As the Washington Examiner’s Zachary Halaschak notes, ISIS is using cows strapped with explosives to attack Iraqi security forces. That might have some people shocked.
It shouldn’t.
ISIS and its precursor organization, al Qaeda, in Iraq have long records of using humans and animals for murder. They are death cults, after all. But when it comes to suicide attacks, there are two different components.
First, there are those suicide bombers who willfully find a moral military purpose in suicide bombing mayhem. Motivated by a Salafi-Jihadist ideology which views human life as something worth only submission to a totalitarian notion of divinity, these individuals regard their murderous deaths not simply as morally pure, but ordained.
Even beyond the obvious moral question, it’s a provable lie.
Yes, these individuals crave the perverse glorification that goes with their murder. But Salafi-Jihadism’s particular ideology is crucial in explaining why ISIS and al Qaeda embrace a rampant form of suicide terrorism. In contrast, while the Lebanese Hezbollah are the original masters of what they regard as martyrdom operations, the group does not employ the tactic with the relentlessness of their Salafi-Jihadist counterparts.
That’s because Hezbollah view the murder tactic as both a means to an end, and an end in itself — as an incarnation of Husayn ibn Ali’s sacrifice at the Battle of Karbala: something holy and done carefully. ISIS views the tactic as a means to maximal destruction.
That takes us to the broader callous irony of ISIS suicide bombing operations. They claim to be holy warriors of purpose, but act in utter contrast to it. Consider al Qaeda’s use of mentally ill children to carry out suicide attacks. Salafist terrorist groups, or groups such as the Taliban under the broad umbrella of that ideology, are tactically flexible even where that flexibility is fundamentally incompatible with their claims of a purposeful, willful jihad.
The ultimate truth: whether willful murderers, unknowing cows, or ill children, Salafi-Jihadism is the definition of evil.
