The video footage of Mohammed Emwazi aka Jihadi John from his school days is difficult to erase from the memory. Partly because of the obvious contrast between the watchful boy and the adult psychopath, but mainly because of his boyhood compulsion to cover his mouth. In the film, aired last week by Channel 4 News, Emwazi is palpably wary, hanging at the edges of the schoolyard groups, hands constantly being raised to cover his lower face when he feels attention being drawn to himself. It was already known that he was bullied at school; the bullies, we learn now, mocked him for his supposed bad breath. The catastrophic impact on his adolescent self-esteem is painful to watch. Then the imagery shifts from the nervy schoolboy covering his face to the soldier of IS that the world came to know , the pitiless arbiter of life and death, clad head to toe in that flattering, black uniform. Quivering victim turned murderous Milk Tray man with Crocodile Dundee knife in hand and, best of all, a sinister black balaclava to cover his mouth. How cool is that?
How he must have longed for the bullies at home to know how far he had travelled. How easy it must have been to transfer that blazing vengeance to his blameless victims, coating his actions in a depraved ideology. How thrilling it must have been to hear that his identify had been exposed, that the western world now quaked at the name of that sad, fearful boy.
No solace
Small wonder that the mother of
James Foley
, the American journalist murdered by Emwazi, took no solace from the killer’s death by American drone. All that planning, time and expense wasted on a “deranged, pathetic young man . . . a sad individual filled with hate for us”, as
Diane Foley
described him. As a summation of bullied schoolboy turned murderous psychopath, it could not be bettered. It rings with an extraordinarily clear-sighted intelligence and integrity. But it fails to answer our immediate, profoundly human need to find meaning even in horror, and to take action of some kind. If some IS recruits are sane as opposed to deranged, how are we to maintain our faith in humanity? How, even in their own depraved terms, can such young men ascribe any sense of bravery or achievement to attacking unarmed people, even people in wheelchairs as they did in Paris? How to explain Emwazi?
The usual narrative of poverty and ignorance does not apply to him or many other young Europeans who have taken the road to IS. "Education, education, education," read a card attached to flowers at one murder site in Paris. But Emwazi was educated – in the conventional sense at any rate. He grew up in north Kensington, attended a Church of England school and went to university. Yet clearly, the strutting brotherhood of IS filled a vacuum. That wasn't all the brotherhood had to offer, of course.
On Monday, as security analysts picked apart the Paris attacks for clues, Kurdish fighters who had recaptured the Yazidi-dominated town of Sinjar, uncovered a mass grave containing the bodies of dozens of older Yazidi women. They were slaughtered because they hadn’t made the grade as IS sex slaves. Before its conquest of Sinjar, as IS explained in Dabiq, its online magazine (yes, it exists), it had tasked its “sharia students” to determine which “Islamic rulings” should apply to the Yazidi community. The students concluded that Yazidi women could be enslaved under Islamic law. They also established that one-fifth of the women should be transferred to the IS leadership and the remainder divided among the fighters.
Thus, IS embedded the buying and selling of women and very young girls into a system of rewards for its fighters. Some survivors reported being stripped naked for sorting and categorising, then labelled and transported across IS territory, to be traded between fighters and awarded by the leadership as prizes. In August, claims emerged that the US hostage, Kayla Mueller, was repeatedly raped by IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi graduate of the University of Baghdad and arbiter of moral purity.
Enter paradise
Under IS manifestos, nine-year-old Muslim girls are allowed to marry and women may work outside the house only in “exceptional circumstances”. The effect is to create a legal paradise for men in search of child sex and domestic slaves. And when the time comes for such righteous men to enter paradise, there is the sacred promise of a slew of “full-breasted virgins” of “modest gaze” and “appetising vaginas”.
The righteous woman entering paradise gets just the one husband, of undetermined physical attributes or sexual experience. But she will be “satisfied with him and will not need any more than that”.
What’s not to like about such ideological simplicity?
A society that guarantees the pre-eminence of the male by subjugating the female, wields an obvious, powerful appeal in an age when sexual equality and meritocracy is gaining ground across the world.
Combating recruitment to that Shangri-La may prove a great deal more complicated.