Daily Times

The gruesome execution of journalist James Foley in Iraq by a militant belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has sent shockwaves across the international community, more so due to the fact that his savage beheading was recorded and uploaded on social media for the entire world to see. It was a most horrid picture of an innocent man murdered in cold blood for a warped ideology that has no place in Islam. Foley was an independent US journalist who went missing from Syria near the Turkish border in November 2012, reportedly captured by militants belonging to the Daewood Brigade, which had links to the Free Syrian Army but later pledged allegiance to ISIS, a particularly cruel and barbaric offshoot of al Qaeda. Foley’s captors reportedly demanded a hundred million euros ransom from Foley’s family and now reports are emerging that they also called for the release of Pakistan-born Aafia Siddiqui, who is currently being held on terrorism charges by the US. The video of Foley’s execution shows a militant with a British accent carrying out the beheading, a point that raises many questions in itself.
The wars ravaging the Arab world have taken many thousands of casualties and James Foley is one of its truly innocent victims. The rise of Islamic militancy the world over has witnessed one very disturbing trend: the more recent terror organisations are growing in savagery, becoming more and more ruthless every day. Iraq has ISIS, which is looking to create a caliphate stretching from Iraq to Spain, while Libya is overrun by Islamist rebels and Syria is at war with homegrown Islamic insurgents. The only common denominator in the rise of these militant groups is that fact that the US has played a part in adventurism in these regions, leaving behind chaos and a political power vacuum that is now being filled by murderers who call themselves jihadists. While the US may have started its airstrikes in Iraq to protect the Shia, Christian and Yazidi minorities who are all being targeted by ISIS, there is still a lot of ground for the US to cover to undo its mistakes. Prepping up the government of Nouri al-Maliki was not enough as it turned out to be too weak to deal with the militant threat; what Iraq needs is proper support for the armed forces, the Kurds and the government there to defeat the creeping ISIS threat. ISIS is a very recent phenomenon. How is it that US intelligence, which projects that not even a butterfly can spread its wings without it knowing, knew nothing of the creation of ISIS, which has now executed one of its citizens and threatens to execute more kidnapped journalists? Just how much does the US know?
The UK and other western countries are now worried about the fact that their nationals are aiding ISIS and other militants, becoming battle-hardened and potentially bringing back those same jihadi views and tactics to their home countries. They are not wrong to think this. The entire western world needs to rectify the mistakes its adventurism has made in the Arab world for the threat of attack to stop from spreading. *