This is a cross-post by Layo
In the “deepest circle of hell”, ISIS have entered. Last month ISIS seized the refugee camp of Yarmouk outside of Damascus. Public executions, shootings and beheadings have followed. 5,000 people have tried to flee their homes since ISIS stormed the camp, but have no place to go. There are fears that 18,000 inside the besieged camp could be massacred. When you stare down the barrel of a Jihadist’s gun, your refugee status counts for nothing. Any Christians, Shia, Homosexuals, Atheists, all that is Kafir, risk being murdered or enslaved in Yarmouk.
After four years of the Syrian Civil War we have become accustomed to the barbarism and horrors committed by Daesh. Their horrors have been broadcast on our TV screens and brought to our nearby shores. Yet ISIS do not stand alone. They are one face, one faction, of a violent totalitarian movement; from Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, to Boko Haram in Nigeria via the Taliban in Afghanistan; the rise of ISIS must be seen within the context of a jihad insurgency that is now global.
World leader’s denounce these terrorists and decry their ‘death cults’. We send war planes and drones to bomb them as we send Special Forces to take out their hierarchy. But as thousands leave Europe to join these groups, little seems to have changed. Islamism, the ideology that drives these terror groups cannot be bombed out of existence. This ideology, its ideas, and how they’re promoted, must too be challenged.
As Maajid Nawaz argues: ‘Recognizing this as an insurgency affects entirely how we react to it…. counter-insurgency rests on the assumption that the enemy has significant enough levels of support within the communities it aims to survive among’. And we must understand and challenge why this is the case. Why for example have more British Muslims joined ISIS than the British Army Reserves? We must understand the deeply rooted issues that make individuals vulnerable to extremism — social exclusion, institutionalized racism and a feeling of disconnect from British society. But if we do this, while ignoring the ideology that drives extremism, we are bound to fail.
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