The Evil That Cannot Be Left Unanswered
Turning Point: ISIS strikes targets in Paris, bringing its fight to the West.
Just
outside Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, there is a refugee camp
where more than 2,700 Yazidis languish in makeshift tents more than a
year after being driven out of northern Iraq by Islamic State fanatics.
I
was there recently, chatting with a couple who showed me photos on a
mobile phone of a man who was beheaded in their village. “They are
slaughterers,” said Anter Halef, a proud man stripped of hope. In a
corner sat his 16-year-old daughter, crying. I asked her why. “We just
ran from the war and…”’ Feryal murmured. Uncontrollable sobbing
swallowed the rest of her sentence. I had seldom seen such undiluted
grief etched on a young face. Life had been ripped out of her even
before she had begun to live.
The
Yazidis, a religious minority viewed by the Islamic State jihadis as
devil-worshipers, constitute a small fraction of the 2.2 million
refugees who have fled to Turkey from the Syrian war and from the
spillover violence in Iraq. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
has described the killing of Yazidis as an act of genocide.
Across
the wide area of Syria and Iraq that it controls, the Islamic State
enacts its nihilistic death cult drawn from a medievalist reading of the
Koran. They slit throats at public executions, butcher “infidel”’
communities like the Yazidis en masse and turn women and children into
sex slaves as they build a self-styled caliphate based on oil revenue,
absolutist zealotry and digital slickness.
From
time to time the group exports the terror it finances with oil revenues
from its sprawling fiefdom. The downing of a Russian passenger jet with
224 people on board, the random slaughter in Paris of 130 people
enjoying a Friday night out, and the worst terrorist attack on American
soil since 9/11, in San Bernardino, California, put an end to the
complacent nostrum that the Islamic State was a local threat.
Nobody
can switch off the Islamic State blockbuster. Its magnetism is
undeniable. The group traffics in movie images whose effect is at once
riveting and disturbing. In an environment of growing unease, rightist
politicians like Marine Le Pen in France or Donald Trump in the United
States find their nationalist messages resonate. It’s already clear that
the 2016 American election will not be politics as usual. Fear and its
other face, belligerence, will be front and center.
How
bad that gets may depend on what ISIS does next. A whole relativist
school has emerged that’s inclined to belittle the militants as a small
Internet-savvy bunch of thugs, a “JV team,” as President Obama once
called them, whose importance we only magnify if we confront them with
the means they themselves use against the West — all-out war, that is.
For
this school of thought, massive retaliation is precisely what the
jihadis want; it will drive recruitment. Better to exercise the Obama
doctrine of restraint. After the Paris killings, Vice President Joe
Biden declared: “I say to the American people: There is no existential
threat to the United States. Nothing ISIS can do could bring down the
government, could threaten the way we live.”
Nothing? Try saying that to the people of Brussels, in near lockdown for several days after the Paris attacks.
Or the people of San Bernardino, where one perpetrator of the mass
shooting, Tashfeen Malik, had pledged allegiance to Islamic State.
The
central question looming over the coming year is whether or not Islamic
State is an existential threat to Western societies, and by extension
whether or not it can be allowed a continued hold on the territory it
uses to marshal that threat.
Today,
Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa, much closer to Europe than the
mountains of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, is tolerated as a terrorist
haven, whereas Al Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary was shut down by military
force after the attacks on New York and Washington. It is as if the
metastasizing jihadi ideology of which Islamic State is the latest and
most potent manifestation has sapped the West’s will.
At
year’s end, for the first time, in some polls, a majority of Americans
favored the use of ground forces against ISIS — a policy rejected by
President Obama, although he called in a speech to the nation after the
San Bernardino attacks for Congress to give final authorization to the
use of military force against the terrorists.
President
François Hollande declared after the Paris attacks that France is now
at war with Islamic State and that far greater urgency must be brought
to the fight. But he has been a lone voice. So far, the Obama
administration prefers to believe that its air-campaign strategy is
working and that, post-Iraq, putting military forces on the ground is
folly.
I
do not see how the Islamic State can be seen as anything other than an
existential threat to Western societies. It stands for the destruction
of all the Western freedoms — from the ballot box to the bed — that grew
out of the Enlightenment and the rejection of religion as the ordering
reference of society. It would take humanity back to the Middle Ages and
target every apostate for destruction.
The
wait-them-out, relativist school has at the very least to clarify why
it is confident that the militants will not use the land they hold and
the oil revenues they amass to develop weapons of mass destruction,
including chemical weapons, or to launch a devastating cyber-attack on
the West. It needs to explain why it believes time is on our side.
Freedom
is not for everyone. The road to Raqqa is in many ways the road from
freedom’s burden — from personal choice and its dilemmas to submission
to an all-encompassing Islamist ideology. If the free world and
potential allies from the region are to fight this magnetism, they must
rouse themselves from liberty’s consumerist drug.
For
evil, unmet, propagates. To allow Islamic State to consolidate its hold
over territory and minds over the coming year is to invite, or at least
to accept, an inevitable replay of the Paris or the San Barnardino
slaughters. It is to accept that the Syrian debacle will worsen for
another year. And that, in turn, will further exacerbate the anxiety and
fears on which nationalist, often Islamophobic politicians in Europe
and the United States thrive.
At
the Yazidi refugee camp, Anter Halef said to me, “We no longer have a
life in this world. It’s empty.” He was broken, but at least, unlike his
children, he had lived his life. “ISIS has no religion,” he went on.
“No sane man would slaughter a child. In one night, they killed 1,800
people.”
Since
we spoke, Kurdish and Yazidi fighters have retaken the town of Sinjar,
the area that the Halef family comes from. The Kurds are investigating a
mass grave said to contain the remains of older women that the Islamic
State, which had held the area since August 2014, did not want to use as
sex slaves.
Perhaps
the Halefs will be able to return one day to Sinjar, the scene of these
abominations. But my impression was that for the teenage Feryal Halef
at least, there was no road back.
I
do not know precisely what had happened to her but she had been
destroyed, just as the journalist James Foley had been before he was
beheaded in August 2014. I will never forget that young Yazidi woman’s
eyes, turned into empty vessels. They demanded that humanity rouse
itself.
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