April 2015
By Lela Gilbert Morning Star News Since summer 2014, the Islamist terrorist group ISIS – a.k.a. Islamic State – has devastated the political, geographic and combat landscape of the Middle East. At the same time, along with its ominous black banners, it has raised worrisome questions about the true nature of Islam. For the Middle East’s ancient Christian communities, the threats posed by ISIS’ extraordinarily brutal warriors have been electrifying. In one haunting story after another, Islamic State jihadists have swept through Christian communities in Iraq and Syria, demanding that residents submit to Islam. Or flee from their ancestral homes. Or face the sword.
Other minorities in ISIS’ path, such as Yazidis and Shi’a Muslims, have suffered even worse fates. In less than a year’s time, ISIS’s ferocious tactics and wanton destruction of ancient historical sites have eclipsed the rampages of Al-Qaeda affiliates such as Al-Nusra in Syria, the incessant imprisonment and execution of dissidents in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and even the kidnapping and killing wrought by Nigeria’s Boko Haram. Across the globe, political observers, military tacticians and scholars have tried diligently to piece together a profile that clarifies ISIS’s motives and intentions. And now the March edition of Atlantic Monthly – a left-of-center and highly secular periodical – has published a
surprisingly useful summary, offering both information and thoughtful insight. What ISIS Really Wants, by Atlantic contributing editor Graeme Wood, is both expansive and intriguing. “The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths,” explains an introductory teaser. “It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse…” The article deserves to be read and reread carefully – start to finish. Perhaps the most significant contribution Wood’s article makes – and there are several – is that the Islamic State’s self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and those who follow and serve him are, above all else, ardently
religious Muslims. Wood examines their fanatical views in depth, taking them very seriously. He interviews several devotees. His research flies in the face of an enormous blind spot – not getting religion – that disables far too many Western journalists. Early in the article, Wood reviews the hard-core version of Sunni Muslim extremism that has been expounded repeatedly by the Islamic State’s Caliphate. They have “…toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally
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