The warrior stood as a symbol of the fight against Isis’s murderous extremism — and the Kurdish political movement’s long-cherished dream of a devolved, federal Syria. Back in 2012, two million long-marginalized Syrian Kurds thought their fortunes had been transformed. The Syrian revolution enabled them to declare de facto autonomy in isolated “cantons” along the northern border with Turkey. Their bitter conflicts with Isis won them international military support from the US-led, UK-backed International Coalition to Defeat ISIS. Kurdish forces duly expanded out of the Syrian Kurdish heartlands known as “Rojava” and came to govern a region the size of Lebanon on a secular, feminist, and nominally direct-democratic basis.

The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (to give it its official title) stretched from the Iraqi and Turkish borders to the River Euphrates. It retained its autonomy for well over a decade, keeping hold of Syria’s oil fields, plus tens of thousands of captured Isis members and affiliates. It even withstood the blitzkrieg offensive led by the militant Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which led to the end of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in 2024.

The fallen female warrior now represents the defeat of that dream. Syria’s 14-year-old civil war has now entered its final, deadly phase — and the tentative Kurdish vision of a secular, federal Syria is finally being extinguished.

More from this author

Why Turkey’s Kurds are tired of fighting

By Matt Broomfield

Across two January weeks, government troops, Islamist militias, and tribal forces under Syria’s new President Ahmed al-Sharaa, have begun to reclaim the territory, benefiting from mass defections of  Arabs in the region who are deeply dissatisfied with Kurdish rule. The deadly conflict has now reached the gates of the Kurdish towns and cities strung along the border where the embattled Kurds are now primed to fight.

In Qamishli — now the de facto Syrian Kurdish capital — I speak to Gharib Hasso, the co-chair of the Kurds’ leading political party. “We see dialogue for national unity as essential,” he says. “If there is such an approach, and our rights are guaranteed, we’re ready.” However, the AK-47 in his hands demonstrates his willingness to continue politics by other means. “But if not, we will struggle. We’ll defend our land.”

Across the past fortnight, President al-Sharaa has reached a number of ceasefire agreements with the commander-in-chief of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), only to use each one as cover to continue the advance into the Arab interior. During this time, the Kurdish forces have relinquished control of the Isis detention centers and camps they long administered on behalf of their UK and US allies.

The diplomatic and security chaos is now matched by the turmoil on the ground. In Qamishli, neighborhood self-defense committees are handing out AK-47s and digging trenches at the entrance to Kurdish neighborhoods. Kurdish fighters ride through the streets on top of BearCat vehicles provided by the US. They swerve around cars packed with ordinary citizens — old and young, male and female  — waving weapons, SDF flags, and the peace sign associated with the Kurdish struggle.

At the Kurdish Red Crescent hospital in Qamishli, I see a man bang on the desk, demanding to be allowed to donate blood even though the blood-bank is at capacity. Bread is in short supply too amid mass power and water outages following the Syrian government forces’ capture of the region’s key energy structures.

Meanwhile, internally displaced Kurds from the regions occupied by al-Sharaa’s forces are arriving in these embattled enclaves en masse to seek shelter. Many have been driven from their homes for the fourth or fifth time since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war — and many express bitterness at al-Sharaa’s persistent breaking of ceasefires. “When they sat down and made [the first] agreement we were delighted, because we thought we would return home,” says Nisreen Mihammed, an elderly woman sheltering in a windowless school room with old Kurdish lessons still scrawled on the blackboard. “We were surrendering land to them, but then they attacked us… The bullets were flying and we had to run.”

She and her fellow internally displaced Kurds are the victims of Trumpian realpolitik — and what Kurdish politicians and civilians perceive as yet another Western betrayal of their cause. The highly successful partnership to counter Isis, forged between Syrian Kurdish forces, the UK, USA and other members of the International Coalition to Defeat ISIS, appears to have run its course. With Assad defeated, the US has now thrown its weight behind his replacement. Al-Sharaa may be an Islamist authoritarian — but he’s the kind of authoritarian who is open to Western investment and a détente with Israel on his southern border.

Ordinary locals are outraged at the spectacle of US generals and Donald Trump breaking bread with their new president. Before al-Sharaa seized control of Damascus in 2024, he was the head of the al-Qaeda splinter group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham with a $10 million US bounty on his head. Now he is reportedly agreeing to align with the US against Iran and the prospect of a Western-aligned strongman opening Damascus up to business seems to have proved irresistible to the White House.

Still, what will become of the 9,000 or so Isis militants held in detention centers across north-east Syria remains to be seen. Scores have already escaped from one key detention center held by al-Sharaa’s Islamist forces. Escapes have also been reported at the Al-Hol Camp, which holds around 20,000 Isis-linked women and children — here, the arriving government forces were greeted by scenes of wild jubilation. At another prison in the former Isis capital of Raqqa, Kurdish guards have been encircled and fired upon by Syrian government forces.

Al-Sharaa has apparently persuaded Trump that he is ready and willing to secure these facilities — and he can point to a track record of violently liquidating other militant factions en route to securing national power. Still, security analysts warn that for all that al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham party has attempted to rebrand itself as a stabilizing force, its origins as an al-Qaeda splinter group together with its accommodation of Islamist extremists mean we shouldn’t take their promises at face value.

The ceasefire deal announced yesterday will see the Kurdish administration reduced to small enclaves within the region’s Kurdish-majority cities and villages, amid full-scale military and political integration within the central Syrian state. However, Kurdish trust in the regime currently stands at precisely zero — thanks to violations against Kurdish civilians and captured female fighters during the last offensive, and a longer-term track record of abuses of the Kurds and other minorities by government-allied militias.

Further reading

Can Kurds survive the new Syria?

By Matt Broomfield

With an overnight drone strike and motorbike bomb in Qamishli, and the Syrian government-allied militias reportedly advancing further upon the encircled city of Kobane, Kurdish politicians are meanwhile urging locals to join the mass mobilization. “We’re with our people, for as long as there’s a drop of blood in our bodies,” says a young Kurdish fighter in front of a burning oil-drum. “We’re going to protect our people and protect our neighborhoods.”

I watch protesters on both sides of the Turkey-Syria border attempt to storm the crossing, drawing live fire from guards. Even the mosques are blaring Kurdish revolutionary music, in a sign of the increasingly radical split between the country’s Kurdish and Arab populations — both Sunni Muslim.

In 2025, Islamist forces allied with al-Sharaa killed over 1,400 members of the Alawite community, who were perceived to be linked with the ousted president Bashar al-Assad — as well as hundreds of members of the Druze religious minority. A further conflict with the well-armed, highly-disciplined Kurdish forces would likely be far more deadly.

The Kurdish politician Hasso asks: “If those criminal militias… want brotherhood, why did they attack the Druze? Why did they attack the Alawites? Why do they attack the Kurds?” Even if the ceasefire deal is implemented, it’s unclear how the government’s forces will be prevented from further bloody violations aimed at totally liquidating Kurdish autonomy in the coming months.

This conflict is also about competing political visions. The Kurdish polity’s vision of a decentralized Syria granting devolved rights to local communities, municipalities and minorities was always met with suspicion by the Arab population of Rojava. The ongoing Isis insurgency drove the Kurdish administration to impose harsh security measures and significant political restrictions — which went against the grain of their stated vision of a free, democratic Syria.

Indeed, it was the defection of the Arab majority away from the formerly multi-ethnic SDF that led to the collapse of Kurdish rule. Kurdish fighters and civilians often refer to these uprisings as “Isis sleeper cells”. However, there are often legitimate Arab grievances mixed in: resistance to heavy-handed Kurdish rule; tribal opportunism; simple war fatigue; and a desire to live in a unitary, internationally-recognized state. Most Arabs never saw the federal project as anything other than a smokescreen for Kurdish nationalism. Those who toppled the statue of the female fighter were likely unaware it depicted an Arab, not a Kurd, slain by the terror group.

Still, the long, sad story of the conflict in Syrian Kurdistan is more complex than one of Arabs versus Kurds. In the Red Crescent hospital, I meet Aqid, 20, one of several Arab fighters who was injured fighting with his Kurdish allies against government forces along the Euphrates. “I don’t see any difference between Kurds and Arabs, we’re all one in the SDF,” he insists. “We all fight to defend our land and the honor of our people.”

Had it been implemented under less strenuous conditions, the Kurdish vision of decentralized, local autonomy could have been appealing to poor Arab regions themselves long economically excluded and politically marginalized by the centralized Syrian state. Hasso insists that the current war is an attack on this bold political vision of equitable governance for all. “This brotherhood that we’re building up, through which we’re developing our society — they want to destroy it.”

The Kurdish-led administration at least offered an alternative vision for a nation that has been dominated for decades by criminal militias. With the rapid collapse of the Kurdish-led governance project, a chapter has closed. Local friends now laugh bitterly at the mention of a “brotherhood of peoples”. The collapse of the Damascus-Kurdish ceasefire was met with scenes of wild celebration, as caravans of locals took to the streets, waving Kurdish flags, briefly jubilant at the opportunity to stand and fight.

The question now is whether the slender rights won in the course of this struggle can be preserved in these isolated Kurdish regions — as Kurdish forces fight government to a bloody standstill in their remaining cities. Syria’s recent history is rapidly running away from the dream of pan-Syrian multi-ethnic federalism. The Kurds are retreating back to the embattled enclaves from which they first launched their wars against Isis. Time seems likely to keep running backward.

That attack stands out as among the most brutal of the 2010s, a decade which saw Isis reach the height of its powers, and in which terrorism came to seem routine, inevitable and all the more horrifying for it. The perpetrator of that era was reliably one of two archetypes: an Isis jihadist or a white supremacist. The immediate context of London Bridge shows this: less than two weeks before the massacre, 22 people had died in an attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena, stuffed to the gills with excited little girls. Two weeks after it, a far-Right extremist would ram Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park, killing one. Other attacks that year took place in Westminster, Stockholm, Barcelona and St Petersburg.

My generation — toddlers during 9/11, and tweens as the horrors of the 2010s filled the news, in which we were just beginning to take an interest — was raised in ambient terror. I was 12 when Anders Breivik slaughtered scores of teens on Utoya Island; I remember pictures of him on the TV, dressed as a police officer, picking his way calmly over rocks in the stream with his rifle. He was given free rein of the Norwegian Labour Party summer camp for 90 minutes before police could reach him; by the time they did, he had killed nearly 70. In him a horror-movie figure, the dead-eyed man in the woods, was made flesh; my sister and I watched the news in silence, realizing that in the real world, nowhere was safe.

The psychic residue of the low-level dread these attacks instilled has persisted into this decade; the acceptance that a joyful day out can turn, within seconds, into a nightmare, is reflected in the paranoia of crowds in present-day Britain. A video posted shortly after the recent Liverpool car ramming showed a small group of friends leaving Water Street just before the incident unfolded; “we’re leaving because I have a gut feeling”, one told the camera. He had seen snipers, he said, and felt “something’s gonna kick off, like a terrorist attack or something”. Similar stories of foresight haunt all attacks; Xavier Thomas’s fiancée told reporters in 2017 that she had had “premonitions” the day before the London Bridge killings, and that on the bridge itself she had felt something was “not normal”.

Without passing judgment on the coincidental nature of these feelings, it is telling that the apparent ability to foretell doom in this way, like a preapocalyptic seer, has returned in an age of secular rationalism. Because of the continuous uncertainty of the era of Isis attacks, the public is now primed with jumpy superstition. Social media, too, is whipped into delirium as soon as the first details of any apparent attack emerge; immediate speculation about race, asylum status and motive speaks to the desire to sort attackers into familiar categories, to know your enemy. The 2010s made us not only superstitious but less trusting, drawing out the bloodhound hatred of the other from darker periods in British history.

Looking back at the 2010s, it strikes me that those attacks marked a rare moment of the best and worst of Western societies colliding; on the one hand there are the attackers, fanatical, furious, broken outcasts, and on the other there are the victims, random bands of normal people often united merely by the desire for a nice day out. Among them would have been all sorts: good people and bad people, angry drunks and talented tennis players, bricklayers and bus drivers and management consultants — but no matter; terror attacks have a habit of flattening a scene, so that to read about it the next morning is to imagine a cataclysm happening to people as generic and benevolent as the cartoon crowds in Lowry’s Fairground at Daisy Nook.

One of the most unexpectedly frightening things about these acts of public murder is that when you imagine being caught up in one, as children of the 2010s constantly did, you perceive yourself being flattened in this way too, reduced to a smiling headshot taken from your uncle’s Facebook page and placed on a gallery spread with a single-line caption. Not only is your life taken away, but the story of your life is never your own; you become, simply, a totem of “us” violated by a despicable, remote, alien “them”.

Since Covid, terror attacks have shifted in form and geography. Islamism has not gone away, but the regularity of Isis “claiming responsibility” for graduates of jihad training camps has waned in favor of lone wolves radicalized online. Often, the motivations of recent attackers have been confused, fragmented, unanchored from specific political objectives and moored more generally to a creed of hate. Brick dust from different ideological monoliths has come to coat dark internet forums; what results is a chaotic bricolage of extremism, the purpose of which is to prop up the personal mythology of a violent loser, rather than that loser having been recruited to an established cause.

Manifestos reflect this shift. The venomous specificity of manifestos like the Unabomber’s or even Breivik’s 1,500-page Islamophobic tract has been replaced by muddled, vengeful wailing akin to an online rant, like the manifesto left behind by the Palm Springs IVF clinic bombing suspect. Meanwhile the motivations of perpetrators are getting weirder, with niche, internet-issued dogmas such as promortalism, 5G conspiracies and even “ecofascism” increasingly peppering suspect profiles. Government agencies began using “mixed, unstable or unclear” as a category of concern in the late 2010s, with the Home Office Channel programme finding in 2023 that it constituted a vast 37% of referrals, compared to 19% for extreme Right-wing and 11% for Islamism.

Suggested reading

How Labour hampers counterterrorism

By Dominic Adler

The figure of the Islamist or white supremacist, so totemic in the 2010s, is not gone — the Isis-inspired rampage in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve shows us as much — but he (and it is almost always he) is now flanked by forum-haunting fundamentalists motivated more by personal grievances than the intoxicating heft of traditional fascism or jihad. The terrorist of 2025 is less likely to be a foot soldier — instead he is a main character; he is not redeeming the world from deviance, but lashing out at it for rejecting him. This makes him harder to spot, his movements trickier to predict; it also makes his fury more difficult to douse with the deradicalization initiatives of the 2010s, which knew to home in on acolytes of Anjem Choudary or Tommy Robinson for seams of extremism.

Terror in the 2020s is lonelier, murkier, stranger. And so while the legacy of the 2010s is ambient, grinding dread, the source of that dread has become dispersed, undetectable. One consequence is that this leaves us unprepared for the new face of terror; where we once watched for Islamist cells we should now also expect new heads of the hydra. As I write, Liverpool reels from a ramming incident; so too does Leicester. In Boulder, Colorado, an Egyptian national, illegally in the US, is suspected of firebombing people demonstrating on behalf of Israeli hostages. For my generation, these stories are met with a sense of weary inevitability; for our parents, there must be a parallel in the constant vigilance of the Seventies and Eighties over Provisional IRA bombs.

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Should you watch footage of terrorist attacks?

By Dominic Adler

The failures of Prevent — to which, let’s not forget, Axel Rudakubana was referred three times — do not show us the futility of such programs so much as their toothlessness in the face of more nebulous forms of extremism (his case was closed as no “fixed ideology or motivation” was found). Those susceptible to radicalization or violent breakdowns will always mill about in our societies; a responsible culture is one which denies them access to content on the internet which will push them over the edge, stops them buying knives and guns, and is quick to stopper the pipelines of hatred which run from social outcast to woman-hater to murderer, from devout to extremist to killer.

Eight years after the London Bridge attack, Britain is still on a hair-trigger; the fundamental objective of terrorism, to create fear, is being met. Each time an attack happens, agencies and government departments own “failings” and promise to learn from them; costly inquiries stretch into years, inquests reveal minute-by-minute the events which, we tell ourselves, must “never happen again”. But can we really say those horror-filled final moments of the eight victims of June 3, 2017 won’t be repeated? Being on the back foot, as we always seem to be, is something we can all sorely afford.

Amid fresh chaos in Syria, history risks repeating itself. Turkey has again unleashed its militias against the Kurdish enclave, and thousands more IS members could yet escape. That includes dozens of British citizens, from young children to Shamima Begum to violent male killers. No wonder Sebastian Gorka, Donald Trump’s counter-terrorism pick, is urging London to follow the American lead and repatriate its militants, hoping they can be tried and punished back home.

The British public and Government are dead set against any such repatriations. Yet it’s exactly this policy of abandoning both the detainees, and their Kurdish jailers, which endangers British lives — and risks blowback of terrifying proportions.

The end of the Assad regime has transformed Syria, including the multi-ethnic polity led by the Kurds in North and East Syria (NES). Emboldened by the collapse of Baathism, Turkey is conducting fresh military operations against the Kurds, just like those that enabled Gondal’s escape five years ago. At the same time, the change of government in Washington could bring its own challenges. Trump is currently weighing up withdrawing from the country altogether, leaving the Kurds, and their prisoners, to their fate.

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Will Erdoğan crush the Syrian Kurds?

By Matt Broomfield

All the while, IS remains a threat years after their physical caliphate was eradicated. Attacks in Syria nearly tripled in 2024, while the top Syrian Kurdish commander has warned that Turkish attacks on their territory are further strengthening the organization. The group’s ideology is still potent too. Just last week, a lone-wolf IS-linked extremist killed 15 in New Orleans, underscoring the diverse threat still posed.

Any breakout would strengthen the organization’s resilient transnational networks, encouraging further attacks across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Even before Assad’s fall, the head of MI5 used a rare public address to warn that IS were the number one security threat facing the country, a danger that would increase exponentially if thousands of radicalized loyalists went loose.

Given all this, it’s unsurprising that Trump should push the UK to take back its own militants, ensuring they can’t fade into the wilderness, but finally face criminal justice at last. Nor is the incoming president alone. The Biden administration, the UK’s own terrorism tsar, and the Kurds themselves have all reiterated the same message: there are urgent security reasons for Britain to secure its IS members.

Yet though Khaled Issa, co-chair for foreign affairs in NES, warns that defeating the threat is “the responsibility of the international community as a whole”, David Lammy has poured cold water on any chance of a policy rethink. Rather, the UK looks set to leave its erstwhile Kurdish allies to guard prisoners alone.

As hardly needs restating, the establishment of anything resembling a new caliphate would be a disaster: not just for Britain, but also ordinary people throughout the Middle East. Exploiting civil war in Iraq and Syria, the Salafist organization rose to rule 10 million people back in 2014, drawing thousands of volunteers from over 80 countries. While Assad was responsible for the bulk of the deaths in his country’s bloodbath, IS’s crimes were particularly heinous. They perpetuated a genocide against the Yazidis; slaughtered Shia Muslims and Christians; burned and beheaded prisoners; paraded crucified corpses; raped gay men and threw them off buildings.

Amid this nightmare, the Syrian Kurds found themselves in an unexpected alliance. Kurdish fighters rapidly proved themselves the only force capable of defeating IS on the battlefield, winning global sympathy and ultimately direct support from the USA, UK and other Western powers. Turkey — which fields Nato’s second-largest army — had long fought a violent war against Kurdish guerrillas battling for autonomy. President Erdoğan, for his part, was unsurprisingly enraged as the US chose to partner with Kurdish ground forces. But Washington trusted their Kurdish partners, and ignored protests from Ankara to offer “temporary and transactional” support to a multiethnic anti-IS coalition spearheaded by Kurdish units. By 2017, this coalition had liberated Raqqa, the IS capital, capturing thousands of jihadis as they went.

Yet these battle-hardened volunteers didn’t simply vanish alongside their caliphate. As Issa notes, over 10,000 male combatants remain in Kurdish custody, all guarded on a minuscule budget and amid war, geopolitical isolation and economic collapse. Male militants are held dozens to a room in former schools, crudely repurposed as detention centers. These are places where disease and radicalization spread with equal ease.

Meanwhile, thousands of highly radicalized female members and their children are held alongside innocent, internally-displaced Syrians and Iraqis in a shabby camp-cum-detention center called al-Hol. Among the endless rows of tents, female loyalists run a clandestine “mini-caliphate” — where they intimidate other residents through beatings, arson, and murder. Some even hold Yazidi women in secret slavery to this day. More than half of the camp’s population is under 12, with female militants grooming and training young boys to continue the jihad. When I visited al-Hol, primary-aged children threw stones as we walked among the tents, raising their index fingers in salute to Allah.

While these conditions might seem a fitting punishment, in truth they only create the perfect conditions for the organization to regroup and rebuild: an ongoing sleeper-cell campaign outside the camps and prisons has killed hundreds of locals. At the same time, Assad’s fall has brought fresh opportunities for IS, benefiting in particular from Turkey’s manipulation of the Syrian crisis to launch fresh attacks against NES. Notwithstanding its claims to oppose IS, the Erdoğan government has happily indulged extremists elsewhere, allowing many thousands of militants to cross its territory into Syria. Today, Ankara bankrolls dozens of Islamist militias for the purposes of targeting the Kurds, including those sanctioned by the USA for sheltering members of IS, while top jihadi commanders have long hidden in Turkish-occupied territory.

Combined with the eagerness of IS members themselves to escape their rackety Kurdish prisons, the arguments in favor of repatriation are clear — not least when the numbers, for Britain anyway, are so manageable. With no more than 10 male British fighters left in Syria, alongside 20 women and 40 minors, it wouldn’t be hard for the UK criminal justice system to process them. As UK terrorism commissioner Jonathan Hall KC has rightly noted, a country of the UK’s stature could easily manage the repatriation of a few dozen ISIS affiliates.

Why, then, has Britain been so slow to take action? Part of the answer again involves Turkey, which is bitterly opposed to any form of political or diplomatic recognition of NES. Domestic opposition clearly matters too. Liberal commentators are doubtless too quick to paint British IS affiliates as mere victims rather than potential culprits who need to be brought to trial, whether in the UK or elsewhere. But at the same time, conservative voices are too hasty in demanding that IS detainees in Syria are left to rot, ignoring the reality that this places an unjustifiable security and humanitarian burden on the Kurds.

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The betrayal of British Kurds

By Matt Broomfield

What’s missing in all this is the voice of the UK’s own Kurdish partners. As Issa puts it: “ISIS committed crimes against our people, war crimes, crimes against humanity, yet there was no international court or criminal justice procedure.” He and his colleagues have therefore been appealing for the West to repatriate its own nationals; to set up a proper international court or tribunal to process those thousands of global IS fighters; and to provide proper financial, political and diplomatic support to their beleaguered administration.

A senior Syrian Kurdish delegation will shortly visit the UK, where the security threat posed by IS detainees in NES will be high on the agenda. But while these officials have met with Trump and Emmanuel Macron, British authorities once again seem terrified of upsetting President Erdoğan, the new kingmaker in Syria — and a key British trade partner. And with Turkey clamoring to finish the destruction it began back in 2019, time is running out for the UK to prevent a catastrophe whose fallout will reach far beyond the windblown camps of northern Syria, with fanatics far worse than Shamima Begum free to spread terror once more.

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

After each mass shooting or terror attack, we begin the collective actuarial task of apportioning cultural and political blame. After the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, Salon published an article under the remarkable headline: “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” The author, David Sirota, is no fool: He was trying to make a point about how Muslims are unfairly blamed en masse after paroxysms of Islamic fundamentalism. And, yes, his outlet was going for clicks. But he and his editors were also playing the game we always play.

In Jabbar’s case, the blame game is deceptively straightforward. He was a convert to Islam and adorned his truck with an ISIS flag. To commentators on the political right, this was the “globalized intifada” that the most ardent pro-Palestinian activists have been calling for. It’s notable, though, that he seems to have turned to jihadism only recently, as personal disappointments and financial obligations piled up. Islamism was the last, deadly stop on his journey to all-American loserdom.

It is, of course, of paramount importance to investigate Jabbar’s ties to extremist groups. But those determined to tether him to radical Islam miss the point. Jabbar had far more in common with Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, than with Osama bin Laden: A quiet rage builds over the years. Marriages fail. Ventures collapse. 

Just watch the 2020 video Jabbar recorded to promote his real-estate business. He is crisply dressed and uses all the right corporate lingo. His office is neat, with a poster touting “discipline” behind his right shoulder. But there is no enthusiasm to his voice, no light in his eyes.

There was a time when the military was a route into a decent life, especially if followed by a college degree. Jabbar was a veteran and college graduate, but these institutions didn’t provide him with stability — or a sense of community. And if his social-media feed is anything like yours, or mine, it was full of glamorous people living their best lives, shifting the paradigm, crushing it, leaning in. It isn’t difficult to imagine the widening gulf between the real and the digital becoming intolerable.

His military service is a notable and alarming indicator, one he shares with another recent attack. Shortly after the carnage in New Orleans, a man later identified as Matthew Livelsberger blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, killing only himself while wounding at least seven. Both Jabber and Livelsberger served in the US Army and had received multiple commendations. They served their country before turning sharply against it. And though we all think we know why — Palestine, the manosphere, guns, Trump, video games, Soros, vaccines — the truth is that the breakdown is more complicated, and more perniciously institutional, than such narratives permit.

Abandoned by elites over Vietnam — a war engineered by so many of our best and brightest that they should have held the 1965 Yale-Harvard football game in Saigon — the armed forces have never really recovered their standing. Nor, it’s worth noting, has the US military won a major conflict outright in nearly a century. Today, the military reflects American pathologies instead of expunging them—and those issues are far deeper than whatever “wokeness” exercises Trump and his nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth.

Other cases are even harder to fathom. Just hours before the slaughter in New Orleans, the FBI arrested a Virginia man who was in the possession of “the largest cache of ‘finished explosive devices’ ever found in the FBI’s history.” According to The New York Times, the suspect, Brad Spafford, had a #NoLivesMatter insignia on his backpack. He wasn’t a social-justice activist (#BlackLivesMatter), nor a pro-police conservative (#BlueLivesMatter). Spafford was a nihilist. He simply wanted to kill. 

Suggested reading

Should you watch footage of terrorist attacks?

By Simon Cottee

The loss of institutional integrity is everywhere, and you can plainly see it. A few years ago, Tablet editor Alana Newhouse wrote an essay headlined “Everything Is Broken,” in which she advised readers to “give up on our current institutions,” since “they already gave up on us.” That is perhaps possible if you have sufficient social capital, as well as capital in the bank account. But if you are Jabbar, already living on the margins, dragging failed businesses and failed marriages behind you, giving up isn’t going to look quite so easy. 

What I mean to say is that Jabbar didn’t “fall through the cracks,” as the cliché goes. The cracks have widened into canyons spanning entire sectors of society. Sure, maybe a social worker missed obvious warning signs. But what ails the people, no social worker can fix. That is not to malign programs that help veterans suffering from PTSD, women escaping abusive relationships, or those struggling to pay their mortgages. These are necessary in a country that makes mere existence into a savage free-market contest. But perhaps we should think about what it is that we exist for, other than mere animal survival. 

