fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Eye on Mordor

A spy inside the totalitarian ISIS state
shutterstock_181928201

The Browser links to an interview with the anonymous Iraqi blogger who runs Mosul Eye, which reports from the city under ISIS captivity. It’s beyond chilling. Excerpts:

How do you describe the feelings of Mosul inhabitants today?

Many of them are creating their own worlds to live in, a world in the street different from that in their homes. They cannot trust anybody, in some cases not even their family members. There is a state of fear, just like in the times of Saddam Hussein. People look at ISIS as a cruel, terrifying entity imposing harsh rules, but it provides services that people need.  They try to reconcile these two things. But I am afraid that people will not be able to continue to do this for long, and that they will surrender within five months to totalitarian governance under ISIS.

How has life in the city changed?

Everything has changed. Gender segregation is imposed everywhere; women are forced to veil their faces, and men must wear long beards. There is a wave of radicalization among young children, which parents are unable to do anything against. Young people are learning a radical ideology even more extremist than that of the current example. Still amid this rise of radicalism, there is a hidden countervailing rise in atheism. People have started to ask questions like “Is God happy with all this killing?” or “Is Islam a problem?” Some have concluded that atheism is the only way to liberate the city.

More:

What are the possible solutions, in your opinion?

It is difficult, and it is getting more difficult as time passes. Solutions that were possible yesterday are not available today. The problems we will face in the period following the end of ISIS might be even more difficult. We have a hidden army now, those teenagers with such a radical vision that it is beyond imagining. To end ISIS, we need to eradicate it everywhere, in Iraq, Syria, and everywhere.

How do you see the future?

It is not difficult to predict the future anymore; the world is on the cusp of a big change, and a shift in humanity’s principles.  In the near future, we will witness continuous wars between the various social groups in the Middle East. Extremism will spread more easily than at any time previously. Our children have a dark future waiting for them. Children have become the most essential source for extremism’s growth in the region. Today, ISIS has youth volunteers who have received strict religious and military training that will transform them into monsters in the future. I cannot watch this world collapsing. The most depressing thing is our seeing everything clear and obvious in front of us. I wish I could have been able to track the way humanity moved from savagery into civilization, but unfortunately, I am tracking now its move from civilization into savagery.

Read the whole thing. 

God help those people. God help Europe. And may God withhold his judgment from America, which helped unleash the demons.

On second thought, it’s easy to say, “God help those people, and God help Europe.” What role must the US play now? Can we do more good than harm? Walter Russell Mead writes:

Syria and Iraq are becoming Greater Lebanon as their inhabitants turn on one another. The law of the jungle is the only law left when communities are fighting, or believe they are fighting, for their survival. Shi’a against Sunni, Kurd against Arab, perhaps soon Kurd against Turk…once these wars get going, they rarely end quickly. The bitterness and above all the fear—existential fear for the survival of your kind—remain, ready to flare into new rounds of hideous violence.

These are the demons that have been unleashed in the Middle East; it is hard to see now how they can be tamed.

Taming them is one thing; can they even be contained? I am reminded of a piece Adam Garfinkle wrote a few weeks back, about the refugee crisis in Europe. Excerpts:

If only a tenth of one percent of these Arabs are now or are later turned toward salafi-based political violence for any number of reasons we can all think of, then Germany will have a problem that will shred its esteemed privacy laws to bits, whether Germans like it or not.

More:

The Left’s normative seizure of Germany is truly amazing. Even the Chancellor, who by German standards is far from a raving leftist, appears to firmly believe that everyone must be a multiculturalist for moral reasons, and that all people who want to preserve the ethno-linguistic integrity of their communities—whether in Germany or in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere—are acting out of base motives. One even sees self-righteous criticism of the Australians now in the German press. The German leadership’s understanding of its moral obligation is without qualification against contingency; they refuse to limit in any way the number of asylum seekers who can be taken into Germany, or the speed with which they may come. But more in Europe—a place of bloodline nationalisms compared to the U.S. creedal version—than in the United States there is a moralbasis, too, for a community’s own sense of self-determination, which presumes the right of self-definition and self-composition. That is not racism in Europe any more than nervousness about immigrants is racism here in the United States. Wanting one’s own community to be a certain way is not aggressively or actively prejudicial against others, any more than declining to give money to a beggar on a city street is morally equivalent to hitting him in the head with a crowbar. It is simply preferring the constituency of a high-social trust society, from which, social science suggests, many good things come: widespread security, prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity being prominent among them.

And:

 I would love to be proved wrong about all this. But the derangement of moral reasoning in Western Europe seems so advanced and deep that it is hard to be optimistic. One fears that if reasonable people do not somehow apply a brake to this wild excess of selfless saintliness, unreasonable people eventually will. And guess who might still be around to cheer, encourage, and perhaps even arm the unreasonable? Yes, Vlad the Putin himself, as he is indeed already doing in a minor key.

Whole thing here, if you can bear it. People get mad at Obama for having failed in Syria, but it’s hard to know what to do if the US is determined not to support the tyrant Assad. In the end, Putin is doing the dirty work that might have a chance at stopping ISIS, a much worse devil. He’s not doing it because he is a humanitarian, heaven knows. But he is doing it. A deeply disturbing thought: with regard to the Middle East, the autocrat Vladimir Putin is acting as a better friend towards the Europeans than the democrat Angela Merkel, and her class of leaders.

UPDATE: From the Christian Science Monitor:

“Russia isn’t playing this game of distinguishing between ‘good’ terrorists and ‘bad’ ones,” says Yegeny Satanovsky, president of the independent Institute of Middle East Studies in Moscow, and a strong backer of the Kremlin campaign. “For Russia, the only way to do this is to back Syria’s existing central government, which is the force that has boots on the ground, and put an end to this rebellion.”

“It’s not that we love Assad,” Mr. Satanovsky says, “but that we’ve already seen what happens when central governments get destroyed: monsters come rushing into the vacuum. If Damascus should fall, it won’t be gentle pro-Western rebels who come marching in, but the genocidal maniacs of IS and Al Qaeda.”

Hard to come up with a more villainous Slavic name than “Satanovsky,” but still, he has a point.

 

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now