

SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania 

RON DESANTIS, Florida 

MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina 

TED S. YOHO, Florida 

CURT CLAWSON, Florida 

SCOTT DESJARLAIS, Tennessee 

REID J. RIBBLE, Wisconsin 

DAVID A. TROTT, Michigan 

LEE M. ZELDIN, New York 

DANIEL DONOVAN, New York 

ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York 

ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey 

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia 

THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida 

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York 

KAREN BASS, California 

WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts 

DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island 

ALAN GRAYSON, Florida 

AMI BERA, California 

ALAN S. LOWENTHAL, California 

GRACE MENG, New York 

LOIS FRANKEL, Florida 

TULSI GABBARD, Hawaii 

JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas 

ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois 

BRENDAN F. BOYLE, Pennsylvania

AMY PORTER, Chief of Staff THOMAS SHEEHY, Staff Director

JASON STEINBAUM, Democratic Staff Director 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, NONPROLIFERATION, AND TRADE

TED POE, Texas, Chairman 

JOE WILSON, South Carolina 

DARRELL E. ISSA, California 

PAUL COOK, California 

SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania 

REID J. RIBBLE, Wisconsin 

LEE M. ZELDIN, New York 

WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York 

JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas 

ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

Page

WITNESSES 

Mr. Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies, 

Council on Foreign Relations .............................................................................. 5

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Ph.D., senior fellow, Foundation for Defense of 

Democracies .......................................................................................................... 13

Mr. Michael Weiss, co-author, ‘‘ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror’’ ....................... 29

Mr. Thomas M. Sanderson, director and senior fellow, Transnational Threats 

Project, Center for Strategic and International Studies ................................... 44

LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING 

Mr. Max Boot: Prepared statement ........................................................................ 8

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Ph.D.: Prepared statement ......................................... 15

Mr. Michael Weiss: Prepared statement ................................................................ 33

Mr. Thomas M. Sanderson: Prepared statement .................................................. 47

APPENDIX 

Hearing notice .......................................................................................................... 78

Hearing minutes ...................................................................................................... 79

(1)

THE PARIS ATTACKS:

A STRATEGIC SHIFT BY ISIS? 

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2015

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, NONPROLIFERATION, AND TRADE,

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS,

Washington, DC. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:05 p.m., in room 

2200, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Ted Poe (chairman of 

the subcommittee) presiding. 

Mr. POE. The subcommittee will come to order. Without objection, all members will have 5 days to submit statements, questions, 

and extraneous materials for the record, subject to the length limitation in the rules. 

I will give my opening statement, then I will yield to the ranking 

member, Mr. Keating from Massachusetts, for his statement. 

At least 130 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded on November the 13th in Paris as a result of the terrorist rampage by ISIS. My condolences go out to all of those who lost their 

loved ones, their family and their friends on that day. 

The shocking attack came in the context of a growing international aggression on the part of ISIS. Just the day before the 

Paris attacks, ISIS claimed credit for a twin suicide bombing in 

Beirut that killed at least 42 people. Two weeks before that, ISIS 

claimed to have downed a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people onboard. ISIS has claimed the lives of 

more than 800 people this year outside its so-called caliphate. 

While the world has witnessed the strengthening of ISIS, the 

President had a different interpretation. On the same day, before 

the Paris attacks, the President said that ISIS was ‘‘contained’’ in 

Iraq and Syria. They may not be expanding their caliphate, but 

ISIS does not look contained to me. 

American and European intelligence officials are now saying that 

ISIS has dedicated cell planning more terrorist attacks overseas. It 

is becoming clear that ISIS is not just a regional threat in the Middle East and that its overseas campaign of terror may have only 

just begun. 

It has been over a year since the President promised to ‘‘degrade 

and ultimately destroy’’ ISIS. U.S. air strikes have done little to reduce the number of ISIS fighters. Foreign fighters are being replenished each day. There simply have not been enough air strikes targeting vital ISIS locations. 

2

Right after the Paris attacks, the French, God bless them, didn’t 

take them long to start hitting ISIS’ strategic locations in Syria 

guided by the U.S. Two weeks ago, we finally started to bomb 

trucks transporting oil for ISIS. It did not seem to happen earlier. 

The question is why. ISIS made $100 million through oil trafficking in 2014. I am curious why there has only been one air strike on the group’s oil operations since November. 

And why don’t we go after the oil fields that produced that oil 

that is being sold on the black market? According to the former 

CIA Director, there were environmental concerns about blowing up 

oil fields. So now we are fighting an environmentally correct war 

and trying to defeat ISIS. No wonder there is no success. 

The President himself was forced to cancel the train and equip program that cost $1⁄2 billion after several false starts. Apparently, 

we need a strategy. We are failing in our efforts to counter foreign 

fighter travel. The majority of the Paris attackers were EU citizens 

who had traveled back and forth from fighting in Syria. The U.S. 

still does not have a national strategy to combat fighter travel. 

We also have yet to devise a real strategy to combat terrorist use 

of social media. ISIS uses social media to advertise its propaganda, 

radicalize and recruit people all over the world. Right after the 

Paris attacks, ISIS supporters took to social media to praise the 

terrorists. How revolting is that? ISIS has released videos praising 

the attacks and calling for now attacks in New York and Washington, DC. 

The administration has promised a strategy to counter online 

radicalization. That was in 2011. Four years later, we are still 

waiting on the strategy. 

Not only that, we need to find better ways to deprive ISIS of 

their money. Their reign of terror is a result of having money to 

kill folks. Last year alone, ISIS made over $1 billion. They get 

money from ransom, killing endangered species in Africa, big dollar 

donors in the Middle East, taxing of locals that they control, and 

of course blood oil. 

We need to start implementing a winning strategy against ISIS. 

Are we waiting to take the gloves off until ISIS commits a crime 

in the United States? It appears to me that we are on the defense, 

not the offense, when it comes to eliminating ISIS. 

The first step toward a better strategy is acknowledging the one 

that we have now is really not enough. So we must be honest with 

ourselves, and we must do everything possible. 

The bottom line is, it is our obligation to protect the American 

people. Continuing to believe in a policy that doesn’t fit the bill will 

continue to endanger us all. So what is the plan? What is the road 

to defeating ISIS? 

And I will now yield to the ranking member for his opening comments. 

Mr. KEATING. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for 

holding this hearing. I would like to thank our witnesses for being 

here. 

As we conduct today’s hearing it is important to keep in our 

minds first and foremost the victims and their families of these attacks in all the countries. I am the cochair of the French Caucus 

3

in the House. Just a few months ago, I was in Paris talking to 

counterterrorism officials and other officials who have worked very 

hard and were very aggressive in trying to deal with terrorist 

issues there, and still it just shows once again that these terrible 

events can occur despite how hard you work to prevent them from 

occurring. 

And the title of the hearing asks whether the attacks in Paris 

represent a strategic shift in Daesh or ISIL. It clearly does. I am 

interested in our witnesses’ perspectives on this question and hope 

that we will be able to have an informative discussion. 

Whether or not they signal a major strategic shift—I think they 

do—however, the Paris attacks, together with the recent bombings 

in Beirut and the bombing of the Russian Metrojet in Egypt demonstrate an escalation of ISIL’s or Daesh’s terrorist activities outside of its bases for power in Iraq and Syria. 

This is a concerning development, to say the least, one that has 

been met with a range of reactions from France and Turkey and 

Russia and the United States. What remains clear is that the 

United States and our international partners must work and communicate on all fronts to defeat ISIL. 

ISIL is a unique threat because it is a global terrorist organization. Because it is, they have an apocalyptic view. And certainly it 

is a concern because they are translating that into significant territory. Its occupation provides substantial revenue through theft, extortion, taxation, and attracts foreign fighters drawn to the cause 

and supporting the supposed caliphate. 

To defeat ISIL, we need to continue to assist our allies militarily 

to reverse the territorial gains made by ISIL, and we are making 

progress in this area. However, while ISIL suffers territorial losses 

in Iraq and Syria, it may ask to increasingly lash out at its enemies outside of the immediate region. 

And in the longer term, however, according to its ideology, ISIL 

needs to control its territory to justify its existence. And ISIL, without significant territory, would be severely weakened. 

But it is important to keep in mind that countering ISIL will require much more than military force. For example, we must do 

more to cut off ISIL’s supply of money and manpower by more effectively countering terrorist recruitment, terrorist travel, and terrorist financing. We also need to work to counter ISIL’s expanding 

influence beyond Iraq and Syria into its so-called provinces of 

Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, as well as other 

locations in Africa and Asia. And it is critical that we enhance and 

share counterterrorism intelligence and information with and 

among our international partners, particularly our European allies 

who are geographically closer to the Middle East and have seen 

greater numbers of foreign fighters travel to Iraq and Syria. 

Ultimately, we also need to identify and address the root causes 

of why so many predominantly young adults are prepared to kill 

themselves in support of such a savage and morally bankrupt 

cause. 

I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about this 

threat post-Paris and how the United States and its partners can 

work together to mitigate and eventually overcome this threat. 

I yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

4

Mr. POE. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts. 

I will now introduce the other cochair of the French Caucus, the 

gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson. 

Mr. WILSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, Judge 

Poe, for your leadership on what is so important, the attacks in 

Paris. 

And, indeed, this is bipartisan. I am grateful to work with Congressman Keating as cochair of the French Caucus. And it is personal to me. I am of French heritage and very grateful for that. 

And we appreciate and have great sympathy for America’s first 

ally, France. 

The Parisian attacks came just 1 day after the President claimed 

that ISIL was contained, further showing that his policy, I believe, 

to protect American families is a legacy of failure. 

What we have, sadly, ISIL, Daesh, is an ability to effectively coordinate mass murders of civilians across the world. We must 

never forget 9/11. It is clear that defeating ISIL will require a 

much more coordinated effort comprised of a broad coalition of 

America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East. I look forward to the recommendations of the distinguished panel here today 

and the insights on how we might counter ISIL’s strategy to commit atrocities worldwide. 

Thank you. 

Mr. POE. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from California, 

Colonel Cook. 

Mr. COOK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I am going to be very, very brief. I just want to mention a hearing that I had this morning. I am also on the House Armed Services Committee, and we had an individual by the name of David 

Ignatius. He is actually a reporter for The Washington Post. And 

the subject was about ISIS. We talked about Paris, obviously. I 

thought the focus was going to be primarily on the military. But 

after listening to him, because he was talking about the history 

and the origins and everything else, which you really, really need 

to understand, where ISIS has been and where it is going and objectives and some of the things which the chair talked about. 

It was an outstanding hearing. And I came away from it that I 

said maybe sometimes we have got to actually have a combination, 

like we did on that hearing that you had last week with Homeland 

Security, and where sometimes in the House Armed Services we 

are only focused on the military and we don’t understand a lot of 

the foreign policy implications, the history, the religion, et cetera, 

et cetera, et cetera, something that was talked about. 

But, anyway, I recommend that in the future. Maybe if we could 

do this. I was just shocked how at knowledgeable this individual 

was. His father, by the way, was the former Secretary of the Navy 

many years ago, probably when I was coming into the Marine 

Corps as a second lieutenant. As I remind everybody, the most dangerous weapon in the world is a second lieutenant with a map and 

a compass. 

But it was a great hearing. And I look forward to the witnesses 

that we have today. The French, now more than ever, are one of 

our strongest allies and we have to make sure we stand with them. 