It takes no great leader to condemn a killer like Jabbar. But it will take an exceptional figure to name, let alone address, the societal ills that he and Livelsberger and Spafford embody. Doing so will not be politically expedient. But it is also necessary. We can’t go on much longer treating the Dow Jones Industrial Average as the true index of our collective health.

After the attack in New Orleans, there was some discussion among the relevant parties over whether the Sugar Bowl — a high-stakes football game — should still take place at the Superdome. The decision was made to postpone until Thursday night, whereupon fifth-ranked Notre Dame blunted second-ranked Georgia’s formidable air assault, the Fighting Irish beating the Bulldogs, 23 to 10.

The question of whether a football game is to be played after a national tragedy is truly one of the great modern quandaries of our time. Two days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the Dallas Cowboys played the Cleveland Browns in Cleveland. It wasn’t a happy contest. “This was a game that nobody was interested in playing, coaching, watching, or writing about,” a columnist observed.

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The truth about extremist misogyny

By Mary Harrington

And yet the show must always go on. There is a relentlessness to American life that foreigners perceive more readily than those born here. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence observed. “It has never yet melted.” In the decades since that observation, it has only become more true, not less. When, in 2001, the NFL cancelled a weekend of games in the wake of 9/11, Brian Billick, who coached the Baltimore Ravens, disagreed with the decision. “I don’t want cowards to dictate what we do in this country,” he said, “That’s where my anguish is right now.” 

If we had real public intellectuals, perhaps they could help make sense of the moment. But they ceased to matter long ago. Now, you head to X (the app formerly known as Twitter), which will give you the take you already had, just a few notches angrier. The same huge and impersonal forces that ripple through all of us can crack some. If you have the material and psychic armaments needed to survive a moment such as ours, consider yourself lucky. Fewer and fewer people do.

And yet, the show goes on. Before the rescheduled game, NPR ran a segment about the Sugar Bowl and the people who attended despite the attack. An on-the-ground correspondent spoke with a man from Cincinnati who had come with his son, both “decked out in Fighting Irish gear.” The fan said that he had been watching the news and had come to the conclusion that it was safe to be there. “So, I have no issues,” he said, failing to understand that he was being asked a moral question that went beyond his own safety.

As if to help him along, the correspondent explained that the fan had been “a senior at Notre Dame back in the 1981 Sugar Bowl, when the Fighting Irish played Georgia and lost big time.” Back in the studio, the host chuckled. “OK, so he’s looking for payback,” she said.

The last time Gondal, who was born in Paris but spent most of her life in Britain, was in the news was in October 2022, when The Sunday Times reported on her impending trial in France. But her imprisonment seems to have gone unreported both in this country and in France. I only found out about it recently after idly googling Gondal’s name — as one on occasion does in my game — and there it was in a rather dreary and matter-of-fact diary report of the Musée-mémorial du terrorisme, which was created in 2018 to honour the memory of France’s terror victims.

The report records the following. Gondal’s trial was held from 1 to 5 December 2023. The prosecution requested a sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment, highlighting Gondal’s “role as an influencer in the service of Isis”, her “apology for acts of terrorism, including those of 13 November 2015 in France, as well as the carrying and handling of weapons of war”. Gondal’s defence, led by Marie Dosé, a prominent French attorney who has represented several other female Isis returnees, argued that the prosecution lacked the evidence for its claims and insisted that Gondal, from the birth of her first child, had wanted to “escape the grip of Isis”.

On the last day of the trial, the president of the court asked if Gondal had anything to say before giving its verdict. “This trial means a lot to me. I apologise,” she responded, striking a tone of respectful humility. As the diary report concludes: “The court delivered its verdict at the end of the afternoon, 10 years’ of criminal imprisonment with a security period of two or three years, with socio-judicial monitoring and a requirement for care.”

Gondal’s imprisonment marks the end of a mad sojourn which started in January 2015. Gondal, then 21, quit her university studies at Goldsmiths, relocated to Raqqa, Syria, became a recruiter for Isis, bore two children, married and widowed three times, got grazed between the eyes by an exploding bullet, earned an exclusion order from the UK, survived Isis’s defeat at Baghuz, surrendered to the Syrian Democratic Forces, starred in a documentary about her life, and fled Kurdish-administered captivity after her detention camp was bombed by Turkey. She was eventually recaptured by Turkish forces and deported to France with her two boys in November 2019.

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There will be many for whom Gondal’s 10-year prison term will be woefully inadequate. This is because of the scope and gravity of Isis’s many crimes, including the genocide perpetrated against the Yazidis, and the role that Isis women played in those crimes. Yet Gondal’s sentence is scarcely a lenient one and exceeds the average prison sentence given to French Isis returnees, which, according to researcher Sofia Koller, is six years and eight months. It also substantially exceeds the average prison sentence for female Isis returnees in Germany, which is three years and 10 months. And it’s a considerably more punitive sentence than the one handed down to the only other British female Isis returnee who has faced justice: Tareena Shakil, who is now reportedly an aspiring fashion influencer, after being jailed for six years in February 2016.

Yet back in the UK, Gondal’s repatriation to France and imprisonment raises some uncomfortable questions. The first is reputational: it is frankly embarrassing that the UK is unable or unwilling to deal with someone like Gondal, when the evidence against her was so damning, extensive and easily retrievable. From 2014 to 2016 she would use Twitter to launch tirades against the West and to recruit young women to the Isis cause. It is of course much harder to know precisely what she did in Syria when she was offline and how high up she was in the hierarchy of foreign Isis women in Raqqa, but it surely would have been possible for the British authorities to have mounted a successful prosecution against her. However, they chose not to and instead shifted that burden onto the French. It is additionally shameful if, as the French report notes, there was a “lack of cooperation from the British justice system” in France’s efforts to convict Gondal.

The second question that Gondal’s conviction raises is educational: had she been tried in Britain, we really could have learned something valuable about her radicalisation and the broader context in which it took place. And this in turn would have cast an illuminating light on the scores of other British women and teens who followed the same path as Gondal and who may even have received help from her in navigating that path. Gondal, for her part, says that she was “manipulated” into joining Isis, which is what nearly all the captured jihadi brides say, apart from the most unrepentant ones. The line that they were deceived by the false promise of a brighter world and were unaware of the beheadings etc. is, of course, bullshit — but it would have been useful to forensically sift through the lies in the cold and purifying light of a courtroom.

More crucially, putting Gondal on the stand would have offered an excellent opportunity to probe her about the offline world she inhabited in the months and years prior to her departure to Syria. We know that social networks and familial ties play an important role in radicalisation, so how did this figure in Gondal’s biography? Did she have a radical father, uncle or aunt, say? Which mosque was she attending and who was she rolling with at Goldsmiths (she had once excitedly tweeted about the fund-raising activities of Goldsmith’s Islamic Society in November 2014)? Who (if anyone) did she know in London’s pro-Isis scene in 2014 and what were the nature of those relationships (if any such ones existed)?

Perhaps we don’t have the stomach, here in the UK, to ask such questions because we’re too afraid of the answers. So instead we idiotically blather on about the online “grooming” of jihadi brides, without any actual “groomers” ever being identified or held to account, and warn about the dangers of social media, which can somehow transport someone like Gondal to Syria, make her enter into multiple marriages with jihadi fighters and turn her into a one-woman Islamic State media outlet.

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The third question that Gondal’s case raises is S-shaped, because if Gondal can be successfully returned and punished then why not Shamima Begum? She, after all, is still stateless and stranded in Syria, after last month losing her final bid to appeal the removal of her British citizenship. But Begum isn’t going away and Gondal’s successful conviction in Paris may add additional pressure on a newly formed Labour government to reconsider the practical and ethical wisdom of indefinitely blocking her return to the UK.

Like Begum, Gondal has expressed regret for her actions and apologised to the British public. But has she really renounced Isis’s ideology and accepted her own culpability in the group’s myriad horrors? I doubt it, having watched her denials and delusions in Benedetta Argentieri’s riveting documentary about her. I’m also sceptical that prison will cause a change of heart in her. It didn’t, for example, spark a change in John Walker Lindh, who, after serving 20 years in federal prison for fighting with the Taliban, appears to have remained a devout extremist. So, too, has a Trinidadian woman who joined Isis in 2014 and is currently serving a prison sentence in Iraq; I know this because I follow her Facebook updates detailing the injustice of her imprisonment. “Such ideas do not reliably dissolve with time,” as Graeme Wood wrote about Isis’s ideology in the aftermath of the group’s territorial demise in Syria. “They sometimes become more concentrated.”

This isn’t of course an argument against locking up violent extremists, but rather a note of realism about its capacity to effect positive ideological change. Whether or not Gondal has changed or can change remains to be seen, but either way justice has assuredly been served. The only failure is that it wasn’t served here.

While a recent US military review concluded that Logari’s plot was not preventable, the findings were less a vindication of America’s chaotic withdrawal than a reminder of how the US–Afghan relationship had broken down. As US forces withdrew, many Afghan government officials told me that they had warned their US counterparts about the threat of Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS–KP), the Afghan branch of Isis. But it appears the US had stopped listening to their warnings; and in doing so, it helped to create the very conditions that led to the Abbey Gate attack.

One of the men who had warned them was Ahmad Zia Seraj, the General Director of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Once a revered spy chief targeted by the Taliban for assassination, Seraj, now a refugee waiting for his residency papers and teaching at King’s College London, cut a very different figure when we met in a London hotel at the end of last year.

Long before the US withdrawal, Seraj had been telling the American top brass about the threat of IS–KP, and is still doing so. “We had detainees from 15 different nationalities in our NDS detention facilities,” he told me. In fact, Seraj had personally interrogated Logari. He knew him as Hamed, a “bright, intelligent young man who spoke several languages fluently”. Seraj described how he brought religious scholars and even Logari’s father to his cell in an attempt to dissuade Logari from becoming a suicide bomber. But it was no use: “Once a person wants to become a suicide bomber, there’s nothing that can stop him.” Logari didn’t want freedom; he wanted paradise.

Seraj told me that he had shared everything the NDS had with the CIA, who would then brief Nato’s commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller, and other US officials. “Frankly speaking we were on the same page.” In fact, he warned anyone who would listen — whether the US, Pakistan, or Central Asian states — about the security threats. So why was he ignored?

During the postmortem of the chaotic US withdrawal, Biden blamed Trump and the US military intelligence apparatus which didn’t anticipate the speed of the Taliban takeover. He also blamed the Afghan government and the unwillingness of the Afghan army to fight. It seemed to play on tropes and criticisms made by journalists and Afghans for decades that Afghanistan was run by corrupt politicians and warlords.

Trump had dealt Biden a bad hand when he came to office in January 2021. The Afghan–American relationship had been damaged ever since the Doha Accords were signed between the Americans and the Taliban in February 2020. The agreement stipulated that the US would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021; the Taliban, in turn, promised to cut ties with al-Qaeda and sit down for peace talks with the Kabul government. Yet the democratically elected Afghan government wasn’t part of the discussions. 

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The deal had been engineered by Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, an experienced figure who served under various US presidents, including Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, but whose rough and tumble diplomacy was not liked in Kabul. The US envoy had reached out to the Taliban without consulting the Afghan government. As Abdullah Khanjani, the government’s Deputy Minister for Peace, told me: “One of the key strategic problems with the whole structure of the peace process was that the Americans did not integrate the Afghan state and Afghan voices into it.”

By contrast, the negotiations empowered and legitimised the Taliban. According to Khanjani, with the Doha Accords, “a strategic propaganda opportunity was given to the Taliban, as an insurgent group. [US Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo sat there to endorse the deal with the legitimacy of being ex-CIA. And this was a shock to everyone. It was a game changer for the Taliban. And this also normalised the Taliban and [changed] the international system of power relations.” A green light was given for other countries to follow suit.

The Doha Accords also set the stage for the Abbey Gate attack. The terms of the deal included a prisoner swap, with the Taliban receiving 5,000 prisoners in exchange for 1,000 captives. The Afghan government was incensed by the condition: the US seemed to be treating Afghanistan as if it was not a sovereign nation but a plaything of empire. One day after the accords were signed, President Ashraf Ghani told reporters that “the government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free[ing] 5,000 Taliban prisoners”, adding that 400 of those prisoners were “a threat to the world”. Seraj told me that many of those prisoners were involved in high-profile attacks including those on the German embassy in 2017, the Intercontinental Hotel in January 2018 and the G4S compound in November 2018. Some of those released, according to a senior government official, were not Taliban fighters but belonged to IS–KP and were related to the Taliban through familial and tribal links. Their release would mean that many would return to the insurgency. 

Neither the preliminary intra-Afghan peace talks in Doha nor the prisoner swap that followed resulted in a reduction in violence. Instead, they gnawed away at the state, creating the conditions for the chaos to come. According to Shuja Jamal, international relations director at the Afghan government’s National Security Council, more than 21,000 Afghan army soldiers were killed, injured, taken prisoner or deserted between March and October 2020. Attacks on journalists and politicians increased as well.

But perhaps more importantly, the prisoner swap demoralised the NDS — the very agency that the US needed to share vital local information. The officers who had interrogated the prisoners could now be identified and targeted by the Taliban and IS–KP. As Seraj explained, many of the NDS officers no longer wanted to risk carrying out interrogations and debriefings if the prisoners would be released.

“You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it,” Seraj added. He had always wanted to model the NDS on the CIA and focus purely on intelligence-gathering, but this soon proved impossible. Instead, Ghani tasked him with strengthening citizen militias that could resist the coming Taliban onslaught. But accepting the task, which he felt should be the military’s remit, made the NDS cumbersome. They were now working with local mayors and tribal and security chiefs on sourcing weapons instead of being the eyes and ears of the republic. And as government forces neared collapse, more problems piled up on Seraj’s desk. Instead of focusing on the enemy, the NDS were forced to investigate corruption allegations against these militias. “80% of our work fell to investigating those charges, while the enemy was at the gates.”

The US withdrawal also meant reducing the air support given to Afghan forces. “Our forces,” said Seraj, “had become so addicted to air support, that without it, it was very difficult for them to fight.” It meant that the Afghan army could not stop the Taliban advance, resulting in the swift collapse of the republic. The Taliban made the situation even more difficult by deliberately targeting Afghan pilots and many were unwilling to fly. Due to a domestic skill shortage the Afghan government tried to source foreign contractors who could service their aircraft, but with little success. In December 2020, National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib flew to Azerbaijan to buy drones which Baku had used to devastating effect against the Armenians in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War weeks earlier, but to no avail. Kabul also reached out to Turkey and the US, wanting to set up a special operations team that could deploy Predator and Reaper drones, but the US was reluctant to accede to their requests. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan was working to undermine the Afghan government. Although the US and Pakistan were allies, Islamabad had always viewed the US presence in Afghanistan as a threat to its nuclear arsenal, which it needed to counter its hostile neighbour, India. As a result, it could not support the US-backed government in Kabul and instead provided sanctuary to the Taliban. Seraj had confronted his Pakistani counterparts on the issue many times, but they would often deny or deflect the issue. 

The Trump administration aggravated the situation in other ways. After the US assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, the situation in Afghanistan became more volatile. Tehran wanted revenge and allowed the Taliban to open up an office in Mashhad in north-eastern Iran. “There was a strong commitment from the Iranians to help the Taliban,” Seraj said. “It’s not that the Taliban are very friendly to them, it was just to see the US leave, and Taliban were used as a tool to expedite that process.”

When Biden came to office in January 2021 he pledged to “lead not merely by example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security.” However, as Alexander Ward shows in his new book, The Internationalists, Biden had always been consistent about getting out of the nation-building business. After a review, he pressed ahead with Trump’s withdrawal policy, albeit with a slight delay. American troops would now leave by the end of August 2021.

Biden made the hand that Trump had dealt him even worse, at least from the perspective of his Afghan partners. The fact that they kept on Khalilzad, Trump’s special envoy, was a sign to Mohib that they would get more of the same. “He would be their fall guy,” Mohib told me. Moreover, as if to rub salt in the Afghans’ wounds, a scathing letter from the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was leaked. It urged Ghani to return to the negotiating table, humiliating and alienating the Kabul government further. It showed the world how the US treated their “partners” and destroyed any goodwill left between Washington and Kabul. Afghan government delegations visited both Moscow and Tehran, apparently exploring other political options.

In February 2021, Seraj invited regional intelligence chiefs to a secret conference and urged them to support his government, warning that many of the extremist groups that plagued them, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), had close ties with the Taliban. The response was muted. “Those were the days when the popularity of the government was so low in Afghanistan,” Seraj recalled, “the neighbours didn’t take us seriously because they knew the government was dying.”

Four months later, Biden gave the order to withdraw. It was to be done as fast as possible: Washington wanted to reduce the risk to its own troops, but in its eagerness to leave, created the conditions for suicide bombers to flourish and move undetected. The US assessed that the Afghan army would hold out long enough to come to a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. But they didn’t take into account Pakistan’s role. 

Intense clashes between the Taliban and the Afghan army immediately broke out in Wardak and other areas. In June 2021, the Taliban took more territory and there was fighting in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Speaking two years later, Fazli Rafi, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, told me that the government assessed that these attacks had a professional command and control structure. “The Taliban knew guerrilla warfare, but this time the Taliban were attacking in 24 different provinces with three different districts in each. That was over 100 battle fronts. We assessed that the Taliban could only attack five provinces. This was the work of a professional army – and Pakistan was implicated.” 

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On 22 June, Seraj’s overwhelming fear was realised. Sher Khan Bandar, the main crossing point on the border with Tajikistan, fell to the Taliban. The dam had been breached. The Afghan government could no longer control its own borders. It was now a case of salvaging whatever one could from the flood. 

Even at the height of the crisis, the president tried to sidestep ministers he felt were close to the Americans. Ghani had become very suspicious of ministers and political leaders. According to insiders, he felt that many Afghan leaders had private back channels with the US and the Taliban and were pursuing their own agendas. But marginalising the ministers only led to more chaos. When they ordered the commanders to do something, the latter responded by saying that the president had told them otherwise.

On 2 July, US troops withdrew from Bagram air base, the key entry point for American hardware and personnel for 20 years. Only a few troops stayed behind to protect the US embassy. By the end of that month, the southern cities of Herat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were scenes of intense fighting. In the first week of August, the Taliban assassinated Dawa Khan Menapal, President Ghani’s public relations chief. Reports of Taliban fighters settling old tribal scores on the Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan heightened the fear. 

By the time the president fled Kabul on 15 August, all the major cities had fallen. It was on that day that the Taliban opened the gates of Pul-i-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul. Taliban militants, as well as hardened criminals, emerged into the sunlight to taste freedom. And among the throng was Logari. 

Seraj was shocked by the president’s departure. Moments earlier, Ghani had called him personally saying that “we should not allow thieves and people to create chaos, we should use whatever force we still have to control the situation”. At the time, Seraj was in Kabul scrambling to secure the release of the governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, as well as trying to relieve Mazar-i-Sharif — the largest city in northern Afghanistan. When the Taliban entered Kabul, he made his way to the presidential palace with his side arm at the ready, intending to protect the Commander-in-Chief of the republic until the end. He expected a call from the president to join other ministers and officials at the palace and then wait for him to take a final decision on the right course of action. Ghani’s departure stunned him. He returned to the office and sat on his desk, numb. “I was speechless for 20 minutes.”

One by one, his WhatsApp groups also fell silent, as ministers and senior civil servants started to leave them. He received messages from his colleagues asking for instructions. But what could he tell them? Should he ask them to fight the Taliban? “The elected government that we’re fighting for has collapsed,” Seraj said. “So what was our legitimacy to stay on?” He continued to receive panicked messages from his colleagues asking for orders, but he had none to give, except that they should lie low and find safety as best they possibly can. The republic was no more and they were now on their own. A US State Department contact got Seraj out of the country, and he joined his wife who was already in London. 

As August passed and Seraj began to piece his life together, the chaos of Biden’s withdrawal became apparent. Today, there are already many reports that al-Qaeda are rebuilding, unimpeded. The UN security council recently noted that eight new camps had been established in 2024 alone. An organisation that appeared to be on life support, looking for a reason to exist, appears to be suddenly revived: in a piece published this month, al-Qaeda’s new leader, Sayf al-Adl, called for attacks on Western and Zionist targets. 

In such a world, it’s hard not to be reminded of Seraj’s earlier warning: “You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it.”

As someone who researches and writes about terrorism for a living, I could say that I had a professional interest in watching this type of murder porn, but that would be only half-true; I wanted to watch. I had no good reason to, unless writing this article justifies watching a terrorist repeatedly slash a man’s throat with a knife, as was shown in a minute-and-a-half video released on Saturday by Isis’s Amaq News Agency and further amplified on X by a Right-wing British activist called Tommy Robinson. I’m not so sure about the soundness of that justification.

These videos are defiling. No one has the right to watch a video of someone getting murdered or their stricken body mutilated by a group of killers. To do so is to violate their privacy and dignity. And it’s nothing less than an abomination that someone like Cheong, who is handsomely paid via Twitter ad revenue, should receive a financial reward for circulating these videos to his nearly one million followers. Cheong later tweeted on Friday that he would not be posting any more videos or images of the Crocus City Hall attack, “as it does not serve anyone’s interest to see the lifeless, and bloody bodies of so many innocent people”. However, this thought didn’t seem to have crossed his mind a few hours earlier that very evening.

When the American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded on camera in 2002, the Islamist militants behind it set a grim precedent, launching an era of the terrorist snuff film that continues unabated to this day. Terrorism, as Brian Jenkins pointed out some 50 years ago, is a form of theatre, “aimed at the people watching”. But Pearl’s beheading signalled something new in the history of political violence: the use of the camera as a weapon of terror and radicalisation.

Prior to this, terrorists parasitically used the international media to disseminate the news of their atrocities, just as that media was in turn parasitic on them for news stories. But now with access to cheaper and better cameras, they could become auteurs of terror, with total creative control over their own spectacles of violence. This development reached its apogee with the rise of Isis in 2014 when, within the space of four chaotic years of expansion and contraction, the group presided over the murder of over 2,400 people on camera. Many of these murders were carefully staged, but others were recorded on GoPro cameras from the POV of the killer-assassins.

Just as Isis was about to lose its last sliver of territory in Syria in March 2019, Brenton Tarrant launched a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 Muslims. He had livestreamed part of the attack on Facebook. Tarrant, a far-Right terrorist, had assiduously followed the Isis playbook, using maximum savagery to generate maximum exposure. But not even Isis had livestreamed their atrocities, a further innovation that has since been copied: in May 2022, another far-Right terrorist called Payton Gendron murdered 10 African-Americans at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, broadcasting his shooting spree on Twitch, an online gaming platform.

At the same time, the victims of terrorism have become auteurs of their own terror: thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone, we can now see terrorism from the point of view of the victims and in real time. This, too, is a new and significant development in the history of terrorist communication and, as with any new technological innovation, the ethics around watching and disseminating these videos have yet to be fully worked out.

Many of the videos of last week’s attack in Moscow were recorded by those who were on the receiving end, desperately fleeing or hiding from the gunmen. These videos are not as shocking as the footage produced by the killers, but they are nonetheless horribly visceral, taking the viewer into the foreground of the horror as it’s unfolding. Should you watch?

There are two contrasting ways of thinking about this. One is that, by recording their “lived” death or near-death experiences, the victims of terrorism want us to watch and to witness their private trauma and suffering as a form of recognising some public truth: This happened to us. The implicit assumption is that the viewer should witness both the horror of their experience and the inhumanity of those who are inflicting it on them: that we should not feel complacent or indifferent to their suffering. As Susan Sontag put it in Regarding the Pain of Others: “Let the atrocious images haunt us”; let us not shy away from “what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously”.

Perhaps this is why so many of the partygoers who were attacked by Hamas at the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7 filmed it on their smartphones: they wanted to document and certify the unthinkable horror that was happening to them, just as they had filmed every other significant event in their all-too-short lives. The Israeli government, for its part, publicly released attack footage from both Hamas fighters, who filmed some of their atrocities on GoPro cameras, and terrified Israeli victims as they hid and sought refuge moments before their death. In one tweet, the Israeli government posted footage of Hamas fighters shooting a dog, explaining: “We wish we didn’t have to share these videos, but we can’t stop. We need you all to know.”

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The opposing viewpoint is that watching spectacles of terror is fraught with moral risk and should be avoided. This is for two reasons: first, watching directly colludes with the terrorists who want people to watch their acts of terror, regardless of whose perspective the horrifying footage is recorded from. Second, there is the possibility that, in repeatedly watching images of terror, we become desensitised to them, leading to passivity or even a perverse kind of voyeurism that, like pornography, creates an insatiable desire for ever more extreme content. This was Sontag’s original concern in On Photography, published in 1977, before changing her mind in Regarding the Pain of Others, which appeared in 2003. Atrocity images, she then worried, can “transfix” and “anesthetise” after repeated exposure.

Given the rise of the smartphone and a social media driven by outrage and excess, Sontag’s later position looks less and less convincing by the day. We should, of course, know about the suffering of others, but the sheer volume of haunting images that now assail us, bidden or otherwise, fundamentally changes the calculus. We have surely now gone beyond a saturation point, and although it’s hard to completely avoid gratuitous online atrocity footage, one quick and easy way of seeing markedly less of it is to unfollow or block those shameless content-curators who make a career out of exploiting our most base impulses.

Yet this is easier said than done. “There is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” former President Barack Obama said in April 2002. And I am just as susceptible to that demand as everyone else hooked on social media. Perhaps this explains why I so loathe the curators of online atrocity porn: they show you disgusting things and arouse your curiosity, and then you feel no small measure of self-disgust for watching. This is, of course, less than ideal — but it’s at least better than feeling nothing at all.

Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, ISKP has worked to build up its external operations capabilities as well as its propaganda arm to incite violence against its enemies. And this project has largely been successful: ISKP has now carried out multiple attacks inside Iran, fired rockets into Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and has been involved in multiple violent incidents in the Maldives. The branch also had plots foiled in Iran, India, Turkey, the Maldives, Tajikistan, and Qatar. Most recently, a plan to attack a central square and church in Jalal-Abadin, Kyrgyzstan, during New Year celebrations was disrupted by special services.

Closer to home, ISKP has overtly stated its intention to target the West, adding a new dynamic to the pre-existing threat from Isis’s central apparatus in Iraq and Syria and its supporters abroad. Only last week, it was revealed that a robust transnational ISKP-linked network was the focus of a coordinated series of raids across Europe after foreign intelligence services tipped off the governments of Spain, Germany, and Austria. The Austrian and German cell reportedly sought to target Cologne Cathedral and Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral. It followed a similar operation last July, when Germany and the Netherlands co-ordinated to dismantle an ISKP-linked network reportedly plotting attacks in Germany.

Ever since March 2019, when the flags of the Syrian Democratic Forces were raised over Isis’s final stronghold in Baghuz, the terror group has been focusing on leveraging events abroad to galvanise and incite its supporters. One such opportunity presented itself last June when an Iraqi asylum seeker in Sweden burned a copy of the Quran outside of the country’s largest mosque. Almost immediately, Isis propagandists tried to use the incident to ignite followers into action. Their weekly al-Naba newsletter, for instance, told its readers to begin “carrying out attacks in the heartland of the kuffar” by “striking their necks and spilling their blood”. ISKP even published a pamphlet critical of the Taliban for failing to condemn the act harshly enough.

