ISIS Terrorist group released a video earlier this month featuring two recruited Yazidi kids before they launched a suicide operation. The video sheds the light on ISIS‘s ongoing children recruitment policy, which saw a major rise since the operations to liberate Mosul kicked off, like reported by aawsat.com .

In the video, the two Yazidi children explained how they joined Islam and spoke about the training and guidance they received by the extremist group. As cited by an Iraqi website, one of two children, named Amjad, claimed that Yezidism is like following the devil, and represents a state of ignorance and heathenism. Both children received the organization’s ideology in the so-called “ISIS’s Institution”, before they were moved to a training camp in Syria, where they pledged loyalty and obedience to the local leaders. The children were filmed with a group of suicide bombers and later appeared standing on a massive armor that was loaded with bombs before exploding it.

Since the launch of Mosul operations in western Iraq, the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights estimates that among the Syrian children recruited by ISIS there are 300 who died while fighting in Iraq in October. A report published by the CTC Sentinel – issued by the US Combating Terrorism Center at West Point – stated that children recruitment rapidly grew between 2015 and 2016. According to CTC’s statistics, ISIS mourned 89 children and juveniles between 1st of January 2015 and 31 January 2016 – 51% were killed in Iraq and 36% in Syria, while the rest of them were killed in Libya, Yemen, and Nigeria.

Based on the pictures shared by the organization, 60% of these recruited members were children, 34% were teenagers, and 6% were pre-teenagers. As per nationalities, 31% were Syrians, 25% were Syrian-Iraqis, and 11% were pure Iraqis. The other 33% were from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Libya, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and Nigeria.

According to the Counter-Terrorism Center’s study, among the 89 documented cases, 39% died after exploding a bombed car, 33% while fighting in random battles, 6% while working as preachers in units, and 4% exploded themselves to target civilians – the 18% left were killed in special operations in which they fought using light weapons before bombing themselves.

Pace

The given data emphasizes an accelerated pace of children and juveniles’ recruitment, as the number of young children who were killed in suicide attacks rose from 6% in 2015 to 11% in 2016. According to the report, suicide bombing witenessed a triple rise in January 2016 compared to that of the same period in 2015. Subsequently, operations implemented by children have become more common for ISIS amid the growing pressure it has faced in its strongholds over the past few months. Not to mention that suicide bombings have become an efficient tool in the organization’s psychological warfare against its enemies.

Olidort’s Study

On another hand, a study conducted by Dr. Jacob Olidort, fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy shows that ISIS’s efforts in teaching children its ideology eases the dedication of this loyalty by the coming generation. According to Olidort, ISIS’ curriculum can be divided to two parts: the first covers the traditional subjects related to religious studies like Quran, Hadith, ideology, jurisprudence, belief’s characteristics and practices in Islam – while the other part covers other subjects like physical readiness, history, geography, and mathematics, which are considered secondary interests for the Islamic identity of the organization and its alleged “Caliphate” project.

In ISIS’s world, school-books condemn western democracies and explain the differences among believers, non-believers, and Muslims who support the West and oppose ISIS. Olidort sees that the organization also uses these books to justify its violent approach and to emphasize the importance of killing to achieve religious goals. The study further shows how ISIS uses books to distort children’s perspective towards the world by stressing the duty of religious authority and the importance of fighting Muslims who disobey the Islamic Sharia.

In his study, Olidort noted that the organization begins the children training by encouraging them on spying and telling the ISIS group about their family members and friends who violate ISIS’s laws or criticize its alleged state.

Brain washing

In July 2015, the Daily Mail reported that ISIS released a video featuring a group of children wearing army customs, while shooting 25 soldiers from the Syrian army in the city of Palmyra – this video came following three others which screened children training on taking captives, setting ambushes, and snipping.

ISIS works on attracting these children in schools by offering candies and toys, and then focuses on washing their brains. A captured ISIS member said he joined the organization when he was 14 years old, and now after seven years spent in its ranks, he raped 200 women and killed around 500 people.

Subsequently, such cases have urged to prepare special programs to reintegrate children who grew under the control of ISIS.Centers to rehabilitate recruited children are a must in countries suffering from ISIS-led wars like in Syria and Iraq.

On February 26, reports surfaced indicating that Abu Kayrh al-Masri had been killed in a U.S. airstrike in Idlib, Syria. Outside of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Masri was one of the most important legacy leaders left from the core al-Qaeda group. Al-Masri was considered al-Zawahiri’s top deputy; it was in al-Masri’s house in Afghanistan that Khalid Shaykh Mohammed briefed top al-Qaeda leaders about plans for the 9/11 attacks. Al-Masri’s death in Syria shows both the longevity of senior al-Qaeda leaders, as well as Syria’s importance to the group.

The number two figure in al-Qaeda, Abu Karyh al-Masri, was reportedly killed in a drone strike in Idlib, Syria, on February 26. Married to one of Usama bin-Ladin’s daughters and a close associate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Masri was one of the most prominent remaining pre-9/11 figures in al-Qaeda, like reported by soufangroup.com. His death highlights both how long the arc of many senior al-Qaeda figures can run, as well as the importance of Syria to the terror group. Al-Masri’s significance in terms of his direct connection to the core of al-Qaeda and to some of its more infamous attacks is difficult to overstate. 

It was in al-Masri’s guesthouse in Kabul, Afghanistan, that Khalid Shaykh al-Mohammad briefed the top leaders of al-Qaeda about the planning of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Originally from Egypt and a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Masri was a long-time associate to current al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and had been a trusted adviser to Usama bin Ladin. He was a member of the al-Qaeda Shura council and their main liaison to the Taliban before the U.S. invasion. He fought in the Balkans in the 1990s as part of the effort to turn the conflict into a catalyst for international jihad, and was wanted by the U.S. for his direct involvement in the 1998 East African embassy bombings.

After the September 11 attacks, al-Masri fled Afghanistan and went to Iran. Along with one of bin-Ladin’s sons and Sayf al-Adl—another top member of al-Qaeda— al-Masri was effectively placed on house arrest while in Iran. This arrangement was reflective of al-Qaeda and Iran’s long and complicated relationship, in which Tehran has essentially sheltered terrorists such as al-Adl and al-Masri, but limited their movements and activities. While the exact date is publicly uncertain, by late 2015 Iran had released al-Masri (along with al-Adl and others) in exchange for an Iranian diplomat held hostage by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In July 2016, a Syrian al-Qaeda media outlet released an audio recording of al-Masri, showing that when he left Iran he went to Syria—the new frontline of jihad—rather than the tribal areas of Pakistan where other members of al-Qaeda’s central leadership are believed to be hiding.

