Dr. Sebastian Gorka, an expert in counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and irregular warfare, told The Cipher Brief that ISIS has superseded al-Qaeda as the world’s leading jihadist terror organization. Furthermore, Gorka explained that the U.S. is currently losing the war against ISIS due to its inability to effectively counter ISIS’ strategy.
The Cipher Brief: What makes ISIS different from other terrorist groups?
Sebastian Gorka: ISIS is an insurgency that holds territory. It’s not just a terrorist group. It is incredibly rich—$500 million income in last year—and incredibly good at recruiting foreign fighters—22 thousand in just one year. They are not a JV team in any way, shape, or form. They have succeeded where every other jihadi group has failed in the last 90 years: they have successfully re-established the caliphate, the theocratic empire of Islam.
TCB: In light of the Paris attacks, should the U.S. rethink its strategy to combat ISIS?
SG: Absolutely. We have to destroy ISIS by empowering local allies, especially Egypt and Jordan, deploy special forces advisors down to at least the brigade level, and we have to engage in a strategic level, counter-ideological campaign that effectively delegitimizes its narrative of holy war.
TCB: ISIS released a video threating attacks against Washington, DC. How can the U.S. government better prepare for possible attacks against the homeland?
SG: The threat is fundamentally a human intelligence challenge. It’s not just a technical intelligence problem. This isn’t the Cold War, and it’s not just a question of photographing tank positions with satellites or a U2 spy plane overflight. We have to have the capabilities to penetrate ISIS’ recruiting channels and its networks in America, the Middle East and elsewhere. We have to find those individuals before they weaponize themselves or before they radicalize. It is a human intelligence challenge.
There are some very interesting things that can be done. Our company, The Threat Knowledge Group, supports the U.S. government and elements of the intelligence community have looked at all of the terrorist-linked arrests in the U.S. in the 20 month period since the Caliphate was declared last June. We found something very interesting. Of the 82 people who have been arrested or killed in the U.S., more than 40 percent broadcast on social media their jihadi affiliation or their pro-jihadi stance. I was one of the experts for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Boston marathon bombing trial. Months and months before the Tsarnaev brothers detonated those two pressure cooker bombs at the marathon, the younger brother was actually posting on Facebook and Twitter the black flag of jihad and his sympathies for the global jihadi movement. The social media domain is going to be crucial in protecting Americans.
The threat isn’t just something we have to rely upon the central government to deal with. It’s up to every single American to protect themselves and to take measures to secure themselves and their loved ones. I’m now an American, but I grew up in the U.K. during the bloody years of the IRA. When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, if anybody put down a plastic bag, let alone a backpack, on the subway or the bus, within seconds somebody would say, “Hey, whose bag is that?” And if there was no answer that bus or train would be stopped and would be evacuated. So Americans shouldn’t be waiting on Uncle Sam to protect them. Americans have to protect themselves. We are all the first line of defense.
TCB: How effective have the U.S. and Western Europe been in countering ISIS and its ideology?
SG: It’s really depressing. On the one hand, the good news is that over the last 14 years we have demonstrated that the United States is preeminent in the kinetic application of force. Nobody comes close to us. When you give us the GPS coordinates of a high-valued target anywhere in the world, we are pretty much able to neutralize that individual in 24 hours or maximum 36. If you look at the bin Laden raid, incredible. We were deep into Pakistan, and we were closer to the border with India than we were to the border with Afghanistan. That’s how deep we were. We sent in 70 operatives, lost a helicopter, and still managed to execute the mission flawlessly and kill bin Laden. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of physical force, we are superb.
But we’re losing the war, because this isn’t only a conflict measured in terms of body bags and destruction on the ground. Destroying one of these units is easy—anyone can do that. But victory is impossible if you're not targeting the enemy's strategy. We haven’t even begun to do that, because the enemy’s strategy is based upon a concept of global jihad. It’s based upon an Islamic ideology of holy war. This administration—but also the prior administration—has attempted to censor the truth about why these people do what they do, whether it was in Paris or whether it was the Boston bombings, or the 9/11 hijackings, or the Fort Hood shooting. They do it for ideological reasons. It’s not because—as the State Department seems to believe—they are unemployed, or they are uneducated. That’s just wrong.
Take the 19 hijackers or Jihadi John, for example. They were all middle class, well-educated individuals with advanced degrees. None of them were born in a refugee camp in Palestine. We have to understand they are mobilized because of ideology. We have to have a strategic counter to that. We have to destroy their message of holy war and caliphate. Unfortunately, in the last 14 years, we’ve been AWOL when it comes to the counter-ideological attack against the global jihadi movement.
TCB: How has the rise of ISIS affected the global al-Qaeda movement?
SG: The analogy that I use is that for more than a decade, al-Qaeda was the Coca-Cola of soft drinks in the jihadi world — the brand leader. Al-Qaeda crushed everybody else. It had the red can with the white writing that everybody knew. In the space of just a couple of months, maybe a couple of years, that brand has been destroyed. ISIS has stolen it. ISIS is now the Coca-Cola of global jihad and al-Qaeda has been relegated to being the RC Cola of the soft drinks world. That’s what is really stunning, because ISIS actually came out of the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq (AQI), which was run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before we killed him, and then it was taken over by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Al-Baghdadi had a split with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda, and he just decided to go his own way. And he’s basically made al-Qaeda irrelevant.
Remember when the President famously called ISIS the JV team? He couldn’t be more wrong. ISIS is the team that is going to the Super Bowl. If there is anybody who is the JV team today, it is al-Qaeda or perhaps depressingly, it’s us, because we’re not being serious about this threat.
So in the case of how to be an insurgent brand, it’s similar to how Uber took down the yellow cab. ISIS is incredibly impressive, unfortunately.
