A recent article by Hannah Roberts in The Tablet, a Catholic weekly international magazine, quotes a close Muslim friend of Pope Francis urging the West not to play into the hands of IS militants by equating their acts of terror to a religious war.

Omar Abboud, who accompanied the Pope on his trip to the Holy Land earlier this year, said that to respond to violence in the Middle East as though it were a religious war would be “a terrible mistake” insisting: “Either you are a terrorist or you are a Muslim. You cannot be both.”

In an interview in a Jesuit periodical, the former secretary general of the Islamic Centre of Argentina, a friend of Francis from his Buenos Aires days, said the terrorists recruit by “twisting the words of the Qur’an, turning it into an ideology they use to fulfil their own interests rooted in money and power.”