The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (29 page)
Read The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Online
Authors: Robert Spencer
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #History, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #Non-Fiction
NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM
As they destroyed the ancient Assyrian statues in the Nineveh Museum in Mosul, one of the jihadis explained that they were just imitating Muhammad: “The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him.”
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Infidels Will Shoulder the Blame
It is highly likely that in a few centuries (or sooner), Muslims in the areas where the Islamic State destroyed ancient artifacts in the early twenty-first century will be blaming non-Muslims for the damage, and this altered version will go into the history books. This is what has happened with the Sphinx’s nose, which was destroyed not by Napoleon’s troops in target practice (as goes the oft-repeated story), but by the Muslim precursors of the Islamic State.
In a rare moment of candor,
Russia Today
noted in late March 2015:
Attacks on the Sphinx date back centuries. Despite many legends surrounding the monument’s missing nose—with harm from Napoleon’s cannon being among the most popular myths—historians believe it was actually destroyed by Sufi Muslim Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr in the 14th century, after he learned that some peasants worshipped the Sphinx.
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Many of the incidents of Muslim destruction of artifacts are ascribed to infidels, in keeping with the general tendency of Islamic supremacists to blame everyone but themselves for their own wrongdoing. In
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History,
Robert D. Kaplan repeats uncritically what he probably heard from local Muslims—or from Christians fearful of what might befall them if they said that Muslims were responsible: that the icons in the local churches had had their eyes scraped off because the superstitious local Christians had taken them to mix in health potions: “According to a peasant belief, the plaster and dye used to depict a saint’s eyes can cure blindness.”
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It is, however, virtually inconceivable that Orthodox believers, even the most ignorant and superstitious, would desecrate their own icons in this way. It is much more likely that the icons had no eyes because Islamic authorities considered it obligatory that they deface the images in order to ruin them as representations of the human form.
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And that’s why the nose of the Sphinx was gone long before Napoleon’s troops ever had target practice.
There are men who build, and there are destroyers. The Judeo-Christian West has always loved life and celebrated creativity. By contrast, these Muslims of the Islamic State, acting on principles of Islam, are the enemies of life and creativity; they love death and destruction. As many Islamic jihadists have boasted, “We will win because we love death more than you love life.”
That they love death is obvious. We can all take heart, however, from the fact that their claim that destruction will ultimately triumph completely over creation and civilization is, at best, dubious.
The Resistance: Enemies of the Islamic State
Who hates the Islamic State? Short answer: everyone.
But some groups in the region hate it more than others, and are actually doing something about it. The Islamic State’s principal enemies:
BARBARIANS AT WORK: PRICELESS ARTIFACTS AND MONUMENTS OF CIVILIZATION THAT THE ISLAMIC STATE HAS DAMAGED OR DESTROYED
A partial list—and more are being added all the time
Ancient Assyrian:
1.
Khorsabad:
2,700-year-old Assyrian city full of huge statues of winged bulls with human heads.
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2.
Assyrian gateway lion statues
from the Arslan Tash archaeological site in northern Syria. At least one of the lion statues was 2,800 years old.
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3.
The winged bulls at Nineveh,
near Mosul: 2,700 years old.
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4.
Nimrud:
3,300-year-old Assyrian city containing numerous Assyrian statues and other artifacts.
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5.
Mosul Museum:
Iraq’s second-largest museum, containing numerous Assyrian artifacts.
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6.
Hatra:
2,300-year-old Assyrian city near Mosul, containing ancient temple artifacts and more.
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7.
Mari:
3,000-year-old city near the border of Syria and Iraq.
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8.
Tell Ajaja and Tell Brak:
3,000-year-old sites containing numerous Assyrian statues and other artifacts.
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The Islamic State has also been busy destroying sacred places of Jews, Christians, and Muslims it considers deviant:
Christian:
1.
The Church of the Immaculate Virgin
in Mosul, one of the oldest Christian churches in the city.
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2.
The Church of the Virgin Mary
in the al-Arabi area of Mosul.
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3.
The St. George Catholic Monastery, also known as the St. Markourkas Church
in Mosul, dating from the tenth century.
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4.
The Armenian Genocide Memorial Church
in Der Zor, Syria.
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5.
The Green Church
in Tikrit, Iraq.
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6.
The Mar Benham Monastery
south of Mosul, which dated to the fourth century.
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7.
St. Sargis Assyrian Church,
Tel Tamar, Syria.
