And it's not just Daesh. The lack of critical thinking is astounding. It's not like these people don't have access to the Internet.
Here are some excerpts, but really you should read the whole thing.
Here are some excerpts, but really you should read the whole thing.
The Doomsday Scam
[...] the Crocodile [a Daesh commander] had an unusual request: The Islamic State, he [Abu Omar, a smuggler] said, was shopping for red mercury.
Abu Omar knew what this meant. Red mercury — precious and rare, exceptionally dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, its properties unmatched by any compound known to science — was the stuff of doomsday daydreams. According to well-traveled tales of its potency, when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives, red mercury could create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb. In another application, a famous nuclear scientist once suggested it could be used as a component in a neutron bomb small enough to fit in a sandwich-size paper bag.
Abu Omar understood the implications. The Islamic State was seeking a weapon that could do more than strike fear in its enemies. It sought a weapon that could kill its enemies wholesale, instantly changing the character of the war. Imagine a mushroom cloud rising over the fronts of Syria and Iraq. Imagine the jihadists’ foes scattered and ruined, the caliphate expanding and secure.
Imagine the price the Islamic State would pay.
To approach the subject of red mercury is to journey into a comicbook universe, a zone where the stubborn facts of science give way to unverifiable claims, fantasy and outright magic, and where villains pursuing the dark promise of a mysterious weapon could be rushing headlong to the end of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the broad agreement among nonproliferation specialists that red mercury, at least as a chemical compound with explosive pop, does not exist.
When hopeful sellers were caught, substance in hand, it reliably turned out to be something else, sometimes a placebo of chuckleworthy simplicity: ordinary mercury mixed with dye. The shadowy weaponeer’s little helper, it was the unobtainium of the post-Soviet world. Among specialists who investigated the claims, the doubts hardened to an unequivocal verdict: Red mercury was a lure, the central prop of a confidence game designed to fleece ignorant buyers. [...] In 1999, Jane’s Intelligence Review suggested that the scam’s victims may have included Osama bin Laden, whose Qaeda purchasing agents were ‘‘nuclear novices.’’
When the Crocodile placed his order, Abu Omar said, the smuggler asked how much the Islamic State was willing to pay. The answer was vague. The Islamic State would pay, he said, ‘‘whatever was asked.’’ This was not the practical guidance a businessman needs. So the Crocodile sharpened the answer. Up to $4 million — and a $100,000 bonus — for each unit of red mercury matching that shown in a set of photographs he sent to Abu Omar over WhatsApp, the mobile-messaging service. The images showed a pale, oblong object, roughly the length of a hot-dog bun, with a hole at each end.
Abu Omar was describing all this in the lobby of a Turkish hotel, where he appeared one night this fall after several phone calls and chat sessions. His stories were more than far-fetched; they were confounding. Anyone with an Internet connection could quickly discover that the red-mercury meme was widely regarded as nonsense. Even a visit to Wikipedia — whose entry on the subject began, ‘‘Red mercury is a hoax substance of uncertain composition’’ — would surely be enough to raise questions for anyone disbursing Islamic State cash. I told Abu Omar that I had spoken with several nonproliferation experts, and they roundly agreed: Red mercury was a scam. Did he believe otherwise?
Abu Omar listened patiently. His face gave nothing away. Then he replied politely, as if addressing the uninformed. ‘‘I have seen it with my own eyes,’’ he said.
Two years before in Ras al-Ain, another Syrian border town, Abu Omar said, he was with a group of Islamic fighters that organized a test with 3.5 grams of liquid red mercury and a container of chlorine. The experiment was led by Abu Suleiman al-Kurdi, who commanded a small fighting group that has since joined the Islamic State. Al-Kurdi gathered the jihadists around his materials as the test began. ‘‘I will count to 10, and whoever stays in the room after that suffocates and dies,’’ he warned.
The chlorine was held in a foil-lined container, Abu Omar said. As the group watched, al-Kurdi dipped a needle into the red mercury and then touched the needle to the chlorine, transferring a drop. ‘‘Everything interacted with everything,’’ Abu Omar said, and a foul vapor rose. All of the fighters were driven away, first from the room, then from the house.
The powers of red mercury, Abu Omar said, were real.
Almost every aspect of this story, like so many other breathless accounts of red mercury, was unverifiable. And even if something did happen in that room, the noxious vapors could have a simple explanation: Chlorine alone damages the respiratory tract and can be deadly if inhaled.
Safi alSafi [is] an unaffiliated rebel and small-time smuggler specializing in weapons, antiquities and forged documents [...]. ‘‘Red mercury has a red color, and there is mercury that has the color of dark blood,’’ he said. ‘‘And there is green mercury, which is used for sexual enhancement, and silver mercury is used for medical purposes. The most expensive type is called Blood of the Slaves, which is the darkest type. Magicians use it to summon jinni.’’
