They're aiming for a few things. They're taking people who once were in some position of power, whether they're journalists, whether they're fighter pilots, and their subjecting them to maximum humiliation and defeat, and ultimately some of the most disgusting deaths possible.
In particular, the case of Lieutenant al-Kasasbeh, the Jordanian fighter pilot, he represented....They're basically taking out their frustrations with the air campaign, which has been quite effective against ISIS. Not only was he burned to death, but before that he was castrated. He was raped. The way he was treated was extraordinarily brutal, even for ISIL.
Now to get to the broader question, I think they're making a mistake. I mentioned that at the outset. They're making a mistake in several ways and this is why ISIL is actually much more vulnerable than al Qaeda, in the longer term.
This kind of debate happened before, and Ms. Abdo referred to it, a debate between al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq, under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It was a debate, and in part she alluded to religion, but it was also a debate about strategy. What al Qaeda saw was that this extraordinarily brutal approach under Zarqawi ended up producing localized resistance in the from of the sahwa, or the awakening movements, which ended up pushing back against al Qaeda and really destroying them. There is a combination of factors.
The fact is that their extraordinarily brutal approach caused people not only to chafe at their rule but also to extract revenge that was every bit as grisly as what al Qaeda did. It's not very well publicized but there were a lot of revenge killings and a lot of humiliation has been put to the al Qaeda guys after the '07 to '08 period, and their defeat.
ISIL is very dependent upon social media and the youth demographic. But one thing we understand is that what's popular today won't be popular in two years. That's why your fellow Canadian, Justin Bieber, is not necessarily going to continue gaining popularity. Most people feel that he has a ceiling and that at some point he'll be considered uncool. We may have already reached that point.
That's kind of a humourous example, but the point is that the extreme brutality is at some point going to be diffused. I mentioned some ways that this could be done. But let me tell you something that I guarantee will happen at some point because I have watched the cycles of revenge in Iraq during the last period.
At some point, you will have a video released by somebody, maybe it will be rogue peshmerga forces; they probably won't reveal their identities, but they'll take an ISIL guy, and rather than his being strong and beheading people, he's going to be crying and humiliated, and he'll be subjected to a death every bit as brutal.
Something like that will have an enormous effect. I'm not condoning it. I don't condone brutal killings in general, but at some point that will happen. You'll get the tools that they have used, used against them. At some point, there will be a kind of reckoning where the al Qaeda strategy will eclipse the ISIL strategy, because ISIL has overplayed its hands.
You're not supposed to fight a two front war. They're fighting a war on about six different fronts right now, with lots and lots of people who want to kill them and kill them in the most disgusting ways possible. In a matter of military strategy, that's not the place they want to be.