After the horrific terror attacks in Paris, French President François Hollande is talking a lot about a “strategy” to deal with the threat posed by ISIS, one he hopes to sell to President Obama and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin within the next week or so.
What should such a strategy look like?
The community
If we use as a metaphor the Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, the Paris killers represented the smallest of the dolls.
The bigger doll within which they were nested is the network of radical Islamist groups that have struck roots throughout France and, indeed, in all Western democracies. That second doll is nested within a third one which is often called “the Muslim community” in non-Muslim societies.
The third doll may not even know what is nesting inside it but, perhaps without wanting it, provides the sociological depth needed for radical groups. In Maoist terms, it amounts to the water in which the militant “fish” thrive. That is done by creating suburbs and chunks of downtowns that have a certain Islamic je ne sais quoi about them with shops and restaurants that serve no alcoholic drinks, women in the mandatory hijab, men with ISIS-approved beards and no moustaches, and mosques that are for political propaganda rather than religious rites and discussions.
Hollande and leaders of other major powers targeted, including the United States, Russia and China, can deal with the two smaller dolls. Through new legislation as well as a more serious educational effort, the community could be made aware of the danger it poses as a human shield for terrorists by constantly cultivating a form of apartheid based on religious misconceptions.
Communities themselves can do more. Islam has no mechanism for excommunication, but it is incumbent on every Muslim to make it clear he does not share the beliefs and deeds of any other Muslims if those are in conflict with his. This could be done in simple, visually effective, ways by discarding the type of hijab now associated with Khomeinists, Taliban and ISIS.
The next doll, the radical sleeper cells in Western cities, could be detected and uprooted by properly working within the law.
It may come as a surprise to some, but France does not have a special unit to combat terrorism; it has a unit to deal with “grand banditry” and “organized crime.” But terrorism is a particular kind of threat, especially terrorism built on a religious matrix.
In 1996, the G-7 summit in Lyon, presided over by France’s then-President Jacques Chirac, approved 45 measures to combat terrorism. The fact is that none of those were put into effect. Also in the 1990s, France spearheaded a global debate on how to fight terrorism, mainly by seeking joint action through the United Nations. However, the whole process was bogged down in the conflict about how to define terrorism with the sick cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
Twenty years and so many atrocities later, in more than 30 countries on every continent, it is perhaps time for France and the European Union to persuade the UN to provide the international framework needed to combat terrorism based on the principle that one man’s terrorist is every man’s terrorist.
Cowardly sickos
The doll that represents ISIS is, paradoxically, the easiest to face and defeat. Provided that its victims, among them almost all Western democracies, really want to do it.
Initially, ISIS appeared as a spectacular success because it managed to “conquer” territory as large as the United Kingdom. But it did so largely because it faced no opposition. It moved into Raqqa after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s troops had fled, many think because he wanted them to leave. ISIS then moved into Mosul and Ramadi, in Iraq, again because local units of the Iraqi army, feeling no loyalty to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad that discriminated against Arab Sunnis, didn’t see why they should fight.
In fact, ISIS has fought two major battles, over Kobane in Syria and Sinjar in Iraq, and lost both to a coalition of Kurdish fighters.
This is not surprising. ISIS patterns its military strategy on that of the Prophet Mohammed that is to say organizing “ghazva” (raids) against soft targets. The Muslim warrior has always been known as the Ghazi, a man who takes part in a ghazva. However, a ghazva is regarded as religiously licit only if the ghazis are more than 50% sure of victory. Otherwise they should return and wait for a better day. That is what the Prophet himself did in his only attempt at ghazva against the Byzantines.
Waging at least one annual ghazva became an almost religious obligation for Islamic caliphs and rulers from the 8th century onwards. And for a long while the ghazis enjoyed a number of advantages. They could decide the time and place for launching their raid as well as which target to choose, thus always having the initiative. Their enemies were forced merely to react, often long after the event.
It took the Persians and the Byzantines almost two centuries to learn the trick. They understood that, if facing no resistance, the ghazi moves rapidly ahead, like a knife in butter; but would come to a halt if he hit something hard on his way. In Persia, the Buyids decided to use the tactic against the Arabs, by becoming “counter-ghazis.” The ghazva knife was blunted and several Iranian provinces never fell to the Islamic “holy warriors.” It was not until 1071 that the ghazis, this time Turks not Arabs, managed to defeat the Byzantines at the Battle of Manizkert.
