To defeat a misguided ‘ideological problem’

The brutal murder of American journalist Steven Sotloff should be condemned by the press community and leaders of the Islamic world.

The image of Islam as a monotheistic compassionate message of God to the human race as a whole has been slaughtered as well and simultaneously by the same group using our religion to justify their barbaric lust for blood shedding or their animal instinct for death.

But Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi and his caliphate cannot be defeated by drones releasing their lethal missiles, or by F16s zeroing their one-tonne bombs onto target military installations in Tel Afar or in Raqqa.

Such a strategy had proved its futility, having been used in Afghanistan against Bin Laden, with the end result that Al Qaeda had spawned two terror organisations, in Tunis and in Libya.

US Air Force strikes against the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, AQAP, failed to eradicate it, but led to the birth of one in Somalia and another in Algeria, reminding one of the mythical Hydra, which had the magical power to grow two heads whenever one was cut off.

Decision makers have two options: either contain Baghdadi’s caliphate or defeat it. 

The second option requires an ideological response to refute the legitimacy of the religious basis that made thousands of young Muslims adhere to Baghdadi, including air force majors, Indian Information Technology engineers, American social media professionals and Indonesian film producers.

Such effort should start at the grassroots level, among preparatory school students, in university curricula, with Friday mosque preachers and on television screens.

Jordan had neglected the second option, having failed to address the phenomenon thirty years ago, when Zarqawi’s threat resurfaced.

Baghdadi was one of Abu Musab Zarqawi’s disciples in Iraq during the dark times of the Islamic Emirate of Fallujah, in the 1990s, when the latter was the role model for hundreds of fourth-generation jihadist salafist fighters.

In Jordan, educationists and religious scholars should create a master plan to rehabilitate the younger generation in villages and refugee camps, and to expose the fallacy of Al Qaeda’s main tenets and its misinterpretation of Islam.

It is a big challenge for decision makers here to tackle an ideological problem that has misguided more than 10,000 Jordanians so far.

It is sad that 2,000 of those Jordanians have already been lost in Syria and Iraq during the last three years.

It does not require a miracle to do what Moscow did in Chechnya to contain, but not to defeat, the Baghdadi Caliphate. The Iranian-American intelligence coordination last week led to a structural blow to his highest echelons.

In case Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan join a regional operation room against such a common threat, Baghdadi’s end is a matter of months, in spite of the daily income of half a million dollars a day from his oil wells, and in spite of the superior quality of his military arsenal compared to what the Iraqi army, the Syrian forces or the Kurdish peshmerga militias possess.