There are seven wars raging in Muslim countries between the borders of Pakistan in the east and Nigeria in the west. In all seven – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and north-east Nigeria – local versions of IS are either already powerful or are gaining in influence. Key to its explosive expansion in Iraq and Syria since 2011 is its capability as a fighting machine. In addition, its successes have been possible because it is opposed by feeble, corrupt or non-existent governments and armies.
The reach of the Islamic State was hideously demonstrated last week by near simultaneous attacks in Tunisia, France, Kuwait and Kobani in Syria. The first three atrocities received blanket media coverage, but the fourth, and by far the biggest massacre, was at Kobani, where at least 220 Kurdish civilians, including women and children, were massacred last Thursday by IS fighters.
Sadly, it was an event that has received only limited attention in the outside world, doubtless because the mass killing of civilians is seen as yet one more tragic but inevitable episode in the war in Syria and Iraq.
Such desensitivity to the ongoing slaughter in that conflict is not only morally wrong, but shows serious political blindness.
What makes the killings in a suburb of Lyon, the beach at Sousse and the Imam al-Sadiq mosque in Kuwait so different from – and in some ways more menacing than – the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks is that today these crimes are promoted by a government, in the shape of the self-declared caliphate, which has a more powerful army and rules more people than most members of the UN.
The US and western European governments are eager for their people to avoid focusing on this dangerous development because they do not want to highlight their own culpability in failing to contain IS.
Its strengths – as well as its opponents’ weaknesses – help to explain its rapid rise and that of other al-Qaeda-type movements in the Middle East and North Africa.
But there is a further toxic ingredient which propels IS forward: this is the exacerbation and exploitation of religious differences and hatreds, most crucially those between Sunni and Shia Muslims. From the moment in the wake of the US invasion in 2003 that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi created the forerunner to al-Qaeda in Iraq and IS, its prime target was Shia Iraqis.
Much the same is now happening in Muslim countries across the world, and particularly in the seven convulsed by warfare. An example of this is Yemen, where one third of the 25 million population belong to the Shia Zaydi sect and the rest are Sunni, but where there has been little sectarian strife in the past.
Compared to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), IS is a late-comer in Yemen but both groups flourish as Sunni-Shia hostility increases. Where Shia victims are unavailable, as in Libya, then IS groups have ritually murdered Christian migrant workers from Egypt and Ethiopia.
The killing of Shia is not just an expression of hatred, but has a less obvious, though demonic, purpose behind it.
The aim of provoking the Shia is that the Sunni are left with no alternative but to turn to IS or al-Qaeda clones as defenders.
There has long been disagreement about the real strength of IS and its ability to expand. Overall, the argument that IS is more powerful than it looks has been borne out by events such as the capture of Mosul on 10 June 2014 and of Ramadi on 17 May this year.
In reality, there are two crucial components to IS expansion, one of which is the strength of the organisation itself, but equally important is the spectacular weaknesses of its opponents.
“Failed states” are more dangerous than they look because when central governments collapse, they create a vacuum easily filled by groups like IS. Foreign military intervention has repeatedly been complicit in creating these conditions – in Iraq in 2003, but also in Libya in 2011 and in Yemen this year where a Saudi-led air campaign has been targeting the Yemeni army, the one institution that held the country together.
The beliefs of IS are rightly seen as an offshoot of Saudi Wahhabism, both ideologies degrading the status of women, imposing fundamentalist Islamic norms and regarding Shia and Christians as heretics or pagans. But though they have common features, they are not identical.
A more accurate accusation against Saudi Arabia is that over the past half century it has successfully used its great wealth to bring mainstream Sunni Islam under the intolerant influence of Wahhabism, thus deepening religious antagonisms.
Since 9/11, Washington has wanted to punish the perpetrators of the attack, but carefully avoided linking the attack to Saudi Arabia, home country of Osama bin Laden, 15 out of the 19 hijackers, and of the private donors funding the operation.
The original article by Patrick Cockburn was first published on June 28, 2015 in The Independent, UK. The graphics were published the same day in i100.co.uk.