Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (17 page)

One cannot help thinking, however, that Obama’s dilemma is also his salvation. No matter how hard the hawks in Congress, the American media, and at least some senior officers in the Pentagon (certainly not all of them) press him to commit to another crusade in the Middle East, he simply can’t come up with a plausible and defensible strategy for doing so. He should be grateful, because that is really the right answer: don’t do it. You’ll only encourage them. Hardly a week passes without some Islamic State spokesman wishing that his jihadis could fight American troops directly. And it’s not just bravado. It’s a rational part of Islamic State’s strategy. But it’s also an essential part of its ideology. It’s all very well murdering Shias and so on, but ISIS needs real infidels to fight.

On November 13, 2014, Islamic State’s Al Furqan Media Foundation released a speech by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi entitled (much in the style of papal encyclicals) “Even if the Disbelievers Despise Such,” which said in part:

America, Europe, Australia, Canada, (and) their apostate tails and slaves from amongst the rulers of the Muslims’ lands were terrified by the Islamic State.… The leaders of the Jews, Crusaders, apostates, their devils, chiefs and seniors gathered. They thought, planned, calculated, plotted and schemed for war against the Islamic State. They then came out with a failing plan manifested by bombarding the positions, battalions, vehicles and soldiers of the Islamic State with the purpose of preventing its advance and march.… Quickly the failure of their plan became apparent, by Allah’s favour. And soon the Jews and Crusaders will be forced to come down to the ground and send their ground forces to their deaths and destruction, by Allah’s permission. Rather, in actuality, this has already begun
.

Here is Obama who has ordered the deployment of 1,500 additional soldiers under the claim that they are advisers because the Crusaders’ airstrikes and constant bombardment—day and night—upon the positions of the Islamic State have not prevented its advance nor weakened its resolve.… And indeed, the Crusaders will be defeated. By Allah’s permission, they will be defeated.… Be assured, O Muslims, for your State is good and in the best condition. Its march will not stop and it will continue to expand, by Allah’s permission, even if the disbelievers despise such.
³⁰

So don’t give them what they want. Don’t send American ground troops into combat in Iraq, and don’t even think of sending them into Syria.

CHAPTER 9

FOREIGN FIGHTERS AND FRANCHISE WARS

W
hat really worries people about Islamic State is the possibility that it might expand into territories that would give it a strong economic base, or (at the extreme end of implausibility) even achieve its declared goal of sweeping much or all of the Arab world into its new caliphate. There’s not much risk that it will conquer Iraq’s Shia-majority region or Kurdistan, now that the first shock of its expansion up to their borders has passed, for both could count on strong Iranian military support if required. Syria is a more worrisome case, for a jihadi victory in Syria would bring Islamic State (and, in the north, perhaps also the Nusra emirate) right up to the borders of Lebanon and northern Israel. Millions more refugees would pour across the borders into Lebanon and Jordan (which have already taken in several million Syrian refugees), possibly with Islamist fighters in hot pursuit. This would create a high probability of a direct military confrontation with Israel, even if the Islamists would really prefer to concentrate on killing Shias first.

But it is the grand strategic ambitions of Islamic State that transfix people, and other Islamist organizations with
some actual territory under their control have already pledged their allegiance to Islamic State in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria and Afghanistan. There are also lone-wolf terrorists in the West who claim to be acting in the service of Islamic State. How seriously should we take all this?

In the case of terrorist attacks in Western countries, not very. Anybody Islamic State sends out to make attacks in Western countries would have to pass through the same airports and the same security checks that other would-be terrorists have had to go through for years now, so nothing has changed there. In any case, ISIS is far more interested in attracting young Western Muslims to come and fight for Islamic State on home ground. Foreign volunteers are not much use militarily, as they lack the combat experience of their locally born fellow jihadis, and their generally limited command of Arabic makes them unsuited for even junior positions of command, but they make great propaganda. Muhammad Emwazi, known to the British mass media as “Jihadi John,” is a good example. Born in Kuwait to Bedouin parents, he grew up in north London and did a degree in Information Systems at the University of Westminster. The videos of him dressed all in black with the obligatory face-mask, speaking English with a London accent as he saws some American or British hostage’s head off with a knife, are calculated to cause maximum distress to the average viewer while at the same time being attractive to potential recruits.

Or take the case of André Poulin.

It’s actually quite rare for an identifiable soldier, known by name, to be filmed in combat at the moment of his death. It’s even rarer to have lots of interview footage of that same soldier talking about why he is fighting and how happy he is to be in the war before he dies. But Abu Muslim al-Kanadi (born André Poulin) got lucky, and all the footage ended up in a recruitment video for ISIS.

Poulin/al-Kanadi grew up in the gold-mining town of Timmins in northern Ontario, a bilingual Canadian of French-Canadian origin, and in the video he tells the ISIS interviewer: “Before Islam, I was like any other regular Canadian. I watched hockey, I went to the cottage in the summer, I liked to fish, I liked sports.” He worked as a street cleaner and says he was happy in his life. At nineteen or twenty he converted to Islam, a fairly uncommon event in Timmins—and then he began a rapid slide into extremism.

