Islamic terrorists are from ‘completely different’ planet

Editor’s note: The just-released book “If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them” by former U.S. Army Captain Jesse Petrilla, provides a rare and often shocking inside look into the Islamic jihadist, including firsthand interviews with some of the world’s most sinister terrorists. Following is an exclusive excerpt for WorldNetDaily readers.

Chapter 1: Tea with the Taliban

… Part of our training upon arrival in Afghanistan included multiple briefings on Islamic and Afghan culture, since we would be working with locals on a daily basis. In one such briefing, the Afghan-American man leading the discussion began by stating, “You must understand that everything about your way of life in America, is completely different in this planet.” He quickly corrected himself to say “in this country,” but his misspeaking was not too far from the truth.

From the way people say hello to the way they go to the bathroom, everything is different, and it is like another world to a Westerner.

In Pashtun tribal law, the largest tribe in Afghanistan comprising almost half the nation, there is something known as khun, or blood money. It can be paid to make amends for various transgressions such as murder, property damage, theft, kidnapping, etcetera. In addition to khun, women can be given to become sex slaves as well as female babies to eventually turn into sex slaves. Women and female babies count as two-thirds of the khun.

Just as in every other part of the Islamic world, Pashtun women have a far less status than a man. To divorce a woman, the man only needs to declare “I divorce thee” three times publicly.

Many Pashtuns also believe that women have something called the “evil eye,” that they have special powers and the ability to cause bad things to happen.

>{?In Pashtun tribal law, if a woman is kidnapped by force, and coerced to consent to marry her kidnapper, but she does not get her father’s permission, the father has the right to kill her. Any inclination of a woman having dishonored the family is rapidly met by her murder. In one of the detainee interrogations, I was truly shocked and saddened when the detainee was describing his family, and nonchalantly said “I have eight children, I had nine but one of my daughters dishonored the family and so I killed her,” a story I unfortunately would hear similar versions of on more than one occasion from multiple detainees.

At a Pashtun wedding, after the vows, a tradition is still observed where the husband takes the new wife into a tent to consummate the marriage. After the consummation, the bed sheets are then examined to determine whether the bride was a virgin or not. If it is judged she was not, the husband can kill her immediately, and the bride”s family is obligated to replace her with a sister or other female relative at the same wedding.

Now just take a moment to think about that, and compare it to the joyous occasion of a wedding in America or the West. Imagine yourself being at a wedding, and after the ceremony having the groom come out of a tent with the bride, murdering her in front of the guests, and then taking her sister and marrying her while the corpse of the murdered bride still lies on the ground.

The Pashtuns are far from unique in having brutal tribal laws, for example, the Nuristani people in Eastern Afghanistan have a law that states in order to become a village elder, known as a Jast, a person must entertain the entire village at a banquet ten times, be a good orator, and have killed five enemies in battle.

A major problem with this is the fact that other tribes they may battle with, such as the Pashtun, have tribal laws stating they must seek revenge if their tribal members are killed, and thus the cycle continues indefinitely. Such laws are a bit different than in the West to say the least, and I am glad when I served on a city council in California at one point in my life that it didn’t have a stipulation saying I had to kill five people from a rival town in order to join.

Many tribal practices are based on war and violence. This can even be seen in the national sport of Afghanistan, Buzkashi. The game involves a goat or sheep being killed. Two teams of mounted men then gallop towards the carcass to grab it. The object is to drop the carcass in a circle to score a goal.

Some other practices, demonstrating warrior “manliness” may seem humorous to outsiders. There is no such thing as dating in Pashtun culture, which is also true in much of the Islamic world, as most marriages are arranged, however, there is another custom called Ghagkawal that can be followed if a man does somehow happen to meet a woman he is enamored with. This is often a first cousin or other relative since unrelated men and women are forbidden to communicate with one another. The way Ghagkawal works is if a man wishes to marry a woman and does not want to go through the arrangement process, he can make his proposal by going outside the woman’s house and firing a gun wildly into the air. The tribal elders will then come and speak with him and they will then approach the girl’s father on the man’s behalf. Something tells me though that in America, bringing a dozen roses to the door of a woman would go over a little better than spraying an automatic weapon into the air.

