Slaying Daesh: An Interview with an American Advisor in Iraq
Chris Hernandez
I once read a novel about a Vietnam veteran’s life after homecoming. In one scene he’s alone in a bar in April 1975, transfixed to a TV, drinking away anger as he watches the last helicopter lift off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. Later I told a fellow Iraq veteran friend that I was pretty sure I’d be in a bar someday, drowning my sorrows in iced tea and watching the last helicopter abandon the American embassy in Baghdad.
About two years later, ISIS hit Iraq. Mosul fell after a not-even-halfhearted defense. The Iraqi Army fled Fallujah without a fight. Baghdad came under threat, and Iraqi troops seemed incapable of defending it. One day as I read yet another report of the Iraqi Army retreating in disarray, my Iraq veteran friend sent a text.
“You picked out a bar yet?”
The Iraqi Army – now there’s a term that’s struck terror into the heart of many an American fighting man. Not in 1991 when we stomped it into defeat during Desert Storm, nor in 2003 when we used it as a speedbump on the road to Baghdad; no, the terror came later, when we tried to fight alongside it. I personally had little direct interaction with the IA, but many who did came home full of misgivings, frustration, and visions of impending collapse. When ISIS swept much of the IA aside with barely a fight, many of us Iraq vets felt our “US embassy in Saigon” moment was at hand.
Helmets abandoned by IA troops fleeing ISIS
Yet, two years into the fight against ISIS, the Iraqi Army seems to have at least improved. It stopped the ISIS advance outside Baghdad (with our help), took back areas on the outskirts of Mosul, took Hit, took Ramadi and parts of western Fallujah, and is preparing to retake the rest of it. Recently we’ve seen video of an IA helicopter door gunner calmly smoking a fleeing ISIS vehicle, read reports of a lone IA Abrams tank nicknamed “The Beast” whacking ISIS all over Hit, and seen video of another IA Abrams hitting a moving VBIED (car bomb) at long range.
As a former tanker, the stories about IA tanks really got my attention. And while I was encouraged, I also cringed. Is the Iraqi Army really capable of using Abrams tanks? I wondered. And if they are, isn’t that knowledge and capability bound to reach ISIS?
So I was pretty happy when I recently met a US Marine Corps advisor to an Iraqi armored division. This officer deployed twice to Iraq as a tanker, and made trips to Afghanistan to see how tanks were being employed there. Policy prevents me from identifying him, so I’ll call him Brad.
Why did I choose “Brad” as a pseudonym? No reason, just a random name.
Brad and I spoke by phone for over an hour. He’s assigned to a base in Anbar province that I used to run convoys to back in 05, and the troops he advises are in the thick of the fight against ISIS. He’s got direct visibility on the capabilities of today’s Iraqi Army, and had direct visibility on the IA during Operation Iraqi Freedom. If we want to know the truth about today’s Iraqi Army and especially their tankers, he’s a good person to ask.
My first question for Brad was whether or not he was going with the Iraqis on missions. In Iraq I was a TWAT (Tanker Without A Tank) on a convoy escort team, and never fought in a beloved Abrams. In Afghanistan I was around French light tanks in firefights, and had one fire its main gun close enough to rock my Humvee, but never connived my way into one for a mission. Some Americans are outside the wire in the ISIS fight, but what about Brad and other tankers?
“We don’t accompany the Iraqis. Mostly, they’re doing it, they don’t need us,” Brad said. “It’s like the old parable, ‘what you expect of people they tend to deliver’. If we don’t accompany them, the Iraqi Army realizes they need to do it on their own. The only thing we really have a problem with is that they move at their speed, and we want them to move faster. But when it comes to the rubber really meeting the road…
“I was part of an operation earlier this month. They were clearing a road, and it was heavily defended by Daesh. They ran into several problems, they lost one of their senior leaders, they had issues where certain units weren’t performing as well as others. But they adjusted their scheme of maneuver on the fly, they provided relatively accurate reporting, they were relatively responsive to our requests for information while they were in the middle of the fight. Their problems now lie in basic soldierly proficiency. They’re in the war now, and they don’t have time to focus on just basic soldiering. They have to keep everybody on the line, they have to keep everybody attacking.”