“He wanted to live in a Muslim environment, so he moved in with a Muslim man here in Timmins—a man who had a common-law spouse and a child,” recalled assistant Crown attorney Gerrit Verbeek, who met the young convert in 2009. “Not too long after [Poulin] started living with this guy, he started accusing his host of living an un-Islamic lifestyle, and said he should surround himself with more people of the Muslim faith.”
³¹
Then, when the host discovered that his wife and Poulin were having an affair, the latter moved out, making death threats as he went.

Poulin was arrested and charged with uttering threats, but even before the trial he was arrested again when he
confronted his former host with a utility knife. He could have gone to jail, but the former host was reluctant to push for that. “First of all, he was scared for his safety,” Verbeek told the
Timmins Daily Press
. “Secondly, [he was thinking], ‘Here’s a young convert who is going off the rails; perhaps if we are kind to him and give him some guidance, it won’t turn out badly.’ ” So Poulin got off with twelve months’ probation—and soon left Timmins for good, next stop Syria.

An ordinary story of everyday folk, except for the very last part. Poulin was not a monster, though he clearly had some growing up left to do; he was just another lost young man looking for a cause. (That’s probably true of the majority of foreigners fighting for ISIS.) He believed he was fighting for God against people he saw as “infidels,” or at least that was how he put it in the video that ISIS shot with him before he went out and died in battle. But he actually died fighting in a turf war between ISIS and the Free Syrian Army: that is, against fellow Sunni Muslims, also in rebellion against the dictatorship of Bashar al Assad, who followed a slightly different version of Islam.

If you know how films are shot and you look at this video, you can’t help suspecting that Poulin’s death was staged. The video follows him (or at least somebody who could be him—you can’t see his face) through his last battle, panning to follow him as if he is a subject of special interest—until he disappears in an explosion. But his corpse, seen later in close-up, looks remarkably undamaged
for somebody who has been killed in an explosion. It’s not unthinkable that he might have been set up for this, because ISIS generally doesn’t see the lives of its foreign volunteers as particularly valuable, because of their lack of combat experience. They tend to be used as mere cannon fodder, or perhaps, in Poulin’s case, as raw material for a propaganda video. ISIS commanders would see nothing wrong in this: it serves the cause, and the volunteers were “martyred” and went straight to paradise, so they got what they came for.

There is a good deal of public fretting in the West about what will happen when the Western volunteers who survive their time with ISIS come back to the country of their birth, radicalized by their experiences in the service of the “caliphate,” and proceed to wreak havoc at home. But they were already radicalized when they left, probably by material they accessed on the web, or they wouldn’t have gone to the Middle East in the first place. And not many of them will be coming home again: they went there to live in Islamic State, not just to fight for it. If they try to leave they will be considered guilty of a form of apostasy and killed, and the few who do make it home will live out their lives under the most stringent form of security surveillance, whether in jail or out of it.

Of those few who return, one or two will no doubt commit terrorist acts anyway—no security system is perfect—but not nearly so many as will be committed by lone-wolf extremists who become radicalized on the web and
never go to the Middle East at all. Men like Martin Couture-Rouleau, who ran over and killed a uniformed Canadian soldier in a parking lot in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, in October 2014 and was shot dead by police after a high-speed chase; and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who two days later killed a soldier standing guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa and then ran up the hill with his rifle and into the Parliament Building (Prime Minister Stephen Harper hid himself in a cupboard), where he was shot down by the sergeant-at-arms. Both were converts to Islam, both had radicalized themselves on Islamist websites, and neither of them had ever left Canada. ISIS later claimed credit for both attacks, but it is doubtful that either man had ever been in touch with the organization.

The right response to this kind of attack is to do as little as possible. Capture or kill the perpetrators and by all means check for gaps in your security systems, but remember that, as with other crimes like murder or robbery, you cannot predict and stop every terrorist incident. Actually, the success record of preventive action with regard to terrorist attacks is better than that with any other major crime, but once in a while an extremist will get through. It is highly unlikely to be a mass-casualty attack—those things are very rare, partly because the involvement of a number of people makes them easier to spot—but occasional lone-wolf terrorist attacks like these two Canadian cases in 2014 must be seen as just part of the cost of doing business in the twenty-first century.

The Canadian government’s actual action, alas, was to change the law to give the security services greater powers at considerable expense to the civil liberties Canadians are otherwise guaranteed. This was a quite typical, although almost entirely irrelevant, official response, chosen because it pleased the public (whose fear had been whipped up by the media’s normal tendency to obsess about terrorism) and because it served the purposes of both the government and the security services. It’s foolish to ask the police or the secret services, “Do you need more powers?” because they will always say yes: it is in the nature of bureaucracies to seek opportunities to expand their control over their environment, and they will seize on any passing event as a pretext to do so. But when that happens it is not really about terrorism; it’s about power. ISIS and its ilk don’t care about what Western countries do to mutilate their own civil liberties, except insofar as overreaction helps to alienate Western Muslims and make them easier to recruit.