The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) stipulates that if a country is unable or unwilling to protect its civilians from mass atrocities, then the international community must act swiftly to fill the protection void. First introduced in 2001 by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), set up and supported in large part because of the leadership of Canada, the policy idea was to acknowledge national sovereignty entails human rights responsibilities and that government leaders would adhere to this. Its origins are traced to the failure to stop the atrocities that marked the 1990s, in particular the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The introduction of R2P is intrinsically linked to acts of violence made in the name of religion. The ICISS report, which introduced R2P, did not get as much attention as it deserved in 2001, partly due to the fact that it was made public just after the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda. Simply put, the Saudi Arabians who diverted commercial passenger planes into two New York City skyscrapers, causing a mass atrocity that claimed the lives of three thousand civilians, fundamentally altered many governments’ security and foreign affairs priorities.

In the months and years after the twin towers were brought down, many capitals focused on countering non-state actors and governments who use terrorism as a form of asymmetrical warfare. Worrying about the human security of other country’s citizens, or enforcing the Genocide convention, seemed to be gaining momentum after the NATO mission to protect Kosovo (and its predominantly Muslim citizens) from the ultra-nationalist Slobodan Milosevic regime, but fell off the agenda of many countries for a few years.

Stopping future terrorist attacks, or mass casualty attacks (mass atrocities) on U.S. soil was seen as a hard security issue, not necessarily connected to human rights. Countering religiously inspired violence by jihadists would be seen through a counter-terrorism lens, while protecting people living outside of the West from mass atrocities was seen entirely through a humanitarian lens (R2P).

R2P was, and is, a hopeful idea. It is also an aspiring norm with supporters taking root among national governments, parliamentarians and elected officials, the United Nations and international organizations, faith leaders, celebrities, NGOs, journalists and individual citizens. Simon Adams, executive director of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, remarked “We have won the battle of ideas. Within the UN, the debate is about how R2P should be meaningfully implemented in specific cases, not whether such a responsibility exists in the abstract. The challenge for us, therefore, is to strengthen the politics of non-indifference.” A global civil society and political constituency for R2P is emerging. But, this community could falter if we attach R2P to counter-terrorism‎ and counter-extremism.

As we bear witness to the terrible human rights abuses taking place in Syria and Iraq, one must ask what is driving the atrocities? Let us highlight the fact that ISIS’ actions are driven by an ideology rooted in intolerance and hatred of diversity. ISIS takes the idea of “jihad[11]” to ultimate extremes:  infidels (non-Muslims), and Muslims who don't conform rigorously to Sharia law are targeted as "enemies of God" against whom they are obligated to respond with violence. 

History reminds us that people haven’t always been able to rely on other states and international organizations to protect them. This past October UN Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura made an impassioned plea: “Do you remember Srebrenica?” he asked. “We do. We never forget and probably never forgave ourselves. When there is an imminent threat to civilians, we cannot, we should not, be silent.”  He compared the siege of the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria by ISIS with the murder of 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.

Today, as the battle continues to rage on in Kobane – while NATO member Turkey’s military[12] sits idly just across the border – the U.S.-led coalition’s air power has hit ISIS hard, allowing civilians to flee and permitting Kurdish militias to reorganize and protect the city. Air power is better than no power, and with a small number of Iraqi fighters belonging to the Kurdish pershmerga (“those who face death”) finally having crossed into Syria, via Turkey, ISIS might very well suffer a strategic defeat.  

But here’s the clincher: The horrors we’re seeing in Iraq and Syria today (and, by extension, around the world) could have been prevented, or at least mitigated. The rise of ISIS can be attributed mostly, if not entirely, to the international community’s failure to act upon R2P in Syria. Al-Assad’s brutal attack against unarmed civilians dragged his country into a civil war, with numerous Arab states[13] supplying weapons and funds to a deadly combination of non-state actors, including ISIS. The air attacks against ISIS are helping enforce the goals of R2P, as the international community works to do more to halt and interdict mass atrocity crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. But has it come too late?