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Nor did its rhetoric fall on deaf ears. After a similar burning last January, Swedish police detained five men on suspicion of conspiracy to commit terrorist crimes, all of whom were reportedly tied to “international calls for attacks”. In Germany, meanwhile, two brothers were detained for planning a bombing against Swedish targets. One of the two men allegedly told a supporter of Isis that he intended to attack a church in retaliation for the Quran burning. Similar arrests took place in Turkey.

Yet it wasn’t until October 7 that this Islamist impetus really burst into the open, with Isis suddenly finding itself on fertile soil for cultivating new followers in the West. Shortly after Israel commenced its military response to Hamas’s attack, al-Naba ran an editorial titled “Practical Steps to Fight the Jews”. The article criticised Israel’s military action in Gaza, its historical oppression of Palestinians, and scorned the West for its past and present support for Jerusalem. It then went on to call for a “rapid field effort to target the Jewish presence in the entire world”, specifying the need to “target and attack Jewish and Crusader embassies everywhere”. As for desired targets, it identified “the Jewish neighborhoods, in America and Europe”, as they “constitute the backbone of the Jewish economy and the hotbeds of control in Western Crusader decision-making circles supporting the Jewish statelet”.

ISKP, in the latest issue of Voice of Khurasan, its flagship English-language magazine, reproduced a translation of al-Naba’s editorial, as well as a full page exalting various Isis-inspired attacks. Furthermore, it threatened the “Crusader governments” of the West, telling them to prepare for many more such occurrences in the future. The issue also featured a call to “kill the Jews where ever you find [them]” and included an infographic advising its supporters to target tourist sites, educational institutions and music events, as well as what weapons to use: Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, crossbows, nail guns, knives, and vehicles.

Within a week of October 7, these calls appeared to bear fruit, when a 20-year-old Russian Muslim fatally stabbed a teacher in France outside of a school in Arras. In a video posted beforehand, the alleged perpetrator highlighted the Hamas attack and expressed support for Isis. Three days later, two Swedish soccer fans were gunned down in Brussels by a 45-year-old Tunisian man who claimed to be acting on behalf of the Islamic State. He was later killed by authorities at a cafe. And in Paris, on December 3, a man claiming allegiance to Isis fatally stabbed a German tourist and injured two other people near the Eiffel Tower.

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This year, all the signs suggest that Isis will only further ramp up its rhetoric. On 5 January, in a speech titled “And kill them wherever you find them”, spokesman Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari announced a new campaign of violence, calling for jihadists to target “Jews, Christians or their allies, on the streets and roads of America, Europe, and the world”. He encouraged supporters to “detonate explosives, burn them with grenades and fiery agents, shoot them with bullets, cut their throats with sharp knives, and run them over with vehicles” in order to “let them know that their crimes in Palestine, Iraq, Sham, and other Muslim countries are being retaliated for in their homes in Washington, Paris, London, Rome, and other Kaffir lands”.

The territorial power base of Isis may be far smaller than 10 years ago, when it was its zenith, but it still presents a heightened threat — and to Europe in particular. The attacks and high number of foiled plots in the West signal that these trends will persist. Combined with Western security and intelligence resources stretched to focus on developments involving China, Russia, Iran, and now the Houthis, Isis and its followers may find new opportunities to carry out operations.

Journalists wrote alarmed pieces about nice boys and girls being transformed into jihadist monsters. Politicians made speeches about the “disease of Islamic extremism”. Academics constructed entire theses on the etymology and evolution of Jihad. Former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz even seemed relevant. This all now seems a distant memory. How did this happen? Did the jihadists go away, or did we just get bored of them?

Unfortunately, the jihadists haven’t disappeared; Isis, for example, is reportedly resurgent in sub-Saharan Africa, as are its rivals, al-Qaeda. But global jihadism as a movement is in grave disarray . The Isis caliphate is gone, and doesn’t look set to return anytime soon. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis leader, is dead: he blew himself up in October 2019 when US Special Operations forces raided his compound in Idlib, Syria. His replacement, Abu Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, is also dead, biting the Syrian dust earlier this year. But few Western journalists took much notice, and nobody was writing op-eds on a posthumous “martyrdom bump” for Isis, or how they would come back stronger after his demise.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is arguably in better shape, maintaining footholds and some measure of success in ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel. But its capacity to stage attacks against the West is greatly diminished, thanks to a sustained and successful counter-terrorism operations by the US and its allies, and a shift in the group’s strategic vision, which now prioritises local grievances over global contention. The killing of leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year in a US drone strike has further weakened its internal solidarity and outward prestige.

According to terrorism scholar Daniel Byman, the last significant jihadist attack in the US was four years ago when a Saudi Air Force trainee working with al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate shot and killed three sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida. We have to go back even further to locate the last jihadist attack in the US that resulted in mass-casualties: that was in 2016, when Omar Mateen, inspired by Isis, went on a shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people.

The last deadly Isis-inspired attack in America — Florida again — was in March 2018, when a 17-year old stabbed to death a 13-year old at a sleepover. And while several individuals, including a teenager, have recently plotted in the name of Isis, none have been able to successfully convert inspiration into competent lethal violence. It certainly doesn’t compare to the 2014-2016 period, when Isis-inspired individuals were responsible for more than three-quarters of all deaths (107 in total) caused by jihadist terrorism in America since September 11, 2001.

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A similar downward trajectory can be seen in Europe, although the threat there remains far greater than in the US. According to a recent report by Scenor, there were 105 jihadi attacks in Europe between 2014 and 2022, involving 133 perpetrators and resulting in 405 deaths, far exceeding the death toll of all deadly jihadist attacks in the US since 9/11. The vast majority (90%) were carried out by so-called lone-wolves and most were Isis-related. But the tempo and lethality of attacks has changed. The deadliest (Paris, Nice, Brussels, Manchester) were carried out by Isis attackers, both directed and inspired, between 2015 and 2017, resulting in a collective death toll of 270 victims. But since losing its caliphate, Isis has neither been able to coordinate attacks in Europe nor inspire attackers there in any great number. And when those attacks do happen, they are often amateurish and of limited lethality.

As the threat of jihadist terrorism has receded in the West, so too has media interest in it. And it is hard to exaggerate what a sea-change this represents. “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Zawahiri wrote in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual founder of Isis, in 2005. A decade later, the consensus was that Isis had conclusively won that war. “They’re using the internet better than we use the internet,” as Trump put it in November 2015, simplifying a widely held view that Isis propaganda was far more sophisticated and “slick” than anything the US State Department could come up with.

But the victory was jettisoned as rapidly as it was acquired. By July 2017, the Isis horror show was almost over: in that month, it lost Mosul, its de facto capital in Iraq, and three months later it was to lose Raqqa, its de facto capital in Syria. At the same time, new horror-shows were vying for our attention, much closer to the nascent obsessions that now polarise the political landscape in the West. In April 2018, Alek Minassian drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10. It had all the hallmarks of an Isis attack, except that before his attack, instead of proclaiming to be a “soldier of the caliphate”, Minassian had declared the arrival of an “incel rebellion” on Facebook. All of a sudden, incels seemed to be everywhere. Then, in March 2019, just as Isis was losing its last sliver of territory in Syria, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

All of a sudden, white supremacists seemed to be everywhere too. And then something strange happened: journalists and extremism experts who had once made careers out of covering jihadists started to cover the far-Right in almost exactly the same way. Just as Isis had been a transnational, “networked” threat, so too were the white supremacists. And just as Isis had been radicalising children in their bedrooms over the internet, so too has the far-Right. Almost overnight, Brenton Tarrant became the new “Jihad John”, Andrew Tate became the new “charismatic” jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, and 8Chan became the new radical mosque, incubating hate and inciting violence.

The broader context for such a dramatic transposition was the culture war and its insatiable demand for new folk devils with which to wage symbolic battle. For one side in this war, a malevolent progressive ideology, promoted by Left-wing activists, is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life. For the other, a no less toxic ideology of white male supremacy is taking over cherished institutions and perilously endangering our democratic way of life.

Correspondingly, the chief bête noire of anti-progressives are radicals who embrace gender non-conformity and who want to abolish the patriarchy, prisons and much else, while for progressives, the root of all evil lies in the figure of the toxic white male. Jihadists, however, resist assimilation into this classificatory scheme for the obvious reason that they’re Muslims and (mostly) from minority backgrounds. Indeed, in some respects they serve to threaten this scheme, because they’re both anti-LGBTQ and militantly opposed to classical liberalism.

Hence jihadist violence has become a symbolic cul-de-sac for both sides in the culture war, affording neither the opportunity to bring attention to or amplify the concerns — pre-eminently around race and gender — that so preoccupy them. This new hermeneutic regime was sharply in evidence in the lethargy which marked the response of both progressives and conservatives to the murder of the Conservative MP David Amess two years ago by a British Isis supporter. The very day after his killing, the Metropolitan Police declared it an act of terrorism with “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. But among British elites there was little appetite for exploring that link; instead they chose to focus on the proliferation of online hate speech aimed at MPs.

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Two months prior to Amess’s murder, a 22-year-old British man from Plymouth went on a shooting rampage, killing five, including his mother, before fatally shooting himself. Devon and Cornwall Police did not categorise this rampage as a terrorist incident. But that didn’t prevent many British journalists and commentators from trying to turn it into one. This was because the perpetrator, Jake Davison, supposedly had links to the incel subculture: he was a self-confessed virgin; he believed that women are biologically hardwired to select men based on appearance; he had made references to the “blackpill”; and he had ranted that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief”.

Within 24 hours of the attack, The Guardian had described Davison as “a hate-filled misogynist and ‘incel’”, and speculated that “Plymouth shootings may be a sign ‘incel’ culture is spreading.” A day after the murder of Amess, an editorial in The Observer sternly reprimanded anyone who was in mind to “politicise this tragedy” on the basis of “scant details”. No such reprimand was issued by that paper in the days after Davison’s killing spree, despite the considerable uncertainty surrounding his motives. They were too busy politicising it, because they could. By contrast, Ali Harbi Ali, the British-born man who murdered Amess, couldn’t be so readily marshalled for symbolic service in the culture war over race and gender.

It was proof that, in some ways, we have become jaded by jihadists, desensitised to their threat and moral squalor by over-exposure to a media discourse and entertainment industry that, for over a decade and a half, couldn’t get enough of them. If they were once exotic and possessed a certain “jihadi cool“, they now resemble some ageing crooner trading on past glories. We just know too much about them and their shabby pasts as failed rappers, drug-dealers, potheads and porn enthusiasts. Jihadi terror has transmogrified into jihadi triviality.

Yet as Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, once observed, society needs its criminals. We just don’t need jihadists anymore, since new and seemingly more forbidding folk have displaced them. And they have done so not because they are objectively more threatening or murderous (they’re not), but because they reflect the shifting existential anxieties of Western elites in a moment of great and rapid change. These anxieties were once focused on the threat of Islamism to democratic norms. Now, they are entangled in fears and loathing around gender and race. And when these moral panics eventually burn out, no doubt a new breed of devils will emerge, too.

And so India’s culture wars wearily carry on, pitching liberal secularists against Hindu nationalists yet again. This particular battle has already claimed its first life in Maharashtra: a 40-year-old electrician died in a stone-pelting contest provoked by an Instagram post about the indie drama. Meanwhile, 20-somethings at a Jammu hostel pummelled one another into hospital beds, after one of them voiced the rather outré opinion that the film was “worth watching”.

It most certainly wasn’t. It’s 138 minutes of my life that I will not get back. Here is a production that falls into the dominant genre in contemporary Indian filmmaking: the deranged docudrama. Militarism and a muscular Hinduism, ChatGPT scriptwriting and CGI cinematography, combine in these epic fantasies of unblushing Modi-ana, as myriad villains get their comeuppance: Muslim militants in The Kashmir Files, Pakistanis in Uri: The Surgical Strike, opposition parties in The Accidental Prime Minister, and all three in the biopic, PM Narendra Modi.

In The Kerala Story, Muslim fundamentalists are once again the villains of the piece. The theme is “love jihad”, an oxymoronic term that refers to a conspiracy theory now ubiquitous in India. Lascivious Muslim men, so Modi’s publicists have it, are seducing unsuspecting Hindu women only in order to convert them and increase the number of Muslim babies. This is the Indian version of the Great Replacement Theory, pedalled by the ruling BJP. Muslims are conspiring to become a majority, the argument goes, in order to impose sharia rule on Hindus and, ultimately, obliterate Hinduism altogether.

The director Sudipto Sen’s sleight of hand is to weld love jihad with another Hindu nationalist bugbear: actual jihad. So, we find Shalini, the tragic heroine, abandoning her nursing degree to take up with a Muslim man, who carries her away to an Isis boot camp in the Afghan desert. Her fate as a suicide bomber destined for Syria seems sealed. But then — spoiler alert — a drone, the deus ex machina of our times, spots her. She is whisked away to a Gitmo-style military prison, where she spills the beans about a ginormous terror network set on converting and killing Hindus in their millions. So far, so trite. So why are liberals up in arms?

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Sen’s spurious statistics, together with the echolalia of the unthinking press, seem to be the main source of outrage. Shalini has it that 32,000 Hindu women from Kerala, all victims of “love jihad”, lie buried in the sands of Syria. In interviews, Sen has stood by that number. Maths clearly isn’t his forte. Only around 500 Hindus convert to Islam every year — generally not to become Isis fighters but, in the main, to marry outside their faith. (At its peak in 2017, Isis counted a mere 37 Keralite recruits and sympathisers, as a convincing database put together by Sara Perlangeli and Dhruva Jaishankar shows.) But liberals need not worry about Sen’s trouble with numbers — or, indeed, his trouble with Muslims. For as propaganda goes, The Kerala Story is piss-poor. If anything, it reflects worse on Hindus than Muslims.

In fact, what the film does is show why it is so easy to convert Hindus. The impetus for Shalini’s conversion betrays not so much the pull of Islam as the push of Hinduism. Flashbacks reveal a life of stifling domesticity and sexual harassment. Evidently, Hindu patriarchy didn’t have much to recommend it. The same goes for the individualistic vacuity of Hindu family life, an instructive contrast with the communal conviviality of its Muslim counterpart.

Shalini, admittedly, might be overreading things here. If Muslim families seemed closer to her, it is because, generally speaking, Muslims in India are poorer than Hindus, and richer Indians have a preference for nuclear over extended families. Likewise, if Hindu women — in her experience — were more likely to be pawed and groped in shopping malls, it is largely because they are more likely to come out of the confines of the home. Nevertheless, Shalini is smitten by the pedestrian theology of her pious Muslim roommate, Asifa. The naughty gods of Hinduism, about as craven and lustful as in the Greek epics, are no match for the pensive prophet. And when Asifa throws a hijab over Shalini’s head, ridding her of unwanted male attention, the good Hindu girl is lost. So utterly convinced is Shalini of Islam’s virtues that not even ludicrously grim jihadists gleefully cutting up bodies and dismembering women for wearing lipstick can shake her faith. That this is how Hindu nationalists choose to depict women — by turns credulous and treacherous — is revealing.

Something, one suspects, is rotten in the state of Hinduism. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit architect of India’s constitution, put his finger on it in 1956, the last year of his life. After decades spent trying to reform religion, it dawned on him that women and the lower orders got a raw deal not because of the corruptions of Hindu belief but rather because of Hindu belief itself. It was, above all, a doctrine of “graded inequality”, a social order held together by “an ascending scale of hatred and a downward scale of contempt”. There was no more to it. He converted to Buddhism, as do thousands of Dalits every year on the anniversary of his birth.

The Hindu obsession with conversion, then, speaks to a constant source of insecurity among its believers. The system works only so long as everyone accepts their station, which is why, when even a few leave the fold, it sets off a moral panic. During the colonial period, the threat stemmed from that adventitious agent of emancipation, Christianity. A vestigial fear of the faith remains central to Hindu nationalist thought today, church burnings being common enough in the eastern tracts of India. But over the past 100 years or so, it was instead Islam that frightened the living daylights of caste Hindus, as I argue in my book Another India.

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Indeed, the very origins of Modi’s BJP lie in the fear of conversion. Its parent organisation, the Sangh Parivar, was born in the Twenties out of panic about lower caste conversions to Islam and Christianity. Most spectacularly, in 1981, more or less coinciding with the birth of the BJP, an entire village of Dalits embraced Islam. Class politics in India always needs to find a religious register. At the outset, these Dalits had contemplated converting to Buddhism before deciding against it, Islam being the epitome of subalternity. The shock of Islam was designed to draw Delhi’s attention to the injustices of the caste system as well as the enormity of state neglect.

In response, Brahmins embraced proselytisation — historically alien to Hinduism. Missionary orders were set up and converts won in elaborate shuddhi — purification — ceremonies. More recently, Modi’s reign has been coeval with the Ghar Wapsi campaign, a concerted drive to, as it were, “return” converts back to the House of Hinduism. Christians and Muslims are won over, often under duress, to their “true” faith, their foreign-sounding names replaced with suitably Hindu ones.

The war against “love jihad” is of a piece with this vision. Starting in the late 2000s, Hindu nationalists set about cracking down on miscegenation. These days, marauding gangs break up mixed couples in ice-cream parlours, cinema halls, and even register offices, forestalling marriages in the nick of time. It’s an uphill struggle, but Hindu nationalists seem to be winning. Interfaith relationships are on the decline.

All the same, and perhaps counterintuitively, liberals ought to take comfort from films like The Kerala Story. Sure, it offends the viewer’s intelligence, but I’m not convinced that the film should be banned because it offends Muslims. For in carping about conversion, not least the effortlessness with which it is secured, Sen and his ilk are unwittingly making the case against Hindu hierarchy: exposing the very real factors that push people away from the nationalists’ faith, rather than confirming the conspiracy theory about Islamism. Here, then, is a truth about Hindu nationalism. It’s brutally effective when violently evangelised, but the minute it tries to persuade, its propaganda goes hopelessly awry.

The scene painted by the footage is both horrifyingly perplexing and peculiarly British. The sky is overcast. No one seems to be running or screaming, or trying to confront and overpower the killers. A consolatory moment is provided by the “Angel of Woolwich”, the woman who calmly conversed with and challenged the killers before taking off to catch her bus. In the background, there is a bundle in the middle of the road. It is the body of Lee Rigby.

Michael Adebolajo grew up and went to school in Havering, where East London spills into Essex. Nevertheless, he addresses bystanders as “you people”, telling them they will “never be safe” before warning that British soldiers must leave “our lands”, meaning Iraq and Afghanistan. To his mind, he is no longer a British man born to a Nigerian-Christian family and schooled in Romford, but a member of the global Ummah, which is under existential attack from the West.

The murderers never attributed their attack to al-Qaeda, but in many ways it fit the al-Qaeda bill. It was a highly specific act of violence, targeting a member of the enemy’s armed forces. It was the kind of attack the group’s Yemen branch had directly called for in their English-language magazine less than a year beforehand. It was so discriminate that Adebolajo was careful to assure bystanders they were not his targets, even going so far as to apologise to nearby women for the bloodshed. Two years later, the al-Qaeda trained Charlie Hebdo killers would similarly — and impatiently — remind a journalist that they had only killed blasphemers; that they hadn’t harmed “civilians”. This was honour, jihadi-style.

In other ways, Lee Rigby’s murder was the kind of gruesome spectacle that al-Qaeda’s leadership would later warn against, but which Islamic State would make their hallmark. A gruesome spectacle, but a shoddy and amateurish one, too: Adebolajo and Adebowale rammed Lee Rigby with a Vauxhall Tigra before trying, and failing, to behead their victim. The rusty antique revolver they had acquired malfunctioned, and they were denied martyrdom by arriving armed police.

By contrast, the Charlie Hebdo attackers came clad in all black tactical gear, wielded Kalashnikovs and raised their fists having avenged the Prophet. They looked the business, and they went down in a hail of bullets. Adebolajo, in his Stone Island beanie and Primarni toggle jacket, did not. Adebolajo and Adebowale didn’t pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda in their attack, but perhaps notably, al-Qaeda never claimed them either.

Still, this did not stop others from imitating them. As Raffaello Pantucci notes, it served to “lower the threshold of what constitutes a terrorist attack, suddenly making the act much more accessible”. It showed other extremists that neither a cell, explosives nor serious weaponry were necessarily prerequisites to action. In the days to follow, a soldier was stabbed in the neck in Paris, while a year later another young extremist convert was apprehended en route to behead a British soldier. Brusthom Ziamani, the would-be copycat who thought Michael Adebolajo a “legend”, has since emerged as a leading and troublesome figure among imprisoned jihadis. In 2020, while he was eight months into a deradicalisation programme, he attempted to murder a prison officer.

The fact that Adebolajo and Adebowale were careful to target a soldier — and only a soldier — reveals much about the evolution of jihadism and the ideological divides within it. While mass casualty attacks are associated with jihadist terror, prior to Isis, discriminate plots were more the norm in Europe: against Jews, military personnel and alleged blasphemers. There were even bitter divides within Adebolajo and Adebowale’s networks: some believed that attacks at home were illegitimate due to a covenant of security with Britain, while others came to view the covenant as null and void since UK participation in the invasion of Iraq.

The 7/7 bombers deemed Britain a legitimate target, but it was not until Lee Rigby’s murder that jihadists were able to successfully attack again — an eight-year wait. Some observers assumed the jihadist threat was a thing of the past: Bin Laden was dead and the London Olympics came and went without a hitch. But it was the same year as the Woolwich attack that British extremists were trickling into Syria to fight — a trickle that became a flood in 2014 when Isis declared it had restored the Caliphate.

In the eight “quiet” years between attacks, Salafi-jihadist activity did not cease. The Islam that Adebolajo and Adebowale had converted to was the Islam of Omar Bakri Mohammad, Anjem Choudary and their acolytes in al-Muhajiroun. Its activity during the 2000s and early 2010s consisted of proselytising, attention-grabbing stunts, establishing European offshoots, and more proselytising. On a day-to-day basis, it also meant living according to the incredibly strict, incredibly demanding lifestyle of a Salafi-jihadist activist, which often involved cutting oneself off from friends, family, jobs and many of life’s pleasures — from football to television. It was to enter a totalitarian pact voluntarily.

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Because of his closeness to these networks, Adebolajo had flirted with the attention of security services on several occasions, but never enough to warrant intervention. In 2010, however, he was apprehended by Kenyan authorities; he was most likely on the way to join al-Shabaab in Somalia, with whom a number of Britons were already fighting at the time. Despite this, a Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee report determined MI5 could not have prevented the attack. Instead, it blamed an unnamed American company — Facebook — which had closed several of Adebowale’s accounts without informing British authorities. Five months prior to the attack, Adebowale had even graphically communicated his desire to kill a British soldier. The trouble was the offending content was picked up algorithmically and closed automatically — no human being ever laid eyes on it.

At the time, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, determined that Facebook was the “one party which could have made a difference” in preventing the murder of Lee Rigby. In some quarters, particularly among civil liberties groups, this conclusion was viewed as all too convenient for the security services, as well as paving the way for more anti-terror legislation and more government control over the internet. The drumbeat for tech companies to act on terrorist and extremist content online would grow louder the following year, as Isis flooded social media with gore and Silicon Valley could no longer refuse to act. Today, it is nongovernmental groups as much as governments leading the charge for more control over the internet.

And yet, despite the infamy of Michael Adebolajo’s image, neither he nor his accomplice live on in the annals of jihadi lore. Although I’m told security services would cast doubt on these claims, Adebolajo allegedly regrets his act and the Jihadist worldview, a fact which is of no consolation to the family of his victim. Instead, it is Lee Rigby’s name and image which lives on — while his killers, denied their martyrdom, must live out their days anonymously and forgotten, somewhere in the bowels of His Majesty’s prison estate.

The young get old and revolutions end up eating their own: and the death of the flagship Vice News Tonight show and drastic downsizing of the Vice News platform, just days after the closing of Buzzfeed News, heralds the closing of the era when the New York new media giants bestrode the news world like strutting conquerors. With the heavily indebted Vice empire reportedly circling on the edge of bankruptcy, and struggling to find a buyer, the media landscape of the 2010s already looks like history. As Ben Judah observed: “The early 2010s were a moment where Buzzfeed News and Vice News gave you the impression you didn’t have to do journalism like the New York Times or the BBC. Them shuttering is telling us, actually, there’s only the way they do it at the New York Times and the BBC.”

Back then, the world looked very different. When the Vice News channel launched on YouTube in 2014, its parent company’s reputation for achingly arch and semi-ironically offensive content aimed at jaded hipsters caused legacy broadcasters to scoff at the idea of their cocky, inexperienced journalists challenging them on their own turf. Within months, their laughter stopped: networks such as the BBC and CNN were now terrified that Vice held the key to the future of news. Vice News went where no one else would go, gaining access to the most difficult stories, and throwing itself into the thickest action with studied indifference. Young people, who had always been disregarded as news consumers, were enraptured by the hard-edged, thrilling content from the worst places on earth; elderly execs and money men threw sponsorship at the company in an attempt to capture some of the magic for their own ailing brands. The future of news was young and online, and there was no going back.

Historians of the craft of newsgathering will record that Vice News changed the visual grammar of the medium. By marrying a cinematic visual style with the tempo and immediacy of breaking stories, and pioneering the use of handheld DSLR cameras, Vice News re-aestheticised TV news. And by having its young reporters talk casually to the audience, like friends, in the middle of the world’s worst chaos, the old world of buttoned-up correspondents stiffly lecturing the camera suddenly looked like a relic from the age of black and white. But while the big networks quickly learned to copy Vice’s style to the point it has become the norm, the fundamental challenge of all news broadcasting — how to make the most difficult and expensive content on earth pay for itself — had still not been solved. In the end, it was all a mirage.

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As is the nature of the trade, it was always a source of pride, and of glittering awards, to obtain better combat footage than anyone else: always getting closer to the action, dancing at the edge of death like a gladiator in the amphitheatre for the audience’s thrill and delectation. The highest word of praise from an exec was “gnarly”. But what neither fans nor critics of what they saw as our recklessness understood was that the “bang-bang” was merely a vehicle with which to smuggle in serious analytical reportage of poorly-understood conflicts and revolutions. Vice’s central insight was that if you framed the story right, and shot it well enough, you could persuade teens and early twentysomethings to watch in-depth explorations of Syrian rebel justice systems, or the intricacies of South Sudan’s civil war. Middle-aged execs from traditional networks had always claimed young people didn’t care about granular detail, or distant wars in Africa: but this (apart from stories about drugs) was always by far the most popular content, judging from YouTube views and comments. The audience never demands dumbing-down: viewers want nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity. They want to see the world as it is, not as it ought to be.

