Wake Up West – Deal With ISIS There or We Will Deal With Them Here

The recently displaced archbishop of Mosul, Iraq was speaking with particular candor when he said, “People in the West say ‘they don’t know.’ How can you not know?  You either support ISIS or you must have turned off all the satellites.  I am sorry to say this, but my pain is big.”

Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city and was once the home of Iraq’s most vulnerable and persistent Christian community, tracing their lineage nearly to the time of Christ.  Now there are no Christians left.

Like so many Christians in Iraq and Syria who watched ISIS kidnap their leaders, burn their churches, sell their children, and threaten all others with conversion or beheading; the archbishop wonders how it is that these maniacs so easily took his home city this summer.

All of this happened under the watchful eye of the West; and while you’d hope that the humanitarian threat (alone) would have motivated the West to act, you would be certain that Mosul’s strategic importance would do so.  Neither proved true.

Mosul was easily taken by ISIS troops, riding in on their decrepit pick-up trucks with guns bolted to them.  Her ancient streets have since been turned red with innocent blood, and the city has become a base for a jihad that rages wildly throughout the entire region.

The people whose lives have been threatened or destroyed by ISIS just don’t understand how this pre-modern evil could run unchecked.  They wonder how it could be that it took the most powerful nations in the world, using airstrikes, over four months with the help of Kurdish forces to defeat a few hundred jihadists waging war in the town of Kobani, and how it is that ISIS has been able to openly run its ‘state’ from a self-determined capital city called ‘Raqqa’ without the daily threat of hundreds of unrelenting airstrikes.  They also wonder how it is that Turkey’s border remains so porous allowing jihadist after jihadist to readily join ISIS.  And the examples of Western inaction are unending.

At present, as many as 300 Assyrian Christians remain in captivity having been kidnapped 2-weeks ago as ISIS assaulted 10-Assyrian, Christian villages along the Khabour River in Syria.  That assault was conducted by a group of ISIS fighters travelling in a convoy of more than 40 clearly marked ISIS vehicles directly toward these vulnerable, Christian villages.

The prevailing argument against Western engagement, or Western support of regional engagement, remains a sense that this is “their” fight and not ours.  Critics say, “It’s high time the Middle East takes care of their own issues.”

The threat of ISIS is spilling over European and Western borders again and again.  ISIS sympathizers have attacked innocent people, businesses and governments in at least the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and Belgium.  Even wanna-be jihadists travel to and from America and Europe on Western passports to fight in the ISIS jihad themselves.  The ISIS propaganda machine is causing mega-corporations like Google and Twitter to struggle to keep up with the amount of jihadist propaganda showing up online every single day; and, shockingly, one study recently noted that one-in-five Arabic language tweets in the United States and the United Kingdom referencing ISIS were in “support” of the organization.

The fact is, we will deal with this crisis there or we will deal with it here.  Not dealing with it is simply not an option.

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel