theatlantic | “We must make this battle very violent,” wrote the Islamist strategist Abu Bakr Naji in his 2004 book The Management of Savagery. Naji—whose thinking paralleled that of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
the deceased leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has since morphed into
ISIS—argued that merciless violence was necessary for the creation of a
“pure” Sunni caliphate. Softness, he warned, spelled failure, citing the
example of the Companions of the Prophet, who “burned [people] with
fire, even though it is odious, because they knew the effect of rough
violence in times of need.”
The conventional wisdom holds that ISIS’s savagery will be its
undoing—that it will alienate ordinary Muslims, and that without their
support the group cannot succeed. But what this view overlooks is that
ISIS’s jihad, as its progenitor Zarqawi well understood, isn’t about winning hearts and minds. It is about breaking
hearts and minds. ISIS doesn’t want to convince its detractors and
enemies. It wants to command them, if not destroy them altogether. And
its strategy for achieving this goal seems to be based on destroying
their will through intimate killing. This, in part, is what the group’s
staged beheadings are about: They subliminally communicate ISIS’s
proficiency in the art of the intimate kill. And this terrifies many
people, because they sense just how hard it is to do.
The beheadings also serve as a dramatic counterpoint to al-Qaeda’s use
of remote improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in attacks, and to
Western shock-and-awe-style military campaigns. The subtext of the
videos appears to be: You—America and your allies—kill with drones
and missiles. We—the true Muslims—kill with our bare hands. You hide
behind your military hardware and lack the courage to fight. We stand
here tall, holding aloft our swords and the Quran. We will conquer you
because our will is greater than yours, because there is nothing we will
not do in defense of our just and holy cause.
One could argue that there is precedent
in Islamic theology and history for this kind of ruthlessness. But the
approach also has echoes in the Western world. Consider the logic behind
the Allied shock-and-awe “area bombings” of German cities during the Second World War, where thousands
of innocent civilians were murdered for the purpose of ending the war
and stopping the advance of fascism in Europe. Or the logic behind the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “The policy of attacking the civilian
population in order to induce an enemy to surrender or to damage his
morale,” wrote the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, “seems to have been widely accepted in the civilized world.”