Al-Masri’s death is another loss for the core al-Qaeda that existed before 2001, and that continues to play a significant role in the group. Several legacy al-Qaeda figures have been able to evade efforts to capture or kill them by the U.S. and others despite intense efforts for more than 15 years; their influence on the group in terms of motivation, symbolism, and operational planning is enormous. Al-Masri served as a direct link between the al-Qaeda that executed the 1998 East African embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks, to the group that is still determined to attack the West and turn Syria into its new base of operations.

A resurgent Russia is making new inroads into Afghanistan, not in the way the former USSR did, but by aligning itself with some of the very extremists whose leaders were involved in the defeat of the Soviet Union’s decade-long invasion of Afghanistan.

In December 2016, Moscow disclosed its contacts with the Taliban, the group that is intent on toppling the Afghan government. The Russian Foreign Ministry announced that it is sharing intelligence and cooperating with the Taliban to fight Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group’s (ISIL, also known as ISIS) militants in Afghanistan.

Moscow has repeatedly declared its concerns about ISIL militants, in many instances exaggerating their presence and power in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Afghan government officials have claimed Russia has been delivering weapons to the Taliban, allegations that have been rejected by Russian officials.

Russia’s recent posturing towards Afghanistan has opened a new chapter in what could be termed a new great game in the heart of Asia with multiple players, including Russia, the United States, China, India, Pakistan and others.

Russia’s diplomatic offensive coupled with battlefield support to the Taliban has perplexed many about the Russian intention in Afghanistan.

Expansionist ideals

Russia’s encroachment into Afghanistan could be part of President Vladimir Putin‘s expansionist ideals to restore Russia’s position as a geopolitical player.

Since coming to power in 1999, Putin has pursued what can be called an interventionist policy through armed conflicts, cyberattacks and propaganda wars.

The second Chechen war in 1999, the conflict in Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the military engagement in Syria in 2015 and the cyber operations on the US in 2016 are prominent examples.

President Putin has successfully exploited these wars to elevate Russia’s standing in the international political transactions and consolidate his position in Russia. So the question now is: what does Russia want in Afghanistan?

Russia is most likely following multiple objectives. By aligning itself with the Taliban, it could gain the ability to strengthen its bargaining position in broader dealings with Washington. Insecurity and instability in Afghanistan is on the rise, directly threatening the survival of the US-backed Afghan government and pose a great danger to the US and NATO mission in the country.

In Russian calculation, harassing US/NATO attempts at this precarious situation could be the best time to extract concessions in the form of reducing US pressure on Russia regarding Crimea and easing US sanctions, among others.

Creating legitimacy 

It is also likely that Russia is trying to gather additional chips with regards to the future of Afghanistan so that it can then have a front row seat at any regional and global diplomacy/talks on the future of peace and security in Afghanistan. A key motivation in this regard could be Russia’s exclusion in most key discussions on Afghanistan in the past.

Russia’s attempts could have also been motivated by its concerns over the degrading status of the Kabul government and the lack of clarity of Kabul’s western allies towards defending Afghanistan against the growing threat of the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

By providing support to the Taliban, Russia might be hedging itself against the increasing fatigue of the Western countries, preparing to manage the political landscape, and shape the future government if the current government collapses.

By hyping the ISIL threat, Russia not only tries to create legitimacy for their collusion with the Taliban, but they may also want to pave the ground for their augmented military presence and political influence in Central Asia.

As the Central Asian states have been falling under increasing economic influence of China, Russia sees itself losing its hegemonic role.

Increasing its military presence will enhance Russia’s policing role in the Central Asian region and expand Central Asia’s security dependency on Russia.

There could also be economic motives behind Russia’s new game. The Central Asian republics have some of the richest natural gas and oil reserves in the entire region. Leaders of these republics have sought to find new markets, especially in the energy-thirsty South Asia.

This is because if Central Asian states manage to diversify markets for their natural gas, it will further reduce Russia’s grip over the region’s energy markets.

As Afghanistan is the shortest route for Central Asian natural gas to reach South Asia, alignment with the Taliban would enable Russia to derail attempts to take Central Asian natural gas to South Asia, thus compelling Central Asian states to remain dependent on Russia and China as the main purchasers of Central Asian natural gas.

There is no doubt Russia has legitimate concerns about growing extremism in the region. A remarkable number of ISIL fighters come from the Central Asian countries, which Russia considers its security backyard.

However, supporting one terrorist group to defeat another terrorist group is not a sustainable geopolitical strategy, particularly in the complex landscape of Afghanistan where history has proved many political and military calculations wrong.

Zero-sum game

It is hard to believe the hardcore ideologues could become strategic partners to Russia because of their deep-seated ideological animosity towards the administration in Afghanistan.

The best approach would be to work with the Afghan government and the regional and international partners to address the growing menace of extremism in the region. Partnering with a dangerous and unpredictable group to pursue a zero-sum game could easily backfire.

Russian support for the Taliban has already helped the militant group make battlefield gains and enhance their legitimacy.

The question is to what extent will Russia support the Taliban and whether it will remain purely tactical support. This will most likely be determined by the state of relations between Putin and the Trump administration and their approach towards fighting terrorism in Afghanistan.

If Russia has begun to view the Taliban as an alternative to the Afghan government, then it is on the wrong side of history. Perhaps, in the short-run, Russia might gain in terms of undermining the US and its allies’ efforts in Afghanistan or even forcing them to abandon Afghanistan.

Yet in the long-run, Russia’s support for the Taliban militants will only unleash a new wave of terrorism in the region, which might see no end and endanger Russia’s very security and stability.

When an Islamic State (IS) suicide bomber killed 88 people and wounded hundreds more at a Sufi shrine in Sehwan on February 16, it did not deter the devotees of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the 13th-century Sufi mystic, who draws millions to his tomb in Pakistan’s Sindh privince.

The attack followed a bombing in November 2016 at another Sufi shrine in the remote Baluchistan region which killed at least 52 people, like reported by theconversation.com .

Sufism, a distinct theological strand in Islam, has a strong presence in Pakistan. Sufi saints are venerated by a significant proportion of the Muslim population, especially, though not exclusively, in rural areas. Some Sufi shrines provide a langar (free daily meal) a guarantee of food for the poor for whom there is no other safety net. But it is not just the poor who visit shrines. They are places where thousands unburden themselves, sharing their inner turmoil at the feet of holy people they believe can intercede on their behalf. The belief is that a prayer by a saint can alleviate poverty, cure illness, amend relations with loved ones and provide solace from the trials of life.

