Daily Times

On June 30, 2015, Islamic State (IS) beheaded two women in Syria for allegedly engaging in witchcraft and sorcery. This is the first time that IS militants have beheaded women but it will probably not be the last. Although IS has been responsible for the death of around 220,000 Syrians so far, the beheadings of these two women show that IS will grow even more brutal as it gains more strength and territory. IS has not only captured significant swathes of Syria and Iraq but also implements its own laws and stones and executes people for reasons as arbitrary and illogical as suspected sorcery, intending to establish its own perverse version of an Islamic caliphate. The recent IS actions in Afghanistan and Yemen show that the group is strategically targeting unstable countries. Syrian Kurdish fighters (the Peoples’ Protection Units or YPG) were recently able to recapture the town of Tal Abyad, which borders Turkey and is a key part of IS’s supply route to its headquarters in Raqqa. The Kurdish fighters were aided by US coalition airstrikes, the al Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra group, Shiite rebels and other smaller militant organisations. This unlikely alliance has led to regional tensions. IS could use these fissures to strategically overcome its opponents — a prospect that seems even more likely since IS has regained some ground on the Turkey-Syria border.

With each passing year, IS is getting increasingly entrenched and as time passes, it will become more difficult to defeat. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has noted that urgent action must be taken. To defeat an organisation that is so backward and medieval in its ideals and practices and yet, paradoxically, so advanced in battle strategy and social media, all stakeholders will have to develop a joint, comprehensive strategy. Considering the reach of IS’s social media networks and the high grade of its encryption software, it is not unlikely that the group’s stellar IT team could hack into government and intelligence agency websites and databases to remain one step ahead of its opponents. It would certainly behove the international community, particularly the countries of the Middle East and South Asia, to put aside their respective differences and combat IS jointly, which is emerging as a serious threat to the security and stability of the world. The US, NATO and their allies, after destabilising Iraq and Afghanistan and then leaving a vacuum when foreign troops were withdrawn, which IS is increasingly able to fill, must take responsibility for this situation. The perils of foreign intervention as exemplified by the war on terror notwithstanding, to combat an organisation as strong and far-reaching as IS, there needs to be a united, concerted global effort to fight IS through intelligence sharing and the cohesion of disparate armed forces. *