Reuters photo of Iraqi SF fighting ISIS in Ramadi.
Basic proficiency is a big deal though, especially considering all the complex tasks that go into running a tank. So where are they as far as being able to perform basic tanker tasks?
“I mean, are they US Marines or American Army? No. Those are the two finest fighting forces in the world. But they adapt to changing tactical situations, they continue to press despite casualties and IEDs. Are they incredibly proficient at accurate fires and all those thing? Well, they’ve got some work to do in that area. But when it comes to behaving like a professional army, they’re making great strides every day, actually. It takes decades to produce the kind of culture and institutional knowledge the US Army and Marine Corps have with their tanks. It takes going to gunnery twice a year, year after year, it takes officers who have been to multiple gunneries, the Master Gunner program, you know, all those things they just don’t have time to do. They are at just a basic level of proficiency. I think the biggest thing to say about this is…they’re not us, but they’re resilient, and they don’t give up. The fighting spirit’s really there.”
Read the rest at http://www.breachbangclear.com/slaying-daesh-in…or-iraqi-tankers/
Chris Hernandez is a 22 year police officer, former Marine and recently retired National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and Iron Mike magazine and has published three military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve, Line in the Valley and Safe From the War through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).
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(Photo by Greg Allen/Invision/AP)
But he’s not an ISIS recruiting tool.
Muslim terrorists don’t hate us because Trump says offensive things about them. They hate us because of who they are, not because of what we do. This isn’t as simple as “don’t make them mad and they won’t attack us.”
ISIS will attack us because they think they’re supposed to. If we’re polite and civil to them, they’ll be in a good mood when they attack. If we’re rude and offensive, they’ll be in a bad mood when they attack. Either way, they’ll attack.
In the face of a new terror threat that’s rapidly becoming existential, America has erected a vast, impenetrable barrier of self-loathing and victim blaming. Every attack by Muslim terrorists evokes shouted comparisons to “The Crusades! Slavery! Attacks on Planned Parenthood!” from the intended victims. ISIS doesn’t have to morally justify their brutal crimes, because Americans do it for them.
Yes, the Crusades were bad. The Muslim invasions of Europe, which started almost 400 years before the first crusade, were also bad. Slavery was bad in every culture that practiced it, which was pretty much every culture on earth including African cultures. Americans fought a war to eradicate slavery, and ended it long before many other countries (the African country of Mauritania didn’t outlaw slavery until the 1980s). The Planned Parenthood attack in Colorado was bad, and was in fact terrorism. But even if it was equally bad as ISIS massacres in principle, it wasn’t equally bad in its effect. If every life is precious, 130 murders are worse than three.
For every atrocity our enemies commit, they (and their American apologists) can point to some historical atrocity that equaled it. We could do the same thing. And no matter how desperately we seek moral equivalence, in a hundred years our descendants won’t be justified in massacring innocent Muslims because ISIS is massacring innocent non-Muslims today.
Here, ISIS massacres Ethiopian Christians. No, that doesn’t mean Ethiopian Christians are now justified in massacring innocent Muslims. Just like the Crusades don’t mean ISIS is in any way justified in what they do.
But too many Americans keep thinking Muslim terrorists are motivated by our actions rather than their own beliefs. Our President has been saying for some time that “[Guantanamo Bay] is used by terrorists around the world to help recruit jihadists.” Yet 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, happened before we started putting terror suspects in Gitmo. So did the USS Cole attack. So did Khobar towers. So did the African embassy bombings. So did the first World Trade Center bombing. So did the Beirut Marine barracks bombing. If holding terror suspects in Gitmo is such a huge recruiting tool for terrorism, what tool got so many terrorists to carry out so many terror attacks before Gitmo opened? And would closing Gitmo do anything more than restore us to the pre-Gitmo status quo, when terrorists wanted to kill us for non-Gitmo reasons?
Now the presumptive democratic presidential nominee has jumped on the “it’s our fault” bandwagon, claiming “[Trump] is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.” Besides the fact that Hillary Clinton has no actual evidence to support that claim, does she really think aspiring terrorists are saying “I was going to be a peaceful moderate, but then Trump said Muslims shouldn’t be allowed into America! Now I’ll blow myself up for Allah!”?
