War on Isis: Former foes have a common aim in defending civilisation from a perverted form of Islam

Civilised values will win in the end – but the savagery, rape, murder and terror of militant Islamism is on the march

'The threat is so pervasive that old quarrels between nations are being forgotten' (Reuters)

In Paris, yet another body has been found – a woman’s – in the flat in Saint-Denis, the suburb raided by police hunting those responsible for murdering 130 people just over a week ago. In Mali, 10 gunmen shouting “Allah is great” stormed a luxury hotel, bringing terror and death. In Iraq, violence of that kind is so commonplace that news organisations barely mentioned that 10 people have been killed and 28 injured in another suicide attack on a Shia mosque in southern Baghdad. In Malaysia, the police fear that as many as 10 suicide bombers may have slipped into Kuala Lumpur, where leaders of 18 states are due to assemble for a summit of South-east Asian nations.

Earlier in the week, Isis boastfully published a photo of what it says was the bomb used to bring down a Russian Airbus, killing 224. It also announced that it had murdered two men, a Chinese and a Norwegian, it had been holding hostage, and it was Isis, purportedly, that posted a video of a suicide bomber getting ready to strike in Times Square in New York.

In Nigeria, Islamist fanatics killed 49 people and injured 123 in two separate attacks on successive days. Last week, on the day preceding the murderous attacks in Paris, 43 people died when a suicide bomb was detonated in a Beirut shopping district.

Randomly killing people in the name of Islam has become a sick fashion across the globe. The threat is so pervasive that old quarrels between nations are being forgotten, and it appears that the United Nations Security Council is on the verge of an almost unprecedented show of unity.

The French are urging every member of the UN “with the capacity to do so” to join in eradicating Isis in the territory it holds in Syria and Iraq. Earlier in the week, David Cameron played down the importance of UN backing for air strikes on Syria because of the possibility of a Russian veto. Achieving unanimous agreement over what to do in Syria, beyond sending humanitarian aid, has proved impossible up to now because Russia is committed to protecting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while the Western powers insist that he must go.

But the French resolution is narrowly focused on the single issue of flushing out Isis. And since Isis has boasted of murdering Russian air passengers and a Chinese hostage, in addition to the dead in Paris and Beirut, and since both Russia and China are worried about a fundamentalist ideology spreading through their own Muslim populations, the risk that any permanent member of the Security Council will veto it has all but disappeared.

Not all the recent terrorist outrages are attributable to the group known as Isis. The carnage in Nigeria was the work of Boko Haram; the Mali gunmen probably belong to a group associated with al-Qaeda. People were killed by Islamist fanatics long before Isis existed, and eliminating that organisation will not stop others from trying to spread death and terror.

Nonetheless, the huge tract of land that Isis controls, spanning the Syria-Iraq border, is where terrorists such as the Paris bombers turn to for weapons, money, training and ideological inspiration. If Isis were eradicated, organising another attack like the one inflicted on the French capital would be vastly more difficult.

Of course civilised values will win in the end. But right now the savagery, rape, murder and terror of militant Islamism is on the march.