BY STEPHEN M. WALT, Foreign Policy It’s time to ponder a troubling possibility: What should we do if the Islamic State wins? By “wins,” I don’t mean it spreads like wildfire throughout the Muslim world, eventually establishing a caliphate from Baghdad to Rabat and beyond. That’s what its leaders say they are going to do, but…
BY SIOBHÁN O’GRADY, Foreign Policy The United States for years has praised Ethiopia’s fight against terrorism in East Africa, but that hard-line approach to extreme Islamism may have contributed to the bloody execution of dozens of Ethiopian Christians who were targeted by the Islamic State in Libya. Addis Ababa has been long consumed with a bigger…
Question: Does the Quran really contain dozens of verses promoting violence? Summary Answer: The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who…
Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. His personal site is gcaw.net. The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it. What…