Another smuggler, Faysal, who said he was awaiting results of vetting by the United States government to join a Pentagon-backed force opposing the Islamic State (the program has since been dropped), continued the lesson. ‘‘It has two different types: hot and cold,’’ he said. The cold form, which other smugglers sometimes call ‘‘spiritual mercury,’’ he said, ‘‘can be found in Roman graveyards.’’ He added: ‘‘Kings and princes and sultans
used to take it to the graves with them.’’ This type of red mercury, the smugglers said, has been recovered by Middle Eastern grave robbers for at least several decades. ‘‘In previous generations, old women wore it in a necklace to keep the devil’s eye away,’’ Faysal said. More recently, rich men shopped for cold red mercury as either an aphrodisiac or to improve their sexual performance.
The substance was so valuable that dishonest traders, al-Safi said, often trafficked in fake red mercury. ‘‘In my village at least 15 people trade in it,’’ he said. ‘‘They buy normal mercury, and they color it. They use red lipstick and put a little on a spoon and heat the spoon until it turns to powder, and you put the powder in the mercury, and you mix it, and it becomes that color. This is how you cheat it.’’
Identifying such cheats was easy, the smugglers said, because real red mercury is attracted to gold but repelled by garlic. Wise buyers bring gold and garlic to test the product before cash changes hands. ‘‘You put a drop on a plate and you approach it with garlic, and that drop is going to move away,’’ a third smuggler, Abu Zaid explained. ‘‘But if you put red mercury on a plate and move a piece of gold under the plate, the red mercury is going to move with it.’’
Cold red mercury, these smugglers said, could not be used for nuclear weapons; that was the role of hot red mercury, which had a more recent origin. Only sophisticated laboratories manufactured it, and the hot red mercury available in Syria had come from the Soviet Union — usually, according to Raed, another smuggler, ‘‘in a specially maintained box with equipment and a manual and special gloves.’’
Abu Zaid said hot red mercury was sometimes offered for sale in Syria and could be useful for the Islamic State, which has a cadre of former Iraqi officials who would know how to harness its power. But he cautioned that buyers could easily make a grievous mistake. ‘‘It is not only about getting the red mercury,’’ he said. ‘‘The very small box needs special equipment to open it, and special reactors to work with it. If you open this box, a radius of eight kilometers around you will be destroyed.’’
This was especially dangerous, because hot red mercury could also be harvested from junkyards and seamstress shops. Al-Safi described how this came to pass. To prevent the weapons-grade material from falling into the wrong hands during what he called ‘‘the American occupation’’ of the former Soviet Union, he said, Russians safeguarding the stock late in the Cold War cached tiny reservoirs of red mercury in sewing machines and
radios bound for export, which were then scattered throughout the Arab world. (Another version of the same tale says that red mercury is hidden in old television sets.)
These rumors have been circulating for years, once driving prices for old sewing machines as high as $50,000 in Saudi Arabia, according to a 2009 Reuters report. Often the most-sought-after machines were the Singer brand — which, considering that Singer was an American manufacturer, did not quite align with the Soviet fable. No matter. Abu Omar also insisted that old sewing machines were a red-mercury source. ‘‘Specific machines,’’ he said, ‘‘with a butterfly logo on them.’’ He said he knew this from experience because the red mercury used in the jihadists’ chlorine experiment in Ras al-Ain had come from his grandmother’s machine.
This was hardly the worst of the hoax’s real-world effects. In southern Africa, it has cost lives. According to a regional and especially cruel variation of the legend, the substance is found in conventional military munitions, particularly land mines, there to be claimed by anyone daring enough to take them apart and extract the goods. Tom Dibb, the program manager in Zimbabwe for the Halo Trust, a private mine-clearing organization, said he and the local authorities have documented people being killed in explosions while hunched over land mines or mortar bombs with hand tools.
In the bloodiest incident, in 2013, six people were killed near Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, by a blast in the home of a faith healer. One victim was an infant. Dibb spoke with the police and said ‘‘they were pretty convinced that it was a tank mine being taken apart for red mercury.’’ In another case, which Dibb examined himself, two men were killed and another wounded as they tried harvesting land mines for red-mercury extraction from a
minefield. The most recent death that the Halo Trust investigated occurred on Nov. 1, Dibb said, when a 22-year-old man, Godknows Katchekwama, was killed while trying to dismantle and remove red mercury from an R2M2, a South African antipersonnel land mine about the size of a tuna can.
The Crocodile kept inquiring about red mercury for more than a year, Abu Omar said, pressing for results. He reached out one last time on WhatsApp in June 2015. At the time, Kurds were attacking the Islamic State in Tal Abyad, and the commander also sought what he called ‘‘thermal panels’’ to deceive the weapons-guidance systems on American
warplanes. But by November of this year, Abu Omar was still emptyhanded. By then Tal Abyad had fallen to the Kurds, and the Crocodile had gone silent, leaving the quest without a sponsor for now.
Abu Omar had kept busy with other work; he said he had recently delivered 23 commercial drones to the jihadists. He remained a storehouse of red-mercury yarns. Word was that the Kurdish fighting groups opposing the Islamic State had been buying up the stuff. ‘‘People I know sold it to Kurds three times,’’ he said. And eight red-mercury warheads had been found in the Aleppo countryside, too. The story was similar to one from Reyhanli, another Turkish border city, where smugglers insisted that rebels in Idlib had overrun a military checkpoint and captured a few grams of red mercury. This material was said to be available for sale, although no one who said this could arrange to see it.
