May 28th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey
When Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, returned to Jerusalem earlier this month, he was asked by colleagues what story he would be covering. The story seemed evident to Jeremy. It was of course the ongoing violence perpetrated by individual Palestinians against Israelis and the hard handed response by Israeli security forces. To his colleagues, that story had lost its news value, it was something that had already been going on for some eight months and had become part of the fabric of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That may indeed be true and yet it is that very fabric that is becoming toxic on more than one level and that is changing in the wake of the popular Arab revolts of five years ago. For sure, the violence reflects the hardening of Israeli and Palestinian sentiments against one another. It is a hardening that takes place among reduced, if not the absence, of contact with one another given travel restrictions on Palestinians going to Israel and Israelis who would want to visit the West Bank outside of the Jewish settlements. Yet, the violence has more than at any other time since the wave of suicide bombings in the early 2000s spread fear among Israeli Jews who no longer feel safe when they take public transportation, are increasingly suspicious of people they see on the street, and avoid areas in Jerusalem or around Umm el Fahm in the Galilee that they no longer feel are secure.
It is a fabric in which significant segments of Israeli and Palestinian society no longer see peace as a realistic option. For Palestinians, the response is resistance that can consist of individual acts rather than an organized struggle. For Israeli Jews, it is the long proven false belief that hard-handed responses to violent acts and repression will keep Palestinian anger and frustration in check. It’s also for Israelis, an increasingly blatant and racist attitude among a majority that believes that only the Israeli right led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can ensure Israel’s security.
The degree to which racism pervades Israeli society was evident in a recent report presented to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin that concluded that three quarters of youth in Israel, Jewish and Palestinian, had experienced discrimination at the hands of the police or in the classroom on the basis of their origin or physical appearance. Eighty percent of those surveyed often turned to alcohol for solace. Ironically, opposition to an Israeli right whose attitudes towards Palestinians threaten to spin out of control is strongest among the Israeli military’s senior officer corps.
Maysam Abu Alqian, an aspiring psychology student who works at a supermarket opposite the Tel Aviv municipality to earn money for his education, was assaulted this month by three border guards as he was throwing out trash. The guards kicked him in the face and body, forcing him to seek medical help at a hospital. Had someone not filmed the incident on his smartphone, it would never have become public. Tag Meier Forum, an umbrella for some 50 groups that fight racism in Israel, asserts that verbal attacks and physical abuse against Palestinians are becoming common.
Tag Meier chairman Gadi Gvaryahu says his group has documented 30 cases in which men who spoke Arabic in public had been attacked and had sustained injuries ranging from slight to life-long disability. The Forum says only 20 percent of reported hate crimes make it to court. The group recorded 1,562 reports of such crimes committed by Israeli Jews between 2013 and 2015 of which only 287 resulted in indictments. The majority of cases were closed due to “lack of public interest” or because the perpetrators were not found.
Netanyahu appeared to reinforce tolerance of racism when he this month appointed ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman as his defence minister. Recently, Lieberman publicly praised Sgt. Elor Azaria, an Israeli soldier for fatally shooting a wounded Palestinian assailant in the head as he was lying on the ground awaiting medical attention and subsequently attended Azaria’s trial in a gesture of solidarity. Azaria, a medic, was caught on video shooting a Palestinian who together with another Palestinian had lightly wounded an Israeli soldier in a knife attack.
Racist supporters of notorious soccer club Beitar Jerusalem, the bad boy of Israeli football and the only club that refuses to hire Palestinian players, this month verbally assaulted Nadwa Jaber, a Palestinian teacher at a bilingual school in the mixed Israeli Jewish-Israeli Palestinian community of Neve Shalom. Writing on Facebook. Rotem Yadlin, a mother of one of Jaber’s Jewish students wrote: “Nadwa educates kids to a life of equality and fraternity, co-existence, peace, faith in mankind. You may be real heroes who know how to spit at a six-year-old girl. We, on the other hand, will keep dreaming together and making this country a better place — for the sake of Amit, (Yadlin’s daughter], Jaber’s daughter, (6-year-old Intissar), for ourselves, for Nadwa.”
Neve Shalom, an effort to prove that Israeli Jews and Palestinians can live together, is the exception. By and large, fear of one another coupled with the erosion of hope for an equitable solution and the fall out of the Arab revolts is rupturing the fabric of society, Israeli Jewish society, Israeli Palestinian society and Palestinian society on the West Bank. Palestinians irrespective of whether they carry Israeli passports or live under occupation have no expectations from an Israeli government and society they see as racist. Similarly, Israelis doubt the Palestine Authority’s sincerity in seeking peace and believe that Palestinians whether with Israeli passports or without simply hate Jews. Youth on both sides of the divide share the experience of the second intifada, the disappointment of the Oslo peace process, and the subsequent expansion of Israeli settlements and security barriers. Many endorse a two-state solution but don’t believe it is a realistic one.
It is a stalemate constructed on mirror images of one another that is sparking changing attitudes among Israeli Jewish, Israeli Palestinian and Palestinian youth. It is also a reflection of a paradigm shift as a result of the popular revolts and of a global phenomenon in which many have lost confidence in whatever system they live under and whoever leads them. A picture published at the beginning of the most recent cycle of violence highlighted the paradigm shift. It showed a girl in jeans and a kaffiyeh passing rocks to a masked boy sporting a Hamas headband.
What I want to do today is focus on Palestinian youth for whom the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a constant in their lives but who are equally and more immediately concerned with social and economic issues that affect their daily lives. In doing so, the long-term effects of the popular Arab revolts are evident in their willingness to openly and publicly confront their parents, elders, communal and other leaders. Like swaths of youth across the globe, they believe that political systems and leaders have marginalized and failed them.
Abed Abu Shehade is a 22-year old student and activist from Jaffa for the Balad Party, one of three Israeli Palestinian parties that formed a common list to make it into the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. As far as Abed and his friends are concerned, getting the party into parliament is proving to have been a wasted effort. The party has no impact on Israeli policy and like much of the Palestinian establishment is unwilling to acknowledge social changes that are occurring in Palestinian society as a result of a youth that feels it has either no or only limited social and economic prospects, is viewed with prejudice not only by Israeli Jews but also by Palestinians, and whose social mores are changing. His is a generation of Palestinians that wears distressed denim, is active on social media, listens to Western music, and watches Hollywood movies. None of this says anything about their religiosity.
If Israeli Jews fear Palestinian youth when they see them on a street, uncertain whether they may wield a knife against them, Palestinians are not sure whether youth they encounter on the street are common criminals or not. Crime as a result of lack of opportunity and un- or under employment among Palestinian youths is but one major concern that Palestinian society is unwilling to openly discuss.
If Palestinian youth expect to be humiliated by Israeli Jews, it’s the humiliation by their own that really hits home. Standing with a friend in line at kiosk in Jaffa several years ago, Abed noted in front of them a middle-aged Palestinian woman, a local politician, clutch her hand bag, afraid that they intended to rob her. “I never felt so humiliated in my life,” Abed said. Had they been initially willing to do anything the woman might have asked of them, Abed and his friends’ response to her assumption that they were common thieves was to intimidate her even more.
Abed and his friend’s response is reflective of a Palestinian youth that not only feels it has no prospects but also that the issues that concern it most are hushed up. Stigmatization by both Israelis and Palestinians and fear of the police and criminal gangs is but one of the problems. Palestinian youths are being pulled in multiple directions, the religious charge they are not religious enough while secularists charge they are too religious. Their concerns unrecognized, political apathy reigns as a result of which Palestinian youth in Israel and the West Bank often stand accused of not being engaged. They feel damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Israeli Palestinian youth hold a racist Israeli society responsible for their plight but feel a Palestinian society that refuses to acknowledge their plight is equally guilty. Abed recalls a childhood friend being released from prison. A social worker came to visit and advised him how to best reintegrate into society. The friend described to her dropping out of school to help his family make ends meet. His brother forced him to sell drugs while his mother helplessly watched her sons go off on a wrong track. That’s when I needed help, he told the social worker: ‘Where were you then?’ A few weeks, later the activist found his friend’s body on a street riddled with bullets.