The timeless mind

In Afghanistan, as is the case with many tribal societies, time has no value.

Militarily, where expediency is crucial, this can prove to be very disadvantageous in the short term, but ultimately, with time having no meaning, they are known to outwait their enemies.

An Afghan translator, discussing the 1979 Russian invasion of Afghanistan, told me, “I had not even had my tea yet, and there were already tanks in the streets.” I have experienced this cultural trend throughout my travels in the Islamic world, and Afghanistan was no different in that respect. Even when meeting with generals or some of the highest-ranking people in the Afghan government, with rare exceptions, nothing is to be discussed related to business until at least one cup of tea is drunk. The great majority of Afghans that I encountered, both Taliban and non-Taliban alike, genuinely did not even know how old they were. Time has no meaning to them.

The concept of a timeless society is truly alien to the American mind. Even our foreign policy often tends to be decided in a very nearsighted manner, where politicians rarely think too far beyond their own next election. But in the tribal world of which our Islamist enemies come from, time plays little role in any decision. For most, religion is the ultimate priority in their life, and beyond that, not much else matters.

In addition to time having little value, equally as unimportant in a tribal society in the Islamic world is the value of life. They will riot when they hear an allegation of a Quran being burned, but will say little to nothing when dozens or even hundreds of civilians are murdered. When you remove time and life as factors, the Islamists have a tremendous advantage in outlasting the resolve of others in a prolonged conflict.

To the Islamists, death is what they thrive on. They believe if someone is martyred in the name of spreading the Islamic ideology, that the martyr’s rewards will be in heaven. The jihadists regularly create martyrs just to promote their cause, from suicide bombings that inflict massive casualties on civilians, to paying a villager the equivalent of fifty dollars to spray an AK-47 at a passing convoy, only to be almost certainly killed by Coalition Forces defending themselves. I have seen cases where Taliban have fired mortars from the roof of a building full of children, only to run away before the counter-attack in which several children were killed, at which time the Taliban will play to the media and blame the Americans for indiscriminately killing civilians, further eroding our mission. This is the same reason why in Israel, Hamas often sets up their headquarters inside apartment buildings filled with civilians. In fact, after their October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, knowing what kind of response it would trigger against Hamas targets hiding within civilian infrastructure, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told the media “We are proud to sacrifice martyrs” of civilians in Gaza.

They don’t care about the lives of other Muslims they endanger. But the jihadists believe these deaths are glorious, because to the jihadist, promoting the spread of Islam is the only thing that matters, regardless of how many are killed, even fellow Muslims.

In their effort to enforce Islamic law, which subjugates women, the Taliban often poison the water supply of schools that teach girls. The first month I was in Afghanistan, in May, 2012, the Taliban poisoned 120 schoolgirls and three teachers in a single attack. The previous month, more than 150 schoolgirls were poisoned in another attack on a girls’ school. These are not just soldiers or “freedom fighters,” who are simply fighting us as soldiers of other nations have fought us in the past.

They hold deep ideological beliefs that transcends any uniform. This is the mindset that we are up against, someone who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. …

A deceptive enemy

One of the first things that struck me when I met with the Taliban was just how genuinely warm their personalities appeared on the surface. If you visit San Quentin or any other prison in America, hardcore prisoners there usually won’t have the best people skills. But at the Detention Facility in Parwan the detainees greet you with warm smiles and lengthy two-handed handshakes.

It all seemed very genuine. The same people who have committed beheadings and other horrific acts will act so very friendly to your face. They are unlike any common criminal.

One of the detainees I met seemed no different than most others, smiling and happy to talk to me, in the same eerie trend of mock friendliness that you see in so many of our Islamist enemies. But as with many detainees I encountered, I would be curious about their background and would look up their case file. This particular individual was a local Taliban executioner.