And actually, Trump isn’t in the latest ISIS video. But President Obama, VP Biden, G.W. Bush and Bill Clinton are. You heard that right; Obama and Biden, “liar” George Bush and “adulterer” Bill Clinton are being used as ISIS recruiting tools.
http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=62389eec34be
Whatever the recruiting tool, ISIS isn’t hurting for recruits and had a steady supply of volunteers long before Trump went full Trump. Estimates of ISIS manpower run as high as 200,000. And that estimate is from February, before Trump’s comments about Muslims. We’ve even recently heard that more British Muslims have joined ISIS than have joined the British military.
(This is bad news; however, the claim has been challenged partly because some of those British Muslims joined other jihadist groups but were included in ISIS numbers. This gives us the good news that British Muslims serve ISIS and the British military in near-equal numbers. So there’s that.)
And ISIS doesn’t rely on the actions of the Great Satan to lure recruits. In its magazine Dabiq ISIS does quote hawks like John McCain, but puts more emphasis on the word of god, the duty of all non-apostate Muslims to join ISIS’s jihad, the paradise awaiting martyrs, etc. It has interviews with martyrs before their deaths. It calls its fighters terrorists and shows them decapitating prisoners. It even shows, as a recruiting tool, pictures of dead ISIS fighters. It tells Muslims who can’t make the trip to Syria to kill non-Muslims wherever they are.
That is in fact a dead ISIS fighter on the left, being used as a recruiting photo.
They were doing this before Trump opened his stupid mouth. Muslims were heeding ISIS’s call by the tens of thousands before Trump. Muslims following ISIS orders or suggestions killed 130 people in Paris, fourteen in San Bernardino and tried to kill who knows how many in Garland, Texas. That was all pre-Trump.
Why does anyone think ISIS cares so much about what we say? If ISIS followers keep committing mass murders, of course we’re going to respond negatively. Of course we’re going to reevaluate our refugee policies. Of course we’re going to take a hard look at who’s a threat and who’s not. ISIS knows this. Who really believes ISIS commands its followers to kill us all, then whines “They said mean things about us!” after its followers try to kill us all?
Some of the 89 dead inside Paris’ Bataclan theater. No, ISIS didn’t kill these people because an American said something mean.
Let’s stop pretending ISIS only hates us because we’re bad people. ISIS hates us because ISIS is full of bad people. No, we’re not perfect, and we don’t have an unblemished foreign policy history. But if supporting dictators or using proxy armies to fight our enemies creates terrorism, then legions of Vietnamese suicide bombers should be attacking America. They’re not, because Vietnamese communists aren’t possessed by an ideology that encourages massacring civilians.
ISIS is possessed of such an ideology, and is proud of it. That 1400 year-old ideology is why they want to kill us. Trump is a clown, but even the democratic party can’t accuse him of creating ISIS ideology. Trump has done a million other stupid things he deserves blame for, but he’s not an ISIS recruiting tool. So stop looking for ways to blame America for Islamic terrorism, and start laying blame on the people who actually are terrorists.
Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).
]]>Consider that for a moment. An army of Muslim fanatics is killing thousands of people, invading an allied country, executing prisoners in unspeakable ways and even televising the brutal decapitations of American citizens. And for no reason I can think of, our President brings up events hundreds of years old. Maybe in an attempt to convince us, “We’re just as bad.”
A few days ago the Huffington Post, mouthpiece of the “we’re evil too” crowd, published something – and I know this is nearly impossible to believe – far more ridiculous than normal. This is the title of their article:
KKK Was Terrorizing America Decades Before Islamic State Appeared
“For David Pilgrim, the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, the actions of ISIS and other extremist groups are familiar — no better, no worse than the historic stateside violence against African-Americans. ‘There’s nothing you’re going to see today that’s not going to have already occurred in the U.S.,’ he said. ‘If you think of these groups that behead now — first of all, beheading is barbaric but it’s no more or less barbaric than some of the lynchings that occurred in the U.S.’”
On its face it’s a ridiculous comparison. ISIS is a huge, well-funded and powerful organization full of fanatical zealots willing to carry out the most brutal crimes imaginable in order to bring about their prophesied Muslim apocalypse. In barely a year ISIS has invaded a country, captured cities and besieged others, massacred many thousands of innocents, taken at least hundreds of slaves, forced young girls to become “wives”, attempted genocide and is now destroying the historical treasures of the cradle of civilization.