Crime, say youth activists is one of the foremost issues, certainly among Israeli Palestinian youth. Drugs is another. So is the fact that pre-marital relationships have become more common, yet cannot be openly discussed. In what seems anti-cyclical, the picture of a Middle East turning more conservative is not immediately evident on the streets of Israeli Palestinian towns like Sakhnin, Arrabe or Deir Hassan in the Galilee, where uncovered, fashionable dressed youth, male and female, is as common as ones who uphold more conservative dress codes.
Social attitudes also appear to be changing on the West Bank. Five years ago members of the Palestinian national women’s soccer team described battles within their families about their right to play. At times their matches, had to be played in empty stadia and guarded by police to protect them from attack by conservative religious forces. Today, the player’s team speak about their family’s support and that they are proud of the fact that they represent Palestine and project it favourably internationally. Stadia host a growing number of fans whenever they play.
Ironically, Palestinian Authority-governed territory, and particularly Ramallah, is attracting Israeli Palestinian youth who feel they have a greater opportunity to be themselves in an urban environment as opposed to the smaller towns they hail from in Israel. Ramallah is however no solution for a problem that threatens to further fracture the fabric of Israeli society, both Jewish and Palestinian.
Similarly, Israeli Palestinian soccer players who play key roles in Israeli clubs increasingly opt to play for West Bank teams and the Palestinian national team rather than its Israeli counterpart. The Shebab Hebron football club recently won for the first time in 30 years the West Bank’s championship, thanks to five new players, all Israeli Palestinians. Six Israeli Palestinians currently play for Palestine instead of Israel. In Palestine they don’t encounter the kind of racism that often greets them in Israeli stadiums.
“Professionalism in Israel is better. But it is developing here and I’m sure that in a few years it will be completely professional,” said Abu Obeideh Rabie, one of the players who moved to Hebron. The moves have not been without problems. Palestinian club Al-Dharia was recently sanctioned after several of the club’s players were barred entry into Lebanon because they carried Israeli identity documents. Israeli citizens are barred from travelling to Lebanon.
Influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is widely viewed as sympathetic to Israel, warned in a recent column that Israel’s travails were in part due to its “desire to destroy itself.” Friedman suggested that Netanyahu would soon become the prime minister of the State of Israel-Palestine as a result of his refusal to come to peace terms with the Palestinians. The implication was that demographics against the backdrop of continued control of West Bank Palestinians would force Israel, if it wants to retain its Jewish character, to continue discriminating Palestinians and would risk becoming the equivalent of an apartheid state.
All of this, points to a powder keg. Israel’s national intelligence estimate warned this year that violence would escalate in the absence of a credible pace process. Social and economic issues are not always what persuades West Bank Palestinians to randomly stab an Israeli. It often is a sense of, humiliation as well as lack of security and freedom as a result of occupation, societal attitudes, and failed political leadership that prompts reasonably successful men and women to attempt to take someone else’s life and waste their own.
Fact of the matter is, no one knows if the powder keg will erupt, and if so, how it will erupt. Escalation of the violence of the past eight months is one possibility. Mass protests as occurred last year as the violence initially erupted is another. There is little doubt that in theory the building blocks for a popular uprising in Palestinian lands are in place.
Palestinian protests are frequently directed as much against the Israelis as they are against the Palestinian leadership. Protests like the second intifada are often preceded by calls for reform that went unheeded. Palestinian youth and civic society groups have made through numerous initiatives and protests clear that they want a say in determining their future, one that puts an end to Israeli occupation and domination and that accords them greater freedom in their own society. Their demands for an end to the occupation, the lifting of the yoke of the Israeli security forces, reform of the PLO, national unity, social justice, and an end to corruption are similar to what fuelled the Arab revolts. Yet, like in many cases in the Middle East and elsewhere it remains impossible to predict if and under what circumstances a revolt may occur.
The stabbings have in common with the popular Arab revolts that they emanate from an amorphous, leaderless whole. They fit the pattern of the unusual suspects who drove the Arab revolts. Yet unlike the revolts they remain the spontaneous acts of individuals and at least until now have not jelled into something organized.
The stabbings tell us that discontent is boiling at the surface. These uncoordinated violent outbursts of anger are one form of resistance alongside the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and local peaceful protest. They are also an expression of frustration with the lack of impact of attempts by the Palestinian Authority to pursue Palestinian rights through the United Nations. The fact that the Palestine Football Association (PFA) last year had to withdraw its proposed resolution for the suspension of Israel from FIFA despite wide support highlighted the PA’s failure.
More than half of youth in the West Bank and Gaza have not registered to vote and have no intention of doing so, according to a recent survey. The stabbings also reflect a widespread refusal by youth to participate in protests organized by either Fatah or Hamas. That was evident in the wave of protests that erupted in the fall of last year even if few seem to believe that protests will actually effect change in Israeli or Palestinian policies.
Much like in the first intifada, the Palestinian leadership at best pays lip service to expressing an understanding of what is driving protest and the youth. It seems singularly unwilling to draw political conclusions from that in an environment in which the history of the resistance, the failure of the peace process and dominance of autocracy in the region has undermined institutions and strengthened self-serving political parties. What were once resistance groups have become bureaucracies bent on ensuring their own survival.
What the stabbings do tell us is that the fabric of Israeli and Palestinian society is being eroded by a conflict to which a solution seems ever more distant, if not impossible, and by societies and leaderships incapable and unwilling to listen to a Palestinian youth whose prospects are dim at best and whose anger is directed as much at Israeli racism as it is against Palestinian indifference, prejudice and refusal to acknowledge changing realities.
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May 7th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Leaked memos from Egypt’s interior ministry discussing ways to counter mounting public anger at the government of general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi raise the spectre of a split between the military and security forces over how to deal with expressions of public discontent and potentially about the future of Mr. Al Sisi’s presidency.
This latest leak, contrary to past leaks, many of which were from within the military rather than the interior ministry and appeared designed to portray Mr. Al Sisi in a negative light and undermine his credibility, seems inadvertent. The internal memos were sent by the ministry to journalists by mistake in an email that was supposed to contain a regular news roundup.
The significance of the leak in evaluating relations between the military and the security forces lies in the fact that some of Egypt’s military-controlled, state-owned media like Al Ahram, which is believed to take its cue from Mr. Al Sisi, and pro-government privately owned media, backed a call by Egypt’s journalists’ union for the resignation of interior minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar.
Members of the union staged this week a sit-in in defiance of Egypt’s draconic anti-protest law in front of the interior minister in support of their demands after security forces raided the group’s offices on World Press Freedom Day. Two journalists were arrested during the raid on charges of calling for anti-government protests against Mr. Al-Sisi’s recent decision to transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.
In response, security forces surrounded the building of the journalists’ syndicate. The raid of was the first in the 75-history of the union despite decades of varying degree of censorship.
The transfer of the islands during a recent visit to Egypt by Saudi King Salman sparked rare public protests. The protesters although far smaller in number than those that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak adopted slogans reminiscent of the chants employed during the 2011 popular revolt. Protesters shouted “Bread, freedom – the islands are Egyptian!” during recent protests, an adaptation of the 2011 chant, “Bread, freedom and justice.”
In addition to backing the journalists’ call for Mr. Abdel-Ghaffar’s resignation, Al Ahram reported that various Egyptian papers were publishing “the image of Egypt’s interior minister in negative, instead of positive, as a form of protest.” The papers also reported favourably on the journalists’ protests and their further demand for the release of scores of their colleagues who have been arrested in recent months.
The backing of the journalists by pro-Sisi media as well as media critical of the president constitutes a pushback by Mr. Al-Sisi against criticism of his presidency by prominent Egyptian journalists who had initially supported his 2013 coup that toppled Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brother who was Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president. It also followed a string of leaked tapes in recent years designed to sour Mr. Al Sisi’s ties to his financial backers in the Gulf by highlighting derogatory remarks that he made.
