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WORK TITLE: The Master Plan
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.isismasterplan.com/
CITY: Menlo Park
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.newamerica.org/our-people/brian-fishman/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/brfishman/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2008127906
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2008127906
HEADING: Fishman, Brian
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100 1_ |a Fishman, Brian
670 __ |a Al-Qa’ida’s foreign fighters in Iraq, 2007: |b cover (Brian Fishman)
670 __ |a Information from Combating Terrorism Center, Sept. 3, 2008 |b (Brian Fishman is Senior Associate in the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and an Instructor in the US Military Academy’s Department of Social Sciences. Fishman’s primary research interest is the impact of the war in Iraq on terrorism worldwide.)
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, Masters in International Affairs (M.I.A.); University of California, Los Angeles, B.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
International Security Program at New America, Washington, DC, counterterrorism research fellow; Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, fellow, previously director of research. CTC Sentinel, founding editor. Formerly, adjunct professor in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Foreign Affairs/Defense Legislative Assistant for Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey.
MEMBER:Council on Foreign Relations (term member).
WRITINGS
Author of numerous studies on U.S. national security, terrorism and international jihadi groups.
SIDELIGHTS
Brian Fishman is an expert on ISIS and on Middle East policies. He is the editor, with Assaf Moghadam, of Fault Lines in Global Jihad: Organizational, Strategic and Ideological Fissures, published in 2011, and the sole author of The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory. He began studying ISIS in 2005 when he was working at West Point in their Combating Terrorism Center. He began teaching courses on ISIS in 2008 and in 2011 predicted the rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq). While at West Point, Fishman led a program to declassify data obtained from al-Qaeda and ISIS. His course on ISIS at West Point became exceedingly popular and continued even after he left the institution. In 2014, school officials reached out to Fishman for an updated course syllabus. Compiling the updated syllabus, prompted Fishman to write The Master Plan.
John Waterbury, a reviewer on Foreign Affairs, wrote that in The Master Plan, Fishman claims that “ISIS and its sympathizers are not heretical zealots; their devotion is not a form of false consciousness. Their practice and understanding of Islam, although extreme and rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, nonetheless qualify as a form of Islamic orthodoxy.” Waterbury continued that Fishman identifies “the practice of takfir—the act of declaring whole swaths of Muslims (frequently Shiites) to be apostates—as perhaps the most important feature of ISIS’ brutal version of jihad” and “expound[s] on the caliphate, slavery, corporal punishment, the end of days, and the coming of the Messiah.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Fishman’s book “a clinical dissection of the Islamic State group’s blueprint for waging jihad and establishing a caliphate.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Foreign Affairs, May-June, 2017, John Waterbury, review of The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory, p. 170.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of The Master Plan.
ONLINE
Master Plan Website, http://www.isismasterplan.com/ (June 28, 2017).
Brian Fishman is a leading expert on ISIS. He served as the Director of Research at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center and began studying the progenitors of ISIS in 2005. In 2008, Fishman first taught an academic course on the Islamic State of Iraq’s turn toward governance, and he predicted the rise of the Islamic State in early 2011, prior to the Syrian civil war. When cadets from that 2008 seminar—now Army officers—reached out in late 2014 asking for an updated course syllabus, Fishman was inspired to write The Master Plan.
While teaching at West Point, Fishman led a cutting edge program to declassify data captured from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq. He is the author of numerous groundbreaking studies, focused on jihadi foreign fighters in Iraq and Iranian military and political influence in Iraq.
Fishman is a Counterterrorism Research Fellow with the International Studies Program at New America, an Affiliate with Stanford University’s Center for International Studies and Cooperation, a Visiting Scholar with UC Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing Studies, and a Fellow with the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He has taught courses on terrorism and counterinsurgency at United States Military Academy, Georgetown University, and Columbia University. Fishman regularly appears in national and international media and testifies before Congress on issues related to terrorism.
Fishman is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Brian Fishman is a Counterterrorism Research Fellow with the International Security Program at New America, a Washington, DC think tank and a Fellow with the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, where he previously served as the Director of Research. He currently manages policy at Facebook regarding terrorism and violent extremism. Fishman also served as an assistant professor in West Point’s Department of Social Sciences. Fishman built and led Palantir Technologies’ Disaster Relief and Crisis Response team, which brought some of the world’s most sophisticated technology to humanitarian organizations. Fishman is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a founding editor of the CTC Sentinel.
