VICE (2013) s03e12 Episode Script
Enemies at the Gates & Global Jihad
(chanting) Shane Smith: This week on "Vice," inside Saudi Arabia's war on terror.
(crowd chanting) Smith: And then, why foreign fighters are joining the Islamic State.
This Islamic State receives between 2000 to two and a half thousand people every month.
(alarm ringing) They represent a worldview that is unacceptable.
We're gonna beat that worldview out of them 500 pounds at a time.
(siren wailing) They have about The majority are terrorists.
We just got to the Peshmerga base, right on the front lines.
ISIS territory is just a mile away.
America's alliance with Saudi Arabia is critical to our strategy in the Middle East, not to mention our economy here at home.
We depend on Saudi oil, and they depend on our military and American-made weapons.
Now partly because of that alliance, Saudi Arabia's increasingly surrounded by the same enemies that the US is trying to defeat.
On their northern border, they're fighting with ISIS, and to the south, Al Qaeda, the Houthi rebels, and another group of ISIS affiliates are all threatening the Kingdom.
So we sent Suroosh Alvi to get a rare on-the-ground look at the high-stakes fight against terrorism in the Arabian Peninsula.
So we're in Mecca.
This is the Masjid al-Haram, where the Kaaba is.
Whoever has control of this site arguably has control over the Muslim world, which is why ISIS wants nothing more than to come into Saudi Arabia and take this place over.
Mecca is to Islam what the Vatican is to the Catholic Church.
So for extremist groups like ISIS, who seek to create an Islamic caliphate, taking Mecca is like seizing Rome.
But according to the self-proclaimed caliph of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group's already there.
(Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi speaking foreign language) Suroosh: Just weeks after this announcement, footage of this shooting emerged, marking ISIS's first attack against a westerner on Saudi soil.
To combat the growing threat posed by ISIS, Saudi Arabia has invested $3.
4 billion dollars on a fence spanning the entire length of its border with Iraq.
But it might not be enough.
In January, ISIS militants broke through the fence and killed three Saudi border guards, including the border patrol commander.
We spoke to the new commander about the growing presence of ISIS inside Saudi Arabia.
(speaking foreign language) Do you think there are a lot of terrorist cells inside of Saudi Arabia? Suroosh: Shortly after this interview, ISIS conducted its first major attack inside the kingdom, killing at least 21 people and injuring more than a hundred.
But ISIS crossing into Saudi Arabia from the north isn't all the Kingdom has to worry about.
On their southern border with Yemen, they face not only ISIS, but also the Houthis, Al Qaeda, and a massive flow of weapons being smuggled into the country.
How many guns did you guys seize this year? (speaking foreign language) Suroosh: To deal with its increasingly hostile neighbors, Saudi Arabia recently made the largest foreign arms deal in United States history.
Roughly $100 billion of Saudi money is going to the American defense industry.
Saudi Arabia is now the largest arms importer in the world, which is convenient since the United States is the largest dealer.
(shouting) During our visit, the Saudis were keen to show us the wide variety of tools in their kit to help keep its citizens safe from attack.
From suicide bombings to airplane hijackings, they seemed to have every scenario covered.
(men shouting) But while the Saudis have made a very good show of fighting terrorism at home, they've often been accused of supporting extremism abroad.
15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudi nationals, as was Osama bin Laden.
Former Senator Bob Graham led the congressional inquiry into 9/11.
28 pages of this committee's report remain classified.
We spoke to him to find out why.
Who specifically does the report implicate? I can't answer that question since the report is still classified.
I can say that there appeared to be, uh, evidence that Saudi interest, including government interest, were providing financial and other support to at least some and possibly to all of the 19 hijackers who were in the United States.
This very important part of our final report has been withheld now for 13 years, and it is time you and any other interested person would be able to read and form your own judgment as to what this means in terms of the U.
S.
-Saudi relationship.
Suroosh: That relationship, firmly established at the end of World War II, is often characterized as oil for security.
The U.