Thank you. 

5

Mr. POE. Thank you, Colonel Cook. 

The other gentleman from California Representative, Mr. Rohrabacher. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank 

you for letting me participate. 

Two weeks ago I was in Paris, which was just a matter of days 

after the massacre, and it was an honor for me, along with Representative Gabbard, that we were able to place a crossed American and French flag there at the sight of the slaughter that took 

place and for us to meet with French officials at a very high level 

to reassure them that Americans stand with them. 

We have had a special relationship with the French people since 

their crucial support for American independence during our struggle for our own freedom. Such a relationship and the supporting relationship as we have had is going to be ever more important in 

the years ahead, because we are entering into a new era of history. 

The Cold War is over. The post-Cold War is over. And this era may 

well be known as the era of Islamic terrorism. 

But whatever they call it, we need to be supportive of all of those 

who are attacking and trying to defeat radical Islam, and that is 

especially true of countries like France. 

Thank you. 

Mr. POE. Does any other member wish to make an opening statement? 

If not, I will introduce the witnesses that we have. And without 

objection, all the witnesses’ prepared statements will be made part 

of the record. 

I ask that each witness please keep your presentation to no more 

than 5 minutes. I will advise everyone that we are supposed to 

have a series of votes in the next 20 to 30 minutes, but we will proceed with all of the statements of the witnesses first. 

Mr. Max Boot is the Jeane Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national 

security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a military historian and foreign policy analyst, who has served as an adviser to the United States commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a senior fellow at the Foundation 

for Defense of Democracies. His work focuses on al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other jihadist organizations with transnational 

ambitions. 

Mr. Michael Weiss is the co-author of ‘‘ISIS: Inside the Army of 

Terror.’’ He also appears on on-air analysis for CNN focusing on 

Syria, Iraq, ISIS, Russia, and Ukraine. 

And Dr. Thomas Sanderson is the director and senior fellow for 

the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and 

International Studies. He currently investigates violent extremist 

activity across Africa and the Middle East. 

I want to welcome all four of our experts this afternoon. And we 

will start with Mr. Boot. 

STATEMENT OF MR. MAX BOOT, JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK SENIOR FELLOW FOR NATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES, COUNCIL 

ON FOREIGN RELATIONS 

Mr. BOOT. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is a privilege 

to be here to talk about such an important subject. 

6

You know, I don’t think that the President is being honest about 

what our strategy against ISIS actually is, because the President 

says we are out to degrade and defeat ISIS. In fact, I think what 

we are really trying to do at the moment is to contain it. We don’t 

have a strategy to defeat and to destroy ISIS. What we have is 

barely a strategy to contain it, which has not been successful, as 

we have seen. 

While it is true that the scope of ISIS’ territorial control in Iraq 

and Syria has been slightly decreased over the course of the last 

6 months or so, shrunk slightly at the periphery, nevertheless, ISIS 

remains a potent threat. It maintains its hold on Mosul, Raqqa, 

Ramadi, Palmyra, and a lot of other territory. And it is not content 

to dominate this Islamic State, so-called, in Iraq and Syria. It is 

expanding rapidly to places like Libya. And as we have seen, of 

course, in the case of Paris, it is also expanding its terror networks 

abroad so that it can strike literally anywhere in the world. 

I believe that we actually need a strategy to make good on what 

the President said we must do, which is to destroy ISIS. And what 

is that going to take? Well, it is going to take a lot more than what 

we are doing at the moment, even notwithstanding the slight escalation announced yesterday by Secretary Carter when he said that 

a joint special operations task force was going to join the fight. 

That is a good step, something I have called for, for more than a 

year, but it is going to be insufficient. We need an integrated military and political strategy to destroy ISIS. 

And it is not sufficient simply to focus on areas such as countering ISIS finance or countering ISIS propaganda online. Those 

are both things that we need to do, but in the end they will not 

be decisive. As long as ISIS controls a state the size of the United 

Kingdom, it will continue to have a potent appeal for jihadists 

around the world. 

The only way to break its appeal is to destroy its hold on its territory. And how do we do that? Well, I think what we need is more 

military action on the part of the United States and our allies, but 

we also need a political strategy, and those two have to be closely 

intertwined, something that is not the case today. 

In terms of military action, clearly, I think we need a more intensive bombing campaign. I mean, it is literally incomprehensible to 

me why 75 percent of U.S. attack sorties are coming back to base 

without dropping their weapons. That suggests that we are waging 

an extraordinarily restrained campaign. As Mike Vickers, the 

former under secretary of defense for intelligence, pointed out recently, in 2 months in Afghanistan, in the fall of 2001, we have 

dropped more bombs than we have in the case of Iraq and Syria 

in something like a year and a half. 

So clearly, we need to step up the bombing campaign. We need 

to make that bombing campaign more effective by allowing our 

joint tactical air controllers onto the battlefield where they can actually call in strikes in an aggressive and precise way while avoiding civilian collateral damage. 

We need special operations teams on the battlefield. Again, as I 

mentioned a second ago, the fact that we are putting JSOC into the 

fight, I think, is a good step, but it is insufficient. At the end of 

the day, I don’t think that special operators alone are going to be 

7

enough to win this battle. I think we also need to put more conventional forces onto the battlefield. And I would estimate something 

on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 troops will probably be required, 

which is well beyond the current level of about 3,500, but still well 

short of the 100,000-plus levels that we reached in Iraq at the 

height of the Iraq war. 

I think those troops are necessary in order to galvanize and support a Sunni uprising against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. And this 

is really the way that we are going to defeat this organization. We 

are going to turn its constituency against it. 

And what is that going to take? Well, in the first place, we have 

to give the Sunnis some assurance that if they rise up, that we will 

stand with them, that we will fight alongside of them, that they 

will not simply be slaughtered by these butchers in ISIS. And to 

give them any kind of assurance, we need to have more troops who 

can work alongside of them and protect them and enable them to 

be effective against ISIS. 

But we also and crucially need a political strategy. We need to 

assure them that if they get rid of ISIS, they are not going to simply replace the tyranny of ISIS with the tyranny of Iran. We need 

to push for Sunni autonomy within Iraq. We need to push in Syria 

for the ouster of Bashar Assad, who has killed far more people 

than ISIS ever has. We need to offer the Sunnis a political end 

state that is worth fighting for. And if we do that, and if we provide 

them with a slightly greater level of support, I believe we can be 

more far successful against ISIS than we have been to date. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Boot follows:]

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Mr. POE. Thank you, Mr. Boot. 

Dr. Gartenstein-Ross, please, sir. 

STATEMENT OF DAVEED GARTENSTEIN–ROSS, PH.D., SENIOR 

FELLOW, FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. Chairman Poe, Ranking Member 

Keating, and distinguished members, it is an honor to be here to 

testify before you at this grave time. Apologies in advance for the 

fact that I am somewhat losing my voice. An infant plague has 

been running around my house, as many of you are familiar with. 

On the specific question that the hearing asks, whether we are 

seeing a strategic shift on ISIS’ part, my answer is no. I don’t think 

this is the key question in the hearing. But I would submit that, 

in general, when the argument has been that a strategic shift is 

taking place, the presumption is that previously ISIS was much 

more focused in their own box. They were much more focus on 

building the caliphate and less so on carrying out attacks externally. 

I would argue that they have been interested from the outset in 

carrying out external attacks. The best comprehensive treatment of 

this is written by two of my colleagues, Nathaniel Barr and Bridget 

Moreng, in Foreign Affairs recently. I have cited it in my testimony 

and actually adapted part of my testimony from their piece. 

To quickly go over it, I think the rhetoric of ISIS has always suggested they were interested in carrying out attacks abroad. 

Secondly, I think lone wolf attacks are very much misunderstood. 

Some of the lone wolf attacks they have engendered have indeed 

just been inspired by ISIS and had no connect to the organization. 

But others have been lone wolf attacks of individuals in Western 

societies who are actually taking orders from ISIS centrally. This 

was the case for several attackers in the United States who were 

inspired and directed by Junaid Hussein. This was also the case for 

a cell in Australia. 

Finally, they previously attempted to carry out similar urban 

warfare-style attacks in the West. There is the plot that was broken up in Belgium back in January of this year, just about a week 

after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, in which the would-be attackers 

had grenades, small arms, and the kinds of things that were used 

in the Paris attack. Indeed, Abaaoud, one of the people who prepared the Paris attack, the ringleader of the Paris attack, had been 

in Belgium. So I think that previously they were trying to do this. 

I do think that there are a couple of shifts we are likely to see 

on ISIS’ part. One is, as they lose territory in Iraq and Syria, they 

are likely to devote more resources to carrying out terrorist attacks 

abroad. They have a narrative of strength. It is very important to 

them to demonstrate to their constituency that they are strong, 

that they are winning. That is one reason why their propaganda 

has always been so brutal. And I think that to show that they are 

strong, they will devote more resources to carrying out terrorist attacks abroad. 

Secondly, I think that ISIS will show more of a focus on its near 

abroad, not just Iraq and Syria, but if you look at places like Libya 

in particular that they have expanded into, they clearly—and it 

was reported recently in a major publication—that ISIS is looking 

14

to make sure that they have continuity, that if they lose enough 

ground in Iraq and Syria that the caliphate is no longer viable 

there that they may shift the locus of their caliphate over to Sirte, 

a city in Libya that they currently control. 

This is a very thorny problem set. Let’s make no mistake about 

that. This is difficult because of all the many players that you have 

on the ground. 

So a few things to consider. The first is that I do think that defeating ISIS on the battlefield is key. They made a very bold move 

when they declared a caliphate, and in declaring a caliphate, they 

staked their legitimacy upon maintaining territory. Territoriality is 

very important to them. And if they no longer have a viable caliphate, that threatens upending their legitimacy in a way that other 

jihadist groups are not vulnerable to. 

Secondly, I agree with the note about social media and its importance to ISIS. Their narrative of strength is key. I testified before 

the Senate on this issue earlier this year. I cite to my Senate testimony in the written testimony you have received. But I think that 

we have not done a good job of puncturing this narrative of 

strength. 

A lot of their so-called gains have often been very exaggerated, 

and in fact they have experienced a number of major losses, especially in Africa, over the course of this year that are virtually unknown. There is a lot of opportunity to puncture this narrative of 

invulnerability that they have set up for themselves. 

Another thing I would like to point to is Sirte. I mentioned that, 

but right now we know that the Islamic State is very strong there. 

We aren’t taking any sort of action to counter this other base that 

they have outside of Iraq and Syria. I think that we should heavily 

consider what we should do to counter their strength outside of 

their immediate theater and in their near abroad. 

As I said, this is a very thorny problem set. ISIS does have 

vulnerabilities, and significant vulnerabilities, and I think part of 

solving this problem set is not just looking at their strengths, but 

also seeing how we can make their own vulnerabilities work 

against them. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Gartenstein-Ross follows:]

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Mr. POE. Thank you. 

Mr. Weiss, statement, please. 

STATEMENT OF MR. MICHAEL WEISS, CO–AUTHOR, ‘‘ISIS: 

INSIDE THE ARMY OF TERROR’’

Mr. WEISS. Thank you, Chairman Poe and Ranking Member 

Keating. It is an honor and pleasure, while slightly depressing to 

be here, given the circumstances of the mass murder in one of the 

world’s best and cosmopolitan cities 2 weeks ago. 