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Muslim:
1.
The tomb of the prophet Jonah (Yunus)
in Mosul: This 2,800-year-old site was said to house the remains of the Biblical prophet Jonah, and was converted into a mosque, honoring the Qur’an’s version of Jonah (Yunus), centuries ago.
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The tomb of the prophet Daniel was likewise destroyed.
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2.
The Prophet Jirjis Mosque
in Mosul, dating from the fourteenth century.
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3.
The Khudr Mosque
in Mosul, which dated from the twelfth century.
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4.
The tomb of Meqam Shiekh Aqil al Manbaj
and at least three other Sufi and Sunni shrines in Syria.
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5.
A Shi’ite mosque in Jalawla, Iraq,
where ISIS also murdered the muezzin, and at least five other Shi’ite mosques.
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6.
The Shi’ite shrine of Fathi al-Ka’en
and another Shi’ite shrine in the Iraqi villages of Sharikhan and al-Qubbah.
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7.
The Tomb of the Girl,
a shrine near Mosul that, according to legend, honored a beautiful young girl who died of a broken heart.
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8.
The Al-Arbain Mosque
in Tikrit, which was said to contain the tombs of warriors from the early days of Islam.
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•
The Kurds.
Kurdistan lies within Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and the Kurds have been trying to establish an independent state since before World War I. Each of those countries has done whatever it could to prevent attainment of that goal, and now the Islamic State poses an additional obstacle. The Kurds today have fielded one of the most significant military forces (the Peshmerga, which means “those who face death”) arrayed
against the Islamic State, and they successfully broke the ISIS siege of the Syrian town of Kobani in January 2015—despite the initial unwillingness of the Turks to provide the slightest assistance, due to their own animosity toward the Kurds.
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The Turks blockaded the city, which lies on the Syria/Turkey border, and wouldn’t allow Kurdish troops from elsewhere to cross Turkish territory to enter it—until finally they relented under heavy pressure from the United States.
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The Iranians.
Iran now has a client regime in Baghdad and another in Damascus. It also controls the jihad terror group Hizballah, which is a major force in Lebanese politics, and funds the Sunni jihad group Hamas in Gaza. This gives Iran a significant sphere of influence all across the Middle East, and a claim to be the leader of the Islamic world, despite its allegiance to the Shia Islam shared by only a minority of Muslims. But in between its presence in Lebanon and Syria and its regime in Baghdad stands the Islamic State, vowing to subjugate the entire world under its caliphate and kill or convert the Shia to Sunni Islam. The Iranians have thus far undertaken only limited operations against the Islamic State, but if ISIS continues to grow and expand, that could easily change.
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Shi’ites in Iraq.
The Islamic State is a Sunni group that has made its contempt and hatred for Shi’ites abundantly clear. Because of the weak Shi’ite government in Baghdad, the Islamic State is able to target Shi’ite civilians as well as soldiers. An Islamic State spokesman explained in July 2014 that before ISIS attacks Israel, which it fully intends to do, it needs to take care of the Shi’ites and Muslims who prefer secular government (or any government other than their
own): “The greatest answer to this question is in the Qur’an, where Allah speaks about the nearby enemy—those Muslims who have become infidels—as they are more dangerous than those which were already infidels.”
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The Sunni Muslims in and around the city of Ramadi.
The Islamic State would count among those “Muslims who have become infidels” the Sunni Arabs of Anbar Province who held out against ISIS attempts to take the provincial capital of Ramadi from early 2014 to May of 2015, when the city finally fell to ISIS. Despite being Sunni, the residents of Ramadi appear to prefer the Shi’ite government of Baghdad to the Islamic State. Their resistance to ISIS represented the remnants of the 2006 “Anbar Awakening,” in which local Sunni tribes formed an alliance against the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) jihadis
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who had been terrorizing the local population with the rigorist adherence to Sharia and the atrocities for which they would later—under their new name of ISIS—become infamous worldwide. The stakes were high: Ramadi is less than seventy miles from Baghdad. In November 2014 Anbar Province governor Ahmed al-Dulaimi said, “If we lose Anbar, that means we will lose Iraq.”
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The Islamic State’s May 2015 conquest of Ramadi inspired more than forty thousand refugees to flee the city before the Baghdad government closed a key bridge—that’s on top of the one hundred thirty thousand who had already fled during the fighting in April.
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Apparently the local population has not forgotten life under AQI, and they don’t want to have to live under the rule of ISIS.