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News Analysis: IS cancerous threat needs more int'l coop to contain it

Xinhua, November 24, 2015 Adjust font size:

It may be true that the terrorist Islamic State (IS) militant group turned its fire abroad from Syria and Iraq, thanks to international air strikes, but this is not the goal if the result is more deadly attacks around the world.

The latest IS terrorist acts against the Russian plane in Sinai and Paris deadly attacks demonstrate tragically that threat posed by IS has not been contained yet, showing the need for substantial international cooperation.

Despite huge casualties that the IS group sustained by the air strikes of the U.S.-led coalition in Syria and Iraq and later the Russia's bombing by missiles and air strikes on the rebel positions in Syria, the group's threat went global in an attempt to compensate its loses in the Middle East.

"The heavy casualties among the IS group members and its increasing difficulty to extend further in Iraq and Syria, have pushed the extremist group to find new fronts outside the classic battlefields in Iraq and Syria," Najib al-Jubouri, a political analyst, told Xinhua.

The IS group, apparently, selected France because it has large Muslim community and many of IS fighters are French, and it selected the Russian plane because Russia is leading military campaign in Syria and because it had a history in fighting against Muslims in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Jubouri said.

"IS group is not acting randomly, they selected their targets carefully and carried out massive and deadly attacks to achieve their goals," Jubouri said.

"IS goals can be summarized in three dimensions: spreading terror, creating social polarization, and mobilizing supporters," Jubouri added.

The IS attacks in Paris killed large number of people prompting widespread of irrational fear. The second dimension is creating hatred among the French citizens toward the Muslim community in France in a bid to divide the society into Muslim and anti-Muslim. Thirdly, such division would inspire IS supporters and attract new ones.

"One of IS familiar mean is to brutally exploit any internal social division - as it did in Iraq between Shiite and Sunni communities - because it knows that a divided community, where hatred is fed by mutual fear, is a fertile soil for recruiting new terrorists," Jubouri said.

After all, it is largely hoped that the latest international alert to confront the IS deadly attacks would end to a sort of consensus on a sustainable international strategy to fight terrorism.

"But this time it is essential to keep the alert state at highest level even if the IS would lose its ability to carry out such massive attacks," he added.

For his part, Ibrahim al-Ameri, a lecturer of politics at Baghdad University, told Xinhua that terrorism is the result of wrong policies which lead to breeding ground for such extremist group like IS.

"Terrorism cannot thrive without a suitable environment. I believe that the world states must abide by the principle of mutual respect, equality and cooperation with the rest of the international community to strengthen anti-terrorist action and to maintain global peace and stability," Ameri said.

The emergence of the IS group, which split from al-Qaida almost three years ago, is the result of imbalance in the relations between the Islamic world and the West. It is the result of lack of peaceful options in correcting such imbalances, al-Ameri said.

Unilateralism by the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 sowed the seeds for violence which would not be uprooted in decades, he said, blaming the U.S. for adopting double standards in global issues.

"The U.S. has its own set of rules to define the act of terrorism and then use it as an excuse to interfere in other country's internal affairs," he said.

Observers attribute the current chronic instability, cycle of violence, and the emergence of extremist groups, such as the IS, to the double standards of the United States, which invaded Iraq in March 2003 under the pretext of seeking to destroy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the country.

The war led to the ouster and eventual execution of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, but no WMD was found. Endit