Last month I was in Istanbul on assignment, interviewing a defector from ISIS. Not just any defector, he had actually served in 

what is called the amn al-dawleh, which is their state security apparatus. This is the branch of their intelligence wing, which has 

four main pillars, that Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi 

John, had served in. They are responsible for interrogation and detention. They are also responsible for essentially creating a border 

guard. If you leave their territory, you have to pass through checkpoints. 

In some cases, they are responsible for training foreign 

operatives. And the guy that I was interviewing, I gave him the 

pseudonym Abu Khaled, told me—this was in mid-October, or late 

October—that he remembers training two French fighters. And I 

asked him, where did they go, where are they now? He said they 

went back to France. 

After the Paris attacks, I got in touch with him, and he said, 

‘‘You know, I am more than 50 percent certain, if they weren’t one 

of the suicide bombers or one of the gunmen who perpetrated the 

attacks, that they were involved in some way.’’ He said to me, ‘‘Michael, ISIS has got sleeper cells all over the world.’’ They have from 

the very beginning had a foreign expeditionary wing and a foreign 

policy. 

And one of the things that struck me by his relay of what it was 

like in the 11 months he spent in this organization, they are a 

state. They conceive of themselves as a state. I know that the 

United States likes to downplay this and pretend that, no, this is 

just a terrorist organization, it can and will be defeated quite easily, but that is not how ISIS portrays themselves. And more importantly, as some of the other witnesses have said, that is not how 

the constituents of ISIS, Sunni Arabs, particularly in the tribal regions of eastern Syria and western-central Iraq see it. 

If you are a member of ISIS, gentlemen, you have free health 

care. And what do I mean by free health care? If you could go to 

the eye doctor, if you have a toothache, that is all paid for. If you 

have cancer, they will send you to Turkey so you can get chemotherapy and put you up in a hotel. 

You get a salary that beats the band, particularly in war-torn 

Syria. If you have a wife, you get a subsidy for her. Your rent is 

free. If you have children, you get subsidies for each child. If you 

take care of your parents and your in-laws, you get subsidies for 

them as well. It is like joining the Communist Party in the decaying days of the Soviet Union. There is a nomenklatura, a new class 

of jihadists. 

And part of this ideological propaganda and exportation is what 

I would call a jihadist internationale. There are main planks to 

30

this. We have all heard about the messianic, apocalyptic vision that 

they espouse. The end days will come in Dabiq, the suburb of Aleppo, where the armies of Rome will meet the armies of Islam, and 

Islam will be victorious. 

But there is also a political project that underwrites this. Let’s 

not forget, the people who run this organization standing behind 

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, where did they come from? A lot of them 

had served in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, in his military, in the Ba’ath Party. They had training from the Soviet KGB 

and the Stasi. Abu Khaled, the ISIS defector, told me, ‘‘Now, ISIS 

doesn’t fight so well on the battlefield.’’ And he would know, because he trained a lot of the infantry soldiers who went like lemmings to their death in Kobani. In fact, many of them defected or 

deserted and said, ‘‘We don’t want any part of this. We just get 

bombed the minute we turn up in a house in that city.’’

I said, ‘‘So how did they manage to take all this territory?’’ He 

says, ‘‘They have very good tradecraft.’’ They are great at spying. 

They infiltrate rival organizations. If it is the Free Syrian Army, 

they send an agent into a brigade or battalion of the FSA equipped 

with $200,000 to $300,000 cash to essentially bribe his way to the 

top of that organization or the top of that military unit, and all of 

a sudden he starts manipulating and finessing the activities of the 

FSA. Some of these groups are backed by the United States and 

the so-called Friends of Syria. 

ISIS takes over territory before the advancing columns of tanks 

and Humvees and shock troops. They have already cultivated a 

constituency. They spend a fortune. 

Most of the money they are making, by the way—you talk a lot 

about oil sales, you talk a lot about smuggling of artifacts or 

human trafficking, that is not it. They have an entire bureaucracy 

that levies fines and taxes and surcharge on any violation that they 

deem to be abuse of their penal code or their sharia law. 

If you are caught smoking cigarettes, you have to sit for 3 days 

in a cage in the town al-Bab, if you are in al-Bab, and Aleppo. You 

also have to pay a fine. If you flee from ISIS-held territory, your 

house, your property, all of your assets are confiscated. They have 

a very sophisticated repossession and eminent domain policy. 

Okay? 

This is the reason they want to terrain, because with terrain 

comes people. They are ‘‘governing,’’ lording it over millions of people. And those millions of people are duty bound to pay taxes. I 

don’t have to tell you what happens if they don’t or if they defy 

ISIS or they try to flee. 

Like any totalitarian political organization, the likes of which we 

have seen in the 20th century, there is a carrot-and-stick approach. 

There is a social outreach program: Come to the paradise of the caliphate, and you can have your Nutella, you can have your video 

games, you can have your bride, we will populate this land with 

the cubs and pearls of new generations who will know only life 

under the true Islam as it should be taught. And then, if you don’t, 

or if you try to stand up or resist ISIS, you will be slaughtered. 

You all remember the Al Anbar awakening in the mid-2000 period in Iraq, which was essentially a pragmatic relationship struck 

between the Sunni tribes and the U.S. military, not because the 

31

U.S. military was seen as a liberating force, but it was seen as a 

more credible alternative than al-Qaeda in Iraq, the head loppers 

and butchers and rapists and monopolists, the gangsters who stole 

money from these tribes. 

There is no 101st Airborne. There is no 1st Armored Division in 

Iraq. What there is today, we call it the Iraqi Security Forces, but 

in reality it is a consortium of Shia militias backed and trained and 

armed by the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran. And many people 

in the Sunni heartland of Iraq see them as worse occupiers and 

worse conquerors than ISIS. 

I know it is difficult to wrap your head around this. The Western 

imagination is very limited in this respect. But believe you me, in 

Syria we are paying a lot of attention to the Kurds. And every time 

I go on television or I talk to somebody, all of a sudden the Kurds 

are going to liberate all of the Middle East. 

I have a great deal of respect for the Kurds. I want an independent State of Kurdistan. But I respect them so much that I 

don’t think they would be so foolhardy or stupid to march into 

Raqqa city or their Deir Ezzor city, much less Palmyra, much less 

Fallujah or Ramadi. That is just not their game. They are not interested in that, because they know they will be slaughtered. 

This what I would call, this sort of strategic region, the Euphrates River Valley, where they are still very much entrenched—I 

mean, they have lost terrain in northern Syria, they have lost 

Sinjar, their supply lines across Syria and Iraq have been interdicted—but they are entrenched in the part of those two countries 

that matters most to them. And the reason is because nobody is 

coming and presenting a more credible alternative to ISIS. This is 

the fundamental reality that needs to be appreciated by the United 

States Government. 

A final point. In 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Abu Musab 

al-Zarqawi, the founder of the organization known as ISIS, essentially made the case that the United States stupidly blundered into 

this country and accidentally handed it to the Islamic Republic of 

Iran. Today, ISIS isn’t so sure it was an accident. What they are 

saying is, actually, no, there is a new coalition of the willing. It is 

the United States, Russia, mobilized, of course, by the Jews, backed 

now by Iran, the Shia militias and death squads of Syria and Iraq, 

Lebanese Hezbollah, and all the apostate or tyrannical Arab regimes in the Middle East and Turkey. There is what I would call 

a caliphate contra mundum conspiracy theory that ISIS is putting 

forward. 

And the dangerous thing is, if you travel to the region, and I do 

it a lot, and you talk to Sunnis, they have a hard time telling 

where ISIS conspiracy theory ends and U.S. foreign policy begins. 

On a bad day, so do I, frankly. You know, how is that Russia has 

been allowed to establish a no-fly zone, bombing not ISIS, as even 

ISIS says in its latest issue of Dabiq, its propaganda magazine, but 

bombing Free Syrian Army and rebel groups that are fighting both 

Assad—actually, Assad, Hezbollah, the IRGC, ISIS, and Jabhat alNusra all at once, and doing so with, on occasion, sophisticated 

weapons, but more often than not AK–47s and hand grenades. 

You know, this is the thing, geopolitics matters to ISIS. They pay 

much closer attention to our policy debates and our discussions—

32

they may be watching us on C–SPAN for all I know—than we do 

to what they are doing in their own terrain, in their own territory. 

And, look, if you look at the profiles of these foreign fighters, if 

you look at the profiles of people who are conducting these terror 

spectaculars or operations abroad, it is almost out of central casting. They are not fanatical Muslims by birth. In fact, they are first 

generation. Their parents came to Europe. They made a good trade. 

They had a good living. They sent their kids to good universities 

or good finishing schools. And these kids become radicalized remotely. They turn on the television. They see American warplanes 

dropping bombs on Muslim babies. ISIS is exploiting that like you 

wouldn’t believe. 

We look at their atrocities, the immolation of a Jordanian airman. What we are not paying attention to is the other 20 minutes 

of the video where they are showing literally infants being pulled 

from the rubble and saying this was courtesy of a Jordanian or 

Saudi or American bomb. It is very compelling. It is very compelling. 

And you don’t have to be even a Muslim, much less a pious one 

or an Islamist, to find it so. And this is the pool of not even hardcore ideologues and supporters, but what I would call the fellow 

travelers of ISIS that they are drawing strength from. And, indeed, 

I mean, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you. 

And this is the thing. The leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy today 

is the more we absent ourselves, the more equilibrium will rise. 

Qasem Soleimani can be the next David Petraeus. I have got news 

for you: We are at a more dangerous period now than we were immediately after 9/11, because right now the level of anti-Americanism, it is actually—some of it is grounded in fact. Some of it is 

grounded in a crushing reality. Five years of attritional warfare, 

where Bashar Assad has dropped chemical weapons, barrel bombs, 

you name it, everything but biological and nuclear weapons on his 

own people, targeting whom? The Sunnis, the exact people we are 

going to need to fight and defeat ISIS. 

And in Iraq, 5 years of tolerating the thuggish regime of Nouri 

al-Maliki and now providing close air support to who? IRGC-backed 

proxy groups and militias who are liberating Tikrit only after U.S. 

F–16s come in. The Sunnis look at us like they hope this is a conspiracy, because if it is incompetence, then they absolutely have no 

faith in the United States. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Weiss follows:]

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Mr. POE. Thank you, Mr. Weiss. 

Mr. Sanderson. 

STATEMENT OF MR. THOMAS M. SANDERSON, DIRECTOR AND 

SENIOR FELLOW, TRANSNATIONAL THREATS PROJECT, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 

Mr. SANDERSON. Thank you, Chairman Poe and Ranking Member Keating and distinguished members of the subcommittee for 

the honor and opportunity to testify before you today on the challenge of ISIS following these recent attacks in Paris, Beirut, and 

in the skies over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. I come to you with a perspective of from field work on terrorism and conflict across nearly 

70 countries over the last 15 years. This includes interviews this 

year with current and former ISIS members who ply the border on 

Turkey’s side quite freely. 

The question before us today is whether these attacks represent 

a strategic shift for ISIS, what policy options the U.S. might have, 

and how those attacks are impacting our understanding of ISIS. 

First, the attacks. I do not believe that the three strikes represent a fundamental shift for ISIS, but rather a logical evolution 

for an organization that is under heavy pressure in some areas, has 

always looked to strike its enemies, and one which has designs on 

territory well beyond Syria and Iraq. 

