Junior history major

Every war has its iconic image. From World War II, we have a famous image of a Soviet soldier raising his country’s flag on the destroyed Reichstag and of Americans doing the same in Iwo Jima. The Syrian Civil War has boasted its own image, the image of foreign visitors as well as enemies of ISIS being beheaded.

Since 2014, various videos produced by the radical group have surfaced showing the beheading of victims from multiple countries and professions. The victims have ranged from Lebanese soldiers to British aid workers. One executioner stands separate from the rest; he is a masked head-cutter with a noticeable British accent who until recently was given the epithet of “Jihadi John.”

On Feb. 26, The Washington Post reported that the executioner was finally given a name. Jihadi John is, in fact, a Kuwait-born Londoner by the name of Mohammed Emwazi with a computer programming degree.

His story is not unlike that of other radicals such as Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers: he was not of a poor background and was relatively well off, so his economic background clearly was not a factor in his eventual transformation. Emwazi apparently left England for Syria in 2012, not too long before the beheading videos of Jihadi John began to surface. His identity was exposed by friends from London, and needless to say, they do not want anything to do with him. An unnamed cousin confessed that the family hated him and hoped for him to die soon, and his father apparently shares the same feelings.

With regard to Emwazi, I had a discussion with a friend of mine as to what future textbooks will say about him and his employer, ISIS. We both agreed that he, just like the leader of ISIS, is the new poster boy for modern Islamic fundamentalism.

There was a time when bin Laden’s face, with its white turban and long beard, was a synonym for “terrorism,” but he has been replaced ever since his death in 2011. Al-Qaeda no longer seems as relevant as it once was, and it is the Islamic State that is synonymous with “terrorism.”

The so-called Islamic State is an unrecognized entity that is, for all intents and purposes, a state with millions of “citizens” living in an area the size of our home state. With these changes in the past 14 years or so, I wonder, will future historians discard the term “War on Terror” and simply call it World War III or the even the Great Middle East War? Will Jihadi John go down in history as a symbol of ISIS and the breakdown of Iraq and Syria and be featured in the openings of chapters in future history books? It’d be interesting to read what historians will write about this conflict and this executioner.

For my last point, the fact that Emwazi spoke during the executions with an everyday London accent and came from an average British home with a computer programming background, of all things, is a symbol of the absolute disowning of Western civilization and the increasingly global nature of the Syrian Civil War and the breakdown of Iraq.

Emwazi is not the first well-educated Muslim to abandon his or her Western home and head to a distant land to wage a jihad, but he is a prime example of this trend. He now has his family against him, the U.S. government offering bounties leading to his capture and the image of a murderous monster, quite in contrast to his earlier years.

This massive, multifaceted conflict in the Middle East is global in nature because countless people from all over the world from the United States to Pakistan have joined in this endeavor, much like the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Unrelated people of different nationalities and linguistic origins have joined together to fight what they perceive to be a common enemy. It is an intense time in Middle Eastern history, and we must be attentive to it.

Gonzalo Molinolo is a junior history major. He can be reached at gmolinolodbk@gmail.com.