S.
helps protect the Kingdom from external threats, and in exchange the Saudis provide a secure source of much-needed oil.
The United States spends about $50 billion a year on Saudi oil, but that doesn't necessarily buy their loyalty.
In late 2009, a leaked classified cable sent by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Even more tellingly, it went on to say that It specifically named notorious extremist organizations like the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hamas, and Al Qaeda, whose branch in Iraq spawned ISIS.
Do you think there is support for terrorism still coming from Saudi Arabia? I think that they were influential in the establishment of what is now ISIS.
Saudi Arabia is a symbol of everything we dislike in terms of a country: autocratic, brutal, willingness to keep its people under medieval subjugation.
And the Saudi government continues to be the primary supporter of one of the most extreme sects of Islam: Wahhabism.
Suroosh: Wahhabism is an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam that calls for a very literal interpretation of the Quran and a strict enforcement of Sharia law, considering non-adherents to be infidels.
It is the dominant form of Islam for both Saudi Arabia and ISIS.
To learn more about it, I spoke to Dr.
Tarek Masoud, a political scientist at Harvard University.
Wahhabism actually has two distinct strands.
You have the strand that we observe with ISIS, right, which is this kind of world-shattering idea that we need to destroy regimes that do not perfectly follow our vision of Islam and we need to erect a caliphate and Islamic state.
And they rely on the same kind of texts that the Saudi regime relies on.
The Saudi regime's version of Wahhabism shares a lot with that, but they believe that as long as the ruler is allowing you to practice Islam, upholds the prayer, upholds these basic tenets of Islam, it is forbidden to rebel against him.
And these different faces of Wahhabism have been promoted by the regime at different times.
For example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Saudis were actively promoting this idea that it is incumbent upon young men to go and wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Suroosh: The most famous of these Saudi jihadis was Osama bin Laden.
But the calls for jihad didn't end there.
(speaking foreign language) Suroosh: Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia made the same public appeal for jihad in the aftermath of the U.
S.
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this time against Americans.
(man speaking foreign language) Suroosh: It appears these calls have not fallen on deaf ears.
Saudi nationals have consistently been the largest group of foreign fighters joining Al Qaeda's efforts in Iraq since the beginning of the war in 2003.
I spoke with Dr.
Abdul Rahman Al-Hadlaq with the Interior Ministry about whether Wahhabism has any connection to the growth of Islamic extremism.
Does the Wahhabi educational system play a role somehow in these individuals who become extremists? I think there are some people questioning the relationship.
Suroosh: Despite the official party line, the facts tell another story.
Saudis spend about $2.
5 billion dollars every year to promote Wahhabism, and more Saudi nationals have joined ISIS than almost any other foreign country.
To find out why they come back to attack their own kingdom, we went to talk to some convicted Saudi terrorists.
We're driving into the al-Ha'ir prison in Riyadh.
It's a maximum-security facility.
They have about a thousand prisoners in here, of which the majority were in Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
I was allowed to speak with a Saudi ISIS member on the condition that he remained anonymous.
When you joined Islamic State, was it with the idea of fighting jihad against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? (speaking foreign language) Suroosh: So while the clerics fuel jihad against Americans, the Kingdom's alliance with Americans in places like Yemen and Iraq has put Saudi Arabia in the crosshairs of its own countrymen.
(gunfire) Suroosh: The problem is, as we learned from Khalid Al-Johani, a former prisoner at Guantanamo, once you've joined an extremist organization, there's little turning back.
Suroosh: And groups like ISIS are becoming even more adept at bringing new recruits down this one-way street.
(speaking foreign language) (Khalid speaking) Suroosh: The Saudi government is even having trouble controlling its own religious leaders.
Shortly before his death in January, King Abdullah scolded his senior clerics for not speaking out against ISIS.
(speaking foreign language) Suroosh: As a new Saudi king takes the throne, the classified content of the 9/11 Report looms large over the U.
S.
-Saudi relationship.
