By Dan O’Shea
Special to The Tampa Tribune
“Victory is gained not by the number killed but by the number frightened” is an ancient Arab proverb.
It succinctly describes the maxim of the Islamic “hostage terrorism” on display in the Middle East, Africa and now coming to Western shores — from Boko Haram kidnapping 260 school girls last year in Nigeria, to the Sydney hostage standoff in December and the Paris hostage crisis last month, to the latest barbaric propaganda video released showing the burning of captive Jordanian pilot that shocked and captivated the world this past week.
Why do these terrorist groups go to such extremes? Simple answer: Hostage-taking is how terrorists negotiate with the West, as the Islamic State is seeing the prophecy fulfilled.
Hostage terrorism can be defined as non-state terrorist groups that use the criminal act of abducting and holding individuals against their will to announce their agenda, raise their profile, garner recruits in their cause and disrupt and degrade the political will of their adversary. Their hostages are propaganda fodder used for the purpose of making public demands, increasing global awareness of their cause, raising funds by extorting ransoms, engineering prisoner swaps and forcing concessions from nation states.
Front and center in the hostage terrorism theater of the macabre is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. ISIS is orchestrating this spectacle of kidnappings, beheadings and now burnings to its advantage because hostage terrorism works. They have captured the attention of the entire world’s news outlets, which is exactly what it wants. The Islamic State will continue to seek more hostages and will continue to exploit its remaining 20 hostages, including an unidentified American aid worker, for future savage snuff films to capture the world’s attention.
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…tocol, refusing to make concessions to terrorists masquerading as kidnappers.
A decade ago, the al-Qaida kidnapping crisis in Iraq was launched with the gruesome Nick Berg beheading video that shocked the world. Over the summer of 2004, kidnappings of foreigners and Iraqis alike became the cottage industry that destroyed the fabric of daily Iraqi life and nearly fractured the international coalition fighting the insurgency in Iraq.
The relentless kidnapping headlines and subsequent beheading videos continued to air until a signature incident. Margaret Hassan, an Irish-born, Iraqi-married humanitarian who ran CARE International, was known as the “Mother Theresa of Baghdad” for her tireless work in Iraq’s worst slums. She was kidnapped in October and murdered a few weeks later by the same ideology on display in Iraq and Syria today. Although her execution video was deemed too barbaric for even Al Jazeera to air publicly, the reports of her death resulted in worldwide condemnation, especially in the Arab world.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq who had been personally leading the beheading campaign, was famously admonished by AQ’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to stop publicly killing women, children and fellow Muslims. What AQ leadership knew then, as ISIS knows now, is that the strategic campaign is really a war of messaging and struggle for the soul of who speaks for Islam and the desired end-state of a modern caliphate. After Hassan, the kidnappings continued, but the video propaganda of hostage executions largely ended.
The previous kidnapping crisis in the region was addressed after a hard campaign of sticking to our “no concessions” policy, approving risky hostage rescue missions and, equally important, winning the propaganda war. It was Iraqis them-[…]