As the Islamic State insurgent group has grown and waged a violent campaign to claim much of Iraq and Syria as its own, some have wondered, can one negotiate with the Islamic State?
“It’s perfectly reasonable to negotiate with villains like ISIS, so why don’t we do it and save some lives?” journalist Robert Fisk recently suggested in a column for the British newspaper The Independent. “Nobody criticizes the Israeli government when it swaps prisoners with Hezbollah.”
It’s a reasonable point to make. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta suggested to USA Today last month that fighting with the Islamic State could go on for 30 years. The U.S. has spent $1.1 billion already to combat the insurgent group it considers to be a terrorist organization.
There’s also a model to follow for negotiating with the Islamic State: Turkey in September exchanged 180 prisoners with the group to release 49 of Turkish diplomatic and consular staff based in and held hostage in the Iraqi city of Mosul.
And the U.S. last year initiated direct peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan aimed at removing the group from power and keeping it from returning to dominance.
As war rages with the Islamic State, negotiation is an idea that will appeal to many who want to see a stop to violence in my home country. We all want peace, but is peace an option for the Islamic State?
That question prompts another: Is Islamic State a different kind of enemy, different from Al Qaida?
Islamic State has beheaded American journalists and British aid workers. A Canadian sympathizer suggested playing soccer with the heads. Its member have killed hundreds of Iraq’s Shiite security forces and buried them in mass graves. The group has put children 12 and 13 years old through training in training camps, instructing them to use AK-47s and to make bombs. The training instills in them a hatred toward everybody who is against the caliphate — an ancient Islamic system of rule that the Islamic State is trying to resurrect.
The Islamic State brags about these actions on the Internet daily.
Since Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi believes that anyone who does not belong to the Islamic State is against the group, there is no other option for us if we believe in freedom and peace and do not want to be associated with the Islamic State.
They kill for the sake of killing.They are the real zombies, as one Iraqi writer put it.
As the Islamic State fights for the Syrian city of Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border, how many prisoners will the group take?
When the Islamic State a few weeks ago advanced on Iraq’s Sinjar mountain region, the group’s militants killed hundreds of men and captured hundreds of women, later enslaving them. I’m sure many saw the images of the children who managed to escape and how they looked after days of walking to get to safety.
President Obama used what they did in that region in August as part of the reasoning to start launching air strikes in Iraq.
In Mosul, the Islamic State destroyed much of the heritage of the city, detonating many old buildings — including multiple ancient mosques. The group displaced the Christian community from the city, leaving the city without Christians for the first time in about 2,000 years.
According to the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, at least 1,119 Iraqis were killed and another 1,946 were injured in acts of terrorism and violence just in September.
The Islamic State is like a moving cloud of chemical weapons or like locusts during a famine. They eat everything in their path. Islamic State militants will keep killing every human being on their way as long as they have the millions of dollars they gain daily from selling oil on the black market, from extortion and other sources, which enable them to buy the weaponry and other provisions they need to survive and grow.
And the group will grow by continuing to win over its sympathizers’ hearts and minds. For example, in September, a Saudi student, Meshaal Suhaimi, went missing while enrolled in an English-language program in Sydney, Australia. Last week, his family discovered that he left Australia to join Islamic State after travelling to Malaysia, Turkey, Syria and finally to Iraq.
The Islamic State is an idea — a fanatical one at that. I think the key question is how we can eliminate it rather than shake hands with the people who spread such a virus.
Ali Al Mshakheel, an Iraqi journalist, immigrated to Portland earlier this year with his family. He covered the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq at many stages for outlets including ABC. He worked at one point as a journalist embedded with U.S. Army troops. This essay has been adapted from remarks Al Mshakheel delivered last month during a panel discussion at the University of Southern Maine.