Ten years since Islamic State’s genocide against them, the justice that the Yazidi craved still eludes them.

In August 2014, Islamic State adherents in Syria and Iraq began committing mass murder, forced religious conversion, enslavement and the most egregious sexual violence against Yazidis, a distinct ethno-religious minority. Tens of thousands of people from 89 countries were involved in these crimes, but only two have been prosecuted.

During the weeks of commemorative events held by Yazidi communities in northern Iraq this month, hundreds of families have been chased from refugee camps with hate speech from their Muslim neighbours. Many have described the experience as similar to what happened a decade ago when Islamic State was in charge.

The Iraqi army launched operations this month against a Kurdish militia group, renewing violence in the Sinjar region, the home of many Yazidis. Thousands have fled to the nearby semi-autonomous Kurdish region. The army says the offensive was aimed at dismantling militia checkpoints. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad has called for an end to the violence. Many Yazidi villages have also experienced aerial attack from Turkey over recent years.

Members of the International Criminal Court, such as Australia and Britain, have an obligation to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of crimes against humanity, war crimes  and genocide in their own court systems.

Britain has long advocated for an end to impunity of the kind of sexual violence Islamic State used in Syria and Iraq. It supported UN Security Council resolutions calling for justice for the crimes perpetrated by Islamic State. But more recent British governments made the decision not to prosecute British foreign fighters, saying they should be prosecuted closest to where the crime occurred.

In Australia, successive governments have implemented legislation revoking the citizenship of nationals who joined Islamic State, making prosecuting them harder. Even when foreign fighters, such as Neil Prakash, have returned home, they have been charged with only terrorism offences, not genocide-related offences.

Revoking citizenship of foreign fighters leaves them out in the world able to continue perpetrating crimes in places where protective security and justice systems are not as strong as in Australia. When Turkey began offensive operations against Syria, many Kurdish controlled prisons where many of these criminals were held were destroyed, and prisoners ran free.

The public abuse that Yazidis are experiencing now is emblematic of the systemic discrimination they experience in Iraq. This is why they don’t feel Iraqi courts will ever give them justice. When cases do come before Iraqi courts, individuals are only charged with membership of Islamic State, never genocide.

Germany is the only country to have prosecuted anyone for genocide of the Yazidi, including sexual violence.

There is good reason why the UN Security Council considers ending impunity for conflict-related sexual violence a matter of international peace and security. Throughout the world, the use of sexual violence during armed conflict undermines social stability and long-term peace. According to my research, sexual slavery contributed US$111 million to the economy of Islamic State.

Peace and justice are inextricably linked. Women’s security is fundamental to global security.

This year, the mandate will expire for the UN investigative team that has been gathering evidence of Islamic State crimes in Iraq.

Countries such as Australia, France and Britain, which so often stand firm at the UN Security Council in support of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, need to put their money where their mouths are. They need to undertake the investigations and prosecutions of their nationals who perpetrated sexual violence as crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide while fighting with Islamic State and other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq.

Justice delayed is justice denied. The Yazidis have waited long enough. They can wait no longer.

In what is becoming a monthly phenomenon, Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan (Islamic State Khorasan, or IS-K) has topped all of its global provinces in terms of both quantity of operations as well as casualties inflicted, reclaiming its place as the most powerful Islamic State branch. Despite pollyannaish claims by senior Taliban officials to Western media outlets that IS-K ‘is not a serious threat to the Islamic Emirate’ or that, ‘If we get rid of all our economic and administrative problems, ISIS will disappear in 15 days in all of Afghanistan’, the reality of IS-K’s resilience and expansion is becoming ever more apparent.

Deborah Lyon, the UN secretary-general’s special representative for Afghanistan, recently told the UN Security Council, ‘Once limited to a few provinces and the capital, [IS-K] now seems to be present in nearly all provinces, and increasingly active’. Indeed, there’s been a marked increase in attacks across the country since 2020. US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl similarly testified to Congress, ‘We could see [IS-K] generate that capability [for foreign attacks] in somewhere between six or 12 months’, adding that the Taliban’s ability to combat the group ‘is to be determined’. The US recently identified and sanctioned senior officials of IS-K, including its leader.

