Mohammed Emwazi: the war on Isis is bigger than one man

The people of Syria and Iraq, as well as those unfortunate enough to fall into Isis’s hands, are no doubt better off with Mohammed Emwazi – “Jihadi John” – killed in a US drone strike, if early reports are correct.But Emwazi was neither an especially senior figure in the group, nor in possession of specialist skills such as bomb manufacture, nor even an important battlefield figure. His significance lay in his London-accented English and enigmatic appearance, both of which served to terrorise us through familiarity. This was not an anonymous Jordanian or an Iraqi with a shadowy Baathist past, but someone educated in St John’s Wood, Queen’s Park and Westminster. An Englishman with an antique, silver-handled sword. This is surely why he was chosen to front Isis’s grisly, cinematic murders. He was a potent symbol and instrument of Isis’s reach into the west. That potency was intensified by the media’s eagerness to style him as the personification of Isis malevolence.

We knew that Emwazi was in the crosshairs. The then US attorney general, Eric Holder, had said as much in February. And legitimately so. Though Isis’s stock of hostages was dwindling, they had more in their possession and had openly threatened to keep murdering them. Capturing Emwazi is unlikely to have been feasible, given that the strikes appear to have taken place near the Isis stronghold of Raqqa. US special forces had attempted a raid to free hostages held near Raqqa in July 2014, but failed to find them and got caught in a three-hour firefight. Emwazi seems to have been in a more populated area still, raising the risks of a large-scale capture mission.

The interesting question is whether the UK, which was surely closely involved in the hunt for Emwazi, was given the option of conducting the strikes itself. This would have reinforced, legally and politically, the important precedent established by the RAF’s successful targeting of Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin in Syria in August. Any such strike would have been feted in most of the British press and welcomed by the UK’s Arab allies eager for greater British involvement. Perhaps the government was deterred by fear of derailing its fading hopes of securing parliamentary support for broader action in Syria, or perhaps it was never asked.