Both the criticism of Mr. Al-Sisi and the leaks would have had to have had the tacit approval of a military unit that oversees the Egyptian media. The unit, according to some of its employees, has military officers in various television studios, vets reports before publication, and at times drafts news stories that are then published in the media.
Mr. Al-Sisi’s counter strategy appears to go beyond proxy battles in the media. He has moved to make Egypt’s unreformed and brutal security forces look more accountable by putting several officers on trial on charges related to abuse of human rights.
The indictments followed a string of incidents involving security forces and local residents that provoked spontaneous local protest. The incidents and the raid have fuelled calls for long overdue reform of the security forces who, according to human rights activists, have been allowed to operate with impunity.
Mr. Al-Sisi, in an extraordinary gesture in February, also reached out to militant soccer fans, a backbone of protest in the country. His overture constituted recognition of the fans’ street power.
The tacit power struggle between the military and the security forces is all the more remarkable given the fact that the interior ministry and the security forces used much of Mr. Morsi’s short-lived tenure to persuade the military to act against him and to feed on popular discontent with the president’s attempts to seemingly Islamicize Egypt to create a popular movement that would back his removal. That effort resulted in mass protests in late June 2013 that paved the way within days for Mr. Al-Sisi’s coup.
The backing of the journalists’ union by the pro-Sisi press contradicts the recommendations made in the leaked memos that are intended to shield the interior ministry and the security forces.
The memos recommended that the ministry not back down in its conflict with the union and suggested that the prosecutor general impose a gag order on the investigation into the killing of Giulio Regeni, an Italian PhD candidate who was abducted in January and severely tortured before his body was found days later on the outskirts of Cairo. The ministry has denied that security forces were involved in the killing, which has strained ties between Egypt and Italy.
The memos also called for the boosting of the ministry’s media image and monitoring capabilities, including the hosting by popular television shows of former police generals to communicate its message and stepped-up monitoring of news websites on a 24-hour basis.
Prosecutor General Nabil Sadek has since issued a gag order on the case of the two journalists arrested in the union offices. Al Ahram and other media reported on the journalists’ protests on their front pages in defiance of the order.
“(The ministry) cannot retreat from this position now; a retreat would mean a mistake was made and if there was a mistake who is responsible and who is to be held to account?” one of the memos said.
Egypt’s military has long been happy with the security forces doing the regime’s dirty work and shouldering the blame for it. International pressure and mounting discontent with the government’s failure to deliver economically have however persuaded Mr. Al-Sisi and those segments of the military that continue to back him that the impunity of the security forces is damaging Egypt’s image and undermining the regime’s legitimacy.
The interior ministry’s fear that it could be held accountable lays bare its concern that its security forces could become a scapegoat. It is a concern that could widen emerging gaps in the country’s ruling elite.
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April 19th, 2016
By James Dorsey.
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April 19th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
President Barak Obama has a challenge and an opportunity when he meets this week first with Saudi King Salman and then with the leaders of the six Gulf states. His challenge is to manage increasingly fundamentally diverging policy differences. His opportunity is to push for political and social change given that the United States’ alliance with Saudi Arabia is unlikely to revert to the status ante quo at a time that the kingdom confronts existential threats.
The list of differences between Saudi Arabia and the United States that have emerged since the 2011 Arab popular revolts is long and growing. It starts with US support for the toppling of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a longstanding American ally; US criticism of the squashing in 2011 of a popular revolt in Bahrain with the help of Saudi troops; Mr. Obama’s backtracking in 2013 on a promise to act if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were to use chemical weapons; and for now ends with the conclusion by the United States and other world powers of an agreement to end the Iranian nuclear crisis that is leading to Iran’s return to the international fold.
If those and other steps were not enough to convince Saudi Arabia that the United States, its foremost protector for which there is no immediate alternative, no longer was an ally that would come to the help of its friends no matter what, Mr. Obama drove the message home in a series of interviews with American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg.
Mr. Obama laid out a vision of diminished significance of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East to US national security, a need for US allies to shoulder their responsibility in ensuring regional stability rather than acting as free riders on the coattails of a United States that pulls their chestnuts out of the fire, and a world in which the kingdom would have to share regional power with its archenemy, Iran.
In response, Saudi officials with Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former intelligence chief and ex-ambassador to the United States, in the lead rejected the president’s assertion that Saudi Arabia had failed to pull its weight. Prince Turki listed numerous incidents in which the kingdom had helped the United States. At the same time, US officials noted that despite differences the US maintained close military, security and intelligence cooperation.
The Saudis nonetheless did themselves no favours when they recently warned US officials and members of Congress that the kingdom might sell off up to 750 billion dollars’ worth of American treasury bills and others assets held by Saudi Arabia if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in US courts for any role in the 9/11 attacks. Obama administration officials have been lobbying Congress to drop the proposed bill.
More fundamentally, Saudi Arabia concluded from the US’ shift in approach towards the kingdom and the region that it needed to be more assertive in both its foreign and military policy in a bid to solidify its position as a regional power and ensure that the regional line-up would back it in its long-standing struggle with Iran for regional hegemony.
As a result, Saudi Arabia launched last year a so far disastrous military campaign in Yemen, escalated tensions with Iran, supported militant rebel forces in Syria, formed a fragile military alliance of Muslim countries, and supported Egyptian-general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s 2013 military coup with massive financial injections. Saudi King Salman, on a visit to Egypt earlier this month, promised Mr. Al-Sisi further lavish funding.
Implicit in the Saudi actions is the hope that increased tension in the Middle East will force, if not Mr. Obama, then whoever wins the November presidential election in the United States to engage, and that a Saudi-led Sunni Muslim alliance will be able to counter Iran’s ambitions as a regional power. In various interviews in recent months, King Salman’s powerful son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has stressed that the kingdom is seeking US re-engagement.
The problem is that Saudi hopes are likely to prove to be wishful thinking. Even if the United States were to re-engage in the Middle East, it would not constitute a return to the status ante quo in which Washington largely sided with Riyadh and shared the Saudi goal of completely isolating Iran. Moreover, Iran’s emergence as one of the Middle East’s foremost regional powers is inevitable while Saudi Arabia’s ability to match if not surpass Iran is a lost cause.
Current Saudi regional leadership is the result of the kingdom’s ability to exploit a window of opportunity rather than reliance on the assets and power needed to sustain it. Saudi Arabia’s interest is to extend its window of opportunity for as long as possible. That window of opportunity exists as long as the obvious regional powers – Iran, Turkey and Egypt – are in various degrees of disrepair.
The lifting of punitive international sanctions and international isolation as part of the nuclear agreement no longer stymie Iran in asserting itself as a dominant regional power. Saudi support of Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, is in effect an effort to compensate for the kingdom’s weaknesses.
Mr. Obama is likely to smooth ruffled feathers in his talks with Saudi and Gulf leaders, but will probably fail to erase regional doubts about the reliability of the United States as an uncritical ally that seeks to align its policies with those of its allies and can be counted on to be there in what Gulf leaders might see as a time of need. It is that crucial change in mutual perceptions of one another that holds opportunity for Mr. Obama, particularly at a time that the United States and the Gulf alongside many other nations seek to counter militant Islamic radicalism and defeat the Islamic State.
Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, recognized in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that US support for autocratic, repressive Middle Eastern and North African regimes had contributed to an environment from which the 9/11 attacks emerged. Mr. Bush sought to address the issue with his ill-fated democracy initiative.
US support for civil society groups was moreover stymied by the US’s reversal to a policy that favoured regional stability through support of autocracy instead of political, economic and social change. Nowhere is Middle Eastern autocracy’s contribution to potential breeding grounds for militant Islam more evident than in the puritan, inward-looking, intolerant world view of Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam that are promoted globally by the kingdom.