IS-K has launched daily attacks against the Taliban across Afghanistan, ambushing, bombing and assassinating its operatives, including senior Taliban official Hamdullah Mokhlis, head of Kabul security and commander of the Taliban’s Badri special forces unit.

It also continues to conduct mass-casualty attacks, particularly but not exclusively targeting the Hazara Shia minority. These attacks include bombing public transport and suicide bombings at Shiite mosques in Kunduz and Kandahar, the so-called ‘Taliban heartland’. Dozens of Taliban were killed and wounded in a bombing outside the Eidgah mosque, where a funeral ceremony was being held for the mother of Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid. A complex attack involving several IS-K operatives on a military hospital in Kabul also resulted in scores of casualties.

In response, the Taliban has been conducting a scorched-earth campaign of indiscriminate violence, detaining and disappearing around 1,500 people in Nangarhar province alone. Recently, the Taliban deployed more than 1,000 additional fighters to Nangarhar province and escalated their brutality. Hundreds of suspected IS-K operatives were murdered and many bodies, some beheaded, were dumped in the streets or strung up in public as a warning.

So brutal is this Taliban war with IS-K that the hospital in Jalalabad, Nangarhar’s provincial capital, treated more casualties in November than it treated during the war between the Taliban, NATO and the Afghan government. Given that many of those being disappeared and murdered are not IS-K operatives, the Taliban’s campaign may only serve to increase IS-K recruitment, and there’s little evidence that it’s having any impact on the group’s operations.

Indeed, IS-K gives as good as it gets, most recently beheading several Taliban fighters in Kandahar, which, together with the mosque bombing in October, indicates that even the Taliban’s stronghold is vulnerable. Taliban intelligence officials in Kabul secretly admit that one area of Nangarhar has become a ‘no-go zone’ for them and is ‘one hundred percent’ controlled by IS-K.

In spite of the Taliban’s backing from Russia, Iran, China and especially Pakistan—with the US likely sharing intelligence amid recurring reports of unidentified drones flying over Afghanistan—all trends suggest there’s fertile ground for IS-K to vastly increase its size and potency. Credible reports have already emerged of the group openly recruiting both Taliban fighters and former members of the Afghan intelligence agencies and special forces in several provinces.

Three months after the Taliban seized power, Afghanistan has experienced total economic collapse and is barrelling towards humanitarian catastrophe and famine. While the Taliban have no funds to even pay their own fighters, IS-K is allegedly offering between US$300 and US$1,000 for recruits, an enticing offer for a starving population. The Taliban’s own brutality towards the Afghan population and complete lack of interest in governing will likely fuel recruitment or at least reduce the ranks of those willing to provide information to the Taliban.

IS-K has also been playing up the Taliban’s warm and public relationship with China, which is engaged in a genocidal campaign against Uyghur Muslims next door. The group made sure to publicise that the suicide bomber in the Kunduz attack was Uyghur, propaganda that could attract the substantial number of Uyghurs fighting under al-Qaeda and Taliban auspices for the Turkistan Islamic Party. IS-K has emphasised that the Taliban is a proxy of Pakistan and a partner of the US, and, most egregiously for potential recruits, has underlined that the Taliban are protecting the Shia rather than killing them.

Aside from financial, sectarian and ideological factors, the Taliban rank and file are simply bored. The group was founded on martyrdom and jihad, and, on top of financial incentives, many Taliban may simply join IS-K to be able to continue waging jihad indefinitely and have the chance to become ‘martyrs’.