President Barack Obama, who withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, cited the threat of genocide[14] as the reason to deploy air strikes against ISIS in August to safeguard the 40,000 Yezidis who had fled jihadi violence and sought safety on the desolate Mount Sinjar. Within a day of the start of the offensive at least 20,000 Yezidis civilians had managed to flee to safety. The air strikes and the arming of the Kurdish peshmerga have also allowed some territory to be retaken from ISIS. Actions in support of R2P may be selectively enforced at times, but that is preferable to it being disregarded entirely.

It would seem that ISIS has lit a match under the feet of many who were indifferent to atrocities in the past. The sad fact is that ISIS, a Frankenstein like atrocity-producing monster, is now on the loose and in control over parts of Iraq and Syria, which together geographically equal the size of the United Kingdom. ISIS is now more powerful than al Qaeda ever was. The growing and “unprecedented” number of foreign jihadists[15] (the UN reports one thousand per month) flocking to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria is mindboggling. More than 15,000 people, drawn from over eighty countries, are now part of ISIS’ ranks. “Numbers since 2010 are now many times the size of the cumulative numbers of foreign terrorist fighters between 1990 and 2010 – and are growing,” says the UN report.

We live in a world where mass atrocities take place on a regular basis. Some of the people who commit these crimes are driven to do so by distorted and extremist views of religion and an obligation to wage jihad (holy war through violence and intimidation) directed most often at civilians. What is the future of atrocity prevention in an age where civilians from over 80 countries are willing to travel to join groups committing mass atrocities with the goal of establishing a “Caliphate ”?

This question raises a number of issues. First, governments who have the capacity to react with military force will continue to be reluctant in deploying "boots on the ground". UN peacekeeping aside, both the NATO air campaign against Libya and the current coalition assembled to confront ISIS are examples of how western countries prefer to keep their military personnel as safe as possible and would rather conduct operations from the air, or employ drones. The fear of military casualties weighs heavily on domestic political leaders who fear a backlash from their constituents back home.

Secondly, we have seen governments, Western ones in particular, react swiftly to humanitarian crises where those groups directly involved in committing atrocities are also hostile to the West and the United Nations . In other words, taking on jihadist groups like Islamic State, Boko Haram in Nigeria and ‎al Shabaab in Somalia offers Western governments both a humanitarian and strategic benefit. The message is that degrading the abilities of jihadist groups can protect human rights abroad and domestically. Mixed motives do exist and in this case they take on a strategic imperative. Whether human rights advocates like it or not, governments have limited resources and will direct them in a strategic and selective manner.

The growth of the transnational jihadist movement has caught many countries off guard while also exposing the magnitude of the problem. The sheer number of international crises coupled with a lack of collective political will to build long-term structures that can enforce international law means that our policy choices to uphold R2P are limited. Policy-makers will be grappling with the question as to whether we apply a broad approach to atrocity prevention or focus our attention on transnational jihadist groups who willfully target civilians. Furthermore, does the prevention of mass atrocities apply to stopping western citizens from joining groups that are committing atrocities? Does countering ISIS and jihadist online propaganda and incitement to commit violence remain strictly a counter-terrorism issue, or an R2P issue, or both?

Alliances must be formed to implement R2P and combat genocide. The transatlantic community, including Canada, has a collective intelligence, economic, political and military capacity that can, and should, be mobilized to assist states under stress from jihadi violence. Part of that effort needs to include preventing jihadists (including those in the West) from traveling to join ISIS and other similar groups including Boko Haram and al Shabaab . Likewise combatting their propaganda online, which is used to incite Muslims to commit violent acts, must be taken more seriously. Genocide begins with words, not actions, and those who incite and indoctrinate people to commit violence need to be confronted with the full force of the law. In early October the European Union and major social media companies like Twitter and Facebook met in Luxembourg to cooperate in fighting online extremism.

Political leaders and the public regretfully see R2P as an external obligation, tied exclusively to foreign policy. However, it is also an obligation of national governments to protect their citizens from these transnational extremist groups. But R2P’s confluence with counter-terrorism will make many humanitarians and human rights defenders uneasy.

Difficult discussions lie ahead but there is no disputing that we are witnessing the overlap between the atrocity prevention field and counter-terrorism activities to combat religious extremists. In an era where the burden of casualties falls on civilians, not soldiers, we are about to enter into a serious discussion.