The self-styled ‘Islamic State’ Group (ISIS or ISIL), the Arabic acronym for which is Daesh, is increasingly haunting the nightmares of Western journalists and security analysts. I keep seeing some assertions about it that strike me as exaggerated or as just incorrect.
1. It isn’t possible to determine whether Daesh a mainstream Muslim organization, since Muslim practice varies by time and place. I disagree. There is a center of gravity to any religion such that observers can tell when something is deviant. Aum Shinrikyo isn’t your run of the mill Buddhism, though it probably is on the fringes of the Buddhist tradition (it released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995). Like Aum Shinrikyo, Daesh is a fringe cult. There is nothing in formal Islam that would authorize summarily executing 21 Christians. The Qur’an says that Christians are closest in love to the Muslims, and that if they have faith and do good works, Christians need have no fear in the afterlife. Christians are people of the book and allowed religious freedom by Islamic law from the earliest times. Muslims haven’t always lived up to this ideal, but Christians were a big part of most Muslim states in the Middle East (in the early Abbasid Empire the Egyptian and Iraqi Christians were the majority). They obviously weren’t being taken out and beheaded on a regular basis. They did gradually largely convert to Islam, but we historians don’t find good evidence that they were coerced into it. Because they paid an extra poll tax, Christians had economic reasons to declare themselves Muslims.
We all know that Kentucky snake handlers are a Christian cult and that snake handling isn’t typical of the Christian tradition. Why pretend that we can’t judge when modern Muslim movements depart so far from the modern mainstream as to be a cult
2. Daesh fighters are pious. Some may be. But very large numbers are just criminals who mouth pious slogans. The volunteers from other countries often have a gang past. They engage in drug and other smuggling and in human trafficking and delight in mass murder. They are criminals and sociopaths. Lots of religious cults authorize criminality.
3. Massive numbers of fighters have gone to join Daesh since last summer. Actually, the numbers are quite small proportionally. British PM David Cameron ominously warned that 400 British Muslim youth had gone off to fight in Syria. But there are like 3.7 million Muslims in the UK now! So .000027 percent of the community volunteered. They are often teens, some are on the lam from petty criminal charges, and many come back disillusioned. You could get 400 people to believe almost anything. It isn’t a significant statistic. Most terrorism in Europe is committed by European separatist groups– only about 3% is by Muslims. Cameron is just trying to use such rhetoric to avoid being outflanked on his right by the nationalist UKIP. One of the most active Daesh Twitter feeds turns out to be run by an Indian worker in a grocery chain in Bangalore who lived in his parents’ basement and professed himself unable to volunteer for Syria because of his care giving chores. Daesh is smoke and mirrors.
4. Ibrahim Samarra’i’s ‘caliphate’ is widely taken seriously. No, it isn’t. It is a laughing matter in Egypt, the largest Arab country. There are a small band of smugglers and terrorists in Sinai who declared for Samarra’i, but that kind of person used to declare for Usama Bin Laden. It doesn’t mean anything. Egypt, with 83 million people, is in the throes of a reaction against political Islam, in favor of nationalism. It has become a little dangerous to wear a beard, the typical fashion of the Muslim fundamentalist. Likewise, Tunisia voted in a secular government.
5. Daesh holds territory in increasing numbers of countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan. But outside of Syria and Iraq, Daesh is just a brand, not an organization. A handful of Taliban have switched allegiance to Daesh or have announced that they have. It has no more than symbolic significance in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These converts are tiny in number. They are not significant. And they were already radicals of some sort. Daesh has no command and control among them. Indeed, the self-styled ‘caliph’, Ibrahim Samarrai, was hit by a US air strike and is bed ridden in Raqqah, Syria. I doubt he is up to command and control. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have a new agreement to roll up the radicals, and Pakistan is aerially bombing them.
Even in Syria and Iraq, Daesh holds territory only because the states have collapsed. I remember people would do this with al-Qaeda, saying it had branches in 64 countries. But for the most part it was 4 guys in each of those countries. This kind of octopus imagery is taken advantage of by Daesh to make itself seem important, but we shouldn’t fall for it.
6. Only US ground troops can defeat Daesh and the USA must commit to a third Iraq War. The US had 150,000 troops or so in Iraq for 8 1/2 years! But they left the country a mess. Why in the world would anybody assume that another round of US military occupation of Iraq would work, given the disaster that was the last one? A whole civil war was fought between Sunnis and Shiites that displaced a million people and left 3000 civilians dead a month in 2006-2007, right under the noses of US commanders.
