Who Are the Terrorists and Why Are They Winning?

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36005-focus-who-are-the-terrorists-and-why-are-they-winning

Nine days before the November 13 terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris, ISIL leaders risked allied airstrikes to bring their senior officials together in the Syrian town of Tabqah, west of Raqqa. There the leadership laid out a decisive shift in strategy. Instead of putting all their efforts into holding the Iraqi and Syrian land in their self-proclaimed caliphate, a task they saw as militarily hopeless, the leadership had already sent hundreds of their European fighters back home to wreak havoc in Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, and the UK.

ISIL’s leaders “believe that European societies are easily weakened through savagery,” wrote The Guardian. “One of the group’s members said its senior officials had a deep understanding of the European political architecture and of the fears of its people.”

“At the meeting, they talked about which societies would crumble first and what that would mean,” said the ISIL activist. “They thought big attacks would lead to pressure on the European Union and even NATO.”

ISIL’s new threat depends on its European jihadis, making it vital to understand what motivates them in their suicidal, homicidal, and ultimately nihilistic Götterdämmerung. At the time of the Paris attacks the best available information came from French scholar Olivier Roy, as I reported in late November. He had systematically studied the publically available information on thousands of Muslim radicals, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud – celebrated by ISIL as Abu Omar the Belgian – one of the main organizers of the Paris attacks.

“The main motivation of young men for joining jihad seems to be the fascination for a narrative: the small brotherhood of super-heroes who avenge the Muslim Ummah,” Dr. Roy concluded. This remains “global and abstract,” unconnected to real people either in Europe or the Middle East. They build their narrative “using schemes taken from the contemporary youth culture: video-games (Call of Duty, Assassins).” And they stage their super-hero fantasies using modern techniques and “very contemporary aesthetics, with a special role for aesthetics of violence.”