The Islamic State might have lost its territory in the Middle East, but it intends to remain a potent threat to innocent people across the world.
ISIS has just kidnapped and murdered 11 impoverished Muslim miners. The attack is a stark reminder of the profound fanaticism that defines this particularly unpleasant terrorist group.
By kidnapping impoverished Hazara miners in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, then executing them at close range, ISIS was pursuing two strategic objectives. First, to intimidate Pakistan’s Hazara population. Despising these predominantly Shia Muslim citizens for their Islamic worship outside of ISIS’s narrow Sunni-Salafist theology, ISIS seeks to trammel them into submission.
The passionate hatred that consumes ISIS fighters is significant. Indeed, ISIS’s attitudes toward Shia Muslims could aptly be compared to Nazi attitudes toward Jews. ISIS sees the Hazara as a verminous infestation against God’s divine order — an infestation deserving only of absolute annihilation.
One Hazara activist who received the miners’ bodies told the New York Times that, “Their clothes from the front were almost fully bloodstained, bruises on bodies also suggest that they were dragged.” Such violence can be seen in other ISIS attacks, such as last May’s assault on an Afghan maternity hospital. ISIS’s capricious disregard for human life, for Muslim life, even, is one reason that the group is so popular with psychopaths and other mentally ill individuals.
This attack wasn’t just about making the Hazara suffer and their compatriots fear for the future.
Attested to by ISIS’s spreading of video footage of the massacre on various social media channels, the group sees this attack as a useful propaganda weapon. Whenever ISIS can target Shia Muslims, Christians, Americans, or any of the many sectarian groupings that are despised by Salafi-Jihadists, it seeks to take maximum propaganda value from its attacks. That propaganda serves two broader purposes — the first being advancing ISIS’s narrative that it alone is the jihadist group to lead the faithful into a new global caliphate.
But the mayhem-on-video strategy also advances ISIS’s interests closer to home. Just as investors in a business want to be confident of a return, extremist benefactors want to know that their money is being spent well. So, ISIS propaganda advances its cultivation of wealthy benefactors. This is no small concern in Pakistan. After all, whether it’s Imran Khan’s government or other powerful political interests around the country, jihadist sentiments do not meet the kind of immediate riposte we might hope for or expect.