But just because these attacks may not be unsurprising does not 

mean we should not be alarmed. ISIS has claimed three strikes, 

two conducted by cells trained in Syria and one in Egypt conducted 

by an ISIS affiliate, which signal that the threat is growing, is very 

bold, technically adept with both encrypted communications and 

bomb miniaturization, and that expeditionary, out-of-area attacks 

are to be expected. We should act aggressively and smartly in countering them. 

ISIS has long called for strikes on states such as France, a nation for which ISIS has tremendous hatred and disdain. ISIS also 

counts hundreds, if not thousands of members who hail from 

France, affording them plenty of French passport holders who can 

maneuver in the country, across Europe, and into the United 

States. 

The attack in Lebanon was a bold move for ISIS and was likely 

carried out in retaliation for Hezbollah’s support to the Syrian military. In Egypt, the ISIS affiliate, Sinai Province, has battled with 

Egyptian forces for years. The group is well aware of Russia’s 

friendship with President Sisi of Egypt and with President Assad 

of Syria and is certainly mindful of Russia’s disposition toward its 

own citizens who have joined ISIS. And of course, it is likely that 

the attack on the Russian airliner was as much targeted at Egypt’s 

tourism industry, and by extension the Sisi government in Cairo, 

as it was on the Russians themselves. 

It is important for us to look at statements from ISIS over the 

past couple of years to understand how these attacks, especially 

Paris, fit in with the ISIS strategy. The ISIS strategy is focused on 

establishing and protecting its territory along the Syria-Iraq border 

and to build influence beyond that space. ISIS has reached out to 

Muslims the world over calling them to help run, build, and defend 

the Muslim caliphate. These calls often came with encouragement 

45

to attack ISIS enemies and promises that one day they will conquer Rome, shorthand for much of the West. 

In the October 2014 issue of their English language publication 

Dabiq, ISIS spoke of targeting the West and others in the coalition. 

This included statements such as,

‘‘At this point in the crusade against the Islamic State, it is important that attacks take place in every country that has entered into the alliance against the Islamic State, especially the 

U.S., U.K., France, Australia, and Germany. Every Muslim 

should get out of his house, find a crusader and kill them, and 

the Islamic State will remain until its banner flies over Rome.’’

It is also important to note that over the last 2 years ISIS has 

accepted pledges of loyalty from fighters from around the globe, including Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Nigeria, Russia, the Philippines, 

Pakistan, and many others, further expanding the ISIS footprint on 

the globe and reminding us that their base in Syria and Iraq is not 

the extent of their ambition. 

What should these attacks tell us about ISIS? Well, the attacks 

signal that ISIS intends to strike where necessary and when pressured. I fully expect them to target the United States and other 

members of the anti-ISIS coalition, and of course they have said 

that they are going to do that. For a group that is so focused on 

imagery, as seen in the thousands of well-choreographed messages, 

images, videos distributed every day, this is a group that must be 

seen as making progress. 

These three attacks also tell us that ISIS, its affiliates, and supported cells, are able to strike successfully in hostile territory. In 

Paris, ISIS executed multiple attacks with several individuals moving between France, Syria, and Belgium, and did so in the midst 

of very competent law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In 

Lebanon, ISIS was able to operate covertly in a denied area crawling with highly suspicious, alert, and well-armed, well-trained Lebanese Hezbollah. Finally, in Egypt, ISIS affiliate Sinai Province 

was able to penetrate airport security and emplace a bomb that destroyed a Russian airliner, killing 224 people. 

These successful attacks are alarming for reasons far beyond the 

skillful tradecraft that was put on display. The impact is also felt 

in the recruiting realm. Given that ISIS offers a sense of mission, 

purpose, adventure, and revenge for young radicalized people, such 

attacks serve as a tremendous stimulant for these potential recruits. The attacks also demonstrate the possibilities for lone 

wolves or organized cells and signal that ISIS can make them happen over distance, in unfriendly spaces, and for little cost. From 

their perch on the margins of society, potential ISIS members witnessed the Paris, Beirut, and Sinai operations, and they want in 

on that action. 

Let’s now consider the implications and possible responses. The 

most recent ISIS attacks present troubling implications for U.S. security and our anti-ISIS strategy. In Lebanon, ISIS has struck the 

state that remains fragile and which borders Israel and is home to 

1 million Syrian refugees. The attack on the Russian airliner demonstrates that commercial aviation remains a very attractive, viable target for terrorists. 

46

The Paris attack offers the most significant concern for U.S. security. This long distance, sophisticated, high-risk ISIS operation 

succeeded on all levels. A leading member of the anti-ISIS coalition 

and close ally of the U.S. suffered a dramatic blow. 

With these examples and others in hand, it is not difficult to envision ISIS supporting a cell or lone wolves in similar operations 

inside the U.S. This would represent a bigger challenge for ISIS, 

but I do not think it is impossible by any means. 

Our response must be well conceived, precise, forceful, multidimensional, integrated, and enduring. But I will state upfront, I 

do not have a lot of confidence that we will succeed in many visible 

and tangible ways. Our country is not currently in the right frame 

of mind to take on this challenge. Many of our partners are incredibly problematic and the conditions and factors at play are so numerous and immensely complicated that I hardly know where to 

begin. 

Let me suggest some of the key actions that are needed in a campaign to gain some advantage in what will turn out to be an evolution in the violence and not a clear-cut victory. The Obama administration’s objection to putting large forces on the ground is 

well-founded, but we need a much more aggressive posture in what 

we are doing now. 

The most important things we can strive for are political 

progress in both Syria and Iraq, ISIS leadership decapitation, more 

targeted strikes from the air, more flexible ROE with those strikes, 

territory denial, counterfinance and countermessaging. 

To make some progress in these areas we need to strengthen efforts at diplomacy, intelligence, special operations, the air strikes, 

training local forces, anticorruption, counterradicalization, good 

governance, and by addressing socioeconomic and political conditions where ISIS operates and, importantly, where they recruit. 

That list is a very tall order and it is not even exhaustive. 

I realize that we have ongoing efforts in each of these areas, but 

we clearly need to do more. We know what ISIS can do and we 

know where else they want to take the battle. So it is time to come 

together politically and to attack ISIS aggressively and intelligently. And if we as Americans lead, others will stand with us. 

Let’s not wait for Washington to be hit before doing what is right 

and what is possible. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Sanderson follows:]

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Mr. POE. I want to thank all of our experts for your testimony. 

I found it fascinating and disturbing. 

We are in the midst of votes at this time, and so we will recess 

until approximately 1:30, and we will start questioning at 1:30—

or 2:30, 2:30. And we will start at 2:30, not 1:30. It wasn’t a trick. 

Thank you very much. We are recessed till 2:30. 

[Recess.] 

Mr. POE. Thank you once again. 

Gentlemen, I have been in a lot of hearings, and I find that this 

hearing has turned out to be one of the most informative and disturbing of any hearing that I have conducted. You have given us 

a lot of information. Most of the information is alarming. And so 

I want to try to take the information all four of you experts have 

given Members of Congress on both sides about the threat of ISIS 

and try to narrow down some proactive things that we ought to be 

doing. 

It seems to me that our dealing with ISIS is reactionary. They 

do something, we react. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we don’t 

react. But it is all reactionary. And being on the defense, our bunker mentality is not going to solve the problem of ISIS. 

So the question is with all of these conflicts—and Mr. Weiss 

made a flow chart to figure out all of the different entities about 

whose side they are on today and whose side they are on tomorrow 

and who these folks are—it is very complicated. So what is our answer to this? What is something we can do? 

And I agree with you totally, it has got to be a political answer. 

Long range, it has got to be a political answer. There has to be a 

military answer, maybe a financial answer. 

The United States doesn’t have a real good track record, I don’t 

think, of going into a region, eliminating whoever is in charge of 

the country, and then the result doesn’t turn out too well. And 

sometimes it is worse than the government we got rid of or the regime or the dictator, whatever. So we destroy ISIS, there is a vacuum there. What happens when we eliminate them? 

First of all, what is the way we can policy-wise have a plan to 

eliminate them? But on the political front, what should we be doing 

as a replacement for all of those concerns that you mentioned about 

the people in the region, who they are looking to for leadership? 

So that is the question. So if each one of you would weigh in on 

some specifics, political results, military results, or things that we 

ought to be doing, long-term, short-term, to give us some guidance 

on America’s role and ISIS. 

I have one question that I just need a yes or no from all of you 

on. Do you think that the United States should invoke Article 5, 

make this a NATO operation? Just like 9/11, after 9/11, that became a NATO operation because we were attacked. Should this be 

a NATO operation or not? And then each one of you weigh in on 

the previous question that I just mentioned to you. So go down the 

row on the NATO operation. 

Mr. Boot. 

Mr. BOOT. Mr. Chairman, I think there is some symbolic value 

to invoking Article 5, although, from what I understand, our 

French allies don’t actually want to invoke it because they are hopVerDate 0ct 09 2002 10:47 Dec 18, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00061 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 F:\WORK\_TNT\120215\97752 SHIRL
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ing to get Russia on board and they don’t want the NATO sponsorship to turn off Putin. 

Now, I think that, frankly, President Hollande is smoking something if he thinks that we are going to get President Putin on 

board with our agenda in Syria and Iraq, because Putin has a very 

different agenda. He is there to support Assad. He is not there to 

destroy ISIS. So I think this is not going to amount to anything. 

But I think there is some symbolic value to invoking Article 5 if 

we can get the French to go along with it. But I don’t necessarily 

think that we need to turn this into a very complex NATO command structure, which we have had in the case of Afghanistan and 

which, to my mind, has actually been in some ways a small impediment to getting results because it becomes a question of balancing 

and having different officers from different nations who are put 

into this command structure for largely political, not for reasons of 

military effectiveness. And that is not necessarily the best way to 

go about business. 

But for the symbolic value, I think there is something to be said 

for that; and also, by the way, for passing a declaration of war or 

a stripped-down AUMF, not like the one the administration has 

submitted, but one that really gives the President, as the Commander in Chief, a great deal of authority to wage war and to destroy ISIS in any way he sees fit. I think there is something to be 

said for that too for the symbolic value that it has, even if at a 

practical level we can still do most of what we need to do without 

it. 

Mr. POE. So would you recommend that Congress debate the 

issue of an authorization to use military force in the box of ISIS? 

Mr. BOOT. Absolutely. I think that would be a good thing. I mean 

certainly the administration lawyers argue that they have the authority they need from the 2001 AUMF. But at this point I think 

anybody who is not in the administration understands that they 

are stretching things a little bit to use this authorization after 9/11 

to attack ISIS, which is a group that basically did not exist on 9/11. 

I think they can do it. I am not saying that they can’t. But I think 

it would be better if there were a stripped-down AUMF, one that 

did not include all the restrictions that the administration has put 

into their version of it. 

Now, on your other question, which I think is a very good one, 

about what happens after—well, first off, how do you get rid of 

ISIS and what happens after ISIS is gone. I think those are very 

good questions. In my testimony, I tried to address the question of 

how do you get rid of ISIS, which I think is a political-military 

strategy that involves slightly more commitment of forces on our 

part, but also a political strategy, which is key, to give the Sunnis 

a reason to fight against ISIS, which they really don’t have at the 

moment because they are afraid that if they get rid of ISIS, they 

are simply going to trade the butchers of ISIS for the butchers of 

the Quds Force and Hezbollah and all these other Iranian-backed 

groups. 