Yes the Klan was, and is, a repulsive organization responsible for many horrible crimes. But how can it possibly be “no better or worse than ISIS”?
I’m a literal guy. As a writer, if I say “the car is red” I don’t mean “the red car represents the angst and polarization of humanity throughout millennia.” I mean the car is red. As a cop and combat soldier, I can’t indulge in hyperbole; I have to understand actual, literal realities. So when I read the HuffPo’s comparison between ISIS and the Klan, I had to check myself. “Maybe this isn’t as stupid as it seems,” I thought. “This has to be some non-literal point. If I look deeper, I’ll see the validity.”
So I looked at it with an open mind. And I concluded, “This is even stupider than I originally thought.”
Differences of scale
HuffPo’s article was, I think, trying to say the Klan and ISIS were no different in principle. Fair enough. But differences in scale matter too.
According to the HuffPo article, “[A] study [by Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative] found almost 3,960 African-Americans were lynched from 1877 to 1950 — a number that supersedes previous estimates by at least 700.”
So for 73 years, the Klan lynched about 54 people per year. That’s horrible. The Klansmen who committed those murders deserved death. Those who assisted deserved to spend the rest of their lives in prison. But the Klan, when sheer numbers are compared, doesn’t come close to ISIS.
Two articles from the Daily Beast, hardly a conservative news source, highlight just how powerful and dangerous ISIS really is. The first article reports that “Iraq Body Count”, an organization that’s tracked Iraqi deaths almost since the beginning of the Iraq War, tallied 15,883 ISIS-caused Iraqi deaths from January 1st to November 30th, 2014.
The second article cites a UN report detailing ISIS’ brutal treatment of Muslims. ISIS fighters have, among other crimes, executed women for refusing to care for wounded ISIS fighters, killed a female doctor for not covering her face while treating patients, executed Muslims for refusing to swear loyalty to ISIS, and destroyed mosques led by imams who wouldn’t swear loyalty to ISIS.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/07/isis-s-gruesome-muslim-death-toll.html
Oddly enough, this August 2014 article is from the Huffington Post. It cites several important numbers: soldiers from five nations have been directly engaged by ISIS fighters; 300 Yazidi women are known to have been taken as slaves by ISIS; and 1,922 Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police were killed by ISIS in June 2014 alone. Zero is listed as the number of openly practicing Christians left in Mosul since ISIS seized control.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/11/isis-iraq-numbers_n_5659239.html
Yet after all this, HuffPo writes that ISIS is no worse than the Klan.
As bad as it was, the Klan was always a regional threat that lacked grand global aims. It didn’t launch mass assaults or capture hundreds of slaves, nor did it proudly televise mass executions. The Klan’s evil was nowhere near the scale of ISIS’ evil. And unless you believe a thousand murders are no worse than a single murder, scale is important.
If scale isn’t important, if “any bad” equals “the worst bad”, then we can make these Huffington Post-like comparisons:
Slavery by blacks in the United States was just as bad as slavery by whites.
In a very interesting and widely ignored article, the black website The Root reports that free blacks owned slaves “in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery,” and had owned slaves since at least since 1654… “Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves.”
Some free black slave owners in Louisiana even requested, and were granted, permission to serve in the Confederate Army. Just before the Civil War’s outbreak the black slave owners wrote, “The free colored population [native] of Louisiana … own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land … and they are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana … They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the British] in 1814-1815.”
http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/03/black_slave_owners_did_they_exist.html
And black Africans played a huge part in the slave trade. “Several nations such as the Ashanti of present-day Ghana and the Yoruba of present-day Nigeria were involved in slave-trading… Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood have provided an estimate that Africans captured and then sold to Europeans around 90% of those who were shipped in the Atlantic slave trade. Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard Chair of African and African American Studies, has stated that ‘without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.’” It’s also worth pointing out that the African nation of Mauritania just outlawed slavery in 2007, although about 20% of its population is still thought to be slaves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa
Since scale doesn’t matter, the HuffPo staff should agree that blacks are just as guilty of perpetuating slavery as whites. I’ll hold my breath waiting for them to publish an article decrying the “black privilege” legacy of black slaveowners.