In fact, US air power can halt Daesh expansion into Kurdistan or Baghdad. US air power was crucial to the Kurdish defense of Kobane in northern Syria. It helped the Peshmerga paramilitary of Iraqi Kurdistan take back Mt. Sinjar. It helped an Iraqi army unit take back the refinery town of Beiji. The US ought to to have to be there at all. But if Washington has to intervene, it can contain the threat from the air. Politicians should just stop promising to extirpate the group. Brands can’t be destroyed, and Daesh is just a brand for the most part.
7. Daesh is said to have 9 million subjects. I don’t understand where this number comes from. They have Raqqah Province in Syria, which had 800,000 people before the civil war. But the north of Raqqah is heavily Kurdish and some 300,000 Kurds fled from there to Turkey. Some have now come back to Kobane. But likely at most Daesh has 500,000 subjects there. Their other holdings in Syria are sparsely populated. I figure Iraq’s population at about 32 million and Sunnis there at 17%, i.e. 5.5 million or so. You have to subtract the million or more Sunnis who live in Baghdad and Samarra, which Daesh does not control. Although most of the rest Sunni Iraq has fallen to Daesh, very large numbers of Sunnis have fled from them. Thus, of Mosul’s 2 million, 500,000 voted with their feet last summer when Daesh came in. Given the massive numbers of refugees from Daesh territory, and given that they don’t have Baghdad, I’d be surprised if over all they have more than about 3-4 million people living under them. And this is all likely temporary. Plans are being made to kick them right back out of Mosul.
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Western women who join Islamic State militants are driven by the same ideological passion as many male recruits and should be seen as potentially dangerous cheerleaders, not victims, experts said.
Western women who join Islamic State militants are driven by the same ideological passion as many male recruits and should be seen as potentially dangerous cheerleaders, not victims, experts said Wednesday.
A new study from the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) said the estimated 550 women who have travelled to Iraq and Syria are expected to marry, keep house and bear children.
But despite being banned from fighting, many are active propagandists for the cause on social media, celebrating the brutal violence of IS militants, acting as recruiting sergeants and even encouraging attacks abroad.
“The violent language and dedication to the cause is as strong as we find in some of the men,” said co-author Ross Frenett, an extremism expert.
“The worry is that as ISIS (the IS group) loses ground, as everyone hopes it does, that more and more of these women will transfer from the domestic world they’re in now to a more violent one,” he told AFP.
Much has been written about young women going to become “jihadist brides”, but the prevailing narrative of wide-eyed recruits drawn by a sense of excitement belies the importance of their own faith and passions.
The ISD researchers have been monitoring hundreds of women on social media, but focused for the study on 12 women from Austria, Britain, Canada, France and the Netherlands who are living with the IS group in Iraq and Syria.
Some of the women endorsed the bloody beheadings carried out by the militants — “I wish I did” it, one said after US journalist Steven Sotloff was killed — as well as railing against Western governments and the suffering of Muslims.
“My best friend is my grenade… It’s an American one too. May Allah allow me to kill their Kanzeer (pig) soldiers with their own weapons,” one said.
Crucially, the women also provide advice and encouragement to other women thinking of joining.
“They’re actively recruiting women and providing them with assistance advice and referrals to go to ISIS-held territory,” said Frenett.
“And they are acting as cheerleaders for terrorist attacks back home.”
– Social media ‘rebranding’ –
“There has been this gender blind spot where we see women as victims rather than as potential terrorists,” said Jayne Huckerby, associate professor at Duke University School of Law who specialises in women and counter-extremism.
“Policy makers have overlooked and underrated female terrorism both in terms of motivations for going and the roles that are played there.”
She said many women were driven to leave Western countries because of alienation and restrictions on their freedom to practice their faith, and drawn to the IS group by a sense of adventure and enthusiasm for a new Islamic utopia.
Their key role, aside from being wives and mothers, is to paint a picture to the outside world of daily life under the militants, through postings on social media that intersperse violent videos with photos of their cooking.
“They’re very important in terms of re-branding ISIS as less of a terror group and more of a state building exercise,” Huckerby told AFP.
She noted that many were also willing to fight, a point also made by Melanie Smith, of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London.
Smith, who maintains a database of about 70 female IS members, said British women are inciting attacks by suggesting them to people who could not travel to Iraq and Syria.
“You can see women online being frustrated about the fact they can’t fight and they suggest to each other that they could do something else,” she told The Observer newspaper.
Despite their passion, many of the women appear to find it difficult to leave their families behind, a factor which could be key to keeping them at home.
