to bring the fight to the west. so is the islamic state really dead? join me as i look at the rise and fall of isis. i ve covered isis from the beginning as the militant army rolled through much of a rock in syria conquering a vast territory and establishing its caliphate. but by the spring of 2019, the tables had turned. isis was losing. i came back to witness the end. only a few thousand of the most hard core militants were left. they were surrounded in a little syrian town. this is as far as we can go.
i had heard arguments like this before that isis members were victims of persecution or looking for something bigger, a cause. but he puts it more bluntly. being cannon fodder, they will fight and die for the so-called islamic state. so as dumb as they come, the more the merrier. the most powerful weapon in the isis arsenal turned out to be propaganda, a media blitz that drew in thousands of new recruits. it is the rise. slick music videos depicted an epic struggle of good versus evil and isis were the good guys. recruits were told they were noble warriors on a devine mission to bring pride black to islam. their own graphic videos show the truth was much darker. thugs and criminals is what
was just an innocent bystander. he said he was an isis medic, but that didn t seem to match the bullet in his face. does that sound believable to you? many things i don t believe, but it s the truth. his curdish guards certainly didn t believe his story. curdish intelligence officials tell us you were a leader in isis, that you worked in their financial department, you worked in their war room. no, no, no. it s a lot of information they got. some of them told me i was working with the secret service out there. so information comes in, and some of them, they are not true. so he claimed. but the video evidence against him was damning.
alive. your women would be raped. there was such terror that no one would fight them. it got so bad 30,000 iraqi soldiers dropped their weapons and fled rather than stand up to less than a thousand isis fighters. we spend $25 billion building this army in southern iraq, hundreds of thousands of personnel. and they didn t even fight. the iraqi security forces just melted away. cities fell one by one. even saddam hussein s hometown, they all fell to isis. and the united states and its allies seemed powerless to stop
i reget the whole thing. i reget the ideology. i regret ever coming here. i regret ever even going online. i regret everything here. i left wondering how much hoda is changing her story because she wants to get out of this prison camp. from what i see women were the backbone of isis, the ones that held the group together and made some of its worst atrocities possible. but why join in the first place? next, the false promises that lured recruits to isis and the violent truth of life inside the caliphate. as a struggling actor, i need all the breaks that i can get. at liberty butchemel. cut. liberty mu. line? cut. liberty mutual customizes your car insurance so you only pay for what you need. cut. liberty m. am i allowed to riff? what if i come out of the water? liberty biberty. cut. we ll dub it. liberty mutual customizes your car insurance