Terrorism:-A plague affecting humanity.
When the attacks of 9/11 shook the world, an influx of fierce terror sprung among the people. Even for a country like the U.S. with high security, deadly response teams to such kind of life-threatening situations, it wasn’t quite manageable. But the demanding question that in a flash strikes a normal individual’s mind is that how and why such kinds of merciless acts occur in the first place though. Well, the simple answer will be the terror organizations, for instance, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, ISIS and many more. The prophecy of Jihad which was originally defined as ‘struggle or meritorious effort’ against an enemy as defined by the holy Quran, surprisingly zero out of the three types of Jihad’s support or permit terrorism as per the holy book. The sole purpose is to spread fear. Leaders of such kinds of organizations brainwash those Jihadists. Unfortunately, high profile cities and countries with minorities or poor economies fall prey to them. Paris, Mumbai, The U.S. are amongst the places where innocent people were killed mercilessly. We often hear about suicide bombers or the execution of people even in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq. According to statistics, Iraq suffered a total of 2415 terror incidents last year with the death toll rising to 6960. India is among the countries deeply affected by terrorism. The horrific attacks of 26/11 on the Taj Hotel, Pulwama attack, and countless others have been sighted. Somehow, after numerous incidents, the disaster is still prevailing in this modern world. It is not a situation where governments are just suffering due to this with their eyes closed but the reason to be taken into consideration due to which this problem is still unsolved is Power. The power and resources possessed by such organizations have a major effect on resolution. The resources they have can be defined as capital, weaponry, military equipment and most importantly ‘Human Resource’.
Moving further, terrorism is an arbitrary word commonly used to highlight a scenario of the use of violence and uncivilized practices for either political or violent purposes. Although talking about the correspondence of Terrorism to some particular religions, communities or people would be a fool’s act. There are nations directly involved in these acts such as Libya, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan. But if we are taking ‘involvement’ of countries into violence and non-combatant practices into consideration, are we not going to talk about the U.S.? During the Iraq war against terrorism, the U.S. fired over 10,000 depleted uranium rounds:- a highly toxic chemical upon civilian areas of Iraq. Typically, terrorism is far more related to just the organizations involved but punishing the people following the same religion or from the community who are nonetheless never related to violence, is also an act of terrorism. It is not the religion related to terrorism but the mentally sick condition of those terrorists or says Jihadists. Even when the Saudi coalition was executing civilians in Yemen, Canada exported $284 million worth of weapons, guided missiles, and combat vehicles to the countries bombing the already hunger and poverty-stricken civilians of Yemen which reportedly killed over 10000 civilians as per the statistics recorded by the UN in 2016 in that civil war.( So, how can we easily ignore these facts and just correlate terrorism to just a religion? Terrorism can be used as a word to define acts like these but the whole picture is quite political. Those organizations using such high profile weaponry, missiles, and other combat gear, artillery vehicles are not easy to obtain. Researches and investigations by the CAR(Conflict Armament Research), an agency that documents the trafficking of weaponry used in war zones; traced the weapons used by the ISIS back to the U.S. and even some parts of Russia. All this, just for trade and profits, despite knowing the consequences of it.
“Terrorism has nothing to do with religion, Islam or otherwise. Terrorism is born of fundamentalism not of religion.”
Abhijit Naskar, The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance
Indeed, after knowing the reasons, aspects of this disaster, a person always wonders about the solution to all this. We all wonder about what it would be like to live in a ‘globalized’ world with peace. Well, the answer is that maybe an individual’s efforts might not help in retaliation against terrorism. Well, it took nearly 10 years for the U.S. Navy SEALs to find and execute Al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden. But the question arises, did it stop terrorism or Al-Qaeda from continuing these massacres. Numerous leaders of terror groups and other significant people involved have been killed by government and other anti-terrorism groups and that has helped a lot in decline in terror activities according to 2014 recordings in Syria, Yemen, and many other countries. The thing is that world peace is itself a big issue and the irony is who knows the upbringing of peace may involve brutal violence such as eradicating terrorism from the globe might need a war against terrorism for starters. This will include civilian causalities, world economical downfall, destruction, and god knows what else. As a result, as trying to accomplish this mission, a possible outcome could be making the world a darker and horrific place to live in. “It is easier to start a war than to end it.”( Gabriel García Márquez) But only for the sake of the innocent people suffering from this problem regularly in countries like Syria and Afghanistan, the world should come together to combat this. “Indeed, Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving like kindred; and forbids indecency, and manifest evil, and wrongful transgression. He admonished you that you may take heed.”, as said in the holy Quran. It’s not the religion that imparts terror. It’s about the grasp of the followers. The religion itself says the truth about kindness and humanity. However, terrorism is the concern about which humanity should be worried about in order to achieve peace. The world was given to us billions of years ago and now it is in our hands what to do with it.
References:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN3s-OxXqis
Statistics and Data retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/islamic-terrorism
https://www.wired.com/story/terror-industrial-complex-isis-munitions-supply-chain/
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