Muslim Observer

Volume 16, Issue 34; Aug 15 - 21, 2014
news
Islamic State Carves Jihadist Hub
in Heart of Middle East
By Samia Nakhoul
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Ridiculed
at first, the new power
which has seized a third of Iraq
and triggered the first American
air strikes since the U.S. troop
withdrawal in 2011 – has carved
itself a powerful and possibly
lasting presence in the Middle
East.
The bombing of fighters of
the Sunni Islamic State is unlikely
to turn around Iraq and its
fragmented condition has given
the self-proclaimed caliphate the
opportunity to establish a hub of
jihadism in the heart of the Arab
world.
To confront the Islamic State
storming through the villages of
eastern Syria and western Iraq, an
international coalition sanctioned
by the United Nations would
need to be set up, analysts in and
outside the Gulf region said.
The jihadist army, whose
ambition for a cross-border caliphate
between the Euphrates
and the Tigris rivers was not initially
taken seriously by their opponents,
is now brimming with
confidence, emboldened by blood
and treasure.
The warriors of the new caliphate
are exploiting sectarian
and tribal faultlines in Arab society,
petrifying communities into
submission and exploiting the
reluctance of Washington and the
West to intervene more robustly
in the civil war in Syria.
Unlike Osama bin Laden’s
al Qaeda, which set its sights on
destroying the West, the Islamic
State has territorial goals, aims to
set up social structures and rages
against the Sykes-Picot agreement
of 1916 between Britain
and France that split the Ottoman
empire and carved borders across
the Arab lands.
President Barack Obama’s
decision to step back into the Iraq
quagmire nearly three years after
withdrawing U.S. troops, with
limited air strikes in the past few
days against the Islamic State,
arises in part because of inertia
over Syria.
A failure to arm the mainstream,
mostly Sunni, rebellion
against Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian
rule opened space for
the Islamic State, which has now
surged back into a broken Iraq,
raising its black flag in town after
town, the analysts said.
Almost a year ago, in a lastminute
change of mind, Obama
decided against bombing Assad
amid accusations of nerve gas attacks
on rebel enclaves. That decision,
many believe, has proved
costly both in Syria and in neighboring
Iraq.
It reinvigorated Assad,
helped in the quashing of Syria’s
moderate rebels and empowered
the militant Islamists who
became a recruiting magnet for
disenchanted Sunnis in Syria and
Iraq.
GROWING CALIPHATE
Well financed and armed, IS
insurgents have captured large
swathes of territory in a summer
offensive, as the Iraqi army – and
now Kurdish Peshmerga forces
in the self-governing north - have
crumbled in the face of its onslaught,
massacring Shi’ites and
minority Christians and Yazidis
as they advance.
The military campaign has
been accompanied by a social
media blitz showing crucifixions,
beheadings and other atrocities.
To many, the business of the Islamic
State is killing infidels,
and it is better at it that any of its
forerunners including al Qaeda,
which has renounced its offshoot
as too brutal.
Interspersed with footage of
executions, and the marking out
of local minorities for extermination,
the message is that the Islamic
State does not just preach;
it acts mercilessly against its catalog
of enemies.
Using captured territory in
north and eastern Syria, nearly
35 percent of the country, as its
rear base, the IS is now attacking
northeastward into Iraqi Kurdistan
and even west across the border
of Lebanon.
Its rapid advances are made
possible by the disintegration
of Syria and Iraq, alienation of
Sunni communities willing to
ally even with IS to resist governments
they see as under the
thumb of Shi’ite Muslims and
their sponsor in Iran, and Sunni
rage at U.S. and Western policy
in the Middle East.
“If you have tens of thousands
of people who are willing
to fight under its banner, that by
itself tells you that the state system
itself is really almost in tatters,”
says Fawaz Gerges, head
of the Middle East Centre at the
London School of Economics.
Obama justified his air
strikes as humanitarian, to protect
tens of thousands of refugees
from the Yazidi community
threatened with genocide, and
defensive - to thwart any IS advance
on Arbil, capital of the
Kurdistan Regional Government
where U.S. diplomats and special
forces might be at risk.
But as Washington starts
provisioning poorly armed Peshmerga
forces policing a 1,000-
km (600-mile) border against
the new caliphate, the strategic
stakes are becoming clearer. The
United States hopes to revitalize
the Peshmerga, whose name
means those who confront death
but who were driven back by the
IS onslaught.
The United States has also
lined up behind Haidar al-Abadi,
a new Iraqi premier to replace
its former ally Nuri al-Maliki –
spurned by his Iranian backers
and most of his own party as a
liability whose sectarian policies
helped drive Iraq’s Sunni minority
into the jihadist camp. The
political struggle exposed the
treacherous political quicksand
Obama now faces.
Dr Hisham al-Hashimi, a
Baghdad-based researcher into
Iraq’s and the region’s armed
groups, said the Islamic State has
found ways to compensate for its
initial lack of manpower, estimated
by most analysts at between
10,000 and 15,000 fighters before
its rapid advance from Syria into
Iraq.
It may be overstretched by
its sudden conquest of vast territory
but has learned to use fear as
a strategic weapon. “The more it
terrorizes the people of those areas,
the longer it can stay” in control,
Hashimi said. “The caliphate
exists and is growing now, in an
environment where (Sunni opinion)
rejects the central government,
be that in Iraq or in Syria”.
