Targeting terrorism
Reports that Russia may have killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have raised hopes that the Islamic State is finally unravelling. Without providing confirmation, the Russian Defence Ministry has suggested that Baghdadi was one of several senior IS leaders killed in an airstrike close to Raqqa on May 28. But even if the speculation turns out to be true, Baghdadi’s demise, while important, may not prove as decisive a blow to the future of his movement as foreign observers would like it to be. IS itself was founded just four months after an American airstrike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who founded a branch of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi’s contempt for Shiites and his indifference to civilian casualties was so extreme – he was narrowly prevented from detonating a chemical weapon inside Jordan – that Al-Qaeda severed its relations with his group. But instead of marking the end of the savagery associated with his leadership, Zarqawi’s killing created a power vacuum that was soon filled by the much greater violence of the Islamic State.
While losing swathes of territory to the overwhelming military forces ranged against it, the Islamic State appeared to escalate attacks on ‘soft’ foreign targets, especially in Europe. But there is evidence that these were planned long before IS found itself hopelessly overmatched. The group has also shown unexpected resilience to attempts to disable its cyber operations, reportedly regrouping within days after its servers have been hacked or closed down. This decentralised organization makes it hard to target the network with a silver bullet and almost impossible to defeat by military action alone.
This resistance to easy fixes is important to acknowledge because Russia’s increasingly destructive intervention in Syria has been carried out in the name of fighting terrorism. In fact, its most significant outcome has been the shoring up of the Assad regime and the entrenchment and prolongation of the civil war at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Russia’s attitude is uncomfortably close to the new stridency in US foreign policy, with its religious undertones of pursuing the fight of good against evil.
Speaking in Saudi Arabia, President Trump urged his audience – a roomful of despots with questionable human rights records – to “drive out” terrorists and extremists: “Drive. Them. Out. Drive them out of your places of worship. Drive them out of your communities. Drive them out of your holy land, and Drive Them Out Of This Earth.” President Trump delivered these remarks as though unaware of any of the