fear and dominates the world news agenda for days on end. All that was needed to carry it out was a fanatical perpetrator willing to be killed as a proof of his faith.
This was the tactic of al-Qa’ida, shown most famously on 9/11, but Isis has used it on a greater scale and, even when it is on the retreat in Iraq and Syria, it can mobilise bombers swiftly and effectively.
The Isis attack on Ataturk Istanbul International Airport was carried out by gunmen and bombers from Central Asia, whom Turkish security had not identified as a threat because it supposed they were committed to overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad and his regime in Syria. What gives Isis’ terrorism its relentless quality is that it is backed by a well-organised, if battered, state machine in the form of the so-called caliphate, that can mobilise men, equipment, expertise and money.
Isis is under pressure on almost every front in Iraq and Syria. It cannot withstand ground attacks backed by precision bombing from the US-led air armada and the same is true of the Syrian army supported by Russian bombers. This may weaken Isis, but does not put it permanently out of business because it can revert to guerrilla warfare and wait for its numerous enemies to fall out, as they invariably do. The Iraqi and Syrian governments are short of good combat troops and have difficulty occupying the territory they have taken.
It is often said that there can be no peace in Iraq without conciliating the Sunni Arabs, the community from which Isis draws its strength, but this is to underestimate the sectarian and ethnic cleansing now being carried out by all sides in the civil war engulfing Iraq and Syria. An increasing number of the Sunni Arab community in both countries – one-fifth of the population in Iraq and three-fifths in Syria – are being permanently displaced and are unlikely to go home.
The sectarian map of this part of the Middle East is being permanently redrawn, which can only intensify the fighting. Isis is a long way from total defeat, but it is giving up population centres and has not made a successful counter-attack for over a year. It will seek to spread its networks of militants to other countries and make sure that its retreats are masked by further atrocities like the ones in Baghdad and Nice.
Patrick Cockburn
INTRODUCTION
Black Flag of Jihad
Saturday, 15 March 2008
‘WE LOVE DEATH’
The al-Qa'ida spokesman who, following the 2004 Madrid train bombings, told the West, "You love life and we love death" articulated a chilling truth. It's clear in Michael Burleigh's book, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, that death has always been the terrorist's trump card. It's not only the targeted assassinations, indiscriminate mass murders and tit-for-tat killings that spread fear; so too does the passion with which certain terrorists embrace their own annihilation. Their mindset seems so bewilderingly alien.
In this bracingly opinionated account, the author argues that all terrorists are "morally insane". From playboys to psychopaths, narcissists to n'er-do-wells, "the milieu of terrorists is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminal." Slaughter costs, and money laundering, peddling drugs, extortion and armed robbery all fall within the job description.
Burleigh defines terrorism as a tactic. It's also a lifestyle choice which is neither glamorous nor admirable, as Burleigh sets out to show. Spanning the last 150 years, Burleigh examines ideologically-inspired movements (Nihilists, revolutionaries, Red Brigadists, the Baader-Meinhof gang) and nationalist/separatist activists: Fenians, ETA, FLN and OAS, the PLO and various Middle East factions, the ANC, Irish Republicans and Loyalists).
Each informative and absorbing chapter could stand alone, whether it's detailing Algeria's fight for independence or the continuing armed struggle of the Basques. Devoting the final portion of the book to Islamic terrorism, the historian explains why Islamofascist or Islamobolshevik are terms to be avoided. (Jihadi-Salafists is more accurate). Latin American and Sri Lankan terrorists don't figure but the weird Japanese Red Army does, whose operatives embarked on missions with Rimbaud poems and origami dolls tucked inside their pockets.
Burleigh's searing anger isn't just directed at terrorists but the way in which he thinks we deal with them. Britain's tradition of offering sanctuary to foreign radicals is partly answerable for our present status as "Londonistan". If we believe him, it's liberal apologists who started making life easy for terrorists as far back as the l9th century. Around the time the Russian Kadet Party was sympathising with their violent acts, French poet Tailharde was declaring "What do the victims matter, as long as the gesture is beautiful?". Since then, other "useful idiots" have included lawyers who abet their terrorist clients, pundits quick to hog the microphone and terror-groupies such as "that loathsome academic enthusiast for the purifying effects of political violence", Jean-Paul Sartre.
Not only have terrorists consistently exploited the media, but their love affair with technology isn't new, either. Once the superiority of dynamite over gunpowder had been established, Fenian and anarchist newspapers gave tips on handling explosives and advertised bomb-making classes. Today the details are available on the internet. The Red Brigades were already filming their executions in 1980. Blowing up London Transport may seem like a sinister new development; however, Fenians dropped bombs on the Metropolitan Line in 1883. Russian anarchists, meanwhile, were carrying out suicide bombing as early as 1904. Long-haired Nihilists with their tinted glasses may not have been anticipating 72 virgins, but they subscribed to the ultimate meaningless act in a world which (for them) had no meaning.
The refugee camp and the occupied homeland have produced generations of brutalised people with nothing to lose. But Bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal both hailed from the super-rich, and there have been scores of "guilty white kids", the offspring of lawyers, architects and judges who have grabbed guns and joined the fray. The youth who murdered Russia's Prime Minister in 1911 rejected a future of "nothing but an endless number of cutlets". Thirty years earlier, Vera Figner abandoned her privileged position as a "beautiful doll" to help assassinate Tsar Alexander II. The Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof had "beautiful dolls" too, ruthlessly exploiting their middle-class connections.
Vanity is never in short supply among terrorists. The charismatic peasant and maniac Serge Nechaev basked in the admiration of socially smart women. High on amphetamines in his tight trousers, Andreas Baader also surrounded himself with a harem of radical chicks. The macho Ali Hassan Salameh of Black September liked gold-medallions and a beauty queen on his arm, while the Northern Irish loyalist-cum-drug-dealer "Mad Dog" Adair opted for arms pumped full of horse steroids and a shaved head polished with Mr Sheen.
Burleigh doesn't spare us the details in a world where punishments and spats are settled with acid in the face, kneecappings, chisels and knives. A sense of the ridiculous occasionally dilutes the horror. There's something comic, for instance, about some of the Baader-Meinhof antics, such as Ulrike Meinhof unscrewing a hand grenade, not realising she was supposed to toss it away. In jail, Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe were given communicating cells. After three weeks, Raspe pleaded for the door to be bricked up again.
Engaging and provocative, Burleigh is master of the caustic putdown. Radical cleric Abu Hamza stuck to bomb-making in Afghanistan being "too bulky to romp easily up and down mountains". Gerry Adams has "the tone of a sociology lecturer at a provincial university"; Bin Laden resembles "those self-righteous superannuated rock stars with delusions of grandeur who harangue world leaders about Africa".
Perceiving Islamist terrorism with its Crusader-Zionist fixation as a real threat to civilisation, Burleigh nevertheless ends on a positive note. We need to entice extremists back to normality and he suggests several things we could do: stop identifying ourselves with repressive states; promote democracy; encourage a true dialogue between