The 28 pages are going to come out.
It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
And when it does, it's going to require our government to reevaluate its relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Is Saudi Arabia a friend of America's? No.
If you can describe a friend as a country which has facilitated the most horrific attack against the United States since at least Pearl Harbor, a country which has been at the center of the continued support for new entities that are advancing the cause of jihadism, ISIS is a symptom.
We have the ability to destroy ISIS, but if that's all we do and we don't deal with the cause, the core, the source of ISIS' strength, then we can expect another organization under a different name but with the same motivations to take its place.
As we just saw, Saudi nationals are among the largest groups of foreign fighters who have joined up with ISIS.
But as the conflict drags on, more and more young men from western countries are actually enlisting in the Islamic State's combat forces.
When Vice News embedded with ISIS last August, we saw firsthand that some of the most devoted soldiers in the Islamic State's ranks were actually Muslims from Europe who left everything in the West behind to fight for the group.
(speaking foreign language) Now, an American-led coalition is trying to stop the Islamic State's expansion using air strikes and military advisors on the ground.
So we sent Gianna Toboni to find out whether or not we're truly making progress in the war on ISIS.
This is the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and it's now the only carrier with jets that are striking ISIS.
Every 50 seconds, this operation has new jets that are taking off to northern Iraq.
We met with the commander of the carrier operation, Admiral Andrew Lewis, to learn what the strategy is and how effective it's been.
My mission is to provide naval aviation forces over Iraq and Syria against ISIS.
Gianna: Is it working? It is working.
What do you think the timeline is, um, for when they can be defeated? Months to isolate, years to remove.
(alarm rings) Gianna: Action on the flight deck is constant.
Ordinance officers load the bombs in missiles, inspect the engines, pilots suit up, check the jet, then they launch.
I will say that in our missions, uh, we have been successful in achieving our objectives on a day-to-day basis.
Gianna: How is the accuracy? Well, the accuracy is-- is spot on.
It's almost 100%.
(high-pitched whistling) Man: We can sleep well at night knowing that these are bad people and they deserve what's coming to them.
They represent a worldview that is unacceptable to any reasonable or rational person.
We're gonna beat that worldview out of them 500 pounds at a time.
Gianna: Absolute confidence in these airstrikes isn't just coming from the men flying the missions.
ISIL has lost large areas it used to dominate.
We are pounding ISIL from the sky.
Gianna: But it's not clear that the thousands of strikes we have launched have won any permanent gains against ISIS, and as recently as May of this year, ISIS was still capable of seizing entire cities like Ramadi.
Part of how they've done this is by bolstering their ranks with a steady flow of new recruits from the West.
To understand the appeal of joining ISIS, we met Abu Ubaydillah, the head of a radical group in Denmark, where many young people have already left to fight.
(speaking foreign language) Gianna: And while the U.
S.
maintains that we're winning the war against ISIS, these young men told us the airstrikes are having the opposite effect.
(man speaking) So do you think that airstrikes are actually encouraging more people to travel to the Islamic State? (speaks) Do you guys have any friends who have-- who have gone to the Islamic State? (speaks) (speaks) Gianna: We heard this in several small cities and towns in Europe, where pockets of young men left seemingly overnight to join ISIS.
How many people do you know personally that have gone to Syria? (speaking foreign language) Do you remember seeing the guys who are now fighters in the Islamic State as students in here? Gianna: How many people from your community have traveled to fight in Syria? (speaking foreign language) Gianna: Have any of your friends left to fight in Syria? What held you back? Why haven't you gone? (speaking foreign language) Do you think that you would bring your family with you if you went? Gianna: And some Europeans have actually already left with their children, like Abdullah Al-Belgian, who named himself after the country he left behind.
Gianna: To understand why Europeans would want to leave the comforts of the West for ISIS territory, we met with two men who are vocal advocates of Westerners joining the fight.