So I think what you have to do, as I suggested earlier, is to offer 

Sunnis autonomy within Iraq in much the same way as we have 

done with the Kurds. Remember that going back to 1991, we have 

been protecting the Kurds. We have used our air power to say, 

59

‘‘Okay, Saddam Hussein, you are not going to be able to slaughter 

the Kurds.’’ And out of that has grown up one of the few success 

stories in the Middle East in the last couple of decades, which is 

the Kurdish Regional Government which is, when you go from the 

rest of Iraq to the KRG, it is like leaving hell and winding up in 

heaven. I mean, they have done tremendously well under American 

military protection for the last couple of decades. 

I think that is a good model to emulate with the Sunnis in Iraq. 

I am not saying that we should give them a separate country. I 

don’t think that is practical. But we should certainly create a 

Sunni Regional Government akin to the Kurdish Regional Government. And ideally we would do that by engineering a political deal 

in Baghdad, but that may not be possible because of the Iranian 

domination of the Baghdad regime. And if that is not possible, as 

I have argued before, we can act unilaterally on our own, work 

with the Sunnis. We can train and arm them in the KRG where 

there is already a huge number of Sunni refugees. And we can basically create for the Sunnis an autonomy within Iraq. We can 

train and arm the Sons of Iraq, like the Peshmerga, that will guarantee their autonomy. We can pledge to use American air power, 

if necessary, to protect them from an onslaught from the Shiite militias. 

I think that is the way that we gain the support of the Sunnis, 

and that is ultimately going to be, I think, the lasting political 

structure within Iraq, which is a very loose Federal structure and 

within it basically the Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni regions. 

Now, in the case of Syria it is a much harder process because 

Syria is much more fragmented right now than even Iraq is. What 

I have suggested is that we need to have no-fly zones and safe 

zones in Syria, which would have many benefits, blunting the 

Assad killing machine, which has killed far more people to date 

than ISIS has, but also creating a space where you could actually 

train and arm the Free Syrian Army and, crucially, where you 

could also give the Syrian opposition movement, which we recognize as the rightful Government of Syria, you could give them a 

chance to actually govern on some territory so that eventually, once 

Assad is overthrown, there is more of a hope that a more moderate 

government can extend its way into ruling the entire country. 

I think what might actually happen in the end is that when we 

get to the point where ISIS and Assad are close to being overthrown in Syria, and we are nowhere close to that right now, once 

you get to that point, I think there is a case to be made for a Dayton-like process where you would have an international conference 

with an agreement to deploy international peacekeeping forces that 

would, for example, give some assurance to the Alawites that they 

are not going to be slaughtered by the Sunnis that they, themselves, have been slaughtering for so many years, give some assurances to the Kurds, give some assurances to the different Sunni 

communicates. 

But we are nowhere close to that right now, and I think we are 

not going to get there just by convening conferences in Vienna or 

Geneva right now. The only way to get there is to change the balance of power on the ground, and that means creating a more viable, moderate opposition in Syria, enabled by greater American aid, 

60

and allowing them to go after not only ISIS, but also after Assad, 

and helping them by preventing Assad’s air force from bombing 

them and helping them by creating these safe zones where refugees 

could stay there, the Free Syrian Army could train there, the Syrian opposition could begin to rule there. I think that is the beginning of a solution to the nightmare that is Syria today. 

Mr. POE. Thank you, Mr. Boot. 

The Chair recognizes that he went over the 5-minute rule. And 

I am going to use a word that I don’t use very often: I will be a 

little more liberal on the time for each of the other members, including you. 

Go ahead, Mr. Keating, from Massachusetts. 

Mr. KEATING. Well, thank you. Maybe we can do other rounds 

too. I will try and stay within that timeframe. 

But, Mr. Weiss, the gentleman that you interviewed in Istanbul 

that fled ISIS, you must have asked him why specifically he left. 

Could you enlighten us with that story? 

Mr. WEISS. Sure. So he spent 11 months with ISIS, and he said 

within the first 2 he wanted to leave. So he essentially spent 9 

months plotting his escape. Because the irony is, when you are a 

member of amn al-dawleh, you have trained up the very people 

who will be manning the checkpoints and the border guard to 

interdict you if you try to flee. And it was sort of out of a le Carre 

novel, the way he described all the preparation, the obtaining of 

the false——

Mr. KEATING. But why did he make that choice after 2 months? 

Mr. WEISS. So he chose because he said the pervasive climate of 

paranoia and lies that had been inculcated. Again, he was in a 

town called al-Bab. I was in al-Bab in 2012. I embedded with the 

Free Syrian Army when it took this town from the Assad regime 

and I saw the life and the sort of civic exuberance that was being 

displayed. I mean, 40 years of totalitarian rule and all of a sudden 

they are a free people, cleaning up the streets at night, having allnight parties and discussions in the cafes. All of that was put asunder by ISIS when they came in about 5 to 6 months later. 

He said to me the sort of turning point moment was what he saw 

at the farm. What he was referring to is, there was a farmer who 

came to him and said, ‘‘Abu Khaled, I run this olive farm just north 

of al-Bab, and it is full of bodies. Every time I till the soil, I turn 

up an arm, a leg, a foot. And, obviously, this is Daesh doing this. 

Can you intervene?’’

So Abu Khaled went to the emir of al-Bab—who drives a BMW, 

by the way, because, as he put it, ‘‘Alhamdulillah, the Islamic State 

is very rich,’’ and the emir said, ‘‘No, this isn’t us, we don’t know 

anything about it.’’

Abu Khaled, a few weeks before, had witnessed the execution of 

a guy that ISIS said was a spy for the coalition. He had been dropping GPS devices, they accused him of, in al-Bab, the better that 

coalition warplanes could target positions on the ground. This guy 

was, as you can imagine, beheaded, and his head was stuck on the 

pike in the center of al-Bab. He was very distinctive because he 

was wearing an Adidas track suit, black and white, I think the colors were. 

61

The next time Abu Khaled went to the farm, he saw the body of 

this man. So he went back to the emir and he said, ‘‘Come on, this 

is you, this is your doing. This is your sort of makeshift burial 

ground.’’ A day later the emir comes back to him and says, ‘‘Ask 

the farmer how much he wants for his farm.’’ Abu Khaled said, ‘‘If 

you open the Islamic State daily newspaper, it is like reading Pravda or it is like reading Syrian state media.’’

Mr. KEATING. Why did he initially join? 

Mr. WEISS. He said because he thought that the United States 

was behind Bashar al-Assad and Iran and Russia. Essentially he 

bought into the ISIS geopolitical narrative, there was this conspiracy. 

Mr. KEATING. Now, his story about why he left, do we have 

enough people telling that story? 

What do you think, Mr. Sanderson. 

Mr. SANDERSON. Congressman, I wanted to relate a story—to answer your question very quickly, no, of course we do not have 

enough people telling that story, certainly not in comparison to the 

numbers within ISIS that are telling their story. 

The 16-year-old that I interviewed on the Turkish-Syrian border 

joined ISIS in January of this year. He was the youngest of 21 children. His father died a year ago. He was in ISIS for 2 months. And 

the reason he left was because within 2 weeks of entering the 

training program ISIS vectored these young recruits against an attacking force that was coming to seize a salt mine that ISIS controlled. ISIS made up a story about who those attackers were, said 

they were bandits, criminals, et cetera. It was the Nusra Front. 

And this young man and his friend left because of the lies that 

ISIS told about the Nusra Front, which is very popular among 

many Syrians for its high content of Syrian leadership and for its 

direct attacks again the Syrian Government. So he left because of 

the lies that ISIS had told him and the other young recruits who 

just after 2 weeks of training were put into action against the 

Nusra Front. 

Mr. KEATING. So it is very difficult to get out. 

Mr. SANDERSON. Oh, yeah. 

Mr. KEATING. How common is it that they are killing—I know 

they take people’s passports usually right off the bat if they are 

coming from——

Mr. WEISS. It is actually a recent phenomenon. 

Mr. KEATING. Do they kill a lot of these people if they try to escape, make examples of them? 

Mr. WEISS. Oh, yes. Well, there is the recent example of two Bosnian girls from Vienna had gone over. One of them recently tried 

to escape and they bludgeoned her to death. And it is not because 

they care that they are losing members of the caliphate. It is because they don’t want these people to come to the West or come out 

and essentially blow the whistle and expose them for what they 

are. 

There is another vulnerability that doesn’t get enough attention 

here, and actually there is precedent for it because the same thing 

happened in Iraq. Zarqawi had always presented the insurgency in 

Iraq, at least the al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgency, as a national—well, 

essentially one made up of native Iraqis. That wasn’t true. RememVerDate 0ct 09 2002 10:47 Dec 18, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00065 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 F:\WORK\_TNT\120215\97752 SHIRL
62

ber, the tip of the spear for the insurgency, the bulk of it was Iraqi, 

but the tip of the spear were foreigners, Jordanians, Saudis, whatever. He attempted to Iraqize the franchise because he realized 

that Iraqis were now seeing two forms of occupation, one by the 

Americans and the coalition, the other by al-Qaeda in Iraq. 

The same thing is happening today in Syria. ISIS is run by 

Iraqis at the top, including, again, members from Saddam’s regime, 

and everybody who is being appointed to serve in the amn’ni, or 

the amn’niate, which is their security apparatus, they are all nonSyrians. So if you are a 60-year-old woman living in al-Bab and you 

have lived there your whole life and all of a sudden a 25-year-old 

Tunisian comes over and says, ‘‘Cover your face, go to mosque, 

what are you doing outside the house without a husband or an escort, go to mosque,’’ this is like having foreign rule, foreign occupation. 

That is a, I hate the word ‘‘narrative,’’ but I am going to use it 

anyway, that is a narrative that has not been emphasized. Syrians 

are very nationalistic, especially the ones that have zero Islamist 

or jihadist ideology, and they feel now that they are chafing under 

the kind of occupation that, frankly, is coming from people that 

they have never met and have countries they have never even be 

to. We need to emphasize that fact. It is a way to sort of increase 

the resistance. 

Mr. KEATING. Thank you very much. I will yield back to our new 

chair. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER [presiding]. The new chair? I have succeeded. 

There I am. 

Listen, thank you to the witnesses. And I will proceed with my 

questioning and then to Mr. Higgins. 

Let me note that I spent a lot of time in the Reagan White House 

in the 1980s. I was with him for 71⁄2 years. I was a speechwriter, 

but also a special assistant to the President. And one thing I noted, 

that Ronald Reagan took a lot of criticism during the time period, 

but he ended the Cold War. No one gives that credit to Herbert 

Walker Bush. They give the credit to Ronald Reagan and justifiably so, because Ronald Reagan prioritized what he wanted to accomplish. He prioritized what we are going to do is we are going 

to eliminate our major threat. What is our major threat? The Soviet Union isn’t the ultimate threat to the United States and the 

world today. 

Unfortunately, it seems like we cannot support people today who 

are killing the people who want to kill us, the people who are the 

great threat, the greatest threat to the security of the people of the 

United States and other Western countries, unlike Ronald 

Reagan—we did work with some unsavory characters, and we 

brought down the Soviet Union, and that was the goal—because 

those other unsavory characters maybe at a smaller level were not 

good people, but they at least were not threatening to injure the 

people of the United States or other parts of the free world. 

