By SK Chatterji
Islamic State has its eyes on South and Southeast Asia. The threat is long-term, but should not be ignored.
The Islamic Caliphate is no longer virtual reality; it’s a tangible experience. Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL) has the basic essentials that make it a serious threat. It has territory, it has the military capability to hold on to its territory, and it has a system of governance, however demented it may be. Of course, its barely contested march has now been stalled by air strikes, the recapture of the Baiji refinery has been hailed by Iraqis as a changing of the tide, and the Peshmerga are gradually coming into their own at Kobani. Still, with the exception of Baiji, there has as yet there has been no substantial reversal of the gains that the Islamic state has made.
The caliphate’s leadership is ambitious, ruthless and singularly focused on spreading its distorted vision of political Islam. Al-Qaeda, for decades the beacon for Islamists, has taken a different approach to jihad, with a strategy that has involved widely dispersed cells that provided ideological guidance, arranged funding, training and administrative support while allowing local jihadi leaderships to marshal the men for operations. In contrast, Islamic State – which has split from al-Qaeda, creating a schism in the global jihad – raises its own forces, selects its own objectives, funds its own operations, and controls execution. While Al-Qaeda’s methods drew strength from covert operations, the operations of Islamic State are akin to a conventional battlefield.
Al-Qaeda has also not employed violence as extensively as Islamic State has done. Islamic State clearly has no reservations on that score. It has regularly posted grisly decapitation clips to the Web. It has provided captured women to its rank and file. It has proposed that the enslavement of prisoners would be within the tenets of its faith. It has stoned women to death for sex outside marriage. It has, in short, engaged in an endless litany of cruelty.
An ambitious leader like Abu Baku al-Baghdadi can hardly be expected to limit the caliphate’s geographical ambitions to parts of Syria and Iraq. An Islamic State map of the caliphate covers North Africa and extends through West Asia, south of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea to stretch across the Central Asian republics, the entire Indian sub-continent and beyond to Malaysia and Indonesia. South and Southeast Asia offer the Islamic State many choices, made more appealing by the fact that some of these countries already have their own homegrown Islamist insurgent movements and terror groups.
Read the full story at The Diplomat