AMMAN,
Jordan — There was one sentiment that many of the Middle East’s
competing clerics, fractious ethnic groups and warring sects could agree
on Wednesday: a shared sense of revulsion at the Islamic State’s latest atrocity, burning alive a Jordanian pilot inside a cage.
In
Syria, the government denounced the group that has been fighting it for
months, but so did Qaeda fighters who oppose both the government and
the Islamic State. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian
government for once agreed on something, the barbarity of the militant
group for the way it murdered the Jordanian, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh.
And in Cairo, Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of the 1,000-year-old
Al Azhar institute, was so angered that he called for the Islamic
State’s extremists to be “killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs
cut off.”
That
leading Sunni scholar’s denunciation was even harsher than similar
outbursts from the region’s Shiite leaders, theologically the more
traditional foes of the Islamic State.
Crowds welcomed home King Abdullah II of
Jordan after the swift executions of two prisoners, a day after
militants released a video that appeared to show a captured Jordanian
pilot being burned alive.
Video by Reuters on
Publish Date February 4, 2015.
Photo by Majed Jaber/Reuters.
In
a way that recent beheadings of hostages had not, the immolation of
Lieutenant Kasasbeh set off a regionwide explosion of anger and disgust
at the extremists, also known as ISIS
or ISIL, or to most Arabs by the word “Daesh.” Even more significant,
in a chronically embattled region that bequeathed to the world the
expression, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Islamic State
suddenly found itself friendless in the extreme.
Name
almost any outrage in the Mideast in decades of them — the Sabra and
Shatila massacre, the Achille Lauro hijacking, Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait, the gassing of the Halabja Kurds, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole
— and the protagonists would readily find both apologists and
detractors. But with one breathtakingly vicious murder, the Islamic
State changed that dynamic, uniting most of the region against it.
The sense of anti-Daesh unity made for strange scenes throughout the region. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, caught by surprise in Washington
when the video of the killing was released, returned home Wednesday not
to anger at his absence, but to a hero’s welcome. Crowds lined his
route from the airport to cheer Jordan’s decision to promptly retaliate
by executing two convicted terrorists, both with connections to the
Islamic State, only hours earlier.
Never
known as a charismatic leader, King Abdullah got rave reviews at home
for his tough talk in Washington, where in a meeting with congressional
leaders he said his retribution would remind people of the Clint
Eastwood movie “Unforgiven.” Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of
California, who was in attendance, said the king vowed “retaliation”
and “getting after the bad guys.”
The
king wasted no time making good on his threat, and before his plane had
even landed, he ordered the two prisoners to be hanged by the neck
until they died.
The
video released Tuesday of the death of Lieutenant Kasasbeh, with its
vows to kill other fighter pilots bombing Islamic State positions, was
clearly aimed at trying to scare Jordan out of the American-led
coalition fighting the extremists. But it seems to have had the opposite
effect among many Jordanians, and Jordan’s government spokesman said
the kingdom would now step up its involvement against the group.
The
pilot’s father, Safi Youssef al-Kasasbeh, an influential tribal sheikh,
had earlier questioned whether Jordan should even be fighting the
Islamic State. But after his son’s death, his qualms were gone. “I ask
the international community to carry out just punishment against those
terrorist groups that have no religion or traditional values,” he said
in a telephone interview.
“I
guess in a way we lost a pilot, but at the same time I think the
government gained a collective support for fighting them, in Jordan and
from all around too,” said Adnan Abu-Odeh, a former head of Jordan’s
intelligence service. “Daesh have made a big error. When you are
weakened as they have been, you try to make your supporters think you
are strong by being more monstrous, but this time they went too far.”
In
Syria, where a chaotic four-year insurgency provided the Islamic State
with an incubator, both those supporting President Bashar al-Assad and
those opposing him condemned the act, as did their foreign backers.
Iran,
the Syrian government’s most important ally and no friend of Jordan,
called the pilot’s killing “inhumane and un-Islamic.” Al Manar, the
television station of another ally of the Syrian government, the
Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, called it “the most gruesome” of many
atrocities committed by the Islamic State.
Qatar,
which opposes Mr. Assad, likewise condemned the killing as
“contravening the tolerant principles” of Islam. Turkey, blamed by many
in the region for allowing foreign fighters to cross its borders into
Syria, where some join the Islamic State, also chimed in. President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it an act of “savagery” that had no place in
Islam, adding, “I curse and damn the burning of the Jordanian pilot.”
Denouncing
the Islamic State as a “diabolical” terrorist group, Al Azhar’s leader
and grand imam, Sheikh Tayeb, cited Quranic verses to show that Islam
forbids the burning or mutilation of enemies at war.
Al
Azhar, a seat of Islamic learning, considers itself a beacon of
moderation and tolerance for the Sunni Muslim world, and the statement
offered no explanation for the incongruity of Sheikh Tayeb’s advocating
some of the same medieval punishments employed by extremists.
Mainstream
Arab leaders reacted to the immolation in a categorically different way
to the long string of hostage beheadings that preceded it. Partly that
may have been because, according to many commentators Wednesday, burning
someone alive is prohibited in Islam as a punishment that belongs to
God alone, applied in hell. Beheadings, however, have a long history in
Islam.
For
all the outrage, some in Syria and elsewhere lamented the lack of a
similar level of anger for the hundreds of thousands of people killed in
Syria’s civil war.
Human
Rights Watch and other organizations tracking the conflict noted that
the Syrian government’s barrel bombings of cities kill far more
civilians than the extremists — however depraved and attention-grabbing
the militant group’s methods.
Khaled
Khoja, the president of the main Syrian exile opposition group, linked
the pilot’s participation in the struggle against the Islamic State
directly to his own country’s opposition’s struggle against Mr. Assad.
“Moaz’s
blood has mingled with the soil of our beloved Syria, and whose remains
mingled with those of hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed by
Assad’s barrel bombs and the terrorist group ISIS,” Mr. Khoja said in a statement. “I strongly condemn this barbaric act, which symbolizes pure evil.”
Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that both forms of killing should be condemned.
“ISIS’s
despicable conduct shouldn’t make us lose sight of the largest killer
of civilians in Syria: Assad’s barrel bombs,” he said in an email. “The
world has been reluctant to address them out of a misguided sense that
nothing should be done that might constrain the fight against ISIS, but
barrel bombs have little if any military significance.”
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