The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

Daesh: They haven’t gone away, you know

Amid the pandemic news, some analysts have been keen to highlight a “resurgence” of Daesh activity in Iraq and Syria. Some of the reporting on this has been overblown; a return to the territorial “caliphate” of 2014-19 is highly unlikely. But the group’s activities have been following a familiar pattern.

Much of the discussion about this supposed resurgence has 2014 as its starting point, when columns of black-clad fighters swept into Mosul, and the international community feared for Baghdad. But we should instead be looking back much farther.  From 2007 the group was harried and its leaders were being killed, but it was still able to launch attacks. In 2007, ISI (one of Daesh’s predecessor groups) killed at least 219 people. By the beginning of 2008, the group had lost 75 per cent of its fighters killed or wounded, yet it managed to kill 225 people that year, 803 in 2009, and 434 in 2010.

The international community has a short memory, particularly when it comes to Daesh. The “surge” in Iraq in 2007 was meant to end the insurgency, but it failed; the insurgency was suppressed, but not destroyed.

When taking a course of antibiotics, you are required to finish the course, even if you are feeling better — because bacteria learn and evolve, and any that survive the original course can be much harder to defeat. But in the battle against ISI and the other insurgent groups in 2007, we didn’t finish the course of treatment. When they bounced back, they were stronger, and they took nearly five years to be defeated in their new territories after 2014. But again, although the coalition to defeat Daesh is still active, it is doing less than it was, and the coronavirus pandemic has diminished counter-Daesh activity.

In October, after the death of its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, I wrote that Daesh was far from defeated so long as the idea that it represented continued to drive its members. It is apparent from continued attacks around the world in the group’s name that its appeal remains high. The loss of its territory has not diminished its power; instead, it has simply added to the jihadi narrative of a global plot against Muslims. And in any case, the group still more or less controls territory through affiliates in other, less noticed, parts of the world.

So attention on the “resurgence” of Daesh is to be welcomed, provided it does not fade as it becomes apparent that defeating the group comprehensively is a long slog, not a glorious short campaign. And the recent increase in attacks is a useful reminder that it is still at large.

The jihadi ideology that Daesh and others like them lean on is not “protected speech,” or the intellectual product of free thought. It undermines the very basis of the global order, and so must be stamped on.

Peter Welby

In the meantime, simply training troops and supporting local authorities in Syria and Iraq is not going to address the true issue. This requires something more comprehensive — a total rejection of jihadi groups’ freedom to operate, anywhere. The international community has never been willing, despite much talk of the scale of the jihadi threat, to put up the resources required to bring stability. If the leading nations of the world had intervened to stabilise Syria in 2011, the opportunities that the civil war has provided as a training ground for terror would not have arisen.

Intervention is costly. If resources are insufficient, it fuels chaos, as we saw in Iraq. But we also see the cost of no intervention. One day, someone will do the sums to see how much the Syrian civil war cost the region and the world; those numbers will be high, in refugees, in terror, in regional disruption, and in the direct cost of combating Daesh and other groups. But if the international community were serious about global stability, and about defeating jihadi terrorism, then the necessary resources could be found.

As I have said before, though, it is the idea of Daesh that is persuasive to some. It is an idea that has drawn a diverse mixture of supporters from IT consultants in Mumbai to doctors in the UK. Too much of the world, particularly in the West, is squeamish about the idea of resourcing robust challenges to extremist ideologies. It smacks of censorship, or even suppression of religious freedom. We need to get over that squeamishness.

The jihadi ideology that Daesh and others like them lean on is not “protected speech,” or the intellectual product of free thought. It undermines the very basis of the global order, and so must be stamped on. Governments and religious leaders, at local, national and international levels, must be prepared to work together to defeat it. And where religious communities are skeptical of working with governments, their leaders need to challenge that skepticism.

But this need for encouragement and goodwill works both ways. Two decades after Al-Qaeda massacred its way into the global consciousness, there are those within governments in the West who are still hesitant about working effectively with Muslim communities and countries to defeat extremists. This is wrong on many levels, and loses sight of the fact that it is Muslims who suffer most from Daesh’s violence, as we saw in Afghanistan last week. If the ideology Daesh espouses is finally to be defeated, it will be defeated by all of our communities working hand in hand.

by PETER WELBY

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views and editorial stance of the SOHR.

Source: Daesh: They haven’t gone away, you know | Arab News