(speaking foreign language) Gianna: That message comes from widely disseminated ISIS recruitment videos, which paint their so-called Islamic State as a utopia, and their gains in Iraq and Syria as just the first step in spreading Sharia law around the globe.
(man speaks foreign language) Gianna: To learn how ISIS has become the most daunting extremist group in recent history, we spoke to Aimen Dean who spent years working undercover inside Al Qaeda for British intelligence and is now in close contact with current ISIS members.
Islamic State receives-- according to smugglers who I talked to between now and then, receives between 2,000 to two and a half thousand people every month from across the globe.
You know, when people ask me like, "Why are they so appealing?" And I say, of course they are appealing.
Imagine, you know, "Come to the Islamic State.
"We will give you a sense of empowerment.
"We will give you a gun.
We will give you a purpose in life.
"You will be laying down your life as a building block "in this great structure called the Islamic State, "which will protect generations of Muslims yet to come.
" But those who are going to join the Islamic State, a follower of this ideology, is distorted and twisted.
If you tell someone, you know, "You can kill and you don't feel guilty about it.
"In fact, you'll be rewarded for it," you have no idea how much this kind of message could liberate that inner psychopath to the point where they can murder people without losing a single second of sleep at night.
The Islamic narrative is in crisis right now.
Gianna: And the source of this crisis is Iraq.
We went to the front lines 30 miles from Erbil, where the Kurdish military is fighting ISIS on a daily basis.
We just got to the Peshmerga base, right on the front lines.
ISIS territory is about just a mile away, and apparently they were taking on a ton of fire right before we got here, so, um, we're being safe, we're trying to stay under the sand bags, but still trying to get an eye.
Apparently, the ISIS flag is visible from here.
(man speaking foreign language) (rumbling) Gianna: That sound is an airstrike.
Right there, that's ISIS right there? Gianna: How often are you hearing the aircrafts and how often are you hearing the actual airstrikes? Gianna: Do you think you could successfully fight ISIS without the coalition airstrikes? Gianna: And still, the coalition's support may not be enough.
The Kurdish military agreed to show us a prison where they're holding over 400 ISIS militants.
A recently captured fighter told us the airstrikes haven't shaken the Islamic State's resolve.
(speaking foreign language) Gianna: So even as coalition forces continue to bomb ISIS from the sky, the global message from their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, endures.
Gianna: And in response, terrorist groups around the world are emerging and pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram has openly declared allegiance to the caliphate, and now groups affiliated with ISIS have a formidable presence in Libya and Egypt.
Their message is spreading, with militants from North Africa to Pakistan aligning themselves with the Islamic State's ideology.
As ISIS extends in to these territories, former FBI agent, Ali Soufan, is concerned about radicalized fighters returning to the West.
Is it easy for one of these jihadists to slip back into one of their countries after they've joined ISIS? Sure, I don't think we know everyone.
They have sleeper cells, so they can tell people, "Go and live your life back home "and wait for instructions.
" And when these networks will be activated in "volcanoes of jihad," as al-Baghdadi called it, that's yet to be seen.
Man: Our battle is a battle between faith and blasphemy.
Reporter: He detonated a suicide bomb in the city of Ramadi.
Even individuals who went to Syria or went to Iraq with good intentions, they have been exposed to significant amount of radicalization in a short period of time.
You see the massacres that happens.
The war crimes that's taken place, from executing people, to beheading people, to mass rape.
I mean, it's very difficult to bring an individual back to London or to Paris or to Brussels and say, "Hey, now you're normal again.
" Man: Until we put the black flag on top of Buckingham Palace, until we put the black flag on top of the White House, we will not stop and we will keep on fighting.
Even if a small percentage of these individuals want to go wacko when they go back to their countries, that will create a big problem for international security.
Gianna: Perhaps more concerning are the radicals who have never left home, but who are absorbing the group's ideology and plotting terror in the West, including a recent attach in Texas where two Americans opened fire at a event that featured cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.
ISIS publicly named them "soldiers of the caliphate.
" Ali: As the cliche goes, we have to be successful 100% of the time, they have to be successful only once.
