Modern Group: ISIS
Introduction
Years after of endless war in the Middle East, Northern Africa and parts of Asia, the Western including the United States (U.S), Canada and European countries reduced their military activities abroad. Efforts by the U.S and United Kingdom (U.K) armies to attack Syria in 2013 remained forbidden by the British Parliament and most of the American people. The unexpected growth of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014 came as a result of the U.S presence in Iraq as they looked for the Iraqi fifth president Saddam Hussein in 2003 – 2006. Since 2001 – 2011, the U.S armies were in search for the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden who claimed responsibility for the United Stated attack on September, 11, 2001. This offered the western administrations additional opportunities to wage war on Iraqi in an attempt to eliminate future terrorist attacks. In the media, attack of brutality stories produced supported the prolonged war. Developing a moral fear about radicalized Muslim youth who are going to join ISIS responded war weariness or may be obliged to terrorist activities. In the exploits of merciless appeal of ISIS beliefs, which are mainly focusing on unresolved grievance, insecurity and religion. The ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has used these ideas to become one of the most dangerous people to humanity. Islam Religion is not the reason for their ideologies but is used to justify violence and as a tool to air out their grievances and insecurity to unsuspecting locals who are later recruited to these organization as a jihad (Kalyvas, 2015). The forces of ISIS seek to create unsettled and malicious environments which allow them to narrow the marketplace of religion, philosophies, and identities. Subsequently, people who remain in the regions where they control have a simple choice of either linking or at least accommodating the groups or death.
Practically, anything may be used as a symbol of identity; traditions, language, values, race and gender. In spite of mythologies of nonspiritual, religion has remained and remains to be used as a symbol of identity. In the United States of America, for example, even though it initiated the separation of church and state, it had for utmost of its history a strong identity as a Christian Protestant nation. This did not transform until the Jews and Roman Catholics were lastly accepted as it is thus surely not the circumstance that religious radicalism feeds loyally motivated terrorism out of unawareness. It is instead an extremely rational choice and violence plays an important part in establishing the circumstances that enable the growth of social groups. Relating these three pillars beyond with the perception of the economics of Islam offers awareness into the religious based social group (Kfir, 2014).
The economics of Islam identifies the existence of two groups which are religious makers and religious consumers, with the prior willing to sell a product, that is Islam or further specifically a worldview that they expect the later will consent. For this power to thrive, nevertheless, the religious makers need conditions that underline their effectiveness and even requirement for individuals. The importance is on contribution of good or services, while at the same time highlighting that people living in a certain area have no actual choices but to agree it. Additionally, it is also essential to have a communication that is generally acceptable or it will find a friendly audience (Kalyvas,2015).
Eventually, Islam has an organizational arrangement that believers can use to convert in that the religious communication serves to attract new recruits by proposing to them both tangible and intangible benefits. In this circumstance, promises made are desperately in need of security and stability which are then used to assemble supporters. There was a vital shift in the way of Islam, the politics, and personality years ago at the start of the modern era. Before then, beliefs and other associations were not clearly distinguished and societies, individuals were rooted into their communities and way of life without influence of other people. In the modern day, things have changed because world has become a global village by the use of internet one can learn other people’s beliefs and ways of life. The people who can get written materials on Islam and other religions tend to join these groups even though they are miles away. They belief on their manifesto and beliefs their lives will become better when they have a leader and comrades who are of the same mind. This use of religion to describe identify and demarcate opponents is encouraged by religious language distinctive of the Abrahamic religions which are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These religions have a similar understanding of God. God is represented as a god of love and justice, peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness. In some places in the Scriptures, God is represented as a furious ethnic war god, inflicting unequal punishment on those who irritate him (Ross & Mohammadpur, 2016).
The group’s reliance on these connected pillars of unresolved grievances, insecurity and religion enables the group to display particular social features in which the displeased, distressed individual can share. This creates a connection between the targeted audience and the group in which self-interest are realized. The setting and the group has to emphasize the element that the state is unable to provide the individuals with the basic safety that they need and justify. Moreover, the state plays a part in decline security by not only inadequately delivering it, but engaging in aggressively harm on all part of the population. The group activities are persistent in sense of insecurity by revealing worrying events in a specific light as a technique to plea to those who could have already shared some of its opinions and by endorsing the group’s capability to deal these distresses, thus emphasizing the group’s power and significance (Kfir, 2014). The challenge for opposing a social group is presenting to current and potential followers that the group is sufficiently powerful to remove concerns from recognized politicians, who would simply offer allowances as part of a negotiating process with individuals who pose a threat to them and the government. Therefore, a social group wants a connection to tie its affiliates together and safeguard a secure source of new recruits. The group also involve themselves in activities that might thin its positions in one manner or another. To recognize this, I will focus on the connection between Islam and personality in the modern world and then look at how religion has been used to manipulate to nurture war and its implications.