Black racist organizations are just as bad as white racist organizations
In 1973 and 1974, a small group of black racists in San Francisco called the “Death Angels” murdered fourteen mostly white victims and wounded eight others. The attacks were usually random shootings of unsuspecting whites, but some were complex and horrific. One white couple was kidnapped and hacked with machetes after two of the killers fondled the wife (her husband survived). A homeless white man was kidnapped, bound and dismembered while still conscious. The killers were eventually arrested after a member of their group turned on them in exchange for immunity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_murders
And then there’s the New Black Panther Party, which even some original Black Panthers disavow as violent and racist. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the New Black Panther Party as “a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.” One of their leaders, King Samir Shabazz, was quoted saying this in a 2009 National Geographic documentary: “I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate it… You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!” Another leader, Malik Zulu Shabazz, in 2002 shouted outside a synagogue, “Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!”
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/new-black-panther-party
The Death Angels and New Black Panthers accomplished nothing on the scale of the Klan’s reign of terror over southern blacks. They committed nowhere near 3,960 lynchings. But following HuffPo’s logic, they’re “no better, no worse”, than the KKK. Which makes black racist organizations no better, no worse, than ISIS. Since, you know, scale doesn’t matter.
I’m sure HuffPo’s next article will be headlined, “Black Racists were terrorizing America decades before Islamic State appeared.”
I can only think of one possible defense for HuffPo’s article: “They just published it. That doesn’t mean they agree with it.” Which makes sense, and explains why HuffPo has published the following articles:
“Why George W. Bush was the best president in American history”
“The Iraq War: blueprint for perfection in all future wars”
“The Democratic party should abandon Hillary Clinton for lying about being under sniper fire”
“A friendly chat with the head of the Tea Party”
Wait…maybe HuffPo hasn’t published those articles, since they obviously don’t agree with them. All web sites publish articles the staff and readers agree with. It’s safe to assume HuffPo and its readers agree that ISIS is no worse than the Klan.
That opinion is ridiculous, and ultimately useless. If in a thousand years the “Christian State of America and Canada” is doing exactly what ISIS is doing today, what purpose would it serve to point out “but others have done bad things too”?
Nearly every culture that ever existed committed some type of atrocity against someone. That doesn’t mean we dismiss atrocities committed today, simply because someone want us to feel perpetually guilty about long-ago crimes. The proper response to ISIS’ evil isn’t self-loathing from moral weaklings riddled with White Guilt.
Sorry HuffPo, but White Guilt won’t win this war. You and your readers keep responding to ISIS by berating yourselves for crimes you never committed. The rest of us will be too busy fighting evil to worry about things we’re not responsible for.
Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).
http://www.amazon.com/Line-Valley-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B00HW1MA2G/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=09XSSHABSWPC3FM8K6P4
http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Our-Resolve-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B0099XMR1E/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S6AGHBTJZ6JH99D56X7
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Last week I attended an “ISIS in America” presentation. It was hosted by a local university for a law enforcement audience, but was open to the public. Making the event a free-for-all was a bad idea; a few people on personal crusades showed up just to pitch their causes. For example, at one point a woman stood up to tell the crowd, for no apparent reason, about her quest to change Texas textbooks.
The event organizer was a retired army officer turned college professor. Most of his talk was a litany of right-wing talking points, delivered to an extremely receptive audience. I found myself annoyed. I actually agreed with many of his comments, but like to think I have a deeper understanding of the reasoning behind them. His speech was more “We need to bomb ISIS!” followed by cheers, rather than in-depth explanations of how incredibly difficult this problem is to solve.
Then the first guest speaker arrived. He was an American Muslim who converted in the 1960s, now a professor of Muslim history. He gave a very interesting, insightful presentation about Islam’s history, and some of the factors that led to ISIS’s creation. He emphatically condemned ISIS, clearly stated the Muslim world needed to defeat ISIS, and joked “Islam would be perfect, except for Muslims.” He mentioned the recent execution of the Jordanian pilot and pointed out Islam does not condone burning prisoners.
I was very impressed with his speech. So were the people I was with. The police officers in the room stayed quiet. But, of course, someone had to make a show of challenging the professor.
