It’s not every day that one celebrates the death of another human being, well, not in the UK anyway. However, news from the US was released this week confirming the death of the notorious ‘desert lion’ Abu Wahib. He was a senior ISIL leader known for his brutality who had stood out in a land where brutality and acts of evil are commonplace.
Abu Wahib, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s military emir for Iraq’s Anbar province, was targeted by a US led coalition Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said on Monday.
The spokesman said Wahib is a former member of al-Qaida in Iraq and has been seen in ISIL execution videos.
That strike also killed three other ISIL jihadists, Cook said.
“Abu Wahib’s death is another blow to ISIL’s leadership that will further degrade its ability to operate, especially in Anbar province,” he said.
I find it striking that in certain parts of the world where people seem at their most ‘godly’ – the acts that they do to each other – the slaughter, maiming, beheading and torture…all appear utter godless. If that is what God truly wants – they can keep their belief and their god to themselves.
Leadership ‘Hit Hard’
ISIL leadership has been hit hard by coalition efforts, Cook said. “This is another example of that,” he added. “It is dangerous to be an ISIL leader in Iraq and Syria these days, and for good reason we want to apply pressure [on] ISIL on as many fronts as possible. Taking out leadership targets is one way to do that.”
Cook noted Anbar province is a critically important area in the fight against ISIL, and the death of Wahib will harm ISIL’s ability to conduct operations in the region.
Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook
The spokesman noted that taking out leadership is part of what he called “a multipronged effort” to apply pressure on as many fronts to ISIL as possible, “and for ISIL leaders to be very worried about their next step.”
I started this story saying how we don’t celebrate death here, and it’s true. Yet, watching some of the videos of men standing beside other men who are either dead or about to be killed (by them) I just can’t imagine the hatred and anger which drives this desire to glorify and celebrate the killing or death of another human.
Former detective Nigel Boulton is the original designer of the multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH), and now supporting MASH delivery and safeguarding improvements around the UK.
Nigel spoke to Jason McCrossan on his Monday Matters radio show on 106.9 SFM (www.sfmradio.com) about how MASH is used to share information across agencies and identify children and vulnerable adults who are at risk from Female genital mutilation, extremism, radicalisation just to name a few.
Tareena Shakil fled to the war-torn Syria in October 2014.
Jason spoke to Nigel on the day that 26 year old Tareena Shakil was found guilty of taking her toddler son to Syria to join terror group ISIS. Tareena had fled to the war-torn region in October 2014 after telling her family she was going on holiday to Turkey. She was found guilty of being a member of ISIS and encouraging acts of terror, becoming the first British woman to be convicted after return from the terror heartland.
An image grab taken from a propaganda video uploaded on June 11, 2014 by jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) allegedly shows ISIL militants gathering at an undisclosed location in Iraq’s Nineveh province. Militants took control of the Iraqi city of Tikrit and freed hundreds of prisoners today, police said, the second provincial capital to fall in two days. AFP PHOTO / HO / ISIL
The medieval way in which terrorist organisation ISIS dispatched Muadh al-Kasasbeh, a Jordanian pilot, to his death in January 2015 was something that caused nausea to anyone who cherishes life and believes in human dignity. Of course, not everyone gasped a breath of repulsion with news reports circulating that Isil broadcast the murder on giant public screens to crowds that included young children cheering and chanting in Raqqa, the de facto capital of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Of course, I say medieval – however, one does not need to look back to the middle ages to find tales of atrocious behaviour carried out by man kind up man kind. As is pointed out in the blog “We Are Respectable Negroes”
For almost a century, the United States practiced a unique cultural ritual that was as least as gruesome as the “Medieval” punishments meted out by ISIS against its foes.
What is now known as “spectacular lynching” involved the ceremonial torture, murder–and yes, burning alive–of black Americans by whites.
In fact, the burned to death images of the black body were one of the most popular types of mass culture in 19th and 20th century America.
And who can forget the many atrocities carried out by German’s under the NAZI flag including beastly experiments with victims coerced into participating; they did not willingly volunteer and there was never informed consent. Typically, the experiments resulted in death, disfigurement or permanent disability, and as such are considered as examples of medical torture.
A Jewish child is forced to show the scar left after SS physicians removed his lymph nodes. This child was one of 20 Jewish children injected with tuberculosis germs as part of a medical experiment. All were murdered on April 20, 1945. Neuengamme concentration camp, Germany, between December 1944 and February 1945. — Guenther Schwarberg
The terror and brutality that is being carried out by ISIS is not new – the speed and method of the delivery of the images is. I’m grateful to have been brought up in the West – in a country where religion is a private matter and the freedom to live life is not dictated by the passages of a religious text or by the gun or knife or a brutal regime that won’t accept dissent. People in Britain must be free to choose to have a religion or not – but it must be a choice and as Allison Pearson writes in the telegraph:
Yesterday came a damning official report by Louise Casey saying that Labour’s Rotherham borough council was “in complete denial” and had failed to respond properly to last year’s scathing report by Prof Alexis Jay. Men of Pakistani origin had been allowed to abuse white girls in part because of “misplaced political correctness”: council staff were terrified of being labelled racist. Cowards and fools, they “decided such issues should be dealt with by people from the Pakistani community”. Good thinking, chaps!
In Rotherham, Casey also found that police had failed to pursue Pakistani perpetrators for fear of “offending the community”.
What community? Not yours and mine, that’s for sure. So desperate is the situation that Whitehall-appointed commissioners are to move in and take over the council. In Rotherham, we see with terrible clarity how the whole edifice of multiculturalism is as rotten as a Tudor monarch’s mouth.
What Allison fails to note is that the kind of abuse that happened in Rotherham isn’t just limited to a particular ethnic group – white men will take just as much advantage of girls as any other race – the worrying element is if the report is true and staff failed to act out of a fear of being racist. And this is why I am strongly against religious schools where children are divided along lines of cultural and often racial background and never mix with anyone who is not of their belief nor race. This cannot be good for our future.
If we are to learn anything from the atrocities committed by ISIS – is that we must integrate the different cultures and backgrounds that exist within Britain better than we are doing at the moment. What makes a teenage boy or girl think that their life is only valuable when it has a bomb attached to it and they are kill themselves and as many people as they can?
How did we let this situation happen? The Prime Minister David Cameron has jumped in feet first to tackle what they would term welfare scroungers – but what about extremists and extremism? It is lazy to think of this as a muslim probably – any more than suggesting that when the IRA was active on British shores they were a catholic problem.
One of the reasons we elect politicians is to make us safe – so far, they have failed us. But if UKIP is the answer – we’re most definitely asking the wrong questions.
Jason McCrossan 