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The Bloody End of the Islamic State's Utopian Dream
[Defense One] The fall of Raqqa this week completed the slow-motion demolition of the world’s only utopian movement worthy of the name.The fall of Raqqa this week completed the slow-motion demolition of the world’s only utopian movement worthy of the name. Like most utopian movements, the Islamic State was barbaric and iniquitous, precisely because it held its own refinement and egalitarianism in such high regard. Assume eventual absolution by history or God, and anything goes in the meantime. The pleasure of dancing on the Islamic State’s grave should not be denied, even if it is true, as experts remind us, that its zombified hand might yet emerge from the earth to grab our ankles as we do so. Having lost Raqqa (and before it Hawija, Tal Afar, and Mosul), it now still holds border areas between Iraq and Syria, plus isolated territory in Libya, Sinai, Afghanistan, and the southern Philippines. What it no longer controls is territory from which it can make its most important claim‐that it has built a paradise on earth, where God’s law is the only law, and Muslims can live lives that fully express their faith. It once boasted that women, children, and the elderly could live full and happy lives in Raqqa. Now an invitation to hijra‐migration to Islamic State territory‐is simply an invitation to die quickly on the field of battle. What hasn’t received much attention, amid the celebration, is the manner in which that death has been dealt. In May, Defense Secretary James Mattis said the war against the Islamic State had shifted from a war of attrition (slip their heads into a noose, then squeeze) to a war of "annihilation" and "humiliation." He has kept his word. Although many Islamic State fighters have surrendered‐sometimes in humiliating fashion‐almost all are Syrians and Iraqis who joined the group pragmatically, and not members of the 40,000-strong contingent of foreign fighters who migrated in the supposed path of God. We haven’t yet heard stories of mass surrender by foreign fighters. One American Islamic State fighter is in custody, out of well over a hundred known to have traveled to the battlefield. The desert plains of eastern Syria are strewn with the corpses of most of the others, I suspect, along with French, Tunisian, and Chechen colleagues. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-10-24 |
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