In Syria, more than three
years of thwarted rebellion
against Assad, built around the
ruling family’s minority Alawite
sect, a heterodox offshoot of
Shi’ite Islam, has given the militants
a base in the east and north
and a following among the brutalized
Sunni majority.
In Iraq, the increasingly sectarian
rule of Maliki caused anger
in the Sunni minority, which held
power until the U.S.-led invasion
of 2003 deposed Saddam Hussein.
The IS is well-resourced,
with young volunteers, cash to
buy weapons and pay wages,
plus an arsenal of U.S.-supplied
heavy weapons it captured from
the Iraqi army in June, when it
overran the mainly Sunni cities of
Mosul and Tikrit.
Monster
from pg 3
The article concludes with a
grim statement by Brett McGurk,
a top State Department official
on Iraqi policy. At present Baghdadi
commands not just a terrorist
organization, but “a full blown
army,” McGurk said. Speaking at
a recent congressional hearing, he
warned: “It is worse than Al Qaeda.”
Truthdig
Aside from funding from
sympathizers in the Gulf and tens
of millions raised from theft, extortion
and kidnapping, the Islamic
State has oil. “In eastern Syria
IS controls 50 of the 52 oil wells,
while in the north and northwest
of Iraq there are now 20 oil wells
under the control of IS,” Hashimi
said.
Many experts cautioned
against comparing IS with its predecessor,
the al Qaeda-affiliated
Islamic State of Iraq run by Abu
Mussab al-Zarqawi, which was
at the heart of the anti-American
insurgency and the Sunni-Shi’ite
sectarian blood-letting of 2005-
08. Sunni tribes finally rebelled
against it.
“These are not just barbarians
who came here to steal
what they could and then leave,”
Hashimi says. “They are now
fighting to establish a state, while
Zarqawi fought to topple the central
government – there is a big
difference.”
The new caliphate declared
by its Iraqi leader Abu Bakr al-
Baghdadi is filling the vacuum
of imploding states and, unlike al
Qaeda, are establishing a real social
base, says Gerges.
“The al Qaeda of Osama bin
Laden was a borderless, transnational
movement which has never
been able to find a social base.
The reason to take the IS ... seriously
is because they are like a
social epidemic, feeding on sectarian
tensions and the social and
ideological faultlines in Arab societies,”
Gerges said, adding that
Syria’s Nusra Front other militant
Islamists were following a similar
pattern.
“The phenomenon of the Islamic
State is a manifestation of
the weakening and dismantling of
the Arab state as we know it.”
Gerges also called the militants’
spectacular brutality – the
crucifixions, stoning of women
and now, according to Iraqi ministers,
the burying alive of women
and children from the Yazidi minority
– all publicized over the
Internet, as “a strategic choice”.
IS has an extraordinary ability
to multiply its numbers by recruiting
and indoctrinating volunteers,
feeding them their radical
brand of Islam and training them
Al Aqsa
from pg 14
pressors in history. They act with
impunity and are extremely hostile
toward the indigenous Palestinian
people. Heavily armed,
they shoot at the slightest pretext
and have no regard for Palestinian
life.
The corrupt Muslim rulers
are totally subservient to the imperialists
and Zionists. Reposing
hope in them to rescue the Muslims
is a waste of time. It would
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The Muslim Observer
15
militarily.
Mohsen Sazegara, one of the
founders of Iran’s Revolutionary
Guards who is now a U.S.-based
dissident, said the emergence of
the Islamic State was a reaction
by Sunni factions to Maliki and
his anti-Sunni policies, which
were defended by the Guards.
Maliki, Sazegara said, squandered
the inheritance of the Sahwa,
the U.S.-funded militia drawn
from among the country’s Sunni
Muslim tribes who were a driving
force in fighting al Qaeda predecessors
to IS in Iraq after 2006.
The U.S. decision to hand
over responsibility for the Sahwa
to the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi
government in 2009 was a mistake,
which alienated them and
drove many to join IS ranks.
“U.S. General (David) Petraeus
used the tribes in Iraq to
fight the al Qaeda predecessors
to IS. But Maliki upset the tribes.
The hardline pro-Shi’ite policy of
Iran and Maliki and those around
him led to this Sunni extremism.
Islamic State is one manifestation
of that,” Sazegara said.
The success of the Islamic
State has created a dilemma for
all the Muslim neighbors and beyond
from Saudi Arabia to Libya.
Riyadh, which until now has
seen non-Arab, Shi’ite Iran as ultimately
posing the greater threat,
is worried that the Islamic State’s
territorial gains will radicalize
Saudis who may eventually target
their own government.
The conservative Sunni kingdom
was so concerned by the Islamic
State’s advance in June and
July that it moved tens of thousands
of troops to the border with
Iraq. Yet, Saudi officials say they
do not believe the Islamic State
is capable of posing any military
threat to the mighty Saudi armed
forces.
By contrast, they regard Iran
and its Shi’ite allies across the
region as posing a far more sustained
and dangerous threat to the
kingdom’s position in the Arab
and Islamic world.
Since the invasion of Iraq
and the overthrow of Saddam’s
Sunni-dominated rule, Saudi Arabia
and its Gulf allies have not
accepted the rise to power of the
Shi’ite majority in Iraq.
require a figure like Salahuddin
Ayyubi to rise among the Muslims
to liberate Masjid al-Aqsa
and Palestine from another group
of Crusaders, this time of the Zionist
variety.
Until then, Muslims can pray
and prepare for that day. A good
starting point would be to become
better informed about their
history that seems to have been
largely forgotten.
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