BtH: Facing the ISIS Threat
At a February 17, 2016 panel held at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, experts provided perspective on how the United States and its allies continue to deal with the developing threat posed by ISIS and its affiliate organizations. The event was part of the School’s “Beyond the Headlines @BUPardeeSchool” or BtH series.
The panel, entitled “Dealing With the ISIS Threat“, included Will McCants, Director of Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Pardee School, and was moderated by Pardee School Dean Adil Najam.
McCants, the author of The ISIS Apocalypse, said the approach of the United States to dealing with ISIS has changed as the organization has evolved into a government in Syria and Iraq, an insurgent organization in other parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa and now an international terror network.
“It is a difficult thing to analyze not just for scholars on the outside trying to make sense of it, but also interestingly for our own military and intelligence services,” McCants said. “You talk to security professionals and they will tell you they have a hard time getting their mind around it, not just because of the religious language it uses but also in terms of the categories they usually use to think about groups like this.”
Stern, author of “ISIS: The State of Terror,” said ISIS poses a unique threat for Western security forces because of the success they have had recruiting in various countries as well as their ability for self funding.
“This organization is incredibly good at self funding and that makes it different from Al Qaeda Central Command, which actually requested funding from the organization that became ISIS,” Stern said.
Najam said he believes there is more to the success ISIS has had in recruiting than solely the focus on young Muslims.
“The assumption that you are a young Muslim man or woman and that you are just ripe for ISIS to pick, I think seems a little too easy.”
Stern added the goals of ISIS are somewhat contradictory, which makes the organization difficult to analyze.
“They imagine they have to destroy the world in order to save it,” Stern said. “They have these two missions which would seem to be in contradiction, they want to spread the caliphate, they want to run this state, and yet they also say they want to goad the West into sending in ground forces to fight with them.”
Jessica Stern’s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. You can read more about her here.
William McCants is a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and has served in government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism, including as State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. Read more about him here.