Supporters and family members of Jordanian pilot, Lt Muath al Kaseasbeh express their anger at his killing ©AP Photo/Raad Adayleh
The war between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, between the real and the surreal, between the world and the tiny group that calls itself a state but isn’t, has reached a new nadir.
Islamic State, has released its most barbaric video yet, showing the execution by burning alive of Jordanian fighter pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, who had been shot down over Syria late last year. It was a horror beyond civilised comprehension.
The response came within hours. The Jordanian government executed, Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi-born woman sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide attack on an Amman hotel, as well as another al Qaeda in Iraq member, Ziyad Karboli.
By chance—or not—Jordan’s King Abdullah II was in Washington DC for meetings with President Obama when the IS video was released. After a hastily arranged photo-op meeting with the President he immediately flew back to Jordan. In a statement, Abdullah called IS a deviant group whose actions bear no relation to Islam. He vowed not to give up the fight.
Queen Rania, a powerful female voice in the Arab world, began an Instagram campaign, echoing #JeSuisCharlie, using the hashtag WeAreAllMoaz.
Meanwhile in Japan, the aftershocks from the videotaped beheading of Kenji Goto, released on Sunday, echo the situation in Jordan and also France. There were the inevitable comparisons to the destruction of the World Trade Center. “It is a 9/11 equivalent for Japan. All the goodwill and noble intentions [of the past] did not work,” former diplomat Kuni Miyake told the Financial Times.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to make the murderers of Goto and his fellow hostage Haruna Yukawa “pay the price.” Abe said, “I will never forgive these terrorists. I will work with the international community to hold them responsible for their deplorable acts.”
The leading Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun demanded, “It is the duty of Japan, as a member of the global community, to join the international coalition against IS.”
That is unlikely to happen. Last year Abe was able to reinterpret Japan’s post-war constitution to allow the country’s Self-Defense Force to take part in out of area actions—if “vital national interests” are involved. But is the barbaric execution of two Japanese citizens in Syria a threat to vital national interest?
All of these responses—in Jordan and Japan, from officials and ordinary people—are rational reactions to an utterly irrational phenomenon.
They demonstrate the limits of reason and our subconscious assumptions about the world. We understand that the great armies of the planet no longer fight each other. Wars are fought by terrorist groups. Their methods are deplorable but it is always possible to discern a political aim —one that makes the violence to a certain degree comprehensible.
Even the origins of al Qaeda can be traced to something we all understand: the removal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. That’s why the West backed Osama bin Laden initially.
But what IS is doing is beyond understanding. Professionals who deal with conflicts for a living—journalists, diplomats, intelligence operatives—whose work requires them to understand the mindset of the most violent fighters, find it impossible to figure out the goal here.
Establishing a caliphate via videotaped beheadings, burnings and defenestrations (as has happened to a number of gay men in Iraq and Syria)? It is incomprehensible.
The facts surrounding the deaths of Lt. al Kasasbeh and Kenji Goto, and the execution of Sajida al Rishawi have a logic. IS had initially demanded ransom from the Japanese government of $200 million, that demand then morphed into a negotiation over an exchange of their captives for al Rishawi. Goto was then murdered and Jordan demanded a proof of life for their pilot. The video of al Kasasbeh’s death was released and, according to sources, he was likely murdered weeks ago.
The twisted sequence of events hints at chaos in the leadership of IS. Half of the group’s top commanders are believed to be dead, with reports that as many as nine out of 18 of its ruling council have been eliminated in coalition air strikes. According to the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, thousands of fighters have been killed, which may have impacted on lines of communication in negotiation, but that is about as far as rationalism can take us.
And it stlll doesn’t help us get inside the mindset of the IS leadership and its multi-national collection of fighters. Yesterday in the New Yorker, George Packer, described IS as “a mass death cult.”
That may be the best description I have read so far. I think it is more a mutant variation in the social genome, an inevitable consequence of the wired-up, sewer flow of media “information” that has characterised the internet age.
But I am trying to comprehend the incomprehensible when I write that. And rather than thinking too much perhaps the way to respond to IS is to do what any oncologist would do with a mutant gene that had begun replicating: cut it out of the body with radical measures. In these extraordinary circumstances the best response is not to be concerned with just war theory and the legal niceties of waging war. IS is not an army, it is not a state and it may just be that engaging with it militarily as if it was is no longer a viable option. Maybe the only suitable response is to match terror with terror.
