The two remaining members of the so-called ISIS “Beatles” cell are preparing for a one-stop tour of Florence.
Unfortunately for Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, they won’t be visiting the Fountain of Neptune or strolling through the Piazza della Signoria. Instead, they’ll likely be spending the remainder of their lives in small individual cells blessed with 4-inch windows. After all, they’re not going to Florence, Italy — they’re almost certainly going to the only federal “supermax” prison, the one in Florence, Colorado. There, they’ll quickly long for yesterday.
First, however, the two terrorists will stand trial in a Virginia Federal Court on terrorism-related charges. Most notable, here, will be an accounting for their murder of innocents such as James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and David Haines. Responsible for the detention, torture, and execution of the Western hostages ISIS kidnapped in 2013 and 2014, the Beatles made their normally brutal ISIS colleagues look tame in comparison. But it wasn’t easy getting to this point. There was political pressure in Britain for the terrorists to face trial in the prison utopia of the Hague’s International Criminal Court. The British government had to strip the two men of their citizenship and successfully defeat a legal challenge by Elsheikh’s mother, who opposed London’s sharing of relevant intelligence with Washington. All in all, it took the Trump administration more than two years to complete this extradition.
Fortunately, those days are over, and the once-proud killers will now face justice. There’s strategic value here. As with the pathetic demise of their erstwhile leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the subjugation of these celebrity killers will again prove that the United States is more powerful than ISIS. That might seem like an obvious truth, but in deterring future recruits to the ISIS flag, it requires broadcasting as far and wide as possible. The U.S. has shown that ISIS’s glory days of an ordained global empire and chaos across the Middle East are over. This is not to say that ISIS has been totally defeated; it remains a serious threat. Still, the group’s narrative of ordained support has lost much legitimacy in the eyes of Salafi-Jihadists and the other losers it seeks to attract.
One wonders whether the two former Britons will come to envy the fate of their Beatles ringleader, Mohammed Emwazi (aka Jihadi John). In November 2015, Emwazi ate a Hellfire missile in Raqqa. His departure from this world might have been overdue, but it was at least swift. The same will not be true for Elsheikh and Kotey. They’ll likely live in their small cells, in isolation, for another fifty years.