A Taliban judge would rule that someone is a spy for the infidels, and this man would either shoot them or carve their head off while the individual was still alive. But to them, death is nothing, and they truly believe that they are only carrying out the will of God.

The Arab culture, which pre-dates Islam by thousands of years, is well known for warm and welcoming behavior. When the Arabs conquered Persia and what is now Afghanistan at the end of the 7th century, this culture of warmth and hospitality on an individual level permeated those societies as well if they weren’t already a significant part of it to begin with. A guest in someone’s home is to be treated like a king. I have felt this on all my travels throughout the Islamic world. But this warmness from the culture can easily be used by an Islamic jihadist to gain one’s trust, and such deception is sanctioned specifically by the Islamic religion. While the average Muslim may genuinely seek the friendship of non-Muslims, to a fundamentalist there are elements of the Quran that, when strictly interpreted, state that a Muslim, although he may appear to hold a desire for friendship, should not take an unbeliever as a true friend.

But digging a little deeper, one can find within Islam a principle called Al-Takeyya, which is a Quran-sanctioned form of deception heavily exploited by Islamists. Verse 3:28 of the Quran states: “Let not the believers take for friends or helpers unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah: except by way of Al-Takeyya, that ye may guard yourselves from them.” Additionally, another verse states that a Muslim can pretend to deny his/her faith entirely when under compulsion. Throughout history, a great number of Islamic scholars and Muslims have interpreted Al-Tekeyya from these and similar verses to allow a Muslim to feign a friendship with a non-Muslim, and for them to even act contrary to their faith when in the presence of the unbelievers, so long as their heart stays true to their actual beliefs and religious goals. A true jihadist will warmly smile and shake your hand, while hiding the knife behind his back. I witnessed this same identical behavior of deception from the jihadist detainees who were brought straight from the battlefield in Afghanistan as I had previously seen from Islamists in America or elsewhere, and I was amazed at just how similar their deceptive and irrational behaviors were among them, transcending cultural, tribal, and national barriers.

Islamists will lie about the most foolish things, making blatant statements that are outrageously absurd, and seem to have no concept of reality. The detainees would say one thing to an interrogator, or during one hearing, even making written sworn statements at times, and when they go before the next hearing, deny everything they had previously stated. …

Despite this behavior, some of our military leaders still attempted to apply our logic to these individuals. In recapping a meeting between an American general officer and an American colonel discussing how to handle the release of Taliban detainees, the colonel told us that he and the general wished to have each detainee make a sworn statement renouncing the Taliban and violence before they would be set free, a desired key stipulation of their release.

At one point during my tour there was a recently captured Taliban detainee who had just been interrogated. The interrogator was laughing and told me while he was taking notes during questioning, the detainee stopped him and asked through the translator what that stick was he was holding. He had never seen a pen before in his life. These are the people we were trying to teach the western democratic republican style of governance. To almost everyone who spent time in Afghanistan, aside from an idealistic few, it was little surprise when the Taliban so rapidly overtook the Afghan government in 2021, in what would be such an unnecessarily chaotic withdrawal of American forces. I recall one instance where we were ordered to turn over a shipping container of captured Taliban weapons to the Afghan government, and I told the major in charge of the mission “You know these are going right back to the Taliban as soon as we leave, right?” Without hesitation he responded, “Oh yes, I know.”

I unsuccessfully lobbied the Colonel in charge of our unit to send the container to Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) and have the entire thing destroyed, but he was adamant that they be given to the Afghans, and now every one of those weapons belongs once again to the Taliban. Most people there got it.

But especially back in Washington, and among so many in the higher ranks in the military trying to please those in Washington, there was a complete disconnect from the reality on the ground, and a complete misunderstanding of just who our enemy is, how they think, and how ferociously determined they are.

“If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them” by Jesse Petrilla is available now from Amazon.