Do we need another 9/11 to understand that that threat is real?
(crowd chanting) Smith: And then, why foreign fighters are joining the Islamic State.
This Islamic State receives between 2000 to two and a half thousand people every month.
(alarm ringing) They represent a worldview that is unacceptable.
We're gonna beat that worldview out of them 500 pounds at a time.
(siren wailing) They have about The majority are terrorists.
We just got to the Peshmerga base, right on the front lines.
ISIS territory is just a mile away.
America's alliance with Saudi Arabia is critical to our strategy in the Middle East, not to mention our economy here at home.
We depend on Saudi oil, and they depend on our military and American-made weapons.
Now partly because of that alliance, Saudi Arabia's increasingly surrounded by the same enemies that the US is trying to defeat.
On their northern border, they're fighting with ISIS, and to the south, Al Qaeda, the Houthi rebels, and another group of ISIS affiliates are all threatening the Kingdom.
So we sent Suroosh Alvi to get a rare on-the-ground look at the high-stakes fight against terrorism in the Arabian Peninsula.
So we're in Mecca.
This is the Masjid al-Haram, where the Kaaba is.
Whoever has control of this site arguably has control over the Muslim world, which is why ISIS wants nothing more than to come into Saudi Arabia and take this place over.
Mecca is to Islam what the Vatican is to the Catholic Church.
So for extremist groups like ISIS, who seek to create an Islamic caliphate, taking Mecca is like seizing Rome.
But according to the self-proclaimed caliph of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group's already there.
(Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi speaking foreign language) Suroosh: Just weeks after this announcement, footage of this shooting emerged, marking ISIS's first attack against a westerner on Saudi soil.
To combat the growing threat posed by ISIS, Saudi Arabia has invested $3.
4 billion dollars on a fence spanning the entire length of its border with Iraq.
But it might not be enough.
In January, ISIS militants broke through the fence and killed three Saudi border guards, including the border patrol commander.
We spoke to the new commander about the growing presence of ISIS inside Saudi Arabia.
(speaking foreign language) Do you think there are a lot of terrorist cells inside of Saudi Arabia? Suroosh: Shortly after this interview, ISIS conducted its first major attack inside the kingdom, killing at least 21 people and injuring more than a hundred.
But ISIS crossing into Saudi Arabia from the north isn't all the Kingdom has to worry about.
On their southern border with Yemen, they face not only ISIS, but also the Houthis, Al Qaeda, and a massive flow of weapons being smuggled into the country.
How many guns did you guys seize this year? (speaking foreign language) Suroosh: To deal with its increasingly hostile neighbors, Saudi Arabia recently made the largest foreign arms deal in United States history.
Roughly $100 billion of Saudi money is going to the American defense industry.
Saudi Arabia is now the largest arms importer in the world, which is convenient since the United States is the largest dealer.
(shouting) During our visit, the Saudis were keen to show us the wide variety of tools in their kit to help keep its citizens safe from attack.
From suicide bombings to airplane hijackings, they seemed to have every scenario covered.
(men shouting) But while the Saudis have made a very good show of fighting terrorism at home, they've often been accused of supporting extremism abroad.
15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudi nationals, as was Osama bin Laden.
Former Senator Bob Graham led the congressional inquiry into 9/11.
28 pages of this committee's report remain classified.
We spoke to him to find out why.
Who specifically does the report implicate? I can't answer that question since the report is still classified.
I can say that there appeared to be, uh, evidence that Saudi interest, including government interest, were providing financial and other support to at least some and possibly to all of the 19 hijackers who were in the United States.
This very important part of our final report has been withheld now for 13 years, and it is time you and any other interested person would be able to read and form your own judgment as to what this means in terms of the U.
S.
-Saudi relationship.
Suroosh: That relationship, firmly established at the end of World War II, is often characterized as oil for security.
The U.
S.
helps protect the Kingdom from external threats, and in exchange the Saudis provide a secure source of much-needed oil.