Frenett said the authorities should better support relatives, and also provide a way out for the women if they become disillusioned.
“There needs to be a path available to them when they come home,” he said.
Now I seem to remember that one of the reasons that John Howard refused to apologise to the stolen generation was that “we” weren’t personally responsible. Afterl all, none of “us” ever stole children so how could “we” apologise for something we didn’t do. And I seem to remember that the Murdoch Media was fairly supportive of this position.
But now I find that Mr. Murdoch embraces the notion of collective responsibility. If you’re a member of a particular group, then you’re responsible for the actions of all members of that group.
It’s an interesting concept.
Should perhaps all energy companies be fined for the actions of Enron?
Or all newspaper journalists be jailed for the phone hacking in Britain?
Of course, it’s be ridiculous to jail all journalists. I think just the ones who work for Murdoch would probably be enough.
But now we’ve established the notion of group responsibility. Here is my quick list of people who should apologise on behalf of their group:
Ok, it’s only a quick list, and maybe an apology isn’t enough. Maybe like Rupert says until the people who are part of the group “recognise and destroy”…
Oooh, that sounds a bit nasty and threatening when put in another context. Gee, I certainly don’t want to suggest that any member of that group should “recognise and destroy” someone else in the group.
I mean, people reading this blog might get the wrong idea about what I mean and it would sound like I were inciting hatred and violence.
Lucky Rupert’s made himself a lot clearer about what he means by “recognise and destroy” and that the words won’t encourage such things!
If the Islamic world refers to these extremists as DAESH which refers to them as non Islamic bigots. Why do we in the Western press give them the credibility and legitimacy that they crave Islamic State. Do Western governments and press want to promote Islamaphobia. Is it in the interests of English speaking governments to do so?
A top Pentagon general has informally rebranded the jihadists of Isis with the name “Daesh” after allies in the middle east asked he not use the group’s other monikers for fear they legitimize its ambitions of an Islamic state.
Lieutenant General James Terry almost exclusively used Daesh in reference to the militants at a press conference Thursday, although the Pentagon’s policy to primarily use “Isil” – an acronym for “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” – has not changed.
Terry, who leads US operations against Isis in Iraq, said partners in the region had asked him not to use the terms Islamic State, Isil or Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). Secretary of state John Kerry has also shifted his language in recent weeks, using Daesh 16 times and Isil only twice during remarks to Nato counterparts in Belgium. Retired general John Allen, the US envoy to coordinate the coalition against Isis, also prefers Daesh. French president Francois Hollande has used Daesh interchangeably with the group’s other names.
Daesh is also an acronym for an Arabic variation of the group’s name: al-Dawla al-Islamyia fil Iraq wa’al Sham. Most of the middle east and many Muslims abroad use Daesh, saying that although the jihadists have declared the nebulous region they control a caliphate, they neither adhere to Islam nor control a real state. Islamic clerics in particular have taken issue with the terms that include “Islamic State”. A group of British imams has suggested to prime minister David Cameron that he call the group “the Un-Islamic State”.
Supporters of Isis dislike Daesh because it separates Islam from their mission, and also because the term has become a pejorative in Arabic. Describing the word’s history, the Guardian’s middle east editor Ian Black wrote in September that Daesh has taken on a meaning beyond the jihadists’ control: “in the plural form – ‘daw’aish’ – it means bigots who impose their views on others.”
Isis itself has gone through many iterations and held shifting titles. It began in 1999 as Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, became al-Qaida in Iraq and then the Islamic State in Iraq under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, adopted “al-Sham”, and finally set out to be simply “the Islamic State”.
When Isis attempted to rebrand itself “the Islamic State” in September, residents in the Iraqi city of Mosul told the Associated Press that the jihadists “threatened to cut the tongue of anyone who publicly used the acronym Daesh … saying it shows defiance and disrespect”.
Updated
The Federal Government has left open the possibility of sending more troops to fight Islamic State (IS) militants, a day after confirming that special forces soldiers have begun moving into Iraq.
Australia sent a contingent of about 200 special forces to the defence base in the UAE in September, but they have been waiting there for a formal direction from the Iraqi government.
The troops have begun moving into the strife-torn country in the past week and will initially be placed in Baghdad in an “advise and assist” role.
US president Barack Obama said yesterday he is in talks with Australia and other coalition partners about how they can “supplement” their commitments.
Assistant Defence Minister Stuart Robert said no decision has been made about sending more troops and would not be made until the success of the current commitment could be gauged.
