What’s in a name: ISIS, ISIL or Daesh?
The U.S. ambassador to Canada is using yet another name — “Daesh” — for the multi-monikered terrorist group known variously as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Islamic State.
Politicians are increasingly using the D-word for two simple reasons: to strip the group of its credibility and to steer away from the Islam-versus-the-West dynamic it apparently craves.
“I’m using the term ‘Daesh’ now, instead of ISIL,” Bruce Heyman said in an interview.
“I think it’s unfair to refer to Islam, and it’s totally inappropriate to think of it as a state — so anything calling it the ‘Islamic State’ is wrong.”
Heyman used the Arabic acronym in a speech Tuesday to a Toronto conference on Canadian business opportunities in the U.S., which began with a moment of silence in honour of the victims of last week’s Paris attacks.
The wording might even strike some as trivial, given the bloodshed. But the evolution of the group’s name offers a window into its history, its place in the Arab world and the bewilderment it has provoked in the West.
Arabs who oppose the group customarily use a version of Daesh, as do European politicians and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, among others. Although he usually prefers ISIL, President Barack Obama used the term a few times at this week’s G20 summit in Turkey.
The group apparently hates it so much it threatened to cut out the tongues of those who use it, The Associated Press reported last year when the group seized the Iraq city of Mosul.
That’s because it sounds like an insult, resembling the Arabic word “daes,” which refers to something that stomps, or crushes. It’s considerably less important-sounding than “Islamic State,” which Egyptian religious authorities have pleaded for western journalists to stop using.
The group’s core mythology relies on being perceived as both Islamic and a state, and the modern-day heir to the original 1,400-year-old caliphates.
I think it’s it’s totally inappropriate to think of it as a state.