Mr. Obama, by putting forward a worldview in which Saudi Arabia and the Middle East is of less importance to the United States and by acknowledging policy differences, has created the space to support civil society groups in the region even if regimes would take a dim view of such actions.
While there is no indication that Mr. Obama intends to exploit that opportunity, the fact remains that militant Islam and the likes of the Islamic State can only be sustainably stymied if political change is part of the policy mix.
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March 5th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey
No free lunches
What the dramatic and bloody developments in the Middle East and North Africa demonstrate is that there are no free lunches. These developments are the product of short sighted policies of on the one hand major players in the international community – the United States, the former Soviet Union and currently Russia as well as Europe and China – and on the other hand of primarily dictatorial regimes or a minority of democratically elected governments like Israel who see merit in exploiting opportunity that allows them to avoid healing festering wounds.
The popular revolts that swept the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 toppling leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, sparked the civil wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen, Saudi military interventions in Bahrain and Yemen, and the rise of jihadism with today the Islamic States at its epicentre, were a response to decades of autocratic, arbitrary rule that failed to produce in national, economic and social terms. That autocratic rule benefitted from the support of the international community. The West saw autocracy as a guarantee for stability while countries like the Soviet Union at the time, Russia today and China never really adhered to values of democratic change.
Many have commented that the revolts demonstrated that the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict despite Arab and Muslim claims to the contrary was not at the core of problems in the Middle East and North Africa. They point to the fact that the conflict did not figure prominently in the events of 2011 and has not been key to developments since. That is true. The fallacy is that the conflict never was at the core of regional issues. Israel-Palestine figures less prominently in the developments because it no longer can serve autocrats as a lightning rod that distracts from the real domestic and regional issues. It did however serve to aggravate problems. The lightning rod backfired. Arab military and political incompetence coupled with divisions among Palestinians and Israeli intransigence ultimately served to undermine the legitimacy of autocrats who failed to perform on what a vast majority in the Middle East and North Africa saw as an issue of national importance and pride and fundamental justice.
All of this summarily explains why the Middle East and North Africa is in transition. It positions the events of recent years as a rejection of corrupt and failed autocratic rule. What it doesn’t explain is why the transition has taken such a violent turn and produced brutal and ruthless forces that range from the Islamic State to the regimes of Bashar al Assad in Syria and the Al Sauds in Saudi Arabia that are willing to pursue their goals and remain in power at whatever human, social, economic and political cost.
Middle Eastern and North African exceptionalism
The uprisings of 2011 caught government officials, journalists and analysts across the globe by surprise. They were until then enamoured by what became known as Arab exceptionalism, the apparent ability of Arab autocrats to buck the global trend towards democracy. Arab leaders appeared to be immune to popular aspirations and able to maintain their grip on power with no credible forces able to challenge them. That myth was shattered in 2011.
That is not to say that Arab exceptionalism is a fallacy. It isn’t. However, what it represents is something very different from what officials and pundits thought it meant. The nature of Arab exceptionalism becomes evident in the exploration of the answer to the question why political transition was relatively successful in Southeast Asia with the popular revolts in the Philippines and Indonesia and military-led political change in Myanmar and why it is so messy and bloody in the Middle East and North Africa.
The answer in my mind lies in four factors – the military, civil society, management of religious and ethnic conflict, and the role of regional powers. In a whirlwind, what this means is that Southeast Asia had militaries, at least parts of which saw change as serving their interest. No Arab military with the exception of Tunisia took that view. Despite repression, Southeast Asia was able to develop some degree of robust civil society, the Middle East and North Africa by and large hasn’t. Southeast Asia has seen its share of ethnic and religious conflict but has often been able to negotiate an end to those disputes. The Lebanese civil war being the exception, the Middle East and North Africa has seen such conflicts as a zero sum game. And finally Southeast Asia is lucky not to have a Saudi Arabia, a counterrevolutionary forced with the temporary wherewithal to stymie change at whatever cost.
A decade of defiance and dissent
All of this means that there is increasingly little space to push for change. Regimes respond with violence to demands of change. Don’t’ forget that revolts like those in Libya, Bahrain and Syria started as peaceful mass anti-government protests that were confronted brutally. Libya sparked foreign intervention to prevent a bloodbath, Saudi Arabia and the Bahraini regime turned Bahrain into sectarian strife and the regime of Bashar al Assad is willing to fight a horrendous civil war to retain power.
All of this takes place in a decade of defiance and dissent. Across the globe, people have lost confidence in the system and their leaders. Donald Trump is an expression of that. The last time this happened was in the 1960s. The difference between then and now is that then there were all kinds of worldviews on offer: anti-authoritarianism. Anarchism, socialism, communism and in the Middle East and North Africa, Arab nationalism and Arab socialism. Today, the only thing on offer are radical interpretations of Islam.
Human rights activist and former Tunisian president Moncef Marzouki asked in a recent Wall Street Journal interview why Tunisia had educated people with jobs joining IS. His answer was: “It’s not the matter of tackling socioeconomic roots. You have to go deeper and understand that these guys have a dream—and we don’t. We had a dream—our dream was called the Arab Spring. And our dream is now turning into a nightmare. But the young people need a dream, and the only dream available to them now is the caliphate.”
What this means is that identifying the root causes of political violence demands self-inspection on the part of governments and societies across the globe. It is those governments and societies that are both part of the problem and part of the solution. It is those governments and societies that are at the root of loss of confidence.
Further troubling the waters is the rise of a public and private anti-terrorism industry that sees human rights as second to ensuring security and safety; has a vested interest in couching the problem in terms of law enforcement and counter-terrorism rather than notions of alienation, marginalization, socio-economic disenfranchisement, youth aspirations and rights; is abetted by autocratic Middle Eastern and North African regimes that define any form of dissent as terrorism; and is supported by a public opinion that buys into support of autocrats and some degree of curtailing of rights as a trade-off for security.
Tackling root causes
Analysts and policymakers have identified a range of causes for the breakdown of the traditional order in the Middle East and North Africa, ranging from a desire for greater freedom and social justice to the fragility of post-colonial regional states as a result of autocratic failure to engage in nation rather than regime building that gave rise to ethnic, tribal and sectarian strife, to inherent flaws in colonial border arrangements at the time of the demise of the Ottoman Empire such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Treaty of Sevres. All of those notions contain kernels of truth but they have contributed to it becoming common place to pay lip service to the need to tackle root causes of the crisis in the Middle East and North Africa as well as of political violence, and that can mean almost anything.
Translating the need to tackle root causes into policy is proving difficult, primarily because it is based on a truth that has far-reaching consequences for every member of the international community no matter how close or far they are from IS’s current borders. It involves governments putting their money where their mouth is and changing long-standing, ingrained policies at home that marginalize, exclude, stereotype and stigmatize significant segments of society; emphasize security at the expense of freedoms that encourage healthy debate; and in more autocratic states that are abetted by the West, Russia and China reduce citizens to obedient subjects through harsh repression and adaptations of religious belief to suit the interests of rulers.
The result is a vicious circle: government policies often clash with the state or regime’s professed values. As a result, dividing lines sharpen as already marginalized, disenfranchised or discriminated segments of society see the contradiction between policies and values as hypocritical and re-confirmation of the basis of their discontent. Western nations, for example, in the fall of 2015, deferred to Saudi Arabia’s objections to an investigation by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) into human rights violations by all sides during the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen in which thousands of civilians were killed. Media reports documented, a day prior to the Western cave-in, a British pledge to support Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s foremost violators of basic human rights and purveyors of sectarianism, in the Council. The kingdom, at the same time, objected to references to gay rights in the United Nations’ newly formulated Sustainable Development Goals.