Fishman is the author of numerous studies U.S. national security, terrorism and international jihadi groups. He has specialized in the so-called Islamic State and its predecessors since 2005 and taught a dedicated course about the Islamic State of Iraq in 2008. Fishman coauthored seminal investigations of al-Qaeda's foreign fighters in Iraq and Iranian support for Shia militias fighting U.S. troops in Iraq. Fault Lines in Global Jihad: Organizational, Strategic, and Ideological Fissures, a volume Fishman co-edited with Assaf Moghadam, was named one of the top books for understanding terrorist recruitment. He regularly appears in domestic and international media regarding terrorism and national security issues.
Fishman has taught as an adjunct professor in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Before joining the CTC, Fishman was the Foreign Affairs/Defense Legislative Assistant for Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey. Fishman holds a Masters in International Affairs (MIA) from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Brian Fishman: THE MASTER PLAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Brian Fishman THE MASTER PLAN Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) 30.00 11, 22 ISBN: 978-0-300-22149-7
A clinical dissection of the Islamic State group’s blueprint for waging jihad and establishing a caliphate.Fishman, a counterterrorism
research fellow with the International Security Program at New America, analyzes the ideological motivation of the progenitors of IS, namely
that of Jordanian “thug” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was first financed by al-Qaida to run a training and recruiting camp in
Afghanistan, alongside the Taliban. With the United States invasion of Iraq, al-Zarqawi learned from the Kurdish jihadi community (Ansar alIslam)
much about violent governance and digital tools that he would later use in making IS a global phenomenon. By 2004, al-Zarqawi and alQaida
had created a joint vision that took the form of a seven-stage “master plan” calling for the establishment of a caliphate
by 2014—exactly as it happened. Fishman divides the book into these seven stages, supposedly culminating in the rallying of 1.5 billion
Muslims worldwide “under a single banner to overthrow remaining apostate Muslim regimes and destroy Israel.” The other
operational blueprint that delineated this murderous vision was the widely accessible manual The Management of Savagery (2004). Fishman
pursues al-Zarqawi’s masterminding of terrorist attacks in Iraq, including the explosion at the Shia holy city of Najaf in 2003, an act
aimed at polarizing relations between the Shiites and the Sunnis. Important tenets of what Fishman calls Zarqawiism are the dispensability of
apostates (actually, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims) and the populist notion that the highest form of religious devotion is being
an active warrior. The author notes how the Iraqi jihadi movement was greatly enhanced by disenfranchised Baathist policemen and by Bashar alAssad’s
release of political prisoners. The bedfellows the jihadi movement has engendered are strange indeed, and Fishman wonders,
“just who would benefit most from the Islamic State’s defeat?”
A sage assessment showing how IS world domination could never come to pass because it has alienated too many Muslims worldwide.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Brian Fishman: THE MASTER PLAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216138&it=r&asid=91ade0bbd91fdab487589461c6728b64. Accessed 31 May
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Middle East
John Waterbury
Foreign Affairs.
96.3 (May-June 2017): p170.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
Full Text:
The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State
BY GRAEME WOOD. Random House, 2016, 352 pp.
The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory
BY BRIAN FISHMAN. Yale University Press, 2016, 376 pp.
These two books afford readers a look into the soul of violent jihadism. Wood, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, is a gifted storyteller
who tracks down jihadist interlocutors around the world. Fishman, a fellow at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, is a diligent analyst and
chronicler of the Islamic State (or isis). He presents the players and the events in impressive detail, without always offering quite enough
guidance on what to think about them. Both authors have much to teach readers. They agree that isis and its sympathizers are not heretical
zealots; their devotion is not a form of false consciousness. Their practice and understanding of Islam, although extreme and rejected by the vast
majority of Muslims, nonetheless qualify as a form of Islamic orthodoxy. Both writers identify the practice of takfir--the act of declaring whole
swaths of Muslims (frequently Shiites) to be apostates--as perhaps the most important feature of isis' brutal version of jihad.
