Islamic State uses image of Alan Kurdi to threaten Syrian refugees for fleeing
Islamic State
is using the shocking image of a drowned Kurdish boy to suggest that
refugees fleeing the grinding brutality of the Syrian civil war deserve
their fate.
A photograph of three-year old Alan Kurdi, face down and lifeless on the Turkish beach where his body washed ashore, sparked global outrage and placed new pressure on European leaders to admit Syrian refugees. His family was seeking the safety of Canada
after fleeing Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish city that Isis besieged and
assaulted for months before being driven off by US-backed Kurdish
fighters.
Now Isis has published a photograph of the boy, whose name was
initially misreported as Aylan, in an article for its English-language
magazine Dabiq under the headline “The Danger of Abandoning
Darul-Islam”, or Islamic lands, a term the article implies means Isis’s
own self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
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It
is not the only inflammatory photograph contained in Dabiq’s newest
edition, published on Wednesday, which includes a two-page pictorial
spread celebrating its destruction of the ancient temple of Bel in Palmyra, a cultural artifact whose construction began in 32 BCE.
Refugees from Syria commit “a major dangerous sin” by seeking shelter
in the west, the Isis article proclaims, a sin that mortgages the lives
and souls of their children.
“Sadly, some Syrians and Libyans are willing to risk the lives and
souls of those whom they are responsible to raise upon the Sharī’ah –
their children – sacrificing many of them during the dangerous trip to
the lands of the war-waging crusaders ruled by laws of atheism and
indecency,” the article states.
In western lands, refugees and their families “are under the constant
threat of fornication, sodomy, drugs and alcohol”, even if they do not
fall into apostasy, the article says. Leaving the caliphate opens “a
gate towards one’s children and grandchildren abandoning Islam for Christianity, atheism or liberalism”.
While many European nativist opponents of resettling the Syrian refugees claim that they will change the character of Europe, Isis warns that it’s the other way around.
“If they don’t fall into sin, they will forget the language of the
Koran – Arabic – which they were surrounded by in Sham [Syria], Iraq,
Libya and elsewhere, making the return to the religion and its teachings
more difficult,” Isis contends.
In keeping with Isis’s blend of sectarianism, the 11th issue of the
militant group’s magazine devotes considerable energy to attacking other
jihadist militant and terrorist factions.
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Continuing its war with al-Qaida,
Isis excoriates what used to be its parent organization for going along
with the two-year ruse that Taliban leader Mullah Omar was still alive.
(It calls new Taliban leader Akhtar Mansoor
an “infamous liar” and stooge of Pakistani intelligence.) Members of
al-Qaida are “blind sheep … [who] do not think for themselves, and
instead allow their personal desires and that of their blind shepherds
to lead them on”.
Reportedly, a new audiotape from the near-invisible leader of
al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, struck a conciliatory note. While Zawahiri
continues to denounce Isis as illegitimate, he reportedly stated that
were he in Iraq or Syria, “I would cooperate with them in killing the crusaders and secularists and Shiites”.
In the magazine, Isis’s al-Qaida rivals in Syria, the Nusra Front,
are portrayed as tools of Nato ally Turkey and the UK prime minister,
David Cameron. Hamas in Gaza is termed fraudulent and inauthentically
Islamic, “a nationalist entity actively adopting democracy as a means of
change since ‘2005’”.
The “hidden imam” of the Shias, whom Isis loathes, is portrayed as a
crypto-Jew, as illustrated by a picture of the antisemitic former
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greeting an orthodox Jewish man. A
caption on a picture of the destruction of the World Trade Center
asserts that “the Crusaders were cooperating with Iran prior to
September 11 and following the blessed attacks their cooperation grew”.
Isis also claimed that the group is holding two new hostages: a
48-year old Norwegian citizen, Ole Johan Grimsgaard-Ofstad, and a
50-year old Chinese citizen, Fan Jinghui. The magazine showed them in
yellow jumpsuits and published a telegraph number for a “limited time”
ransom offer. It does not say when or where they were abducted. Isis has
beheaded other hostages.
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