Olivier Guitta: The Iran nuclear deal has bolstered the Islamic State’s propaganda war
National Post (Canada) 5 Aug 2015
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While almost everything has been said and written about the consequences of the recent P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran, not much has been covered about how the deal will impact the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL). Federica Mogherini, the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy who took part in the negotiations with Iran, believes that the nuclear deal is a disaster for ISIL. She is sadly mistaken.
Contrary to what Mogherini and other diplomats think, the Iran nuclear deal has made the West much less safe, largely because it strengthens ISIL. To understand why, one has to look at the propaganda war ISIL has been waging against the West since 2013.
The lack of intervention against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in the summer of 2013 was the first Western gift to ISIL. It allowed jihadists to recruit many young Westerners who wanted to help their fellow Muslims fight the bloody dictator.
The second gift was handed ISIL in August 2014, when U.S. President Barack Obama decided to intervene militarily in Iraq against ISIL, in support of the region’s Shia population. ISIL quickly made the case that a Sunni life was worth nothing compared to a Shia life for the West.
This is a very strong argument that proved to many that the West had a double standard — letting Assad butcher and gas 200,000 people, while rushing to save the Shias in Iraq and rewarding Iran. This narrative led to both a huge ramp-up in the number of Western recruits travelling to Syria and Iraq to join ISIL, and a rise in the number of ISIL-inspired terror plots in the West.
The West had, for the past year, said it was not co-operating with Iran in Iraq, while the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were on the ground and Iranian jets were bombing ISIL targets. Then it was revealed that U.S. troops and Iran-backed Shia militias were actually sharing the same base in Iraq. ISIL spokesman Abu Mohammad al Adnani warned repeatedly of a Western plan to hand over the Muslim world to Iran.
What could pass as a conspiracy theory a few months back is now ringing true for a majority of Sunnis, following the Iran deal. In fact, the nuclear deal with Iran is the best propaganda and recruiting tool for ISIL, because it allows the group to argue that the West is now a pawn of Iran and the Shias. Unsurprisingly, within a few hours of the announcement of the deal in Vienna, ISIL released a video clip that made the case that the U.S. betrayed Saudi Arabia, in order to directly work with the terrorist regime in Iran.
The West is doubly at risk here: first, because it has waged war against ISIL since August 2014, and secondly because it is now the consenting ally of Iran, the sworn enemy of the Islamic State. The recent deal only serves to make matters worse, because it will lift many of the sanctions now levelled against Iran, which will allow the regime to further prop-up Assad.
French President François Hollande recently revealed that jihadist terrorist plots are being foiled in France on a weekly basis. Scotland Yard also mentioned that an average of one potential terrorist is arrested every day in the United Kingdom. The nuclear deal with Iran is only worsening this bleak situation and actually endangering Western security by helping ISIL recruit even more members in the West, some of whom have been trying to hit Western targets.
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