Isis: The Origins of Violence

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High above the war zone,

the all-seeing eye of the West

searches out the enemy.

But what do we really know about the

enemy?

The terrorists claim they are

fighting for Islam.

The vast majority of Muslims, and

Western leaders too...

...insist that they have nothing to

do with Islam.

But who is right?

There is only one way to discover

the origins

of the extreme violence of Isis.

By taking a journey into the past.

My name is Tom Holland.

In 2012 I made a film about the

origins of Islam.

But a lot has happened since then.

It's as if something buried deep in

the past has caught up with us.

Things have been done in the

name of Islam

that I would never have

imagined happening.

I promised myself I'd never go back

there again.

But here I am, going back.

This is our khilafah in all

its glory.

We are men honoured with Islam who

climbed its peaks to perform jihad,

answering the call to unite under

one flag.

This is the source of our glory, our

obedience to our Lord.

So bring it on, all of you.

Your numbers only increase us

in faith

and we're counting your banners,

which our prophets said would reach

80 in number.

And then the flames of war

will find you

and burn you on the hills of death.

Bring it on.

So, we've grown very accustomed to

the ultra-violence of Islamic State

and that's the thing that really

captures the headlines,

it captures our imagination.

So it develops this strategy of

extreme and brutal ultra-violence

in order to try and intimidate its

opponents into saying, well,

we may not get to you today or

tomorrow but if we do,

we'll be so barbaric and

sadistic and horrific

that we just want you to understand

the costs of participation

against us.

It's not just here but right

up here.

We're going to continually raise the

cost of participation.

Isis, even here it fills you with a

kind of horror.

They use this principle

called muathala.

What happens is they don't just burn

him alive in the cage

but at the end of the cage,

a truck comes

and drops rubble on top of the cage

and that rubble and rock

is from a site that they said

he'd bombed.

These atrocities are like

video games.

They've got a kind of script.

Scripts have to start somewhere and

lead somewhere.

My own feeling is that this is

a problem,

and a crisis that will be

around, probably,

for the rest of our lifetime.

We've come to Paris because Isis

come to Paris.

Because Isis have a thing about

Paris.

They've attacked concert halls and

football stadiums.

They killed the cartoonists of

Charlie Hebdo.

They shot dead a policeman here on

the Champs-Elysees.

But what's all this got to do

with Islam?

In fact, what's it got to do

with Paris?

Isis call Paris the capital of

prostitution and vice.

They call France the home

of the Crusades.

It just seems crazy... .

..all those killings.

It's like fiction.

Something out of The Da Vinci Code.

With every new atrocity they're

sending out a message.

But what is the message? And who's

it being sent to?

You can't help thinking that somehow

the answers are here in Paris.

The streets of Paris have always

been witness to violent crimes.

Up here, for instance, there was a

particularly brutal killing.

A man was seized, a knife was put to

his throat,

and his neck was severed off.

And you could almost say that Paris

begins with this beheading.

But that was long ago in the third

century when Saint Denis,

the first Bishop of Paris, lost his

head here, in Montmartre.

But in those days it was the victims

who were the martyrs.

Today it's the killers who

go to Paradise.

And people who live here

are nervous.

The Bastille.

I got a message to meet someone

here.

A refugee just escaped from Isis.

He doesn't want us to reveal

his name.

Sometimes I don't want to remember

these things,

but I think I have to tell it.

When I went there I saw a

crossed man.

On the cross? Yeah.

And what had he done?

Do you know?

They said he is a spy. Right.

Was he alive or dead?

Was he dead or alive? Dead. The

dogs were eating his flesh.

Yeah, it was horrible.

Do you feel safe now you are

in France?

You know, here we are being filmed

but you have your back to

the camera,

you don't want to be seen on camera.

Why is that? They will kill my

family because of this.

Will it be dangerous for me?

To the... You mean... You mean... To

the brothers of the Islamic state?

Yeah, it could be dangerous.

He tells me that even though he

escaped from Isis in Iraq

he still doesn't feel safe in Paris,

and after what happened round the

corner from the Bastille,

maybe he's right.

Daniel Psenny's flat overlooked the

street behind the Bataclan.

He filmed the Isis attack from

his balcony...

...and he still hasn't recovered from

being shot in the arm.

Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

Oscar!

Oscar!

Oscar!

90 people were killed at

the Bataclan.

Another 40 were shot in cafes

and bars across Paris.

These were not simple murders.

These were murders in the service

of an idea.

The victims were merely the means of

conveying the message.

Young people dead, all the killers

dead, all killed in the name of God.

Everything in the name of God.

But to do something like this,

you've got to have a very good idea

of what God wants.

The truth is we all know that people

have killed in the name of God.

Christians no less than Muslims.

But Isis are raising a lot of ghosts

from the past.

We've just gone through Vienna.

Muslim armies came this far twice.

We've passed a town where they

massacred everyone.

And the further east across Europe

you go,

the more people remember

things like this.

It's nightmarish...

and it's supposed to be.

Isis have a user's manual.

It's called

The Management Of Savagery.

"We need to massacre others,"

it says.

"Hostages must be eliminated in a

terrifying manner."

The circumstances we are now in

resemble those faced by the

first Muslims.

Istanbul,

a city that has always been in the

crosshairs of the titanic rivalry

between Christendom and Islam.

But it is also a city that shaped

the very beginnings of Islam.

In the early 8th century it was a

Christian capital, Constantinople.

And an Arab war fleet was laying

siege to its walls.

Constantinople, the capital of the

Christian Roman Empire,

the greatest city in the world,

the great object of Muslim desire.

The Arabs believed that they had

been promised the world by God,

so they wanted to reach out

and take it,

probably more than anywhere else in

the world.

And they did that twice, and twice

they failed to do it.

They were so tantalisingly close,

but they couldn't quite get

hold of it.

And so, in the face of that failure,

they went back to first principles.

They asked themselves, "What should

we be doing here?"

And they decided that what God

wanted was struggle.

Jihad.

So this is where the notion of jihad

really begins,

before the walls of Constantinople.

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