ISLAMABAD:
The Foreign Office has decided not to call Middle East’s terrorist outfit Islamic State, but instead refer to it as ‘Daesh’, a name that the group has reportedly been stated to ‘hate’.
“I would refer to the outfit as Daesh as there is nothing Islamic about it,” Foreign Office spokesman Qazi Khalilullah said in reply to a question at his weekly media briefing on Thursday.
The foreign ministry had previously been using both IS and Daesh in its statements.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was amongst the first few who avoided calling the group with the name ‘Islamic State’ and later US, Australian leaders followed.
There have also been calls by Muslim scholars for calling the group Daesh in a move to de-legitimise it.
The group likes to be called Islamic State because it negates the concept of borders and promotes a vision of one Muslim caliphate.
Daesh is an Arabic acronym for `Al Dawla al Islamyia fil Iraq wal Sham’, the group’s original name, which was translated as`Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ or `Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’.