While the rewards in the early days were mismatched to the risk, the degree of experience offered to young journalists was unrivalled, a huge draw to those with an adventurous streak. Journalists at the beginning of their careers were given access to stories the networks reserved for their hardened veterans, and repaid that trust with a fervid dedication to their craft. I was a green 31-year-old reporter when I started, with only the Libyan war, Tunisian revolution and a strange months-long sojourn with tribal rebels in Sudan under my belt. Vice gave me the freedom to follow the Malian army into bloody battle against jihadist rebels, experience the Egyptian coup from the Islamist side, return to Syria over and over again during the course of the war and follow the Isis story from their initially underplayed rise to their final desert gotterdammerung.

And like Isis, Vice was a 2010s phenomenon that wrongly thought it could take on the giants and win. Perhaps that strange kinship between the decade’s two great disruptors is why Vice News was the only western network Isis let embed with them in Syria and Iraq. This isn’t as wild as it sounds – Isis watched us and we watched them. As the Syria reporter for years, focusing on Isis, I watched the terrorist group copy Vice’s style in their videos as Very Online western millennials took over their output, syncing cinematic DSLR footage with hypnotic music and thrilling action sequences.

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Young Western Isis fighters and social media influencers were constantly messaging me on Twitter, critiquing my films, and either asking me to join them or threatening to kidnap and behead me next time I deployed. I have the unusual distinction, as a legacy of my time at Vice News, of having featured in three Isis videos, twice using extracts from my films, and once combat footage of them shooting (unbeknown to them at the time) at my Landcruiser. Isis won the video battle: they had the resources of a state behind them, a demonic desire to shock and horrify, and could orchestrate combat for the cameras. But ultimately neither could maintain their exponential growth beyond the 2010s: both had dramatically overestimated their chance of taking over the world.

Careering skyward after their Isis scoop, Vice upped the sponsorship stakes with a deal to make HBO a prestigious nightly news series: and when the new network execs came in to run the show, Vice purged the young and idealistic journalists who had risked their lives to win the hipster bible journalistic credibility. Friends and colleagues who had risked their lives to produce groundbreaking coverage from Ukraine, Syria and the Central African Republic were let go with a lack of sentiment unusual even by the standards of America’s media industry. Vice News gave Vice the credibility to raise money from investors to furiously expand the rest of its brand, but the newsgathering itself was too expensive to sustain. For a while, Vice was making money, but little went to the journalists who originally built the brand.

Even still, the common online narrative that the glossier “new Vice” was a paltry shadow of “old Vice” is hard to maintain. Under the new regime, journalists were paid well, and professional security advisors were brought in to ensure the company never paid the toll in deaths that other networks gossiped were just about to happen. In any case, Vice News’s most sustained string of awards came under the new management, and some of the work from Syria that I am most proud of came under the nightly HBO banner, along with my only Emmy. Even up to the very end, long after the now-greying old hands like me had moved out to pasture, Vice News’s coverage of conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen and Ukraine outclassed the world’s biggest networks, raking in awards: Vice News Tonight closes with more Emmy nominations than any of its big name rivals for five years running.

Perhaps what really destroyed Vice News’s hope of making TV news into a profitable industry was the rise of Trump. The political polarisation of American life after 2016 saw viewers drift away from whatever interest they showed in confusing wars in far-off places for an obsession with their own internal conflict. The legacy cable networks such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox revived their ailing fortunes through a constant focus on the Trump reality show, and the rest of the world retreated back into obscurity — unless it could be viewed through Trump’s prism. As the online world polarised, Vice’s original YouTube fanbase, which skewed young male and often hard Right, vocally resented the radically progressive orientation of much of the company’s new output.

At the same time every publication from the New York Times to Teen Vogue began speaking in the same voice, Vice no longer sounded distinct. The punk magazine-turned-megabrand had gone corporate, and now sounded like any other American corporation, only more so. Vice, which had won acclaim for dispassionately showing viewers how the world really is, now looked excessively concerned with its own virtue. As American society polarised, Vice could never fully capture the newly divided, inward-looking zeitgeist – stunts like reading the entire Mueller Report live on air for four hours didn’t possess quite the same old magic. HBO switched its patronage to newer, DC insider platforms such as Axios, showing the world as viewed from the top down, not the bottom up, and Vice News moved to new and less lucrative deals on smaller cable networks. While the quality of foreign coverage remained high, and awards kept piling up, the ambition dwindled. Vice had set out to conquer the legacy broadcasters, but found itself reliant on their largesse to keep the show on the road.

For a few short years, Vice News looked like it had found the secret to making news pay by showing viewers the world as it really is, far from Western capitals, rubbing viewers’ noses in the darkness of reality. But news is expensive and talk is cheap: we have reverted to an era of talking heads and studio debates, where perhaps only state broadcasters have the funding and desire to present their chosen images of reality to the outside world, with all that implies. Bored young men who want to see brutal images of combat can now get their kicks watching Ukraine snuff clips on Twitter. For good or ill — I still can’t decide — working for Vice News over seven years forcefully reshaped my worldview, by confronting my original impeccably liberal assumptions about how the world worked with constant immersion in the hard reality of tribal, religious and ethnic conflict. Young and idealistic, I thought I could change the world: instead the world changed me.

But as my old colleague, Vice News’ former Latin America bureau chief and chronicler of Mexico’s bloody internal conflict Daniel Hernandez wrote in an elegy on Twitter, “It was truly about going to countries that ‘didn’t matter’, diving into gnarly security situations — it’s a miracle no one — for conflict reporting in Syria, Ukraine, Mexico, Venezuela … Just a wild, idealistic time. Honored to have been there at its birth.” Vice News was the future, once. If even they can’t make hard foreign news pay, then perhaps it has no future.

It is not often you hear words like these, especially in Iraq. But Barzani is no ordinary Iraqi. As well as being the nephew to the former President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, he is also first cousin of the incumbent, Nechirvan Barzani, a general in the Kurdish Peshmerga army, and a Telecoms billionaire.

I first met him in October 2021, just after the last Iraqi elections, at his base, the Black Tiger camp (Black Tiger was his military call sign), on the disputed borders of the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Barzani is a hero to many in the region. He and his troops were the tip of the Kurdish spear against Isis in northern Iraq. They fought them hard and won, but they paid in blood — an old story for Barzani who spent the Nineties battling Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Kurdish mountains.

The results of that election were, as ever, reflective of the sectarianism that strafes Iraqi politics. The Sadrist Movement, led by Shi’ite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — an Iraqi nationalist and no friend of Iran — was the largest party with 73 seats, but was short of the majority needed to form a government; the Iran-backed Shi’ite Al-Fatah saw its vote drop from 48 to just 17. Sunni parties formed the second sectarian block. The Kurds came in third, with their major party, the Kurdistan Patriotic Union (KDP), taking 16 seats. The various blocs then haggled for more than a year to form a functioning government, until, in October 2022, Mohammed Shia’ Sabbar Al-Sudani was nominated to take office as Prime Minister. Iraqi democracy had finally kicked into gear again.

“Twenty years on, the situation is good, especially when compared to 2003,” Barzani told me last week. “We finally have democracy. It’s not perfect of course, and it may take 20 or 30 years for it to become mature, but it exists.” Democracy is an important word for Barzani — and for the Kurds of northern Iraq generally. During my trip to Black Tiger Camp just after the elections, I remember noticing how the tip of each soldier’s right index finger was covered in violet phosphorous-based ink, signifying that their vote had been cast. Barzani’s, I noted, seemed a little more faded than the rest. “It’s because he voted first,” an aide told me.

But if Barzani is now cautiously content with the state of Iraqi democracy, that is only half the story of post-2003 Iraq. The Kurds remain the world’s largest stateless population; their desire for a homeland stretches back centuries. I was in the region’s capital Erbil to cover the 2017 referendum when, against the implicit desires of Washington and the unambiguous orders of Baghdad, 92.73% of the Kurdistan region of Iraq voted to become an independent state.

As I watched Kurds celebrate in the streets, I remember thinking that the Iraqi government would make them pay for what they had done. And it did: as Iranian tanks massed on the border, Baghdad banned international flights to the region, slapped sanctions on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and sent troops into the city of Kirkuk and its oilfields. In total, the KRG lost around 40% of its territory. Iraq’s Supreme Federal Court decreed that to preserve the unity of Iraq, no province could be allowed to secede — a ruling the KRG ultimately said it would respect. And so, a unified Iraq remains, as do the sanctions on the Kurdistan region. Yet people here still say it was worth it. Centuries-old dreams of statehood die hard.

Erbil, though, continues to pay for its perceived intransigence. “What happened after the referendum was unfair,” says Barzani. “[To punish us] they cut our government budget and the Peshmerga budget, even after it was left to the Peshmerga to fight on behalf of civilisation against Isis. They sent no money, no equipment, no ammunition. When our leaders and people looked at al-Qaeda, the civil war, Isis and then the weak government which still sanctioned us for wanting independence after all we had done, they were not happy.”

These tensions are present throughout Kurdistan to this day. On the highway out of Erbil, the light turns a wan yellow as it hits the mounds of beige gravel and cement that line the arid land on either side. This part of Iraq may look sparse, but it is rich. Cement, oil, wheat and corn are all grown or produced here. I’m driving with Colonel Surd, head of intelligence of Peshmerga Sector Six (of eight). Six is the largest, stretching to almost 120 square kilometres and is responsible for protecting Erbil.

Six also has another job: to deal with the remnants of Isis who refuse to surrender — the most fanatical members of a former army of fanatics. They are holed up in caves and tunnels across the sector. On the day we meet, the Peshmerga have found more tunnels containing ammunition and grenades. “Daesh [Isis] is an ideology, and many of its people still adhere to it,” Surd says. “They are still active; their sleeper cells are very active. They recruit local people from the Qaraj and Zab and Hawija areas around us. From our thermal cameras we have counted around 60 fighters in no-man’s land. We don’t know if they are the same people or rotating, but based on our intel sources, there are more than 100 villagers who support them. Some because they believe, some for money and some from fear. Isis asks them for food and if they refuse to give it, they kill them.”

We arrive at a Peshmerga outpost: a small gravel-covered compound with a line of armoured vehicles along one side and several low, flat-roofed buildings on the other. In the largest, I meet Lieutenant Colonel Aziz, the commander of Battalion Two, Division 14. “We watch for them [Isis] 24/7,” he tells me. “The last major fight was during August 2021. They blew up a tower and then, by the checkpoint we just passed, took some civilians, eventually exchanging them for ransom.” In December 2021, they attacked again, killing three civilians. “We pursued them into the mountains, but they had laid an IED on the road, and 10 of our Peshmerga were martyred. After that, we changed our strategy. But I still ask myself: they are the enemy, they are outside the law — yet they have night-vision equipment, which we do not, and all the latest tech. How?”

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As if to prove his point, in Erbil later that day I am told that two coalition drones recently disappeared from the sky. Isis, my source explains, has anti-drone jamming equipment. The battle may be a low-level one, but it is fierce. In 2021, I accompanied Barzani to the front where Peshmerga would abseil down into caves housing Isis fighters and fire anti-tank rockets into darkness. It was, I was told, the most efficient way to deal with them.

Another soldier who declines to be named, but who has been itching to speak, interjects. “Isis tells you the situation Iraq is still unstable, even 20 years after the removal of Saddam. [With Isis], we have our feet on a landmine — it could go off at any time, and it will either take off a leg or kill you. This is Iraq in 2023. Before we had one Saddam, now we have militia leaders and corrupt politicians and foreign enemies.”

The soldier goes on to describe Iraq as “a failed marriage” between three groups — the Shia, Sunni and Kurds — who have been forced together. “A three-state confederation is the best choice for Iraq right now. While there is a Sunni governor in Mosul, Hashd [the Shia militias] control the city. A confederation of states for Sunnis, Shias and Kurds would fix this. Then, each group will have no choice but to go back to their part of the state, which will create less problems in every region.”

When I later raise the issue of a “three-state solution” with Barzani, he is more circumspect. “It’s strange,” he says. “Many of the people for whom a united Iraq seems an almost holy enterprise are also those who rail most against the Kafirs [infidels]. I always ask: if they hate Kafirs so much, why do they revere the work of the two Kafirs — Sykes and Picot — who created modern Iraq and started so much of this mess?”

Barzani sees double standards at work when it comes to Baghdad’s treatment of Kurdistan. “When it comes to the budget, we are not Iraqis. When it comes to money and equipment for the Peshmerga, we are not Iraqis. When it comes to the disputed territories, we are not Iraqis. But when they need us to fight Isis, we are Iraqis — the bravest Iraqis — and even then, they didn’t give us any money or weapons for the fight. We don’t need much: just the tech, intelligence, and drones to support us on the ground.”

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I ask him what he thinks might happen when the Coalition eventually leaves Iraq, in all forms, for good. He pauses, and then, in an even tone, answers. “Let me be plain: it will be catastrophic. When they withdrew from Afghanistan, we saw first-hand how that empowered Isis; it gave their fighters hope they would do the same here. And when the Americans withdrew the troops in 2011, we also saw what happened: al-Qaeda, the civil war and then Isis. If they withdraw their support, the same scenario will repeat itself — the state will fracture.”

In other words, the Kurdish fight against the Isis resistance is representative of something greater: of the chaos and failure of post-2003 Iraq. What was arguably the state’s greatest victory turns out to have been incomplete: violence in Iraq is never far below the surface and, once more, it is the Kurds who are facing the fallout of it all.

They remain a patient people. History has given them little choice. But everything has its limits. “I hope the present government can continue with its good work, but the three-state solution is always on the table,” Barzani concludes. “And if Iraq reverts to what it was in 2011 and implodes then, one day, it will become the only solution.”

We join a short queue and a guard looks vaguely in our direction. “Ok, prepare the cigarette. Oh, and take off your seatbelt. If you’re not smoking and you’re wearing a seatbelt, it means you’re UN, which is a problem because it means paperwork.” I do as instructed, and also take out a set of prayer beads I bought in Baghdad. “Nice touch,” says Mohammed with a grin as we pass through with ease.

Mosul suffered more than almost any other Iraqi city following the US invasion. The removal of Saddam brought the people a taste of democracy, but it also unleashed a sectarian war, mainly between Sunni and Shia. Of many things the carnage spawned, the Sunni terror group Isis was arguably the worst. 

In December 2013, after an attack on the city of Fallujah, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the leader of al-Qaeda’s pathologically anti-Shia offshoot the “Islamic State of Iraq”, announced he was forming the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. Six months later, it captured Mosul, Iraq’s second most important city. From the pulpit of the city’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, al-Baghdadi proclaimed the birth of a new worldwide Islamic Caliphate.

Isis then swept across the country. The Iraqi army simply couldn’t cope. At its peak, in autumn 2014, the caliphate spanned 41,000 miles across Iraq and Syria ― and ruled over eight million people, as well as its 40,000 foreign fighters who arrived from 120 countries. As we drive into the city, I ask Mohammed who joined Isis. “Various people,” he replies. “Those who supported Saddam; people who had family members killed by the Americans; and then many Sunnis who got sick of being treated like shit by Baghdad and the Iraqi security forces after Saddam fell.”

Saddam’s fall emancipated Iraq’s Shia majority, many of whom were looking for payback after feeling victimised under his Sunni rule. “There was so much anger here,” Mohammed tells me. “In Mosul, between 2011-2014, every neighbourhood had only one entrance and exit and if the soldier guarding it was in a bad mood, he’d just close everything. There were lines of cars waiting for hours.”

We weave slowly through traffic until we reach the Taqatu al Dawasa roundabout, one of the busiest in Mosul. “Over there used to be a tall building — the Orzdy,” Mohammed tells me breezily. “Isis used to throw gays off it.”

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Almost everything around me is either half-destroyed or being rebuilt. “This street used to be a line of trenches,” Mohammed says as he points out of the window to his left. “The two sides would just fire bombs and rockets at each other.” We pass a Mosul police patrol truck with a man in a balaclava standing on the back, holding a mounted PKC machine gun. SWAT is written across his back.

We enter Mosul’s old city. It’s a hive of winding narrow streets with construction works everywhere. I notice some graffiti and ask if it’s political. “Real Estate advert,” he replies. Mosul was once a battlefield; now it’s a building site. Billions have poured in to regenerate the city. “ When I was embedded with the military during the Battle of Mosul,” explains Mohammed, “this street was all rubble. Only Humvees could drive here. I’ve never seen so many people get killed. At least 50 every day — and that was just in our area. God only knows how many civilians got caught in crossfire.

We get out and walk. Mohammed points to a green door. “That’s a garden. During the fighting there were so many bodies there was no space in the cemeteries, so they’d bury them in their gardens.” We walk on. Once more Mohammed sweeps his arms outwards. “All this was a battlefield — between the Iraqi Golden Division and Isis.”

If the fight against Isis was brutal, their rule here was arguably worse. In a small shop in the old city, I meet Sarmad Al Moaymy, a realtor who lived under their rule. “In 2014, even several months before the city’s fall, it was obvious that Isis had taken over — and it was Nouri al Maliki [who became Prime Minister after Saddam’s fall] who gave them the “space” to do so,” he tells me as we drink tea. “The Government treated the people here really badly, arresting them randomly and forcing them to pay bribes to get out of jail, which they couldn’t afford. The people felt like they were being suffocated. Isis came and kicked out the Government and gave them freedom — they felt alive again; in the beginning at least.

“For a while the city was safe; every neighbourhood had the concrete blocks around their entrances removed; people could drive around again. Then Isis slowly started publishing laws and restrictions: no shorts or tight trousers; then people had to have beards. That’s when we started to realise what they were. Every day they would execute people on the roundabout in front of everyone. It was terrifying: today it was a stranger, tomorrow your neighbour, the next day it could be you. I refused to grow a beard so after six months I fled the city.”

In the nearby bazaar, I meet Fares Khalaf, a former sergeant in the fire department of the army and now a wheat farmer dressed in the traditional thawb. The market is a sensory assault: old electric fans recycle hot air; cuts of meat hang from hooks; sparks fly from welding tools. Rows of fake Prada and Hermes bags are lined up next to sacks of vegetables and nuts and fruit. “Life under Daesh [Isis] flipped upside down,” he tells me. “Before, we used to farm our barley and sell it to the government; under Isis there was no government — so we had to come to the bazaar to sell it. Wages for workers fell from 25,000 Dinars to 3,000. Many people tried to flee. But I stayed, where would I go? My family and my farm are here. And besides, you need money to flee.”

By this point, Isis’s violence had spread well beyond the city walls. “They killed nine from my village, one of whom was my son,” he says without changing his tone. “It was in 2014. My son and eight other men were driving in their cars and Isis shot them. They did an investigation afterwards and came to my house to say that they had killed him by accident and that they were sorry. I said: ‘What does your sorry get me? Does it get my son back?’”

It was this sort of barbaric behaviour that forced the Iraqi state to finally step in — even if it needed a lot of help to finish the job. On 13 June 2014, just days after Isis took Mosul, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, issued a call to all Iraqis to take up arms against the terror group. For the Shia it had the force of a Fatwa. Two days later, Al Maliki announced the formation of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), a group of (predominantly Shia) militias who would band together to fight Isis, and in so doing radically change the Iraqi state.

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Only Sistani had the moral authority to unite these rival groups. Few noted the irony of him bringing them together in a de facto alliance with Tehran. The Iranians had been arming and funding Shia groups in Iraq since the fall of Saddam — the PMF was their chance to scale up this influence. Meanwhile, someone with sufficient military skills was needed to run them effectively, and with the charisma and political nous to keep them united. There was perhaps only one man in the entire Middle East who could do that: the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani.

Not just an accomplished military commander, Soleimani was a master of a particularly Iranian art: political warfare. For years he had overseen the killings of US soldiers and subverted US policy in Iraq wherever he could. Now he dreamed of turning the PMF into a centralised force like the IRGC.

Soleimani soon made his presence felt. He was, by all accounts, “fearless” — famous for never wearing a flak jacket, even on the front lines. His fame spread. In December 2014, Newsweek put Soleimani on the cover, while the accompanying article claimed that the Shia militias were the only chance the world had of defeating Isis.

In truth, the militias were just one part of a combined effort that involved the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga and, flying overhead providing air cover in what was an inescapable irony for all concerned, the US-led coalition. For the next two years, this alliance drove Isis out of cities across Iraq. By the end of 2016, it controlled just 7% of Iraqi territory. Its final stronghold was Mosul and both the Iraqi security forces and the coalition were determined that the PMF — whose militias were often brutal to the Sunni inhabitants of the towns they liberated — would be kept out of the fight.

Rebin Rozhbayani, was then an officer in the 3rd battalion, 1st brigade of the Kurdish Peshmerga, was part of the first push to retake Mosul on 16 October 2016. The battalion’s job was to pierce the Isis lines that surrounded the city, open the gates, and allow the Iraqi army to enter the city.

The fight was tough. On the first day, as they reached the village of Fazilia near Mosul, a suicide bomber drove into their convoy, destroying two Humvees and killing three of his comrades. Canadian air support then announced they were pulling out to another sector where other forces were taking heavy casualties.

“We continued,” he tells me. “But then a second car hit our PAK unit. We lost two more Peshmerga. Once the Canadians had gone, we had to stop and put our American armoured vehicles into a 360-degree defensive circle. We spent the night like that, though no one slept as we were surrounded by Isis not knowing when they would attack. We were two brigades, 200 Peshmergas, facing about 200 of them.”

The second day was perhaps worse: “We killed about 20 Isis fighters who emerged from tunnels they had dug around the city to attack us with RPGs and SPG-9s. Getting captured was always a big fear. In the beginning, they wanted to capture rather than kill us. I used to listen to their radio and they always said: ‘Take them as prisoners, it’s so much more effective.’ A lot of their power came from their beheading videos. That’s partly how they captured Mosul so quickly. Their videos were so violent that the Iraqis forces became scared to fight them.”

After losing 31 Peshmerga, the brigade managed to enter the village of Bashiqa, where the fight was easier since Isis were withdrawing to Mosul for their final stand. It was the beginning of the end.

Rozhbayani accepts that Iran played a role in fighting Isis but, he stresses, it always had its own agenda — it didn’t matter what was good for Iraq. “The plan was to push Isis out of Iraq and back into Syria. But [Syrian leader] Bashar al-Assad is Iran’s client and the Iranians didn’t want them there, so they pushed them toward Kurdistan instead. And then at the end of it all, the PMF got 40 seats in the Iraqi parliament,” he concludes with a slight laugh. Once more, Soleimani’s political skills played a role. After Isis’s defeat, the Iranian-backed militias proclaimed themselves the country’s saviours, organising victory parades and celebrations.

Even today, in parts of the city, images of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Muhandis, the former deputy leader of the PMF, both killed in a US drone strike in 2020, are pinned to almost every lamppost. The checkpoint to the city is supposed to be manned by local police, but the guards are Shia militias dressed up in their uniforms. “Look at their beards,” Mohammed told me as we passed through. “No Iraqi policeman or soldier is allowed to have a beard like that.” They collect a tax of 10,000 dinars from every truck that comes through.

We later pass the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, its dome reduced to a torn and gaping turquoise shell swaddled in brown scaffolding. When Mosul was about to fall, Isis had a choice: either retreat from the site where the Caliphate had been announced or blow it up. It chose the latter.

Will Mosul recover? I ask Mohammed. “Life is back,” he replies. “Corruption is back. In fact, everything is worse — because so many people lost loved ones. There is a huge ditch in Khalsa in southwest Mosul, which contains the bodies of more than 14,000 civilians and police killed by Isis. And all this for what? WMDs? Oh please. The only WMD Iraq ever had was stupidity.”

Mohammed Merah began his rampage in Toulouse on March 11, 2012, first executing a French-Moroccan paratrooper who nobly refused an order to lie down. He struck again on March 15, firing on three soldiers in Montauban — two were killed and another left paralysed. The murdered soldiers were all of North African Muslim descent. Then, on March 19, Merah pulled up outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school. In the schoolyard, he gunned down a Rabbi before executing the man’s three and five-year-old sons as they tried to crawl to safety. He then entered the school and grabbed an eight-year-old girl, at which point his gun jammed. Unperturbed, he swapped weapons and shot her. He filmed it all. After a manhunt and lengthy standoff, Merah was shot dead by police at his apartment.

Even considering the usual moral squalor of jihadist violence, Merah’s spree stands out for its depravity. Yet, for some reason, he is still widely revered. Nicole Yardeni, a deputy mayor in the city, tells me that his name is sometimes viewed positively even outside of jihadist circles, as “a symbol of rebellion” against society. After all, Merah is the man “who brought France to its knees”, as one local youth reminded the mother of his first victim. Even at the time of the police manhunt and siege, Facebook posts and pages honouring the gunman attracted thousands of likes, while police prevented people from laying flowers at his apartment. (It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority, Muslim and non-Muslim, were horrified.)

Within Salafi-jihadist circles, Merah’s cold-blooded rampage made him an icon. At the time of his attack a petty criminal, 28-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche, was killing time in a prison cell. Ordinarily, he would have refused to watch infidel television, but this time he asked his guards for a TV set so he could jubilantly follow the Merah manhunt live. Nemmouche would later head for Syria where he became a jailer for Islamic State. Chillingly, he told a captive that, like Merah, he “dreamed of grabbing a Jewish girl by the hair and shooting her dead”. Nemmouche would go on to deliberately target and murder Jews, killing four at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in 2014. It was Europe’s first attack by an Isis returnee.

Merah told police that he had conducted his attack on behalf of al-Qaeda, but that has not stopped their bitter Islamic State rivals from invoking his name. Journalist David Thomson interviewed several French members of Isis, each one praising Merah. Even official Isis propaganda has urged Francophone supporters to follow in Merah’s footsteps.

Laurence Bindner, who co-founded Jihadoscope to monitor jihadi online activity, tells me that Merah’s impact on the ground in his Cité des Izards housing estate “has been profound”. To Bindner, Merah’s place in jihadi lore is symbolic for a simple, gruesome reason: “He was the one who has no limits, the one who kills children.” But, she quickly adds, “this also put him beyond the pale even for some radical Islamists”. Merah was the first to cross a line.

Merah’s act divided Salafi-jihadists in France and beyond. But for the next few years, his supporters seemed to be winning the argument, and decisively so. The Merah generation wanted to transform Europe’s streets and plazas into the new theatres of jihad. In doing so, they helped unleash a campaign of extreme violence against European civilians with France — very deliberately — at the centre. Merah and his imitators shattered the illusion that France, by virtue of not participating in the Iraq invasion, would be spared the terror which had struck in Madrid and London in the years prior. Following in Merah’s footsteps, this generation had few qualms about the massacre of children, from Nice’s Promenade des Anglais to the foyer of Manchester Arena.

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By Norma Costello

Perhaps the most damaging myth that Merah created was that of the loup solitaire — the lone wolf. It was deployed in Merah’s case to underline that he had acted alone and not received formal direction from al-Qaeda, but these were the old rules of counter-terrorism not yet updated for European jihad’s coming of age. Security services anticipated clandestine cells and bombings of “high value” targets and infrastructure; what they got was a bottom up wave of often intimate mass casualty violence, and trained extremists with EU passports dispatched across borders from a terror state on Europe’s doorstep. The lone wolf framing prevented the state and civil society from fully realising what was coming, and it obscured the extremist socialisation processes quietly taking place in certain locales around Western Europe.