Inclusiveness is the answer
Creating a policy framework that is conducive to an environment in the Middle East and North Africa that would favour pluralism and respect of human rights and counter the appeal of jihadism and emerging sectarian-based nationalism is not simply a question of encouraging and supporting voices in the region, first and foremost those of youth, or of revisiting assumptions of Western foreign policies and definitions of national security. It involves fostering inclusive national identities that are capable of accommodating ethnic, sectarian and tribal sub-identities as legitimate and fully accepted sub-identities in Middle Eastern and North Africa, as well as in Western countries, and changing domestic policies towards minorities, refugees and migrants.
In the case of the international community’s effort to defeat IS, inclusiveness means, for example, that victory has to be secured as much in Raqqa and Mosul, IS’s Syrian and Iraqi capitals, as in the dismal banlieues, run-down, primarily minority-populated, suburbs of French cities that furnish the group with its largest contingent of European foreign fighters; in the popular neighbourhoods in Tunisia that account for the single largest group of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq; in Riyadh, seat of a government whose citizens account for the second largest number of foreign fighters and whose well-funded, decades-long effort to propagate a puritan, intolerant, interpretation of Islam has been a far more important feeding ground for jihadist thinking than the writings of militant Islamist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb; and in Western capitals with Washington in the lead who view retrograde, repressive regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Focussing on root causes that are at the core of both the crisis and deteriorating, if not total disrespect of, human rights, means broadening scholarly and policy debate to concentrate not only on what amounts to applying Band-Aids that fail to halt the festering of open wounds but also to question assumptions made by the various schools of thought on how to solve the problem. The facts on the ground have already convincingly contradicted the notion that Western support of autocracy and military interventions primarily through air campaigns despite paying lip service to ideals of democracy and human rights could counter common enemies like IS. It has so far produced only limited results. Respect for human rights has, in many Middle Eastern and North African nations, significantly deteriorated since the 2011 popular revolts while IS is largely standing its ground more than a year into a US-led air campaign, a Russian bombing operation that began in the fall of 2015, and ground campaigns by the Iraqi government and the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The group continues to advocate a regime that celebrates its rejection of pluralism and human rights and metes out relatively transparent yet brutal justice, and it poses a fundamental threat to the existence of post-colonial nation states as the world knew them, first and foremost Syria and Iraq, but ultimately also others like Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Libya.
Defeat is not the solution
Yet, even a convincing defeat of IS would not solve the problem or promote notions of pluralism and respect of human rights. Al Qaeda was degraded, to use the language of the Obama administration. In the process, it weakened a jihadist force that, despite having no appreciation for concepts of pluralism and human rights, increasingly advocated a gradual approach to the establishment of its harsh interpretation of Islamic law in a bid to ensure public support. Instead of reducing the threat of political violence, the largely military effort to defeat Al Qaeda produced ever more virulent forms of jihadism as embodied by IS. It may be hard to imagine anything more brutal than IS, but it is a fair assumption that defeating IS without tackling root causes would only lead to something that is even more violent and more vicious.
Nonetheless, defining repressive, autocratic rule and IS as the greatest threat to regional stability and security and the furthering of more liberal notions is problematic. In the case of IS, that definition elevates jihadism – the violent establishment of Pan-Islamic rule based on narrow interpretations of Islamic law and scripture — to the status of a root cause rather than a symptom and expression of a greater and more complex problem. It is an approach that focuses on the immediate nature of the threat and ways to neutralize it rather than on what sparked it. It also neglects the fact that the ideological debate in the Muslim world is to a large extent dominated by schools of thought that do not advocate more open, liberal and pluralistic interpretations of Islam.
That is where one real challenge lies. It is a challenge first and foremost to Muslims, but also to an international community that would give more liberal Muslim voices significant credibility if it put its money where its mouth is. Support for self-serving regimes and their religious supporters, as in the case of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, reduces the international community’s choices to one between bad and worse, rather than to a palate of policy options that take a stab at rooting out the problem and its underlying causes.
A wake-up call
To be sure, change and progress towards the embrace of pluralism and universal human rights will have to originate from within Middle Eastern and North African nations. Saudi and UAE efforts to target political Islam as such that have also resonated in the West, were articulated by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair argued against “a deep desire to separate the political ideology represented by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood from the actions of extremists including acts of terrorism.” He acknowledged that it was “laudable” to distinguish “between those who violate the law and those we simply disagree with” but warned that “if we’re not careful, they also blind us to the fact that the ideology itself is nonetheless dangerous and corrosive; and cannot and should not be treated as a conventional political debate between two opposing views of how society should be governed.”
On that basis, it is hard to see why Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s puritan interpretation of Islam that is the well-spring of much of contemporary jihadist thinking, does not top the list of ideologies that are “dangerous and corrosive.” Saudi Arabia, like the Islamic State, was born in a jihadist struggle that married Islamist warriors led by an 18th century jurist Mohammed Abdul Wahab, with the proto-kingdom’s ruling Al Saud clan.
The failure of the 2011 popular revolts and the autocratic counterrevolution that they provoked, the rise of IS, increased repression and the region’s deterioration of respect for basic freedoms constitutes a wake-up call for many in the Middle East and North Africa. It has fuelled a long-overdue debate among Arabs and Muslims about the kind of world they want to live in.
In an essay entitled ‘The Barbarians Within Our Gates,’ prominent Washington-based journalist Hisham Melhelm wrote: “The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism — the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition — than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago… The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays — all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms…. The jihadists of the Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed out of a rotting, empty hulk — what was left of a broken-down civilization.”
For his part, Turki al-Hamad, a liberal Saudi intellectual, questioned how Saudi religious leaders could confront the Islamic State’s extremist ideology given that they promote similar thinking at home and abroad. Al-Hamad argued that the Saudi clergy was incapable of confronting the extremism of groups like IS “not because of laxness or procrastination, but because they share the same ideology.”
Neither Melhelm nor al-Hamad are Islamists. Yet, they reflect widespread soul-searching among Islamists and non-Islamists across the Arab world. Theirs is a debate that predates the rise of the Islamic State but has been pushed centre stage by jihadists, autocrats and misguided Western politicians alike. It is a debate that is at the core of tackling the root causes on which jihadist groups feed, and which in turn has become a primary alibi for autocrats to discount pluralism and greater freedoms. It is, however, also a debate that threatens to be squashed by a policy that focuses on military rather than political solutions and promotes status quo regimes whose autocracy chokes off opportunities for the venting of widespread discontent and anger, leaving violence and extremism as one of the few, if not the only, options to force change.
The solution is medium-term
As a result, the Obama administration’s alignment with the Middle East’s counter-revolutionary forces and targeting of groups other than IS, risks identifying the US with efforts by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to target political Islam as such. The three Arab nations have cracked down on non-violent groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE particularly has since called for an expansion of the campaign against the Islamic State to include all non-violent expressions of political Islam. The US alignment prevents it from adopting a policy that would seek to contain IS militarily while focusing on removing the grievances on which the group feeds. It is a policy that is destined, at best, to provide a Band-Aid for a festering wound.
Moreover, in a globalized world, events in the Middle East and North Africa, and among minority populations elsewhere with roots in the region, often mutually reinforce one another. By the same token, there are no quick solutions or short cuts. The key is the articulation of policies that over the medium term can help generate an environment more conducive to more liberal change rather than the continuous opting for knee-jerk reactions to events and facts on the ground as was evident in Tunisia’s response to a June 2015 attack on a tourist resort, Kuwait’s reaction to the bombing of a Shiite mosque at about the same time, and France’s answer to an almost simultaneous assault on its territory by a lone wolf.
Tunisia deployed 1,000 armed policemen to tourist sites even as tourists left the country en masse, and closed 80 mosques suspected of hosting radical clerics; a move that was likely to push militants further underground. Kuwait, which displayed a remarkable degree of inclusivity with Sunnis and Shias joining hands in their condemnation of the bombing of a Shiite mosque that left 27 people dead and more than 200 others wounded, looked at adoption of a stringent anti-terrorism law while France passed legislation that authorised sweeping surveillance. None of these measures address the sense of hopelessness and willingness to rebel that potentially pervades predominantly young Muslim in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, and is reinforced by increased prejudice sparked by violence and brutality perpetrated by Muslim extremists.
