Manama: Bahrain will persist in combating terrorism and will be relentless in taking the necessary measures to combat the phenomenon, the foreign minister has said.
“We continue to closely monitor frontiers and outlets so as to stop the citizens of the kingdom from contacting terrorist groups or joining them,” Shaikh Khalid Bin Ahmad Al Khalifa said. “We continue to arrest all those who have allegedly been affiliated to them as soon as they return to the country and to prosecute them,” the minister said as he addressed the 69th United Nations General Assembly in New York on Monday.
The measures are part of a three-axis strategy adopted by the island kingdom to help ensure a stable and secure region.
“Combating terrorist groups requires us to work together along three major axis. First, the security and military axis following the aggravation of the threat posed by terrorist groups as they acquire heavy weapons, enabling them to occupy cities that they use as a safe haven and base from which they launch their terrorist operations endangering the stability and security of our region,” he said. “Hence, our common responsibility with sisterly countries and our allies to eradicate the terrorist group of Daesh. To this end, our air force, in collaboration with these countries, targeted a number of Daesh positions. We welcome Security Council resolution 2178 which focuses on stopping the recruitment of foreign terrorist fighters,” he said.
The second axis of the strategy is to fight the ideology that deforms human nature, diverts true Islam from its essence and disfigures its principles.
“Herein lies the importance of the role of Muslim religious figures and scholars to counteract such a misguided thought. We call upon all Muslim scholars to discard and incriminate those ideas that are not related to Islam in any way; we appreciate their leading role in this respect. It is imperative to stand together in the face of the ideas propagated by those terrorist groups,” he said.
Addressing ways to drying up the financing of terrorist groups is the final axis of the strategy.
‘Extremely difficult times’
“Finances constitute the lifeline for those terrorist groups, enabling them to perpetrate their barbaric acts. Based on this, the Kingdom of Bahrain is convening a high-level international conference during the first week of November to examine the financing of terrorism, how best to combat it and dry up its sources. We firmly believe that ending the financing of terrorism is half the battle to defeat and eventually eliminate them,” he said.
Shaikh Khalid drew a gloomy picture of the situation in the Middle East.
“Our region is going through extremely difficult times, maybe the most challenging in its modern history, in which a state of instability, chaos, tension and savage, bloody and unprecedented terrorism prevails,” the minister said.
Top among the challenges is the multiplication of terrorist groups, with various global dimensions and affiliations.
“They thrive in our region with greater savagery and callousness. They not only target innocent people in general but also aggravate their inhumane practices by mass murder, public beheadings and the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, displacing them and destroying their cultural and civilisational heritage, depriving them from their religious freedom and their habitat. They attack entire cities and they declare war on sovereign countries regionally and internationally with complete disregard for all religious doctrines and intrinsic human nature. These terrorist groups destroy Islamic values under the pretext of Islam to which they are completely alien. Terrorist sectarian groups, such as Al Qaida, Daesh and Hezbollah along with its extensions, recruit fighters from the East and the West to perpetrate horrible terrorist acts. The young and the old are killed, women are taken as war booty, families are displaced and privacy is violated. Their objective is to undermine security, propagate anarchy and topple regimes,” he said.
