APD Review | The Growing Resentments between Britain and ISIS

By APD writer Wang Peng

Britain’s terror threat level has been raised from severe to critical, indicating a further attack may be imminent following the Parsons Green tube bombing, Theresa May has said.

Twenty-nine people including a young boy were injured when the bomb partially detonated and sent a ball of fire along a carriage of a District line train at Parsons Green, west London.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blast, the militant group’s Amaq news agency said on Friday evening.

The hunt is under way for the bomber who attempted to bring carnage to a London rush-hour tube train packed with schoolchildren and commuters.

The information about the criminal is limited, but anti-terrorism experts generally believe that this is another ‘lone-wolf’ attack in London. Islamic State may not actually get involved in, directed or organized this attack, but just makes a statement to claim responsibility for the bombing in order to retrieve its descending honor after several decisive defeats in Middle East battlefield during recent months. Certainly, regarding the previous experience, the raider may also be brainwashed by the popular ‘Hate propaganda’ made by Islamic State.

The organization that called ‘Islamic State’ was a branch of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda in Iraq before 2003. In the key year of 2013, due to a series of re-organization and augment, a powerful political-military complex, as well as global terrorist group named ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL’, or ‘Islamic State of Iraq and al Shams, ISIS’ came to power in Iraq and Syria.

After the very beginning, this ‘Islamic State’ made a lot of tragedies in Middle East. The bloodbath in Iraq for eight years, and the unspeakable hardship its people have experienced are a mirror and a warning. However, the western powers failed to eliminate this newly emerging terrorist group for various reasons, including but not limited to their disunity and opportunistic usage of terrorists as practical weapons to strike geopolitical rivals.

As a key member of the NATO, the U.K. joined the western alliance against ISIS by the end of 2013. After 10-hour tedious debate amongst the MPs, the Parliament finally decided to send military forces to attack ISIS in Syria by a vote of 397 to 223. From then on, the U.K. has become the fifth enemy state of ISIS, following the bomb launched by America, Russia, France, and Germany.

ISIS’s revenge came soon. Just one month later, they released a horrible video of massacre and “beheaded”. By the end of the video, the terrorist claimed that their next target will be the U.K., as a revenge to Britain’s bombing in Syria.

Now the Pandora box is opened. Especially in recent years, the widely reported terrorist attacks in the U.K. made this land a heaven of raiders in the mind of global audiences. However, security data shows since the catastrophic event of serial bomb attacks in London in 2005, the U.K. has kept a proud record of “zero terrorist raids” for more than ten years. But why are the situations changed now? What made the once successful anti-terrorism measures invalid? Politicians and citizens of Britain are all thinking about this.

As the former Prime Minister David Cameron warned that young generation of British citizens who are seduced by the vivid masculine propaganda posed by terrorist online recruitments will be become their cannon fodder - ‘if you are a boy, suicide bombers are to strapped to your body; if you are a girl, you will be rapped and abused.’

Similarly, the current Prime Minister Theresa Mary May also lamented that the real battle field between the U.K. and Islamic State is not in Middle East, but on the land of England itself, in the heart of young generation and their online social networks.

Cameron and May are correct, but there is still a long distance from their right recognition to effective actions. Regarding the current situation, it is clear that terrorist groups have defeated the UK government in the battle of attracting particular groups of young people, especially those who are marginalized by the mainstream society.

The ‘second generation of immigrants’ whose father and mother came from Middle East are feeling abandoned by their own ‘motherland’, as The Guardian commented. In addition, those native ‘white’ grassroots, what made their lose heart in the mainstream culture and hence turn to extreme organizations to seek spiritual comfort and the value of life, is the most immediate question in front of politicians in London.

Confucius commented 2000 years ago that, ‘I am afraid Lord Jisun’s trouble is not from the Tribe of Zhuanyu, but inside his own country’. So is the UK in the 21st century.

Dr. Wang Peng, Fellow at APD Institute, Research Associate at the Charhar Institute and China Institute of Fudan University.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)