Some of those affected locales were in Toulouse, where decades ago militants connected to Algeria’s Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) helped to construct a key node of French jihadism — a milieu where Mohammed Merah belonged. A mentor to Merah was the Syrian “white emir” Olivier Corel, who established a cult-like Salafi-jihadist commune in the countryside. Other Merah associates included the notorious Clain brothers, whose activism helped to swell the ranks of Toulouse’s extremist circles from a few dozen to a few hundred. In the 2000s, this network dispatched extremists to fight against the Americans and the Shia with al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Merah was no black sheep: his extended family nurtured an intense hatred of French society and Jews. His own brother, nicknamed locally after Osama Bin Laden, is thought to have joined the jihad in Iraq. His sister Souad was active in militant Salafist networks. She was part of an independent school established to raise model Muslims as defined by Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood — whose ideas had cross-pollinated in the densely populated housing estates. Souad, who declared she was “proud, proud, proud” of her brother for massacring Jews would, like so many of Merah’s associates, eventually join Isis. Meanwhile, Merah’s stepbrother was the only Frenchman formally accused of crimes against humanity for his role in the Yazidi genocide.

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Merah’s killing spree also triggered a debate on the apparently unique susceptibility of petty criminals and gangsters to jihadism. And though it may well be true that the brutality was attractive to those already inured to violence and seeking status or redemption, this view fails to consider the bigger picture. In France, certain neighbourhoods once in the grip of gangs were slowly taken over by the muscular evangelising of Salafi activists and Islamists, a process facilitated by the isolation, urban density and absence of authority in the Cités. In some locales, the Salafi activists steered people away from crime towards militant religion, in others — like in Toulouse — they incorporated the drug trade into their activism and saw no contradiction between the two. Examining the housing blocks explicitly targeted by this aggressive proselytising programme, it is perhaps less surprising that many petty criminals eventually filled the ranks of Isis.

Merah’s impact on the jihadist movement and European counter-terrorism was profound, but so was his impact on Toulouse. I briefly moved to the city in the aftermath of the rampage, and the attack seemed to loom over its residents. It also weighed heavily on Toulouse’s Jewish community, as Yardeni, who headed a Jewish organisation before joining the mayor’s office, estimates that hundreds of families took the impossible decision to leave. Perhaps it was not just the cruelty of Mohammed Merah’s killing spree that made Toulouse’s Jews reconsider, but the knowledge that, to a small number of their neighbours, this act made him a hero.

Britain is now one of its many targets. The IRGC has sponsored terror, kidnap and seemingly endless sordid criminal acts since its founding. Its targets have always been global and since 2015, there has been a surge in IRGC activity in the UK and Europe. In 2022, MI5 acknowledged a real threat from Iran’s “aggressive intelligence services” to kidnap or kill UK-based people.

On Monday, the UK placed further sanctions on Iranian officials following the execution of dual British-Iranian national Alireza Akbari. On 12 January 2023, the House of Commons passed a motion calling on the UK government to finally proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. The vote passed unanimously in favour, though it’s not binding. It does, however, remain an indication of the growing tensions between the UK and Iran, which have intensified after the recent execution of dual British-Iranian national, former Iranian Deputy Minister of Defence Alireza Akbari, for alleged spying.

On one level, as Kasra Aarabi, Iran Programme Lead at the Tony Blair Institute, observes, the IRGC is a “violent, Islamist-extremist organisation that operates no differently to proscribed groups in the United Kingdom, including the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda and Hizbullah”. But the group is more than this. Key figures in the 1979 revolution — some of whom had trained with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Lebanon and even, further back, the Muslim Brotherhood — decided that, after the Islamic Revolution achieved victory by overthrowing the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an organisation would be needed not just to safeguard the revolution, but to bolster and strengthen it.

A tough gig, then. But what makes the IRGC so potent, beyond mere military prowess, is its ideological mission — which has only grown over the past few decades. If the group’s centrality emerged with the foundation of the state, its only increased in 1989 when Ali Khamenei succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader. Khamenei was determined to use the IRGC to further spearhead one of post-revolutionary Tehran’s key ideological tenets: exporting its Islamic revolution across the Muslim world. For this task, he set up a division known as the Quds (Jerusalem) Force, whose official objective is to “liberate” Jerusalem through the destruction of the state of Israel.

The Quds Force has become the engine of Iranian offensive operations across the Middle East — murdering its way across Syria, Yemen and Iraq, to name just a few countries. And in all the theatres in which it operates it does so not just as a military outfit, but a political one, too.

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The case of Iraq is instructive. It is Tehran, partly through skilfully deploying its Quds Force, that has been the clear winner of 2003’s cretinously planned and executed invasion of Iraq. From the beginning it exploited the void left by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, to expand its political, military and economic penetration of Baghdad. This is the bonus that comes with “extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world”. It tends to have considerable geopolitical benefits.

It’s no surprise that the Quds Force was led by Qasem Soleimani, who — until the US droned him in Baghdad in January 2020 — was a man of great charisma, striking looks and political acumen. Yes, Tehran was behind a lot of the violence in post-invasion Iraq, not least through its founding and sponsoring of several Shia militias to challenge and often supplant Baghdad’s authority. But it was the political talents of Soleimani, and his Iraqi sidekick Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis (who was killed in the same drone strike), that really drove the Iranian stake into the heart of Iraqi governance.

When, in 2014, several of the Iran-based Shia militias decided to band together in an umbrella organisation that came to be known as Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), it was Soleimani and Muhandis who kept their near-pathological infighting in line, and who were integral to formulating their political strategy. They were soldiers, but they were also what the Russians would call “political technologists”.

When they got whacked, it all started to fall apart. In the October 2021 Iraqi general elections, the political block of the Iran-backed Shia militias lost badly; and it lost because the various parties failed to understand the ramifications of electoral reforms, while their opponents used them to their own advantage. Since then, Baghdad has been unable to form a government while the Shia militias are squabbling among themselves and becoming even more unpopular among the Iraq people.

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As one regional expert told me last year: “The mess the Iran-backed Shia militias are in right now, can be traced directly to that drone strike in 2020. Without Soleimani they simply aren’t as politically effective.”

This speaks to an important, and inescapable, wider truth: All of the IRGC’s soft power activities are designed to aid its hard power activities. It has, over decades, cultivated demonstrably effective political, cultural, economic and intelligence divisions, the importance of which can never be underestimated. They ensure the group’s influence permeates into almost all aspects of national life, and across the Middle East — and now, critically, even in the United Kingdom.

In the UK, the IRGC can rely on a lattice of ostensibly religious and cultural institutions to further its ideological and criminal aims. Much of its propaganda, which is designed to nurture homegrown extremism, poses a threat to Britain’s national security and promotes the Guard’s ideology in mosques, charities and schools.

An analysis of the IRGC’s training manuals used to radicalise recruits reveals that the group’s ideology promotes both violence and a clear doctrine of extremism underpinned by a misreading of Islamic texts similar to terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. The materials make armed jihad against “enemies of Islam” — identified as non-Muslims and opponents of the regime (including Muslims) — an imperative for adherents, and explicitly calls for killings against Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians.

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As ever, ideology stands in the service of politics. The materials are at pains to stress that there is an equally strong imperative to torture Iranians who oppose the Islamic Republic prior to their execution on the basis they are “waging war against God” (moharebs).

As protests continue across Iran following the killing of Mahsa Amini in police custody on 16 September 2022, a succession crisis also looms. The 83-year-old Khamenei is seeking to ensure that his son Mojtaba, if he does not follow him as Supreme Leader, is at least the real power broker in Iran. In the background sit the IRGC, determined that whoever succeeds will be amenable to their interests.

Right now, Iran is in flux. The protests are unquestionably the most serious the regime has ever faced. The IRGC’s foot soldiers, the Basij, are out in the streets alongside the protestors doing what they do best — killing and maiming. Alongside mass unrest, the economy is tanking; summer will bring with it the now-familiar problem of drought. The threats facing Tehran are multiple and pretty much existential now.

The Mullahs and their sadistic enforcers are worried. In a state known for its near-pathological exercise of control, the future is unusually vague. One thing, though, is certain: whatever happens next, the IRGC will stand malevolently at the centre of it, and not just in Tehran but, unless the UK government finally acts, increasingly in London as well.

Where America is unique among the rival great powers jostling for mastery of the century to come is its distraction fighting a still-virtual civil war on social media at the same time. In the midst of this global contest, we as social media consumers are like some luckless peasant community of a contested borderland, simultaneously the justification for the war, through their expressions of sincere concern for our safety and security, and the battleground, through the harvesting of our data and the endless background turmoil that now fills our lives.

Into this bearpit strode Elon Musk, carrying a sink, with a stated vision of remaking Twitter according to the dreams of its founders barely a decade ago as the “global town square”. The phrase, redolent of Socratic dialogue beneath some shaded colonnade, seems quaintly inappropriate. Few Americans, and fewer foreigners, would wish to linger long in San Francisco’s real-world urban plazas, and their virtual replacement is hardly more congenial. In the real world, far beyond the ayahuasca visions of the site’s unworldly founder, the central square is as often a place of repression and public execution as of well-ordered debate and conviviality; it is the place where political power is expressed through the raising or toppling of statues, bloody revolutions, and intimidating displays of force.

The tiresome and self-defeating illusion of many conservatives, like that of any Hyde Park orator, is that if only the passing public were given free exposure to the brilliance of their dialogue, they would soon become converts. It is the precise illusion punctured by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, when he observed that “a class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict,” for as he notes, “the essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.”

But it cannot, and here we see the essential contradiction of Musk’s self-imposed mission: the conflict between free speech and the good of the community is fundamentally unresolvable. Decisions will always finally have to be made by someone, and those decisions are always by their nature political, arbitrary, and thus always a source of dispute. For the essence of politics lies in the final decision for Schmitt, then still writing as a fashionable intellectual of the Catholic Centre Party, aiming to save the Weimar state from its own dysfunction: his remorseless logic had not yet driven him to embrace the disastrous political form which gives his reputation its current frisson. Schmitt’s fundamental insight is more applicable to the Musk case than we may at first think: for now Musk has found himself mired in the ad hoc policing of speech on the site, whether through Twitter polls, or his own arbitrary decisions. 

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For Schmitt, this is all as it should be: the arbitrariness is the point, as the sovereign reveals himself as such through “a pure decision not based on reason and discussion and not justifying itself, that is, to an absolute decision created out of nothingness”. For at times of crisis, unresolvable in terms of ordinary politics, comes the state of exception in which sovereign power unveils itself, cutting the Gordian knot of political deadlock: “at times it does so as a deus ex machina, to decide according to positive statute a controversy that the independent act of juristic perception failed to bring to a generally plausible solution; at other times it does so as the graceful and merciful lord who proves by pardons and amnesties his supremacy over his own laws”.

This tension reveals itself at its most political in the edge cases, the debatable borderlands where what is lawful may outrun what is good for the community. Again, this aligns with Schmitt’s insight: his opening line from Political Theology, that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” is immediately followed by the observation that, “only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept,” indeed, this very “definition of sovereignty must … be associated with a borderline case and not with routine.” That is, only those cases where the course of action is contested are by their nature political: and only through the final act of decision, one way or another, does the political sovereign reveal himself.

On Twitter, the edge cases are those, like Trump’s presence, on which the preservation of America’s political order have been stated to depend, and on the content most widely considered objectionable by society as a whole: jihadist and extreme Right-wing invocations to terrorist violence, and child exploitation content. Back in an earlier iteration of the platform, before the political community reached a consensus that groups such as Islamic State should not be allowed to openly congregate on social media, Twitter became one of the prime vectors of jihadist propaganda, recruitment and social interaction. It was interesting, even amusing at first, to engage in back and forth debates and snarky banter with Islamic State fighters on Twitter; then it became horrifying and unbearable as the group hurtled further into its darkness. From being a reporter whose career was largely based on the juxtaposition of monitoring Isis content on social media, while reporting the battle on the ground against their physical manifestation in Syria and Iraq, I eventually had to stop following Isis content at all: the constant blurring of the virtual and the real, between London and the Middle East, became too jarring. But is it true, as has recently been claimed, that Musk’s commitment to free speech will lead to a terrorist revival on the platform?

Experts are undecided. Moustafa Ayad, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank monitoring jihadist use of the platform, told me that on Twitter, “the rate of Islamic State accounts being set up or used to spread propaganda has increased over the past two months under new management”, perhaps due to lax moderation as “most moderation teams have been gutted (despite public statements to the contrary) of the context and subject matter expertise required to effectively go after terror-supporting accounts.” Yet Twitter remains a site of negligible activity for the group, compared with other apps such as Telegram where discourse is far less tightly monitored (at least overtly). On Twitter, supporters of Islamic State evade banning through avoiding open encitements to terrorist violence. As Ayad notes, “They primarily stay away from posting violent content to inhabit ‘legal grey areas,’ but they continue to post branded terrorist content and share legacy material, old videos, sermons and series. They will similarly use the phrase ‘IS,’ as a means to reference the Islamic State and still argue that they were referring to the concept of an Islamic state and not the group.” It is illegal to advocate for the Islamic State, after all, but not for an Islamic state: a distinction of which Anjem Choudary finally fell foul when forced by events to upgrade his fealty from the theoretical to the real. 

Laith Alkhouri, CEO of Intelonyx Intelligence Advisory, told me that he has not “not seen an uptick in accounts returning since Musk took the helm”, as groups such as Isis already have secure and thriving networks on far less rigorously policed social media platforms. Like Ayad, Alkhouri notes that the surviving Isis Twitter accounts maintain their presence by avoiding explicit celebration of violence. The accounts he has seen “mostly focus on religious content, abstain from posting images/videos or Isis branded content, and refrain from mentioning Isis as a group. I think these evasion techniques help keep accounts alive.”

Due to the nature of America’s internal political conflict, the policing of Right-wing speech is a more contentious matter than that of jihadist content: jihadist terrorism may kill far more people, but it does not threaten the political order, in the eyes of the political mainstream. Lucas Webber, co-founder and editor of the Militant Wire consultancy, told me that “There is nowhere near the level of terrorism-related content on Twitter compared to the peak IS in Iraq/Syria era of the mid 2010s. However, some extremist elements and ideological armed movements have adapted and manoeuvre around Terms of Service violations.” The Russian extreme-Right Rusich militia, fighting in Ukraine, uses Twitter to “funnel supporters” onto Russian-owned platforms, “and then fundraise from this support base to provide Rusich with weapons, drones, medical supplies, and more – things that have a real-world impact and are used to kill Ukrainians”. As Webber notes, “elements from the “TerrorGram” movement were quite pleased when Elon Musk took over and expressed their excitement about leveraging the platform to grow their international support network. This could ultimately result in direct acts of violence — for example, the recent Bratislava LGBTQ bar shooter was deeply immersed in this space and posted on Twitter during and after the attack.”

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But in Webber’s opinion, “the hysteria from public figures and the mainstream media seems to be largely politically motivated and blown out of proportion. However, the loosening of restrictions will inevitably give more space and oxygen to extremist actors to spread their message and promote their cause.” While decision-making on the edge cases of acceptable speech remains largely arbitrary as “Musk has taken a kind of brute force approach and is aggressively forging his vision through trial and error rather than any real coherent terms of service,” Webber believes that “this aspect will become more institutionalised and stable over time, and this is where it could either revert to type, or settle on set and consistently enforced rules that provide more freedom for political dissidents, conservatives, Right wingers etc to express their opinions”.  Yet it is here, in the debatable lands between legitimate Right-wing critique of the current order, and assertions of the need to violently overthrow it, that Twitter’s speech policies have been most fraught: where does Trump, now facing criminal charges for “insurrection” fit in, having declared on January 6 a state of exception he did not bother to attend? The broadly liberal political establishment may have overreached in its muzzling of Right-wing discourse, but even here lines will eventually have to be drawn by someone, and the final decisions made will always be by their nature arbitrary.

On the heated question of child exploitation content, similar edge cases will always remain a source of political conflict. Though initially disputed by many, experts now agree that Twitter before Musk’s takeover was markedly lax in taking down child abuse material, with the Internet Watch Foundation claiming in 2019 that the site was responsible for 40% of the illegal content hosted on the public internet. Even here, legal grey areas and ambiguities remain, and will, therefore, remain a source of political conflict as the dividing lines are contested. Like Instagram and TikTok, Twitter remains host to legal but unseemly material derived from underaged social media influencers: the task of distinguishing between what is legal and what is morally acceptable proved such a headache for Tumblr that it ended up banning all glamour content (in the process driving adult pornographic influencers to Twitter en masse). Though vastly more reported — and this can only be because it has become a source of heated political distinction between the two American political factions — just the same case can be made regarding the confluence of children and drag performances now driving the American “groomer” discourse. 

As the tech writer Jon Stokes observes in this excellent recent essay, the politics of sex has become the central dividing line of American political conflict. As Stokes enumerates, “Drag Queen Story Hour, Drag Brunch for kids, Kids putting dollar bills into strippers’ thongs, doing pole dancing with strippers, or some other sex-work-related activity, School books that present sex work to kids as just another kind of work, Pride parades with kink on full display and kids present and even participating, Drag kids, Child beauty pageants, Evangelical purity balls, Gay conversion therapy, Porn use by teens” have superseded race as the central battlegrounds on which America’s two political factions contest social media. Sharply divided by the politics of sex in general, the conflict between liberals and conservatives is most heated precisely where the stakes are highest — in the protection of children — and where the boundary between what is legal and what is morally acceptable is so contested.  

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In all of these vexed debates, the central political question is, as Schmitt observed, Who decides? Who decides who may stay on Twitter, and who must be banished from the town square? Who can pluck Kanye West or the former president from their ignominious exile, and thrust them back into silence when they reoffend? It is only Musk, exercising his sovereign power. Where such decisions were once obscure, seemingly nudged behind the scenes by functionaries of the American security state, now they are on display, to be hissed or applauded by the crowd, as if watching an emperor decide the fate of a wounded gladiator. This situation cannot go on for long, but in observing the contours of the present battleground, we are given insight into both Schmitt’s thought and into the contradictory, unresolvable tensions within conservatism between advocating free speech for all that is legal, and opposing that which is harmful 

In his 1929 lecture The Age of Neutralisations and Depoliticisations, Schmitt mocked the technological utopians of his day, who, like Twitter’s founders, believed that “technology appeared to be a domain of peace, understanding, and reconciliation,” where “all peoples and nations, all classes and religions, all generations and races appear to be able to agree” because “unlike theological, metaphysical, moral, and even economic questions, which are forever debatable, purely technical problems have something refreshingly factual about them.” No, warned Schmitt, it is precisely the opposite: “Technology is always only an instrument and weapon; precisely because it serves all, it is not neutral.”

As he observes, in a passage that skewers the initial Utopian dreams of Silicon Valley, “If humanitarian-moral progress is still expected by many today from the perfection of technology, it is because technology is magically linked to morality on the somewhat naive assumption that the splendid array of contemporary technology will be used only as intended… and that they themselves will control these frightful weapons and wield this monstrous power.” Yet this is a grave misunderstanding, Schmitt warns: “Technology is no longer neutral ground” but instead, “every strong politics will make use of it” in ways which “will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground”.

It is in the friend-enemy groupings coalescing on social media, particularly on Twitter, that the political battleground deciding our future has been drawn, and it is in the battle for who controls the edge cases of acceptable speech, that the power to make the arbitrary decisions defining political sovereignty resides. It is a marvel of America’s political culture that, at precisely its moment of greatest internal conflict since its civil war, the world’s richest man could buy himself, if not the throne itself, what is likely to be a veto on who next ascends it. Similarly, for all that Schmitt has re-emerged as a source of political inspiration on the Right following his 2000s adoption by the populist Left, it was America’s liberal establishment that revealed themselves the true Schmittians, in their urge to save American democracy from its errant voters. Under their guidance, echoing Schmitt’s definition of crisis as where “a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state” exists, American politics since 2016 has become a permanent state of exception, in which the diminution of sovereign power in the White House was manifest largely through manipulation of social media. 

Like an absent-minded ascetic king, Jack Dorsey accidentally built a site of great, yet unclearly defined political power, certainly greater than many nation-states: when, by threatening Musk with sanctions, we see the European Union try to assert its own sovereignty, power frankly does not seem weighted in Europe’s favour. Whether or not Musk wishes to keep this power is an unresolved question: as he has recently declared, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.” It is now too late for us to debate whether or not such power should exist: the fundamental question, for Twitter as for American politics, remains unresolved: who next decides?

The women did not hold back. Every day I turned on my phone to a deluge of Isis slogans, religious memes and terror threats. Images of destroyed western cities were particularly popular. I was told that terrorists such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the Boston bomber) were heroes. My new contacts would make jokes about blowing up London. They bantered about beheadings.

These women had been holed up in the Kurdish-run desert camp since the fall of Baghouz, the last Isis enclave, in March 2019. They wanted money — and were getting it. With the help of Isis women who had already managed to return to the EU or Turkey, they were spearheading a fundraising campaign to “free the sisters” from the Kurds. Their rhetoric was typically fiery, and the groups used encrypted apps such as Telegram to organise donations. Since then, I’ve watched as their language has softened — and begun to poison the West’s mainstream media.

Around the beginning of the pandemic, family and friends of Isis members began to gently craft a new narrative about their women. They had never supported the caliphate. They were innocents forced to travel there by men. They were, in their own way, victims. These grown women had been “trafficked” into Isis territory. Ignore the fact that many of them bought their own tickets.

This narrative was being peddled by a cluster of online groups, which had sympathetic names such as “Repatriate the Children”. The funding behind them is questionable: in Ukraine, where I am now, some organisations supporting Isis families were connected to Russia. Most claimed to be primarily concerned with the wellbeing of minors, many of whom had been born in Isis territory, were injured and, yes, should have been repatriated — albeit to countries many of them had never even visited. But soon the remit of these groups broadened. They began to speak of “women and children” in a Syrian “refugee camp”.

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A number of NGOs have fallen for this narrative — as has the Western media. Where reports once condemned evil Isis brides joking about beheadings, now they depict the plight of innocent Isis brides who just want to come home after a terrible ordeal. Last month, the New York Times ran an article on the repatriation of Australian Isis families headlined: “After years of ‘Hell’ in Isis Detention Camp, 17 Australians Return Home”. The story celebrated the return of 13 children, as well as four grown women who were almost certainly committed to Isis once, even if they aren’t anymore. It also featured comment from the ecstatic patriarch of a large Sydney-based family from which several adults have fled to join the caliphate. There was no mention of those for whom Isis made life “Hell”: the Yazidis, who were brutally enslaved, and the Kurds.

This NYT report appears to be the result of three years of lobbying to ensure that anyone who makes the terror group look bad is utterly erased. The truth is, the women of Isis are rarely passive victims. I have visited the section of al-Hol that houses foreign women and children several times. It is many things, but it is certainly not a refugee camp, unless the women are refugees from a terror state many of them travelled thousands of kilometres to join. It is a prison camp full of inmates who support an extremely dangerous ideology. (That’s not to say the camp doesn’t deserve criticism: the conditions are inhumane, and children in particular should never have to experience them.)

The first Isis “bride” I encountered, shortly after Baghouz fell, was a woman in niqab who started to shout, condemning me and everyone from my country for destroying the caliphate. More women gathered around us, triggering a ritual with which I would become quite familiar: exhausted Kurdish women from the YPG, a group that not only fought Isis but were then tasked with guarding them, brandishing their AK47s and telling me to move. I was “exciting” the inmates, who, I was warned, could become aggressive. During my visits, I saw women making beheading gestures. They often spat at our feet.

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My observations weren’t unusual. Colleagues ran headlines describing the camps as “toxic” and the inmates as “radicalised”. Women screamed on camera about the glorious legacy of Isis ideology and scoffed that they would never go to prison. The Guardian described al-Hol as an “incubator for Islamic State resurgence”, and reported several brutal murders carried out inside the camp.

But a year after the fall of the caliphate, Covid-19 raged across continents, and foreign correspondents with experience in Syria were refocused. The international news cycle was now in a furious pandemic-obsessed spin. Pro-Isis lobby groups saw their opportunity — and started to change tack.

Women inside the camps were instructed to tone down their language. Twitter accounts that had previously called for the beheading of journalists like me now took a more humanitarian approach. And it wasn’t long before NGOs adopted this rhetoric. Human Rights Watch started to issue press releases with titles such as “’Bring me back to Canada’: plight of Canadians held in Syria for alleged Isis links”. That particular publication includes quotes from Kimberly Poleman (“Let me be who I am, a Canadian”), who met an Isis fighter online and travelled to the caliphate in 2015. A year earlier, Isis’s Yazidi genocide of August 2014 had been well-documented. Poleman could hardly claim to be ignorant about the crimes of the organisation she was going to support.

But, disturbingly, Yazidis, Kurds and the caliphate have slipped out of NGO press releases, which instead focus on the rights of foreigners held in “filthy conditions”. Meanwhile, aid organisations have reduced their services in the Yazidi camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. Yazidi girls held as sex slaves by Isis receive messages on social media apps from Isis supporters telling them they are coming back to get them. Some girls refuse to leave the sprawling, under-resourced camps for this reason. Meanwhile, young Yazidi boys, having been groomed by Isis to fight and dig tunnels in Mosul, spend their days shooting things in online games. Many local aid workers are terrified of these children returned from Isis. “Can you take them to your country?” one camp worker asked me, when I visited.

Journalists, like NGOs, have also lost interest in these Yazidi victims, while anything featuring Isis brides continues to receive exposure — which, perhaps cynically, is why I believe some NGOs continue to champion foreign repatriations. Headlines generate interest, interest generates donations. No one seems to realise that Isis itself is perfectly capable of supporting its women — it may have been defeated territorially but it still has a lot of money in the Middle East, and a well-organised global network of supporters.

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More than anything, these last three years have felt like a bizarre experiment in how to whitewash the actions of terrorists. The time, effort and resources that went into reframing women who supported slavery — and openly told journalists they wanted to kill them and destroy their societies — is remarkable. Late last year, those of us who covered Isis for years joked that the next narrative to take over would be “save the innocent men!” And then, like clockwork, CTV News ran a piece about the British-Canadian Isis fighter Jack Letts that described him as a “bright teenager”. A few months later, the Guardian ran a piece headlined, “The UK government’s hypocrisy is keeping Jack Letts and his mother in purgatory” — in which the Brit is described as an Isis “volunteer”, rather than a fighter. The piece again omits any reference to the victims of Isis; lines are blurred, language is changed, and suddenly a man who joined a terrorist organisation is “a symbol of this government’s shameful unwillingness to confront the hardest of its responsibilities”.

Yet despite all this, you might find it strange to learn that I have campaigned for the repatriation of Isis members. Ireland, my native country, still has one naturalised citizen in Syria. I have advocated for his repatriation and subsequent trial — because Ireland is one of the few countries to have successfully prosecuted Isis members.