The United States spends about $50 billion a year on Saudi oil, but that doesn't necessarily buy their loyalty.
In late 2009, a leaked classified cable sent by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Even more tellingly, it went on to say that It specifically named notorious extremist organizations like the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hamas, and Al Qaeda, whose branch in Iraq spawned ISIS.
Do you think there is support for terrorism still coming from Saudi Arabia? I think that they were influential in the establishment of what is now ISIS.
Saudi Arabia is a symbol of everything we dislike in terms of a country: autocratic, brutal, willingness to keep its people under medieval subjugation.
And the Saudi government continues to be the primary supporter of one of the most extreme sects of Islam: Wahhabism.
Suroosh: Wahhabism is an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam that calls for a very literal interpretation of the Quran and a strict enforcement of Sharia law, considering non-adherents to be infidels.
It is the dominant form of Islam for both Saudi Arabia and ISIS.
To learn more about it, I spoke to Dr.
Tarek Masoud, a political scientist at Harvard University.
Wahhabism actually has two distinct strands.
You have the strand that we observe with ISIS, right, which is this kind of world-shattering idea that we need to destroy regimes that do not perfectly follow our vision of Islam and we need to erect a caliphate and Islamic state.
And they rely on the same kind of texts that the Saudi regime relies on.
The Saudi regime's version of Wahhabism shares a lot with that, but they believe that as long as the ruler is allowing you to practice Islam, upholds the prayer, upholds these basic tenets of Islam, it is forbidden to rebel against him.
And these different faces of Wahhabism have been promoted by the regime at different times.
For example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Saudis were actively promoting this idea that it is incumbent upon young men to go and wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Suroosh: The most famous of these Saudi jihadis was Osama bin Laden.
But the calls for jihad didn't end there.
(speaking foreign language) Suroosh: Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia made the same public appeal for jihad in the aftermath of the U.
S.
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this time against Americans.
(man speaking foreign language) Suroosh: It appears these calls have not fallen on deaf ears.
Saudi nationals have consistently been the largest group of foreign fighters joining Al Qaeda's efforts in Iraq since the beginning of the war in 2003.
I spoke with Dr.
Abdul Rahman Al-Hadlaq with the Interior Ministry about whether Wahhabism has any connection to the growth of Islamic extremism.
Does the Wahhabi educational system play a role somehow in these individuals who become extremists? I think there are some people questioning the relationship.
Suroosh: Despite the official party line, the facts tell another story.
Saudis spend about $2.
5 billion dollars every year to promote Wahhabism, and more Saudi nationals have joined ISIS than almost any other foreign country.
To find out why they come back to attack their own kingdom, we went to talk to some convicted Saudi terrorists.
We're driving into the al-Ha'ir prison in Riyadh.
It's a maximum-security facility.
They have about a thousand prisoners in here, of which the majority were in Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
I was allowed to speak with a Saudi ISIS member on the condition that he remained anonymous.
When you joined Islamic State, was it with the idea of fighting jihad against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? (speaking foreign language) Suroosh: So while the clerics fuel jihad against Americans, the Kingdom's alliance with Americans in places like Yemen and Iraq has put Saudi Arabia in the crosshairs of its own countrymen.
(gunfire) Suroosh: The problem is, as we learned from Khalid Al-Johani, a former prisoner at Guantanamo, once you've joined an extremist organization, there's little turning back.
Suroosh: And groups like ISIS are becoming even more adept at bringing new recruits down this one-way street.
(speaking foreign language) (Khalid speaking) Suroosh: The Saudi government is even having trouble controlling its own religious leaders.
Shortly before his death in January, King Abdullah scolded his senior clerics for not speaking out against ISIS.
(speaking foreign language) Suroosh: As a new Saudi king takes the throne, the classified content of the 9/11 Report looms large over the U.
S.
-Saudi relationship.
The 28 pages are going to come out.
It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
And when it does, it's going to require our government to reevaluate its relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Is Saudi Arabia a friend of America's? No.
