“Welcome to Jordan! What are you studying here?” a cab driver asked me the other day on my way to class.
“Arabic and politics,” I responded, thinking I was in for the usual biographical interrogation characteristic of your average Jordanian cabby.
“Politics! You want to know something? America is funding da’ish,” he exclaimed using the Arabic abbreviation for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
To any semi-educated American, this statement would appear shocking, even offensive. And so I scoffed, turned away and left our interaction at that. But while this statement is indeed ignorant, over the past two months in Jordan, it has become all the more apparent to me that this belief is in fact rooted in a far more complex scenario--a scenario that is also intertwined with the ignorant perception among many Americans that Islam is a religion favorable to violence and radicalism.
The brutal rise of ISIS, with its beheadings, mass shootings, and other gruesome crimes against humanity in the name of Islam, has built an image in the minds of many Americans that Islam is a cruel religion.
However, if there is one enduring lesson I could convey from my experience in Jordan, it is that the “Islamic State” is not a religious movement. The organization is a political actor that has taken advantage of a power vacuum that has emerged in Iraq as a result of internal sectarian tensions and the power vacuum that has evolved in Syria throughout its three-year civil war. Any region that develops an environment lacking a legitimate, central authority becomes susceptible to domination by a radical actor.
To reiterate, the rise of ISIS cannot be attributed to Islam’s status as a violent religion, but to its use of the brand of Islam to take advantage of desperate people who feel humiliated by what they view as decades of western exploitation. The belief of my cab driver, and of a shocking number of Jordanians, that the United States is directly funding ISIS is their extension of the widely-accepted view in this region that US foreign policy in the Middle East has contributed to an environment conducive to the rise of an organization like ISIS.
Regardless of the merits of past US foreign policy toward the Middle East, the question today is how an organization like ISIS can be fought? While current airstrikes are necessary for short-term containment, as Omar Rifai, an important figure in Jordan’s Foreign Service since the 1970s and who is one of my professors this semester, put it, “You kill 30,000 ISIS fighters today and 60,000 will appear tomorrow.” While fighters acting in the name of a radical ideology can be combatted militarily, the radical ideology itself can only be stopped by eliminating the root cause of its appeal.
The ultimate undermining of ISIS is a Middle East in which people feel they have opportunities to advance themselves and their families. Rifai advocates a Marshall Plan-like initiative of Western and Gulf economic assistance to create such conditions. However, even if such an effort were to begin tomorrow, it would be shortsighted to expect its effects to be felt immediately. For now, as ISIS continues to cement its position in the region, its demise appears far off. Basing a response that addresses ISIS’s root cause is a critical start in shaping an effective strategy.
The jury is still out as to whether my Arabic is now good enough to convey this idea to my next cab driver.
Elijah Jatovsky graduated from Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2016 with a major in international politics. Hailing from San Francisco, California, during the fall 2014 semester he studied at the Jordan Institute of Diplomacy in Amman, Jordan and blogged for the Berkley Center's Junior Year Abroad Network.
