Radical Islamism and Jihad
The Khawarij aroused condemnation by mainstream scholars such as 14th-century Muslim Ismail ibn Kathir who wrote, “If they ever gained strength, they would surely corrupt the whole of the Earth, Iraq and Shaam (Syria) – they would not leave a baby...
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner and feminist, Shirin Ebadi, says in Iran, sexual abuse against women goes largely unreported and officially, it is unrecognised. The situation is similar in Malaysia. A majority of Muslim women who are are physically or sexually abused in marriages suffer in silence....
Yet, as the recent suicide attack at Dera Ismail Khan reveals, the TTP is not averse to deploying women as suicide bombers or fighters. Neither is it the first time that Pakistani woman militants have engaged in combat....
As a 14-year-old struggling to fit in at an American public high school, Khalid said he turned to the internet to make sense of what some saw as the negative connotation of his first name, “Mohammed.”
He said he quickly became enthralled with the answers online extremists offered....
The Al-Qaeda ideologue Abu Qatada operated openly, just like Abdelhaleem
does today. London policymakers mostly shrugged or ignored the hate preachers
and their associates. But 9/11, and then the 7/7 bombings in London, changed
the rules of the game....
Between the rhetoric of the IS and the claims of success by the security
forces, lies a much larger area of understudied global jihadist mobilization in
India....
This raises a profound question: how is it that a group that commanded
such extraordinary, unprecedented attention across the world from 2001 to 2011
can disappear from public attention so completely?...
It is, in fact, an extremely worrying development because the new batch
of militants not only reject the Indian state but Pakistan too — indeed, the
very concept of the nation state....
The international community fought to defeat the Islamic State — but the
job is not done. Abandoning the Yazidis to a war-torn land and uncertain future
allows the seeds of further violence to take root....
"They used to be
against girls’ education during their regime and they are still killing or
punishing girls in areas under their control for attending schools," which
under their beliefs is "anti-Islamic.”…
At their office in Aurangabad, the ATS officers pushed a sheaf of papers
towards him. It was a list of 240 questions but not about him and IS. They were
questions no one had ever asked him....
More worryingly, total fatalities in first six months and 28 days of
2019 have already crossed the total number of terrorism-related fatalities
recorded each year, since 2016....
These women were not only from Muslim countries but from westernized
world and even non-Muslims also. It is estimated that more than 80 women have
travelled to IS-controlled territory from the Netherlands since 2012. From the
United Kingdom and France, these numbers are even higher, respectively around
1452 and 2003 women and teen-aged girls....
Salafi Jihadism has become a serious problem in Central Asia that
encompasses five former Soviet republics – Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan – collectively known as the “Five Stans”, as well
as Afghanistan and western China....
The country's first recorded case of a suicide attack by a female
Fidayeen was reported on December 25, 2010, when a female suicide bomber blew
herself up at a distribution centre of the World Food Programme (WFP) at Khar
town in the Bajaur Agency...
About 1,000 fighters have
crossed into Iraq over the past eight months, most of them in the aftermath of
the caliphate’s collapse in March, said Hisham al-Hashimi, a security analyst
who advises Iraq’s government and foreign aid agencies….
In his typically outlandish style, President Rodrigo Duterte vowed to
crack down, ordering the military to “wipe Abu Sayyaf out from the face of the
earth.” Such rhetoric is common from Duterte, but it has rarely made much
difference on the battlefield against extremist groups....
The Taliban simply don’t want modern education and prefer the madrasa
that they see as the future inspiration of Afghanistan. They destroy schools
wherever they see them: The number of attacks on schools tripled, according to
UNICEF, rising from 68 in 2017 to 192 in 2018....
Mr.
President,
The US is
withdrawing from Afghanistan as well as from Iraq and Syria. Inspired by the
Taliban declaration of victory, a radicalised terrorist in the Indian state of
Jammu and Kashmir, backed by a Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist organisation,
attacked an Indian military convoy, killing 40 soldiers. Similar suicide attack
killed 27 elite revolutionary guards in Sistan, Iran. Emboldened Jihadists will
surely carry out more such attacks in future. The gloating in Islamist circles
for having “defeated” both the superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United
States, has reached its peak.
Mr.
President,
Still fresh in
our minds is what happened when the international community abandoned
Afghanistan in 1989. Taliban ruled and Al-Qaeda got a safe haven. A series of
atrocities including 9/11 and horrors of Islamic State followed.
In this backdrop, the complacency of the world
community in allowing Taliban to govern Afghanistan is inexplicable. Jihadist
strength does not come from their soldiers and territories. It comes from an
ideology and ideologies cannot be defeated militarily.
Mr.
President,
The Jihadist
ideology is based on very solid foundations in Islamic history, scriptures and
theology. Moderate Muslims have not yet succeeded in evolving a satisfactory
alternative theology of peace and pluralism to challenge the current theology
of violence and exclusion. Even when such a theology evolves, it will take time
and effort for it to be established. Mainstream Muslims should be allowed the
time and space to work out and propagate a counternarrative. I would,
therefore, urge the international community not to repeat the mistakes of 1989
and invite further disasters....
The vast majority of Muslims are
horrified by the barbaric regression that the Islamic State (ISIS) represents,
as well as by its claim to speak in the name of Islam – an Islam most Muslims
do not identify with. But while condemning ISIS on both a moral and human
level, they have difficulty confronting it on a theological level....
Almost all of these consultants have privately shared they find more
allies and support among Muslims in the Middle East than Muslims in the West.
The latter are mostly herded under the propaganda of Western Islamists for whom
religious identity has become a political weapon....
While committing many atrocities
against women, ISIS at the same time understood and valued the domestic and
emotional labour of women for their own nefarious ends....
But analysts say Daesh, the group’s Arab acronym, have had to return to
its roots as a mainly Iraq-based insurgency force and are undergoing a
generational change. Nonetheless it has the capacity to re-emerge, if it's
ignored....
At a time when al Qaeda is facing an existential crisis and has been
entirely marginalised in the global Islamist terrorist movement, and at a time
when its incipient proxy in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), the Ansar Ghazwat ul
Hind (AGH), has been virtually wiped out barely two years after its formation,
Ayman al Zawahiri, the current amir (chief) of al Qaeda, has issued a renewed
call for jihad in Kashmir....
Female participation in IS terrorism has not been confined to the
theatres of Syria, Iraq, and Libya. Women have been involved in, planned, and
perpetrated terrorist attacks around the world since the inception of the
Islamic State....