[In a way that recent beheadings of hostages had not, the
immolation of Lieutenant Kasasbeh set off a regionwide explosion of anger and
disgust at the extremists, also known as ISIS or
ISIL, or to most Arabs by the word “Daesh.” Even more significant, in a
chronically embattled region that bequeathed to the world the expression, “The
enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Islamic State suddenly found itself
friendless in the extreme.]
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|
Professional:
Experts believe that the slick, professionally shot 22-minute
video
of Kasasbeh's murder would have taken some time to edit, suggesting
he
is likely to have been killed in early January
|
AMMAN, Jordan
—
There was one sentiment that many of the Middle East’s competing clerics,
fractious ethnic groups and warring sects could agree on Wednesday: a shared
sense of revulsion at the Islamic State’s latest
atrocity, burning alive a Jordanian pilot inside a cage.
In Syria, the
government denounced the group that has been fighting it for months, but so did
Qaeda fighters who oppose both the government and the Islamic State. In Egypt,
the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government for once agreed on
something, the barbarity of the militant group for the way it murdered the
Jordanian, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh. And in Cairo, Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb,
the head of the 1,000-year-old Al Azhar institute was so angered that he called
for the Islamic State’s extremists to be “killed, or crucified, or their hands
and legs cut off.”
That leading
Sunni scholar’s denunciation was even harsher than similar outbursts from the
region’s Shiite leaders, theologically the more traditional foes of the Islamic
State.
In
a way that recent beheadings of hostages had not, the immolation of Lieutenant
Kasasbeh set off a regionwide explosion of anger and disgust at the extremists,
also known as ISIS or
ISIL, or to most Arabs by the word “Daesh.” Even more significant, in a
chronically embattled region that bequeathed to the world the expression, “The
enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Islamic State suddenly found itself
friendless in the extreme.
Name almost
any outrage in the Mideast in decades of them — the Sabra and Shatila massacre,
the Achille Lauro hijacking, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the gassing of the
Halabja Kurds, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole — and the protagonists would
readily find both apologists and detractors. But with one breathtakingly
vicious murder, the Islamic State changed that dynamic, uniting most of the region
against it.
The sense of
anti-Daesh unity made for strange scenes throughout the region. Jordan’s King
Abdullah II, caught by surprise in
Washington when the
video of the killing was released, returned home Wednesday not to anger at his
absence, but to a hero’s welcome. Crowds lined his route from the airport to
cheer Jordan’s decision to promptly retaliate by executing two convicted
terrorists, both with connections to the Islamic State, only hours earlier.
Never known as
a charismatic leader, King Abdullah got rave reviews at home for his tough talk
in Washington, where in a meeting with congressional leaders he said his
retribution would remind people of the Clint Eastwood movie “Unforgiven.”
Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, who was in attendance,
said the king vowed “retaliation” and “getting after the bad guys.”
The king
wasted no time making good on his threat, and before his plane had even landed,
he ordered the two prisoners to be hanged by the neck until they died.
The video
released Tuesday of the death of Lieutenant Kasasbeh, with its vows to kill
other fighter pilots bombing Islamic State positions, was clearly aimed at
trying to scare Jordan out of the American-led coalition fighting the
extremists. But it seems to have had the opposite effect among many Jordanians,
and Jordan’s government spokesman said the kingdom would now step up its
involvement against the group.
The pilot’s
father, Safi Youssef al-Kasasbeh, an influential tribal sheikh, had earlier
questioned whether Jordan should even be fighting the Islamic State. But after
his son’s death, his qualms were gone. “I ask the international community to
carry out just punishment against those terrorist groups that have no religion
or traditional values,” he said in a telephone interview.
“I guess in a
way we lost a pilot, but at the same time I think the government gained a
collective support for fighting them, in Jordan and from all around too,” said
Adnan Abu-Odeh, a former head of Jordan’s intelligence service. “Daesh have
made a big error. When you are weakened as they have been, you try to make your
supporters think you are strong by being more monstrous, but this time they
went too far.”
In Syria,
where a chaotic four-year insurgency provided the Islamic State with an
incubator, both those supporting President Bashar al-Assad and those opposing
him condemned the act, as did their foreign backers.
Iran, the
Syrian government’s most important ally and no friend of Jordan, called the
pilot’s killing “inhumane and un-Islamic.” Al Manar, the television station of
another ally of the Syrian government, the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah,
called it “the most gruesome” of many atrocities committed by the Islamic
State.
Qatar, which
opposes Mr. Assad, likewise condemned the killing as “contravening the tolerant
principles” of Islam. Turkey, blamed by many in the region for allowing foreign
fighters to cross its borders into Syria, where some join the Islamic State,
also chimed in. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it an act of “savagery”
that had no place in Islam, adding, “I curse and damn the burning of the Jordanian
pilot.”
Denouncing the
Islamic State as a “diabolical” terrorist group, Al Azhar’s leader and grand
imam, Sheikh Tayeb, cited Quranic verses to show that Islam forbids the burning
or mutilation of enemies at war.
“This vile
terrorist act,” he said in a statement issued by Al Azhar, “requires punishment
as cited by the Quran for oppressors and spoilers on earth who fight God and
his prophet, that they be killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs cut
off.”
Al
Azhar, a seat of Islamic learning, considers itself a beacon of moderation and
tolerance for the Sunni Muslim world, and the statement offered no explanation
for the incongruity of Sheikh Tayeb’s advocating some of the same medieval
punishments employed by extremists.
Mainstream
Arab leaders reacted to the immolation in a categorically different way to the
long string of hostage beheadings that preceded it. Partly that may have been
because, according to many commentators Wednesday, burning someone alive is
prohibited in Islam as a punishment that belongs to God alone, applied in hell.
Beheadings, however, have a long history in Islam.
For all the
outrage, some in Syria and elsewhere lamented the lack of a similar level of
anger for the hundreds of thousands of people killed in Syria’s civil war.
Human Rights
Watch and other organizations tracking the conflict, noted that the Syrian
government’s barrel bombings of cities kill far more civilians than the
extremists — however depraved and attention-grabbing the militant group’s
methods.
Khaled Khoja,
the president of the main Syrian exile opposition group, linked the pilot’s
participation in the struggle against the Islamic State directly to his own
country’s opposition’s struggle against Mr. Assad.
“Moaz’s blood has mingled with the soil of our beloved Syria,
and whose remains mingled with those of hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed
by Assad’s barrel bombs and the terrorist group ISIS,” Mr. Khoja said in a statement. “I
strongly condemn this barbaric act, which symbolizes pure evil.”
Ken Roth, the
executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that both forms of killing
should be condemned.
“ISIS’s
despicable conduct shouldn’t make us lose sight of the largest killer of
civilians in Syria: Assad’s barrel bombs,” he said in an email. “The world has
been reluctant to address them out of a misguided sense that nothing should be
done that might constrain the fight against ISIS, but barrel bombs have little
if any military significance.”
Rod
Nordland reported from Amman, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting
was contributed by David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Ranya Kadri from Amman,
Mohammad Ghannam and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Ceylan Yeginsu from Istanbul, and
Jeremy W. Peters from Washington.