Former soldier Lisa Smith travelled to Syria twice and was ultimately sent to al-Hol. In July, she was tried in Ireland as a fully-grown adult whose actions have consequences. Joining a terrorist organisation that enslaved an ethnic group and sold young girls for sex is an action that deserves punishment. NGOs and journalists might see a softer narrative as a means to ensuring children are removed from prison camps, but there is no excuse for whitewashing the crimes committed by the women of Isis. The cleansing of their story will undoubtedly provide a template for terrorists — and only serves to embolden the well-resourced group, who are quite frankly laughing at us all.

Anyone who builds a career out of watching such material, whether it’s for the purposes of documenting it, reporting on it, or inquiring into its wider causes and meanings, ought to have some thoughts on the moral ambiguities intrinsic to it. In his memoir, Unreasonable Behaviour, first published in 1990, the British war photographer Don McCullin explains how he was drawn to war by a sense of adventure and the belief that by documenting its horrors he could stir the conscience of those who could put an end to them.

But he soon came to doubt that conviction and to question the true nature of his motives: “If war had become so hateful to me, why did I not keep away?” Reflecting on his long and celebrated career, he can’t repress the nagging suspicion that war photographers are nothing more than glorified profiteers, coldly trading on other people’s unspeakable suffering and grief. “Yet, I ask myself, what has all my looking and probing done for these people, or for anyone?… What have I done with my life?”

Reading Unreasonable Behaviour today is a jarring experience, not just because of its raw honesty, but also because of the contrast it invites between McCullin’s temperament and his peers who now cover war and conflict. McCullin is ambivalent, self-reproachful, measured and stoic, whereas his successors tend to be self-righteous, ideological and fragile. When McCullin was asked about Covid, at the height of the pandemic, the then-84-year old contemptuously snorted: “I couldn’t give a sod about it.”

There are certainly no Don McCullins in the extremism profession today, where stupefying levels of self-aggrandisement are matched only by a stupefying absence of any self-awareness. Consider Vidhya Ramalingam, founder and CEO of a counter-extremism company called Moonshot. Referring to the Eradicate Hate Global Summit held in Pittsburgh last month, Ramalingam insisted that its purpose was “to stop an epidemic of violence that has cost us so many lives… We are the group that are going to stop this”.

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The self-promotion and self-regard on display here is really quite breathtaking. So, too, is the sense of unreality. How, you might ask, does Team Ramalingam plan to go about the task of stopping America’s epidemic of violence? By speaking at plush conferences about “novel forms of safeguarding”? By supporting workshops on the intersection between gaming and extremism? By posting insufferably smug tweets about men “taking responsibility” for male-dominated power structures?

Of course, all of this raises a bigger question: what is the point of the extremism profession? Ramalingam would say its overriding purpose is to make the world a better place; that it’s only by properly understanding how extremism works that we can identify effective solutions for combating it. Yet if you take even a cursory glance at the extremism profession it becomes glaringly obvious that the driving imperative behind it is not to eradicate extremism, but to hunt down, if not outright invent, new forms of it in order to drum up business from all the internet-scraping, report-writing, and digital counter-messaging that the industry trades on.

This explains why so many industry-insiders have embraced the concepts of hate speech and the related notion of “online harms”, and it’s why some extremism experts have heartily endorsed the notion that violent extremism has become “mainstream” in American culture and society. They have done so not necessarily because they are committed to radical activism, although some certainly are, but because the alarmist, progressive vision of a society saturated in mutual hatred affords so many opportunities for the extremism profession to engorge itself on.

The result is a curious, if mutually beneficial and lucrative, alignment, where the concerns of Left-leaning activists are leveraged and repackaged for profit by hard-nosed extremism hucksters who are now suddenly awakened to the lethal menace of Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. At the same time, the radical activists have embraced the language of violent extremism — “mass radicalisation”, extremist “eco-systems”, dangerousness, vulnerability — to impugn their political enemies on the Right and to legitimise their social banishment through censorship.

Another curious aspect of this alignment is how readily so many extremism experts and scholars have embraced the infantilising trauma discourse of radical activists. This is a subject I address in my new book on the seductions and repulsions of violent online spectacles. If you spend all your time watching this stuff, out of choice, as many extremism experts do, you will inevitably run up against the suspicion that you might secretly enjoy it or have been irreparably desensitised by it.

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Nobody in the extremism profession would ever dare confess to harbouring such feelings — and if they were to voice them they would be ostracised as a degenerate voyeur or sociopath. Instead, many claim to have been traumatised by what they have seen. And while I have no doubt that some have been psychologically or spiritually damaged by over-exposure, the invocation of trauma serves to deflect or neutralise any deeper inquiry into the murky business of tracking extremist material on the internet and the complex motives and emotions that it involves.

War, as many illustrious war correspondents have testified, can be a warping experience. In his memoir about covering the war in Bosnia in the early Nineties, Anthony Loyd remarked that although war didn’t fundamentally change his already black-pilled perspective on the world, it did serve to reinforce his “views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe”. For Christopher Hedges, the feeling was far more visceral and dramatic. Recalling a ruck he’d gotten into with an airline clerk on the way back from a particularly harrowing trip to El Salvador, where he’d been covering the war there between 1983 and 1988, he wrote: “Blood streamed down his face and mine. I refused to wipe the dried stains off my cheeks on the flight to Madrid, and I carry a scar on my face from where he thrust his pen into my cheek. War’s sickness had become mine.”

Similarly revealing is an anecdote told by Rukmini Callimachi, the New York Times journalist who made her name reporting on Isis, in which she describes hearing someone repeatedly banging on her apartment door late at night. She called the cops, fearing it might be an Isis operative paying her a menacing visit. (It was actually someone from the local water company.) Callimachi tells the story with humour, but the moral behind it is a serious one: to be exposed to carnage and chaos, all of the time and without let up, can seriously derange one’s perception, judgment and sense of proportion.

The best reporters are acutely aware of this danger and try, as best they can, to inoculate against it. Loyd, by his own admission, failed miserably on that front. Not only did the war in Bosnia wrench open the lid on the darker side of his mind; it also blew a gaping hole in his sense of professional detachment and made him contemptuous of the “complacency of Western societies”.

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This hints at a greater paradox that extremism professionals would do well to consider: that through over-exposure to the very worst places of the internet, they succumb to the very radicalisation dynamics that they’re trying to expose and hinder. When mainstream journalists think that MAGA is an armed insurgency or declare that, as one headline put it in Foreign Policy, “White Supremacists Want a Dirty Bomb”, or believe that a red dress or “ok” sign is a fascist dog-whistle, it becomes impossible to deny that some kind of warping has occurred. By staring too intently into the twilight world of online megadeath, mayhem and tribal hatred, they inevitably project this gruesome and fringe demiworld onto the real world that the rest of us inhabit. As the terrorism scholar Peter Neumann has observed:

“If people end up spending too much of their time in virtual communities, the online forums come to function like one of Edwin Sutherland’s “criminogenic environments”, in which deviant and extreme behaviours are learned and absorbed and in which extreme ideas come to seem normal because of constant interaction with people who hold similar—and similarly extreme—views… As a result, people acquire a skewed sense of reality…”

The irony, which seems lost on the extremism reporters and experts, is that this dynamic applies as much to them as to the extremists they spend all of their time “infiltrating”. Don McCullin knew all about the dangers of getting too close to his subject and, along with other like-minded war reporters, he has much to teach us about the ambiguities of their profession and their own conflicted relationship to it. The new generation of hate eradicators and extremism experts would no doubt benefit from reading them — although such are the exigencies of saving the world that they probably don’t have the time.

Her name was Tooba Gondal, a then 21-year-old from East London. She was a savvy operator on social media and had revealed little about her personal life in her numerous pro-Isis Twitter accounts. But she couldn’t do anything about that tweet from an earlier account she had used before she became an Isis true believer. It was innocuous enough, but there it was: a casual reference to her father by his full name.

Last month, Benedetta Argentieri’s documentary The Matchmaker premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The film is about Gondal, who, in her incarnation as Umm Muthanna Al-Britannia, sought to enlist foreign women and girls to Isis, where they would become the wives of the male fighters. The film’s title self-consciously appropriates Gondal’s tabloid name (“the Isis matchmaker”), but there’s nothing remotely sensationalist or cheap about the film.

Argentieri first met Gondal in March 2019, where she was filming at the Ain Issa Camp, and where Gondal, now 28, had surfaced with her two young children shortly after Isis’s final territorial defeat at Baghuz. Never shy of media attention, Gondal was a willing participant in the documentary. The entire project is a riveting case study in the psychology of denial and dissimulation: Gondal portrays herself as a victim, flagrantly lies and contradicts herself. [1. I appear in the film as an interviewee, and I count Argentieri as a friend, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call her film a stinker if it were a stinker. It isn’t a stinker.]

“It’s a mystery why anybody talks to a reporter,” Lawrence Wright has observed. Why would you willingly expose yourself to a cold-hearted stranger with a story to tell? Of course, Wright knows all-too-well why people talk to reporters: because they want to be heard and understood, because they enjoy the attention and feel important, and because they want to shape or control the narrative about themselves.

Yet often they come to regret their credulity, realising that their journalist-interlocutor is not, in Janet Malcolm’s words, the “permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother” they’d imagined, but “the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father”. Even the most powerful and privileged people are susceptible to this delusion: earlier this year, when Mohammed bin Salman agreed to an interview with The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood, he must have thought that Wood would be a soft touch. (He wasn’t.)

Gondal, I suspect, will come to regret her involvement in Argentieri’s film. Perhaps she thought she could project an image of herself that would go some way towards reversing the negative press she’s received in the UK. Almost certainly, she would have enjoyed being at the centre of attention and welcomed the distraction it offered from the ball-breaking grind of life in the camp. No doubt she thought she was dexterous enough to walk the boards and avoid any trap doors that might lie in wait. On this last count, she failed.

Of all of Isis’s many war crimes, the genocide it perpetrated against the Yazidis is one of the gravest. It is by now well-documented that not only did the group brutally slaughter Yazidi men, but also subject thousands of Yazidi women and girls to sexual enslavement. It’s also well-documented that many Western men and women who joined Isis were active participants in this horrific genocide. Some of the most affecting scenes in The Matchmaker centre on two of its victims: 15-year-old Rawa and 22-year-old Salwa. Rawa was bought and sold 13 times. “The Isis women were really violent to us,” she says, adding: “My god, the women were worse than the men. They beat us up thousands of times, put us in obscene clothes, and sent us to the men.” Salwa concurs: “The women were the most guilty in the selling of our girls.”

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Argentieri takes this up with Gondal, who denies knowing anything about the involvement of Isis women in such barbarity. Argentieri, who is a highly skilled interviewer, knows better than to express incredulity, much less outrage, at this response. She calmly follows up by asking Gondal if she’d ever met a Yazidi. Gondal bites: she says yes, but only once and at a dinner with other Western foreign Isis members. “She was maybe 13,” Gondal says of the Yazidi slave-girl. “She was very happy and in love with him,” she continues, referring to the girl’s Islamist slave-master. Having now fallen squarely into the hole, Gondal keeps on digging, caking herself in dirt and grime:

“He had spoiled her with everything that she wanted. She had her own phone, her own tablet, it was like very, very good treatment. I don’t know how much he bought her for, but she was crazy in love with him. I remember he wanted to eventually get rid of her, like he was just tired, she was just too clingy or I don’t know what the problem was. He wanted to sell her off to someone else and she was crying and she didn’t wanted to… I think one man from Saudi bought her.”

This is an astonishing piece of testimony, not simply because of the way in which Gondal inverts the victim-perpetrator relationship, but also due to the psychopathic insouciance with which she delivers it, and the utter contempt she shows towards a child victim of rape.

Another piece of striking testimony concerns Allison Fluke-Ekren (Umm Mohammed), who led the Khatiba Nusaybah, an all-female battalion based in Raqqa, and had plotted attacks on targets in America. In June, Fluke-Ekren, a 42-year-old former school teacher from Kansas, pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support to Isis and admitted to training over 100 women and girls for defensive combat.

Although Gondal doesn’t name her, she says she knew Fluke-Ekren “personally”, disclosing that “I saw her planning, I saw her training the women and everything… she was real, real American”. Gondal is adamant that she was not part of the Khatiba Nusaybah, yet she confides that she saw one of the Khatiba’s “training sites”, which she describes as a “very dark, underground basement”. Their aim, she says, “was to target every woman”. Despite clearly knowing a great deal about the Khatiba Nusaybah and its leader, Gondal claims that she didn’t even know how to use a gun.

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Her tweets, however, tell a different story. On 1 March, 2016, she told her followers: “Muhajirat muaskar [an all-female training camp] is the best thing so far for me loving it! Alhamdullilah [“Praise to God”]… firearm training is wajib [duty] in the land of Jihad.” In another tweet, using a different account, she declared that she was about to buy a Makarov [a Soviet semi-automatic pistol] and a suicide belt.

When asked to address accusations that she acted as a recruiter for Isis, Gondal says: “No, it’s not true, I never recruited any women.” The film then cuts to Gondal’s tweets where she openly invites Isis sympathisers at home to message her so that she can help them come to Isis-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq. It isn’t known just how many girls and women she recruited, but it’s a matter of public record that she tried recruiting her younger sister to the group.

In another tweet, in late 2015, Gondal declared: “I came here to die. I will not leave till I get what I came here for: shahadah [martyrdom].” When Argentieri raises this, Gondal laughs and feigns surprise. “Oh god, was that really my tweet? That is a really distressed tweet.” Later that year, after the Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed by Isis terrorists, Gondal gleefully tweeted: “Wish I could have seen the hostages being slaughtered last night with my own eyes. Would have been just beautiful.” Argentieri asks her to comment on this. Gondal doesn’t deny writing it, but says she has no memory of doing so. “I’m shocked that I even said that,” she says.

Who, really, is Gondal and how or why did she radicalise and leave Britain to join Isis? The film sheds only a partial light on this, chiefly because Gondal can’t or won’t convincingly explain it herself. According to Gondal, she lived a very secular life as a teenager in London: “I tried clubbing, I tried smoking, drinking, I tried having a boyfriend… everything you can imagine to find happiness.” She didn’t find it. Instead, she found misery and a spiritual void. But returning to Islam, she says, helped fill the void and gave her “inner happiness”.

But if Islam had indeed given her inner happiness (Gondal reverted in late 2012), why travel to war-torn Syria? Perhaps what Gondal was really searching for was not happiness at all, but struggle, excitement, danger: an all-engulfing emotional experience that would give her life a deeper meaning. Gondal, of course, can’t voice any of this, because it would directly contradict the other voice she’s assiduously learned while in detention. This is the passive voice of denial and dissociation.

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When Argentieri asks how she became “pro-jihadi”, Gondal says that she was “manipulated” and “brainwashed”. On only one occasion does Gondal break cover from this and level with Argentieri. This is when Argentieri expresses her puzzlement as to why so many Western women joined Isis. Gondal, with uncharacteristic directness, says: “It’s clear, they were looking to live under Sharia.” When pressed on what she found so appealing about Isis, Gondal falters and invokes the register of contrition: “If I’m honest, I regret that I even travelled to Syria.”

The Matchmaker has no thesis to advance about how Gondal came to renounce her life in the UK, where she had the support of a warm and well-off family, and join Isis. Nor does it have a view about what should be done about Gondal, who fled from her detention at the Ain Issa camp after it was shelled by Turkey in October 2019, is now in custody in France, where she was born and lived as a child before coming to London with her family. What it does have is the thing that all journalists and filmmakers long for but rarely find: a grippingly dire character with a story to tell.

One of the great merits of The Matchmaker is that it doesn’t judge or condemn Gondal and it certainly isn’t interested in forgiving her. That would be boring and political. Instead, it holds a mirror up to her and lets her do all the talking. The result is an absorbing incursion into the cursed complexity of radicalisation and human malevolence.

“Every villain,” Janet Malcolm writes, “wears a mask of goodness.” At many points in Argentieri’s film we see Gondal’s mask drop. But the woman it reveals remains a puzzle — to me, to Argentieri and even to herself.

The last time Begum hit the headlines it was because she’d had a makeover. This was exactly a year ago: gone was the bulky black burqa, and in were the skinny jeans, Nike baseball cap, sunglasses and pink nail-varnish. Had a new beauty salon opened up in Al-Roj, the arid and austere holding-pen in north-east Syria where Begum is housed, alongside other former female Isis members and their children? It seemed unlikely, but Begum had somehow got her hands on a new bit of clobber and wanted the whole world to know about it.

Subliminally, the message seemed to be: I’m not one of them – them being the burka’d ghouls she’s detained with and who routinely throw dirt and blood-curdling insults at visiting Western journalists. No, she was saying: I’m one of you, a normal British girl who you wouldn’t look twice at in the street. The sort of girl her former comrades-in-arms want to blow up in nightclubs.

Begum has again returned to the block caps of front-page news. This time it is because the Sunday Times journalist Richard Kerbaj has a book to flog: The Secret History of the Five Eyes. The book, which is about Western spycraft and was published this week, claims that Begum was smuggled into Syria aged 15 by a Syrian man who was leaking information to the Canadian security services about Western Isis recruits. Begum, with her legal team, has also been working with the BBC on a 10-part podcast series that is due to air any day now: you’ll be hearing a lot more about her in the coming weeks and months.

In his book, Kerbaj recounts how Mohammed al-Rashed, a people-smuggler who worked for Isis, helped Begum and her two schoolmates, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, cross from Turkey into Isis-controlled territory in Syria shortly after they flew from London to Istanbul on 17 February, 2015. According to Kerbaj, al-Rashed had photographed the girls’ passports and sent the images to his handler with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) at the Jordanian embassy. But by the time the handler had received news of the girls’ travel, it was too late — they were in Syria. Al-Rashed is thought to have helped many more Britons migrate to Syria to join Isis.

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This revelation about Begum is not actually all that revelatory: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran a story on it in March 2015. But it didn’t attract much interest at the time. Kerbaj, the BBC and Begum’s legal team and her apologists want to change that, refocusing the story on how Begum was trafficked and how the West had a hand in it.

According to the Begum family’s lawyer, Tasnime Akunjee, one of the main arguments he expects to marshal in an forthcoming legal hearing to challenge the removal of Begum’s citizenship rests on her putative status as “a victim of trafficking”. It was “shocking”, he said a few days ago, that a Canadian intelligence asset was involved in the smuggling operation that facilitated her travel to Syria. Joshua Baker, the producer of the new BBC podcast on Begum, seems to agree with this rhetorical framing: “Shamima Begum was taken to Syria by a highly organised smuggling network and at the centre of it was Canadian Spy,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

The podcast, I’m Not A Monster: The Shamima Begum Story, is yet to be released, but it doesn’t bode well that its producer is flagrantly misleading the public about Begum’s passage to Syria in an effort to promote it. Begum was not “taken” to Syria, if by “taken” it’s meant that she was kidnapped or coerced into going to Syria by others against her will. On the contrary, she went under her own steam with Sultana and Abase, both now thought to be dead.

Of course, and in a very trivial sense, Begum and her schoolmates were “taken” to Syria by the pilot who flew the commercial jet that transferred them from Gatwick to Istanbul, where they were then “taken” to southern Turkey by a bus driver. And from there they were “taken” across the border into Syria in a car driven by a smuggler. But this isn’t what Baker means by “taken”: he means it in the Liam Neeson sense of a staged disappearance organised by shadowy criminals.

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In reality, Begum was not the victim of human traffickers, but a willing client and beneficiary of their criminal services. Her decision to go to Syria was stupid and short-sighted, but it was still her decision. And let’s not pretend that she was a vulnerable and clueless little girl, as she is now incentivised to retrospectively claim that she was. Far from it: she was a smart, brave, bolshie and precocious teenager. It took a lot of guts and cunning for her to go to Syria, and no one made her believe that the caliphate was a glorious idea. She enthusiastically believed in it, because she needed or wanted to, and because when she traded Raqqa for London, ISIS was a revolutionary political movement in the ascendant. She volunteered to join it and then paid for the services of a smuggler by stealing jewellery from her family, as did the other two girls she went with. This cannot, in good faith, be categorised as “trafficked”; to try to do so is an insult to the real victims of human trafficking, who are sexually enslaved against their will.

And here’s the thing about the younger Begum that unthinking journalists like Baker can’t or won’t comprehend: she wanted to submit to the sexual enslavement of a god-fearing jihadi husband because the logic of her ideological-belief system commanded it. Far from being trafficked to Syria against her will, Begum wanted to go there because she felt it was a divine duty to join Isis and help build the nascent caliphate. To see Begum as groomed is to catastrophically fail to see the attractions of violent political movements, especially to the young who are impassioned and recklessness enough to join them.

None of this, however, is to say that Begum should be abandoned and that Britain should expect the Kurdish authorities in northern Syria to indefinitely house her. That would be callous and irresponsible. Begum’s detractors say that she is a security threat. But the evidence for this isn’t very strong: yes, she was once a supporter of ISIS and had joined the group to help advance the caliphate project as a baby-making machine. But there’s no credible evidence to show that she fought for the group or that she learned how to use weapons or make bombs. Begum’s fighting ability is thus in serious doubt.

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In the absence of any credible evidence that she’s a threat, Begum’s detractors revert to the argument that she’s a monstrous traitor who doesn’t deserve a second chance. She’s dead to us, and nothing she does or says matters. There can be no repentance; she should rot in Syria. This, I think, is not only profoundly illiberal but pathologically harsh, and wholly disproportionate as punishment for her actions. It exhibits the sort of catastrophic hurt and wounded pride that one would expect of an Islamist who wishes death on all apostates.

The strongest way of defending Begum isn’t to say that she was trafficked, but to acknowledge she did a bad thing and that it’s time to forgive her for it. She has endured over three years of suffering and sorrow in conditions that would test the resilience of the most hardened jihadi jailbird. This ought to be enough punishment to cleanse her of the imperious arrogance and idiocy that animated her to join Isis.

Imagine her despair, her uncertainty over her fate, her risk of capture and abuse by militants, and her knowledge that she is loathed by so many. Britain must now forgive her and allow her back. In return, Begum should take responsibility for her actions and not cloak herself in denial and evasion.

Will Begum ever fully reckon with her actions and acknowledge the full scale of the horror that Isis unleashed in Syria and Iraq? Will she reflect in an open and honest way on why she was once so passionate about joining the group? Will she properly recognise the crucial role that she and all the other Isis women played in helping the group expand? This seems unlikely, because no one is really interested in hearing Begum’s unfiltered thoughts about all this.

For her defenders, she is a wretched victim of circumstance and abuse by sinister outsiders, so she must speak only to this and to the broader question of how evil, Islamophobic Britain radicalised and then abandoned her. For her detractors, she is simply an untrustworthy villain who deserves zero sympathy, so she shouldn’t speak at all. She is a symbol of everything wrong with weak, Islamist-friendly, woke Britain.

I, for one, relish the day when Begum will speak for herself, neither spoken over by her critics, nor shackled to a script prepared by her cynical yet naïve supporters.

Many of Britain’s most dangerous jihadists are imprisoned, perhaps affording us this false sense of security. But the sporadic information we get from behind the prison walls is anything but reassuring. While much hope is pinned on the largely uncharted territory of “deradicalisation”, its targets are making a mockery of these efforts. As the Chief Inspector of Prisons made clear a few weeks ago, the highest-risk prisoners in the country are outright boycotting these interventions, with some offenders listening to music or pretending to sleep during their one to one sessions.

On the other hand, even those who appear to comply may pose a threat, as Usman Khan’s slaying of those who sought only to help him tragically demonstrated. While participating in an educational course or qualification can be taken by authorities as a sign of progress, it is no objective measure of deradicalisation, not least when the knowledge gained can be put to use for the cause, to better proselytise or wage war.

Prisons are not isolated and cut off from the world, their walls are porous: people, information and material come and go. Meanwhile, the jihadists inside do not see imprisonment as an end to their struggle — so nor should we. The West’s experience with jihadism, now into its fourth decade, shows how its adherents often see their incarceration as a rite of passage and opportunity: to better prepare for jihad, to gain qualifications and skills on the taxpayer, to forge crucial connections and relationships, to proselytise among the prison population, and to test their faith.

Prisons around the world have proven integral to the global jihadist movement’s remarkable resiliency and regenerative capability, but so has naivety. In 2005, a jailed Parisian named Chérif Kouachi led his social worker to believe he had been “tricked” into associating with extremists busy funnelling fighters to the insurgency in Iraq. On the inside, however, Chérif fraternised with jihadi veteran Djamal Beghal, who had helped recruit “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in London in the Nineties. Exactly a decade after being “tricked”, Chérif and his brother Saïd burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine to massacre the writers, satirists and illustrators inside.

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Today, no longer pick-up riding or passport-burning, the Islamic State’s jihadists are marooned in the dilapidated camps and makeshift prisons of Northern Syria, where — like the Islamists in Bosnia and Afghanistan before them — they play back our own tropes about their manipulation and vulnerability for the domestic audiences they once threatened on social media. Some even offer to help deradicalise or prevent radicalisation in future, while lying about their own trajectory into terror.

Inside the British prison system though, a more bellicose extremist subculture appears to be developing. According to a recent review, among the imprisoned extremists an Islamist gang culture has developed. The counterterrorism lead at HMP Whitemoor, the site of Britain’s first attack inside the prison walls, told an inquest that terror offenders are held in a kind of “perverse esteem”. while Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Johnathan Hall QC, wrote how some offenders enjoy a “distinctly heroic profile”.

The risk, though, is not just of attacks. The failed state-building project of Isis should have made clear there is an ideological endgame, an all-encompassing worldview, a way of living and a revolutionary overhaul of state and society which jihadis seek to usher in. In their own microcosms, imprisoned jihadists are trying to live their lives in accordance with this endgame from the inside. There are cases of extremists intimidating staff and prisoners who do not comply with their interpretation of Sharia and holding crude Sharia courts which mete out floggings. Self-styled ‘emirs’ exert such influence over prison wings that authorities sometimes appeal to them to help restore order.

Surrounded by like-minded practitioners of their faith, they are living pure, virtuous and rigorist lives in accordance with God’s will. To them, this life of belief is the straight and narrow, while the rest of us are morally decayed hypocrites and criminals. For them, the idea they need deradicalising or rehabilitating is a bad joke and worthy of scorn. Just a few hours a week of mentoring and interventions stands little chance of competing with the offender’s entire social circle, the moral universe which colours it, the norms which govern their every action and interaction, and the status they enjoy as a terrorism offender on the inside.

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This is not to say that there is no hope, but that it will take an almighty effort to dismantle a worldview that we don’t seem able to fully comprehend, or at times even discuss out of misplaced sensitivities. Being realistic about the scale of the challenge and treating the extremists as intellectually serious and rational beings, rather than unthinking vessels driven to terrorism by circumstances beyond their control, gives the best hopes of averting tragedy like at Fishmonger’s Hall.

As we have seen, when the chips are down, jihadists have historically pleaded innocence or ignorance. But the reports above suggest this is not how Britain’s imprisoned extremists are behaving. Far from it. This indicates that they do not perceive themselves to be in a state of weakness but in one of strength. After living their lives as close as possible to the ideal Islamic state from inside the prison walls, it seems likely that upon release, many will continue to try to do so while they wait for the caliphate or divine reward they are assured will eventually arrive.

