There
was one feeling that many of the Middle East’s fractious clerics, competing
ethnic groups and warring sects could agree on Wednesday: a shared sense of
revulsion at the Islamic State’s latest excess, its video showing a Jordanian
pilot being burned alive inside a cage.
In Syria, the government denounced
the group that has been fighting it for months, but so did Qaeda fighters who
oppose both the government and the Islamic State. In Egypt, the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Egyptian government for once agreed on something, the
barbarity of the militant group for the way it murdered the Jordanian, First
Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Cairo’s
thousand-year-old Al Azhar institute and a leading Sunni scholar, was so
angered that he called for the Islamic State’s extremists to be “killed, or
crucified, or their hands and legs cut off.”
In a way that the beheadings of
hostages had not, the immolation of Lieutenant Kasasbeh united the Arab world
in an explosion of anger and disgust at the extremists, also known as ISIS or
ISIL, or to most Arabs by the word “Daesh,” derived from the extremists’ Arabic
acronym.
The sense of anti-Daesh unity made
for strange scenes throughout the region. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, caught by
surprise in Washington when the video was released, returned home not to anger
at his absence, but to a hero’s welcome. Crowds lined his route from the
airport to cheer Jordan’s decision to promptly retaliate by executing two
convicted terrorists, both with connections to the Islamic State, only hours
earlier.
Never known as a charismatic leader,
King Abdullah got rave reviews at home for his tough talk in Washington, where
in a meeting with congressional leaders he said his retribution would remind
people of the Clint Eastwood movie “Unforgiven.”
While the propaganda video, with its
vows to kill other fighter pilots bombing Islamic State positions, was clearly
aimed at trying to scare Jordan out of the American-led coalition fighting the
extremists, it seems to have had the opposite effect among many Jordanians.
Jordan is one of a half-dozen Arab countries actively participating in the
coalition, in addition to Iraq, and Jordan’s government spokesman said the kingdom
would now step up its involvement.
“I guess in a way we lost a pilot,
but at the same time I think the government gained a collective support for
fighting them, in Jordan and from all around too,” said Adnan Abu-Odeh, a
former head of Jordan’s intelligence service. “Daesh have made a big error.
When you are weakened as they have been, you try to make your supporters think
you are strong by being more monstrous, but this time they went too far.”
In Syria, where a chaotic four-year
insurgency provided the Islamic State with an incubator, both those supporting
President Bashar al-Assad and those opposing him condemned the act, as did
their foreign backers.
Iran, the Syrian government’s most
important ally and no friend of Jordan, called the pilot’s killing “inhumane
and un-Islamic.” Al Manar, the television station of another ally of the Syrian
government, the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, called it “the most gruesome”
of many atrocities committed by the Islamic State.
Qatar, which opposes Mr. Assad, likewise
condemned the killing as “contravening the tolerant principles” of Islam.
Turkey, blamed by many in the region for allowing foreign fighters to cross its
borders into Syria, where some join the Islamic State, also chimed in.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it an act of “savagery” that had no place
in Islam, adding, “I curse and damn the burning of the Jordanian pilot.”
Denouncing the Islamic State as a
“diabolical” terrorist group, Al Azhar’s leader and grand imam, Mr. Tayeb,
cited Quranic verses to show that Islam forbids the burning or mutilation of
enemies at war.
“This vile terrorist act,” he said in
a statement issued by Al Azhar, “requires punishment as cited by the Quran for
oppressors and spoilers on earth who fight God and his prophet, that they be
killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs cut off.”
Al Azhar, a seat of Islamic learning,
considers itself a beacon of moderation and tolerance for the Sunni Muslim
world, and the statement offered no explanation for the incongruity of Mr. Tayeb’s
advocating some of the same medieval punishments typically employed by
extremists.
Mainstream Arab leaders reacted to
the immolation in a categorically different way to the long string of hostage
beheadings that preceded it. Partly that may have been because, according to
many commentators Wednesday, burning someone alive is prohibited in Islam as a
punishment that belongs to God alone, applied in hell. Beheadings, on the other
hand, have a long Islamic history.
Others, while condemning the Islamic
State, sought to draw attention to the Syrian government’s barrel bombings of
cities that, according to Human Rights Watch and other organizations tracking
the conflict, kill far more civilians than the extremists — however depraved
and attention-grabbing the militant group’s methods.
Khaled Khoja, the president of the
main Syrian exile opposition group, linked the pilot’s participation in the
struggle against the Islamic State directly to his own country’s opposition’s
struggle against Mr. Assad.
“Moaz’s blood has mingled with the
soil of our beloved Syria, and whose remains mingled with those of hundreds of
thousands of Syrians killed by Assad’s barrel bombs and the terrorist group
ISIS,” Mr. Khoja said in a statement. “While I strongly condemn this barbaric
act, which symbolizes pure evil that the terrorist group represents, and the
deepest of depravity to which they are prepared to sink, I call upon the
peoples and governments of the world to stand by the Syrian people and end
their suffering caused by the Assad regime and ISIS alike.”
Ken Roth, the executive director of
Human Rights Watch, said that both forms of killing should be condemned.
“ISIS’s despicable conduct shouldn’t
make us lose sight of the largest killer of civilians in Syria: Assad’s barrel bombs,”
he said in an email. “The world has been reluctant to address them out of a
misguided sense that nothing should be done that might constrain the fight
against ISIS, but barrel bombs have little if any military significance. They
are so inaccurate that the Syrian air force doesn’t dare drop them near the
front line for fear of hitting its own troops.”
“It will be hard to win the hearts
and minds of the Syrian people by arguing that they should stand up to ISIS’s
atrocities while ignoring the government’s,” he said.
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