Citing US military sources, the Foreign Affairs magazine website estimated that about 13,000 Islamic State (IS) members, or about 1,000 a month, have been killed in aerial assaults. Nevertheless, this does not appear to have made a dent in IS's combat capacities, or stemmed its ability to expand in Iraq (evidenced by the capture of Ramadi), Syria (Palmyra) and even faraway Libya, where IS's presence has extended to Sirte. The reason for this is IS's ability to recruit new members to compensate for its losses. Observers have remarked on the constant flow of volunteers of various nationalities joining IS ranks. According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), the number of foreigners coming to fight in Syria alone has reached more than 20,000. Of these, around 11 per cent, according to prior studies, were from Western Europe, 70 per cent from the Middle East and the rest from the Balkans, other former Soviet republics, the US, Canada and Australia. In 2013-2015, the recruitment base broadened to include extensive portions of East and Southeast Asia and China. Also, former terrorist jihadist organisations, such as Gamaa Islamiya in Egypt, have become active again and are supplying new materiel for the new terrorist generation. Because of all of this, the abovementioned figures cited by US sources seem reasonable. In view of the foregoing, the current battle against terrorism is a universal one. This is not a battle that concerns a particular state, or even a particular region, such as the Middle East. It concerns the entire world, not only because terrorist attacks have already been carried out in many parts of the world, but also because of the spectre of protracted battles that lie ahead when those volunteer fighters return to their own countries, bringing with them their extensive combat and terrorist expertise and the highest degrees of fanaticism, bigotry and racism. Still, the Greater Middle East remains our primary concern, especially given the alarming rise in the number of conflicts and victims of terrorism in several Arab countries, due to the increase in terrorist activities and the proliferation of terrorist groups and movements. It has been estimated that 71 conflicts raged simultaneously in the Middle East in 2014. According to UN statistics, in the period from the Arab Spring to the end of 2014, some 430,200 people were killed as the result of violence due to political tensions (most of which were sectarian and ethnic in nature and caused by religio-political movements). Syria alone accounted for over half of the toll, with 230,000 people killed. Iraq followed with 160,000. The other numbers were 50,000 dead in Libya, 11,000 in Yemen, 4,500 in Egypt, 2,800 in Bahrain, 400 in Lebanon and 219 in Tunisia. As for the injured, they totalled 2,359,700, of whom 1.1 million were in Syria, 1 million in Iraq, 120,000 in Libya, 100,000 in Yemen, 250,000 in Egypt, and 1,491 in Tunisia. Of course, it is impossible to distinguish, in these casualty counts, between the numbers of dead and wounded due to the violence wrought by local fighters and those claimed by the foreign fighters hailing in growing numbers from virtually all parts of the globe. But what is certain is that Turkey is the main portal for their entry into the vast theatre of war that straddles the border between Syria and Iraq, where the international coalition forces are battling the forces of IS. Turkey has tried to defend itself on the grounds that it is a “liberal” country that follows “European traditions” and, hence, can hardly use violent methods against the terrorist elements that infiltrate across its borders. It also argues that its borders are very extensive, stretching not only along northern Syria, a portion of Iraq and Iran, but also along a number of former Soviet republics. In addition, authorities in Ankara point to the fact that Turkey is a major tourist destination, receiving some 35 million tourists a year, which makes it very difficult to detect the jihadists who might be hiding themselves in the midst of all those tourists of different nationalities. The difficulty is compounded by the growing numbers of Syrian and Iraqi refugees who move back and forth across the borders. However, there has been considerable eyewitness testimony at the Turkish-Syrian border that supports the counter arguments. Crossing into Syria from Turkey is quite easy, they say. In fact, it is facilitated by logistical services that offer clothes, maps, directions and other things that foreign terrorist volunteers might need before they set off across the border. Second, Turkey has allowed transportation of oil produced from the oil fields occupied by IS through the pipelines that pass through Turkish territory before being shipped to European markets. Third, Turkish hospitals in southern Anatolia are filled with wounded IS who are receiving medical treatment. Ankara's contradictions are alarming. On the one hand, it is ostensibly contributing to the international coalition against terrorism that is specifically targeting IS. On the other hand, it is leaving its doors open to a form of terrorist invasion into the region, which has become the training base for teachers and trainers of terrorists in the Sinai and in Sirte, Libya. To be fair, Turkey is not the only country in the region where one finds such contradictions. Not a single country enlisted in the fight against terrorism is free of similar contradictions. While they may be less severe or less glaring, they still hamper the coalition's ability to fight IS and the other terrorist factions. Now that a year has passed since that terrorist organisation invaded Iraq and Syria and expanded its terrorist activities to other Arab countries, it has become time for an urgent revision of the subject of the war against terrorism in its entirety. IS's determination, not only to establish a so-called “Islamic caliphate”, but also to expand through the creation of an international and regional coalition consisting of a large number of extremist organisations, and to become a recruiting machine drawing an influx of foreign fighters from around the world, has generated what we might term a wave of new invaders. It is well known that these new invaders are extremely brutal and are ready to turn the entire Arab region into a wasteland in order to pave their way to take it over. Their intentions are no secret. The terrorists have publicised them in their own various publications in different languages. From time to time they add a reminder in the form of a massacre, to let all those who have not already gotten the message know that their religious fascism is on the way to writing a new history for the region. Surely it is time to halt the prospect of that history becoming a reality, before it exacts an even more massive price on the region.
