King tells CNN Daesh ‘works by intimidations’

AMMAN — CNN network is expected to air on Sunday a full interview with His Majesty King Abdullah, excerpts of which were published on Friday and Saturday. 

His Majesty will appear on “Fareed Zakaria’s GPS”, according to the Royal Court and the network’s website.

According to promos CNN published, the King refuted claims by the Daesh terror group to be representing Islam. 

He said the group works by intimidations. It is “always trying to intimidate, scare, put fear into people’s hearts”, King Abdullah has said in the wide-ranging interview.

“They’re trying to invent falsely a linkage to a caliphate, linked to our history in Islam, which has no truth or bearing to our history. To bring in... young men and women that think that this is sort of an Islamic nation and it has nothing with our history,” the King told Zakaria.

“The barbarity of the way they executed our brave hero [Muath Kasasbeh] I think shocked the Muslim world, and specifically Jordanians and people from this region, that it had nothing to do with Islam,” His Majesty added.

In response to a question on how the West should deal with Daesh and whether the response should essentially be led by Muslims, King Abdullah said: “This has to be unified. I mean, I’ve said this to leaders, both in the Islamic and Arab world and to the world in general, this is a Third World War by other means, this brings Muslims, Christians, other religions together in this generational fight that all of us have to be in this together.”

He added that there is a short-term part of this war, “which is the military part of the issue; there is the medium part, which is the security element of it; and then there’s a long-term element of this, which is obviously the ideological one”.

When asked by Zakaria on his opinion of US President Barak Obama’s decision not to call groups like Daesh Islamic extremists “because he doesn’t want to give them the mantle of legitimacy by acknowledging that they’re Islamic”, the King said he thinks Obama is right.

“I think this is something that has to be understood on a much larger platform, because they’re looking for legitimacy that they don’t have inside of Islam. When we’re asked in this debate, you know, are you a moderate or extremist — what these people want is to be called extremist. I mean, they take that as a badge of honour.”

Elaborating further, His Majesty said the term being used more often to describe such groups is the Arabic word “Khawarij”.

“These are in a way outlaws that are on the fringe of Islam, and if you look at sort of the way that they are actually represented inside of our religion, they are, these are sort of takfiris, and takfiris inside of... Islam.

“If... Islam is 1.5 billion Muslims, they represent only 1 per cent. Out of that, maybe 200 to 500,000 of these people are actually takfiri jihadists… So to label Islam under the term of extremists and moderates is actually completely wrong,” the King stressed.

“I don’t know what these people are, but they definitely do not have any relationship to our faith. When [Daesh’s leader Abu Baker] Baghdadi... came out with his manifesto, even extremist organisations completely backed away from what he said. So he has nothing to do with the tenets of Islam, which is a religion of tolerance that reaches out to other people.”

On Friday, Zakaria asked His Majesty to describe his reaction after watching the video of the brutal killing of Kasasbeh.

His Majesty answered: “In actual fact, I didn’t see the video, and many of us refuse to see what I think is propaganda.”

The King continued, “Disgust; sadness to the family; I had met the family on many occasions. My heart went out to the father, the mother, the brothers and sisters, his wife — they had only been married for five months; anger, as a son of the Arab Army, the Jordan Armed Forces, Muath, God bless his soul, is a brother in arms. And so I think all Jordanian soldiers, past and present, were angered and disgusted by the brutality of what Muath was put through.”

His Majesty stressed that “if Daesh tried to intimidate Jordanians, I think they just had the reverse effect. If you look at our history, we have always punched way above our weight. I think, if anything, Daesh has now got a tiger by the tail. It has just motivated Jordanians to rally around the flag and the gloves have come off.”