By Jim Geraghty
Monday, October 28, 2019
The world is a safer place today than it was just a few
days ago. On Saturday night, U.S. special forces killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi during a night raid in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib.
Take a moment to appreciate not only this spectacular mission, but how severe
the threat of Baghdadi and ISIS was, and how our military and our allies
managed to shut down a kingdom of horrors and smash an army of cruelty.
Back in March 2014, Graeme Wood wrote a lengthy
article in The Atlantic that, at the time, was one of the most detailed
and extensively researched portraits of ISIS, what fueled its rise, what
attracted its members, and what its leadership wanted. A key part of Wood’s
profile was laying out how this particular group of Islamists differed from the
group of Islamists Americans were already most familiar with, al-Qaeda. After
the U.S. Navy SEALS took out Osama bin Laden in 2011, al-Qaeda gradually faded
from the list of prominent worries of the average American. The last major
al-Qaeda attack on western targets was the Charlie Hebdo shooting on January 7,
2015.
One of the surprising conclusions from Wood — and perhaps
one that other terrorism experts might dispute — was that ISIS was less focused
on the West than al-Qaeda.
. . . its threat to the United
States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would
suggest. Al-Qaeda’s core is rare among jihadist groups for its focus on the
“far enemy” (the West); most jihadist groups’ main concerns lie closer to home.
That’s especially true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its ideology.
It sees enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on
the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the expansion
to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much directly: in
November he told his Saudi agents to “deal with the rafida [Shia] first
. . . then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] . . .
before the crusaders and their bases.”
Nonetheless, ISIS repeatedly demonstrated an ability
inspire jihadist-minded Muslims to attempt deadly attacks wherever they lived,
and this inspiration created a pervasive threat to civilian targets around the
world. The list of targets is stunning, even after living through it: the
Canadian parliament, the train from Paris to Amsterdam, the Bataclan theater,
San Bernardino, a Starbucks in Jakarta, a tourist intersection in Istanbul,
Brussels metro stations and airports, Ataturk International Airport in
Istanbul, Bastille Day in Nice, France, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a
church in Normandy . . . ISIS never launched any attack as deadly as the 9/11
attacks, but it set its sights lower and was arguably more effective: it
created a sense that it could hit anywhere, not just prominent landmarks. (Many
would argue this approach to terrorism inspires even more fear. You can choose
to avoid airplanes or the tallest skyscrapers and government buildings; it’s
much more difficult to avoid any public space or public transportation.)
Unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS could point to a territory and a
spectacularly cruel and brutal government, expanding its territory and
conquering new peoples. ISIS argued it was the fulfillment of an ancient
promise to Muslims, and that history and the divine were on its side. It
represented a threat unlike any other in American history: a hostile state that
was comparably technologically primitive but repeatedly demonstrated an ability
to kill our civilians in unpredictable ways, often by turning our own legal
immigrants and citizens
against ourselves. (In a reflection of how our political divisions were
starting to consume us, a
significant portion of the public refused to believe that an ISIS attack was an
ISIS attack, and that it simply had to be primarily driven by homophobia.)
Wood wrote:
If [ISIS] 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. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and
behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate
would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve
it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with
battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a
conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be
routed, it might never recover.
The United States did not invade but put together a
coalition of most of our NATO allies, Jordan, Morocco, Turkey (although there’s
a lot to unpack there) — and perhaps most importantly, the Iraqi Army and the
Syrian Democratic Forces who had to do most of the fighting on the ground. (On
paper, Russia, Iran, Iraq, and the Syrian government formed their own coalition
against ISIS, but somehow their bombs kept landing on rebels fighting against
Assad’s regime.)
ISIS isn’t dead and gone, but it’s a shadow of its former
self. Jacob Olidort, special adviser on
Middle East policy and Syria country director at the Defense Department in 2016
and 2017, wrote earlier this year that the president and his critics were
talking past each other, that while ISIS will have members and followers for a
long time to come, it no longer functions as a coherent organization:
New fissures within the group have
opened over the past two years, with grievances ranging from issues of
authenticity and ideological purity to organizational and bureaucratic
failures. The Islamic State’s ideologues have acknowledged its changed
circumstances and offered explanations for the defeats and loss of territory
since the fall of Mosul. But these defenses haven’t been persuasive for some of
the organization’s adepts, who have begun questioning why the Islamic State is
experiencing a decline.
Similarly, Al-Qaeda isn’t dead and gone, but it’s a
shadow of its former self as well. Ayman al-Zawahiri called for new attacks
against Americans last month around the anniversary of 9/11. If any al-Qaeda
adherents tried, we didn’t notice, and we live in a world where the tools of
terror are not difficult to find: vans and steak knives and propane tanks. (By
the way, if you ever worry that you’re not aging well, take a look at Zawahiri.
He looks older than Si Robertson from Duck Dynasty lately.) These days Zawahiri
is complaining about “backtrackers” not being sufficiently committed to jihad.
This is the terrorist equivalent of becoming a grumpy old man.
Depending upon how you want to define the term “major,”
the last major jihadist terrorist attack on American soil was the Pulse
nightclub shooting in Orlando, June 12, 2016. (Others might point to the
Minnesota mall stabbing attacks in September of that year, and the concurrent
bombings in New York City and New Jersey that thankfully had no fatalities; the
following month a Somali refugee tried to run down people on the campus of Ohio
State University, injuring 13, but again, thankfully no fatalities.)
The good news — maybe some of the best news for America
in a long time — is that the fear of jihadist terrorism on American soil has
gradually faded from our cultural landscape and collective consciousness. We no
longer feel terrorized by them, and that is the ultimate failure in terrorism.
The bad news is that mass shooters and domestic
terrorists appear eager to fill the void.
No comments:
Post a Comment