The ISIL Challenge

Since the beginning of 2014—the year in which the world was to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I by leaping headlong into new situations fraught with grave threats for world peace—several regional conflicts have morphed into worldwide concerns. All of these are critical, difficult to solve and risky in that they pose a catalyst for world conflict: the war in Syria, the war in Ukraine, the exchanges of missile fire between the Israeli government and Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip, all of these have this year shaken the foundations of world peace. But perhaps the most immediate and high-profile of these threats has been the swift rise of the fundamentalist terror organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL.

Without a doubt, ISIL is a clear and present danger to world peace and democracy. But it is worthwhile reflecting that it is as much an indirect threat, because of how burgeoning fear of its rapid advances might affect the quality of Western democracies through the self-defensive initiatives that they themselves implement, as it is a direct threat, because of the barbaric fundamentalist actions that it is carrying out. ISIL is violently challenging the West—as well as the Middle East—by seeking not only to impose its authoritarian Islamist crusade on the Arab world (and thus, if successful, place it off limits to relations with democratic Western nations), but also to send its jihadist fanatics out into the rest of the world to wreak havoc on what it considers the corrupt societies of Western Christian and Jewish infidels.

Now often referred to simply as the IS or Islamic State, the Sunni-fundamentalist ISIL has evolved simultaneously with the better-known al-Qaeda Islamic terrorist movement. But it is far less politically flexible and far more fanatically focused than al-Qaeda. So much so that, while the two groups formerly fought side by side against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria’s three-year-old civil-turned-regional war, al-Qaeda earlier this year publicly broke all ties with ISIL due to the latter’s relentlessly brutal tactics and to its notorious intractability. Since then, the Sunni insurgent group has declared itself a “caliphate”, also grandly claiming de facto religious authority over the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Its immediate goal is not only to take physical control of Iraq and Syria, but also to eventually win control over the entire Levant region, which includes Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and portions of Turkey. Its ultimate goal is to bring all Muslims everywhere in the world under its political control. And their main rule for all of these objectives would appear to be zero tolerance of any but their own politico-religious ideology. Quite simply, those conquered must choose between ISIL-style Islam and death. And as if to illustrate, in its rampage across the Middle East, ISIL has tortured and murdered thousands of civilians in the most horrific of ways: beheading, crucifixion and mass execution among them.

While the goals of ISIL may sound insanely ambitious, it is worth recalling that they are no more so than those of other fundamentalist fanatics before them—the Fascists and the Nazis, to name just two examples. And while its following may be relatively small, its ranks have grown nearly tenfold in the past couple of years and today are estimated to total anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000. Nor is this surprising as radical extremist movements go: Hitler’s earliest followers could (and did) fit into a beer garden.

The threat of ISIL to the Middle East is of obvious and serious concern to the West—if for no other reason, because the group is concentrating its combat efforts on taking the most oil-rich areas that it can—but its ability to sow terror on the streets of Western capitals is of even graver concern to governments in the West, since recent intelligence is demonstrating that converts to Sunni extremism in Europe and the United States may number into the thousands. This provides easy access by such foreign-trained terrorists to their countries of origin and neighboring nations in the West. And nowhere is this trend more prevalent, it would appear, than in Britain.

According to counterinsurgency experts, a typical British ISIL recruit is a male in his twenties, with at least some university education and a history of some sort of Muslim activism. Many are from middle class families of Muslim origin. These young men frequently commence their radicalization through contact with Islamist propaganda on the social networks, which ISIL is particularly adept at using for recruitment.

According to at least one expert, Britons who become ISIL recruits usually fall into one of three categories. One recruit type is made up of thrill-seekers, youths who have previously been involved in gang-related activities in their urban neighborhoods in Britain and are attracted to ISIL because of its glorification of armed violence, the sophisticated weaponry that it shows off on the Internet, and the camaraderie that ostensibly flourishes in the group’s training camps in Syria (or al-Sham in the ISIL lexicon).  A second type comprises dangerous sociopaths who are merely attracted to ISIL’s extroverted brutality, people who want to join up precisely because it’s the most ruthless outfit around and because the idea of committing heinous crimes against humanity with complete impunity is attractive to them—and clearly, to a terrorist organization like ISIL, this type of cold-blooded killer is of great practical use, as witnessed by “Jihad John’s” decapitation of American journalist James Foley on an ISIL video tape. Finally, the third type of recruit is the idealist. Islamist idealists form part of the “spiritual” core of groups like ISIL, because they are the “moral justifiers” of extremist actions.

