Who makes up Daesh

Photos of Paris street memorials for the 132 people killed by Daesh on November 13 show flowers, pictures of victims, drawings, and, even, a bottle of red wine.

The refrain adopted by mourning Parisians is: “They want to destroy our way of life.”

A life  filled with visits to cafés  and restaurants, pop and classical music concerts, football matches and just walking around the streets, sailing toy boats on park ponds, pausing at second-hand bookstalls, holding hands, laughing.

This is true on the superficial plane.

“Destroy” is, however, far too harsh a word for what Daesh can in fact do to France.

Daesh can only temporarily disrupt the French “way of life” by frightening people, preventing them from savouring their existence.

Therefore, the bombings and shootings will have a limited affect for a certain period of time on Parisians and others who were not harmed by the attacks. Those who were wounded and lost loved ones will suffer much longer.

While the world is in mourning for French fatalities and wounded, it has completely ignored the cult’s destruction of the “Syrian way of life” in Raqqa and Palmyra and “the Iraqi way of life” in Mosul, Ramadi and Falluja.

Residents of these cities are in permanent lock down, live in fear; cafés, restaurants and schools have been closed.

Music is forbidden. Mosques and churches have been destroyed. Smoking is banned.

Prayer is obligatory although “compulsion in religion” is prohibited in Islam.

The plight of civilians living in these cities did not serve as a “wake-up call” for the Western powers that determine policies on the international scene.

They did take some notice when Daesh conquered Mosul in June 2014, but not enough to do anything about Daesh’s atrocities in northern Iraq in August of that year when the cult drove Kurdish peshmerga from Sinjar and began massacring Yazidis, an offshoot of Persian Zoroastrianism.

Only then did the US form a coalition to strike Daesh targets from the air. The US, which flies 93 per cent of sorties, mounts, at most, 10-15 raids a day as compared to 110 a day during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and 2,500 a day during NATO’s intervention in the 1999 Kosovo war.

Neither the Afghan war nor the Kosovo campaign posed a danger comparable to the threat of Daesh, which has affiliates in Europe and the US, as well as in Africa, Asia and this region.

David Kilcullen, an Australian army veteran who served as counterinsurgency adviser to US General David Petraeus during the Iraq occupation, warned in an AFP interview that the Daesh attacks on Paris seem to approximate “urban guerrilla war”.

In his view, 200,000-400,000 troops would be needed to uproot Daesh — but he called such a deployment a “fantasy”.

He said that instead of targeting them as a terrorist group — knocking off leaders and weapons dumps — the international community had to go for Daesh as an “enemy state” and strike with a “radical increase in air support” for forces fighting Daesh on the ground.

He admitted that there would be civilian casualties.

A full-scale bombing campaign has to be combined with dealing with the reasons mostly young men and some women join Daesh.

A friend of Salah Abdeslam, the Belgian man of Moroccan origin, could not fathom his involvement in the Paris attacks.

Abdel Ben Alal, a Belgian deliveryman, told The Independent, that Abdeslam “studied hard and… was well educated”.

They went to “the same school and played football together”.

However, when they met, Abdeslam wanted to discuss what was happening in Syria and Palestine, while other friends simply preferred to play cards.

Long before Syria and Iraq stirred the hearts and minds of Muslims across the world, “Palestine” was an issue that radicalised both religious and secular nationalist Arabs.

Since the Syria-Iraq war began taking centre stage in the regional drama, Palestine has faded as the chief dispute with the West in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Palestine was a prime mover for Osama Bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda, the parent of Daesh, a renegade cult which even Al Qaeda has repudiated because of its appropriation of Islam, persecution of all who deny the legitimacy of the Daesh interpretation, and brutality.

The Paris suspects of Moroccan background who grew up in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek were petty criminals who had been involved in drug trafficking and robberies, but were not reported to be religious.

They had several run-ins with the police but did not spend much time in detention.

They were radicalised in Belgium or in Syria after being approached by Daesh recruiters.

Previous contacts with drug dealers would have made it easy for them to obtain assault weapons and explosives used in the operation. Guns and drugs are transited and traded by these gangs.

The logistics chief of the Paris operation, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was a well-known Daesh figure who joined the cult in 2013, rose to a position of command, and featured in video clips posted on the Internet.

One shows him joyfully driving a lorry with corpses roped to the back, demonstrating that he was a seriously disturbed person.

When he left his home in Belgium in 2014, he took his 13-year old brother with him.

While Daesh does attract sincerely religious people who, living under its control, may be appalled by its policies and actions, the cult also engages small-time gangsters, misfits and sociopaths, as well as opportunists seeking money, drugs and slave girls.

Others are simply young men who have limited education and no jobs and “prop up the walls”, caging cigarettes from each other and passers by in run-down neighbourhoods in European and Third World cities, towns and villages.

Just such young men joined the Algerian Islamic Group which waged a 10-year revolt against the government in the 1990s.

These young men reject lives of menial labour or low-paying boring jobs and opt for the excitement, the psychological high, of carrying guns, lording it over captives and captive communities, and posing as heroes to each other and, via social media, their mates back home.