U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has branded its members psychopathic monsters, Francois Hollande calls them barbarians, and David Cameron describes them as a death cult. But Islamic State (IS) is much more than that.
As newly obtained documents demonstrate, IS is also made up of bureaucrats, civil servants and jobsworths. Hundreds if not thousands of cadres have set themselves to work creating rules and regulations on everything from fishing and dress codes to the sale of counterfeit brands and university admission systems.
About 340 official documents, notices, receipts, and internal memos seen by The Guardian show that they have been trying to rebuild everything — from roads to nurseries to hotels to marketplaces, from the Euphrates to the Tigris. They have also established 16 centralised departments, including one for public health and a natural resources department that oversees oil and antiquities.
This has been the plan all along. A 24-page statecraft blueprint obtained by The Guardian , written in the months after IS’s declaration of a ‘caliphate’, shows how deliberate the state-building exercise has been, and how central it is to its overall aims. Examined together, the IS papers build a highly detailed picture of what is going on in the militants’ putative state.
In the early days after the declaration of the ‘caliphate’ in June 2014, the emphasis was on regulations on dress and behaviour.
Then around the turn of this year, IS appeared to seize the momentum, issuing a slew of documents directly relating to state building and job creation.
It posted notices advertising job opportunities within the newly established department of zakat or tithes — akin to a social services department.
On the education front, there were announcements about the beginning of the school term, the opening of a kindergarten and recruitment for teachers.
During the past five months, there has been a noticeable rise in the number of documents relating to security measures and military mobilisation; IS is becoming increasingly paranoid.
There has been a complete prohibition on private Wi-Fi networks, notices have been issued to checkpoints to crack down on smuggling of gold, copper and iron, and at the start of October the group issued an amnesty for military deserters — presumably because it needs more soldiers.
That is the general chronological progression of IS, but there are several themes that cut across this timeline. In trying to assert its jurisdiction across what were once two separate countries, IS is engaged in a programme of unification. To that end, IS has created a new district, Euphrates Province, which falls over both sides of the international boundary, and has been busily issuing regulations like the rest of the group’s dozen or so provinces.
Where IS struggles on this front is with tertiary education — the differences in the Syrian and Iraqi secondary systems have made it too hard to create a unified university admissions system — and the currency, where it still deals in Syrian pounds, Iraqi dinars and the ubiquitous U.S. dollar.
In wider economic matters, IS appears to have little patience with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and has been enforcing rent and price controls on a whole variety of goods and services, from caesarean sections ($70) to sugar (70 cents per kg). But the caliphate is not implementing Soviet-style levels of economic control. It allows private citizens to own property, run businesses and carry out state projects such as road building.
One of the most striking documents reveals how IS is making its money. A six-page monthly financial statement for Deir ez-Zor province for January 2015 shows total monthly revenue was $8.4 million — handsome for a terrorist group, but pitiful for a state.
Taxes generated 23.7 per cent of its income while oil and gas sales made up 27.7 per cent. If that figure is correct then, daily revenues from IS’s most oil-rich province yielded $66,400 dollars a day — nothing like estimates of $3 million a day that have been bandied around.
But topping both oil sales and taxes are “confiscations”. IS has been fining smugglers of outlawed goods such as cigarettes — including the electronic kind — and auctioning off property seized from designated enemies of the state. This activity made up a whopping 45 per cent of its income, almost as much as natural resources and taxes put together.
On the expenditure side, 63.5 per cent of the province’s cash was spent on soldiers’ salaries and upkeep for military bases. And only 17.7 per cent was used for public services.
The last and strongest of the themes that comes through from the documents is IS’s desire to portray itself as a utopia for true believers. This can be split into two; a drive to create positives and attempts to do away with negatives.
To that second end it has initiated an anti-corruption drive. There are standard complaint forms which even have suggestion boxes. And at some point in 2014 IS opened a “complaints office” in its self-declared capital of Raqqa.
IS have also been busy promoting the positives of life under the caliphate and buoying morale. It regularly awards $100 prizes for excellence in religious studies and in May, it doled out free passes to an amusement park and its newly renovated five-star hotel in Mosul, to celebrate its military victory which saw the group take the ancient city of Palmyra from Assad’s forces.
Of course, the theory of statecraft has been sorely tested by the sobering realities of aerial bombardment from without and disenchantment from within. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