Away from the desires of the material world, Sufis believes a connection with a saint can build a connection with God, Allah. There are many thousands of shrines across Pakistan, South and Central Asia and the Middle East.

It is not just Islamic State (IS) who have issues with shrine-based religious practices within Islam. Deobandis, for example, who focus on the scriptures of Islam, are critical of the veneration of saints and the role of holy people as intercessors between the individual and God. They believe such practices have been absorbed from local indigenous cultures. There are Sufi shrines across South Asia, for example, which are visited regularly not just by Muslims but by some Hindus and Sikhs too and vice-versa.

Sufism, too, is a broad church – and not all Sufis approve of the dancing and chanting at the tombs of saints. Diversity within Islam has always existed and doctrinal divisions go back to the time of the first prophet of Islam, Muhammad. It was on his death – and on the question of his rightful successor – that the sectarian division between Sunnis and Shias emerged. IS’s version of history glorifies seventh-century Arabia, distorting the battles and bloodshed that ensued in the wake of Prophet Muhammad’s death.

IS does not want to reform Islam, but to strip it of its history. Purge the religion of all who do not adhere to your version of what Islam is and how a Muslim should live their life, and you can start anew.

According to IS ideology, the foremost enemies of Islam are not the kuffar (non-believers) but those who call themselves Muslims and do not subscribe to the IS world view – a world view in which there is room for only one account of the past and only one way of being a believer. All else is innovation – or bid’ah – which IS forbids, and the Sufis are the guiltiest of all.

To IS, the Sufi practices of dhikr (devotional dance) Qawwali (music which praises the sublime) ta’widh (amulets with verses from the Qur’an for protection against the evil eye) are bid’ah. And, what takes place at the tombs of saints is a form of idolatry which takes Sufis outside the fold of Islam.

One Islamic world-view

Alongside these theological critiques of Sufism, IS targets Sufis for more pragmatic reasons. Sufism has the capacity to mobilise the masses, which makes it a competitor in the market place of faith. Systematic destruction of Sufi infrastructure through bombing holy monuments is also about destroying the artefacts of a religious competitor. Destruction of people and places on this scale is both a way of rewriting history and securing a future.

IS does not recognise the border of Pakistan or any of the states in the Middle East and South Asia. For IS these boundaries are irrational, established arbitrarily by colonial powers for their own ends. Its followers believe that the modern nation state is itself an innovation and an imposition on the Muslim world.

Where al-Qaeda’s mission was primarily to free Muslim lands from foreign occupation in the 1990s and 2000s, IS takes a longer view both in terms of the past – plunging through history and picking out fragments that suit its worldview – and for the future. It is fighting to claim territory, not for a secular nation state, but for an Islamic State where it can rebuild seventh-century Arabia without the compromises of 14 centuries of history.

For IS, sanctity lays not in human life nor in heritage but in one description of the truth and one vision of how to recreate it in the 21st century. That is why they glorify Islam’s past and want to purify its people.

Recent reports said that the Arab League is suffering from a severe financial crisis which could force the organisation to move its headquarters from Cairo to Dubai, so that the government of the UAE can pick up the tab for its running costs, like reported by middleeastmonitor.com. Diplomats have said that it has lost its role and Secretary General Ahmed Abul-Gheit is warning that it could be dissolved. What, though, has the League ever done for the Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular? Has it, indeed, ever actually done anything at all?

The Arab League is nominally the main Arab representative organisation; it has 22 member states. The organisation was established in 1945 after a year of discussions initiated by the then Prime Minister of Egypt, Mustafa Al-Nahhas Basha. According to the BBC, and this opinion is supported by many Arab scholars, the idea of the Arab League was proposed by Britain as it wanted to gather together the Arab leaders against the Axis powers during World War Two.

Article two of the Arab League Charter identifies the purpose of the organisation as “close cooperation” in “economic and financial affairs, communications, cultural affairs, nationality, passports, visas, execution of judgments and extradition of criminals, social affairs and health affairs.”

According to article three of the charter, it is its council which “decides upon the means by which the League is to cooperate with the international bodies… in order to guarantee security and peace and regulate economic and social relations.”

Given the terms of these two articles, it is highly pertinent to ask what the Arab League has been doing while its member states fight against each other and other nations are attack them and violate their sovereignties. Let us be generous, and suggest that the Arab League has never been equipped to deal with such major issues; what about the Palestine issue, though, to which the organisation’s charter allocated a special section? Palestine’s “international existence and independence in the legal sense cannot be questioned any more than could the independence of the other Arab countries,” the charter insists.

So what has the Arab League done for Palestine? When the Zionist Leader David Ben-Gurion announced the establishment of the state of Israel on 15 May, 1948, the Arab League issued a statement, in which it pointed out that “Palestine is an Arab country” and “the rule of Palestine should revert to its inhabitants… and the Palestinians should alone have the right to determine their future.”

However, the member states of the Arab League could never stop the Zionist project, which has been Judaising the land of Palestine continuously since 1948. The Arab League has never even liberated a single square metre of the historic land of Palestine, which is a member of the organisation.

Moreover, after less than three decades, the largest Arab state, Egypt, recognised Israel as a state on the land of Palestine occupied in 1948, amounting to 78 per cent of its total area. Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat visited Israel in 1977 and two years later he signed a peace accord with the Zionists that included the normalisation of ties on the basis of keeping the neighbourhood peaceful.

Egypt is home to about one third of all Arabs; it is Palestine’s neighbour; and it initiated and hosted the discussions which led to the establishment of the Arab League. It was also the first country to turn its back on the League, which suspended its membership and moved its headquarters to another country. When other Arab states followed Egypt, the League ended its suspension and moved back to Cairo.

In 1994, Jordan, the second effective member of the Arab League, also signed a peace treaty with Israel that included normalisation of ties and the exchange of ambassadors. In fact, even before Jordan made this move, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which represented the state of Palestine in the Arab League, recognised Israel in 1993 in its covering letter for the now notorious Oslo Accords.

In 2002, the Arab League unanimously adopted a Saudi Peace Initiative, which recognised Israel as a sovereign state. Practically, this means that the 78 per cent of historic Palestine occupied since 1948 is no longer recognised by the Arab League’s members as part of Palestine; logically, therefore, the League also denies that the original Palestinian inhabitants ethnically cleansed when Israel was created no longer have a right to return to their land. That is the devastating impact of the recognition of the state of Israel by the Arab League and its members.

