Jihadis with MBAs

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, is an apocalyptic and brutal terror movement that showed its global reach with hits on Paris. The IS is a Wahhabi / Salafi jihadist extremist militant group, self-proclaimed to be a caliphate and Islamic state with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi being named its caliph. It is led by and mainly composed of Sunni Arabs from Iraq and Syria. It is said to control territory occupied by 10 million people in Iraq and Syria, and through loyal local groups, has control over small areas of Libya, Nigeria and Afghan istan. The group also operates or has affiliates in other parts of the world, including North Africa and South Asia.

While its medieval mindset of beheadings, rape, enslavement, holy war and wholesale slaughter in the name of religion makes it a deadly organization, it seems to have no problem of finding recruits to propagate itself. A stepped-up war by the West may also help it draw new recruits as it seeks to expand.

A predecessor movement was defeated when the leaders of the Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, established to fight the Americans after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, were killed. After the Americans left Iraq, the group rose again from the shadows, its new avatar considerably more brutal.

The American policy of wishing that the Syrian president Bashar-al-Assad must go for the sake of the Syrian people has not changed even after the Paris attacks seem to have unified Russia and the USA and its allies in the fight against IS. It is Putin’s view that Assad is an ally in the battle against IS. Iran too backs Assad. And yet the USA seems to wish to play two cards at once - bomb the hell out of IS and seek Assad’s ouster.

“Islamic State are jihadis with MBAs,” says Iraq scholar Toby Dodge, speaking of a movement so modern it has its own gift shop.

“ISIS and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division,” Guardian columnist Seamus Milne.

Russians believe the wellspring of radical religious ideology was Saudi Arabia and the Sunni states of the Persian Gulf. Their support of Islamic fundamentalist causes - radical imams and schools — has bred the sort of extremist ideology that is the backbone of groups like the Islamic State, according to Russian experts.