“The Prime Minister has not announced that and the Prime Minister has not made any statements to that effect – nor should we make any commitments further until we’ve actually bedded down what we’re putting into theatre right now,” he told NewsRadio.
“Our forces have now spent a number of days moving into locations. It will take more days to actually become effective in the advising and assisting.
“It will take weeks if not months for that training force to really come into effect.
“So let’s see what effect we can have on our ground before we jump further.”
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who is in Beijing for the APEC summit, said yesterday that Australia continues to talk with its partners about fighting the terrorist group.
n June the leader of Islamic State declared the creation of a caliphate stretching across parts of Syria and Iraq – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself the caliph or leader. Edward Stourton examines the historical parallels and asks what is a caliphate, and what is its appeal?
When Islamic State (IS) declared itself a caliphate in June this year, and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claimed the title of caliph, it seemed confirmation of the group’s reputation for megalomania and atavistic fantasy. Al-Baghdadi insisted that pledging allegiance to this caliphate was a religious obligation on all Muslims – an appeal which was immediately greeted by a chorus of condemnation across the Middle East.
But is it dangerous to underestimate the appeal of IS? Al-Baghdadi’s brutal regime does not, of course, remotely conform to the classical Muslim understanding of what a caliphate should be, but it does evoke an aspiration with a powerful and increasingly urgent resonance in the wider Muslim world.
The last caliphate – that of the Ottomans – was officially abolished 90 years ago this spring. Yet in a 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims living in Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia and Pakistan, two-thirds of respondents said they supported the goal of “unifying all Islamic countries” into a new caliphate.
Why do so many Muslims subscribe to this apparently unrealisable dream? The answer lies in the caliphate’s history.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at his first public appearance in Mosul, Iraq in JulyThe Arabic khalifa means a representative or successor, and in the Koran it is linked to the idea of just government – Adam, and then David and Solomon, are each said to be God’s khalifa on earth. And when the Prophet Mohammed died in 632 the title was bestowed on his successor as the leader of the Muslim community, the first of the Rashidun, the four so-called “Rightly Guided Caliphs” who ruled for the first three decades of the new Islamic era.
These four were, according to Reza Pankhurst, author of The Inevitable Caliphate, all appointed with popular consent. He argues that their era established an ideal of a caliph as “the choice of the people… appointed in order to be responsible to them, apply Islamic law and ensure it’s executed”. He adds that the true caliph “is not above the law”.
Listen to The Idea of the Caliphate, broadcast on Analysis on BBC Radio 4 or download the podcast
Shia Muslims challenge this version of history – they believe that the first two caliphs effectively staged a coup to frustrate the leadership claims of the Prophet’s cousin Ali – and this dispute about the early caliphate is the source of Islam’s most enduring schism. But to today’s Sunni Muslims, many of them living under autocratic regimes, the ideal of a caliphate built on the principle of government by consent is likely to have a powerful appeal.
Another significant source of the caliphate’s appeal today is the memory it stirs of Muslim greatness. The era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs was followed by the imperial caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids.
“Seventy years after the Prophet’s death, this Muslim world stretched from Spain and Morocco right the way to Central Asia and to the southern bits of Pakistan, so a huge empire that was all… under the control of a single Muslim leader,” says historian Prof Hugh Kennedy. “And it’s this Muslim unity, the extent of Muslim sovereignty, that people above all look back to.”
Abd-ar-Rahman III (889- 961) – Emir and Caliph of Al-AndalusThis Islamic Golden Age was also marked by great intellectual and cultural creativity – the Abbasid court in Baghdad valued literature and music, and fostered world-changing advances in medicine, science and mathematics.
Yet these dynasties extended their rule so far, and so fast, that it became increasingly difficult for any one lineage to control all Muslim lands. As power fragmented, it was not just a political dilemma for any particular dynasty, but also a theological challenge to the very idea of the caliphate. The power of unity was closely linked to the idea of a caliph – yet it only took just over a century of the Muslim faith for the world to see parallel – and even competing – caliphates emerge.
The Sunni theologian Sheikh Ruzwan Mohammed argues: “While you do have two caliphs on earth proclaiming that they’re the representatives of the Muslim community at this point, and more deeply that they are the shadow of God on earth, Muslims at that point were very pragmatic, and they acknowledged the fact that there could be more than one caliph representing the benefits and the concerns of the Muslim community – and that was also understood and accepted by Muslim theologians.”
