What DAESH really believe

I have been reading a horrifying but very convincing article on The Atlantic site by Grahame Wood called What ISIS really wants.

When, like myself, you have met many Muslims who are decent, civilised people who describe their faith as the religion of Peace and can quote the Prophet in support of tolerant, decent, civilised behaviour, it is very confusing to find that some of the worst murderers in modern history claim to be acting in the name of the same religion.

Not that Islam is alone in this: there have been people who committed murder in the name of Jesus Christ. Most of them didn't appear very familiar with the New Testament, with sayings like "love your enemies" and that Jesus ordered his followers not to take up arms against those who came to arrest him with the words "Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword."

It is extremely hard for most Western people, certainly including myself, to understand the mindset of those who call themselves the "Islamic State," even more so than it was with Al Queda or the Taleban. Nothing I had previously read or heard about them made much sense at all.

Having read this article, I still do not claim to really understand the movement which calls itself "Islamic State" and is sometimes known by the first letters of its' Arabic name, as DAESH. However, at least Graeme Wood's description of how and why they operate does fit all the observed facts, explain why they fell out with Al Queda and are even more extreme than that group, and also explains why some Muslims are drawn to go and join them.

Wood explains that the split between AL Queda and DAESH began over the latter's wholesale readiness to declare other Muslims to be apostates, marked for death and hellfire. His article says that

'In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous. “If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ ” the Prophet said, “then one of them is right.” If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation.'

Bin Laden and his successors were reluctant to use takfir against large numbers of other Muslims: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is not. For example, Wood says that DAESH regards all 200 million Shias as apostates who are marked for genocide if they are ever in a position to inflict it. He adds that

"... the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims."

He also argues that because DAESH claims to have re-established a "Caliphate" which has claimed significant areas of what we call Iraq and Syria as territory, hardline Jihadists who accept that claim will interpret certain passages in the Quran as instructions them to travel to DAESH territory and join them. So we can expect to see radicalised youngsters heading for the airport and should put measures in place to stop them.

Any study of history should quickly indicate that some ideas and philosophies have shown an amazing invulnerability to military defeat or persecution - seventy years of persecution failed to eradicate Christianity from Russia, a similar period has failed to do the same in China, two thousand years of persecution including a massive genocide failed to eradicate Judaism. But other philosophies, particularly those dependent on force or on the idea that one group of people is somehow superior to another, can be reduced to nuisance level by an overwhelming military defeat.

Antisemitism and fascism may not be dead, but the Nazi variant of them took a blow in 1945 from which there was no possibility of recovery:  the defeat of the Confederate State of America in 1865 was to all intents and purposes final.

DAESH is somewhere between the two. A complete military victory which took away all their territory would mean they could no longer claim to be a Caliphate, and that would be an extremely serious blow: if, and only if, the ground troops who did this were muslim, it might be as devastating to them as the defeat in 1945 was to Nazism. Wood says

"Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding."

But invasion by the west would be an extremely high-risk strategy. DAESH believe there will soon be a final war, in which the army of "Rome" (which will doubtless mean any non-muslim military force opposed to them) will initially win crushing victories, until the Jihadists are on the verge of final defeat.

Most insane of all in the eyes of any Christian, the "Islamic State" Jihadists believe that at the very final moment when they are on the verge of total defeat, Jesus (who they regard as the second most holy prophet in Islam) will return, kill the leader of their enemies with a spear, and lead the "Islamic State" to victory.

Hence a Western military ground force attacking them in Iraq or Syria is exactly what the jihadists want, and any defeat short of a total wipe-out will merely make them all the more convinced that the final age of the world, and their final victory, are imminent.

Instead he urges that we should give the support to local muslim enemies of DAESH, of whom there are plenty, that will enable them to defend against and contain the so called "Islamic state."

He argues that

"Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like."

It's difficult and messy, but I certainly have not seen a better plan than Wood puts forward to deal with these people.

The author is interviewed about the article at

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/387391/what-isis-really-wants-graeme-wood-interview/