The New York Times
In Syria, the government denounced the group that has been fighting it for months, but so did Qaeda fighters who oppose both the government and the Islamic State. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government for once agreed on something, the barbarity of the militant group for the way it murdered the Jordanian, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Cairo’s thousand-year-old Al Azhar institute and a leading Sunni scholar, was so angered that he called for the Islamic State’s extremists to be “killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs cut off.”
In a way that the beheadings of hostages had not, the immolation of Lieutenant Kasasbeh united the Arab world in an explosion of anger and disgust at the extremists, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or to most Arabs by the word “Daesh,” derived from the extremists’ Arabic acronym.
The sense of anti-Daesh unity made for strange scenes throughout the region. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, caught by surprise in Washington when the video was released, returned home not to anger at his absence, but to a hero’s welcome. Crowds lined his route from the airport to cheer Jordan’s decision to promptly retaliate by executing two convicted terrorists, both with connections to the Islamic State, only hours earlier.
Never known as a charismatic leader, King Abdullah got rave reviews at home for his tough talk in Washington, where in a meeting with congressional leaders he said his retribution would remind people of the Clint Eastwood movie “Unforgiven.”
While the propaganda video, with its vows to kill other fighter pilots bombing Islamic State positions, was clearly aimed at trying to scare Jordan out of the American-led coalition fighting the extremists, it seems to have had the opposite effect among many Jordanians. Jordan is one of a half-dozen Arab countries actively participating in the coalition, in addition to Iraq, and Jordan’s government spokesman said the kingdom would now step up its involvement.
“I guess in a way we lost a pilot, but at the same time I think the government gained a collective support for fighting them, in Jordan and from all around too,” said Adnan Abu-Odeh, a former head of Jordan’s intelligence service. “Daesh have made a big error. When you are weakened as they have been, you try to make your supporters think you are strong by being more monstrous, but this time they went too far.”
In Syria, where a chaotic four-year insurgency provided the Islamic State with an incubator, both those supporting President Bashar al-Assad and those opposing him condemned the act, as did their foreign backers.
Iran, the Syrian government’s most important ally and no friend of Jordan, called the pilot’s killing “inhumane and un-Islamic.” Al Manar, the television station of another ally of the Syrian government, the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, called it “the most gruesome” of many atrocities committed by the Islamic State.
Qatar, which opposes Mr. Assad, likewise condemned the killing as “contravening the tolerant principles” of Islam. Turkey, blamed by many in the region for allowing foreign fighters to cross its borders into Syria, where some join the Islamic State, also chimed in.
Denouncing the Islamic State as a “diabolical” terrorist group, Al Azhar’s leader and grand imam, Mr. Tayeb, cited Quranic verses to show that Islam forbids the burning or mutilation of enemies at war.
“This vile terrorist act,” he said in a statement issued by Al Azhar, “requires punishment as cited by the Quran for oppressors and spoilers on earth who fight God and his prophet, that they be killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs cut off.”
Al Azhar, a seat of Islamic learning, considers itself a beacon of moderation and tolerance for the Sunni Muslim world, and the statement offered no explanation for the incongruity of Mr. Tayeb’s advocating some of the same medieval punishments typically employed by extremists.
Mainstream Arab leaders reacted to the immolation in a categorically different way to the long string of hostage beheadings that preceded it. Partly that may have been because, according to many commentators Wednesday, burning someone alive is prohibited in Islam as a punishment that belongs to God alone, applied in hell. Beheadings, on the other hand, have a long Islamic history.
Others, while condemning the Islamic State, sought to draw attention to the Syrian government’s barrel bombings of cities that, according to Human Rights Watch and other organizations tracking the conflict, kill far more civilians than the extremists — however depraved and attention-grabbing the militant group’s methods.
Khaled Khoja, the president of the main Syrian exile opposition group, linked the pilot’s participation in the struggle against the Islamic State directly to his own country’s opposition’s struggle against Mr. Assad.
“Moaz’s blood has mingled with the soil of our beloved Syria, and whose remains mingled with those of hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed by Assad’s barrel bombs and the terrorist group ISIS,” Mr. Khoja said in a statement. “While I strongly condemn this barbaric act, which symbolizes pure evil that the terrorist group represents, and the deepest of depravity to which they are prepared to sink, I call upon the peoples and governments of the world to stand by the Syrian people and end their suffering caused by the Assad regime and ISIS alike.”
Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that both forms of killing should be condemned.
“ISIS’s despicable conduct shouldn’t make us lose sight of the largest killer of civilians in Syria: Assad’s barrel bombs,” he said in an email. “The world has been reluctant to address them out of a misguided sense that nothing should be done that might constrain the fight against ISIS, but barrel bombs have little if any military significance. They are so inaccurate that the Syrian air force doesn’t dare drop them near the front line for fear of hitting its own troops.”
“It will be hard to win the hearts and minds of the Syrian people by arguing that they should stand up to ISIS’s atrocities while ignoring the government’s,” he said.
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