The media seems to be hell bent on portraying ISIS / ISIL as some kind of terrorist super-villian group. The common trope seems to be that each successive extremist group is out doing the previous in extremism and crimes against humanity: Taliban < Al Qaeda < ISIS / ISIL.
Its all very convenient, but is it really?
In terms of atrocities, from what I can tell the Taliban carried out pretty much equivalent crimes. Mass executions, ethnic cleansing of entire villages, torturing of children and execution of children. Cite: http://lubpak.com/archives/5150
When a power vacuum is created in the middle east, an extremist group pops up and attempts to create an islamic state using torture, mass executions and ethnic cleansing. Happened in Iran, happened in Afghanistan and now is happening in Syria / Iraq.
The only difference I can see is ISIS / ISIL’s use of social media, and the fact its happening in a country that the US has recently occupied. Apart from that, its the same story. In fact I suspect if you looked far enough back, you’d find equivalent atrocities that occurred when the House of Saud was cementing their power over Saudi Arabia.
A lot of people weren’t happy with the Taliban’s atrocities, you know. Saying that someone isn’t any worse than the Taliban doesn’t actually demonstrate anything.
of course, but specifically I’m questioning the current media frenzy which explicitly is claiming ISIS to be something new that we haven’t seen before.
Well, the Taliban have always largely been confined to what is, in most respects, one of the most worthless and empty bits or real estate on the planet. Al Qaeda was based there too, originally, and although it managed to reach out and kill people all around the world, it never really controlled any territory, and never, in reality, seems to have had very many members. ISIS, by contrast, seems now to have a large number of fighters, and to have grown very quickly 9and are continuing to grow), such that they now control quite a large swath of quite valuable territory in a reasonably well populated area of the world that has the potential to be quite rich, if only it were politically stable. In a way I think they are more scary than the Taliban or Al Qaeda (unless you happen to be an Afghani woman or an educated Afghani man).
To add to that, from what I’ve been reading the fact that they control valuable territory is also making them exceptionally well financed and independent of rogue Middle East donors; they are supposedly even selling oil through covert agents and making millions of dollars a day. That translates to a lot of power.
What is this group actually called? I have noticed that Obama, and Obama alone calls them ISIL, while everyone else calls them ISIS. Does anyone know, and is there a difference between the two groups, or is the difference in name only?
At first I thought that someone got it wrong, but Obama has continued to use ISIL in pressers… Is ISIS a subset of ISIL? and do the letters stand for anything, or are they not an acronym for any recognizable name?
Sorry for the hijack, but in reading this thread, it reminded me that I have wanted to ask this.
Same people. The name can be translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. Many people call them ISIL, not just Obama.
And indeed some now refer to them as IS / Islamic State, since the group themselves dropped the last part (presumably in anticipation of expanding beyond Iraq and Syria).
Different translations of an Arabic name. In Arabic speaking parts of the world (including where they actually are), they have a different acronym, DAESH,which I guess maybe also can have meaning as sort of a word itself, especially to the opponents of the group. Remember that we’re not only translating from a different language, but also from a different script, so different interpretations are possible.
I guess that “al-Sham” can mean either Syria, or the greater area of which Syria is a part (i.e. the Levant), or even just Damascus, depending on the context.
The Taliban was a local movement, interested only in control of Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. Al Qaeda is a global terror organization with tactics involving attacks against Western Countries (as well as M.E. countries). The Taliban never looked beyond its own borders.
ISIL is more of a conventional military, with 30,000 fighters bent of establishing rule over the entire Muslim world (meaning any place that had ever been under Muslim rule). Compared to al Qaeda, they are, indeed, a super-villain group just be their very size. ISIL is what al Qaeda wished it could be. But the Taliban always had a local focus, making them a different kettle of fish than either of the other two organizations. They never threatened the US or Western interests, so from the perspective of The West, I think it is accurate to say that Taliban < al Qaeda < ISIL.
One thing I might add, I do find it ironic that the western media recently exploded in outrage over false claims that IS was mandating female genital cutting in Iraq, and then shortly afterwards the West threw its support behind the Kurds, who are the one group in Iraq that actually do make most of their female population undergo genital cutting. So in that sense IS is certainly no worse than a group that we don’t even regard as “extremist”.
(Which isn’t to say IS aren’t atrocious in other respects. They are.)
Yea, I kind of wish people were a little more careful about ascribing every bad behaviour they can think of to groups like this. ISIL is certainly bad news, but just because they do some bad things doesn’t mean they do every bad thing.
The genital mutilation thing was particularly egregious since it didn’t make much sense, since there wasn’t any tradition of it amongst Arabs in the region.
*(Egypt is the only Arab country where the practice is widespread. I always wondered why they’d adapted it, when even in N. Africa it doesn’t seem to have gained much traction in similar countries).
It seems to have come up the nile or down the nile as the epicentre of this practice is in NE Africa, the horn plus Egypt. It is not known in the maghreb at all or among the berbers.
It was “adopted” because of societal inertia. Which is to say it wasn’t adopted at all, but rather they kept the same practice that they had been in the habit of doing for thousands of years and retroactively tried to graft a veneer of more modern religiosity on to it ( Christian, Muslim or Jewish - all the faiths in that region practiced it ). That particular type of extreme FGM is called ‘Pharaonic Circumcision’ because it is believed to date back to classical Egypt or possibly Meroe ( in modern-day Sudan ).