As a result, Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, the 2011 Arab revolts, the rise of IS and attacks in Paris, Ankara, Beirut, Tunisia and Kuwait, have served to undermine efforts at greater inclusiveness and assurance of equal rights and opportunity – such as Europe’s pursuit of multiculturalism – and sparked violent counterrevolutionary efforts by Arab autocrats. The result has been, in the Middle East and North Africa, fractured states and increased repression that seemingly places pluralism and respect of human rights in the realm of wishful thinking. Autocratic and Western responses to jihadist attacks and propaganda play into the militants’ hands by feeding an already existent sense of rejection among disenfranchised and marginalized youth as well as ethnic and religious minorities. All of that is fed by growing intolerance, suspicion of the other, stereotyping, and a feeling of not being welcome among minority groups, and it is strengthened by sectarian policies adopted by Middle Eastern and North African governments.
Ironically, US President George W. Bush concluded, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, that Al Qaeda was as much a product of US support for autocratic Arab regimes as it was the result of politically bankrupt Arab leaders. The acknowledgement amounted to an admission of failure of a US policy designed to maintain stability in a key geostrategic and volatile part of the world and led to Bush’s ill-fated initiative to promote democracy in the Middle East and North Africa.
Where to look?
One place to look for alternative approaches is Norway. In contrast to most reactions to political violence and expression of pro-jihadist sentiment, Norway’s response to right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s traumatic attacks in 2011 that killed 77 people stands as a model for how societies can and should uphold concepts of pluralism and human rights. Norway refrained from declaring war on terror, treated Breivik as a common criminal and refused to compromise on its democratic values. In doing so, Norway offered a successful example of refusing to stigmatise any one group in society by adopting inclusiveness rather than profiling and upholding the very values that autocrats and jihadists challenge.
The result of exclusively security-focussed approaches, coupled with the exploitation of economic opportunity by autocratic Middle Eastern and North African regimes and Western governments, is an increasingly insecure region in which the creation of pluralistic societies that honour human rights seems ever more distant. Said an Egyptian Islamist militant, whose non-violent anti-government activism is as much aimed at opposing the regime of general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi as it is designed to persuade increasingly frustrated youth that there are alternatives to nihilistic violence: “The strategy of brutality, repression and restricting freedom has failed to impose subservience. It hasn’t produced solutions. Governments need to give people space. They need to prove that they are capable of addressing the problems of a youth that has lost hope. We have nothing to lose if they don’t.” The Egyptian’s inclinations pointed towards peaceful protest in favour of a more liberal society, albeit bound by Islamic morality codes; his options, however, left him little choice but to drift towards jihadism.
What to do?
Creating the kind of options that would give the Egyptian militant real choices is easier said than done and unlikely to produce immediate results. It would, among others, have to involve:
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Recognition that the Middle East and North Africa are in the throes of a brutal process of change that is likely to play out over years. Attempting to halt the process is futile; nurturing it with policies that encourage non-violent, non-sectarian change – even if it means a redrawing of the region’s map and regime change – will ultimately far better serve the reestablishment of regional peace and security and the creation of an environment conducive to pluralism and respect of human rights;
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Tying political, military and economic support to governments in the Middle East and North Africa to progress towards support of human rights and greater equality for minorities through the adoption of inclusive, non-sectarian, and non-repressive policies;
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A halt to the global propagation of intolerant ideologies by some Middle Eastern governments and state-sponsored groups such as Saudi Arabia’s interpretation of Wahhabism that contrasts starkly with that of Qatar, the world’s only other Wahhabi state;
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Abolition of sectarianism in state rhetoric;
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Recognition of minority rights;
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Reform of brutal police and security forces that are widely feared and despised;
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Granting of greater freedoms to ensure the existence of release valves for pent-up anger and frustration and the unfettered voicing of grievances;
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A crackdown on corruption;
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Reform of education systems that produce a mismatch between market demand and graduates’ skills.
Some of these policies are easier achievable than others. Some might seem like pie in the sky. Fact of the matter is, you’ve got to start somewhere. That somewhere realistically will involve policies and measures that are low hanging fruit against the backdrop of a push for a paradigm shift in the way we think about big picture things like the kind of societies we want to live in, the mismatch between what we profess to believe in and what we in fact do, the foreign policies we want to see adopted, and the framework in which we look at a range that starts with freedom of expression and peaceful dissent and ends with brutal, political violence.
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February 12th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Saudi Arabia has raised the ante in its battle with Iran by publicly committing to send ground troops to Syria. This latest move by the Saudis is aimed at drawing the US into a more direct involvement to confront Islamic State as well as the de facto alliance of Russia and Iran to keep Syrian President Bashar Al Assad in power. An agreement by major world powers to negotiate a cessation of hostilities in the next week does little to thwart Saudi Arabia’s strategy.
In a recent, wide-ranging interview in The Economist, Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was unequivocal in a recent about the goals of Saudi Arabia’s more assertive, interventionist foreign and defence policy. To achieve the kingdom’s goal of rolling back the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa and contain Iranian influence in the region, Saudi Arabia needs to leave the US no option but to re-engage rather than simply focus on the fight against jihadism.
“The United States must realise that they are the number one in the world and they have to act like it,” Prince Mohammed said, suggesting that the sooner the US re-engages the better. Reengagement means to the Saudi leader, aggressive US support for the kingdom’s efforts to shape the Middle East and North Africa in its image.
What happens in Syria has a far more immediate regional fallout than events in Yemen where the Saudi military is struggling to win an unwinnable war against Iran-backed Houthi rebels unlike the war in Yemen, with its indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, Saudi ground forces in Syria could force the US to become more involved.
Saudi intervention in Syria would, in contrast to Yemen, which the kingdom sees as a proxy war, bring Saudi troops in closer proximity to Russian forces and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Russian and Iranian attacks on Saudi-backed rebels would inevitably have to elicit a Saudi response.
It’s a high-stakes gamble that would create the perfect powder keg, from which the US would be unable to stand aside. The US hopes that implementation of an agreement by the International Syria Support Group (ISSC) to arrange a ceasefire in Syria within a week will avert Saudi military intervention. The agreement, despite Saudi support for the ISSC decision, excludes not only Islamic State but also the Saudi-supported Al Nusra Front from the cessation of hostilities, which raises questions about what the kingdom’s real intentions are.
The agreement, even if implemented, does little to lower the risk of a Saudi-Russian-Iranian conflagration. By exempting the two jihadist groups, Russia and the US-led alliance retain the right to conduct airstrikes against the militant Islamists. Russia’s track record so far has been that it has targeted a scala of rebel groups rather than just the jihadists in its bid to strengthen the Assad regime.
Saudi military spokesman Brigadier General Ahmad Assiri described the cessation of hostilities was being negotiated as “irreversible decision.” At the same time, Saudi Arabia announced that a 34-nation military alliance made public by Prince Mohammed in December would meet in Riyadh next month.
In many ways, the Saudi offer, whether implemented or not, constitutes a master stroke. To sidestep the Saudi challenge and prevent a dangerous escalation of the Syrian war, the Obama administration will have to come up with proposals that justify delaying Saudi intervention, but go beyond air strikes against IS and futile efforts to breathe new life into peace talks.
Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist with close ties to the ruling Al Saud family, defined “the Americans” as the target of the Saudi offer. “The Saudis are telling the Americans: ‘we are ready to send our troops to Syria.’ What the Saudis did not say is: ‘what are you going to do about it?… How are you going to come along with us?’ We are, I think, challenging the Americans because the Americans are not doing their duty… We are saying: ‘Are you willing to send troops along with us? Mr. Khashoggi said in an Al Jazeera interview.
The Saudi gamble ironically fits neatly with the strategy of the Russian and Iranian-backed regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Syria and its backers want real negotiations that could end Syria’s five-year old, brutal civil war until the lay of the battlefield definitively enhances their respective negotiating position.
