What do we mean by the fight against ISIS?

Among the most important topics of the NATO 2014 summit gathering in Wales is the struggle to be waged against ISIS. The ISIS phenomenon is not taking place only in the Middle East, that is, in Iraq and Damascus. Above all, people come from all over the world to fight in these places.

This requires all countries to exercise extraordinary vigilance and monitoring of their own Muslim citizens. Because the subjects of the stories of joining ISIS and of turning into monsters in this organization that generally come to light are made up of the most ordinary, most familiar faces of their own countries.

Someone of Arab origin who once worked in the aircraft maintenance and repair unit at an airport in the US is now in the ranks of ISIS, and moreover in the beheading unit. Another trailer features the story of a pop music performer in his own country turning into a militant. These stories can be seen to serve to spread, in an increasingly dangerous way, the perception that every Muslim, every Arab, is a potential ISIS militant.

That is, we can expect that the paranoid attitude toward Muslims seen in many countries right after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 will develop exponentially with the ISIS affair.

European, American and Turkish media are full every day of news of ISIS actions, each more frightening than the last. Naturally, this news makes it unavoidable that something be done against ISIS. Here is a topic prepared with care for the agenda of NATO's regular meeting.

On the other hand, we learn that US Secretary of State John Kerry has called on 10 allied countries to contribute to the struggle against the ISIS threat. The US has decided to form a core coalition made up of 10 countries, Turkey among them, in the struggle against ISIS.

I think we can better assess toward what outcome ISIS's violent and terror-laden actions are setting whom in motion in light of these measures it has set in motion.

It is seen and understood that the struggle against ISIS is being launched after every kind of sociological and mental ground for ISIS's formation has been prepared, indeed after this ground has been supported to the utmost for a sufficient period. That is, for about 12 years in Iraq and for a few years in Syria, the most favorable ground for the formation of ISIS was first being prepared. In the post-occupation conditions in Iraq, all the practices the US put forward already served the formation of organizations like ISIS.

More plainly, the US and its allies first created swamp conditions in this region, and afterwards are trying to fight the mosquitoes that emerged in these conditions. In this fight, priority is given to the physical tracking of those who may incline toward the violence that can naturally issue from the accumulation of anger, revenge and rancor formed in the Middle East, to bringing their bank accounts under control, and to interning each of them one by one with public order measures when necessary.

Of course, in the meantime a distinction is kindly being drawn between "real Islam" and a "fake Islam" that ISIS exploits, fabricates, and brings forward through rhetorical means it uses very well. But we know from our experience so far that such distinctions neither prevent the Islamophobic complications that may arise from this nor are of any use in the struggle against ISIS. Everyone knows anyway that ISIS is neither Islam nor a state.

Essentially, let us set aside the conditions in Iraq; the inevitable result of delaying Assad's departure in Syria was the vacuum that formed there. One did not need to be a soothsayer to predict that this vacuum would create very favorable conditions for the emergence of ISIS or similar radical elements.

Let us pass over that too. When the organization moved toward Mosul, coming from completely uninhabited areas in plain sight, it would have been very easy to take measures against its units at that very moment; yet after it had settled into the cities, especially Sunni cities, the only victims of the war launched against them are the inhabitants of these cities.

More than half of the inhabitants of the generally Sunni cities where ISIS has settled (such as Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah) have been forced to leave their homes and flee. Attacks from the air or ground directed at the ISIS militants who have settled in these places make life even less bearable for the inhabitants of the city and force them to migrate too. In the meantime, the cities are turning into ruins.

Under the name of the struggle against ISIS, the entire human geography of the region is being reshaped. In the meantime, Islamophobic waves of a size unprecedented in the world are rising. Moreover, these waves have support from the ground up: the pornography of death that has gained public visibility through ISIS, severed heads, girls held by force, and so on.

Let us admit that never before had such justified reasons for Islamophobia been created.