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| Will Isis still be a threat in a year's time? I doubt it | Will Isis still be a threat in a year's time? I doubt it |
| (about 5 hours later) | |
| In all the head scratching about the challenge posed by Islamic State (Isis) militants to the crumbling stability of hard-pressed Syria and Iraq (and Britain), did you make any connection between a string of incongruent images that appeared in British media last week? In an odd way they demonstrated just how shallow and short-lived the Isis threat is likely to prove. | In all the head scratching about the challenge posed by Islamic State (Isis) militants to the crumbling stability of hard-pressed Syria and Iraq (and Britain), did you make any connection between a string of incongruent images that appeared in British media last week? In an odd way they demonstrated just how shallow and short-lived the Isis threat is likely to prove. |
| One widely used set of photos showed a fashionably dressed Muslim British student, Nawal Msaad, leaving the Old Bailey after being acquitted in a terrorist money-smuggling case in which her friend was convicted. The other was a video screengrab of a bearded young man, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary from west London. Kitted out in Kevin the Teenage Jihadi uniform, he was boasting about his adventures in Syria while holding a severed head ("Chillin' with my homie, or what's left of him") in one hand. | |
| Never slow to chill the spines of its readers, the Daily Mail followed it up with a lively feature about the seductive videos now being posted on Islam-facing websites, some based in Latvia and hastily shut down by Google. They function as a travel guide for disaffected Muslim boys as keen to see some action as the British army's eager, naive volunteers were 100 Augusts ago. | |
| Should I bring my own trainers, wannabes asked? (Yes.) Guns? (Easily available for cash in Syria.) Nutella? Western consumer goods are available, too, explained Kevin, AKA Madhi Hassan, 19, from Portsmouth, who was holding a reassuring jar of the legendary Italian delicacy in the shot. But do bring first aid kit, an iPad and loo paper, wannabes are advised. Good for morale, that loo paper, we miss it when it's not there. | Should I bring my own trainers, wannabes asked? (Yes.) Guns? (Easily available for cash in Syria.) Nutella? Western consumer goods are available, too, explained Kevin, AKA Madhi Hassan, 19, from Portsmouth, who was holding a reassuring jar of the legendary Italian delicacy in the shot. But do bring first aid kit, an iPad and loo paper, wannabes are advised. Good for morale, that loo paper, we miss it when it's not there. |
| Are we supposed to laugh or cry at these stories, with their accompanying quotes, often jokey text messages in teen slang, both boastful and fearful, including mundane queries about gym membership. "Should I wait until it ends before coming out to fight?" No, cancel it or give it to a family member, like other bros did, is the right-on answer. Do we think someone worrying about gym membership – the lack of sliced bread in Syria is also unsettling, we learn – will ever take the jihadi plunge? It's impossible to say: some 500, young women among them, have done so from Britain. | Are we supposed to laugh or cry at these stories, with their accompanying quotes, often jokey text messages in teen slang, both boastful and fearful, including mundane queries about gym membership. "Should I wait until it ends before coming out to fight?" No, cancel it or give it to a family member, like other bros did, is the right-on answer. Do we think someone worrying about gym membership – the lack of sliced bread in Syria is also unsettling, we learn – will ever take the jihadi plunge? It's impossible to say: some 500, young women among them, have done so from Britain. |
| Yet in that odd way they are as reassuring as they are menacing. Fashionable Msaad (a different outfit every day for the court) was conspicuously non-political, integrated into our own consumerist wasteland, you might say. Her unfashionable and convicted chum, Amal el-Wahabi, was clearly under the thumb of a bullying husband who had left her for jihad and threatened to take a new wife if she disobeyed him. | |
| It's horrible to contemplate the state of mind of a young man like Bary – formerly a would-be rapper called Jinny but son of a radical Bin Laden associate – or fellow jihadis, some from eminently upright British immigrant families. How can they move so easily from suburban London or Cardiff to a world where mass executions of perceived Isis enemies, complete with decapitations, can become both normal and morally right? | |
| Economic and social exclusion is one comforting answer on the left; the romantic search for flags and a cause worth dying for is a rightwing trope (Spanish civil war, anyone?) – and both options are reinforced by genuine religious feeling, often triggered by repentance for a life of petty crime. | |
| There may be truth in all such explanations. Adolescent strop, a universal condition, and the opportunity for sanctioned violence must also be pull factors. In his time Kevin the Teenager was also the IRA's Kevin Barry. Organised criminality? Well, that usually comes in phase two. Isis hasn't yet had time to get into the rackets, as Iran's once-idealistic Revolutionary Guard or China's People's Liberation Army are. We hope it never will. | |
| But the Kevins, the Barys and their tweets remain rooted in our own world, Pop Idol, the football season, even the death of Robin Williams, and their self-evident silliness shines through the words they glibly utter as clearly as it does through those beards, as obligatory a fashion statement as tattoos or nose-piercing in some quarters. Last year Kevin was into rapping or medical studies, this year jihad, next year back to studying perhaps – if he survives the Nutella-free side of jihad and escapes the attention of the British police at Heathrow or Manchester airport. It may look like a video game on YouTube, but it isn't. | But the Kevins, the Barys and their tweets remain rooted in our own world, Pop Idol, the football season, even the death of Robin Williams, and their self-evident silliness shines through the words they glibly utter as clearly as it does through those beards, as obligatory a fashion statement as tattoos or nose-piercing in some quarters. Last year Kevin was into rapping or medical studies, this year jihad, next year back to studying perhaps – if he survives the Nutella-free side of jihad and escapes the attention of the British police at Heathrow or Manchester airport. It may look like a video game on YouTube, but it isn't. |