Wood plunges into the thickets of extremist theology, giving it voice through an eclectic sampling of its most committed practitioners. They
expound on the caliphate, slavery, corporal punishment, the end of days, and the coming of the Messiah. Wood's account is unrivaled in the
breadth and depth of its exposition. Fishman usefully stresses the seminal role played by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadist who laid the
foundation for isis in the wake of the American-led invasion of Iraq, before he was snuffed out by a U.S. air strike in 2006. He is often portrayed
as a coarse thug, but Fishman reveals him to be much more than that. According to Fishman, Zarqawi served as the inspiration for the influential
Egyptian jihadist strategist Saif al-Adel's seven-stage "master plan" for the triumph of Islam. However, as Fishman points out, the master plan
anticipates the unification of all Muslims, and yet the practice of takfir assumes that most Muslims are beyond salvation.
A People Without a State: The Kurds From the Rise of Islam to the Dawn of Nationalism
BY MICHAEL EPPEL. University of Texas Press, 2016, 188 pp.
The Kurds: A Modern History
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BY MICHAEL GUNTER. Markus Wiener, 2015, 256 pp.
The Kurds enjoy a romantic reputation as doughty mountain fighters who have been denied their freedom and independence by the Arabs,
Persians, and Turks who dwell in the cities and plains below. They number somewhere around 40 million, with the biggest populations in Iran,
Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Significantly, much of the territory where large concentrations of Kurds reside is rich in oil and gas reserves.
Eppel and Gunter, both academics, demonstrate clear but guarded sympathy for the Kurds and their national aspirations. Neither sees Kurdish
nationhood as immanent, and both view Kurdish national identity as a fairly recent notion developed by the Kurdish intelligentsia, rather than as a
manifestation of a deep historical truth. Eppel notes that the Kurds lack an urban bourgeoisie of the kind that has historically played a critical role
in successful ethnonationalist movements.
Eppel's account mostly covers the Ottoman era. Gunter's focuses on recent decades, paying close attention to the period since the 2003 U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq and especially the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. Both authors depict the Kurds as living in a meat grinder. In centuries past,
the Kurds suffered under the Persian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, engaging in a series of shifting alliances and betrayals that seemingly left
everyone worse off. In more recent times, the oppressors have been different but the experience similar, as the fiercely nationalist Republic of
Turkey, Islamic Republic of Iran, and Baathist Iraq and Syria became the main obstacles to Kurdish self-rule. More distant powers--the
Americans, the British, and the French--have often joined in proxy wars that have engulfed the Kurds, who have seldom obtained a good deal.
Kurdish fortunes seemed poised to improve with the emergence of the highly autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq in the
wake of the Gulf War of 1990-91--as close to a state as the Kurds have ever come.
The story of Iraq's Kurds is relatively well known; Gunter's book sheds light on the less familiar Syrian Kurds, who number around 2.2 million
and occupy three enclaves along the Turkish border. Syrian Kurdish militias have proved to be the most effective of Washington's partners in the
fight against the Islamic State (or isis) in Syria. But they are also closely aligned with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or pkk, a group that the
United States has designated as a terrorist organization and that is anathema to Turkey, a member of NATO and a close U.S. ally.
Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein
BY JOHN NIXON. Blue Rider Press, 2016, 256 pp.
Nixon spent 13 years as an Iraq analyst for the CIA. When U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein a few months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
Nixon and a colleague were tasked with "debriefing" the dictator--in other words, questioning him in order to gain intelligence. Nixon's book is
informed by those conversations and examines Saddam's life and reign, U.S. policy in Iraq, and the role of the firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada alSadr
in post-Saddam Iraq. Nixon believes that the invasion was a mistake, but that view appears to have little to do with his interrogations of
Saddam. Nixon acknowledges Saddam's misdeeds but also puzzlingly asserts that "no one knew better the dreams and desires of Iraqis." He sees
Sadr as a lasting force in Iraqi politics but does not spend much time explaining why. Nixon also complains of an "era of analytic mediocrity" at
the CIA, which he associates with the tenure of Director George Tenet. During that period, Nixon argues, the agency allowed itself to become a
tool of presidential agendas.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Waterbury, John. "Middle East." Foreign Affairs, May-June 2017, p. 170+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491038245&it=r&asid=a203a4c1350d9d120adcd43703c9f043. Accessed 31 May
5/31/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496286420345 5/5
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491038245