Islam is being used to express character and to make both an external rival and an enemy within. It is important to identify that Islamophobia has been started and encouraged by governments, even though when unleashed it has caused a mock on its own. It is hard not to perceive it as a disbelieving scheme to make a new opponent after the fall of socialism. People stopped detesting and dreading socialists, only to suddenly beginning to hate and fear Muslims. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, there was a discussion on reconciliation bonus as all the monies and funds, which had been budgeted into conducting the Cold War, could now be shifted to meet human needs. Islam is a very effective connection, especially in times of social difficulties that often take residence when insecurity is thrived, allowing the promoter of the religion to propose a radical explanation that emphasizes people’s feelings of separation (Kalyvas,2015).
Religious personalities in the words of some people are not easily changed, and transformation costs do not only follow from the distance covered. In other disputes, Islam reliefs strengthen identities by giving an absolute base for communication that discourses the spiritual and physical worlds, making huge demands on the way to explain its memo. Particularly, from the simple communication, radical understandings are frequently used by sects emerging in whose definition are less acceptable, and the leaders frequently not only discard the state, but also pursue to overthrow it. Therefore, those persons encouraging an unusual, radical explanations of the religion are involved in a procedure that not only offers reasons for sorrow, but comprises of classification and identification of the commendable and undeserving, with rewards that must not be tangible in the near future.
Religion, especially when it improves a sect-like approach has the capacity to prepare persons not fully commit to the source and, more prominently the group. The group’s self-interest is the unconditional requirement to act to entice support and emphasizing on the group’s uniqueness from real or probable competitors. Islam is often, but not really, vibrant to a person’s identity and some societies may not be religious at all. What is important and what is central will vary from one society to another, and can adjust over time. The roles, reputations, and codes that brand up the attention of identity are all social and they provide the connection among a person and the group. For example, if an individual is an Islam then the codes, rites, and practices of their religion become one of their own identities (Ross & Mohammadpur, 2016). The more essential a certain attention is to a person’s identity, the more the society comes to define that person. Certainly, because religion is superior, that is, it has an influence ability to connect an individual to a group of people. Association in the state is certain and thus critical for citizenship, the permit, and who has privileges, and which all too regularly is withheld from subgroups.
Bin Laden’s infamous announcement of the World’s Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Supporters pronounced the principles of Al-Qaeda’s exceptional opinion on world history. The announcement and other writings identified three main connected grievances of which all are related to individual anxieties and struggle for power. The grievance, which is mainly religious in nature focuses on the inhabitation of Muslim lands which allowed Bin Laden to differentiate between Muslims and non-Muslims, with non-Muslims undignifying and misusing the Arabic Peninsula and the spiritual base of the Muslim state which are referred to as umma. Infused with these messages are biased or even unreliable, values by Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda decides who is a noble Muslim and who has drifted (Kfir, 2014).
The following grievance, which is economic, cores on the authorizations and demolition formed on Iraq and its general public. On this title, the non-Muslims not only lure Muslims from the factual path, but also they impose terrible real harms on them by making insecure environs that permit criminals, guerrilla leader, and other notorious people to prosper in their uncouth activities. The link between the religion and the economy by recognizing threatening powers in which bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have an entitlement opinions behind the terrors that Muslims suffer. The threatening powers are from the west mostly the United States who is referred to as the far enemy and greed, which attracts Muslims from their responsibilities (Kfir, 2014). Al-Qaeda promotes its exclusive communal position with their supporters commonly adored as martyrs, are willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater mission of creating Caliphate state, even if it means murdering those that might originally be acquitted spectators. Caliph is the supreme leader of ISIS organization and two state leaders who are reporting to him (The caliph) on activities of the provinces that are held by ISIS. The state leader represent Syria and the Iraqi respectively. Under these leaders, we have provincial leaders who are the main administrators in the provinces and run all activities in relation to ISIS mandate (Kalyvas, 2015). The leaders promote opinions whereby the addiction with greediness by the modern society weakens the umma which leads to abandonment of the correct habits of Islam. The grievances are widespread, and are aimed at inspiring activities that are understood as responding to incitement, against those who want to destruct or weaken the society.
