Right now our sense of global order, humanity and even modernity is being undermined and betrayed in the Islamic State-controlled badlands of Syria and Iraq. Almost 70 years after the UN was formed — “to maintain international peace and security ... to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression” — we are confronted with its impotence. A lifetime after we reeled at the extent of the Holocaust, we are seeing a bloody onslaught of summary executions and exterminations the likes of which we never could have imagined. A coalition of nations is helping the governments of Iraq and Syria — such as they are — to resist the onslaught but, in the main, the world is standing back. And the UN wrings its hands.
In this era of lasers in the jungle we know that young men of Islamic State, some with privileged upbringings and educations in Western countries, are grabbing the hair of their victims, pulling back their heads and hacking through their necks. These are the barbarities of the moment; there are no pleasant ways to describe them or any good reasons to shield ourselves from the reality. A Jordanian pilot is burned alive for being the enemy; a young girl is incinerated for refusing depraved acts as a sex slave. Women and children are raped, tortured and beheaded, roads are lined with decapitated victims and people are buried alive. Thousands are killed for being Christian, Yazidi or Shi’ite. Terrorists pose with severed heads while others film as girls are drained of blood. It is unspeakable.
The march of Islamic State, for all its strategic significance, is not merely a strategic dilemma. Here is medieval brutality, prehistoric bloodlust or apocalyptic nihilism challenging our sense of civilisation in the here and now. We cannot plead ignorance. The pictures are available and once seen cannot be unseen. Questions about how many atrocities would demand action or how many lives would spark global outrage are superfluous when not only have we seen individual horrors but dozens executed and then tens of thousands slaughtered as Islamic State captures territory and cities including Ramadi, just an hour from Baghdad. Islamic State delivers its convert-or-die extremism, killing of gays and trading of sex slaves not only to dusty villages and isolated camps; it also rules Mosul, a city larger than Adelaide, and runs oil refineries, banks and local governments, albeit via terror.
After Iraqi troops surrendered Ramadi, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said they had “no will to fight” and now Qassem Suleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force, says “there is no will in America to confront” Islamic State. Here, Tony Abbott says this setback “should cause us to be more committed, not less committed”, but this presumes a level of purpose from Iraq, the US and other coalition partners. Iran, the Shia nation that for so long has been seen as a pariah (for good reason) by Israel and the US, remains the largest regional bulwark against Islamic State.
And the UN? “Through our collective efforts, we must ensure that all counter-terrorism actions and policies are consistent with international human rights and humanitarian laws,” secretary-general Ban Ki-moon told last year’s summit on foreign terrorist fighters. We can hardly imagine these comments being heard above the bloodcurdling screams in Iraq and Syria. Islamic State takes the Nazis’ inhuman extermination of ethno-religious victims and turns it into a weapon of export, used to seize and control territory and strike terror into far-off nations, like ours, a world away.
Mistakes have been made in the past by the US and UN in Syria and Iraq — failing to intervene here, intervening there and failing to consolidate gains or make good on so-called “red lines”. For all the undoubted complexities, the question — not just for the US but the UN, NATO and all civilised nations led by the permanent members of the UN Security Council — is that if we cannot muster a concerted and effective effort to defeat and eliminate this evil, then when can humanity ever defeat barbarism?