The Assad regime made this clear by recently launching a major offensive in Aleppo that significantly weakened a rebel stranglehold on the city and its environs and ensured that United Nations-sponsored peace efforts were rendered stillborn before they even effectively started. Saudi Arabia, backed by Turkey, contributed their bit by persuading rebel negotiators to leave Geneva in the wake of the Aleppo offensive.
The Saudi offer of ground troops exploits an increasingly untenable situation. The Aleppo offensive has sent tens of thousands fleeing to the Syrian-Turkish border. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has warned that the latest fighting could force and additional one million Syrians to flee.
With 2.5 million Syrian refugees already in Turkey and European leaders urging Turkey to accommodate them rather than allow them to head to western Europe, Ankara is urging NATO to patrol the waters off its Mediterranean shore to prevent human traffickers from smuggling refugees to Greece. The Turkish demand for NATO assistance adds to the Saudi strategy of forcing the US to become more engaged.
For both Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Syria constitutes the ultimate battleground for hegemony in the region. Russian military intervention and Iranian backing have turned around the once waning fortunes of the Assad regime.
A Syria in which the regime and IS, rather than other rebel groups, are the only real domestic players turns Bashar al-Assad into a pivotal cog in the fight against jihadism. That is something Saudi Arabia cannot allow to happen. To turn the tide, it needs a United States that is engaged and willing to do its bit.
Mr. Khashoggi hinted at how far Saudi Arabia was willing to go when asked whether Saudi ground troops risked direct confrontation with Russia and Iran. “Yes, it’s a risk but it’s more of a risk if the Iranians win in Syria and have hegemony over that Arab land,” he said.
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January 30th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
President Xi Jinping’s visit to the Middle East, the first by a Chinese leader in seven years, saw the signing of billiions of dollars worth of agreements with Saudi Arabia and Egypt and a ten-fold expansion of trade with Iran over the next ten years. The significance may go far beyond commerce as Chinese interests align more with Iranian interests than those of Saudi Arabia.
Commentary
PRESIDENT XI Jinping went from Riyadh to Iran this month to become the first foreign leader to do so following the lifting of international sanctions against the Islamic republic. Saudi leaders could not have been pleased. To be sure, China and Saudi Arabia (and Egypt) signed US$55 billion worth of cooperation agreements during Xi’s visit, including a nuclear cooperation pact. Yet Xi’s determination to gain a first mover advantage in Iran at a time that Saudi Arabia is seeking to increase rather than reduce the Islamic republic’s international isolation suggests that more than commerce is at play here.
Xi’s visit to the kingdom was accompanied by talk of brotherly relations and strategic cooperation. The rhetoric however did little to mask serious differences on issues ranging from Syria to Saudi propagation of Wahhabism, a puritan interpretation of Islam that many fear breeds jihadism, and a relative decline in Chinese reliance on Saudi oil.
At odds over Syria
Chinese officials worry that alleged Saudi funding of Islamic schools or madrasahs in Xinjiang may be encouraging Uighur militants who have staged several attacks in a low intensity campaign for equal rights and autonomy, if not independence. Saudi officials have assured their Chinese counterparts that they do not support the violence despite the fact that the Uighurs, some of whom have joined Islamic State (IS), are Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslims.
Those assurances appear to have done little to put Chinese concerns to rest. “Our biggest worry in the Middle East isn’t oil – it’s Saudi Arabia,” a Chinese analyst told the Asia Times. Religious affinity is however not something China has to worry about with Shiite-majority Iran, which has long projected itself as a revolutionary rather than a sectarian power.
China supports the Iranian-backed regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and favours Russian intervention in Syria to prop up the Assad regime – a position that puts it at odds with Saudi Arabia that backs the rebels and has hinted at intervening militarily on their behalf.
Russian and US airstrikes against Saudi-backed Islamist rebels have allowed Syrian and Kurdish forces to gain increasing control of much of Syria’s borders, making it more difficult for Uighurs to find their way to Syria. Several hundred Uighurs are believed to have joined IS, which recently released its first Chinese-language recruitment video. This adds to China’s concerns about Xinjiang.
Redressing balances
In anticipation of the lifting of the sanctions, China has furthermore stepped up naval cooperation with Iran. A visit to Iran last October by Chinese Admiral Sun Jianguo, who is widely seen as the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) next naval commander, produced a draft memorandum of understanding for closer cooperation in counterterrorism, cyberwarfare, and intelligence sharing.
Sun’s visit followed joint Chinese-Iranian search-and-rescue naval exercises and training exercises in 2014 in the Gulf. The exercises, involving two Chinese warships were held close to the base of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain at a time of tension between the United States and Iran over the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme.
The visit built on a long-standing security and military relationship that China was forced to temporarily curtail as a result of the sanctions. Nonetheless, China sold Iran anti-riot gear and tracking technology in 2009 which were used to counter anti-government protests against the allegedly fraudulent election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The protests coincided with riots in Xinjiang.
Chinese-Iranian military relations date back to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s when China was the Islamic republic’s main military hardware supplier. Those supplies caused tension with the United States when in 1987 Iran fired Chinese-made Silkworm missiles at Kuwaiti vessels in the Gulf.
Forced to halt the supply of sophisticated weaponry, China helped Iran kick start the development of an indigenous military-industrial sector evident in the design and technology of Iranian-made missiles.
Shifting oil relationships
Similarly with regard to Chinese oil purchasing, Iran is determined to win back Chinese market share with the lifting of the sanctions. Iran expects to boost oil exports by 500,000 barrels a day, much of which it hopes will go to China. Iran’s oil plans put it in direct competition with Saudi Arabia, which had long been one of China’s largest suppliers.
That picture has however begun to change with China apparently shifting its reliance on oil away from Saudi Arabia. Chinese oil imports from the kingdom rose a mere two percent last year while its purchase of Russian oil jumped almost 30 percent. The shift is likely to create an opening for Iran at Saudi Arabia’s expense.
The shift could not come at a worse moment with Saudi Arabia being forced to tighten its belt as a result of low commodity prices and high expenditure on wars in Yemen and Syria and the propping up of autocratic regimes like that of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
All in all, President Xi returned to Beijing from his trip to the Middle East maintaining his emphasis on non-interference and harmony, with commerce, trade and infrastructure investment as part of his One Road, One Belt initiative. Reading the tea leaves however tells a different story.
China has increasingly significant interests in the Middle East that impact not only its energy security but also its efforts to pacify Xinjiang and patch together a Eurasian land mass that is linked through infrastructure. Iran’s geography bordering on the Caucasus, Central Asia, Turkey, and the Middle East makes it a far more important link than Saudi Arabia in China’s Silk Road plans.
As a result, Chinese interests are gradually forcing it to realign its policies and relationships in the region. To do so, China will ultimately realise that it no longer can remain aloof and will have to become a player in the Middle East and North Africa.
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January 21st, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
Chinese President Xi Jingping’s visit this month to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt, the first by a Chinese leader to the Middle East in seven years, acknowledges growing Chinese concerns about instability in the region that potentially threatens vital Chinese interests. It demonstrates Beijing’s difficulty in maintaining its policy of non-interference while expanding economic cooperation.
Commentary
CHINESE PRESIDENT Xi Jingping has effectively acknowledged that increasingly China will be unable to remain aloof to multiple crises in the Middle East by deciding to visit the region – at a time that two of its major powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are at loggerheads. It was only last year that Xi dropped plans to visit the region after a Gulf alliance headed by Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in Yemen. Xi feared at the time that his visit would be seen as taking sides.
Since then, China has signalled its grudging recognition that it no longer can limit relations to economic ties and has no choice but to play a greater role in Middle Eastern affairs. A long-standing supporter of President Bashar Al-Assad, China has recently sought to position itself as a mediator in the brutal Syrian conflict by inviting representatives of the government and the opposition to visit Beijing.
