The war is on, then, between the terrorist Islamic State (IS), formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and the international and regional community. IS, which has proclaimed a state in an area that straddles Iraq and Syria, now faces the military might of a bundle of Western countries and NATO, led by the US, and a group of Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia. It is a new kind of war, one that those working in the fields of international relations and international law will probably difficult to come to terms with. After all, the clash is not between nations or coalitions of nations. Rather, it is between nations that have formed coalitions and an organisation that is not a state or a political player. That type of enemy floats between countries and continents, creates its own types of alliances, flagrantly flouts international law and has nothing but contempt for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. The terrorist organisation is a very close cousin of organised crime. Like organised criminal gangs, it knows no recognisable boundaries as it moves from one country to the next to traffic in drugs, human beings or other illicit activities. Perhaps the only new facet that IS and its peers such as Al-Qaeda have brought to these activities is that they perpetrate them in the name of Islam. But behind that subterfuge they still fund themselves through larceny and theft, and they still terrorise and massacre innocent civilians because, in fact, they have no values and hold nothing sacred. But IS has added a new and unfamiliar dimension to the general run of terrorist crimes and activities. It has seized control of and established a base on the ground, which has given it a certain mystique that sets itself apart from Al-Qaeda, especially now that IS declared itself a caliphate. True, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahri rushed to declare a caliphate over Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, but not only was this a nominal claim, it appeared more in the nature of a propaganda bid to outstrip the competition, a desperate one now that various other terrorist organisations have split away from Al-Qaeda in order to sign up with the new terrorists. This trend began when members of Al-Nusra Front in Syria abandoned that group and cause in order to sign up with the bolder and better-funded IS, which appears to have more than sufficient material and human resources to provide for its fighters' food, accommodation and sex needs. Soon Al-Qaeda in Yemen followed suit and, much further away in North Africa, the Jund Al-Khilafa (Soldiers of the Caliphate) organisation broke away from Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, declared allegiance to ISI and cursed Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the mother Al-Qaeda organisation in general because it had not joined IS. Then followed the Brigade of the Free Sunnis in Lebanon, while the Shura Council of Ansar Al-Sharia offered its moral support, the services of its members and perhaps money, and the Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis in Egypt, or at least part of it, declared its allegiance to IS. That is a large alliance of terrorists that has coalesced across quite a few national boundaries. The available intelligence on it is meagre. In some countries, such as Libya and Somalia, there is sufficient chaos to support such groups, but the delicate power balances in those countries are such as to inspire sympathies with IS while, simultaneously, keeping them focused on the demands of their own domestic realities. Even so, the larger truth is that they are all part of the great terrorist army that plagues the entire region and that gives IS the ability to move and strike on many fronts. The other truth is that while the rifts with Al-Qaeda may ultimately weaken the terrorist front, they simultaneously might fuel the rivalry that could drive Al-Qaeda to notch up its own brutality in order to hold on to those of its members who are thirsting for more bloodshed and who are evidently blaming the mother organisation for not supplying that in sufficient quantities. So, if an international and regional coalition is coalescing in order to degrade and eliminate IS, the latter is forming a counter-coalition consisting of many terrorist forces spread across a number of Arab and Islamic countries. This is why the Egyptian viewpoint expressed in the recent conference in Jeddah is so important. The Egyptian participants at that conference stressed the need for the anti-terrorist coalition to be comprehensive and to cover the entire region without exception. Terrorism is like cancer. It can be eliminated from one part of the body only for it to resurface in another. Such a reality, naturally, calls for setting priorities or protocols on the basis of available intelligence on the level and provenance of the threat within the framework of a general strategy for eliminating terrorism. In World War II, the strategic aim was to destroy the Nazi/fascist alliance between Germany, Italy and Japan. At the outset, the allies prioritised the fight in the North African front. Thus, victory at El-Alamein was followed by the victories in Tobruk, Tunisia, Sicily and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and then the Italian mainland. All this was before opening up a second front to destroy Germany and then a third front, which culminated in the defeat of Japan. In war, setting strategic priorities is not only legitimate but is expected. They can take different forms depending on the nature of the war, and certainly the war against terrorism is vastly different from all the wars that have preceded it and that were ultimately resolved by the overall balances in power between nations and their coalitions. Terrorism is waging a global battle in which it is not so much attacking borders of nations but rather the peoples of these nations and their cities. It strikes Boston, New York, Washington, London, Paris, Madrid, Moscow, Cairo, Khobar, Amman and countless cities in Yemen and Syria. It destroyed countries such as Afghanistan and Somalia. Its cells take root and proliferate in every area where extremism and fanaticism prevail. In fact, perhaps this is the crux of the strategic challenge. Every religion has had its share of extremists and fanatics, some of whom turned into terrorists who committed assassinations and other appalling acts. However, the current situation suggests that terrorism has evolved into an industry, involving design and planning, and rapid strikes with frequent shifts from one theatre of operations to another. Another trademark of this industry is its focus on “soft” targets, namely innocent civilians and defenceless human beings. The problem, then, is that we are not just speaking of a conventional balance of forces that can be calculated in terms of the respective military strengths and resources of the rival coalitions and other such assets, and which, in the forthcoming battle and the war beyond that, are in favour of the international and regional coalition. The coalition of terrorism has a number of tactical advantages. The only defence against these advantages resides in the people's ability to detect, discriminate and act quickly in the areas where terrorists are spreading, in order to gather intelligence about religious fronts or to undertake lethal operations. Ultimately, the international and regional coalition will prevail. My purpose in this article is to underscore the fact that the coming confrontations will not be easy. What we will need is the ability to see the battle from the perspective of its strategic comprehensiveness on the ground, and to carefully determine where the major battles will be fought and won.
