September 10, 2015
14 years ago, Americans learned they can't ignore the terror of extremists.
Fourteen years ago, the United States suffered a shockingly successful surprise attack by a little known Islamic extremist group based 7,000 miles away in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Since then, a U.S. invasion chased al-Qaeda out of its haven, and targeted strikes eventually eliminated most of its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden in 2011. The danger from the group that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, has waned.
Its influence lives on, however, through offshoot extremist groups that have eclipsed al-Qaeda — none more so than the Islamic State, the lightning spread of which through Syria and Iraq has been marked by medieval barbarity, adapted to the Internet age.
The group, also known as ISIL or ISIS, announced itself with carefully publicized video beheadings of captive Westerners and the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot inside a cage. Less visible in the West, but easy to find online, are gruesome videos of the slaughter of the group’s enemies.
As if mass murder weren’t enough, the group has regularized the rape and sexual slavery of women and girls it captures, justifying the brutality with twisted readings of the Quran. ISIL even issued a guide with 27 answers to militants’ questions, noting that the females’ “unbelief” makes it legal to enslave them.
Last month came reports that ISIL attacked civilians and rival insurgents with mustard gas. The group also destroyed ancient religious structures in the Syrian city of Palmyra, and beheaded the 83-year-old retired director of antiquities there, actions that echoed the Taliban’s destruction of giant Buddha statues six months before 9/11.
ISIL represents the embodiment of evil in the modern world, and it mustn't be allowed to establish a foothold from which to plot attacks against the United States or to inspire so-called lone wolf sympathizers to do so. But the U.S.-led effort to "degrade and ultimately defeat" ISIL has shown underwhelming results.
The effort's seemingly deliberate pace is of little comfort to those being raped, shot and beheaded while the West figures out how to take on a group that has attracted an estimated 20,000 fanatical foreign fighters and defied predictions that it would never get this far.
After more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans are understandably wary of sending men and women to fight and die in Middle East conflicts. That has made President Obama reluctant to engage ISIL on the ground except through proxies such as the Iraqi army and trained fighters in Syria.
Both proxy efforts have been a disaster. Iraqi forces have repeatedly been routed by much smaller but better-led ISIL militants, and about 50 U.S.-trained Syrian rebelswere almost immediately captured, killed or driven off by a Syrian al-Qaeda group in July.
The administration asks for patience, insisting that with U.S. and allied airstrikes, and with the U.S. and its allies painstakingly rebuilding an effective Iraqi army, the tide will turn. Indeed, some metrics hint at progress; the administration says ISIL's movements have been effectively limited in nearly a third of the areas in Iraq it used to control. The U.S. has assembled a coalition of 62 nations and international organizations to counter ISIL, almost double the 34 nations that rallied behind then-President George H.W. Bush to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991.
The struggle against ISIL is likely to be long, one that will be won not just by driving the group out of the territory it claims as its caliphate but also by countering the ideology that has brought the group so many followers despite its depravity. Unless the current approach starts to show better results soon, America should prepare to take more aggressive actions, including the use of Apache helicopter gunships to assist ground fights, and deployment of U.S. forces to act as spotters for airstrikes and to bolster Iraqi units.
If there’s one lesson the nation should have learned from that awful day 14 years ago, it’s that the United States cannot afford to ignore a rabidly anti-American terrorist group that has established a haven in a faraway place.
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