Worldwide Web of Terror

Internet will be the new battlefield for ISIS, says Edna Fernandes’ The Hollow Kingdom: ISIS and the Cult of Jihad

By the close of 2014, the US Congressional Research Services issued a report putting the total cost of America’s War on Terror, encompassing Afghanistan, Iraq and other operations, at an official USD1.6 trillion. A respected military think-tank, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), estimated that Britain, America’s main military partner in these wars, had spent around GBP29 billion (‘Wars in Peace’, RUSI, 2014). Both wars were deemed by RUSI to be ‘strategic failures’.

By June 2015, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, the economic impact of wars around the world, many of which were related to the fight against Islamist extremism, amounted to USD14 trillion. That is 13 per cent of global GDP, or the combined value of the economies of the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Brazil and Spain.

Yet the economic cost is nothing compared to the human cost in terms of deaths, displacement and injuries, both physical and psychological. In 2015, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War issued a report called ‘Body Count’ which put the total number of casualties in the wars on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan between 1.3 million and 2 million. Looking at Iraq in particular, the report noted that there were casualties that could not be quantified easily — those caused by the collapse in healthcare and the degradation of living conditions: ‘(After) June 2006 living conditions in Iraq worsened drastically once again. While the healthcare system largely collapsed, diseases spread because of the lack of access to drinking water and the contamination of rivers.’

The report said almost 3 million people became internal refugees. It catalogued ‘the long-term consequences through the poisoning of the environment brought about by the war’ and cited that in many areas of Iraq ‘the number of occurrences of various forms of cancer, of miscarriages and abnormal and deformed babies multiplied. A major reason for this is likely to be the massive use of ammunition containing depleted uranium. On impact, this material combusts into extremely fine, highly toxic and radioactive uranium dust, which is able to spread very widely and can enter the body not just through the air but also via water and food.’

‘Body Count’ also referenced a study (2005-2009) by the International Journal of Environment Research and Public Health, which said child mortality multiplied in the following years, the number of occurrences of cancer quadrupled, and the number of cases of leukaemia increased by a factor of 40.

But the report did not make global headlines on the scale it should have done, as the world was preoccupied with the latest front in the war on terror — against ISIS in the newly declared Caliphate.

These and other studies on the battle against Islamist extremism, whether of the al Qaida or ISIS brand, demonstrate that the provocative ideology that has inspired jihadis in both groups has worked. The economic burden to the world’s superpower and its allies, together with a mounting civilian death toll, has long been part of a deliberate strategy by these and other terror groups to draw their enemies directly into costly wars, sow division at home and abroad through mass casualties, and alienate some Muslims within their adopted land until they are driven into the arms of the fanatics. The impact of the West’s assault in Iraq had a huge impact on civilian lives, which in turn helped fuel the fanatics’ campaign for infinite war.

The story of what unfolded in Iraq is pretty much by the terrorist textbook, Naji’s manual of jihad, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Ummah Will Pass, which was first published by al Qaida in 2004. If we are to understand why ISIS has been successful, where it wishes to go next and how to avoid playing into its