A recent edition of New York Times Magazine included a cover story extolling a proposed English program of amnesty and reconciliation for returning and presumably repentant ISIS fighters. In the print-edition headline “Why do they go,” Muslim and non-Muslim exponents of a “go easy” policy cite the seductive quality of the Islamic State in Syria on social media, the immaturity of the recruits and the injustice of punishing them for thoughts and deeds they claim to have renounced.
As an estimated half of ISIS’ fighters are from Western countries, the correctness of the position of the “mercy brigade” is vitally important from a security point of view, as some returnees are already being implicated in attempted terrorist attacks in their home countries.
But it is the lack of a sense of justice, of morality, that most disturbs me. These ISIS volunteers joined a movement that has tortured, raped and massacred tens of thousands of Zoroastrians, Christians, Shi’as and members of the 95 percent of their fellow Sunnis alienated by ISIS’ monstrous deeds. In many civilized nations, those who are accomplices in homicide are themselves tried on charges of murder; why not these returnees?
Throw in the fact that the recruitment videos on the Internet openly celebrate the most inhuman crimes perpetrated by the movement, feature nightmarish footage such as beheadings of aid workers and the burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot, and it is difficult if not impossible to feel a smidgen of empathy for those so turned on by these horror shows that they want to join up. The Western ISIS volunteers resemble Manson Family members far more than the “holy warriors” they (ridiculously) claim to be. What sane nation wants to allow characters like that back into its citizenry?
And these ISIS volunteers had no valid reason to join the group. Most of the British recruits are not the product of an oppressed, ethnically downtrodden underclass. Among the examples of English recruits mentioned in the Times article are graduates from top-rank prep schools and universities, computer programmers and the like, many, if not most, from normal upper-middle-class immigrant families who have found success and total acceptance in their new United Kingdom homeland.
But what I really want to talk about is the ironic racial prejudice surrounding this proposed open-arms program toward what are by any definition war criminals of the worst kind. What if these same characters had been complicit in the mass execution of American or British prisoners, or Israelis, or European tourists? I am 100-percent positive there would be no talk of easing their re-entry into society with little more than a slap on the wrist. If you murder people like us, you are a terrorist; if you mow down a hundred fellow Arabs, well, everyone makes mistakes. What kind of message does this send to the non-Western world?
All of this, of course, is yet another example of our cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Emirates that surreptitiously fund the Taliban, al-Qaida, Boko Haram, ISIS, Daesh and the other radical Sunni groups who plague our world. All of these groups are the product of funding and encouragement from radical Sunni billionaires in the Gulf. Saudi Royals were even directly complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks – read my book, Hunting bin Laden, if you are in doubt – and, as we all know now, Osama bin Laden was protected by Gulf-backed Pakistani Army Intelligence for years. The fact that the Emirates sometimes end up attacking their own demonic creations is explainable by blowback from an incoherent foreign policy, nothing more. And yet we persist in denying the glaring truth and pouring billions of military aid to these false allies, even as they hire the killers of our own armed forces personnel and their moderate Muslim comrades from Afghanistan to Africa and beyond.
The reason this outrageous farce continues is because of one thing: money; the value of the oil we get from the Emirates and the billions of money our defense contractors get in return. And you can throw in the Beltway lobbyists and their political pals who keep the dirty game going.
If I seem exercised by any suggestion of a soft solution to the dilemma of returning ISISers, I confess I have a personal emotional bias. Dr. Syed Majrooh, my friend who ran the Afghan Information in Pakistan during the Afghan war against the Soviets, was assassinated by a Hizb-i-Islam Heckmatyar gunman from the guerrilla party the CIA favored above all others. Dr. Majrooh was a liberal proponent of Western-style democracy and was killed in cold blood for his efforts. My good friend Dr. Tom Grams, of Durango, was among the 10 medical aid workers executed by a Taliban hit squad a few years ago; the leader of the group was a Punjabi, a Pakistani, with obvious links to Pakistan-run Taliban. Sgt. Bob Paul, member of a six-member Civil Affairs team I embedded with for 10 months in Baghdad, was later killed by a suicide car bomber in Kabul, another Taliban attack. He was planning to visit me in Telluride for a river-running holiday when he and I returned home. I have many other friends who died at the hands of Gulf-funded fanatics, but I think I have made my point.
As far as I’m concerned, no one who has been in ISIS is innocent; they should be wiped off the map or isolated on some remote desert island. I totally opposed Guantanamo because of the sloppy way it swept up the guiltless along with the guilty, and the shabby way the prisoners have been treated. But that was a different kind of war, not one of outright genocide and massive ethnic cleansing. The Guantanamo prisoners were imprisoned because they may have been associated with groups unknowingly sheltering the Sept. 11 attackers. In contrast, the ISISers revel in publicly killing masses of innocent civilians. There’s a vast difference between the two.
Finally, wiping out ISIS will not be the end of the story; wealthy Emirate Arabs will continue to fund similar groups in their struggle to win what is really a civil war inside Islam, a well-funded minority of radical Sunnis against moderate Sunnis, Sufis, Shi’as and anyone else who threatens to get in their way. In the past, we have turned a blind eye to the crimes of the former; in fact, we have often aided them through our so-called oil-rich allies, all in the name of economic greed. Returning a sense of morality to our foreign policy deliberations is way, way overdue, and it could well put an end to ISIS-like groups and their crimes.
Rob Schultheis has traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan on and off since 1972, most of the time as a reporter and human-rights investigator. He is the author of Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan and Hunting Bin Laden, as well as scores of articles for Time magazine, The New York Times and other publications. He spent nine months embedded with a six-member U.S. Army Civil Affairs team in Baghdad, recorded in a third book, Waging Peace.