Mr. Boot, I am sorry, but I am appalled at the Council on Foreign Relations and what has been happening with the option of allowing the Russians to play a major role in defeating radical Islam, 

which is the greatest threat to the security of the people of the 

United States. Russia is no longer the Soviet Union and it is being 

63

treated as if it is still the Soviet Union. And it is appalling to me 

when I hear people going out of their way to say what Putin is 

thinking. So you don’t think that Putin is not there to destroy ISIL. 

How many people were killed in that Russian airliner? Do you 

think that had anything to do with his judgment? You don’t give 

Putin that credit? 

Mr. BOOT. Well, with all due respect, Congressman, Putin was in 

Syria before that airliner was blown up. And if you actually look 

at the pattern of Russian air strikes, very few of them are hitting 

ISIS-held areas. Most of them are hitting areas held around Aleppo 

and so forth, which are held by moderate opposition groups backed 

by the United States. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Does anyone else have any information? Because the information I read is that is not true. 

Mr. WEISS. Well, Congressman, if ISIS believes that Russia is 

not hitting ISIS, I would consider that pretty much evidence 

against interest. If you look at their latest propaganda magazine, 

Dabiq, they actually laugh, they mock the Russians and they mock 

us, and they say that the drunken Russian bear is bombing here, 

there, and everywhere, confusing think tankers and journalists. 

In fact, their intervention is targeting the America-backed Sahwa 

forces. That is to say, Sunni rebel groups that are fighting ISIS, 

that is who Russia has been bombing. Reuters conducted an investigation a few weeks ago, an independent one, no government sponsorship, found four-fifths of the sorties had been going after nonISIS targets. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. You guys are better read than I am on this. 

But let me just say——

Mr. WEISS. Well, there is another point that doesn’t get enough 

attention as well. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I have talked to several people from the region. However, let me move—it goes from what you are saying 

here, and that is—and by the way, I appreciate, you gave me a 

briefing once, it was excellent, I might add. 

Assad being this horrible, evil regime, the people who were rising 

up against the Assad regime within Syria, did they have any outside support from any Sunni-based governments in the region? Of 

course they did. 

Now, tell me this. Of those other governments that happen to be 

friendly to us, do you think that if there was an uprising that was 

sponsored by, let’s say, Assad or someone that they didn’t like, that 

those regimes—do you think Qatar, for example, if there is an uprising among those many, many more non-Qatar citizens, were uprising and they were being supported by somebody like Assad, do 

you think that they would be less likely to commit atrocities 

against those people? 

I think that—I am just—I will just posture, because there is no 

doubt in my mind, I note that the Qatar people, they are good people, but the fact is, if there was some type of a Shiite-backed uprising among the people who live in Qatar, you would probably have 

just as many thousands, or proportionately, murdered in order to 

maintain that government. 

And Assad has been portrayed as something different and Putin 

is portrayed as something different. The fact is that they are 

64

flawed. And right now, neither Assad nor Putin threaten to murder 

thousands of Americans if they get their chance. If a bomb goes off, 

a nuclear bomb goes of in Philadelphia or Los Angeles, it is going 

to be a radical Islamicist bomb and it is not going to be Putin. 

Putin is out there trying to at least come to grips. And by the 

way, what does he have to do with fighting, why is it he is not 

there to destroy ISIL? How many ISIL soldiers come from 

Chechnya, Mr. Boot? 

Mr. BOOT. I don’t know. Some do. But there is certainly evidence 

that Putin has looked the other way as people from the Russian 

Caucasus have gone to join ISIS. 

But if I could make a longer point——

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I will let you make your point. But let me 

just note the reports that I heard, there have 3,000 and 5,000 

Chechnyans in ISIL. Now, don’t tell me that what is Putin doing 

there. They blow up his planes. They have people who are murdering—these Chechnyans who are murdering Russians in Russia. 

Yes, Putin may be there and he is a flawed guy, he is a thug, 

as everybody says, but just like Ronald Reagan, we had to deal—

look, we made an alliance with China during the Cold War in order 

to defeat the Soviet Union. We made a deal with the Russians during World War II to defeat Hitler. That is great. But right now, the 

Council on Foreign Relations and the people who just can’t get over 

the Cold War is over are basically putting us at a great disadvantage to be working with somebody who shares a common enemy. 

Go right ahead and retort that, it is fine. 

Mr. BOOT. Congressman, if I thought that Putin was actually 

going to intently fight ISIS, I would be all in favor of making common cause with him. Unfortunately, what he is doing is he is supporting Bashar Assad, who is the greatest recruiting tool that ISIS 

ever had. As long as Bashar Assad is out there dropping barrel 

bombs and killing people, what he is doing is he is driving Sunnis 

into the arms of ISIS. That is why ISIS is able to have a raison 

d’etre. That is why ISIS is able to posture itself as the defender of 

the Sunnis in Syria against the butchery committed by Assad, by 

Russia, by Iran, by Lebanese Hezbollah, and all these other groups. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. There was an uprising going on, and he was 

very heavy-handed in trying to defeat that uprising, and there is 

no doubt about it. 

Mr. BOOT. And he is still heavy-handed. And as long as he continues slaughtering Sunnis, that gives ISIS a reason to exist. There 

is a symbiotic relationship between the Iranian-backed forces like 

Assad and the Sunni extremists on the other side. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. You expect the Saudis and the Qataris and 

the others would be far more humane than what Assad was? 

Mr. BOOT. Well, they may not be. But they are not the ones who 

are slaughtering 200,000 people at the moment. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right now. Right now they are. But you are 

putting Assad in a different situation because he was confronted 

with an uprising being sponsored by an outside power. 

Mr. Higgins, you may proceed. 

Mr. HIGGINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Weiss, you were making a point during my colleague’s questioning that you said was important. Do you want to finish it? 

65

Mr. WEISS. You will have to remind me, Congressman, what was 

the——

Mr. HIGGINS. You were talking about narrative and you were 

talking about something that hadn’t been talked a lot about. 

Mr. WEISS. Oh, yes, the idea of foreign occupation, that ISIS is 

essentially a new form of colonial rulership. That is very powerful. 

A lot of Syrians, as I said, dislike being governed and lorded over 

by people that come from other countries. 

If I may say, there is another element to this too. We have done 

nothing, nothing substantive I should say, to really demonstrate to 

Sunni Arabs that the United States has their plight and their dispossession and ethnic cleansing and murder to heart. A tweet by 

Samantha Power every now and then doesn’t cut it. This has to be 

backed by fire and steel. Max is 100 percent right. 

I actually disagree with Max on one point, though. I think Syria 

is exactly the place to start. Demographically speaking, it is a 

Sunni-majority country. That means that, as I mentioned, as everyone here has said, the very constituents you need to turn against 

Sunni Taqfirism or Sunni jihad are right there, and they are willing and they are able, but they face a lack of credible alternatives. 

And here is the thing that sort of gets me. You know, the U.S. 

puts out this policy of train and equip, right? We are going to create essentially a Sunni—actually it was Sunni-Turkman, not even 

Sunni-Arab at the start—but a Sunni counterterrorism proxy force, 

send them in with packs and M–4 rifles and white pickup trucks, 

and have them fight not only ISIS and make them forswear in a 

piece of paper that they will not use the weapons and the training 

they received to go after any of the other manifold groups, which, 

as Max also pointed out, are responsible for the vast, overwhelming 

majority of casualties and fatalities. 

A study that was done recently found that between January and 

July of this year, Assad killed seven times the number of people 

that ISIS has killed. For every atrocity ISIS has committed, Assad 

has done one better, including burning people alive. 

We sent them in with a target painted on their back, right? And 

it was no surprise that some of them defected to al-Qaeda or sold 

their weapons. 

Now, the one program that is being done with a marked degree 

of success is the one that nobody wants to talk about, which is the 

clandestine CIA program to back 39 rebel militias in Syria, provide 

them, through Saudi Arabia, with TOW antitank missiles. Putin 

has gone after them expressly, and I know it because I talked to 

the rebel commanders from those units. And still they hold the 

line. They have made, as they put it, a graveyard of Syrian tanks 

in Homs and the al-Ghab plain. 

Nobody wants to talk about this because this is the one thing we 

are doing to actually give the constituents, the indigenous people 

of Syria, some incentive to work with us. They want to fight Assad 

first, and they want to fight him for a very pragmatic, simple reason: He is the one killing them. 

Mr. HIGGINS. You were embedded with the Free Syrian Army? 

Mr. WEISS. Yes. 

Mr. HIGGINS. How long ago? 

Mr. WEISS. In 2012. 

66

Mr. HIGGINS. How do you define the Free Syrian Army? 

Mr. WEISS. In my personal experience, the people that I saw, 

they protected me. I did a tour of the entire city with them. I 

talked to innumerable activists. I mean, I am a journalist for a long 

time. I can tell when I am being gamed or somebody is giving me 

a statement that is coerced or not 100 percent truthful. 

Mr. HIGGINS. Did you use the number 39 units or militias? 

Mr. WEISS. This was way before that program was inaugurated, 

or I should say before the program gained enough——

Mr. HIGGINS. In your experience, is the Free Syrian Army or was 

the Free Syrian Army a cohesive, monolithic group? 

Mr. WEISS. At the time, there were a lot of different rebel units, 

but they had a common objective. Now, they were insufficiently 

backed. You want to talk about external support. 

Look, here are the facts, I have been to Turkey many times. All 

these weapons have been pouring in from Libya, Saudi Arabia, 

Qatar, Kuwait, you name it. But they sit in warehouses. And you 

have Western intelligence officers going through the warehouses 

with a manifest saying, ‘‘Yes, you can have this. No, you can’t have 

that.’’ The price of bullets in Syria went up astronomically when 

the insurgency was in its second or third year, okay? They fire 

their ammunition. They run out. Then they have to come back and 

say, ‘‘Mother, may I,’’ to get more. All the while they are facing 

down fighter jets, barrel bombs, Scud missiles, sarin gas. 

You are asking these rebels—Derek Harvey, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who anatomized the Iraqi insurgency, 

put it best: We are asking them to fight five different enemies at 

once with slingshots. And you wonder why they have descended 

into chaos or, in many respects, defected over to al-Qaeda or over 

to ISIS. 

Mr. HIGGINS. We spent, the United States spent about $1⁄2 billion, about $500 million, trying to train and equip a moderate fighting force that was vetted through the United States of Free Syrian 

Army representatives. Was that inaccurate or insincere? 

Mr. WEISS. Well, that was the program I referred to, Pentagon’s 

train and equip. As computer programmers say, the bug was a feature, not an accident, right? The conceptualization of the program 

was completely flawed. The raison d’etre of all Syrian rebels is to 

go after the regime, not ISIS. They say, ‘‘We will get to ISIS eventually, they are our enemy.’’

There is another program. We say that these groups were vetted. 

Yeah, the rank-and-file soldiers were vetted. But guess what, I 

have done deep reporting on this and I helped bury the program 

because it was so flawed and tainted. The commanders, the brigade 

commanders we were sending in to lead these guys had not been 

properly trained or vetted. And it is any wonder that they took our 

materiel and sold it to al-Qaeda? 

So this is the program that, frankly, I opposed from the very beginning, because you have to understand the culture, you have to 

understand what these people are going through. 

Mr. HIGGINS. You make a good point. 