Seen from this perspective, there is little difference between this last type of ISIL recruit and many of the American fighters who gladly volunteered to invade Iraq in 2003. Just as those idealistic Americans bought into the provably groundless story that they were avenging their 3,000 countrymen who died in the nine-eleven terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and that they were making the world safe for Western democracy, these Islamist idealists go to Syria to avenge the women and children murdered by the Assad regime or to Iraq to avenge the hundred thousand civilians who have died as a result of the 2003 US-led invasion and subsequent decade of civil war in that country, while, more importantly,  gaining ground for Islam.  Even the extremist idealists who eventually become such battle-hardened veterans that they no longer think of themselves as heroes coming from abroad to take revenge on Western-backed regimes will, nonetheless, frequently become fanatical crusaders invested in the argument that they are the keepers of the faith and of the territory of Allah and that it is their duty to impose and dispense God’s will, by wielding his swift and mighty sword in Iraq and the Levant.

In general, it is hard for Western Christians and Jews to comprehend the Jihadist holy war being waged by Islamic fundamentalists against the rest of the world at large and we do so, for the most part, by classing them in the same category with other types of anarchic terrorists.  But to do so is to miss the point and to underestimate their resolve. It would be wiser to view the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism as comparable to the Christian Crusades that, for nearly 200 years, from the 11^th to the 13^th centuries pitted “Knights for Christ” against what were considered “Islamic infidels”—as well as against any other “enemies of the Church” that successive pontiffs marked as such. Like the Christian Crusades, Islamic Jihad is frequently more politically than religiously motivated and it is just as often peopled by cut-throats, mercenaries, and power-hungry fortune hunters as its Christian counterpart was. But at its core, as in the Crusades, Jihad is driven by religious fanaticism and social fundamentalism, forces capable of breeding self-justification for the most heinous of acts against any and all “infidels”, since the essential purpose is to either convert or exterminate the “enemy” in the “holy name of God”.

In view of this reality, then, perhaps the single most important factor that the West should be bearing in mind—as it continues what promises to be a prolonged struggle against the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism—is that of its own core beliefs and social mores. Up to now, that hasn’t been the case. In a very real sense, as of September 11, 2001, jihadist extremists have been winning ground from Western democracy, simply by instilling fear in the government and in the citizens of the United States and its allies. And it is of utmost importance that this situation be remedied and that the ground lost be won back, in terms of human and civil rights as well as the rule of law and rules of engagement.

Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism has managed to undermine the most essential bases of Western democracies, starting with the United States, simply by using their own fear against them. Reeling under the effects of panic, the leader of Western democracy has eroded human and civil rights through exceptional laws and procedures implemented in the wake of nine-eleven and, in doing so, has given rise to previously unthinkable occurrences: the suspension of constitutional guarantees for anyone deemed a terrorist, the circumventing of major international treaties on the treatment of prisoners of war, government violation of citizens’ right to privacy in telecommunications and the mail, pressure brought to bear on the media, arbitrary arrests without charges by a court of law, the utilization of operative methods employed by dictatorships long criticized and targeted by Washington for sanctions, including the limited use of torture within the country by agencies under federal government control, the pressing into service of third party countries for the purpose of torturing and interrogating persons of interest, and the creation of lists of individuals marked for extermination under orders from the Executive Branch of government.

In the 1970s, General Carlo Dalla Chiesa, the one-time leader of Italy’s elite national police, the Carabinieri, who was placed in charge of that country’s strategy in fighting the Red Brigades terrorist organization, referred to the danger, in confronting a cunning and ruthless non-traditional enemy, of turning into something no better than one’s rival if one loses sight of the rule of law. On the occasion of the abduction and subsequent murder of elder statesman and former Prime Minister Aldo Moro many voices were raised calling on Dalla Chiesa to use non-traditional methods such as torture to find out where the renowned politician was being held. But in the face of this growing sentiment, the general responded: “Italy can survive the loss of an Aldo Moro, [but] it will not survive the implementation of torture.”

His message should today stand as a warning to the United States and other Western democracies, which at other times in their history have served as the moral and ethical compass for the rest of the world. As the West seeks to form and lead a worldwide alliance to provide a solution to the ISIL challenge, it should focus on also winning hearts and minds by clearly demonstrating, through exemplary conduct, that Western democracy is up to that challenge and that the hard and fast rules of secular democracy and the rights of Man are not simply hollow terms, but practicable values that are far superior to the fundamentalist ideologies against which the West is attempting to defend the world.