The caliphate strikes back

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[/audioplayer]When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already torn apart by civil war and sectarian hatreds. So the self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to be just another thug and opportunist ruling over a blighted no-man’s land, little known and still less revered in the wider Islamic world. He was surrounded by a rag-tag army of jihadis, whose imperial hubris seemed to reflect only a warped genocidal fanaticism. Surely they were far too otherworldly, with their obsession over the life lived by their prophet and his companions more than 1,400 years ago, to have much of an impact on the world in which we scuttle off to work each morning?

Two years on, even the most hardened sceptic is having second thoughts. The apparent bombing of a Russian airliner last week, minutes after taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, was proof of the caliphate’s potential to wreak havoc on a global scale. It left hundreds of thousands of Britons, Russians and others stranded and distraught, or hastily cancelling their holidays. Here was more evidence, too, that Islamic State’s strategy of recruiting the Muslim masses by impoverishing them, while damning all among them who do not shun or kill infidels, is likely to be far more consequential than al-Qaeda’s spectacular attacks against prominent western targets. Egypt, after all, had been the only Arab country (apart from Iran-controlled Iraq) to openly support Russian airstrikes in Syria, and just a few weeks after making that fateful decision its most important resort is deserted. Others, such as Luxor and Aswan on the Nile, have been ghost towns since the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.