Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Seven Podcast Three

 Crusade!—The West Fights Back               This chapter now moves to the Western fight against the Caliphate in the Middle East. Western states and individuals fight the Islamic State with both nonviolent and violent means.   Western-Led Nonviolent Resistance               Some Westerners travel to Mesopotamia in the name of humanity. They seek to ease the suffering of refugees. NGOs help feed, shelter, and provide medical care to the dispossessed. Just as some Westerners are drawn to the Caliphate to serve and kill in the name of Jihad, Western humanitarians are drawn to the Middle East to relieve, feed, heal, and nurture. One of these was Kayla Mueller.   Profile Twenty-Five: Kayla Mueller—“I Find God in the Suffering’s Eyes”               By all accounts, she was a loving, spiritual, and kind woman. She was trusting, perhaps too trusting. Kayla Mueller grew up in Prescott, Arizona, and after college devoted herself to helping the less fortunate. She said she was doing God’s work. In a letter to her parents, she wrote, “I find God in the suffering’s eyes reflected in mine.” She helped HIV/AIDS patients and volunteered at a women’s shelter.               Kayla traveled the world to ease the suffering of the downtrodden. This took her to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey. “For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal.” She and her boyfriend were kidnapped in August 2013 after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria. Leaders of what would become the Islamic State sentenced her to life in prison in retaliation for the imprisonment of an American of Pakistani descent who had tried to join the Taliban. The United States refused to swap the women.               Kayla became the sex slave of the Caliphate’s leader. Abu Bakr announced that he had “married her,” and Kayla’s parents wept. Her mother countered, “Kayla did not marry this man. He took her to his room and he abused her, and she came back crying.” Kayla was allowed to write a few letters to her parents, in which she pleaded for their forgiveness. She begged them to forgive “the suffering I have put you all through . . . in the end, the only one you really have is God.”               In February 201, President Obama announced that Kayla had been murdered. The Islamic State claimed that she was killed by an errant US bomb, but this is almost certainly a lie. Al-Baghdadi may have grown tired of her and had her killed. As of this writing, there are no exact details, but a Yazidi sex slave who later escaped had shared a cell with Kayla and had firsthand knowledge of Kayla’s murder. The Yazidi girl also shared another memory of Kayla—that she had eaten very little in her captivity. Instead, she gave what little food she had to the Yazidi girls. Why? “[Kayla] didn’t want us to be hungry.”   Kinetic Operations—“Harvesting Jihadis”               Several Western countries have made war on the State and continue to do so through drone warfare and elite teams of special operators. There are Western hunter-killer teams that partner with Iraqi forces. One observer quoted a British officer as saying, “It is now time to harvest the Jihadis.” Some Western civilians have tried to do so in the service of Kurdish forces. As in the Spanish Civil War, they come from all over the Western world to fight for cause and comrades. The Lions of Rojava, a Kurdish organization, helps foreigners join up with anti-State fighting units.               According to one source, 108 Americans had fought against the State as of summer 2016. “These volunteers paid their own way to the war zone and usually returned home when their funds ran out.” They were drawn to fight the State because of the killing of Christians, the general atrocities, and the lure of battle for a good cause. Some veterans had nostalgia for the camaraderie of prior military service.               Canadian Dillon Hillier, a veteran of the Canadian military and the son of a politician, became a minor celebrity in his homeland, earning the moniker “Canadian Peshmerga.” Reece Harding of Queensland, Australia, nicknamed “Surfie,” could not abide what he saw as Western inaction. A fellow surfer described Harding as having a spark of humanity. “Everybody liked him.” Leaving his surfing days behind, the handsome, blond, twenty-three-year-old man told his parents he needed a short break. In fact, he left to fight with the Kurds and was killed by a landmine. His comrades posted a tribute to him on Facebook. The next day, they called his father in Australia to share the tragic news.               Richard Jansen, a Dutch sniper older than Surfie, left a comfortable home like the Australian to fight with the Kurds. In the Netherlands, he worked as a bodyguard for 10 years. He wanted to fight Jihadis in Europe but couldn’t. So he traveled to Turkey to fight with the Kurds. Jansen found Syria a target-rich environment and claims to have killed forty State fighters. On Dutch television, he seemed to relish the memories of killing the enemy. “These are not people. It is prize shooting at the carnival.” The “carnival” ended for Jansen when he was wounded in combat and sent to a medical clinic in Germany.               The German-born Ivana Hoffmann was the first foreign woman to die alongside Kurds. She joined a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party at an early age. Her parents were black South Africans, and she said she wanted to fight for internationalism. Ivana was killed on the eve of International Women’s Day in March 2015. She was not forgotten in Germany, and several thousand friends and supporters carried red banners in Duisburg in her memory. She was nineteen years old.               Thirtysomething Canadian-Israeli Gill Rosenberg fought among the ranks of the Peshmerga forces, becoming the first foreign woman to do so. Rosenberg explained, “We Jews always say of the Holocaust, never again. In my opinion, that’s true not only for the Jews, but for all mankind.” Thirty-six-year-old Keith Broomfield of Massachusetts, like Rosenberg, had a strong religious identity, though in a different religion. Keith was a devout Baptist who had had a difficult youth. He heard a calling to fight with the Kurds and stop the State’s slaughter. The New Englander had no contacts and knew it was “a crazy thing to do.” His father stated that his son was led by the Lord to the battle lines. He did so, where he fought and fell.               An energetic senior citizen, Alan Brooke was desperate to join Kurdish forces, but the sixty-two-year-old retired archaeologist was told to return to his seventy-one-year-old wife in England. Undeterred as of 2016, he said, “I intend to go back. I can’t think of a better way to use my pension. My wife is fully supportive.”             Some other fighters are highly idiosyncratic, and British character actor Michael Enright is among them. After basic training with the Kurds, he made himself useful as a photographer, documenting the brutality of the Caliphate’s war. He took risks. His comrades in arms do not doubt his enthusiasm, but some question his stability. Reportedly, he suffers from emotional aberrations that are sometimes very melodramatic. “It’s gotten to the point where I just want to absolutely annihilate them and kill them on sight.”   Summary               The Caliphate has ordered killings throughout the West. Some of its cadres have traveled from Europe to the Middle East and back. Others have pledged fealty to the State and killed on its behalf. Westerners have traveled to the Middle East to fight with the Kurds against the State.               In June 2016, an American killed forty-nine people at a gay nightclub. He paused after a few volleys to pledge allegiance to the Caliphate. He was killed, but other Islamic State operatives plan to attack Westerners. Non-Muslims, particularly those high on the State’s enemies list, have taken note. After the Florida attacks, many American gays are worried.               Some public intellectuals and politicians dismiss the charge that the Caliphate-directed or -inspired attacks are driven by Islam. They warn against backlashes against Muslims and the continued need to partner with Muslim leaders to suppress radicalism. A seventeen-year-old New Yorker explained, “Islam is all about peace. In Ramadan, we don’t even curse. You’re not supposed to do anything bad.”92 But, increasingly, many Westerners see this and similar statements as tortured apologetics. They see the State’s attacks as Islam—pure and simple.