The most important thing about these grievances is that they permitted Bin Laden to classify, identify, and compare the Muslims with persons who want to weaken them. An important element in Al-Qaeda’s ideology is its tactics, which are designed to extract heavy wounded people from the recognized as enemies and provoke responses from other countries and creates a persistent sense of insecurity (Ross & Mohammadpur, 2016). The murders are part of a self-centered goal to terrorize communities and attract the attention of the general public. It was clearly identifying that accountability for the trouble in which modern Muslims find themselves in the West, particularly the United States of America, Muslim leaders consent themselves to be used by the West. The Al-Qaeda compares themselves constructively not only with the noticeable infidel, non-Muslims but also the Muslims who have drifted from the path that is denoted the Al-Qaeda.
The rise of ISIS and the story of the Islamic State in Iraq which is mostly related to the American occupation in Iraq and the civil war in Syria have made these self-proclaimed Muslim leaders who use Islam to move masses into terror (Kfir, 2014). These circumstances strengthened Islam caused by unusual appreciation of the necessity to participate in social harmonization to prevent accusations that are used to justify forceful tactics and to project power and the capability to entice many foreigners as troops. Dependence not only on terror to sustain itself but also on an intricate support system which is encouraged a culture in which the community unconsciously related by having a link to someone in authority as the only thing slightly adjacent to an assurance of safety of all types (Kalyvas, 2015). The civil war assisted to form ISIS’s strategies to grabbing territory, regulating smuggling routes, and operating with the local government. To comprehend the rise of ISIS, whose exact numbers continue to be unknown but are assumed to be at least ten thousand combatants, it is important to scrutinize first the state in Iraq for the last few years.
Iraq experienced sessions of optimism, development, insecurity, and partition, terminating in Islamic civil war. The main challenge in Iraq after their leader Saddam Iraq is to reconstruct not only what was demolished in the fighting but also what Saddam sanctions for over a decade had tumbledown mostly any idea of political system. Separating the political, social, and economical changes in Iraq is difficult in that without a clear governmental settlement, appealing in resilient economic or social modernization remains efficiently intolerable.
Conclusion
The territory in which ISIS might unveil more attacks, reinforce its power and suggests too many Sunni Muslims who are tired of their own ethnic leaders and the Iraq and Syrian governments with another which is made more pleasant because ISIS can give immediate promises or solutions of ultimate commercial security. Hence, a vital way to weaken ISIS is by finding an answer to the Syrian war, which will involve making harsh concerns, as Syria is gradually becoming the Afghanistan of the 1980’s. The Western countries, being led by the United States of America, have turned into religion in hunt of a new opponent. Years of war in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, and Central Asia has made huge devastation in that thousands of dead soldiers and civilians, tens of thousands of injured hundreds of thousands of victims, and millions of immigrants but has perceived neither success nor any indication offending this war. And by adopting Islamic religion fear, they have created real adversaries, at home and overseas. Identifying the goals and resolution of ISIS, which appears to resolved on re-igniting a religious civil war in Iraq, and perhaps in the whole of the region, as a technique to remove old borders it emphasizes on how dangerous the ISIS is, especially as it is influences personalities, leading to forced social groups. Iraq has witnessed religious founded communal identities which come to the forefront, so that only genuine or subjective affiliation give individual’s security, which is the Main ideology of Al-Qaeda and precisely the ISIS leader Mr. Zarqawi desired. Therefore, to challenge ISIS needs a policy of liberation that shuns communal identities to the utmost extent imaginable. That is, Iraq must look for ways to first conquer ISIS by organizing identities and also remembering that continuous war may lead to dysfunction and weaken the nation. Thoughtful effort to stop and finally end the violence plunging on Iraq would require citizens to reject contentious politics and principles and to view ISIS as the rest of the world. ISIS is a violent society holding to a headstrong appearance of Islam and the Caliphate.
References
Kalyvas, S. (2015). Is ISIS a Revolutionary Group and if Yes, What Are the Implications? Perspectives on Terrorism, 9(4).
Kfir, I. (2014). Social Identity Group and Human (In) Security-The Case of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).
Ross, N. O., & Mohammadpur, A. (2016). Islamic state as a modern phenomenon. Journal of Global Faultlines, 3(1), 36-40.