A timely warning that we are within Islamic State’s reach

THERE are a number of reasons why the drama over the 15-year-old Cape Town girl who tried to join the Islamic State should be alarming to all South Africans. Many South Africans, quite rightly, sympathise with Iraqis and Syrians, who had their world turned upside down by the US invasion of Iraq more than a decade ago. That spawned a number of unintended consequences — not least of which is that Iraq is now dangerously close to becoming an anarchist state where militias battle on the street against Islamic State forces, with atrocities committed on all sides.

But this does not mean that the Islamic State is anything more than an indefensible terrorist organisation whose only defining characteristic is that the level of bloodshed it routinely indulges in is of a different scale to anything we’ve seen before.

No one who saw the gruesome footage in February of the mass beheading of 21 Egyptians or the mass slaying of hundreds of Iraqi security force members in the desert last July will be under any illusion that the group is anything more than a gang of violent, deranged thugs.

What is worrying is that certain South Africans seem to believe this to be a noble cause. Reports this week of a vehicle driving around Johannesburg’s Mayfair district proudly displaying the Islamic State flag have alarmed the local community, as have reports that Muslim clerics have been threatened for speaking out against the group.

“What [the Islamic State] is doing is against Islam. They do not act in the name of Islam or any religion,” said Shabbir Ahmad Saloojee, the principal of one of South Africa’s largest Muslim schools, this week.

But it is not some disorganised gang of schoolyard bullies. For one thing, it is far more technologically astute than its predecessors: this week, for example, it hacked into French television network TV5Monde, and it has marshalled social media with alarming proficiency.

The Cape Town teenager most likely first contacted the Islamic State through social media — as did many children from countries such as the US and Britain, lured into joining it in a gruesome twist to online grooming.

The Islamic State has a 21st-century grasp of social media. The fate of the 22-year-old Briton Ifthekar Jaman, who moved to Syria to join the group in 2013 and attracted hundreds of Twitter followers, is well known. He was killed in the first few minutes of his first “operation”.

It is tempting for South Africans to swipe these stories into the box marked “Middle East troubles”. But add the Cape Town teenager to the Kenyan university tragedy, and it becomes clear that the creep of the most sophisticated and bloodthirsty terrorist operation ever to fire a bullet is almost on our doorstep.