A century ago, the idea of war was to send infantry charging out of trenches and straight into a hail of fire. That now seems so ancient.
Tuesday night into Wednesday, US-led coalition forces struck at multiple targets in Syria using scores of smart bombs launched from a variety of platforms. Cruise missiles were launched from hundreds of miles away. Stealth fighter-bombers unloaded their munitions on top of targets. Drones swooped in and attacked with even greater precision.
It was a symphony of high tech weapons. The accuracy was pinpoint. The timing was perfect to the split-second. The outcome, however, was destruction in its most sordid sense.
The world was duly briefed after the operation. We were shown before and after photos of the targets. In one, only the communications array on top of the building was destroyed, as intended, by a specific weapon that detonated overhead, leaving much of the structure unscathed. In another, only one wing of a building was destroyed, as planned, leaving the other half intact.
The technology available for war is truly awesome — especially for people like us who labor with lousy phone interconnections and slow broadband.
Beyond that awesome display of technological warfare, however, the real news coming out of that air assault in Syria is the existence of an Al Qaeda offshoot. The organization is referred to simply as the Khorasan Group.
Khorasan is apparently a well-organized terrorist network using the rebel-controlled zones in Syria as base. Most of the structures attacked from the air by US-led forces were logistics dumps, barracks and command-and-control networks of the Khorasan.
The air assault could not have come at a more appropriate time, if we go by the findings of US intelligence. The Khorasan, we are now told, was in the latest stages of preparation for a number of terrorist strikes in Europe and North America.
In the ranks of this terrorist network are hundreds of foreign volunteers from the US, Europe and Asia. These volunteers, trained in handling explosives, were to be sent out on terrorist missions in the West. All the threats issuing from the extremists in the Middle East about punishing the western nations who have attacked their jihad were not idle after all.
There have been persistent reports that perhaps hundreds of Filipino volunteers have travelled to Syria to train with the extremist networks there. Two are reported to have been killed in skirmishes in Iraq. A few are said to have returned to Mindanao to rejoin homegrown extremists. The Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) recently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the name sported by the heavily armed militia that invaded Iraq.
The air assault in Syria and Iraq, therefore, might not be as distant from us as might seem at first blush. If the Khorasan terrorist campaign took off, we would likely be one of the targets — simply because some of the trained suicide bombers originated from here.
Although we might be unwilling or unable to contribute anything to the international campaign to crush the Korasan and the ISIL, we have a stake in its effective conduct. Whether we like it or not, the sort of war the jihadists seek to wage is borderless.
In the same way that the threat of pandemics rises because of the increasing number of people travelling the air routes, the virus of terror is easily spread by the accessibility of international travel.
The air assault on the Khorasan infrastructure might succeed in upsetting the group’s plans and diminishing their capacity to wage terror for the moment. The threat remains, however, that so many “lone wolves” might already be out there ready to strike vulnerable open societies.
None of the sophisticated smart bombs will help us much against fanatics with crude explosives. We will need human intelligence of the most classical variety to root them out and prevent them from carrying out their missions of mass murder.
Bedfellows
The sheer insanity that Khorasan and ISIL represent brought together the strangest bedfellows.
Hours before the massive air campaign was launched on terrorist targets based in Syria, the US ambassador to the UN informed the Syrian ambassador of the forthcoming operation. Consequently, when US planes entered Syrian airspace, Syrian military radar remained “passive” — they tracked the US air armada but did not lock onto any of the planes.
The Assad regime is obligated to demand respect of its airspace, but is ultimately benefitted by the US assault. It helps them scuttle the extremist militias waging a bloody civil war against it but which it could not defeat on its own.
At the same time, the US and other European powers are committed to scuttling the Assad regime. Several western governments have committed to arming the Free Syrian Army, the pro-democracy rebels group sidelined by the entry of extremist militias into the civil war.
The regular Iraqi Army is virtually useless, having fallen back with such speed after the ISIL began its assault months ago. The more reliable force against the extremists is the pro-western Kurdish militia, now carrying the brunt of the fighting on the ground in Iraq. The Kurds are also fighting a war of national liberation against Turkey, a valuable pro-western ally.
The Iraqi Shiites have several large militia units raring to fight ISIL. These units receive arms and other logistical support from their sectarian brethren in Iran, a staunchly anti-western state.
Several largely Sunni states — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar and Bahrain --- have joined the US-led strikes in Syria against the Sunni extremists. The anti-Israel Hezbollah in Lebanon is Shiite and supports the Assad regime in Damascus.