The Mongol siege of Baghdad, 1258The Abbasid caliphate lasted for half a millennium before coming to a brutal end in 1258. When Baghdad fell to the Mongols, the last of the city’s caliphs was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death under the hooves of Mongol horses – this was, bizarrely, a mark of respect, as the Mongols believed that people of rank should be killed without their blood being shed.
The institution of the caliphate, however, survived. Members of the Abbasid family were installed as titular caliphs in Cairo by the Mamluks, the main Sunni Islamic power of the day. They were more ornaments to the Mamluk court than anything else, but merely by existing they preserved the ideal of a single leader behind whom all Muslims could unite. So the title was still there for the taking when a new Islamic empire arose. Early in the 16th Century it passed – in slightly murky circumstances – to the Ottoman sultans, who ruled a new Islamic world power for a further 400 years.
The caliphate was finally extinguished by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, in 1924. He believed the abolition of the institution was essential to his campaign to turn what was left of the empire into a 20th Century secular nation state. The last Ottoman caliph was expelled from Istanbul to live out a life of cultured exile in Paris and on the Cote d’Azur.
Mustafa Kemal AtaturkBut the institution he represented had by then existed for nearly 1300 years, and the impact of its abolition on Muslim intellectual life was profound. Salman Sayyid, who teaches at Leeds University and is the author of Recalling the Caliphate, compares it to Charles I’s execution, which opened up so many profound questions about the roles of parliament and the crown. In the same way, he says, Muslim thinkers in the 1920s suddenly found they had to ask fundamental questions they had never confronted before: “Do Muslims need to live in an Islamic State? What should that state be like?”
By the mid 20th Century leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser had come up with an answer to those questions – the ideology known as pan-Arabism offered a kind of secular caliphate, and during the 1950s Nasser even established something called the United Arab Republic, which joined Egypt and Syria.
But everything changed in the Middle East with the foundation of the State of Israel, and Pankhurst argues that Pan-Arabism was wrecked on the rock of Israeli military might. “Pan Arabism drew its legitimacy from the fact that it was going to return the Arabs to their position of glory and liberate Palestine,” he says. “When we had the abject defeat of 1967 (the Six Day War) it exposed a hollowness to the ideology.”
Pankhurst belongs to Hizb ut Tahrir, an organisation founded in the 1950s to campaign for the restoration of the caliphate, and he argues that the revival of the idea has been driven by a general disenchantment with the political systems under which most Muslims have been living. “When people talk about a caliphate… they are talking about a leader who’s accountable, about justice and accountability according to Islamic law,” he says. “That stands in stark contrast to the motley crew of dictators, kings, and oppressive state-security type regimes you have, which have no popular legitimacy at all.”
The regimes that dominated the Middle East during the late 20th Century did not like Hizb ut Tahrir – unsurprisingly, in view of its ideology. Pankhurst spent nearly four years in an Egyptian jail.
In the early days of the Arab Spring, the revolutions in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were interpreted in Western capitals as evidence that the Muslim future lay with democracy. Then in Egypt came the overthrow of the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the army under General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – and then came the horrors of Islamic State amid the bloody chaos of civil strife in Syria and Iraq.
Egypt’s ousted President Mohammed Morsi inside the defendant’s cage at his trial“Many people will say that IS begins with al-Sisi’s coup,” says Salman Sayyid of Leeds University. “We right now have a growing gap of legitimacy in most governments that rule the Muslim peoples – and that gap isn’t closing… One way of thinking about the caliphate is really a quest for Muslims to have autonomy. The idea that you should have capacity to write your own history becomes very strong and for Muslims I think the caliphate is the instrument for trying to write their own history.”
Many classical Sunni scholars challenge the very notion that the caliphate is a political project. Sheikh Ruzwan Mohammed, for example, argues that the key to the caliphate is really spiritual. “I think the Islamic State should come from within,” he says. “It should be an Islamic State first and foremost of mind and soul.” And the overwhelming majority, even of those who do believe that a new caliphate is a realistic political objective, completely reject the violence espoused by the self-styled Islamic State.
But IS has skilfully exploited the elements in the caliphate’s history which best serve its purposes. The historian Hugh Kennedy has pointed out, for example, that their black uniforms and flags deliberately echo the black robes the Abbasids adopted as their court dress in the 8th Century, thus recalling Islam’s Golden Age. And their original title – the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – harks back to the days when there was no national border between the two countries, because both territories were part of the great Islamic caliphate.
The success of IS does, in a grim way, reflect what a powerful and urgent aspiration the Caliphate has become. The IS project is certainly megalomaniac and atavistic, but it is building on an idea that is much more than a fantasy.
olddogthoughts 