By Luke Hunt
A foreign-led coalition against IS must contain a large contingent from Muslim countries.
With the Western world predominantly reinventing the “Coalition of the Willing” and dispatching arms and air support to Kurdistan, where the Peshmerga have stood alone in battling the Islamic State, pressure is rightly being applied to Southeast Asia to pitch-in, particularly ASEAN’s three predominantly Muslim members: Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.
Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur have loudly distanced themselves from IS amid fears their nationals, who trained with IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, will return having learned terrorist tactics in order to back demands for a Southeast Asian caliphate.
Brunei, which introduced sharia law in May, has been predictably quiet amid reports its ruler Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah was hoping to buy the landmark Plaza Hotel in New York in a deal worth more than $2.0 billion, which would also include the famed Grosvenor House hotel in London.
In Australia, columnists have urged Prime Minister Tony Abbott to try and persuade his Malaysian counterpart Najib Razak and recently elected Indonesian President Joko Widodo to contribute more than words, and send money, arms and perhaps troops to Iraq, where the Islamic State has made great inroads via Syria in recent months.
“Involving Indonesia and Malaysia in Iraq now would also have a big symbolic advantage. It would help rob the extremists of their religious pretensions that Western Christian ‘crusaders’ are the enemy if forces from Indonesia, the world’s most populated Muslim-majority nation, are also on side,” Sydney Morning Heraldcolumnist Daniel Flitton wrote.
Read the full story at The Diplomat