If you can describe a friend as a country which has facilitated the most horrific attack against the United States since at least Pearl Harbor, a country which has been at the center of the continued support for new entities that are advancing the cause of jihadism, ISIS is a symptom.
We have the ability to destroy ISIS, but if that's all we do and we don't deal with the cause, the core, the source of ISIS' strength, then we can expect another organization under a different name but with the same motivations to take its place.
As we just saw, Saudi nationals are among the largest groups of foreign fighters who have joined up with ISIS.
But as the conflict drags on, more and more young men from western countries are actually enlisting in the Islamic State's combat forces.
When Vice News embedded with ISIS last August, we saw firsthand that some of the most devoted soldiers in the Islamic State's ranks were actually Muslims from Europe who left everything in the West behind to fight for the group.
(speaking foreign language) Now, an American-led coalition is trying to stop the Islamic State's expansion using air strikes and military advisors on the ground.
So we sent Gianna Toboni to find out whether or not we're truly making progress in the war on ISIS.
This is the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and it's now the only carrier with jets that are striking ISIS.
Every 50 seconds, this operation has new jets that are taking off to northern Iraq.
We met with the commander of the carrier operation, Admiral Andrew Lewis, to learn what the strategy is and how effective it's been.
My mission is to provide naval aviation forces over Iraq and Syria against ISIS.
Gianna: Is it working? It is working.
What do you think the timeline is, um, for when they can be defeated? Months to isolate, years to remove.
(alarm rings) Gianna: Action on the flight deck is constant.
Ordinance officers load the bombs in missiles, inspect the engines, pilots suit up, check the jet, then they launch.
I will say that in our missions, uh, we have been successful in achieving our objectives on a day-to-day basis.
Gianna: How is the accuracy? Well, the accuracy is-- is spot on.
It's almost 100%.
(high-pitched whistling) Man: We can sleep well at night knowing that these are bad people and they deserve what's coming to them.
They represent a worldview that is unacceptable to any reasonable or rational person.
We're gonna beat that worldview out of them 500 pounds at a time.
Gianna: Absolute confidence in these airstrikes isn't just coming from the men flying the missions.
ISIL has lost large areas it used to dominate.
We are pounding ISIL from the sky.
Gianna: But it's not clear that the thousands of strikes we have launched have won any permanent gains against ISIS, and as recently as May of this year, ISIS was still capable of seizing entire cities like Ramadi.
Part of how they've done this is by bolstering their ranks with a steady flow of new recruits from the West.
To understand the appeal of joining ISIS, we met Abu Ubaydillah, the head of a radical group in Denmark, where many young people have already left to fight.
(speaking foreign language) Gianna: And while the U.
S.
maintains that we're winning the war against ISIS, these young men told us the airstrikes are having the opposite effect.
(man speaking) So do you think that airstrikes are actually encouraging more people to travel to the Islamic State? (speaks) Do you guys have any friends who have-- who have gone to the Islamic State? (speaks) (speaks) Gianna: We heard this in several small cities and towns in Europe, where pockets of young men left seemingly overnight to join ISIS.
How many people do you know personally that have gone to Syria? (speaking foreign language) Do you remember seeing the guys who are now fighters in the Islamic State as students in here? Gianna: How many people from your community have traveled to fight in Syria? (speaking foreign language) Gianna: Have any of your friends left to fight in Syria? What held you back? Why haven't you gone? (speaking foreign language) Do you think that you would bring your family with you if you went? Gianna: And some Europeans have actually already left with their children, like Abdullah Al-Belgian, who named himself after the country he left behind.
Gianna: To understand why Europeans would want to leave the comforts of the West for ISIS territory, we met with two men who are vocal advocates of Westerners joining the fight.
(speaking foreign language) Gianna: That message comes from widely disseminated ISIS recruitment videos, which paint their so-called Islamic State as a utopia, and their gains in Iraq and Syria as just the first step in spreading Sharia law around the globe.