Mr. Boot, I just wanted to, on Iraq, you have advocated for a 

Sunni Regional Government that would be autonomous, protected 

by its own militia, and guaranteed by the United States. You also 

67

suggested in your testimony the 30,000 or 40,000 U.S. troops on 

the ground in Iraq to fight with Sunnis and that we would train 

and arm the Sunnis in Iraq. As you know, the United States spent $24 billion, $25 billion 

training an Iraqi Army of some 240,000 fighters, including security 

and police forces. That failed miserably. How does this work 

logistically? And how does that affect the relationship if, in fact, it 

matters, with the Shia-led government. 

Mr. BOOT. Well, I would say, based on my personal experience 

on numerous trips to Iraq going back to 2003, that our train and 

equip program for the Iraqi Security Forces was actually working 

pretty well until we completely pulled out in 2011. And what happened after that is that the Shiite sectarian regime in Baghdad 

completely corrupted and perverted the security forces, which is 

why when ISIS rose up and struck, the security forces fell apart. 

At the moment, what we have been doing basically is we have 

been trying to pour new wine into old bottles. We have been trying 

to provide support for the Iraqi Security Forces as if they still exist 

in their old pre-2011 from. But the reality is that they don’t. They 

remain hopelessly compromised by the Iranians and the Shiite 

sectarians who really run the regime there. And most of the energy 

of the government has been poured not into standing up nonsectarian Iraqi Security Forces, but rather in creating these popular mobilization forces, which are Shiite militias effectively under 

the control of Iran. 

Now you hear from the regime in Baghdad that they don’t want 

U.S. troops in Iraq to fight ISIS. Well, of course they don’t want 

U.S. troop because that would interfere with Iranian designs to 

dominate the Shiite heartland of Iraq. 

Mr. HIGGINS. Let me ask you this. The name of Qasem Soleimani 

is often invoked. He is a guy that clearly gave Nouri al-Maliki his 

final term. He is a guy that has demonstrated extraordinary influence with the Shia government with his control of the Shia militias. He probably saved Bashar al-Assad in Syria in the final hour 

by actually traveling there and conducting ground forces on the 

ground. 

You know, going in there and propping up the Sunnis by promising or committing to a regional government, does that not necessarily—I am not saying that—I am not defending him in any 

way, shape, or form, the current government or the previous government in Iraq, because I think that whole experiment has been 

a huge, huge failure for a number of reasons. We have empowered 

the very people that we are trying to push back. But does that not 

necessarily sow the seeds of a new civil war between Shia and 

Sunni in Iraq? 

Mr. BOOT. Well, you already have a civil war going on in Iraq. 

What I am suggesting is to create a more durable balance of power 

that will actually keep the peace. What I am suggesting is that if 

we create, whether working through Baghdad or directly on our 

own, if we create the Sunni Regional Government that would be 

protected by its own Sons of Iraq militia and ultimately by the 

guarantee of American air power and American support, I think 

that could create a balance of power, because essentially you would 

have the Sunnis in control of the Sunni area, the Shiites in control 

68

of the Shiite area, the Kurds in control of the Kurdish area, and 

you would have a more peaceful situation of the kind that actually 

existed in 2011 before we left Iraq. 

At the moment, of course, what you have is the most radical and 

extreme Shiites in control of the Shiite areas, ISIS in control of the 

Sunni areas, and the Kurds, fairly moderate Kurds, in control of 

their own areas. 

The bottom line is that the Sunnis have no reason to fight ISIS 

if they think that ISIS is going to be replaced by the kind of Shiite 

tyranny that they have known after 2011. You have got to give 

them a reason to fight ISIS. And, basically, the reason is you have 

to give them a political end state that they would be satisfied with, 

and the only one that I could foresee right now is some kind of autonomy, which is not going to be easy to do. 

And they are not going to trust us very well because they feel 

like we abandoned them in 2011. But if we show that we are willing to help them, if we are willing to put some troops on the battlefield to work with them, and if we are willing to keep troops long 

term in, let’s say, the KRG, maybe in Anbar, and somewhere else, 

I think that might give the Sunnis enough confidence and might 

create a more stable end state under this loose Federal structure 

in Iraq. I think, at this point, that is really the only good bet that 

we have. 

And simply continuing to support the Shiite sectarian regime in 

Baghdad, as we are doing now, even sending them F–16s, that 

doesn’t make any sense because essentially what we are doing is 

we are subsidizing the Iranian power grab in Iraq, where our Air 

Force is basically acting as the air force for the Iranian militias. 

That is not helping to defeat ISIS. That is only helping to entrench 

Iran more deeply in Iraq. 

Mr. HIGGINS. Just a final thought, Mr. Chairman. We have been 

dealing with this issue, whether it is the Foreign Affairs Committee, the whole committee, the subcommittee, joint committees of 

Homeland Security, Foreign Affairs. And it is like Tom Friedman 

used to say, he would go to the Middle East and he would say, ‘‘I 

have traveled this area, I have studied it, I have written about it, 

it is all very clear to me now: What a mess.’’

But I think the point is there is a book by Marwan Muasher 

called ‘‘The Second Arab Awakening,’’ and in it he argues that the 

Middle East it a very pluralistic society. And Bashar al-Assad in 

Syria is an Alawite, which is a variant of Shia, and it is not that 

everybody supports him, it is that the minority groups that gravitate to him are afraid that they will get slaughtered if a Sunni government takes over in revenge. 

And that is a big part of the problem in the Middle East. So long 

as there is a zero-sum game, the sum will always be zero. And unless and until minority rights are actually respected and guaranteed in some kind of document, not even a constitution or a preamble, whatever. 

You know, I look at the situation in Northern Ireland, although 

it is not perfect today, but you took two warring factions as part 

of the Good Friday Accord and they both had to denounce violence. 

You know, there was mutuality. They had to take risks. Gerry 

Adams of Sinn Fein, his life was not threatened from without, it 

69

was threatened from within because they were moving away from 

a physical force tradition. 

And I think until you have that kind of breakthrough with real 

leaders that have a vision for Middle East peace, you are going to 

have a continuation of this horrible situation from which there are 

nothing but bad decisions for the United States. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you for that insight. 

Ms. Kelly. 

Ms. KELLY. Since my day has started, it seems like I have been 

in meetings dealing with this topic. And one thing that came up 

was about Turkey and their questionable partnership, are they 

really true partners. Another meeting I was in, they spoke about 

how porous their borders are and a lot of things are going through 

Turkey that are causing problems for the United States and others. 

What do you think that we can do to truly get them committed 

to defeating ISIS, or what can NATO do, if you think they aren’t 

true partners or really committed? 

Mr. SANDERSON. Thank you, Congresswoman. I would support 

your suggestion that they have not been true partners. From day 

one, they have facilitated the movement of extremist fighters 

through their border to fight Kurds and to fight the Assad regime. 

Fighting the Assad regime is a good goal, but fighting the Kurds 

has not been, and they are our best partner on the ground. 

They have tightened their borders a little bit, but they still see 

these elements, these extremist Islamist fighters coming in as 

doing their bidding against Kurds in particular. They do have a big 

border, but they have allowed these fighters, fighters I have interviewed, fighters that have been treated in Turkish hospitals, and 

I have seen those medical records and I have seen those fighters, 

they still ply the borders from Turkey’s side. 

I do not know what we can do to turn the screws on them. They 

seem to have an awful lot of leverage. The President has publicly 

upbraided them for not doing all that they can. But we take a lot 

of advantage from using the Incirlik Air Force Base there. That is 

part of the deal we have with Turkey. 

Unfortunately, I think they hold a lot of the cards. And as powerful as the U.S. can be, in this area, the Turks are very much a tier 

1 actor and they can call a lot of the shots. But they are not being 

nearly as helpful as they could be. 

Ms. KELLY. That is very disappointing. 

Anyone else have a comment? 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. Congresswoman, thanks for the question. I think it is excellent. 

I think that Turkey has taken a very dark turn. In addition to 

what Mr. Sanderson has said, I would point to two factors that are 

worth looking into. One is Turkish charities that have been supporting extremist factions throughout the world. There is a lot of 

information on that. And the second thing is I would look into recent U.N. delisting of extremists who were hosted in Turkey, including Mohammed Islambouli, who, according to open source reporting, is a high-level figure in the Khorasan Group, which is associated with al-Qaeda. 

I think that Turkey is not supporting ISIS. I think they are supporting al-Qaeda factions. And that points to one other thing that 

70

I think is worth raising. Mr. Sanderson referred earlier, in the 

Q&A, to the 16-year-old he spoke to who left ISIS because ISIS 

conscripted him to fight against Nusra. The Nusra Front is the alQaeda affiliate. As Mr. Sanderson said, the Nusra Front is very 

popular in Syria. 

So while we wouldn’t like it to be this way, dealing with the 

problem set of al-Qaeda I think is actually even more complex than 

dealing with the problem set of ISIS. And our moderate rebels have 

been helping al-Qaeda to take ground. I mean, this is something 

that I wish were not the case. But since the Russian bombing started, U.S. officials have been very open about that in the media. 

They have named areas where moderate rebels were bombed, such 

as Idlib and Hama, and those correlate with areas where Nusra 

has control, and Jaish al-Fatah, which is the coalition it is a part 

of, but where it is the major faction. 

Now, I agree with what Mr. Weiss said, which is that if you look 

at it from the rebel perspective, I don’t think this makes them terrible people. I mean, when you are faced with enemies on all sides, 

you are going to find temporary marriages of convenience. 

The real question I have is, are we going to be able to clean this 

up in some way? Or are we helping al-Qaeda to take ground only 

to create another mess? I think it is something that really deserves 

a hearing both with advocates, such as Mr. Weiss, of arming the 

rebel factions and also those who are opposed to it. Because what 

I see deeply disturbs me, and I also think it is actually a violation 

of U.S. law. 

Mr. WEISS. I agree with everything Daveed said, including Turkey’s dark turn. You will recall the U.S. Special Forces raid that 

killed Abu Sayyaf, I think somewhat erroneously referred to as 

ISIS’ oil minister or CFO, some of the best reporting done on the 

aftermath of that raid was done by a friend of mine at the Guardian, Martin Chulov, who said the intelligence that the U.S. took 

back from that compound has very much implicated the Turkish 

Government in all kinds of conversations and discussions with senior ISIS officials. Turkish businessmen have been buying more oil 

from ISIS than even Bashar al-Assad, who remains one of the chief 

financiers of ISIS through the energy economy trade. 

I think that this is exactly as Daveed said, let the Islamists and 

the jihadists come in and let them be the commandos if NATO 

doesn’t want to have it. Assad will take it by hook or by crook. 

I have traveled the Syrian border from Turkey. I can give you 

a funny anecdote or two. There was a native from Homs, Syria, 

wearing a keffiyeh, who was stopped by the Turkish Gendarmerie 

and questioned, interrogated for 20 minutes because the guy didn’t 

think he was Syrian. I went across, no problem. So apparently I 

look more Syrian than someone from Homs. 

Another journalist friend of mine who is Indian was actually 

stopped once. He has been across that border two dozen times. And 

the last time he was stopped and arrested, he convinced the Turks 

that he was a Syrian refugee. I guess he had dark skin. They gave 

him a refugee card. Now he can go back and forth as he likes. He 

is a British journalist too, but from India by heritage. 

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It is a sieve, that border, and it is a sieve not because it is so 

difficult to invigilate, but because the Turks have chosen to look 

the other way. 

With respect to the rebels, I want to be very clear. David 

Petraeus, not exactly a squish on radical jihadism, Sunni or Shia, 

made a very controversial comment actually to the Daily Beast, my 

publication, several months ago. He said, look, there are elements 

within Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the official al-Qaeda franchise in 

Syria, that we can peel away to work with us. 