Putting such considerations to one side, in recent years the Arab League has been unable to help the Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, who have faced three major Israeli military offensives within six years. Although some individual member states have provided vital support, the organisation itself has not done anything to treat the wounded or rebuild their destroyed homes. In fact, only one member out of 22 in the Arab League — Qatar — has acted upon what it feels is its duty to help the Palestinians. Two others, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have offered limited and conditional help to rebuild a few homes.

Instead of helping the Palestinians in Gaza to cope with the effects of the 10 year internationally-backed Israeli siege, the Arab League has been unable to put pressure on Egypt to open a border crossing, even for humanitarian purposes. This is despite the terms of its charter.

The secretary general of the Arab League has warned that the Arabs will be the losers if the Arab League has to close down due to a lack of funds. This is the same man who, when he was the Egyptian foreign minister, warned that any Palestinian trying to escape the siege in Gaza by crossing into Egypt — which is supposed to be a brotherly Arab state and fellow member of the Arab League, remember — would have his legs broken by the security forces.

That was Abul-Gheit’s attitude; the man now leading what is supposed to be the umbrella organisation for all Arabs, regardless of their nationality. He neither cares about the Palestinians nor wants to help them. Why, then, should anyone care about or want to help what is clearly an organisation that is not only financially but also morally and legally bankrupt? We will be better off without it. The Arab League is an abject failure which exists to suppress, not support, the Arabs. If it has no other purpose — and it clearly hasn’t — then it should be closed down. Nobody will miss it, least of all the people of Palestine.

Hundred years of the region’s history is formed of changing allies and shifting alliances. The least that could be said about the idea of forming a quartet Arab NATO is that it is just another natural reaction against Iran’s active tripartite alliance, like reported by aawsat.com .

The Arab military has been compared to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in the wake of Soviet expansion. NATO was the western military power in the face of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

How can Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Jordan form a joint military force against Iran’s expansion, after it stretched its presence to Iraq and Syria and extended its influence to Lebanon and Yemen?

The four Arab nations had been in coalition for a long time and are now involved in the Yemeni war, including Egypt. UAE army has been fighting on the Yemeni soil alongside Saudi troops since the beginning. Jordan is militarily tied to the other three countries.

Even with this cooperation, we can’t consider the close relation as something similar to NATO in its concept and the nature of commitments it requires.

Our region suffers from a large political void and imbalance of military regional forces particularly during the past eight years.

Also, attributing to the imbalance was U.S. limiting its commitments to the region and signing the nuclear deal with Iran, which represents reconciliation and end of confrontation between the two countries.

This vacuum resulted from Iran’s expansion of its influence inside Iraq, engaging in a major military war in Syria and forming for the first time ever an army of armed militias, which it sent to Syria.

Iran is trying hard to keep the war ongoing in Yemen by supporting the insurgency.

Reports of a proposed Arab NATO cooperation with Israel are just perceptions that precede the alliance, which hasn’t been even formed yet.

Even if we assume they were true, the cooperation, if remained a secret, will be limited.

Israel is usually present in the region’s disputes even if its presence is limited and silent. It exists in Syria’s war, once bombing Hezbollah’s targets, another attacking ISIS groups, and sometimes supplying different parties with information that helps Israel.

An Israeli expert said they were happy to see thousands of Hezbollah fighters involved in the war in Syria, because they used to hide underground when Israeli forces fought them in Lebanon relying on guerrilla tactics. Today, they play Israel’s role in Syria.

The idea of an Arab NATO, or a quartet Arab coalition, if realized will be announced publically and won’t remain a top secret project as reports suggest.

A militarily cooperation is a good idea and necessary step especially if it encompassed much more than that. Establishing an alliance is a vital balance to face Iran. Tehran has formed a military alliance of three countries: Iraq, Syria and Iran. Tehran built a new cooperation with Russia, which has a military base in Iran.

Russia participates in the war in Syria alongside this Iranian alliance.

Iran fortified its coalition through including armed militias from Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon and other countries. They are all fighting under its banner in Syria.

Iranian forces under the pretense of “experts” are also fighting in Iraq and to some extent manage battles there.

Therefore, if an Arab NATO was indeed formed, it remains a natural response of Iran’s “Warsaw” pact.

The focus of Nato’s conference in Brussels, the first since Donald Trump got to the White House, was on the message he sent to an organisation of Western allies he had called “obsolete” while speaking of his admiration for Vladimir Putin, like reported by indiatimes.com.

The message, a veiled threat, conveyed by US Defence Secretary James Mattis, was that the continuing failure of the alliance to pay its share on security would lead to the US reevaluating its commitment to the defence of Europe. That and the continuing fallout over Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s departure after clandestine contacts with the Russians, were the sources of fascination and foreboding here. Almost unnoticed a development took place at the end of the summit, on Libya, which is likely to have great resonance in relations between Nato, the US and Russia, Trump and Putin. Nato’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, announced that the alliance is likely to provide security support to the Libyan government of Fayez al-Sarraj.

“We have said for some time that we are ready to help Libya but that any assistance has to be based on a request from the Libyan government,” said Stoltenberg. “This is the request we received yesterday – training local forces is one of the best weapons in the fight against terrorism and building stability.”

Libya has, of course, become a source of huge trouble for Europe since David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy instigated Nato’s military intervention and the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi six years ago. It is the main conduit for hundreds of thousands of refugees crossing the Mediterranean and also the lawless place where Isis has established its main base for carrying out attacks in the Maghreb.

Special forces of Western countries are already in action in Libya – the US has carried out airstrikes on Isis and other Islamist terrorists. But any formal deployment of forces by Nato faces problems. There is the danger of mission creep: being sucked into a violent and semi-anarchic quagmire, as well as the fact that the Government of National Accord, headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, which Nato is supposed to prop up, has very little territory and very little power.

The man who claims to wield real power – an aspiring new Gaddafi according to his enemies – is former general Khalifa Haftar with his force the Libyan National Army (LNA). He has the backing of Egypt and the UAE whose warplanes have carried out airstrikes in his support. Now, crucially, he has the support of a Russia expanding its influence across the Middle-East and North Africa.

General Haftar went to Moscow twice last year to seek help and then turned up on board the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov as it was returning from waters off the coast of Syria where it had been part of the blitzkrieg enabling Bashar al-Assad to recapture Aleppo. He met the Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu, on board, to discuss, according to the Kremlin, “fighting international terrorist groups in the Middle East.”

The US under Barack Obama had refused to deal with General Haftar but the Libyan commander and his backers, the parliament in Benghazi, one of the country’s three governments, say they are also now optimistic that they will get the support of the Trump administration.

