We can't ignore the atrocities committed by ISIS in Iraq and the West must consider intervening, argues James Snell.
Due to the wonders of the modern age, it is now possible to watch one of the millions of videos pouring out of Iraq as easily as it is to switch on the evening news. I did so this morning. ISIS – the horrific offshoot of Al-Qaeda which is now in de facto possession of much of Iraq and Syria – has certainly been busy in the editing suite.
Unlike the news, however, where films are carefully and conscientiously edited to fit an audiovisual template, there was a sense of real immediacy to proceedings. Shot remarkably well, with techniques almost reminiscent of a low budget reimagining of a Hollywood blockbuster, this particular film depicted savagery of almost indescribable proportions.
All the usual horrors were present, but captured in glorious Technicolor rather than dingy home movie quality. There were drive-by shootings, a token beheading and bombings galore. Rather unsavoury stuff, then, but it did help drive home the point.
These films are made as propaganda, both to extort like-minded would be murderers to sign up, and to warn off potential adversaries.
For me, however, it had the exact opposite effect. I did not feel the urge to fly out to Mosul and begin slaughtering its Shia inhabitants, and nor did I get the message that ISIS were not to be trifled with. Rather, seeing this cruelty unfold on screen solidified my interventionist impulses. For me it became very clear: evil on this scale should not be allowed to continue.
Reports – unconfirmed as yet – hint at the potential scale of these and similar atrocities. ISIS claims to have massacred over 1,700 officers from the Iraqi army. An example of footage of this nature shows an ISIS thug interrogating and taunting his captives. In one of his films he takes immense pleasure in the fact that the man he has just killed was a Shia. Such instances may constitute war crimes in the eyes of the United Nations.
Of course, the rapid territorial expansion of a nakedly brutal Islamist militia ought to worry everyone who knows about it – and the question needs to be asked: what can we, in the west, do to stop this evil.
But it is not being asked, and it would be shouted down if it were. William Hague has already ruled out action in the country, despite the fact that support for intervention is rapidly gaining traction – even from normally anti-war centre-left think tanks, like the Center for American Progress, which this week suggested that the US government should ‘prepare for limited counterterrorism operations against ISIS, including possible air strikes’, in a new report.
The crisis in Iraq is a direct consequence of the disaster which has engulfed Syria for the last three years. In the aftermath of war crimes committed by the Assad regime, including the widespread use of chemical weapons and ‘barrel bombs’, the West at large – unlike me – remained unmoved by the suffering of the Syrian people, despite the fact that their plight was transmitted to millions of TV screens daily and dominated internet news around the clock.
Regardless of that, intervention was spurned by the British and American people, with consistent polls demonstrating a public consensus against the use of military force to alleviate the effects of the awful civil war.
After that, support for more extreme groups, such as ISIS, grew. Pro-Western rebels, such as the fairly moderate FSA, were usurped by assorted Islamists and radicals. Suffering tends to push political opinion towards the fringes, and the Syrian people have suffered more than anyone would wish upon them.
Their plight was caught on a thousand cameras. Heroic citizen journalists documented the effects of airstrikes and chemical attacks.
The world watched, and calmly changed the channel. The direct result of inaction, and inattention, towards the Assad tyranny is the barbarism shaking Iraq to its foundations. Looking away once again, in the face of yet more carnage, would only be deliberately blinkering oneself to realities of this most terrible of realities.
51 Responses to “We should intervene to stop ISIS atrocities in Iraq”
Paul J
“If the weapons the FSA have already bought with their own money but
that Obama ordered to be impounded in Turkey were released,”
WTF are you on about? This is nonsense. There is nothing that corresponds to reality in this claim.
“Of course if the West actually armed the democratic rebels, that would help more…”
THERE ARE NO DEMOCRATIC REBELS. They do not exist in any meaningful sense. Groups which espouse democracy and secularism make less than 5% of the (non Kurdish) armed rebellion. That’s a generous estimate BTW.
“As far as I know…” I would just leave it If I were you.
Jason Pike
Who do you think you mean by “we”? Are you part of the British military high command? Are you part of the ruling class? The only “we” for the working class is the working class. The working class in Britain doesn’t have its own army (yet, unfortunately,) and if it wants to help the working class of Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan, its organisations should send aid to their militias to overthrow the Syrian and Iraqi governments – but at the moment this would be illegal, so it would also require a concerted struggle against the British government to make it possible. This won’t be easy when much of the Left in Britain is scabbing as much as it can on the Arab Spring and calling it an imperialist conspiracy. Your article will make those class traitors’ job in justifying their hypocrisy much easier because it counterposes your obviously pro-imperialist subsitutionism to their hypocritical pro-imperialist substitutionism – they support the West’s real policy and accuse it of soing the opposite. An article like this is just the kind of thing they LIKE to argue against because they can refute it. They would probably just love to debate with you in public. You are as bad as each other.
Jason Pike
It’s a pity most of tghe people criticising you here are lying genocide junkies. Maybe I should just leave you to each other.
Paul J
Bearing in mind how f*cked up your dialectic is, that’s not a bad idea.
Jason Pike
If you had actually been in contact with the people who organised the peaceful protests you would know that they are now engaged in a war for the defence of their nation’s existence. them are engaged directly in the fighting, but there aren’t enough guns for most of them and some are continuing other forms of resistance to the regime. Not all but MOST of them see this as in solidarity with the FSA and understand the need for its military allinace with JAN and various other groups. They have NOT become reconciled to the regime that is torturing and killing them and anyone else who happens to be within blast radius of them and giving their country bit by bit to ISIS and Iran. They haven’t because THEY say they haven’t. So when YOU say they have, that’s slander. The only exceptions are that some of those who fought IN THE FSA (so not pacifists) changed sides, mostly when Obama threatened to bomb Syria. It is now well- established that he hadn’t the slightest intention of doing so been far more defections in the opposite direction.