What will be the effect of the apparent death of the infamous “Jihadi John”?
In all likelihood, very little.
It appears that a U.S. drone strike killed “Jihadi John” in Syria last week. Jihadi John, the masked face of ISIS for many in the West, became infamous last year because of his role in the televised execution of U.S. journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, as well as other ISIS captives. The strike occurred late in the night on Nov. 12 in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria. While the Pentagon was unwilling to confirm Jihadi John’s death, it declared itself “reasonably certain” that he had been killed.
Jihadi John – whose real name was Mohammed Emwazi – cut a terrifying figure in videos that shocked the world. Masked, dressed in black and wielding a knife as he stood next to his helpless, kneeling victims, he became a symbol of ISIS’s savagery.
But he was terrifying for another reason, too: the 27 year-old Emwazi was not nursed in the violent atmosphere of the Middle East. On the contrary, he spent almost all his formative years in the United Kingdom, attending local schools and obtaining a college degree in information systems and business management. His radicalization – like that of others elsewhere in Europe and the United States – represented an acute challenge to Western law enforcement and intelligence gathering. Several thousand Westerners (include hundreds of Americans) have joined the fight in Syria and Iraq, mostly on the side of ISIS. Many have or will return home, raising the prospect of trained cadres capable of launching deadly attacks in the United States and Western Europe. The horrifying attacks in Paris last week highlight this threat.
There is no need to mourn the loss of a man who matched barbarous practice with brutal ideology; he was a violent individual who met a suitably violent end. Perhaps the families of his victims will find some comfort in the idea that rough justice has been administered. Let us hope so. It’s even possible that Emwazi’s demise will deter others outside the Middle East from joining ISIS. One suspects that the effect will be minimal. Western Europeans and others willing to throw in their lot with ISIS are driven, after all, by fanaticism, not a narrow cost-benefit analysis. But his death – though newsworthy because of his evil celebrity – will almost certainly have little or no effect on ISIS or the struggle against it. Infamous as he was, Jihadi John was simply not a very important figure in the organization’s command.
Joe Barnes is the Bonner Means Baker Fellow at the Baker Institute. He previously served as a career diplomat with the U.S. State Department, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.