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was the first foreign leader to congratulate Trump after his victory and the Egyptian president has been pressing Washington to switch its support to General Haftar. And, according to reports, members of the Trump team have started discussing the Haftar option. An American official in Brussels commented: “The Trump people may well think Libya would be a less sensitive theatre to cooperate with the Russians on counter-terrorism than Syria: the common conception is that Libya is a mess – we have Daesh [Isis] running around there and if this guy Haftar is being effective, then maybe he is the man.”

Even before the coming of Trump there has been a feeling among some American officials that the problems being faced by Europe from Libya were, to an extent, self-induced. Paris and London were very much the cheerleaders in getting rid of Colonel Gaddafi, with Washington somewhat dubious about the outcome. The military mission was initially French and British led, but the Americans had to step in as shortfalls in equipment and bombs and missiles became apparent. In his speech to Nato at the end of the conflict, US defence secretary Leon Panetta warned that “legitimate questions about whether, if present trends continue, Nato will again be able to sustain the kind of operations we have seen in Libya without the US taking on even more of the burden.”

The “trends” that Panetta was talking about was most of Nato not paying their way for the defence of the alliance. American officials pointed out that Mattis was having to make the same point again, much more forcefully, this week, six years later.

The issue of money is not something bothering General Haftar at the moment. Russia has printed 4bn Libyan Dinars (around $2.8bn) on contract to the Libyan Central Bank which it has transferred it to his backers in Benghazi. Haftar now claims that Moscow will enable him to spend the money legitimately by helping to lift the UN arms embargo in place since 2011. This allows only the UN-backed GNC administration in Tripoli to bring in weapons with the approval of the UN Security Council Committee.

Two concepts increasingly dominate public discussions on the Muslim and Arab world. The first is the notion of civil war in the context of countries like Syria, Yemen and Libya. The second is the notion of conflict between Islam and the West. Both concepts fail to recognize that the Muslim world is in the throes of multiple civil wars, like reported by geopoliticalfutures.com.

Our model indicates that Turkey and Iran are the two major powers in the heart of the Muslim world, especially after the hollowing out of its Arab core. These two are the main competitors for influence in the Arab world. For the most part, the Turks and the Iranians have avoided clashing with each other. But we are always on the lookout for signs of what is an inevitable clash, and over the past few days we have noticed bellicose rhetoric emanating from Ankara directed at Tehran.

On Feb. 12, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, while on a visit to the Arab island kingdom of Bahrain, accused Iran of seeking the disintegration of Iraq and Syria. Erdoğan identified “Persian nationalism” as a threat that needs to be blocked. As expected, Iran rejected the remarks and obliquely accused Turkey of supporting terrorist groups and violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Syria. On Feb. 16, pro-government Turkish daily Yeni Şafak escalated matters by accusing the Iranians of creating conditions that could lead to an “Islamic civil war.”

The “Islamic civil war” referred to here is the struggle between the Sunni and Shiite sects. Iran is the de facto leader of the latter while Turkey is trying to assume leadership of the former. Arab states need Turkey to counter Iran, but they don’t exactly want to accept Turkish domination of the Arab world. Saudi Arabia is the most powerful Arab state but a weak one, which is why it seeks a partnership of sorts with Turkey as opposed to a subordinate role.

The Shiite-Sunni conflict and the intra-Sunni struggles underscore that the Islamic civil war the Turks are warning about is already raging. In fact, the contemporary sectarian conflict has been going on for nearly four decades. However, the Shiite-Sunni struggle has been a constant since the earliest days of Islam.

It has its roots in the election of the first caliph (literally meaning successor) in the wake of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632. At that time, there were no Sunnis or Shiites. Those who supported the first caliph Abu Bakr eventually came to be known as the Sunnis. Those who strongly felt that Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali was deprived of a divinely ordained right to lead the Muslim nation over time became part of what is now known as Shia Islam.

The first intra-Muslim civil war took place during the reign of the third caliph, Uthman bin Affan, who was assassinated by dissidents in 656. The second civil war broke out in 680 with the Battle of Karbala, during which the troops of the caliphate dominated by the Umayyad dynasty killed Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, and many members of his family. By the time the third civil war began, there ceased to be a single caliphate as the Baghdad-based Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Damascus-based Umayyad regime – remnants of which then established a rival caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula. With the Abbasid takeover of the caliphate, the Muslim world ceased to be a singular geopolitical unit.

In addition to competing caliphates, numerous independent emirates, imamates and sultanates arose. At one point, three large competing caliphates existed – Abbasid, Umayyad and Fatimid. Most of these were Sunni dominions competing with each other. But over time, the Shiites (which also broke into many subsects, such as the Twelvers, Ismailis, Zaydis and Alawites) were able to gain power as well. The mainstream Shiite sect (the Twelvers) reject the caliphate and insist that 12 imams from the Prophet’s lineage ought to have ruled after Muhammad’s demise.

The most notable caliphate was the Fatimid (909-1171), which at the height of its power ruled most of North Africa, the Levant and the west coast of Arabia. In Yemen, the Zaydi imamate was founded in the late 9th century and lasted all the way to the early 1960s. In Persia and Mesopotamia, the Buyid emirate was a Twelver Shiite polity that lasted from 932 to 1055. It was not until the 16th century that the current sectarian battlespace began to take shape.

It was in the first half of the 1500s that the Safavid Empire emerged as a Twelver Shiite polity in Persia and the Ottoman sultanate was firmly established in the Arab world. These two powers waged war against each other, but the Ottomans retained the upper hand because they were firmly entrenched in modern-day Iraq and Syria. With the onset of modernity, these imperial states fell victim to European colonialism. While the Europeans drew many of the modern nation-state borders, these Muslim lands had their own inherent divisions stemming from intra-Muslim divisions that lasted nearly 13 centuries.

After almost a century, the nation-states in the Arab world are now under tremendous stress because of the evolving nature of the intra-Muslim struggles that have never ceased. Some of these states have been destroyed and are unlikely to come back. The Shiite-Sunni conflict is just the most glaring example of the battle that is raging. However, it is not the most important because Sunnis account for around 80 percent of the world’s Muslim population.

Throughout history, whenever the Shiites have risen as a geopolitical power, it was the result of an internal crisis within Sunnidom. Today, this war over who speaks for Sunni Islam is perhaps much more contested than it ever has been. The majority sect is increasingly fragmenting along many different lines – geographic, ethnic, cultural, political and ideological. Islamism and its violent incarnation of jihadism are a direct consequence of the intellectual and geopolitical crisis within Islam’s majority sect.

