The United Nation Security Council has unanimously passed a resolution aimed at weakening Islamist groups in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and the Al Nusra Front, by cutting off their funding and the flow of foreign fighters. The resolution was adopted amid confirmed reports of Isil massacring dozens of Yazidis in northern Iraq and abducting hundreds of girls.
The move against these terrorist organisations highlight the clear and present danger they pose to the region. These groups have declared war against other Muslims, religious minorities and destroyed places of worship, museums and historical artifacts dating back thousands of years.
The global decision to confront these terror outfits came after the reluctance of most regional states to stop the funding and flow of ‘Jihadists’ through their borders, especially countries neighbouring Iraq and Syria. The UN resolution will hopefully encourage those countries to move crackdown on the financial and manpower bases of which those groups have been drawing from in the past three years.
The threat is not an imaginative one. It is very real. And it will not be confined to the borders of Iraq and Syria. We should have learned from the lesson of Al Qaida and Taliban — the two groups which were supported by the West to fight the Soviets only to turn their guns few years later on the west and their allies.
The most catastrophic fallout of the growth of such groups though will impact our region itself. The ideology and actions these groups espouse and carry have already divided societies, displaced minorities (for long considered as the pride of our region and its symbol of peaceful co-existence and religious harmony) and stemmed the promise of progress and development in many countries. Countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya among others need decades to recover and rebuild what has been destroyed because of the absurd wars that still rage on.
The UN resolution is an important step to confront those forces of darkness. But again, the responsibility lies on our shoulders. The war against terror will only be won by the governments and peoples of our region.