I have written before about the possibility of the jihadist movement in Europe evolving into a belligerent and destructive social force, rather than one merely focused on mass-casualty attacks, which were only ever a means to an end. The subcultures developing in prisons translating to the outside world would see these extremists creating micro-communities which reject and withdraw from the surrounding unbelief of society, in order to instil their own norms and values in line with the principle of “loyalty and disavowal” (al-wala’ wa’l-bara’).

Of course, the problem should not be overstated: the numbers being discussed here may be unprecedented, but they are nonetheless small. There are graver threats and societal issues facing Britain and her allies. But at the same time, being prepared to combat the threat, not just through security or intelligence, but intellectually, is critical. In certain locations, a mere handful of extremists have already been able to multiply their followings into several hundred over the course of a decade. The networks — perhaps better thought of as micro-communities— they fostered would go on to fill the ranks of Isis.

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Far from radicalised online and overnight, many of those who migrated to Isis’s Caliphate project were extremist activists who were already, as Bernard Rougier put it, “living in an imagined caliphate” from inside the unbelief of the West. Through the barrel of an AK-47, Isis transformed their fantasy into an irresistible operational reality, so they merely diverted their energy from practice and proselytising in the likes of Brussels, Trappes, Portsmouth or Gothenburg towards migration to Islamic State.

The risk is that the genie is again out of the bottle. 9/11 resulted in al-Qaeda’s decimation but nonetheless succeeded in advertising jihadism to the entire world on live television. ISIS, by contrast, declared itself a caliphate and invited confrontation with the West which reduced it to rubble, but nevertheless succeeded in advertising not just attacks, but the Salafi-jihadist endgame to the world. We do not yet know who and how many were paying attention.

With the time they are afforded in British, European and Kurdish prisons, the movement is currently assessing the mistakes and shortcomings of that episode so as not to repeat them. Some will conclude the attacks of Bataclan or Manchester Arena were counterproductive, so will channel their energies into other means but remain believers. Others will no doubt remain committed to more of the same. Despite its apparent medieval rigidity, jihadism is a constantly mutating phenomenon which adapts to its own time and place. How the movement evolves and re-emerges from its current ailing condition depends on the discussion and debate happening right now inside cells and on prison landings. It’s time to start paying attention.

It was early 2016, and I had gone to Trinidad to report on Trinidadian ISIS foreign fighters for The Atlantic. Between 2013 and 2016, some 240 Trinis travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the caliphate, making Trinidad one of the world’s biggest exporters, per capita, of ISIS foreign fighters. I wanted to know how a country famed for calypso, rum and carnival could incubate something so profoundly unTrinidadian.

As a former resident of the country, I’d heard a lot of things about Yasin Abu Bakr, none of which contained the word “spiritual”. He had led the Jamaat al Muslimeen (JAM), a fringe group of black Muslims, with all the tact of an inebriated pitbull — and it was clear there was a connection, albeit tangled and complex, between the JAM radicals of the Nineties and the ISIS fighters who came later.

It was here, 32 years ago this week, on 27 July 1990, outside the mosque where Fuad and I were standing, that Bakr gathered his men for a group prayer and pep-talk. They were armed to the teeth with AK47s, pump-action shotguns and rifles. According to Fuad, Bakr was seeking guidance from God, a sign that he was on the right path: “He was saying to God, ‘if I’m gonna do the wrong thing, then stop me from leaving here’.” But there was no divine obstruction, and Bakr and his men, all 114 of them, sped off into Port of Spain to overthrow the government.

When Bakr and his men left the compound at 1 Murcarapo Road, one group headed for the nation’s parliament in the Red House, and another to Trinidad’s only TV station, Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT). Within hours of laying siege to the parliament, which was still in session, a senior JAM member had shot Prime Minister Arthur Robinson in the leg. A female clerk was killed, and Leo des Vignes, a government MP, was also shot in the leg: he died from blood loss a couple of days later. Robinson, already wounded, was made to lie on the floor with his trousers pulled down.

In the TTT building, where 27 hostages were being held, Bakr was preparing to address the nation. Like the stars of the present-day global jihad, Bakr instinctively understood the power of the media, both as a tool for attracting attention and for spreading propaganda. At just after 7pm, TTT went on air with the most dramatic newscast in its 28-year-old history: “At 6pm this afternoon, the government of Trinidad and Tobago was overthrown,” Bakr coolly told the nation. “The Prime Minister and members of the cabinet are under arrest. We are asking everybody to remain calm. The revolutionary forces are commanded to control the streets. There shall be no looting.”

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Almost immediately, looting began — but there was no uprising. The JAM leadership had made a gamble: that once they took over the parliament and TTT, a groundswell of popular support would propel them forward to a real and durable political takeover. But it didn’t happen, because while many Trinis sympathised with Bakr’s critique of political corruption and social injustice, they were appalled by his violent contempt for democracy. This included the vast majority of Trinidad’s mostly East Indian Muslim population, who were suspicious of Bakr’s group and did not take kindly to Bakr’s inflammatory suggestion, voiced to the Trinidad and Tobago Sunday Express in 1985, that they were not “really practising the true tenets of the religion”.

The coup continues to cast a dark shadow over life and politics in Trinidad. Bakr and his followers were never properly punished for their actions — they were pardoned after serving just two years in prison — and Bakr not only took perverse delight in playing up to the monstrous image that the local media had assigned to him, but remained a vexatious and controversial public figure in Trinidad right up until his death last year aged 80.

Furthermore, many Trinis believe that the spiralling levels of crime in the country since the late Nineties is a legacy of the coup: Trinidad and Tobago currently has one of the highest crime rates in the world. In Freudian terms, Bakr, the big monster, cleared a path for all the little monsters, showing them it was possible to unleash murderous havoc in Trinidad and more or less get away with it. Then in 2013, Trinis began joining ISIS; many were the sons and daughters of original JAM members.

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But how could this mainly Christian and Hindu country, with a population evenly divided between descendants of African slaves and Indian indentured labourers, fall victim to an attempted Islamist coup?

The answer doesn’t lie in ideology — although Bakr would have journalists believe that the JAM had sacrificed themselves for “the poor and oppressed”. While it’s true that Bakr’s group attracted many impoverished families, providing them with shelter, food, work and a supportive community, the coup had nothing to do with advancing the interests of Trinidad’s marginal men and women. Nor was it about some grand plan to create an Islamic State in Trinidad.

The primary cause, rather, was far more prosaic: it was to do with a convoluted land dispute between the JAM and the government over the ownership of 1 Murcarapo Road. When the JAM moved there in the late Seventies as guests of the Islamic Missionary Guild (IMG), it was mostly swampland. The IMG left, but the JAM remained: they drained the land and started building on it, putting up a mosque, a medical clinic, housing quarters and a primary school. But they did so without the approval of the local government, and on land that they had no legal right to. And so began the JAM’s conflict with the government.

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Three months before the coup attempt, the army and police entered the Murcarapo premises and set up positions. This was to prevent the JAM from continuing to build on the land. Bakr not only saw this as an intolerable challenge to his moral authority; he also came to believe that the authorities wanted to kill him and destroy his group. When asked, in 1993, by criminologist Ramesh Deosaran what “really sparked” the 1990 insurrection, Bakr said: “It was a military solution to a military problem.”

Last year, I made a 12-minute documentary: Diary of a Jihadi: The 1990 Coup in Trinidad and Tobago, supported by the Airey Neave Trust, on how the coup unfolded over the course of six days. The opening scene features the late Raoul Pantin, a prodigiously talented journalist who was working at TTT when Bakr’s men came calling and was taken hostage alongside his other male colleagues. In his personal account of the coup, Days of Wrath, he sharply conveys the sheer ridiculousness of Bakr and the strangeness of the events he unleashed. In one telling passage, he recalls that three days into the coup Bakr and his men broke into song:

There was Bakr, using the mouth of an AK47 rifle as a microphone, singing along with a popular calypso playing on the radio. It was the old legendary calypsonian, Sniper, crooning, “Trinidad is my land and to love it I’m proud and glad”… Two or three other gunmen had joined in, one of them using his rifle butt as a drum, and the other strumming an imaginary guitar on his AK47.

Just days earlier, these militants had aimed those very same weapons at the heads of the hostages in TTT, and had already put them to vigorous use. Now they resembled the kind of moronic extremists that Chris Morris would go on to satirise with such verve in Four Lions.

In an observation that cuts to the very psychological core of Bakr, Pantin speculates that it was “not wholly implausible that Bakr had staged a bloody coup merely to appear on television and harangue the nation… In his two earlier appearances on TTT that Friday night, Bakr had been the star of his own show, relishing every moment of it, switching from the angry Leader of the Revolution, to the humble Imam who was merely carrying out ‘the will of Allah’”.

Toward the end of Days of Wrath, Pantin wonders if Bakr is crazy. On the last day of the coup, after he had successfully negotiated a deal with the government and agreed to surrender, Bakr invited all the hostages at TTT to dinner at his Murcarapo compound once the coup was over. “A shuddering thought went through my mind,” Pantin wrote. “He’s insane. He’s probably been insane for years.”

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Political violence is such a horrible and serious business that there’s a strong temptation to think that violent extremists must be deeply serious people. Pantin’s book calls this into question. A good number of the JAM militants were very young, Pantin observes, and clearly didn’t know what they were doing. But did Bakr and the other senior leaders of the JAM know any better? Despite their rhetoric about martyrdom, they clearly did not want to die. Indeed, they eventually surrendered. And the idea that 114 self-styled jihadis could overthrow a democratically-elected government in a majority Christian-Hindu country was utterly insane. Pantin teaches us to prick the self-glorifying rhetoric of extremists and to recognise their fundamental lack of seriousness.

Of all of Bakr’s critics, perhaps the most trenchant were the Trini ISIS jihadists, whose parents were once part of Bakr’s orbit. In July 2016, Dabiq, ISIS’s glossy propaganda magazine, published an interview with Shane Crawford, one of the first Trinis to join ISIS. He would have been five years old in 1990: “There was a faction of Muslims in Trinidad that was known for ‘militancy’,” he told the magazine, referring to the JAM. “Its members attempted to overthrow the disbelieving government but quickly surrendered, apostatised, and participated in the religion of democracy, demonstrating that they weren’t upon the correct methodology of jihad.” This was no idle reminiscence on Crawford’s part: according to many classical interpretations of the Islamic faith, the punishment for apostasy is death. Crawford was, in effect, saying that the blood of the JAM was halal and could be shed. In February 2017, Crawford’s own blood was shed: he was severely injured in a US airstrike in Raqqa and died.

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The irony is that without Bakr and the JAM, Crawford would probably still be selling fish along the Southern Main Road in Enterprise, central Trinidad, for it was from the JAM that an ISIS-supporting faction emerged. Nazim Mohammed, who fought in the coup and is now in his late seventies, split from Bakr and set up his own radical Islamic community in the south. At least 15 members of his family left Trinidad to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq — but he denies any association with ISIS.

No one in Trinidad has yet been charged for joining or supporting ISIS, and there are reportedly around 100 Trinis in detention in camps in Syria, while Nazim Mohammed’s daughter and three granddaughters are currently locked up in an Iraqi prison. At some point, they will return.

Whether the jihadi spirit will be rekindled in Trinidad is yet to be seen. But Bakr’s coup shows just how easy it is for a small group of marginal men, radicalised by grievance and inflamed with ideological zeal, to inflict a tremendous amount chaos and suffering on a democratic society. It also serves as a salutary reminder that, while we should resist the temptations of apocalyptic alarmism, we should never take for granted the resilience of democratic institutions.

“The most affecting gore thriller of all and, in a broader view, among the most effective horror films ever made… The girl watches as her unconscious boyfriend is cut into fillets by a chainsaw. As the afternoon wears into night, more of the youngsters are stalked and murdered … What is remarkable … is that its outrageous horrors seem entirely real.”

The remarkable thing about Isis execution videos, of course, is that the outrageous horrors staged in them are entirely real. You can point to the strategic logic behind the videos, if you want. You can say that they serve an instrumental purpose, that terrifying violence works, that it pushes people away, while drawing others in. But you also have to acknowledge the total insanity of the videos. They are insane. The violence is terrible, graphic, excessive and real. Despite (or because of?) this, large numbers of people have watched them. What prompted them to do so and what impact, if any, did the videos have on them?

In my efforts to find out I spent three months in 2017 closely tracking four popular internet shock-sites. During this period, I watched scores of appalling videos and read thousands of comments that forum-members had made in response to them, focusing on jihadi execution videos. I collected thousands of member-posts that spoke to or touched on the issue of motive, and I interviewed several prolific gore enthusiasts who had shared and commented on jihadi execution videos. I also interviewed the sites’ founders to ask them about the voluminous amounts of jihadi content on their sites and what they thought about this.

Gore fans are naturally defensive about their specialist interest, as well they might be. It is one thing to watch an actor scream and squirm in a scene of simulated torture, but quite another to watch a real person scream and squirm at the hands of a real torturer. We all recognise this elemental distinction, and we all recognise the line we cross when we watch real, as opposed to fictional, victimisation on camera. Gore fans live over on the other side of that line.

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For gore fans, the Holy Grail is snuff: that is, real-life murderous violence on camera, the more monstrous the better. As one war-porn obsessive explained to the journalist Olga Craig, referring to the beheading video of Kenneth Bigley: “This is no horror movie. If it is titillation I feel, then it is because this is happening to a real person. The fear is real, the brutality is real, the blood is real, it is all real.” This same gore fan confided that he had watched the Bigley execution video at least half a dozen times. “I suppose you could say it is one of my favourites,” he clarified. Whereas most people would go out of their way to avoid watching this kind of thing and would question whether they had any right to watch it were they to come across it, gore fans go out of their way to locate it at its very worst.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the parents of Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded on camera in 2002, spoke of their anguish in knowing that the video of their son’s murder was on the internet and would likely be on there forever. “We could never, ever watch our beloved son’s murder,” Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel, said. “What sort of depraved person would want to?” This nicely distils the conventional or “normie” view, which is that only a freak, deviant, odd-ball, voyeur or pervert would want to watch a real person being butchered to death. Gore fans vigorously dispute this portrayal by insisting on the normalcy of their preoccupations and the hypocrisy of their condemners. From the perspective of gore watchers, it is perfectly comprehensible for someone to want to watch the total insanity of an Isis video.

***

“I’m pretty sure I’ve literally seen every single Isis video out there, man,” Donnie told me when I first spoke to him. I met Donnie on “Watch People Die”, the notorious forum on Reddit that was banned in March 2019 for violating the site’s rules on glorifying violence. The ban was a result of several posters uploading the video of the Christchurch massacre, where Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand on 15 March, 2019; Tarrant, using a GoPro Camera, live-streamed part of his rampage on Facebook.

Donnie is a 25-year-old political science graduate from the south-east of England. He was intense, smart and swore profusely. “It’s gotten to the point where I’d go on Watch People Die and if it says Isis I’ve probably seen it already and if it’s a beheading, I’m like, it’s boring because like I’ve seen so many beheadings.” Donnie, who is a non-Muslim and has never been religious, said that he had watched so many Isis videos that “you get to the stage where you can basically start reciting a couple of their nasheeds, like ‘Salil al- Sawarim’, that’s a big one”. Donnie said that he visited Watch People Die “at least every other day”.

Donnie recalled that the first gore video he watched was the beheading of Kenneth Bigley. This, he said, “was way back, in the early war in Iraq”. (The video was released in October 2004). Donnie must have been around 13 then. He heard about it on the evening news, and then straight after started to search for it on the internet. “It was like really shit and recorded on like a wobbly camera phone, you know, it was really bad quality but I just remember it being super shocking, you know, I was literally like, ‘oh my god, like what the fuck?’”

I asked Donnie what he found appealing about Isis videos. He paused and then said:

“One, they’re really high quality, they’re high production value. If you’re watching videos like that anyway, you get used to watching shit videos on like grainy screens and everything like that. Second, they’re interesting, because this is actually happening, it’s current and, it’s kind of like a story that follows on, if that makes sense? Third, it’s a reality-check in a way, like I’m lucky enough to live in the UK and, you know, I’m a white male and stuff, I don’t have to deal with these fucking issues.”

“They’re doing it,” Donnie continued, referring to the act of killing, “in really intricate ways as well, like have you seen the cage burning video, the drowning video? I nodded. Donnie went on: “Take that video where they chain everyone up and then just slash their necks, they’re in a sort of slaughterhouse, abattoir type thing.” I told Donnie that I knew of the video, but had refused to watch it. The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood described it as “the worst thing I have ever seen”.

“Oh man,” Donnie said, “it was like one of the best fucking videos I’ve ever seen.” I asked what he meant. “I’m comparing it to other videos of that nature, but it was one of the best,” Donnie clarified. “Purely because there was a lot of content, if that makes sense? Like, for example, you get one video and they’ve beheaded a guy and you’re, like, okay that’s a beheading, whereas not only was that like really, really fucked up, it was something that I really get empathy from. Kind of like, I can really put myself into someone’s shoes.”

This response baffled me. I didn’t understand what he meant about empathy and it wasn’t clear whose shoes he was imagining himself standing in — the Isis slashers or those of their victims. I told Donnie that I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Like it feels incredibly real,” he explained. “Well, when I was younger I used to have a lot of morbid dreams of dying or bleeding out and stuff like that and it creates like an adrenal response, if that makes sense? The shock value doesn’t come from the fact that his throat’s been slit, it’s from imagining if I was there, if that was happening to me.” In Donnie’s telling, as I understood it, watching Isis gore was a way of trying to imagine his own death. Later on in our conversation, he said that one of the main reasons he watched Isis videos, and gore in general, was to do with what he called “the philosophy of death”. “That’s a huge thing,” he said. “You know, like what does it feel like to die, what does it look like to die?”

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I was curious to know what Donnie thought of Isis. He’d absorbed huge quantities of the group’s propaganda. Had that altered his view of the group, I asked him? He was emphatic: “Unless you’re a sympathiser there’s only one other view you can have of Isis, which is they’re a bunch of cunts tarnishing the name of their religion.” Yet the sheer extravagant cuntiness of Isis didn’t seem to put him off from wanting to watch the group’s atrocity propaganda. I mentioned this apparent paradox, which prompted him to reflect on why he thought it was useful to watch real online gore: “Desensitisation is power, somewhat. If anything ever happens in real life, I’m not just gonna sit there… Because I’m not shocked, I’m not frozen, I’m not fearful.” This sounded like an ex post facto rationalisation to me, although I couldn’t be sure. I followed up on Donnie’s reference to desensitisation. “I can watch a [gore] video now and not be fazed at all, or even bored,” he said.

Throughout our several interviews it became clear that watching Isis atrocity videos for Donnie was as much about prurient curiosity and thrill-seeking as empathetic transportation into the shoes of a doomed person. Donnie said that Isis videos improved markedly after the demise of Jihadi John in late 2015. (He was killed in a US drone strike on November 12, 2015.) This, he said, was when “they started getting intricate”. One mass-beheading video, which involved explosives instead of knives, struck him as being “really inventive”.

This sounded tone-deaf, if not indeed outright callous. Real individuals — with families, commitments, ambitions and whole lives ahead of them — were horribly murdered, and here Donnie is discoursing on the video’s envelope-pushing innovativeness. At one point, Donnie said, in one of his many digressions, that Isis videos were so well filmed that “it’s easy to distance yourself from it”. I wondered if the demonic creativity that Donnie refers to here served to create a yet further layer of distance for him from the human horror in the foreground of the video. Perhaps, it made it seem less real and more movie-like. Or perhaps the staged atrocity in the video was so preposterously monstrous that Donnie just couldn’t absorb it on a human level. It’s also possible that there’s just a streak of callousness in Donnie and that, like most people, he’s selective in his empathy.

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Donnie didn’t use the term “thrill-seeking”, but instead spoke of “the cringe”, which he described as a sort of somatic recoil — in Susan Sontag phrasing, “the pleasure of flinching”. “It’s your body reacting. It’s not just your brain saying, ‘oh, this is fucked up’. Your body is literally reacting to what is happening and you don’t get that in movies, you don’t get that on television… I don’t know, it’s just an adrenal response basically and it’s so fucking intense and there’s loads of things that go through your head.” I think what Donnie is sharply conveying here is what Mathias Clasen calls the “primary and irreducible appeal of horror”, which is “the pleasure of experiencing strong and rich emotions in a safe context”.

When Donnie watches gore videos, it’s the cringe — the visceral throb, jolt, shiver, the “ick” — he’s looking for. But why would he go looking for such a fundamentally aversive feeling? “Death is a morbid thing in itself and having that kind of thing in your face is like the closest you can get to experiencing that without actually dying,” Donnie explained. He returned to the Bigley video, the first filmed execution he ever saw. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. Like, oh my god, imagine being that guy.” The cringe, it seems, was the price Donnie paid for indulging his curiosity about violent death; but it was also something he found, after a while, to be emotionally exhilarating all by itself. For Donnie, gore seemed to engage his gut as much as his mind.

Gore enthusiasts and the philosophical defenders of morbid curiosity insist that death is ultimately life-affirming, and that we can only truly appreciate our existence when we recognise its inescapable fragility and temporality. Well, watching Isis videos didn’t make me appreciate life more — it did, however, give me a sharper appreciation of how cheap and meaningless lives are to murderous zealots. Above all, it intensified my sense of how evil and shameless human beings can be. I would not classify this as trauma, in the clinical sense, but instead see it as a kind of moral unease. And there is no treatment for moral unease, because this is the stuff of life in all its richness and dark complexity.

Simon Cottee’s new book, Watching Murder: ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalization, is published by Routledge,

Back before Big Tech cracked the whip on jihadis and their online fanboys, it wasn’t uncommon for journalists and analysts to interact directly with terrorists in distant war zones, even building something of a rapport. The bizarre tension of these interactions, between battle-hardened religious fanatics and those on the other side of their celestial war, was not lost on terrorism scholar J.M. Berger. Describing his virtual relationship with an American al-Shabaab fighter, he noted how it became “part of my daily routine… to check in with a terrorist with a professed love of al-Qaida in Somalia on the other side of the world.”

Jihadist groups recognised the enormous and unprecedented potential reach that social media afforded. Posts by Isis fighters formed part of a deliberate grassroots strategy to flood the internet with unofficial propaganda to complement the organisation’s glossier official output.

Initially, Western security services were indulgent toward the tweeting terrorists, thanks largely to the treasure trove of intel they provided. Jihadist recruits would post photographs with easily geolocatable features — treelines, ridges, hills and apartment buildings — and pose for selfies that would haunt them in court many months or years later. Posts also provided valuable insights into internal dynamics and even instability within terrorist groups. The American in al-Shabaab live-tweeted his dispute with the organisation’s mainly Somali leadership, a dispute which ended in his eventual assassination. Leaving jihadis online, it was argued, left them right where we could see them.

The summer of 2014 changed all that.

In June that year, Isis easily overran Mosul — and the US trained and equipped Iraqi forces defending it — and declared a caliphate. This declaration transformed the trickle of foreign fighters joining the group (now a quasi-state) into a flood. In the weeks that followed, “Isis Twitter” was drunk on battlefield triumphalism, apocalypticism and a catalogue of pornographic violence — violence that was “instantly accessible at the click of a mouse.”

Despite a litany of other atrocities, it was the filmed execution of American reporter James Foley in August that prompted decisive action. Here was an act so monstrous, and with such reach, that social media companies changed their content moderation policies almost overnight. “We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you”, tweeted Twitter CEO Dick Costolo the morning after a video of the beheading was posted online. Facebook took similar action, mere months after defending its decision to leave videos of cartel atrocities online.

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Jihadis had beheaded victims on camera before, but never in such high definition and never at the hands of a masked executioner with an unmistakable British accent. (The killer, nicknamed “Jihadi John” by the press, was later revealed to be a London-raised IT salesman named Mohammed Emwazi.) Perhaps the accent was the decisive element which prompted such a response: instead of violence between distant and unfamiliar people, the killer was one of our own. And, unlike the terrorist spectacle of 9/11, the sickening act of decapitating helpless captives represented what the philosopher Adriana Cavarero has described as horrorism: “An ontological crime well beyond the inflicting of death.”

Revisiting the commentary in the days that followed is like peering through a window to another planet. The New Yorker asked “Should Twitter Have Taken Down the James Foley Video?”, while Slate ran the headline: “Did Twitter and YouTube Make the Right Call in Suppressing Images of James Foley’s Beheading?” Both explored the possible consequences of the companies adopting editorial control.

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At the same time, Western governments were leaning heavily into the narrative that the exodus of their own citizens to the newly declared caliphate was a product of gruesome Isis propaganda. Tech companies sought to deflect mounting pressure from governments over terrorist content, but they could not outright reject the charge that their platforms were influencing minds and behaviour — it is central to their ad-based business model.

Government concern over online radicalisation and the loose changed tech companies deigned to throw at initiatives countering it fostered the emergence of an online extremism industry. Despite its efforts, a considerable radicalisation has since taken place — a radicalisation not of large numbers of internet users transformed into terrorists by social media, but of the entire discourse on online terrorism and the field it sustained.

The response to Jihadi John’s campaign of choreographed butchery set the precedent that tech companies could be pressured and shamed into censoring extremist content. Since then, the number of people and groups who’ve come under the microscope of online extremism entrepreneurs has dramatically expanded, as has the list of ideologies deemed near-terroristic.

Sexless men on the internet are the next great terror threat. Criticising immigration policy is mainstreaming the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Gender critical feminists are peddling hate. Millions of Americans are in fact, “mass radicalised”. Free speech itself is a far-Right talking point. Critics of Covid lockdowns were spreading misinformation and making bedfellows of the far-Right. As terrorism scholar Simon Cottee put it, “Nobody in this game, if we’re honest, has an interest in seeing radicalisation go away. It’s bad for business. We need radicalised people, and if we can’t find them, we’ll invent them.”

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It used to be that “radicalisation” meant the process that led individuals to kill for politics. But, responsive to the latest controversies and funding incentives of the day, it has expanded to cover broader concepts such as “hate”, “mis/disinformation”, “harm” and more, dangerously blurring the lines between political debate and counter-terrorism. This confusion was helped along by the narrative of resurgent fascism that accompanied the populist victories of 2016. In some counter-extremism circles, Brexit and Trump could be mentioned in the same breath as the present-day genocidaires of Isis.

If this list of new extremists and terrorists sounds like a list of progressive bogeymen, it is. The constellation of extremism NGOs and academic centres fill their rosters from social classes where certain interests, prejudices and worldviews are near hegemonic. Those interests happen to strongly overlap with the incumbent governments in both Canada and the United States, who are of course content for likeminded organisations to define who is an extremist and who is an upstanding citizen deserving of an online presence.

This political alignment grants access to funding opportunities, as well as platforms in a sympathetic media environment, for progressive extremism experts, who can in turn paint targets for politically sympathetic moderators in Silicon Valley and pressure them to act.