In addition, aside from the strong grassroots support among some urban Tajiks, exacerbated by the fact that the Taliban is essentially a Pashtun movement, IS-K has absorbed cadres that defected from the Taliban and other jihadist entities, including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, otherwise known as the Pakistani Taliban. This has allowed the group to expand its operations in Pakistan, as well. So thoroughly infiltrated are the Taliban and TTP by IS-K that the Taliban’s emir, Haibatullah Akhunzada, recently warned the group in a rare address. IS-K nearly killed Akhunzada in Pakistan in 2019, as part of a wide campaign across Afghanistan and Pakistan hunting the Taliban.

On paper, the Taliban have every advantage against IS-K; in practice, there’s no evidence that their take-no-prisoners campaign has affected IS-K to any great extent. While IS-K probably won’t threaten the Taliban’s overall control of Afghanistan in the short term, it will soon likely be able to contest multiple districts, as it reportedly has in Nangarhar. US hopes of a counterterrorism partnership with the Taliban to prevent IS-K attacks were always ill-conceived—the Taliban can’t even protect themselves.

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

As the post-9/11 era took shape, the old demands of state security still stood at centre stage, dressed in new cyber garments but carrying the familiar flags of power contest.

Terrorism was a domestic issue in Australia as much as an international fear, sharing space on stage with other dangers. The policy phrase for an era when terrorism wasn’t the only terror became ‘all hazards’.

In Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 national security statement, terrorism sat with climate change, followed by a range of other scourges, from people smugglers and organised crime down to the need for e-security against cyberattacks. The rise of ‘all hazards’ meant the remit and membership of the cabinet’s National Security Committee expanded.

When Rudd’s successor, Julia Gillard, announced a national security strategy in 2013, non-state actors had dropped down the list. In Gillard’s ordering, the central role of the state applied as much to the cyber domain as to the ‘strategic competition’ she identified between the US and China.

The government’s judgement was that the security environment was ‘positive’ and ‘benign’. Gillard gave this description of the journey through the 9/11 era:

The attacks of 11 September 2001 are the most influential national security event in our recent history. The threat of global terrorism not only shaped the national security landscape of the past decade, but also heralded a new era for national security across the globe. Since then, much of our national security focus has been dedicated to guarding against such an attack occurring on our own soil.

Some 12 years on, our strategic outlook is largely positive. We live in one of the safest and most cohesive nations in the world. We have a strong economy. A major war is unlikely. Our highly-effective national security capability is already focused on priority activities. We have made considerable gains against global terrorism, and our alliance with the United States is as strong as ever. We also have deepening relationships with a range of influential countries in the region and across the world.

As Peter Jennings commented: ‘Welcome to the decade after the national security decade.’ The strains of the national security decade, though, ran through much of the second decade of the century.

From 2001 to 2014, Australia’s terror alert level was set at ‘medium’—an attack could happen. In September 2014, the warning was lifted to ‘high’—the risk of an attack was likely. The threat was from home-grown terrorists. Levi J. West wrote in The Strategist that the strategic power of small acts or ‘lone-wolf’ attacks were important aspects of the global terrorist milieu:

That evolution of the terrorist threat, and the arrival in Australia of active, offensive, individual and small-cell jihadist terrorism, demands the permanent embedding of our counter-terrorism structures (and funding) into the normal operations of government.

ASPI considered the system of threat communications and what the government should be saying to change people’s behaviour. More than just issuing advisories, Anthony Bergin and Clare Murphy wrote, the government had to ensure the community understood what alerts meant:

Communicating terrorism alert level warnings is a tough challenge. It’s no easy task for our political leaders to find language that conveys the need to be alert, while also creating a sense of calm. But right now the public feels underinformed when it comes to terrorism advisories.

In 2013, ASPI set up a strategic policing and law enforcement program, with research funding from the Australian Federal Police; its inaugural report was on organised crime. The first head of the program, David Connery, wrote that strategic policing involved protecting national interests at home and abroad, to deal with:

• espionage and foreign interference
• instability in developing and fragile states
• malicious cyber activity
• proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (especially domestically)
• serious and organised crime
• terrorism and violent extremism
• countering state-based conflict and coercion.