We are used to viewing civil wars within the confines of a single country. In the case of Islam, there are many civil wars raging. The outcome of these conflicts is far more consequential as it will shape the relationship between Muslim-majority countries and the West. The conflict in Syria, especially as it relates to the Islamic State, will be a key determinant in the geopolitical makeup of the Middle East. However, it pales in comparison to the war within Islam’s body politic.

There were great hopes for Tunisia when it became the only country in the Arab Spring of 2010-12 to make the transition to democracy. Now the country, a top source of foreign fighters, is facing a crisis with many soldiers heading home and others seeping into Europe, like reported by theglobeandmail.com.

Ali was a normal Tunisian teenager, or seemed to be. He went to school in his middle-class Tunis suburb, hung out with friends and loved watching soccer, especially Espérance, the feted Tunis team that won the Africa Cup in 2011. But in 2012, his family noticed that his behaviour was changing, and they started to worry.

“At age 18, he began praying a lot,” his uncle, Fathi, told me in late January, his eyes welling up. “He stopped watching TV and didn’t talk to women, only his mother and sister. He went to the mosque every day. He would even sleep at the mosque.” (Fathi asked me not to use his full name or those of Ali and his family).

We were sitting in the nearly empty upper floor of a café near the centre of Tunis, around the corner from Fathi’s cluttered auto repair shop. Friday morning prayers from the mosque directly across the street blared from speakers mounted on the minaret, forcing us to speak loudly, mostly in French, with some help from my Arabic interpreter.

Fathi, 65, is balding, with a mustache and hands blackened with grease. He said that Ali’s mother, Fatima, fearing that Ali was being preyed upon by radical imams or recruiters on the hunt for fighters to send to Syria, Libya or Iraq, hid Ali’s passport.

Those fears were justified. One weekend, Ali begged off joining the family at their retreat in Hammamet, a seaside town an hour’s drive south of Tunis. “When they came home, their son wasn’t there,” Fathi said. “The neighbours saw him leave with a knapsack. He didn’t even say goodbye.”

At that point, Ali became the family’s tragedy and an alarming statistic. He entered the ranks of the 6,000 Tunisian fighters who have joined the extremist groups fighting in Iraq and Syria. (The estimate is from the Soufan Group, a private security and intelligence company, and is disputed by the Tunisian government.)

Hundreds of those Tunisian fighters are now returning home and the police forces of the Tunisian and European governments are scrambling to determine whether some of the most violent Tunisian jihadis will continue their battles on Tunisian and European soil.

Tunisia, the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring that blew through North Africa and the Middle East between late 2010 and 2012, has now become, by a wide margin, the top source of foreign fighters in Syria.

The two deadliest terrorist attacks in Europe in the past year were the work of two Tunisian-born assailants, though neither had fought in the Middle East. The first, on July 14, in Nice, France, saw Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel use a truck to mow down and kill 86 people, injuring more than 400 others. On Dec. 19, a young drifter and failed asylum seeker named Anis Amri, who had been in prison in Sicily, used the same method – a truck – to slaughter 12 people and injure 56 at a Berlin Christmas market.

Less widely reported in the Western media is the virtually endless stream of terrorist attacks on Tunisian soil – dozens since 2011 – leaving hundreds of civilians and terrorists dead. Some of those terrorists had been foreign fighters.

Mokhtar Ben Nasr, the president of the Tunisian Centre for Global Security Studies who was a colonel-major in the Tunisian army and the Ministry of Defence spokesman during the Tunisian revolution of 2010-11, told me that he has no doubt that some Tunisian jihadis who fought or were trained in Syria, Iraq and Libya will surface in other countries. “Some will go to the south of Libya or Niger and Mali, but some could infiltrate Europe,” he said. “These terrorists can infiltrate in boats.”

Their motivation to avoid Tunisia increased in 2015, when the government passed a tough anti-terrorist law that calls for the arrest of fighters upon their return. In a recent interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, Tunisian Prime Minister Youssef Chahed said that 800 Tunisians who had fought overseas had returned to Tunisia; about 100 of them are in prison awaiting trial while the rest are being monitored. “Many other countries in Europe also fear the return of these well-trained fighters because they could destabilize their countries,” he said (Mr. Chahed declined a Globe and Mail interview request).

Ali is typical of the young Tunisians who have heard the call to jihad. His family discovered he had travelled through Turkey and ended up in Syria, where he was absorbed by al-Nusra Front, the jihadi rebel group that was then openly advertising itself as the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.

Fathi said that he and Ali’s father, Ridha, an auto mechanic, flew to Ankara, where they went to the Tunisian embassy. The embassy gave the two men the phone number of a Tunisian in Istanbul, who Fathi referred to as the “transportation man” – the man who allegedly arranged Ali’s trip to Antakya, the Turkish city near the Syrian border, not far from Aleppo. Fathi claimed they met the man, who had Ali’s name on a computer flash drive.

Fathi and Ridha paid the Tunisian the equivalent of €800 ($1,100) to try to retrieve Ali. “But we’re not sure he actually went,” Fathi said. “He says he went to the border and couldn’t find him.”

Had Ali turned into a ruthless killer? Will he return to Tunisia or creep into Europe?

Fathi said they don’t know, even though Ali calls home every few months to assure his family that he is alive (Ali’s sister, whom I would meet briefly, confirmed that her brother has made calls home.) “We think he wants to return to Tunisia,” Fathi said. “But we think he’s afraid he would go into prison here.”

Shortly before Christmas, a highly unusual boat left Cap Bon, a peninsula in Tunisia’s extreme northern tip, and headed northeast, crossing the 150 kilometres of open water that forms the Strait of Sicily.

The boat might have travelled at high speed because it was equipped with three, 400-hp marine outboard motors – the most powerful outboards available, normally used only for racing boats. An Italian intelligence source, who did not want to be identified, said a boat with such an extreme power-to-weight ratio might have been capable of short bursts of speed as high as 150 kilometres an hour – far faster than any vessel in the Italian or Tunisian coast guards or navies.

The boat reached the southwest Sicilian coast, between the seaside towns of Marsala and Maraza del Vallo, just before dawn. It stopped just offshore and as many as 10 of its passengers jumped overboard, swam to shore and apparently fled in separate small groups, eyewitnesses told the authorities. In wet clothes, two of them boarded an intercity bus to Palermo. What the duo did not know is that an Arabic speaker – a Tunisian resident of Sicily – was on board and overheard their conversations. He feared that they were not typical illegal migrants and went to the police after the bus reached the Sicilian capital.