A tall older man in a suit, apparently not a cop, stood and walked to the professor with a book in hand. He asked in a loud, bombastic voice, “Professor, are you familiar with this book? This is a biography of the Prophet Mohammed, written hundreds of years ago!”
The professor said he had heard of the book. The man asked, again in a loud voice, “Would you agree, professor, that this is an accurate representation of Mohammed’s life?”
The professor said he hadn’t read it.
The man announced, “Allow me to point out this passage!” And he told a story of Mohammed setting a fire on a Jewish prisoner’s chest to make him reveal where he’d hidden valuables.
The professor calmly explained that not all Muslims accept the biography as true, and that it’s not a source of religious law. He said that even if the story was true, that didn’t mean Islam condoned burning prisoners. The professor badly stepped on his crank at one point – “If Mohammed did that, he didn’t do it often,” which drew laughter from the audience – but he clearly explained that despite the biography’s claim, Islam does have rules governing treatment of prisoners.
After the grandstanding man finally sat back down, an elderly woman confronted the professor about Islam’s treatment of women and non-Muslims. The professor, of course, defended Islam’s racial inclusiveness. But he also admitted it has problems. “Islam does have a room for improvement when it comes to equality.”
The woman made a comment about crimes committed by radical Muslims. Then she turned to the audience and sneered, “The ‘religion of peace.’”
When the host shut down questions, another man actually put an “infidel” t-shirt on, over his long-sleeve button-down collared shirt, and tried to approach the professor. He didn’t get a chance, because someone else was already there asking why “all the different sects like Sunni, Shiites and Kurds” – not understanding Kurds aren’t a sect – “are killing each other.”
I listened with growing disgust. Yes, I despise radical Islam. I’d personally napalm every ISIS fighter if I could. And I’m agnostic, no fan of religion in general. But I’ve lived and worked with Muslims in Kosovo. I’ve fought beside Muslim soldiers in Afghanistan. I’ve helped a Muslim friend write a novel. I’ve taken a Muslim friend from Libya to the shooting range. Two months ago I attended a murder mystery party hosted by a friend originally from Lebanon; my wife and I mingled with white, black and Arab guests all dressed in 1920’s flapper and gangster costumes (and at any party hosted by an Arab, the food is awesome).
With two Afghan Army officers in Kapisa province, 2009. The soldier in green coveralls was thirty-five then, and had been fighting continuously since age fifteen. I went on many mission with him.
The Muslims I’ve known and served with had nothing in common with ISIS, despite the fact that they share the same religion. Just like my Christian parents have nothing in common with the Westboro Baptist Church. I can hate the WBC without hating all Christians. And I can hate radical Islam without hating all Muslims.
ISIS is in fact Islamic, as The Atlantic explained in a fantastic recent article (http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/). So were the Afghan troops I served beside. So were my Albanian friends in Kosovo. So are many of my American friends. ISIS wants a return to the caliphate of Mohammed’s time, and believe in following every Islamic law to the letter. The Muslims I’ve known have been, to say the least, different.
Many Afghan soldiers really liked American girly magazines, and alcohol. An Albanian friend in Kosovo explained, “Yeah, I’m Muslim and all that. But if you follow all the Muslim rules you can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t have sex, can’t do anything. I’m not going to live like that.” A Muslim fellow police officer in Texas echoed that sentiment. “You know Catholics who go to church twice a year, on Christmas and Easter? That’s how Muslim I am.” A former Afghan translator I served with in Afghanistan, who now lives in Texas, is so incensed by ISIS’ acts in the name of his religion he wants to join the Peshmerga and kill them. I know Muslims who are devout and observant, and still have nothing in common with ISIS.
I might also mention that the Kurds, who are heroically resisting ISIS, are Muslim. So are the Muslim Jordanians. I’d venture to say Jordan’s King Abdullah commands more respect among soldiers and marines than our own president.
I can hate ISIS without hating all Muslims. I can acknowledge the blindingly obvious – ISIS is Islamic – without believing all Muslims are like them. While there is obviously something in Islam which convinces far too many of its followers they’re justified in committing the most inhuman acts imaginable, far larger numbers of Muslims reject ISIS’ actions.