Now, this was remarkable for two reasons. Number one, you will 

recall the awakening/surge period in Iraq. The only group that the 

U.S. refused to work with in the Sunni insurgency constellation 

was al-Qaeda in Iraq. There were every other group, whether nationalist, Islamist, or even, frankly, borderline jihadists, who had 

been on Tuesday bombing U.S. compounds or military checkpoints 

or forward operating bases, on Wednesday receiving U.S. weaponry 

and close air support because they had become essentially a paramilitary squad hunting and killing al-Qaeda in Iraq. 

A same dynamic exists today in Syria. Now, Daveed is right, 

rebel groups that we would consider, quote/unquote, moderate or 

nationalistic or at least not so bad in the Islamist orientation, work 

cheek by jowl with Nusra or work at an operational tactical capacity with Nusra because they think Nusra, frankly, most of them 

are Syrians, they are not so bad, and, yes, the West demonizes 

them all as al-Qaeda, but we know a lot of these people. 

There are interviews. I can acquaint every member on this panel 

with many of them. People who went from the anti-Assad protest 

movement to some to FSA battalion to Jabhat al-Nusra to ISIS, 

then defecting. What does that tell us? Not everybody is born a diehard ideologue. Not everybody who is a jihadi yesterday will remain one tomorrow. There is a lot of human capital that can still 

be worked with. 

But, again, you have to be persuasive. You have to show the 

Sunni Arabs of that country that we have their back, that their 

plight matters to us. And right now, they think the opposite is 

true. And that, ultimately, in addition to Assad’s depravity and the 

IRGC’s depravity and Lebanese Hezbollah’s depravity, is the greatest recruitment drive for ISIS. 

Mr. BOOT. If I could just jump in and make one fast point. I 

think we have really been hurting ourselves. We have been in this 

cycle in Syria since 2011 when we say, ‘‘Well, we are concerned 

about who the rebels are, we are concerned that some of the rebels 

are radical Islamists, so we don’t really want to help them, we are 

going to stand back and watch what happens.’’

Well, what happens is exactly what my colleagues have been describing, which is that when we are not doing more to help the 

moderates, that only helps the extremists, because the extremists 

find support from other countries, from outside backers, what have 

you, whether it is Turkey, Qatar, whoever, winds up backing the 

more radical elements and those are the ones that get in power. 

And then a few years down the road we are saying, ‘‘Oh, my 

gosh, where are the moderate rebels? They don’t exist anymore.’’ 

Well, what do you expect would happen if we are not providing the 

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same kind of backing to the moderates that other groups are providing to the extremists? 

But to underline the point that Michael has just made, and I 

think it is an important point, which is that a lot the people who 

are with the al-Nusra Front or who are with ISIS are not necessarily ideologues, they are not necessarily fanatical jihadists, 

they are just opportunists looking for a way to arm themselves and 

to defend themselves against the Bashar al-Assad regime. If we can 

offer them an alternative way to do that which doesn’t involve the 

imposition of this extreme Salafist brand of Islam on Syria, which 

is not very popular with ordinary Syrians—I mean, ISIS is out 

there punishing people for smoking. I mean, if you travel in this 

part of the world, everybody smokes. This is not a popular position 

to take. 

So people are not embracing groups like ISIS because they love 

the ideology. They are embracing it because this is the only way 

they can survive. But if we can offer them a different way to survive, I think you will see that a lot of these opportunists will leave 

the ranks of the al-Nusra Front, will leave the ranks of ISIS just 

as quickly as they left the ranks of the Taliban in the fall 2001. 

When we started fighting against Taliban, all of a sudden all this 

formidable support that the Taliban had dissolved within a matter 

of months because people decided that was no longer the winning 

side. Unfortunately, at the moment, we have not convinced anybody that our side is the winning side. 

Mr, KELLY. I am sure my time is up. 

Mr. POE [presiding]. I want to thank all the gentlemen. 

I would like each member that wishes to make some brief closing 

comments. We will start with the ranking member. 

Mr. KEATING. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And thank all of you. 

We have just scratched the surface of all these issues, but it was 

important to do because I think it demonstrated how complex this 

is. And simplistic solutions that some people offer can be counterproductive. 

One of the dynamics I learned, and I don’t have an answer, I 

think in hearings like this sometimes you walk away with more 

questions, which is good. But the narrative that if we are just there 

and have more of a military presence on the ground that suddenly 

Sunni Arabs are going to feel we have their back and they are 

going to all of a sudden come up in arms and join us, I don’t think 

it is that simple, based on what Mr. Weiss was talking about. 

There are other alternatives besides us, like al-Nusra. They are 

there. And it is not that simple. 

I will leave one thought that we didn’t get into that I think, with 

all of the complexities of what will be challenges, there is one thing 

that we can really—not us, but our allies in Europe can do—they 

can start taking passenger name records for their own security. 

They can start checking more than 30 percent of the people at the 

Schengen exterior border. 

I know there are different laws and different privacy laws in 

those countries. Yet, I would hope that in the wake of the terrible 

tragedy, the second terrible tragedy in France, that maybe those 

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mediately. I hope that happens. At every opportunity, I am going 

to continue to press my European colleagues to do that. It has languished since 2013, the bill to deal with the passenger name 

records. 

So I hope they can move forward on this. They will help their 

own security. I understand and respect their sovereignty. But they 

also by making these changes help keep us more secure here as 

well. 

So I thank all of you for—this is a very good hearing and all of 

you were great contributors to do that. 

So I want to thank our witnesses and yield back. 

Mr. POE. Thank the gentleman. 

Mr. Rohrabacher from California, closing comments. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes, thank you very much. And it has been 

enlightening. 

And, Mr. Boot, let me just suggest that I think your plan for a 

Sunni Regional Government and that part of your plan is good. It 

is excellent. It is probably the only, I would say, real plan that I 

have heard thrown onto the table and it has a lot of validity to it. 

So I hope that the powers that be will take that seriously, and I 

will be talking about it myself, although I am not a power that be, 

I am just here. 

Let me ask you this. All over the Internet there is an interview 

with General Wesley Clark, former, I believe, NATO commander, 

who immediately after—a day or two after 9/11 went to the Pentagon. And one of his generals he worked with over his life visited 

him. And the general confided that they were not, this is a couple 

days after 9/11, they were consumed with the plan to move forward 

with a forceful regime change against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, not 

Afghanistan, but against Saddam Hussein. 

And then he came back about a couple weeks later, the same 

general said, ‘‘Well, are you still moving forward on Saddam Hussein?’’ And according to General Clark, he said, ‘‘Well, actually, my 

friend then said, no, we are now preparing to forcefully remove 

from office the five or six governments in the Middle East that are 

deemed to be pro-Russian, including Libya, including Assad, including Saddam Hussein, et cetera.’’

Now, have any of you heard that even after 9/11, that our Government was targeting its activity on that type of—for that type of 

a mission, to eliminate, basically regime change for those regimes 

that had been close to Russia during the Cold War? 

Mr. SANDERSON. No, Congressman. 

Mr. ROHRABACHER. You haven’t heard? Okay. So have you heard 

Wesley Clark’s statement on this? No one has heard it. 

I would suggest that you—I am not—listen, Wesley Clark may 

be making it up. I doubt if a man of his stature would make this 

up. But I would suggest you take a look at it. 

And with that said, one last point on Assad, and that is I know 

these players. I have never met the son Assad. I did meet his father once a long, long time ago. And Assad in those days was 

known as the guy who protected Christians in that part of the 

world. But I know the different players. I don’t know one player 

there in the Middle East that if their government was being confronted with an uprising that was being supported by a Shiite govVerDate 0ct 09 2002 10:47 Dec 18, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00077 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 F:\WORK\_TNT\120215\97752 SHIRL
74

ernment, that that government wouldn’t be just as brutal as what 

Assad has been in suppressing his regime. 

It is okay, listen, I want to say all of you gave me some good insights today. And I remember, as I say, Mr. Weiss gave me a personal, how do you say, briefing one time and it was excellent. All 

of you did an excellent job. Thank you for actually giving us something to think about. 

Mr. POE. The Chair will recognize the gentleman from New York. 

Mr. HIGGINS. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross, you had indicated in your 

opening statement that there is a need to challenge the ISIS narrative of strength, and that ISIS has vulnerabilities and we have 

to make those vulnerabilities work against them. Do you want to 

elaborate? 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. Yes. So their key vulnerability, the one 

that actually holds the potential to completely reverse the ISIS’ 

brand, is the territoriality aspect of their mission. When they declared the caliphate, one of the things that they had to do was 

maintain a legitimate caliphate. If their caliphate reaches the point 

where it is nonviable, then they have a lot of explaining to do to 

their constituents. 

A second thing is they have a narrative that has rested so much 

on strength. That is why they don’t have a problem burning men 

alive, drowning them in swimming pools, and putting it on a video, 

beheading people on video, talking selfies with severed heads. It is 

a narrative of strength. It works while they are winning. 

We saw a complete brand reversible previously with al-Qaeda in 

Iraq, which was very similar—which ISIS was born out of—very 

similar to ISIS. Back in the 2005 to 2007 period, they were one of 

the strongest players. They were the dominant force in Anbar province. They committed massive atrocities. And then when they started to lose, suddenly the narrative shifted from one of strength to 

one of them having overplayed their hands. Al-Qaeda, in fact, 

views AQI’s loss as devastating to their organization. They have 

been trying to rebrand themselves ever since. 

In terms of their narrative of strength, they have at times exaggerated their victories in ways that they have gotten our media to 

echo. They claimed falsely that they controlled the city of Derna in 

Libya, something we now know definitively was not true, but CNN, 

BBC, and other major outlets reported that they controlled Derna 

when they actually didn’t. They have experienced four major reversals in Africa, the most important of which is the Algerians basically wiping out the entirety of the ISIS branch in their country. 

They also got kicked out of Derna by the Derna Mujahideen Shura 

Council. They also had their defector organization from a militant 

organization called Al-Mourabitoun experience significant losses at 

the hands of the al-Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who went 

after them ruthlessly. And they have experienced significant losses 

at the hands of Shabaab’s internal security apparatus as they have 

tried to establish a presence there. 

The point being, they have a lot of losses that people just aren’t 

aware of. And I think that one of the key things our own information operation should do is focus on this narrative of strength. 

Now, right now doing so will not be particularly helpful, right? 

They just executed the Paris attacks, the Sinai attack. They are in 

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a position of strength right now, regardless of their loss of Sinjar 

and other territorial losses. But there have been ebbs and flows for 

ISIS. And right now they are at a period that is quite good for 

them. It is not necessarily going to last, and we need to focus on 

shattering their narrative of strength. 

Mr. POE. I do want to thank you once again. Fascinating, depressing. And I think it is incumbent upon us, Members of Congress, work with the administration, that we look at the big picture 

of what is taking place with ISIS, the growth, and then have a response, a military response partially, a political response, and important also that we understand the consequences of every act and 

failure to act. What is the long-term consequence of what we do as 

a Nation regarding ISIS, how it affects not just us but the whole 

chaos in the Middle East. I think that is a big job ahead of us. 

And I appreciate, personally, and the committee appreciates your 

insight specifically about what is really taking place in the Middle 

East. 

Thank you very much. The subcommittee is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 3:35 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

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