Even though five leaders of the Islamic State ISIS have recently been captured, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-proclaimed caliph of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims has evaded capture so far. Here are quotations from two related articles The Arab Weekly published for their weekend edition on May 27.
Photo: A wristwatch that belonged to an ISIS fighter
and is bearing the typical logo of the Islamic State.
US officials from President Donald Trump on down say the Islamic State (ISIS) should be on its last legs with its short-lived caliphate broken up in late 2017 and its fighters dispersed to the four winds.
However, as one terrorist horror follows another, the warnings from experienced counterterrorism specialists that ISIS would not go away gently but would strike wherever it could until it reorganises are proving to be deadly accurate.
The Trump administration seems to have accepted the harsh reality by announcing it was reversing plans to dismantle the US State Department’s special unit overseeing the war against ISIS.
Ten days earlier, Trump boasted that five of ISIS’s “most wanted” leaders had been captured by US and Iraqi forces, which lured them into a trap from their hideouts in Syria through Baghdad’s intelligence service.
..........
To the dismay of the United States and its allies, Baghdadi’s organisation, held together by seasoned militants who include former Iraqi Army officers and top intelligence operatives who served Saddam Hussein, have in recent weeks carried out dozens of attacks as far apart as Mali, Niger, France, Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country and increasingly a linchpin in ISIS’s drive to reorganise from the splintered territories it holds in Iraq and Syria.
As ISIS 2.0 takes shape, new leaders are emerging on the internet, long a key recruiting tool for the extremists, and it seems that their propaganda particularly resonates in the United States.
One is Zulfi Hoxha, the son of an Albanian-American pizza store owner in New Jersey. He is known to have become a senior Islamic State (ISIS) figure and a key recruitment icon since he was seen, dressed in black, in a propaganda video beheading captured Kurdish peshmerga fighters in Syria.
[The Arab Weekly is a multinational daily printed in London, Britain]
عوض شفيق: عدد التنظيمات الإرهابية أكثر من 250 تنظيم
Awad Shafiq: Organized terrorism comprises more than 250 organizations.
Editor's Note: Dr. Awad Shafiq is a professor of international law in Geneva.
الدكتور عوض شفيق، أستاذ القانون الدولي في جينيف
[Copts United الأقباط متحدون, newspaper of the Coptic community in Egypt, on May 26, 2018]
Editorial :
Why Are European and
US Youth Joining ISIS ?
There are different reasons for European and US Muslims to join ISIS, and there is, as well, a common reason rarely being discussed.
In January 2015, the Huffington Post published an article that analyzed the reasons for European Muslims to join the Islamic State. Without going into the details, here is the essential item they excavated:
The European Muslims setting off to fight [the Jihad] usually belong to the second or third generation of immigrant communities from the Middle East or South Asia. These generations can be vulnerable because they are at the point of losing the culture of their ancestors and yet are not fully absorbed or accepted in the country in which they live, despite being citizens.
It must be added that the first generation of Muslim immigrants came in the frame of bilateral treaties between European states and the states of origin because there was an urgent need of "guest workers" in the years of economic prosperity in Europe.
This might differ from Muslim immigration to the USA and which seems to me as a rather private and unorganised business of those who want to live the "American dream".
One thing, however, seems to be equal in Europe and the USA and which I dare to describe as a " loss of basic values ".
European and US youth of a certain age, Muslims or not, are nowadays experiencing the moral decay of the Western society they are living in. A society concentrating on the benefits of economic growth and relating individual well-being to the consumption of lifestyle goods and services, thereby neglecting the basic requirements for living in a well-balanced society.
While former generations where aligned by a basic Christian or Muslimic education providing them with the rules that make up for life in a well- balanced society, now the credibility of such rules has become questioned as there is so much hypocrisy everywhere.
And it is at this point, when the "psychological warfare" of religious extremists is taking its toll.
[Source: ABC 15 Arizona]
As an indicator how Western societies are already infected by a loss of basic values, it only needs to look at the increasing number of school shootings that happened in different federal states of the USA. For 2018 alone, 43 of such incidents have been registered in the first five months.
Such shootings have emerged as well in Europe, however on a much smaller scale, because any development that once began in America is known to take some time before being fully adopted abroad.
مفتي الجمهورية: المتطرفون يتوهمون أن الإسلام جاء ليضيِّق على الإنسان ويعزله عن العالم.. وغاب عن الإرهابيين احترام الدين للعرف والتقاليد غير المخالفة للشرع
Mufti of the Republic : Extremists believe that Islam has arrived at
oppressing the human being and isolating him in the world ... and
the terrorists lose respect for the religion, its doctrine and tradition
but not the contradiction of Sharia.
Editor: Sheikh Abdul Karim Khasawneh, the Grand Mufti of Jordan is chief Islamic justice of his country.
[The Arab Today العرب اليوم , Amman / Jordan on May 27, 2018]
A visitor from Amman, Jordan, and who reminds us of ISIS, the
Islamic State that once took over vast areas in Iraq and Syria.
Today's traffic to "blueprint news" passing via Ashburn / Virginia,
"The Bullseye of America’s Internet", located in the neighbourhood
of Washington DC.
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