We in the west often say the Muslim world needs to strongly condemn ISIS. Then we have Muslims who do condemn them, like the professor. And they’re willing to do so out loud, in public, to an audience of non-Muslims. They should be applauded for that. Instead, some are challenged and ridiculed by morons using their ignorance to prove a flawed point.
Plenty of Muslims are good guys. We’re fighting on the same side, against a common enemy. When Muslim good guys condemn Muslim bad guys, let them. Support them. Stand with them. Don’t insult and berate them, simply because you can’t tell the difference between good ones and bad ones.
Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).
http://www.amazon.com/Line-Valley-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B00HW1MA2G/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=09XSSHABSWPC3FM8K6P4
http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Our-Resolve-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B0099XMR1E/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S6AGHBTJZ6JH99D56X7
]]>I know for a fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, nor do they all support terror. I also know that Islamic terrorism is a huge threat. But as we prepare to go to war (or something like it) with ISIS, I see our nation’s leaders bending over backward to not admit what’s blindingly obvious to just about everyone in the entire world.
“The Islamic State is not Islamic.”
Yes it is.
A certain world leader who shall remain nameless recently claimed ISIS isn’t Islamic. John Kerry recently said, “ISIL claims to be fighting on behalf of Islam but the fact is that its hateful ideology has nothing do with Islam.” I guess that explains why ISIS declared its territory is the new Islamic Caliphate. Since, you know, an Islamic empire founded by devout Muslims with the sole purpose of spreading Islam has nothing to do with Islam. And I guess thousands of Muslims from all over the world are joining ISIS because it’s not Islamic.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/isis-declares-new-islamist-caliphate-1404065263
This reminds me of another very stupid argument. In recent years I’ve heard supposedly intelligent people declare that Muslim suicide bombers blow themselves up because they’re poor, or feel powerless, or their honor has been impugned. But they don’t detonate their suicide bombs for Islam.
The suicide bombers themselves offer a counterpoint. They often make martyrdom videos before blowing themselves up. In those videos, they bluntly state they’re doing it for Islam. Watch this American suicide bomber’s video below, then try to tell yourself, “That had nothing to do with Islam.”
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/4375.htm
Suicide bombers say they’re doing it for Islam. ISIS fighters say they’re murdering people for Islam. Gosh darn it, this certainly seems to be evidence that those suicide bombers and ISIS are Islamic. I’d categorize the “This terrorism has nothing to do with Islam” crowd as having more college degrees than brain cells. It’s pretty ridiculous for non-Muslim Americans to hear thousands of people proudly proclaim “I’m Muslim and I’m blowing myself up for Islam!”, then turn around and say, “They don’t really mean it.”
I know, I know. Those terrorists aren’t “real” Muslims, because murder is against the rules and real Muslims wouldn’t do such a thing. And Jesus preached peace and forgiveness, so Crusaders who committed atrocities weren’t real Christians. Killing is a sin, so American troops who kill in war aren’t really Christians either. Priests take a vow of celibacy, so the Catholic priests who sexually abused children weren’t really Catholic. Catholic Croatians who told Serbian Orthodox prisoners “convert or be killed,” then killed them anyway, weren’t really Catholic. The Serbian paramilitaries who committed the Srebrenica Massacre weren’t “real” Orthodox Christians, because real Orthodox Christians would never murder anyone.
Let’s face it: breaking a religious rule doesn’t mean you aren’t part of that religion. The Westboro Baptist Church fanatics are flaming douches, but they are in fact Christians. ISIS members are evil, murderous pieces of warthog crap who somehow assumed human form, but they are in fact Muslim.
If we acknowledge their religious beliefs, that doesn’t mean we have to believe all Muslims are like ISIS. The Srebrenica murderers and child-molesting priests were Christian, but I don’t think my Christian parents, aunts and uncles, siblings, cousins, coworkers and fellow soldiers are murderers or child molesters. Admitting the obvious – that ISIS is Islamic – doesn’t require us to paint all Muslims with the same brush.
I’ve had many Muslim friends. I’ve trusted some of them with my life. One of my Italian coworkers in Kosovo said, “My Albanian police officers would die before letting me get hurt.” The officers I worked with were the same way; yes they were Muslim, no they weren’t terrorists, and they protected me even though I was a non-Muslim American. After 9/11 quite a few Albanian Muslims asked me how they could join the U.S. military and fight Al Qaeda, because they were so angry we’d been attacked.
