Islamic State: No One Wants to Talk to Terrorists, but We Always Do

Islamic State: No One Wants to Talk to Terrorists, but We Always Do - and Sometimes It Works

By Kristin M. Bakke and Govinda Clayton

Truthout - Saturday, 18 October 2014

Lt. Gen. Erdal Ozturk, representing Turkey, listens as President Barack Obama speaks at a meeting of more than 20 defense chiefs regarding operations against the Islamic State group, at Andrews Air Force Base. Gen. Joseph Votel, left, is head of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Maryland, October 14, 2014. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)

The Islamic State (IS) now occupies significant swaths of Iraq and Syria, has pushed as far as the border with Turkey, and has succeeded in dragging “the West” into two civil wars in the Middle East. The West’s offensive, spearheaded by the US and supported by the UK and others, is to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS.
But in the face of IS’s state-building efforts, that strategy will only work if it manages to degrade the group’s legitimacy as a governing enterprise.
While IS’s extreme ideology and brutal tactics obviously pose problems for its legitimacy among the population it now rules, it has taken many steps to try to win local people’s hearts and minds and to build local alliances. It has set up local governing structures, a tax system, a judicial system, and formed an education policy.
And though little is really known about what people living in IS-controlled territory actually think of their new overlords, the group may well enjoy more legitimacy than we give it credit for.

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