The late Australian photographer, Neil Davis, who was one of those who covered the Vietnam War and the only one who documented the fall of Saigon to the Vietcong in the spring of 1975, recalled a short tale when he was about to film the execution of a Vietcong rebel in a street in Saigon.

“I thought for a few moments about the right angle to take the photograph [from], and I chose to stand almost behind the rebel making the officer ... [carrying] out the execution face the camera”.

According to Davis, who gave his testimony in a documentary film titled War reporters produced in the 1980s, he chose this angle betting that the officer, while facing the camera, might hesitate and, possibly, halt the execution. According to Davis, the officer didn’t carry out the execution.

But is it only journalists and photographers who recognise the dangerous relation between camera and those who do the killings?

Crimes don’t take place in front of cameras, as everyone knows the last thing killers wish for is a camera documenting their deeds. Recalling Davis’s testimony makes us wonder: how would a terrorist kill a hostage, who is bound, in cold blood, without showing any distress or tension or even a reaction that any person would feel in such moments?

And how can another terrorist, from the same group, be calm when talking to a girl accused of adultery, minutes before he and others stone her to death without showing any signs of anxiety or nervousness in front of a camera?

We saw these types of murderers in Daesh (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) videos showing the execution of three western hostages and, more recently, in another video that went viral over social media depicting the stoning to death of a young woman accused of adultery in Syria. Some of those who had a careful look at the videos concluded that the execution scenes looked like they were filmed in a studio while others said that the incident involving the stoning to death of the woman was made by the intelligence apparatus of Bashar Al Assad’s regime.

The debate here would lead to a vital question: what do we know about Daesh, apart from this “visual memory” of brutality, which has been formulated aggressively and persistently in the past few months? A visual memory full of horror and blood, which led some commentators to conclude that Daesh was winning the cyber war. Nevertheless, nobody is arguing that Daesh only exists in the cyber world; it’s active on the ground with a heavy-handed presence. The story of this heavy-handed presence began, according to Nabeel Naeem, one of the founders of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, soon after the release of an Iraqi man called Ebrahim Awad Al Samarai from American detention in 2006.

According to Naeem, this man (who would later come to be known as Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi) spent around $20 million (Dh73.4 million) to form Daesh. He also said that Abu Musaab Al Zarqawi was killed soon after Al Baghdadi visited him in his hideout — something which has been repeated by other leaders of Al Zarqawi’s organisation.

For Naeem, (an old friend of Ayman Al Zawahiri in Egypt and Afghanistan) the vital question is: how can a detained man spend $20 million soon after being released to form an extremist organisation?

Al Baghdadi and Al Zarqawi both have no real known bio that can be tracked before their sudden appearance — Al Zarqawi after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Al Baghdadi in Mosul in June. Both are from the same type of the extremist leaders in the last decades who came out of the blue and declared wars on behalf of Islamic ummah (nation). For such leaders, it’s enough to raise the banner of Islam for people to assume their goal: fighting infidels.

But Daesh, when it was founded in Iraq in 2006, hardly fired a bullet against the Americans who were occupying Iraq but did so against the Iraqi Sunnis. And it’s the Sunni tribes who fought them and kicked them out of the Sunni areas in Anbar and elsewhere, while Al Zarqawi was targeting and killing Shiites. Both didn’t target Americans.

Million-dollar question

And in Syria, Daesh fought mainly against other opposition groups, not against the Al Assad regime. So the question here is: why didn’t they fight the Americans in Iraq or Al Assad’s forces in Syria? If Daesh is the willing tool of Americans, even for the sake of argument, why would some young Arabs be attracted to it and join it eagerly? This question would take us inevitably back to the wrong interpretation of religion in some sections of Arab society. Here, few words by a friend can summarise the dilemma. “Whenever I listen to the Friday preacher, I am enraged, with a desire to kill someone.”

That friend is not talking about the present time, but about the 1980s when he was young and the preacher was one of the stars of what was called at that time “Sahwa Islamiya” (Islamic revival), which was at its peak as a result of the Soviet invasion of and the war in Afghanistan and the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. But why did the US turn against Daesh and form an international coalition against it? The takeover of Mosul last June might give some answers.

Daesh gained more power when former officers from the Iraqi army, who were disbanded by the Americans soon after the start of the occupation of Iraq, joined Daesh. Add to this the Sunni tribes, who fought the organisation in the past but were marginalised by the Nouri Al Maliki regime.

An uprising gone wrong

No wonder, the first joyous comment after the occupation of Mosul came from Ezzat Ebrahim Al Douri, the former vice-president under Saddam Hussain. The event was described by some Arab Baathists as an uprising of the tribes. With such a coalition, priorities changed and the wizard lost control over his devils. It’s the old story of double cross and inventing monsters. And the golden rule in the political and military conflict is still valid: “If you want to eliminate an enemy, create another one more extreme than him.”

That’s why “Al Qaida” has receded now and the world has forgotten about it. The monster that succeeded Al Qaida exceeds its brutality and ugliness. And because such groups become brands, many parties use them, when the circumstances are right. So after Americans gained some safety in Iraq, the Syrian regime was the second in the list of beneficiaries. The Syrian regime sought from the early days to portray the civilian protests as a conflict with Islamist extremists.

It benefitted from Daesh when they fought other opposition groups, specially the Free Syrian Army. Although Daesh controls many areas in Syria, they are not fighting the Syrian army but the Kurds.

The threat and danger of Daesh can be exported exactly like the danger of Al Qaida in the years following 2001. It’s a perfect tool for blackmailing any party, whether in the Middle East or in the Caucasus.

 

— Mohammad Fadhel is a Bahraini writer and Media consultant at “b’huth” (Dubai).