The Italians got this one right. Two weeks ago, The Washington Post’s Adam Taylor helpfully collected tweets that Italians put out after a murderous video issued by the Islamic State, or ISIS, warned: “Today we are south of Rome,” one militant said. “We will conquer Rome with Allah’s permission.”

As the hashtag #We_Are_Coming_O_Rome made the rounds in Italy, Rome residents rose to the challenge. Their tweets, Taylor noted, included:

• #We_Are_Coming_O_Rome ahahah Be careful on the highway-Ring Road: there’s too much traffic, you would remain trapped!

• #We_Are_Coming_O_Rome hey just a tip: don’t come in train, it’s every time late!

• #We_Are_Coming_O_Rome You’re too late, Italy is already been destroyed by their governments.

• #We_Are_Coming_O_Rome We are ready to meet you! We have nice Colosseum plot for sale, Accept Credit Cards Securely, bargain price.

The Islamic State’s murderous ways are not a joke, but the Italians’ mocking of it is rather appropriate. While we agonisingly debate the group’s relationship to Islam, we have forgotten a simple truth about many of the people attracted to such groups. It is the truth uttered by Mr Ruslan Tsarni on CNN after his two nephews, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were accused of the Boston Marathon bombing. They were only two losers, he said, who resented those who did better than them and dressed it up in ideology. “Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, is a fraud, is a fake.”

COUNTERING The ISLAMIC STATE’S THREE FACTIONS

There is a lot of truth in that. The Islamic State is made up of three loose factions and we need to understand all three before we get deeper into another war in Iraq and Syria. One faction comprises the foreign volunteers. Some are hardened jihadists, but many are only losers, misfits, adventure seekers and young men who have never held power, a job or a girl’s hand and joined the organisation to get all three. I doubt many are serious students of Islam or that offering them a more moderate version would keep them home. If the Islamic State starts losing, and cannot offer jobs, power or sex, this group will shrink.

The group’s second faction, its backbone, is made up of former Sunni Baathist army officers and local Iraqi Sunnis and tribes, who give the Islamic State passive support. Although Iraqi Sunnis constitute a third of Iraq’s population, they have ruled Iraq for generations and simply cannot accept the fact that the Shia majority is now in charge. Also, for many Sunni villagers under the Islamic State’s control, it is only less bad than the brutalisation and discrimination they received from Iraq’s previous Shia-led government. Google “Iraqi Shia militias and power drills” and you will see that the Islamic State did not invent torture in Iraq.

The United States keeps repeating the same mistake in the Middle East: Overestimating the power of religious ideology and underappreciating the impact of misgovernance. Ms Sarah Chayes, who long worked in Afghanistan, has written an important book, Thieves Of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, about how government corruption helped turn Afghans away from the US and from the pro-US Afghan regime. She argues that nothing feeds extremism more than the in-your-face corruption and injustice that some of America’s closest Middle East allies administer daily to their people.

The third Islamic State faction is composed of the true ideologues, led by Mr Abu Bakr Baghdadi. They have their own apocalyptic version of Islam. But it would not be resonating were it not for the fact that “both religion and politics have been hijacked” in the Arab world and Pakistan, creating a “toxic mix”, said Mr Nader Mousavizadeh, who co-leads the global consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners. The Arab peoples have been mostly ruled by radicals or reactionaries. And without the prospect of a legitimate politics “that genuinely responds to popular grievances”, no amount of top-down attempts to engender moderate Islam will succeed, he added.

Islam has no Vatican to decree whose Islam is authentic, so it emerges differently in different contexts. There is a moderate Islam that emerged in decent political, social and economic contexts — see Indian Islam, Indonesian Islam and Malaysian Islam — and never stood in the way of their progress. And there are puritanical, anti-pluralistic, anti-modern education, anti-women Islams that emerged from the more tribalised corners of the Arab world, Nigeria and Pakistan, helping hold these places back.

That is why Islamic State is not only an Islam problem and not only a “root causes” problem. The group is a product of decades of failed governance in the Arab world and Pakistan and centuries of a calcification of Arab Islam. They feed off each other. Those who claim it is only one or the other are dead wrong.

So, to defeat the group and not see another emerge, you need to: Wipe out its leadership; enlist Muslims to discredit the very real, popular and extremist versions of Islam coming out of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; stem the injustice, corruption, sectarianism and state failure now rampant in the Arab world and Pakistan; and carve out for Iraqi Sunnis their own autonomous region of Iraq and a share of its oil wealth, as the Kurds have. I know: Sounds impossible. But this problem is very deep. This is the only route to a more moderate Arab Islam — as well as to fewer young men and women looking for dignity in all the wrong places. THE NEW YORK TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at The New York Times.