(man speaks foreign language) Gianna: To learn how ISIS has become the most daunting extremist group in recent history, we spoke to Aimen Dean who spent years working undercover inside Al Qaeda for British intelligence and is now in close contact with current ISIS members.
Islamic State receives-- according to smugglers who I talked to between now and then, receives between 2,000 to two and a half thousand people every month from across the globe.
You know, when people ask me like, "Why are they so appealing?" And I say, of course they are appealing.
Imagine, you know, "Come to the Islamic State.
"We will give you a sense of empowerment.
"We will give you a gun.
We will give you a purpose in life.
"You will be laying down your life as a building block "in this great structure called the Islamic State, "which will protect generations of Muslims yet to come.
" But those who are going to join the Islamic State, a follower of this ideology, is distorted and twisted.
If you tell someone, you know, "You can kill and you don't feel guilty about it.
"In fact, you'll be rewarded for it," you have no idea how much this kind of message could liberate that inner psychopath to the point where they can murder people without losing a single second of sleep at night.
The Islamic narrative is in crisis right now.
Gianna: And the source of this crisis is Iraq.
We went to the front lines 30 miles from Erbil, where the Kurdish military is fighting ISIS on a daily basis.
We just got to the Peshmerga base, right on the front lines.
ISIS territory is about just a mile away, and apparently they were taking on a ton of fire right before we got here, so, um, we're being safe, we're trying to stay under the sand bags, but still trying to get an eye.
Apparently, the ISIS flag is visible from here.
(man speaking foreign language) (rumbling) Gianna: That sound is an airstrike.
Right there, that's ISIS right there? Gianna: How often are you hearing the aircrafts and how often are you hearing the actual airstrikes? Gianna: Do you think you could successfully fight ISIS without the coalition airstrikes? Gianna: And still, the coalition's support may not be enough.
The Kurdish military agreed to show us a prison where they're holding over 400 ISIS militants.
A recently captured fighter told us the airstrikes haven't shaken the Islamic State's resolve.
(speaking foreign language) Gianna: So even as coalition forces continue to bomb ISIS from the sky, the global message from their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, endures.
Gianna: And in response, terrorist groups around the world are emerging and pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram has openly declared allegiance to the caliphate, and now groups affiliated with ISIS have a formidable presence in Libya and Egypt.
Their message is spreading, with militants from North Africa to Pakistan aligning themselves with the Islamic State's ideology.
As ISIS extends in to these territories, former FBI agent, Ali Soufan, is concerned about radicalized fighters returning to the West.
Is it easy for one of these jihadists to slip back into one of their countries after they've joined ISIS? Sure, I don't think we know everyone.
They have sleeper cells, so they can tell people, "Go and live your life back home "and wait for instructions.
" And when these networks will be activated in "volcanoes of jihad," as al-Baghdadi called it, that's yet to be seen.
Man: Our battle is a battle between faith and blasphemy.
Reporter: He detonated a suicide bomb in the city of Ramadi.
Even individuals who went to Syria or went to Iraq with good intentions, they have been exposed to significant amount of radicalization in a short period of time.
You see the massacres that happens.
The war crimes that's taken place, from executing people, to beheading people, to mass rape.
I mean, it's very difficult to bring an individual back to London or to Paris or to Brussels and say, "Hey, now you're normal again.
" Man: Until we put the black flag on top of Buckingham Palace, until we put the black flag on top of the White House, we will not stop and we will keep on fighting.
Even if a small percentage of these individuals want to go wacko when they go back to their countries, that will create a big problem for international security.
Gianna: Perhaps more concerning are the radicals who have never left home, but who are absorbing the group's ideology and plotting terror in the West, including a recent attach in Texas where two Americans opened fire at a event that featured cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.
ISIS publicly named them "soldiers of the caliphate.
" Ali: As the cliche goes, we have to be successful 100% of the time, they have to be successful only once.
Do we need another 9/11 to understand that that threat is real?