The intelligence source says it was obvious that use of the expensive, ultrafast boat meant the passengers did not want to be caught and did not want to be funnelled through a migrant processing centre in Sicily, where they would be photographed and fingerprinted. It meant they, or their sponsors, could afford such a boat and the enormous amounts of fuel it would consume. “It’s possible they were foreign fighters,” he said. “Whoever wants to escape in [boats like these] really wants to get to Italy and really wants to leave Tunisia.”

A state prosecutor in Palermo confirmed that his office was aware that the high-speed boat had reached Sicily at that time. While another prosecutor said there is no official terrorism investigation into the arrival of the boat, Italian prosecutors are investigating the possibility that jihadis who fought in Syria, Iraq and Libya are making their way into Italy. One of them said the Italians are working with the Tunisian authorities, who have visited Palermo.

On the night of Feb. 3-4, another fast boat from Tunisia landed on the southern Sicilian coast, this time near the town of Sciacca. Its arrival was widely reported in the local media. The boat was impounded and four of its passengers – all Tunisian – were taken in for questioning. A fifth passenger escaped, his whereabouts unknown.

While the boat – which appeared to be six or seven metres long and made of fibreglass – was not nearly as fast as the three-motor machine that reached Sicily before Christmas, it was certainly quick and expensive. The Italian coast guard estimated the boat, which may have been stolen, was worth €40,000. The regional prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into the landing.

Unlike the thousands of rubber rafts and small, clapped-out fishing boats that brought 180,000 migrants to Italy from North Africa last year, the use of the high-speed boat suggests its passengers hoped to avoid detection, too.

But while most making the trip across the strait are economic migrants in search of a better life, Tunisian authorities are well aware that there are some who have other intentions.

Speaking in early January on Tunisian TV, Hedi Majdoub, the Tunisian Interior Minister, said the government has the names of 2,929 Tunisian citizens who are currently abroad and suspected of having links to jihadi groups. About half of them are thought to be in Syria, some 500 in Libya and 150 in Iraq. Ominously, he said that “400 more [are] spread across several countries, the majority in Europe.” He did not account for the several hundred others.

On Feb. 1, less than a month after Mr. Majdoub’s TV appearance, German police launched a series of sweeps that snared a 36-year-old Tunisian, whose name was not released. He was suspected of being a recruiter for the Islamic State and planning to carry out an attack in Germany.

The man was also wanted in connection with two big terrorist attacks in Tunisia since the 2010-11 revolution. The first was the attack in which 21 tourists were killed, claimed by the Islamic State, on the Bardo museum in Tunis in March, 2015. The second was an onslaught, launched from Libya, by dozens of terrorists on Ben Gardane, the border town in southern Tunisia that is infamous as a smuggling hub and recruiting centre for Tunisian fighters. Mr. Ben Nasr, the retired colonel-major said 49 terrorists, 11 Tunisian police and seven civilians were killed in that battle.

The German police raids, which involved 1,100 officers, arrested 15 other suspects. Peter Beuth, the Interior Minister for the state of Hesse, where the raids took place, said the arrests “smashed a multibranched Salafist network,” he said referring to an ultraconservative branch of Sunni Islam.

Hedi Yahmed, 42, the Tunisian author of a book on homegrown terrorists called Beneath the Back Flag: Tunisia’s Salafists, said that radical Islam and terrorism in Tunisia is hardly a new phenomenon. Tunisia, he said, developed an Islamist movement in the 1980s and 1990s under the leadership of Rached Ghannouchi, now president of the Islamist party, Ennahda. Suppressed by dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, many of the leaders found exile in Europe. After Mr. Ben Ali was ousted in the 2010-11 revolution, Islamist leaders began trickling back into the country.

Mr. Yahmed said the violent Tunisian jihadi movement started after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. One of the most murderous attacks was the handiwork of Nizar Nawar, who bombed the ancient synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba in April, 2002. The attack had been planned a few months earlier, when he was living in Montreal. The truck bomb, made from containers of cooking gas, killed 14 German tourists, five Tunisians and two French nationals. Just before the attack, Mr. Nawar sent a letter to an Arabic daily newspaper, saying he would kill in the name of al-Qaeda.

That attack, and others, triggered a massive crackdown by Mr. Ben Ali’s ruthless security forces, with thousands of Islamists and jihadis imprisoned. Most of them were released just before the democratically elected Ennahda government came to power in 2011. Mr. Yahmed said the sudden new freedoms – media freedom and freedom of expression at mosques, even from radical imams – triggered an “explosion” of jihadis. At the same time, the dire post-revolution economy, which sent youth unemployment soaring, made many young men easy prey for foreign fighter recruiters.

“A lot of the fighters who went to Syria to join Daesh came from poor neighbourhoods,” Mr. Yahmed said. “Some went there to prove they were real Muslims. … But now Daesh (an alternate name for the Islamic State) is in retreat and the Tunisians are coming back. Some are convinced that jihad is an obligation and will go to Europe with false identities.”

According to Mr. Ben Nasr, there were 64 terrorist attacks in Tunisia between 2011 and 2016, including one on the American embassy compound in Tunis in 2012, which the Ennahda government seemed slow to suppress. The deadliest one happened in June, 2015, when a lone Tunisian gunman used a Kalashnikov assault rifle to kill 38 people, most of them British tourists, at a resort hotel just north of Sousse, Tunisia. The killer, Seifiddine Rezgui Yacoubi, is thought to have been recruited by the Tunisian branch of Ansar al-Sharia, whose Libyan branch was accused of the 2012 murder of Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

Fully aware that another terrorist attack could destroy the crucial tourism industry, the Tunisian government, equipped with its new anti-terrorism law, has substantially weakened the jihadi networks in Tunisia, security experts say, through mass arrests, brutal crackdown and gun battles with the security forces. On his last day as U.S. president, in January, Barack Obama authorized the bombing raid that is said to have killed about 80 militants at an Islamic State training camp in Libya. Many of the dead were thought to have been Tunisian.

Ashton Carter, then U.S. defence secretary, said, “They were external plotters who were actively planning operations against our allies in Europe.”

Alaya Allani, a professor of Islamism and Salafism at Tunisia’s Manouba University, said there is no doubt that the Tunisian jihadi networks have been severely damaged. He noted that a few of their recent raids were aimed at nothing more than getting food supplies – an indication of their desperation as their supply lines deteriorate.

