Just when Washington and Nato feared they were going to be bombing Isis on their own, the self-styled “Islamic State” has single-handedly created a new Arab military alliance to bomb the West’s enemies, said Independent Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk.
By its seaside slaughter of 21 Egyptian Christians, the so-called ISIS or Daesh has brought ex-Field Marshal President Abdel Fattah El Sisi into the war against it. And by burning Jordan’s captured pilot alive, it provoked 56 more air strikes from Jordan, a return to action by the UAE and a flight of Bahraini jets to Amman to help in the struggle. In what is almost a sideshow, Libya’s air force – supporting one of its country’s two rival governments – continues to bomb Isis fighters, but now in co-operation with Egypt.
So President Obama and the Pentagon can, it seems, take satisfaction in seeing their “moderate” friends in the Middle East flying alongside them in their latest version of the “war on terror”. So far, so good. No “boots on the ground”, as the now-hackneyed expression goes. No Western lives in danger – save for the pitiful handful of hostages still held in Raqaa. Of course, any Iraqi who opposes the “Islamic State”, any Iraqi Shia, and any Christian – Libyan or otherwise – who falls foul of Isis’s sectarian hatred, will suffer accordingly. But that will be Arab killing Arab. Americans are safe. So are the Israelis.
But crystal balls almost always break in the Middle East – especially when, to expressions of outrage and shouts of “barbarism”, fighter jets take to the air. Isis, in all its various mutations, can now claim that it is fighting its enemies in Iraq, Syria, Arabia (Yemen), Egypt (Sinai), Libya and Algeria. It boasts as much, even warning that France and “French-speakers” – a clear allusion to Algeria’s ruling military-bourgeois elite – must expect to be attacked. Italy, too. And remember all those thousands of extra refugees who’ll now be washing up on Italian shores.