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President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing programme a veneer of legality. This is the old colonial formula of liberal values at home sustained by a hidden illiberalism in the periphery – where routine extra-judicial killing is normalised.

colonial history teaches us that violence always ‘comes home’ in some form: whether as refugees seeking sanctuary, whether as the re-importing of authoritarian practices first practised in colonial settings, or indeed as terrorism.

What results is a mutual reinforcing of the militarized identity narrative on both sides: the jihadists point to numerous speeches by western leaders to support their claim of a war on Islam; and western leaders legitimise war with talk of a ‘generational struggle’ between western values and Islamic extremism. What is striking today is the tired rhetoric of military aggression – Hollande’s “pitiless war” – once again recycled, despite the obvious failures of the past 14 years.

The town of Abu Kamal defies simple characterizations. Indeed, pace Elizabeth O’Bagy’s misleading map in her now infamous Wall Street Journal op-ed, it would be wrong to think of Abu Kamal as a mere stronghold for “extremist groups.” The reality is that there are factions of a range of orientations in Abu Kamal, from non-ideological (Liwa al-Mujahid Omar al-Mukhtar and Liwa Allahu Akbar) to standard Islamist (Kata’ib Allahu Akbar) and pan-Islamist/jihadist (Kata’ib Junud al-Haq/Jabhat al-Nusra and Katiba Bayariq al-Sunna). This kind of arrangement can similarly be found in a number of towns with an ISIS presence, such as Tel Abyaḍ in Raqqa governorate, and Idlib towns like Saraqeb, Salqin and Ma’arat an-Na’aman.

The town of Abu Kamal defies simple characterizations. Indeed, pace Elizabeth O’Bagy’s misleading map in her now infamous Wall Street Journal op-ed, it would be wrong to think of Abu Kamal as a mere stronghold for “extremist groups.” The reality is that there are factions of a range of orientations in Abu Kamal, from non-ideological (Liwa al-Mujahid Omar al-Mukhtar and Liwa Allahu Akbar) to standard Islamist (Kata’ib Allahu Akbar) and pan-Islamist/jihadist (Kata’ib Junud al-Haq/Jabhat al-Nusra and Katiba Bayariq al-Sunna). This kind of arrangement can similarly be found in a number of towns with an ISIS presence, such as Tel Abyaḍ in Raqqa governorate, and Idlib towns like Saraqeb, Salqin and Ma’arat an-Na’aman.