But ailing jihadi networks in Tunisia do not mean the European terror threat from Tunisians who fought abroad has diminished. “Not all of the Tunisian fighters in Syria will come back to Tunisia,” Prof. Allani said. “Some hotheads will go to Europe or into North Africa. They would be the most dangerous ones.”

The family of Ali, the young Tunisian man who went to Syria in 2012, was devastated when he vanished.

Using different phone numbers, Ali calls home every few months, Fathi said. “He’s alive. He is married and has a child, but we don’t know what he is doing,” he said. “They’ve brainwashed him. We feel he wants to come back but can’t.”

The trouble is the Europeans and Tunisians want the foreign fighters to stay in the countries where they are fighting. Once they leave, they become another country’s problem.

One of the key figures driving President Donald Trump’s national security policy outlined a counterterrorism vision on Monday squarely focused on defeating ISIS beyond the battlefield.

Sebastian Gorka’s view of the ISIS threat melds with many in the White House who believe that the U.S. is engaged in a nontraditional war against radical Islam, like reported by dailysignal.com .

Gorka, and others in Trump’s orbit, allege that previous administrations have not properly combatted the ideology they say fuels terrorism, and that the U.S. government has struggled to define the war it is fighting.

“In this current warfare environment, body bags are not a good metric for winning,” said Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president, during an event at The Heritage Foundation. “You can kill a jihadi high-value target. But what happens if the next day, 20 people volunteer to replace that jihadi? The last 16 years we have become preeminent in exquisite whack-a-mole. Oh, and we are good at it.”

“We look at physical battlefield actions as the metric for success,” Gorka continued. “We have to understand 80 percent of this war will be fought in the mind, and 80 percent of our conflict will be fought in the media domain.”

Early Actions

Gorka, a former Breitbart News national security editor who has held positions at various military educational institutions, did not outline specific policies that transfer his ideas into action.

But some early actions by the Trump administration, and others reportedly being considered for roles in it, reflect a different approach to counterterrorism explicitly focused on “radical Islamic terrorism.”

At the Heritage event, Gorka defended Trump’s executive order temporarily halting refugee admissions, and travel from seven countries the Obama administration and Congress had designated as posing risks of terrorism.

Politico reported Monday that Gorka was one of the few White House staffers consulted ahead of Trump’s order, which has been blocked by the courts.

Lawsuits around the country have alleged that Trump’s order violates the Constitution by intentionally punishing Muslims, and many trial courts blocked aspects of the president’s order.

Gorka, and others in the Trump administration, reject charges of religious intent, and say the chosen countries are sources of terrorism.

“One of the reasons the president signed his executive order [is that] those [targeted] nations are where ISIS and al-Qaeda exist, plus Iran,” Gorka said. “We won’t capture or kill all jihadis. What will happen is they will move. They may go to your neck of the woods. We want to make sure that events like Berlin, like Nice, like Paris, don’t happen in America. We have to understand that ISIS’ battlefront begins when you leave your house in the morning.”

Gorka’s calls for a tougher response against Islamist radicalism are reflected in other moves being considered by the White House.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering re-engineering a Department of Homeland Security domestic counterterrorism program—known as Countering Violent Extremism—to concentrate on Islamic extremism only. Some counterterrorism experts say this singular focus ignores other forms of extremism, and may harm relations between Muslim community groups and the government.

In addition, the Trump administration, according to The New York Times and others, is debating an order to designate the Muslim Brotherhood, an influential Islamist group in the Middle East, as a foreign terrorist organization.

‘Help Muslims Win the War’

Together, these actions and ideas represent an about-face to traditional U.S. strategy embraced by both Republican and Democrat administrations.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama defined the terror threat in narrower terms as they tried to avoid making it seem the U.S. was at war with Islam.

They argued that a more direct focus on radical Islam would feed into ISIS’ narrative that Muslims are not welcome in the West, and encourage more extremism.

Gorka on Monday defended himself against others in the national security establishment who’ve criticized his rhetoric as inflammatory.

“We are not at war with Islam,” Gorka said. “Let me be explicit here. It’s very easy for our detractors to paint us as Islamophobes. It is absolutely wrong. This is a war inside Islam—war for the heart of Islam. Which version will be preeminent? We have to help Muslims win the war for the heart of their own religion.”

Whereas Obama tried to not legitimize ISIS by overstating its power, and said he believed they did not constitute an existential threat to America, Gorka argues the U.S. government needs to take the claims of the terrorist group literally.

“ISIS is different because it succeeds where every jihadi group failed, and it has captured transnational, transregional territory, which by itself means it is a tier one threat to all people who believe in freedom of religion, freedom of expression, democracy, and representative government,” Gorka said. “ISIS has not just rehashed al-Qaeda’s message of jihad. They have really executed an ideological and theological coup.”

“Every time it [ISIS] tweets or goes on Telegram [a messaging service] and says, ‘We are the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham [translation of Syria in Arabic],’ they are a sending very powerful message to that man in his mom’s basement, to that Pakistani immigrant on a fiancé visa in San Bernardino,” Gorka added.

‘Deligitimze Ideology’

Gorka, and others in the Trump administration, have so far not outlined specific differences on how to fight ISIS and take back territory it controls in Iraq and Syria.

Late last month, Trump issued a directive ordering his new defense secretary, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, to submit a strategy within 30 days to defeat ISIS.

But Gorka did signal a pullback from one component of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism strategy: relying on elite special operations forces to conduct raids and kill missions. Obama described this approach as less costly and more efficient than traditional combat operations.

Trump’s first counterterrorism operation using special operations forces, a raid against al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate last month, resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL, and civilian casualties.

“In the last eight years, we have tended as a government to look at our special operations capabilities as the easy button,” Gorka said. “That is a wholly fallacious understanding of special operations. The whole point of our bravest of the brave is that they are a tactical level deployment meant to effect strategic results—not a tactical level asset for tactical results. We should go back primarily to do what they were created to do. We should be helping others fight their own fights, not fight their fights for them.”

If Trump follows Gorka’s approach to counterterrorism, he envisions a dramatic result.

“What is victory in this war?” Gorka said. “Sebastian Gorka’s definition of victory is very simple. We will have won when the black flag of jihad, when the black flag of ISIS, is as repugnant across the world as the white peaked hood of the Ku Klux Klan and the black, white, and red swastika of Hitler’s Third Reich.”

“Don’t get me wrong, killing terrorists is great,” Gorka continued. “I am down with killing terrorists. But the ultimate victory will have accrued when we delegitimize the ideology of groups like the Islamic State.”