The Islamic State: Pure Poison

Every week there is a fresh atrocity and every week the feeling that we have witnessed a new low in human savagery. As if on-camera beheading were not the lowest that could be stooped to, this week the world learned of the burning alive in a cage of the Jordanian pilot who had crashed in Islamic State-held territory. Later videos were released of crowds of adults and children watching this atrocity on huge screens put up in public squares by Islamic State (IS) in the areas they control.

The argument that ‘something must be done’ is felt more strongly after such outrages than at any other time. The media in the region and internationally starts asking whether this is the causus belli for further intervention, perhaps including an international commitment to sending land troops to tackle IS. Of course the visible atrocities of IS can be read in several ways.

There is the argument that IS carry out atrocities like this and send the footage around the world in order to terrorise people into keeping out. If this is the strategy then it has had some success. This week we learnt that the United Arab Emirates were no longer flying sorties over IS territory and had effectively withdrawn from the international coalition. Terror is used because terror works.

But there is also a view that IS are carrying out these highly visible acts of barbarism precisely in order to provoke an ill-judged and unsuccessful ramping-up of international action. If the US and her allies were ‘bounced’ into further and deeper commitment it could be the end for IS or it could be – if they have prepared for it properly and melded sufficiently into the local populations – precisely what is needed to embarrass and humiliate their deepest enemies.

The international community must therefore take stock of this. The week after next President Obama is convening an international conference in Washington to address the issue of ‘violent extremism’. It will, we can easily predict, achieve nothing. It is not possible to solve a problem you are not even willing to correctly understand or even to name. IS is not a product of ‘violent extremist’ ideology. It is an entity dedicated to a literalist and ultra-fundamentalist institution of Islamic law. It is purest poison first and foremost not for the West but for the Middle East and the wider Muslim world.

Which is why its defeat must – if at all possible – come not from the West alone but from the Muslim world. The pilot whose life was so brutally and publicly ended this week must be remembered not for the gruesomeness of his death but for the hope his life and choice of career gave. Because if IS is to be utterly defeated at some point then that defeat must be if not lead then at least seen to be lead from within the heart of the Muslim world. We hear a lot about ‘reclaiming the faith from the extremists’. Well now this must be done not just with words but with fighter planes and heavy munitions.