How Did ISIS Win Through al-Baghdadi’s Death?
The death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was not the monumental event it was portrayed to be, nor was the death of those who came before or after him. Likewise, the declaration of victory over ISIS in Iraq and Syria by Iraq and its coalition partners was not a monumental event. To be more precise, a logical reading of developments on the ground suggests that it may actually represent the greatest military victory in the history of Islam, because those who fought ISIS were—and still are—fighting something they do not fully understand well enough to eliminate.
Yes, the coalition won the military battle in Syria and Iraq, but at the same time it opened a wider door for ISIS than the one it closed. It provided the organization with a new lease on life that would require something far greater than the coalition itself to eradicate completely and permanently.
The fundamental problem is that those fighting ISIS believe they are fighting extremists with an ideology separate from the Islam familiar to most people, and that they are merely an armed group that can be defeated militarily. Yet every time an Islamist organization is destroyed, another emerges that is even more resilient and better able to adapt to new circumstances—much like a virus that evolves over time, develops resistance to antibiotics, and continually surprises us as events unfold.
To understand this more clearly, one must observe that whenever rapid Islamic advances occur—sometimes within days—sufficient to bring down an entire state, as happened in Syria and Afghanistan, or to seize large territories, as happened in Iraq, the speed of these developments often exceeds the ability of observers to fully comprehend them. This is where the real dilemma lies, and it is something those fighting Islamist movements must understand. It is not primarily a military issue but an ideological one, rooted in more than fourteen centuries of history.
To understand ISIS and how it might be defeated, we must first understand Islam itself during Muhammad’s advance toward Mecca. Muslims commonly repeat that he told the people, “Go, for you are free,” yet the accounts considered authentic by others state that he said, “Kill them, even if they cling to the curtains of the Kaaba.” Islam, in this view, is capable of prevailing repeatedly because Muslims are not a clearly defined organization but rather a self-replicating ideological phenomenon transmitted through birth. As a result, Christians, Jews, and ethnic minorities associated with Islamic societies have, according to this perspective, fallen into the trap of Muslim majorities throughout the Middle East.
Once Islam was classified as a world religion, the entire world fell into the same trap. For example, if a political party submitted its founding charter in any country and that charter stated that killing anyone outside the party carried no punishment, or that leaving the party was punishable by public execution, the party would undoubtedly be rejected and prosecuted internationally. Yet despite the apparent logic of such a response, Muslims and their organizations are accepted throughout the world because these principles are concealed beneath a religious rather than political framework. The religion’s sacred texts and classical Islamic jurisprudence openly discuss the execution of apostates and the killing of opponents.
This, according to the argument, is how the world fell into the trap of Islamic terrorism: by opening the door to global acceptance and dissemination of the ideology, effectively distributing ISIS throughout the world in the form of Muslim immigrants. These ideas are expressed openly, including calls for violence against others, yet they are often treated as matters of religious freedom. At the same time, Islamic institutions and movements that insist they are different from ISIS and that ISIS does not represent Islam—Al-Azhar being cited as an example—do not declare ISIS outside the fold of Islam, do not excommunicate its members, and do not call for war against them.
It is considered foolish, from this perspective, to ignore the fact that many knife attacks and vehicle attacks in Europe are committed by Sunni Muslim refugees. The repetition of such incidents is viewed not as isolated events but as coordinated and organized. Through ignorance or deliberate avoidance, Europe continues to classify these incidents as ordinary crimes rather than Islamic terrorism, while continuing to admit Muslim refugees and then asking why hatred, stabbings, and vehicle attacks continue to increase.
There may be political reasons why certain states use such organizations in specific regions to advance mutual interests. Yet reaching that stage itself represents another form of Islamic victory. A country such as Qatar, for example, is said to have distorted the true image of Islam that the world should recognize as dangerous. Visitors to Qatar may believe its prosperity results from the application of Islam, whereas the argument here is that Qatar has achieved its development through modern science and technology while still maintaining religious doctrines that regard the creators of those technologies as unbelievers whose killing is permissible because they are non-Muslims. Consequently, states conclude that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, even though, according to this view, a Qatari citizen, a member of the Taliban, and an ISIS fighter would give essentially the same religious answers. The question then becomes: why treat them as though they belong to different camps?
Why does Europe permit demonstrations supporting Hamas while prohibiting demonstrations supporting ISIS? The answer offered here is that Hamas has been shielded by the Palestinian cause, even though Hamas and ISIS allegedly differ by less than one percent in ideology. The same dynamic, it is argued, led states to fall into the trap of al-Jolani simply because he put on a modern suit.
This is how Islamic terrorism achieved victory. Those fighting it believed that killing al-Baghdadi or al-Zawahiri, or confining the remnants of ISIS to camps, constituted victory. Yet victory was never about killing al-Baghdadi. Al-Baghdadi died, but he taught Muslims that a minor change in appearance could remove the label of terrorism and allow them to continue preaching freely even in the heart of Europe.
For this reason, I see no basis upon which the coalition or anyone else can claim victory over ISIS while remaining so naïve that they cannot distinguish between a bearded ISIS supporter and one without a beard.
That is the core problem. Those who judge terrorism by clothing or beard length will repeatedly fall into the same trap. They will believe they have won by killing a bearded man named al-Baghdadi, only to encounter another figure such as al-Jolani wearing a suit and a shorter beard, standing in Damascus just as al-Baghdadi once stood in Mosul.
And in exactly the same way, both men told the people:
“Obey me so long as I obey God among you.”
Zion Peace Union