The policing program built on earlier habits of thinking about the international dimension of Australian policing. ASPI’s first Strategic Insights paper, in 2004, was Police join the front line, by Elsina Wainwright, on how Canberra had turned to the AFP for foreign policy purposes. The AFP was used to help preserve the security and stability of weaker South Pacific states. Australian police had been working in peace and capacity-building operations in Bougainville, East Timor and Solomon Islands.

The Strategist launched weekly columns on policing, ‘The beat’, and on counterterrorism, ‘CT scan’; these eventually merged to become ‘The national security wrap’, which these days is called ‘The threat spectrum’.

In 2015, more than 100 Australians had left to fight in Syria and Iraq, and high-risk terrorism threats being monitored in Australia had more than doubled, prompting the report Gen Y jihadists: preventing radicalisation in Australia. Australia had become an exporter of terrorists, and later debate would turn to how to avoid the return of these fighters.

The Gen Y jihadists database identified Australians believed to be pulling the strings in Islamic militant groups, as well as a significant number of others who had been drawn to extremist beliefs, as Rosalyn Turner and Stephanie Huang wrote:

The database shows that there’s no archetype of an Australian jihadist. Australian foreign fighters come from a diversity of backgrounds, and there’s a wide range of influences and factors that appear to contribute to their decision to take part in a conflict half a world away.

However, one recurrent factor was the presence of an influential mentor that encouraged or facilitated the person to make hijrah (migration).

The ‘radicalisation’ broker was a guide offering purpose and a sense of belonging to something ‘bigger than themselves’, wrote Tobias Feakin, the inaugural head of ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, in 2014. Online, modern jihadist propaganda had all the tools, as exemplified by Islamic State. A striking image expressing this was a photo ccirculated on Twitter showing three rifle bullets, each with a different top: ‘A bullet. A pen. A thumb drive … There is a different form of jihad’.

Islamic State members had grown up with digital technology, Feakin wrote, and were adept at using those tools to glorify the conflict:

JustPaste is used to publish summaries of battles that have taken place, SoundCloud to release audio reports of activities, WhatsApp and Kik Messenger to communicate and send images and videos, and Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to share images, propaganda and messages from the frontlines. They even have Q&A sessions about joining the group on Ask.FM. Their messages are tailored to their audience, changing depending on whether they’re intended for a local audience, or would-be Western recruits.

The many dark places on the ‘darknet’ were a key element of the all-hazards understanding.

Last month, an 18-year-old Chechen immigrant stalked, stabbed and decapitated history teacher Samuel Paty in a Paris suburb near the middle school where he worked. Soon after, a Quran-carrying Tunisian man beheaded a woman and fatally stabbed two other people in a church in Nice. In the same month, two British-born Islamic State militants were brought to the United States to face trial for their participation in a brutal abduction scheme in Syria that ended with American and other hostages being beheaded on camera.

In a world wracked by violence, such killings stand out for their savagery. While the absolute number of victims is relatively small, the threat this practice poses to fundamental principles of modern civilisation should not be underestimated.

The ancient Greeks and Romans instituted beheading as a mode of capital punishment. Today, radical Islamists commonly employ it in extrajudicial executions, which have been reported in a wide range of countries, including Egypt, India, the Philippines and Nigeria. In Mozambique, up to 50 people, including women and children, have reportedly been murdered—and, in many cases, decapitated—by IS-linked fighters this month alone.

Such savagery casts a long shadow—especially because perpetrators so often share images of their actions. Ever since the 2002 decapitation of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, terrorist organisations have taken to posting videos of beheadings online. After murdering Paty, the perpetrator tweeted a photo of the severed head.

For Islamists, beheadings are a potent weapon of asymmetric warfare. The gruesome spectacle inspires jihadi sympathisers around the world, while fomenting fear in local communities, to the point that the Islamists are often able to impose their will—including medieval codes of conduct—on the societies in which they operate.