The threat to free speech and civil liberties posed by this arrangement should be obvious to all but the most partisan. This is not just a cheap pop at progressivism. It should barely need saying that the danger would be just as real if the industries at hand were dominated by conservatives and if conservatives ruled the roost in Ottawa and D.C. But at present, they aren’t and don’t.

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Nor is it enough to point out that the Big Tech companies are private. As free speech guru Jacob Mchangama has observed of the major social media platforms: “No government in history has ever been able to exert such extensive control over what is being said, read, and shared by so many people across the world and in real time.” These platforms are the public square now; upstart competitors are liable to be crushed, sometimes under political and media pressure amid accusations of extremism.

It seems unlikely Elon Musk will be reinstating Isis Twitter on free speech grounds. But today, the legitimate debate on how far platforms should go in response to online extremism is less likely to focus on Jihadi John’s beheading videos than on Joe Rogan’s podcast or a contrarian Substack. The historian of populism Thomas Frank summed up the dominant attitude among his fellow liberals: “The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an ‘extremism expert’ shushing the world.”

As the recent jihadist assassination of David Amess MP shows, even with actual attacks, our culture seems unable to process terrorism through any lens other than an immediate clamour for greater online controls and censorship. Eight years after Isis splattered blood and gore across social media, we still need real expertise and study of extremist and terrorist groups. What we do not need is an industry laundering censorious agendas as impartial expertise, enforcing partisan truths to combat disinformation, or managing public debate under the guise of counter-terrorism.

Last Tuesday a 15-year-school boy, recently named as Ethan Crumbley, allegedly shot and killed four fellow students, injuring seven others. This happened at a high school in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The week before, Darrell Brooks allegedly drove his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring many more. According to witnesses, he appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people; one of the victims was an eight-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, Brooks was on bail, after being charged with running over the mother of his child in a domestic dispute earlier last month.

Prosecutors in Michigan have levelled one charge of terrorism against Crumbley, in addition to four first-degree murder counts and numerous other charges. No charges of terrorism have been brought against Brooks; he instead faces six counts of first-degree homicide. 

This raises all sorts of questions about the politics of categorising mass-causality violence. While school-rampages often result in multiple deaths and terrorise those who are victimised in them, they are not conventionally classified as terrorism, since the motives of those who carry them out are typically personal. They are not intended to further a political cause or ideology. So it is curious that the authorities in Michigan have levelled a charge of terrorism.

Crumbley’s alleged motives are as yet unclear, although he reportedly left some writings that may shed some light on his thinking. Explaining the terrorism charge to CNN, Karen McDonald, the Oakland county [Michigan] prosecutor, said that Crumbley had set out to kill and injure as many people as possible. “If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is,” she said, in the process enlarging the concept of terrorism far beyond its standard meaning of politically-motivated violence against civilians and into the far broader domain of criminal murderousness. McDonald also noted, by way of further explanation, “how terrifying it is to be in close proximity of another student shooting and killing fellow students. I mean, it’s terror”.

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Brooks’s alleged motives are similarly unclear, although we know that he had advocated for attacks against white people on social media and shared an anti-Semitic meme praising Hitler. We also know that vehicular rammings, unlike high school shootings, are a common modus operandi of terrorists. Scores of ISIS-inspired and directed operatives, for example, have used cars and trucks as weapons of mass-slaughter. So it is seems worth noting that Brooks, who clearly harboured extremist sentiments, and whose alleged victims were all white, has not been given a terrorism charge. Needless to say, Brooks’s alleged actions would have been terrorising to those who were on the receiving end of them.

What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.

But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.

As the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari has recently documented, the coverage of the Brooks case by mainstream media outlets has been quite appalling. The Washington Post, in a tweet, described the ramming attack as a “tragedy caused by a SUV”. A CBS national correspondent made reference to “the Wisconsin parade crash”, as if what happened was an unfortunate accident. If this sounded coldly dispassionate and euphemistic in the extreme, it is because it was. What it emphatically wasn’t was an inferno of alarmist online commentary and outrage about the perpetrator’s vile beliefs.

The Michigan attack, by contrast, has provoked a very different kind of commentary and critical probing. Thomas Renard, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, tweeted: “This case raises so many questions: What is terrorism? Does terrorism offence bring any added value in such case? Could it be counter productive? Should we use CT [counter-terrorism] toolbox more often, to deal with more forms of extremism, or not? Pros and Cons?”

Renard is right: the Michigan school shooting does raise many questions, one of which is why extremism scholars like Renard had nothing to say about Brooks’s alleged vehicular ramming attack and how that case might raise questions about terrorism and ideologically motivated violence more broadly.

To be fair to Renard and my fellow extremism researchers, perhaps they just hadn’t clocked the news about the Waukesha attack, especially given that it had attracted relatively little media attention. Or perhaps they had heard about it, but were apt to ignore it because Brooks wasn’t charged with terrorism.

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But neither explanation holds up to scrutiny. Many terrorism experts and extremism researchers are very online. Some of these people, evidently, are never not online. It’s hard to think that the Waukesha attack would have escaped their notice.

There’s also a whole cottage industry of counter-extremist entrepreneurs which thrives on churning out report after report on the wider online “eco-systems” of misogynistic hate and racialised invective. So it’s odd that Brooks’s violent rhetoric, and past violence against women, didn’t raise any eyebrows among a group of researchers who are nothing if not hyper-vigilant when it comes to spotting signs of hate.

I suspect other and deeper imperatives and incentives are at work. One is to do with what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management”, while the other relates to the politics of grift. The triumph of identity politics, and the fear of running afoul of the puritanical scolds who police it, has meant that whenever an act of mass-casualty violence has been perpetrated by a white male — that reviled figure of opprobrium in the cosmology of the what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology” — it is tempting to vigorously call it out and to account. The act of doing so has become a familiar ritual in public life, the purpose of which is to communicate one’s virtue.

It is to pronounce, in effect, “I really care about the evil of systemic racism”. In a Durkheimian sense, it also allows people to bond with other morally upstanding people, and in a way that is emotionally seductive.

The temptation to call out or draw attention to the mass-casualty violence of the far-Right is even stronger for extremism researchers, since many have made decent careers out of researching and writing about jihadist groups and violence. This makes them vulnerable to the charge of islamophobia and racism, or both, and perhaps even gives them a bad conscience. From the perspective of their Left-leaning critics, these researchers are guilty of focusing disproportionately on the jihadist threat or perpetuating dangerous “essentialist” tropes about Islam and Muslims.

Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or racism, and one way of forestalling or neutralising that accusation is to constantly amplify the threat of the far-Right. Of course, extremism researchers would deny that they’re in the business of impression management, of trying to foster a righteous impression before others. And if they’re sounding alarmist about the far-Right threat, this is because the threat is so goddamn alarming that it keeps them awake at night.

Another reason why extremism researchers are now so transfixed on the far-Right threat is because it’s unquestionably good for business. It’s where all the grant money is. You certainly won’t receive state or private funding by saying that the QAnon threat is exaggerated or that incels are more dangerous to themselves than to others. And no publisher is going to offer a lucrative book deal for How Terrorism is Overblown.

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This isn’t just an American pathology. Here in Britain two recent acts of lethal violence engendered two very different responses. One was a killing spree by a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison. In just 12 minutes he killed his mother in the house they shared and then went on to shoot to death four others, before turning his weapon on himself. Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out terrorism as a motive, although it was known that Davison had visited incel online forums and was a disgruntled virgin. This prompted a slew of commentary on how Davison was a terrorist, and how incels were far-Right extremists. The Guardian ran a story titled, “Should the Plymouth shootings be declared an act of terror?” Quite why the headline-writer thought it necessary to phrase the headline as a question was unclear, since the whole substance of the piece sought to argue that there was little doubt that it should be declared an act of terror.

Then, in October, Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old British-Somali man, allegedly stabbed to death the Conservative MP David Amess. The police soon declared this a terrorist incident, and had referred to “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. Yet the main focus of the media response was not on the political motives of the perpetrator, but rather the scourge of online hate aimed at British politicians more generally, as if somehow the dark corners of the internet had murdered Amess.

It gets boring to keep pointing out the double-standard here, which is that progressives are liable to deny or sanitise the political violence of those with whom they are in sympathy (pre-eminently minorities), while amplifying the political violence of their enemies (pre-eminently the running dogs of white, heteronormative patriarchy). Of course, the Right is also prone to a similar double-standard, pointing out the mental health problems of far-Right attackers while prioritising the role of militant religiosity in jihadi attacks. But it’s imperative for terrorism experts and extremism researchers to resist this sort of tribal temptation.

What is terrorism and who is a terrorist? A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to answer this, but it’s really not that complicated. Terrorism, as the Australian philosopher Tony Coady has usefully defined it, is “the organised use of violence to attack non-combatants (i.e. civilians) or their property for political purposes”. Correspondingly, a terrorist is someone who commits this kind of violence.

The trouble with terrorism, as a concept, relates not to its core meaning, but to its practical application. Was the Michigan school-shooter a terrorist? Was Darrell Brooks? The honest answer to both questions is that it’s still too early to tell — and that both cases are complex. Yet it’s striking that only one of those questions is being publicly asked right now, and it’s not the second one.

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

But despite the obvious differences between a failed Arab state of 18 million and a dual-island nation of 1.3 million, the two countries have become strange bedfellows. As unlikely as it may seem, Trinidad has become one of the world’s key recruiting grounds for Isis, a status linked to the country’s other big wheeze: drug trafficking.

I was reminded of the connection between the Caribbean, the caliphate and cocaine last week after hearing of the death of 80-year-old Yasin Abu Bakr, an imposing 6ft 6in former TV producer and ex-cop who, as leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen movement, in 1990 pulled off an attempted coup in Trinidad. For the better part of a week, Abu Bakr was effectively the head of state, making him the only person to ever lead an Islamic coup in the Western Hemisphere.

I met Abu Bakr in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, in 2018 while researching a book on tribalism. Initially, I was drawn to him after more than 100 Trinidadians left home to join Isis and the jihadi cause, lured by a mix of fundamentalist ideology, warped romanticism and, in many cases, money. These young men travelled not just to Syria but also Iraq, often taking with them, and usually against their will, scores of women and children.

Given its small population, Trinidad has provided disproportionate numbers of jihadis to the ISIS cause. The US and Canada, with a combined population of some 350 million, larger Muslim communities and a seemingly more fertile breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment, are believed to have exported just 300 or so men and women to the Levant for jihad.

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Yet in Trinidad, just 6% of the population are Muslim, and, of these, an estimated 90% are of Indian descent. While most are arguably “moderate”, a small minority has no strong attachment to their communities — thanks to a combination of atomised families, absent fathers, rampant drug addiction, gang culture and social marginalisation. Such a perfect storm feeds the worst excesses of identity politics, making young, impressionable and often desperate men vulnerable to the chest-beating Isis propaganda machine.

But even before Isis existed as an idea, let alone as an organised terror group, the foundations of Islamic extremism were being laid in Trinidad. In the late Seventies, the island saw a revival of Islam that came off the back of an American black power movement underscored by the teachings of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, as well as the Islamic revolution in Iran and the assertion of a more muscular, global Muslim identity. This Islamic reboot differed from the prevailing, passive Trinidadian Muslim identity and capitalised on endemic corruption, a growing gang problem fuelled by a burgeoning cocaine trade and a sense of alienation felt by many youths who were unable to access a piece of the oil and gas pie being divvied up by foreign capitalists and their government cronies.

Without proper education and lacking job opportunities, those who felt left behind began to turn to Islam as a way out, and a means of clearing the streets of the drugs that went hand in glove with the new money. Located seven miles north of Venezuela, which has an ultra-porous 1,378-mile border with the cocaine capital of the world, Colombia, drugs continue to enter Trinidad by speedboat and leave on container ships, planes and private yachts, as well as in condoms carried inside the stomachs of drug mules.

These narcotics often enter Trinidad with decommissioned Venezuelan military weapons, which explains the tendency of gangs in Port of Spain and elsewhere to have more firepower on the streets than most police forces. Perhaps that’s why an unofficial investigation by the government in 2009 found that up to 90% of cops were involved in illegality, ranging from “running and selling drugs, to colluding with gangs by renting out weapons to criminals, to performing extra-legal killings”.

Throughout the Eighties, the Islamist reboot was seen as a counterpoint to a society that was rapidly turning into a Sodom and Gomorrah for urban youth. Muslim militias took the fight to the dealers, drug lords and gangs on the streets of Port of Spain and beyond, becoming a vigilante force to be reckoned with. Indeed, as the new incarnation of Islam became more and more powerful, its more pernicious fringes — who were more concerned with financial gain than philosophical enlightenment — became enforcers, protection racketeers and, in many cases, out-and-out gangsters themselves.

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Already well-developed in the US, Prislam — a brand of prison-based Islam that conferred protection to its adherents and access to criminal networks both inside and outside of jail — soon took hold, causing schism after schism. Initially, these took the form of pseudo-religious “Muslims versus apostates” conflicts aimed at legitimising gang-on-gang assassinations. Then came “Muslims versus non-Muslims” contract killings — until it became expedient for gang members to either align themselves with the Prislamic “Muslim City” faction or their non-Muslim uber-gang rivals, “Rasta City”.

Semantics aside, the names of both organised crime groups soon had little to do with Mecca or Haile Selassie, save for some members who happened to be Muslims or Rastas, as well as drug dealers, hitmen and government stooges. But something had to give. With cocaine and oil came the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, unbridled corruption and gangster politics, which eventually gave rise to an unprecedented rejection of the government.

Enter Abu Bakr.

Over afternoon tea in the Jamaat al Muslimeen compound in Port of Spain, Abu Bakr, a sardonic, charismatic character formerly known as Lennox Phillip, told me how on July 25, 1990, he mounted the coup with some 113 black Muslim foot soldiers, using intelligence sources to determine when key police and military figures were indisposed or out of town. The plotters duly blew up the capital’s main police station, took the local TV news channel and stormed parliament, taking the prime minister, ANR Robinson, and a number of his fellow legislators hostage at gunpoint for several days. Trinidad being Trinidad, chaos ensued. Riots led to several hundred injuries and some 30 deaths.

Having taken the Trinidadian government to task for its complicity in ramping up the country’s drug problems and spiralling violent crime, Abu Bakr’s audacious move, in fairness, was more a citizen’s arrest of the government than a coup d’état, designed to seize control and take the reins of power. Abu Bakr’s power grab came to an end when he and his followers gave themselves up. After being charged with murder and treason, Abu Bakr was released from prison two years later as part of an amnesty deal.

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“We were a community outreach organisation,” he told me in his modest office, adding he still believed that he could have reversed Trinidad’s crime epidemic if he had succeeded. “A hundred people would convert at Friday prayers. We got money from Libya. We were cleaning up the drugs on the street — we were doing good work. We had outreach centres, feeding centres, shops, businesses, land, medical centres… The Government feared us.”

That fear, Abu Bakr said, had led to the government violently clamping down on his organisation. With no recourse to the law, Jamaat al Muslimeen’s seizure of power was, he claimed, as much about self-preservation as it was about ending corruption.

“It’s a known fact that many people who said they were Muslims manifested themselves as something else,” he suggested. Certainly Jamaat al Muslimeen struck me more as a sort of Islamic scout movement than an insurgency. But for a few that wasn’t enough; the lure of jihad was too great. “The Trinidad-ISIS connection is not nonsense,” Abu Bakr told me. “Many people left Trinidad to fight for ISIS because of the lack of hope.”

Is there any sign of that hope being restored? If there is, it is hard to spot. Three years after our conversation, the drugs continue to flow into Trinidad — and violence continues to erupt. As Abu Bakr told me at the time: “This is the land of steel pan and carnival. This is supposed to be paradise. Yet for many, it is anything but.”

For many, the ethnicity and heritage of the only person facing charges in this case, Ali Harbi Ali, were wholly irrelevant to his alleged behaviour. Acknowledging that Ali is of Somali background, we were told, is racist and xenophobic. He must only be identified as British.

As someone who was born in Somalia, I find this absurd. Of course a suspect is not a murderer because he has a Somali background — and Ali is not a murderer until proven as such. But denouncing facts as racist — especially when the person in question was referred to Prevent, and police and security services believe he may have been inspired by al-Shabaab in Somalia — forces a dangerous ignorance on the public.

Yet it is just one of a number of fallacies that continue to dominate almost every discussion about Islamist-driven terrorism — fallacies that are promoted by both the media and British authorities. Indeed, it strikes me that our efforts to counter Islamist attacks are hindered by at least three other misconceptions: our insistence on describing a perpetrator as a “lone wolf”, our obsession with online self-radicalisation, and the idea that “all extremisms are created equal”.

Take that first fallacy. As unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge, I suspect numerous victims of Islamist extremism might be alive today, if those in charge of preventing terrorism recognised that Islamist extremists are anything but lone wolves.

In a liberal society, it is appealing to think of suspects of Islamist terror as solitary actors. As a matter of principle, we uphold the importance of individual freedoms, rights, and responsibilities, while our judicial system assumes that individuals are responsible for their actions. We also recognise the importance of not maligning an entire community because of the extremist views of a few of their fellow believers. This is particularly crucial when the historical relationship between a particular minority and their new country is fraught with memories of colonialism.

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But while individuals responsible for terrorist attacks may conduct their attacks alone, they still emerge out of communities or networks of like-minded individuals, whether in-person or online. They learn from teachers, imams or instructors the radical ideas that inspire their violence. This is not to say that their entire family or community is extremist — only that these individuals find and are exposed to people who are. Little is known about the background of the murder suspect, Ali, but we can be certain that if found guilty, he would not have plunged a knife into a total stranger, possibly picked at random, wholly of his own accord. Someone or some group would have inspired these actions.

Since last Friday, we’ve heard from a number of people who reportedly knew Ali, all of whom have expressed shock at his alleged crime. Yet it seems hugely unlikely that no one in his immediate circle would have picked up on any extremist tendencies. After all, the Somalian communities are very social. Unlike in traditional Western families, where individuals live an atomised life within an atomised society, a Somali family typically lives together in one household, where everyone is involved in everyone else’s business.

Gossip is a way of life. Solitude is not an option, even more so during the pandemic when families not only lived together but were home more often. It is likely, therefore, that key signs of radicalisation — a shift in language, withdrawal from society, increased frequency of praying and attending mosque — would be noticed by various family members.

When that does happen, you might expect a person’s family to become more involved, to pull them back into their community. But that isn’t always the case. Imagine, for example, that you are a family member of a potentially radicalised individual from a highly tight-knit community. You notice something of concern — but might it be best to keep quiet? Are you a sinner if you report your brother to a programme led by non-Muslims? What does it mean for your relationship with God and the afterlife? What kind of traitor would report their own blood to the authorities?

Or perhaps you are just a non-Muslim colleague or friend of the individual. You may notice a change in behaviour, but are you really going to go forward and report them, with the possibility of being labelled a racist or an Islamophobe? Who would report a potentially innocent person, just for observing their religion?

Lone wolves, then, do not come out of nowhere. They are inspired by other radicals and they are noticed by their community. The problem is that the community then keeps quiet.

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A similar fallacy looms over our understanding of online radicalisation, which does not occur in a silo, between the individual and their computer screen. The individual has to be susceptible, in a place of vulnerability, where Islamic radicalism can easily set in.

Though there is much about Ali that we are yet to learn, we do know that his father was Harbi Ali Kullane, a former government official in Somalia. Since the attack, reports have presented Kullane’s Twitter profile as a testament to assimilation, displaying his support for Captain Tom and the England football team. It has also been reported that, while working in Somalia, he faced threats from al-Shabaab.

And yet I suspect his attitude to his new country is more nuanced than has been presented. It is striking, for example, that not a single news outlet has flagged a tweet by Kullane from 2017, in which he suggests: “the 5-pointed star [on the Somali flag] represents the aspiration of a nation and the misery inflicted by British colonialism. Let’s not sugar coat this #Somalia.” Given that Kullane moved to the UK in the Nineties, his comment suggests an antipathy to Britain that has so far been ignored.

The last fallacy that must be confronted is the belief that all forms of extremism are created equal and should be treated as such. Under the British counter-terrorism Prevent programme, Islamism is lumped together with other forms of extremism, such as far-Right extremism, and handled with a similar approach. But while Right-wing extremism is a threat that should not be downplayed, its causes and motivations are totally unrelated to radical Islamists. They should be distinct and handled separately.

The only way to prevent Islamist terrorist attacks is to understand the lexicon of the Islamists. It is vital to understand the historic heroes that inspire them, the hadiths that speak to them, the myths and legends that motivate them, and the materials that are put into their hands. It is important to know not just the history of Islam, but also the history of the nation that is connected to the radicalised individual.

This kind of specialisation is not possible when so many in the UK cry Islamophobia at every turn. The only way to ask family and community members to come forward and report potentially radicalised individuals is to win their confidence. Individuals have to feel that they can safely approach the authorities without repercussion. They also deserve to know that the situation will be handled by someone who deeply understands the issues at hand. As Nik Adams, a counter-terrorism police officer, explained brilliantly, we need people who can recognise “how significant the seemingly insignificant might be”.

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Given the ineffectiveness of Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, and the blinkered approach to reporting since Sir David’s murder, that will be an uphill struggle. But it is not impossible: Prevent is undergoing an independent review, led by the capable William Shawcross, that will report in December and produce suggestions on how it can be improved.

More importantly, I believe that, by and large, the Islamic terrorist narrative is waning. al-Qaeda is a skeleton of what it was two decades ago, while the spectre of ISIS continues to serve as a real-life deterrent to what living under a caliphate requires. Even the Muslim Brotherhood narrative is stale and petering out. Yes, the Taliban may have taken control of Afghanistan, and the threat of Islamism in Africa remains deeply concerning and often ignored. But taken in its entirety, radical Islam does not have the same potency it once did.

So even if Sir David’s death is proven to be a terrorist incident, the defeat of radical Islam in Britain is still attainable. But achieving that requires us to bin the fallacies regurgitated after every attack. If we don’t, the pattern of seemingly random terrorist violence will persist.

Back in 2006, Brafman had co-authored a popular book on organisational structures, The Starfish and the Spider, in which he compared the difference between biological organisms like the spider, which have a small head that controls its body, and the much stranger organisms, like the starfish, that don’t have a centralised structure but whose limbs can regenerate, even when severed from the main body. Chop off the spider’s head and the spider is dead. But the starfish doesn’t have a head and many of its functions have been decentralised, allowing it to keep going even when a major part of it has been cut off.

It turns out that the US Army was much taken with the spider and the starfish as metaphors for different organisational structures, mainly because of the trouble they were having with ISIS. The Army was a spider, with a strong command and control structure, while many terrorist organisations were radically decentralised, specifically designed to avoid infiltration or decapitation. And it worked – they were proving extremely difficult to destroy.

Writing a thesis at the US Military Academy at West Point a few years later, Major Luciano Picco explained why the US Army was having such trouble dealing with the starfish way of doing things.

“Due to a long history of success by embracing the hierarchical structure,” he wrote: “indications are that as a whole, the Army has a hard time conceptualising the decentralised ideas presented by Mission Command and inculcating those notions throughout the Army.”

But it wasn’t just the Army that was getting interested in Brafman’s ideas. Ten years ago this month the Occupy movement first arrived at Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district, proclaiming the slogan “We are the 99%”.

But it wasn’t just the message that was radical, it was also the way they organised themselves — the fact that there didn’t seem to be anyone “in charge”. Despite the need of the media to isolate leaders around whom to tell the story of a movement, Occupy operated on starfish principles. It was held together not by some central leadership group, but by a shared sense of conviction. Policies would not be handed down from a central committee, but would emerge from assemblies of the faithful.

This was a real headache for those tasked with negotiating with the protesters. When I was involved with the dispute between Occupy and St Paul’s Cathedral, it was clear that the City of London authorities, the Police and the Cathedral couldn’t quite understand what they were up against.

Their instinct was to approach Occupy with the familiar request “take me to your leader” — after which they would negotiate with them and perhaps strike some sort of deal. But there wasn’t a leader, and because of this the authorities had little idea what to do. From the Occupy perspective this meant there was no one who could sell them out, no central figure(s) who could be discredited or strong-armed into compromise. The spider had no idea how to deal with the starfish.

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The police eventually cleared the Occupy camp at St Paul’s in February 2012, evicting the protestors. But that was not the last that the police saw of these faces. Over the years, many of the same people who were there went on to help set up Extinction Rebellion and were also influential in other protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

The aims morphed and adapted, and new limbs to the protest movement were grown – ideas were “emergent”, to use the organisational jargon. You cannot evict an idea. And this model is not just a feature of the Left. The Tea Party movement was just as horizontally organised. After all, who was its leader? It’s hard to say. Does it even matter?

Unfortunately, the Church of England learned very little from its encounter with Occupy. Just this week it was unveiling a new plan for its future organisational structure, and it is a doubling down on the whole centralising tendency that has been going on for the last 30 or so years. Just as protest movements were out there “taking the knee”, Church leaders were poring over their spread-sheets and flow charts.

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Organisationally, the Church of England is a mess of overlapping and competing powers — bishops, synods, councils, pension boards, parliament, parishes — which is a real irritation to the pathologically tidy-minded. Formed as a shotgun marriage between two very different, perhaps incommensurable, approaches to religious authority — the Catholic and the Protestant — it’s little wonder the Church of England is an organisational hotchpotch.

Calling for greater “clarity”, this new plan announces that there is a “considerable confusion… about decision-making authority, a lack of understanding about which decisions different bodies are empowered to make and how those decisions are reached.”

So this review proposes a new body to take over most of the central functions of the Church. And inevitably it has an organisational flow chart and an acronym CENS – the Church of England National Services. Now there’s a rallying point to stir the blood and drop the faithful to their knees in wonder!

It’s as if the Church has decided to invest in Blockbuster Videos just as everyone else is switching to Netflix. All over the world, decentralised systems are on the ascendency. The Taliban have seen off the US Army. Blockchain technology has allowed radically decentralised crypto currencies like Bitcoin to flourish. eBay may have a CEO, but its real power lies in the millions on mini-encounters between buyers and sellers.

As Brafman observes in a more recent book, The Chaos Imperative, it is often from the edge of human networks that the serendipitous encounters driving innovation and creativity take place. In Church terms, these edges are called parishes — often small, semi-independent pockets of half-organised goodness, spreading out into their communities rhizomatically.

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On this traditional model, the bishop is not primarily a leader or a manager. He or she is concerned with the promulgation of doctrine, renewing the core message with inspiration, and the care of the clergy — a vicar to the vicars. These days, unfortunately, we have too often dulled their spirit by locking them in committees and chaining them to laptops to write bloodless reports. And the parishes are becoming sucked into this whole top-down managerialism led by bishops who go on leadership courses and do half-baked MBAs. God save us from people with MBAs.

What Brafman maintains is that the crucial thing keeping inherently messy organisations together is a belief in the cause. They don’t even need better management flow charts, they don’t need more command and control – often less of it – they need better preachers. And the Holy Spirit has no need of acronyms.

The Church is becoming more spider-like just as everyone else is learning the power of being more like a starfish.