A9 Little headway in halting Islamic State
Isis is stepping up its propaganda offensive as the coalition is no nearer a coherent strategy to defeat the Islamists on the ground, writes Con Coughlin.
PETER KASSIG, the former American soldier whose beheading by Islamic State militants was shown in a justreleased propaganda video, had, like Alan Henning, given up everything to deliver aid and assistance to the Middle East.
Having previously fought with the 75th Ranger Regiment in Iraq, the 26-year-old decided to leave the military so that he could devote his life to helping others, particularly in the Arab world.
After visiting Beirut, Kassig became ‘‘consumed’’, as he described it, by the Syrian crisis and the humanitarian tragedy it had spawned, and set up his own aid outfit to provide medical training and supplies in areas deemed too dangerous for other Western organisations to operate.
Such was his determination to empathise with the local community that, following his abduction by Islamist fighters in October last year, he converted to Islam, changing his name to Abdul-Rahman Kassig. But not even that was enough to spare him a grisly end at the hands of Islamist fanatics.
Like so many other wellmeaning Westerners who have travelled to the region with charitable intent, Kassig was simply regarded as someone Islamic State (Isis) militants could exploit for their own ends.
His murder will inevitably increase concerns over the fate of John Cantlie, the last remaining British hostage known to be held by Isis. Cantlie appears to have
Kassig was simply regarded as someone Islamic State (Isis) militants could exploit for their own ends.
made a conscious effort to placate Isis by making them a number of propaganda videos, in which he attempts to defend their ideology and portray their achievements in a positive light.
Certainly, so far as Isis is concerned, winning the propaganda war is deemed to be just as important as capturing large swathes of territory in northern Iraq and Syria.
So it is safe to assume that the timing of the release of its latest video, which was broadcast as G20 leaders held their Australian summit, will have taken priority over any consideration that Kassig’s life might be spared.
The video was the fifth purporting to show the murder of Western hostages, and the most gruesome. Apart from appearing to show Kassig’s murder, the 15-minute video also depicts the beheading of a group of Syrian military prisoners, while at the same time threatening ‘‘slaughter’’ on Western streets.
Isis’s videos are designed to strike fear into the hearts of their opponents in Syria and Iraq, and the rest of the world.
And while the leaders meeting in Australia condemned Isis’s ‘‘depravity’’, the West appears to be making little headway in its declared intention to ‘‘degrade and destroy’’ Isis’s terrorist infrastructure.
Coalition air strikes have, it is true, succeeded in stemming Isis’s previously unchallenged capture of large areas of northern Iraq and Syria, and there have even been reports that the bombing has claimed high-profile targets.
Last week, rumours spread that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis’s leader, had been killed in an air strike, while on Sunday it was reported that ‘‘Jihadi John’’, the British terrorist held responsible for murdering a number of hostages, had been killed, although this must have post- dated the recording of the latest video, in which he features.
But it is proving far more problematic for the coalition to curb Isis’s ability to terrorise large swathes of the Middle East, where Kurdish leaders now suggest it can call on as many as 200,000 fighters, or use its self-styled ‘‘caliphate’’ as a base to coordinate terror attacks against the West.
PART of the reason for the coalition’s faltering response to the Isis challenge is the inability of the key allies to agree on an effective plan of action.
At the G20 summit there was much talk from the likes of United States President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Australia’s hawkish prime minister, Tony Abbott, about defeating Isis, but few practical contributions as to how this might best be achieved.
Waging war by coalition is never easy, and often leads to serious clashes between the major players over policy and political objectives.
This was certainly the case during the recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, where sharp differences over how best to achieve objectives were never far from the surface.
In Afghanistan, where British combat operations finally drew to a close last month, one of Britain’s most senior generals was accused by his American opposite of causing unnecessary military casualties because of his reluctance to engage the enemy.
Lieutenant-General Daniel Bolger made his extraordinary attack on General Sir Nick Carter, the recently appointed head of the army, in a new book on the campaign, in which he claims Carter’s determination to avoid civilian casualties at all costs resulted in unnecessary military deaths.
British officers who served under Bolger in Afghanistan laughed off the criticism, describing the US general as being as ‘‘mad as a box of frogs’’, and as showing little interest in avoiding civilian casualties.
While mud-slinging of this nature might be high on entertainment value, it hardly helps the coalition’s efforts to achieve its desired goal.
And if the current mission to defeat Isis is to stand any chance of success, then the coalition partners need to put their differences behind them and implement an effective plan to liquidate Isis’s terrorist infrastructure once and for all.
Military action