Jihadis represent a tiny minority of the world’s Muslims. But, by making clear their willingness to behave inhumanely, they have ensured that few dare defy them. Just this month, a Bangladeshi cricket star was forced, under threat of Islamist retaliation, to apologise publicly for briefly attending a Hindu ceremony in India. Through such tactics, Islamists are gradually snuffing out more liberal, diverse Islamic traditions in non-Arab countries.

Although beheadings have a particularly visceral impact, they are far from the only way the jihadists incite fear. Earlier this month in Afghanistan, IS-linked gunmen stormed Kabul University, killing at least 35—mainly students—and wounding dozens more. In Vienna, another Islamist, who had previously been jailed for trying to join IS, killed four people and wounded 22 in a shooting rampage.

The persistent scourge of Islamist violence is a clear signal that the global ‘war on terror’, launched after the 11 September, 2001, attacks in the US, has faltered. Even within Western countries, meaningful government action against Islamist extremism has often been stymied by concerns about discrimination. But, far from protecting Muslims, those crying ‘Islamophobia’ often are making Muslim communities less secure, by allowing extremism to grow unchecked.

The truth is that there is only one country in the world today that is truly cracking down on Islam, rather than on radical Islamism: China. In the last few years, China has incarcerated more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities in its western region of Xinjiang. Under the pretence of fighting terrorism, authorities are carrying out a methodical, large-scale erasure of Islamic identities.

And yet the international community—including Muslim countries—have remained largely silent about China’s actions. Last year, Malaysia’s then prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, explained why: ‘China is a very powerful nation’.

By contrast, after the Nice attack, Mahathir tweeted that ‘Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past’. The incendiary tweet has since been removed for ‘glorifying violence’, though Mahathir’s account wasn’t suspended—a missed opportunity to push back against incitement.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, has called for a boycott of French goods, because French President Emmanuel Macron pledged after Paty’s murder to defend secularism against radical Islam. It is clearly far easier to attack a democracy than to stand up to a ruthless dictatorship.

But none of this will protect Muslim communities, let alone end Islamist terrorism. For that, governments must adopt a new approach, based on a better understanding of the enemy they are fighting.

Islamist extremism is not an organisation or an army; it is an ideological movement. As recent attacks show, the existence of a clear doctrine of violence obviates the need to coordinate action. That is why eliminating high-level figures in IS or al-Qaeda does so little to stop the bloodshed, and why military action alone will always fall short.

Instead, counterterrorism efforts should target the font of jihadist terrorism: the militaristic Wahhabi theology, which justifies and commands the use of violence against ‘infidels’. This means, first and foremost, discrediting that ‘evil ideology’, as former British prime minister Theresa May put it, by attacking its core tenets, starting with the claim (unsupported by the Quran) that 72 virgins await every martyr in heaven.

It also means taming the clerics and other preachers of violent jihad. As the late Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew explained, we must target the ‘queen bees’ (the preachers of violence) who inspire the ‘worker bees’ (suicide attackers), not the worker bees themselves. Otherwise, the war on terror will continue to rage, and violent Islamism will become more deeply entrenched in societies.

In December 2018, US President Donald Trump declared victory over the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, tweeting that ‘ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains. We’re coming home!’ And in the first three months of this year, Trump said or tweeted 16 times that IS was either completely defeated or soon would be.

But the United States government appears to disagree. In August, the three lead inspectors general from the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the US Agency for International Development submitted a joint report to Congress reviewing Operation Inherent Resolve, the US campaign to defeat IS, over the period from 1 April through 30 June of this year. They concluded that, ‘Despite the loss of physical territory, thousands of ISIS fighters remain in Iraq and Syria and are carrying out attacks and working to rebuild their capabilities.’