We’ve been in Kosovo since 1999, and haven’t lost a single American soldier or police officer to an attack by an Albanian Muslim. Albanian Muslims were proud of their religion, yet even they called Al Qaeda what they were: Islamic terrorists. I’m sure they’d use the same term to describe ISIS. (And as moderate and Western as Albanian Muslims are, even they have problems with Islamic extremism; dozens of Albanian ISIS fighters were recently arrested in Kosovo, and 16 have been killed in Syria and Iraq.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-schwartz/isis-and-the-kosovar-alba_b_5670061.html
As ISIS carries out more atrocities and gains more power, our leadership still argues over how to define them. Yet ISIS has no problem defining itself. ISIS screams “We’re Muslims!”, our leadership responds with “No you’re not.” That response might be an unnecessary trick calculated to convince Muslim allies we’re not against their religion. Or, and this is scary, our leaders could actually believe it. They might be sticking their fingers in their ears and saying “I don’t care what you say, I know what you believe better than you do.” They may be refusing to see the truth staring them right in the face: some Muslims hate us, some Muslims want to kill us all, some Muslims declared war on us and don’t care that we haven’t declared war back.
The truth is, ISIS is in fact composed of devoutly Muslim terrorists, carrying out brutal attacks in the name of their religion. And the truth is, not all Muslims are terrorists and not all Muslims support ISIS. Why can’t we just say that?
Refusing to acknowledge obvious truth isn’t just stupid. It’s stupid and weak. Many of us war on terror vets suspect this “war” with ISIS, if it really happens, will be fought with one hand tied behind our collective backs. But if our leadership continually refuses to even admit who our enemies are, then we’ll fight with one eye closed as well.
A brief note on the executions of James Foley, Steven Sotloff and David Haines
After James Foley’s execution video was released, several people criticized Foley’s apparent lack of resistance to his impending murder. A few comments I read, mostly from combat veterans, said Foley should have done something rather than just give up. He should have run, kicked, bitten, or at least called his executioner a mother****er before dying. Understandably, those of us trained to fight to the last expect anyone facing certain death to resist in some way. In the video, Foley, to me, looked like he knew what was coming. So why didn’t he resist?
The truth is, resisting could have made things worse. In the novel Treblinka by Jean Francois Steiner, a Nazi camp guard stands on a platform in a yard and calls prisoners’ names. If a prisoner heard his name, he had to sprint to the platform, stripping off his clothes as he ran. The camp guard’s goal was to have the prisoners assembled and naked within seconds of being called. That way they could be led to the gas chamber in an orderly manner, and nobody would have to take time stripping the bodies afterward.
Why would the prisoners cooperate, if they knew they were going to die anyway? Because, in Steiner’s fictional account, if they cooperated they would die a relatively quick and painless death in the gas chamber. If they didn’t cooperate, they’d be brutally murdered after hours of torture.
Foley may have faced a similar dilemma: cooperate and die a painful but relatively quick death by decapitation, or resist and endure a long, gruesome and horribly painful death. Death was the foregone and inescapable conclusion; I can understand if he chose the less horrible death, and don’t blame him for it.
And there’s another possibility. Foley may have been told, “If you resist, we won’t just kill you. We’ll kill the other prisoners too.” It’s a tactic used by many criminals: “If you fight back I’ll kill your wife. I’ll kill your children.” Foley could have accepted his horrible fate, in the hope that others might live. This is pure conjecture on my part, and we’ll likely never know the exact circumstances surrounding any of the executions. But neither Foley, Sotloff nor Haines were known to be cowards. There was probably a good reason they didn’t resist.
If they cooperated with their murderers in order to give their friends a tiny bit of hope for survival, then we didn’t see James Foley, Steven Sotloff and David Haines die as cowards. What we actually saw were the last, brave acts of very brave men.
Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com, Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected].
http://www.amazon.com/Line-Valley-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B00HW1MA2G/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=09XSSHABSWPC3FM8K6P4
http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Our-Resolve-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B0099XMR1E/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S6AGHBTJZ6JH99D56X7
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