| None of this is meant to sound frivolous, only to invoke a sense of perspective. Isis and its self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, are familiar figures on the world stage: the puritans who come out of the desert, the small provincial town or the steppe (beards and black kit tend to be favoured), preaching a mission to extirpate wickedness and usher in a new reign of goodness. Gullible young men are their canon fodder, holy terror their pacifying instrument. | None of this is meant to sound frivolous, only to invoke a sense of perspective. Isis and its self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, are familiar figures on the world stage: the puritans who come out of the desert, the small provincial town or the steppe (beards and black kit tend to be favoured), preaching a mission to extirpate wickedness and usher in a new reign of goodness. Gullible young men are their canon fodder, holy terror their pacifying instrument. |
| They act in the name of righteousness, committing atrocities that are fondly believed to be of the cleansing kind as well as providing social services and protection on their own terms: modern Robin Hoods. But the sight of Isis and Baghdadi on TV, of severed heads and extreme punishments for social transgressions such as alcohol or music, evokes memories of 16th-century Europe, divided between Catholic and Protestant zealots much as the Shia are from the Sunni. | |
| Watching Vice News' 40-minute film, Islamic State, filmed in their "capital", the Syrian provincial city of Raqqa, may prompt history students (are historians too knowing to do jihad, I wonder?) to recall the radical Protestant Anabaptist sect's insurrection at Münster in north Germany. It ended bloodily after 16 months in 1535, but not before its leader had taken 16 wives and a lot of locals had died. | |
| No surprise there, then. That's how these excitements usually end and probably will this time when Isis's growing number of circling enemies recover from their initial shock over its success – though quite how is not yet apparent. I could be wrong, Baghdadi could be the new Genghis Khan, but I doubt it: as an empire-conquering cavalry commander who came from nowhere he was the last of a kind. | No surprise there, then. That's how these excitements usually end and probably will this time when Isis's growing number of circling enemies recover from their initial shock over its success – though quite how is not yet apparent. I could be wrong, Baghdadi could be the new Genghis Khan, but I doubt it: as an empire-conquering cavalry commander who came from nowhere he was the last of a kind. |
| And – contrary to what the Mail asserts – Baghdadi and his movement are routinely condemned as "evil, corrupt, self-centred and unIslamic" by leading British Muslims, though not loudly enough to generate media headlines very often. As with the IRA during the Troubles there is usually a thread of ambiguity among some co-religionists, priests and mullahs, which the media prefer to focus on. | |
| My hunch is reinforced by the enterprising Vice film. It's obviously a slick bit of public relations planning by Isis, whose press officer can be seen firing off a few rounds at Syrian government troops during his working day – as if he was Ernest Hemingway. Vice's reporter gets a lot of access and some good footage, though what it mostly conveys is a sense of tedium and oppression to add to the oppressive dust and heat of a small place, long neglected and battered. The occasional crucifixion briefly relieves the tedium. | |
| We see Baghdadi's only public appearance – lots of interactive chanting with the lads at the mosque – soldiers like "Abdullah the Belgian" mouthing slogans ("I will raise the flag of Allah on the White House") and promising to kill Muslim apostates and infidel, which seems to cover most of us. "The family is the least important thing" and "the harder the situation is, the closer we are to God" are phrases that stick in the mind. | We see Baghdadi's only public appearance – lots of interactive chanting with the lads at the mosque – soldiers like "Abdullah the Belgian" mouthing slogans ("I will raise the flag of Allah on the White House") and promising to kill Muslim apostates and infidel, which seems to cover most of us. "The family is the least important thing" and "the harder the situation is, the closer we are to God" are phrases that stick in the mind. |
| You can see why they appeal to young militants, as they must have done to some in 1914. In Raqqa they get small boys to repeat slogans on camera, too. The sight of the Hisbah patrols – community support officers enforcing Sharia law against uppity women ("Tell your wife to change her veil") may have some appeal to confused boys from Cardiff or Portsmouth. | You can see why they appeal to young militants, as they must have done to some in 1914. In Raqqa they get small boys to repeat slogans on camera, too. The sight of the Hisbah patrols – community support officers enforcing Sharia law against uppity women ("Tell your wife to change her veil") may have some appeal to confused boys from Cardiff or Portsmouth. |
| But for all their threats to stick one on the White House or reopen Turkey's Atatürk dam (shutting the Euphrates' water off to both Syria and Iraq lately) by conquering Istanbul, the viewer can't help but notice how utterly in thrall the Kevins are to so-called "western" technology and behaviour, and how utterly dependant on it they are. They drive around in "western" 4x4s and talk volubly on "western" mobile phones. The automatics may be Kalashnikovs, but the state-of-the-art kit they captured from the so-far-hapless Iraqi army is American. | |
| It wasn't like this when the German armed forces took on four great powers in 1914-18 and again (by this time only two and a half great powers) in 1941-45 and fought all the way to the rubble that became Berlin. They harnessed the brilliance of German science and the mighty power of German industry to their cause – they fought with their own kit. It is 400 years since the Ottoman empire was such a dynamic restless force, much longer since the ingenuity of Islamic science faded under the sclerotic weight of orthodoxy. | |
| So, let's tackle Islamic State and Kevin the Canon Fodder; better still let's encourage well-armed state actors in the region to sort out a fundamentalist problem it helped to create from Saudi and football-loving Qatar. But let's not over-react, let's not do some of the brutally counterproductive and brutal things we've done in the past. We want the lucky Kevins to survive, to come home for clean underwear, chastened not angry, and keen to go to college. | |
| Will we still be talking about Isis in a year? I may be wrong, but I doubt it. Here's hoping. | Will we still be talking about Isis in a year? I may be wrong, but I doubt it. Here's hoping. |