Islamic State uses image of Alan Kurdi to threaten Syrian refugees for fleeing

Islamic State is using the shocking image of a drowned Kurdish boy to suggest that refugees fleeing the grinding brutality of the Syrian civil war deserve their fate.

A photograph of three-year old Alan Kurdi, face down and lifeless on the Turkish beach where his body washed ashore, sparked global outrage and placed new pressure on European leaders to admit Syrian refugees. His family was seeking the safety of Canada after fleeing Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish city that Isis besieged and assaulted for months before being driven off by US-backed Kurdish fighters.

Now Isis has published a photograph of the boy, whose name was initially misreported as Aylan, in an article for its English-language magazine Dabiq under the headline “The Danger of Abandoning Darul-Islam”, or Islamic lands, a term the article implies means Isis’s own self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

It is not the only inflammatory photograph contained in Dabiq’s newest edition, published on Wednesday, which includes a two-page pictorial spread celebrating its destruction of the ancient temple of Bel in Palmyra, a cultural artifact whose construction began in 32 BCE.

Refugees from Syria commit “a major dangerous sin” by seeking shelter in the west, the Isis article proclaims, a sin that mortgages the lives and souls of their children.

“Sadly, some Syrians and Libyans are willing to risk the lives and souls of those whom they are responsible to raise upon the Sharī’ah – their children – sacrificing many of them during the dangerous trip to the lands of the war-waging crusaders ruled by laws of atheism and indecency,” the article states.

In western lands, refugees and their families “are under the constant threat of fornication, sodomy, drugs and alcohol”, even if they do not fall into apostasy, the article says. Leaving the caliphate opens “a gate towards one’s children and grandchildren abandoning Islam for Christianity, atheism or liberalism”.

While many European nativist opponents of resettling the Syrian refugees claim that they will change the character of Europe, Isis warns that it’s the other way around.

“If they don’t fall into sin, they will forget the language of the Koran – Arabic – which they were surrounded by in Sham [Syria], Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, making the return to the religion and its teachings more difficult,” Isis contends.

In keeping with Isis’s blend of sectarianism, the 11th issue of the militant group’s magazine devotes considerable energy to attacking other jihadist militant and terrorist factions.

Continuing its war with al-Qaida, Isis excoriates what used to be its parent organization for going along with the two-year ruse that Taliban leader Mullah Omar was still alive. (It calls new Taliban leader Akhtar Mansoor an “infamous liar” and stooge of Pakistani intelligence.) Members of al-Qaida are “blind sheep … [who] do not think for themselves, and instead allow their personal desires and that of their blind shepherds to lead them on”.

Reportedly, a new audiotape from the near-invisible leader of al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, struck a conciliatory note. While Zawahiri continues to denounce Isis as illegitimate, he reportedly stated that were he in Iraq or Syria, “I would cooperate with them in killing the crusaders and secularists and Shiites”.

In the magazine, Isis’s al-Qaida rivals in Syria, the Nusra Front, are portrayed as tools of Nato ally Turkey and the UK prime minister, David Cameron. Hamas in Gaza is termed fraudulent and inauthentically Islamic, “a nationalist entity actively adopting democracy as a means of change since ‘2005’”.

The “hidden imam” of the Shias, whom Isis loathes, is portrayed as a crypto-Jew, as illustrated by a picture of the antisemitic former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greeting an orthodox Jewish man. A caption on a picture of the destruction of the World Trade Center asserts that “the Crusaders were cooperating with Iran prior to September 11 and following the blessed attacks their cooperation grew”.

Isis also claimed that the group is holding two new hostages: a 48-year old Norwegian citizen, Ole Johan Grimsgaard-Ofstad, and a 50-year old Chinese citizen, Fan Jinghui. The magazine showed them in yellow jumpsuits and published a telegraph number for a “limited time” ransom offer. It does not say when or where they were abducted. Isis has beheaded other hostages.