The IS resurgence is partly the result of Trump’s December decisions to withdraw all US troops from Syria and halve the number in Afghanistan, which prompted defence secretary James Mattis to resign and made America’s regional security partners less able to conduct counterterrorism operations. In Iraq, IS is regrouping and building clandestine terrorist cells in key areas of Baghdad, Ninewa and Al Anbar provinces, and in the Middle Euphrates River Valley. In Syria, the group is mounting strong counteroffensives in Raqqah and Homs provinces, and is aggressively seeking to establish a safe haven.

Trump isn’t likely to reverse his decision on troop withdrawals. But IS’s battlespace is digital as much as physical. And in that regard at least, the Trump administration must strengthen America’s capacity to wage war effectively.

When IS attacked the Iraqi city of Mosul during the height of the group’s insurgency in 2014, millions of people watched in real time by following the hashtag #AllEyesOnISIS on Arabic Twitter. They included the city’s Iraqi defenders, who became increasingly demoralised and fled. As Peter W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking write in their book LikeWar: the weaponization of social media, IS ran ‘a military offensive like a viral marketing campaign and won a victory that shouldn’t have been possible’.

Similarly, the resurgent IS 2.0 uses press releases and social-media savvy to spread its influence worldwide and recruit foreign fighters, sympathisers and financial backers. In April, for example, the group released a video of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who claimed responsibility for the deadly Easter Sunday bomb attacks in Sri Lanka. IS’s global media operation also produces Soldiers Harvest II, an upgraded weekly publication covering the group’s military operations.

This communications offensive is enabling the group to contest the global view that it was defeated following the collapse of its caliphate. Even more fundamentally, as Singer and Brooking point out, IS has weaponised the internet itself, creating a digital battlespace in which an online narrative of victory can translate into success on the ground.

Americans and publics around the world must finally understand that the war against IS and other jihadi terrorist groups is a new and different kind of conflict that will not be ‘won’ once and for all. Support for IS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and the like reflects multiple social, economic and demographic factors, from corruption to climate change. The fight against these groups must therefore take place in many different arenas, starting with the domestic politics of the countries in which they operate.

This struggle must also take place online, as the US military well knows. In 2016, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff published a paper that focused on how to win the ‘battle for the narrative’. It opened with the quote: ‘It’s easier to kill a bad man than a bad idea.’ With that in mind, US Cyber Command will be transformed into an information warfare operations command by 2028, with the goal of integrating cyber, electronic warfare and information operations.

But 2028 is almost a decade away, and IS won’t wait. Moreover, this fight is too important to leave only to the soldiers. The US national security strategy should thus recommend a collaborative model similar to the British Army’s 77th Brigade, which combines government departments under one umbrella to conduct information warfare.

Regrettably, the Trump administration has gutted the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which originally countered terrorist propaganda and is now tasked with fighting global disinformation. Fortunately, Congress has pushed back; the State Department needs to be a full partner in developing a strong and credible counternarrative, which requires much more nuance and range than traditional counterpropaganda.

Furthermore, other countries fighting IS must ensure that they have similar capabilities and can collaborate with allies both diplomatically and militarily. Information wars are contests between different ways of seeing and understanding the world, and they require new capabilities and expertise that extend well beyond traditional communications.

Finally, national and global media outlets face a quandary. On one hand, stories about IS press releases and interviews raise the visibility, and to some extent the attractiveness, of it and similar groups. On the other hand, the significant decline in US media coverage of IS over the past few years strengthens the public perception that the group is no longer a threat. Reporters and editors should be aware of this tension, and should perhaps examine more closely how the forces countering IS worldwide are engaging with the public.

Publicity is the lifeblood of all terrorist groups; they use attacks to raise awareness of their cause and to attract the support of the disaffected. Moreover, digital technologies allow IS to control parts of the virtual landscape in a way it rarely can on the ground, enabling it to regroup and find new ways to mount physical attacks.

IS’s recent media resurgence is thus the precursor to the group’s physical revival. That is why the information war against IS should never stop.