Continuing the tradition, ISIS goes where it is easy to go and flees from where it is difficult to resist. It just moved into Palmyra because nobody wanted to stop it. Next, it tried to enter Suwaida and amassed a large number of fighters and weapons for the ghazva. The city in southwest Syria had the advantage of being home to the Druze minority, providing ISIS with a tempting target. (Islamists regard the Druze as heretics who must be put to death.)
“If we use as a metaphor the Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, the Paris killers represented the smallest of the dolls.”
ISIS carried out two probing attacks on two Druze villages in Al-Huqf close to the Jordanian border in May and June 2015, cutting the heads of five “miscreants.” Druze fighters then came in from Suwaida and engaged ISIS in a mini battle, killing 11 of them. ISIS quietly withdrew.
ISIS understood that the Druze would not quietly go to slaughter as had done the peace-loving Yazadis in Iraq. As Druze fighters poured into Suwaida for the showdown, ISIS realized that the cost-benefit of the projected ghazva was not worth the effort. The caravan of ghazis had to make a U-turn back to Palmyra and Raqqa.
ISIS is not a classical terrorist organization. It is an enemy of humanity. Thus, despite what President Obama says about merely “containing and degrading” it, it must be defeated and destroyed.
So far ISIS has been relatively successful because it has not hit anything hard on its way. The homeopathic airstrikes, reluctantly ordered by Obama, have boosted ISIS’s narrative of Islamic victimhood without doing much real damage.ISIS has simply factored in the attacks as part of the daily hazards, especially because its agents all the way are capable of warning about the approach of bombers over their cellular phones.
ISIS has been in control of the rhythm and tempo of this war, even choosing the cadence of the mini battles it fights.
If Hollande manages to create a new coalition, the aim should be to wrest the initiative away from ISIS. That means turning a low-intensity war into one of medium intensity with wider and more frequent airstrikes and raids by Special Forces to destroy ISIS’s logistics and cancel its territorial contiguity. This could be done only if the local militias, many of them allied to ISIS because of fear or in exchange for arms and money, are confident that the major powers seek ISIS’s “defeat and destruction,” regardless of how long that might take.
In his message to Congress, Obama asked for permission to take action in Syria but insisted that he was not looking for something “unendurable,” (sic) presumably meaning a short campaign. Last month, Kerry corrected that by inventing a word of his own, “multi-year,” that is how long he thinks fighting ISIS would take.
There are plenty of people who want to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq: the Kurds, the Turkmans, the Druze and the less obnoxious Islamist groups such as Ahrar al-Shaam (Freemen of the Levant), Jibhat al-Nasr (The Victory Front), not to mention Sunni Arab tribes on both sides of the border.
Many areas ISIS operates in are held by emirs who could be persuaded to switch sides. With their help, ISIS territory could be turned into a patchwork of conflicting authorities vulnerable on all sides. ISIS’s decision to masquerade as a state, a “caliphate,” may be its chief attraction for Western “volunteers for martyrdom” in search of an Islamic dream. But in military terms, this could be ISIS’s Achilles’ heel because it offers a range of easy targets for airstrikes. Why these are not hit remains a mystery, at least to this writer.
It was precisely by raising the intensity of a low-intensity war that US Gen. David Petraeus managed to destroy al Qaeda in Iraq. An adapted version of that strategy could help us get rid of ISIS. But that requires US leadership.
Head of the snake
Finally, we have the largest doll in which all others are nested: Islam itself.
Islam, having started as a religion, has atrophied into a matrix for diverse and often conflicting political ideologies. Lacking a hierarchical structure, it has become a generic brand, unable to propose a coherent ethical and moral discipline for its adepts, who could become mystic Sufis or cold-blooded mass murderers.
Also because it has had no living theology for at least 200 years, contemporary Islam is incapable of offering a religious approach, let alone an analysis, of the key issues of the modern world.
No Western leader, as President Obama and Hollande have done, can say of the attacks: “This is not Islam.” Many Muslims, quite a few in fact, think otherwise. It would be more prudent for French leaders not to pose as arbiters of what is and what is not Islam.
Neither Hollande nor any other outsider could tackle the problems of the biggest doll. That is something that Muslims themselves must do.