Islamic State Aims to Provoke Backlash Against Muslims in West By Yaroslav Trofimov
http://www.wsj.com/articles/islamic-state-aims-to-provoke-backlash-against-muslims-in-west-1449743581
Group wants to stake claim as the only protector of Muslims
Before dawn in February 2006, militants sent by the precursor of today’s Islamic State sneaked into the golden-domed Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra, disarmed the guards and rigged the building with explosives.
By most accounts, nobody died in the explosion itself, which blew off the dome and reduced the venerated mosque to rubble. But the bombing achieved its goal of baiting Iraq’s Shiite majority into a spree of retaliation against the country’s Sunnis. Thousands died in the wave of sectarian killings that began hours later, and the social fabric of Iraq was torn forever.
In this environment of sectarian strife, many Iraqi Sunnis eventually came to view Islamic State as their only, however unpalatable, protector.
That is why just a few hundred of the group’s militants were able to seize Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, home to 1.5 million people, in June 2014.
This lesson of Samarra now looms over the West. Islamic State is using the same playbook in its attacks on Western targets this year—be it the ones directly organized by the group, such as the Nov. 13 massacre in Paris, or ones apparently only inspired, such as the shooting in San Bernardino.
The group’s objective is clear: to try to bait Western societies into an indiscriminate backlash against millions of Muslims living in Europe and the U.S. It is a backlash that, if successfully provoked, would disrupt these Muslims’ bonds with their countries of citizenship and residence and—as is it happened with Iraq’s Sunnis—validate Islamic State’s claim to be their only protector.
“ISIS thrives on polarization,” said Hassan Hassan, an expert on the group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “They want people to say—they hate us, and so we hate them. This is the foundation of their success.”
Middle East Crossroads
Islamic State itself outlined this strategy this year in its Dabiq magazine. The treatise posited as the group’s goal the “extinction of the gray zone”—otherwise known as peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West. Muslims living in Western countries, Dabiq predicted, “will quickly find themselves between one of two choices”—abandon their faith, or join Islamic State “and thereby escape persecution from crusader governments and citizens.”
This strategy of provoking a societal split and polarization isn’t exactly new. It builds on a 2004 book “Management of Savagery,” which outlines how cleavages in societies can be created and exploited and is among the most influential pieces of recent jihadist literature. And al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America had a similar goal.
Back then, however, President George W. Bush worked to contain the danger to a great extent. Six days after the twin towers came down, he visited a mosque in Washington to proclaim that “the face of terror is not the true face of Islam.” He also said that women who wear the hijab “must feel comfortable going outside their homes” in America, and that those who take out their anger on ordinary Muslims “represent the worst of humankind.”
The reaction, on both shores of the Atlantic, is different today—even though Islamic State’s attacks in the West, so far, have been orders of magnitude less deadly or disruptive. There have been no retaliatory killings or pogroms. But openly racist language about Muslims, unlike 14 years ago, is no longer confined to the political fringe.
In France, the far-right National Front received a major boost following the Paris attack, becoming the country’s largest party in regional elections. It is likely to win control of several regional administrations in the second round next week. It is no longer beyond the realm of possibility that the Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, may become president in 2017. Some opinion polls placed her ahead of the incumbent.
ENLARGE Such successes by National Front “tell a significant number of Muslims that they are not welcome in France, that any dream of assimilation for Muslims is impossible, discrediting the moderate figures and empowering the radicals,” said Daniel Byman, director of research at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
In the U.S., the leading Republican presidential hopeful, Donald Trump, went even further than National Front’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in France, saying this week that he would prohibit all Muslims from entering the United States.
If Islamic State succeeds in carrying out more attacks in the West in coming months, something that terrorism experts and counter-terrorism officials say is a near-certainty, such polarization is only likely to intensify. And it is this tearing of the fabric of Western societies, rather than the physical impact of Islamic State’s actual killings, that is likely to inflict the biggest damage, they warn.
“What I worry about is the hysteria that is engulfing the West,” said Issandr Amrani, head of the North Africa project at the International Crisis Group, a global conflict-resolution organization. “It’s both the mainstreaming of bigoted ideas, and of the idea that ISIS is more popular than it actually is. And the more ISIS terrifies the world, the more romantic and nihilistic appeal it will have among alienated young men who want to rebel.”
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