Islamist surge must be a wake-up call for the West

THE WESTERN coalition of forces currently operating in Iraq and Syria against ISIS - the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - has seen fit to forge an alliance with Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The professed objective of demonstrating that this is not a war of the Western world versus the Arab/Muslim world as a single monolithic bloc is sound. But the prolonged apathy of the international community in the face of the crimes and massacres committed in Iraq and Syria has been astounding, say experts. The United Nations, which dispatched a fact-finding mission on warfare in the Syrian conflict in 2011, waited until August 15, 2015, to adopt a resolution concerning the plight of minorities under ISIS, in particular the Yazidis and Christians. The Americans intervened on their own initiative by bombing enemy positions to support the overwhelmed Kurds. Experts say this intervention is undoubtedly sound and necessary. However, some international soul-searching would be necessary to find out who is funding ISIS and spreading its ideas. Some say questions should be asked about the double standards, such as those of some oil states in the Gulf. But, experts say, they are not the only guilty parties as the US bears particular responsibility to guarantee its oil supplies. France is also said to share the blame. In reality, this strange situation concerns not just Iraq, but a large part of the Arab world, stretching all the way to Libya and even parts of sub-Saharan Africa, with the presence of terrorist groups Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria. It cannot be stressed enough that these terrorist movements did not appear out of thin air, and they do not finance themselves. Yet the coalition should also be just as well rooted: first off, say experts, it should not be merely military. It must also be economic, political and ideological, since it is confronting a new totalitarianism which has all these four objectives. The ISIS ‘caliphate’ is barbaric. Yet some other Islamic states also have no tolerance of the existence of Christians or other religious minorities. The West cannot become indifferent to this situation. If it does, then it will no longer be the West, and its values will be rendered meaningless. There exists a principle of minority rights, which must be applied without fail. Recent events, in which the Islamic State is the most identifiable and ruthless figure, are not only driven by political or economic factors, contrary to what the West is often led to believe. The new enemy, which the West has not sought out but which has marked it as such, is shaped from fanaticism and ideology: it fights for convictions which are certainly twisted, and for a faith, which is undoubtedly a distorted faith, but a faith nonetheless. That poses the question of the West's capacity to respond to it, because fighting for their faith gives these Islamists the promise of paradise, so they are not afraid of dying. In reality, the West has entered into a war of religion, and it has not yet understood what is transpiring because it is no longer religious. The Islamic State confronts the West with a quasi-coordinated geographic bloc which has designated the West as an enemy and has ideological intermediaries and sympathisers within the West's populations. There will be no respite for the West. It is not only the populations in Syria and Iraq which are suffering under the barbarous yoke imposed on them by combatants coming from all over the world. It is also in Western countries, that a risk of violent operations or attacks can be seen. Experts say this is not a call to give in to paranoia or any kind of suspension of individual rights, and care should be taken against the temptation to turn anti-terrorism into a general policy of controlling populations. But war has been declared and it will undoubtedly last as long as the Cold War against the communist bloc from 1947 to 1991. That raises the issue of the type of defence to use against ISIS or Boko Haram. The West's defence system is currently ill-suited for these purposes and a new solution to counter these asymmetrical phenomena of war is required. Nuclear deterrents and heavy weaponry are of little use under these circumstances. Development should primarily focus on special forces and means of surveillance.

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