US Remains Top Dog
Chinese interest in Syria is fuelled by the rise of Islamic State (IS) that has singled China out as one of its targets, the group’s demonstrated ability to launch attacks across the globe, and the fact that hundreds of Uighurs, a rebellious Turkic Muslim ethnic group in northwest China, have joined the ranks of IS as foreign fighters. IS recently broadcast its first Chinese-language recruitment video. In November, IS executed a Chinese national.
Like in Syria where a negotiated settlement that would put an end to the violence remains elusive, Xi is likely to find that there is little incentive for a resolution of the Saudi-Iranian dispute. Saudi Arabia, in its current defiant mood and willingness to pursue a risky foreign policy and military strategy in a bid to force the United States to re-engage in the Middle East, has little reason to resolve its dispute with Iran. Iran meanwhile is riding high with the lifting of punitive international sanctions as part of the implementation of its agreement to dismantle its potential military nuclear capabilities.
Beyond realising that neither Saudi Arabia, China’s foremost oil supplier, nor Iran, with whom China has long had close relations are interested in serious mediation, Xi is likely to discover that the United States remains the only power potentially capable of managing the dispute even if appears unwilling at this stage to get involved more deeply.
Ironically, Xi’s visit at a time of rising tension in the Middle East, coupled with China’s efforts to mediate in Syria, denotes the significance of this month’s publication of China’s Arab Policy Paper with its stress on upholding traditional Chinese foreign policy principles that are increasingly being challenged in the Middle East and focus on energy and economic cooperation. The paper is China’s first articulation of a policy towards the Middle East. However, rather than spelling out specific policies it emphasises in generalities China’s core focus in its relations with the Arab world: economics, energy, counterterrorism, security, technical cooperation and its One Belt, One Road initiative.
Domestic Hindrances
Xi’s visit to the Middle East is nonetheless aimed at more than securing China’s energy imports, countering terrorism and discussing infrastructure projects to further his Silk Road initiative. It constitutes a recognition that China needs to become a player in the Middle East as part of the protection of its interests and if it wants to be taken seriously as a major power. Arab officials and pundits have long demanded that China act as a superpower and adopt a more active role in the region.
Yet, in doing so, China like the US with its close ties to Israel, is also hindered by domestic considerations in its approach to the Middle East. Taking sides in the Middle East is a risky business and in China could have negative repercussions in Xinjiang. As a result, China has long been careful not to adopt positions that would upset Turkey because of the latter’s close ties to the Uighurs who speak a Turkic language.
China’s recent anti-terrorism law nevertheless constitutes a first step towards greater Chinese engagement. The law allows the Chinese military to stage overseas counterterrorism operations provided it has the agreement from the relevant country. Similarly, China is establishing its first military base in Djibouti. The policy paper further says China intends to “strengthen exchange of visits of military officials, expand military personnel exchange, deepen cooperation on weapons, equipment and various specialized technologies, and carry out joint military exercises” with Arab countries.
Xi is likely to conclude from his visit that dabbling in the Middle East is easier said than done. Engagement in a region that is fraught with ethnic conflict and political disputes that frequently are cloaked in religious terms is not something to which China has had much exposure. If anything, its efforts to suppress dissent in Xinjiang hold out little promise for Chinese deftness in seeking to lower tensions or resolve conflicts in the Middle East. Moreover, it will take more than promises that China is not seeking hegemony in the Middle East to enable it to manage the region’s multiple pitfalls.
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January 7th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Scholars, policy pundits, policymakers, and journalists have identified any number of reasons for a crisis in the Middle East and North Africa that, starting with the 2011 popular revolts, has swept the region; toppled leaders in four countries – Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen; prompted Saudi-led military interventions in Bahrain and Yemen; ignited brutal insurgencies and wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya; and sparked the rise of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, and the expansion of its territorial reach to the Gulf and Africa.
Identifying the root causes of the crisis that is shaking the roots of long-standing autocratic, un-democratic rule in the region, irrespective of whether regimes are monarchies or republics, is key to mapping out solutions, particularly ones that hold out hope for pluralism and respect for human, social, economic, cultural, and ethnic rights. Complicating the identification of root causes is the fact that analysts and policymakers were caught off guard by the challenges to autocracy and the Middle East and North Africa’s long-standing nation state order, as well as the emergence of simmering ethnic, tribal and sectarian politics as centrifugal forces.[i]
Turkish Scholar Sener Akturk argues moreover that, on the basis of case studies of Turkey, Algeria and Pakistan, Muslim-majority nations established with a secularist ideology have the potential for struggles over values including pluralism and human rights, between secularists, who are more prone towards universal principles and Islamists, and that these struggles are built at independence into their very nature. These states were “founded on the basis of an Islamic mobilization against non-Muslim opponents but having successfully defeated these non-Muslim opponents, their political elites chose a secular and monolingual nation-state model for these countries, which led to significant and recurrent challenges to the state in the form of Islamist and ethnic separatist movements. Secular nationalism faces a structural and path-dependent crisis of legitimacy in these countries because of what could be described as a historical or “genetic” disjuncture located at the very origins of these nation-states,” Akturk wrote.[ii]
Further troubling the waters is the rise of a public and private anti-terrorism industry[iii] that sees human rights as second to ensuring security and safety; has a vested interest in couching the problem in terms of law enforcement and counter-terrorism rather than notions of alienation, marginalization, socio-economic disenfranchisement, youth aspirations and rights; is abetted by autocratic Middle Eastern and North African regimes that define any form of dissent as terrorism;[iv] and is supported by a public opinion that buys into support of autocrats and some degree of curtailing of rights as a trade-off for security.
Analysts and policymakers have identified a range of causes for the breakdown of the traditional order in the Middle East and North Africa, ranging from a desire for greater freedom and social justice[v] to the fragility of post-colonial regional states as a result of autocratic failure to engage in nation rather than regime building that gave rise to ethnic, tribal and sectarian strife,[vi] to inherent flaws in colonial border arrangements at the time of the demise of the Ottoman Empire such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Treaty of Sevres.[vii] All of those notions contain kernels of truth but they have contributed to it becoming common place to pay lip service to the need to tackle root causes of the crisis in the Middle East, and that can mean almost anything. Many also merely embrace notions that are crucial to creating an environment conducive to respect of pluralism and human rights.
Putting One’s Money Where One’s Mouth Is
Yet, translating the need to tackle root causes into policy is proving difficult, primarily because it is based on a truth that has far-reaching consequences for every member of the international community no matter how close or far they are from IS’s current borders. It involves governments putting their money where their mouth is and changing long-standing, ingrained policies at home that marginalize, exclude, stereotype and stigmatize significant segments of society; emphasize security at the expense of freedoms that encourage healthy debate; and in more autocratic states that are abetted by the West, reduce citizens to obedient subjects through harsh repression and adaptations of religious belief to suit the interests of rulers.
The result is a vicious circle: government policies often clash with the state or regime’s professed values. As a result, dividing lines sharpen as already marginalized, disenfranchised or discriminated segments of society see the contradiction between policies and values as hypocritical and re-confirmation of the basis of their discontent. Western nations, for example, in the fall of 2015, deferred to Saudi Arabia’s objections to an investigation by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) into human rights violations by all sides during the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen in which thousands of civilians were killed.[viii] Media reports documented, a day prior to the Western cave-in, a British pledge to support Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s foremost violators of basic human rights and purveyors of sectarianism, in the Council.[ix] The kingdom, at the same time, objected to references to gay rights in the United Nations’ newly formulated Sustainable Development Goals.[x]
Creating a policy framework that is conducive to an environment in the Middle East and North Africa that would favour pluralism and respect of human rights and counter the appeal of jihadism and emerging sectarian-based nationalism is not simply a question of encouraging and supporting voices in the region, first and foremost those of youth, or of revisiting assumptions of Western foreign policies and definitions of national security. It involves fostering inclusive national identities that are capable of accommodating ethnic, sectarian and tribal sub-identities as legitimate and fully accepted sub-identities in Middle Eastern and North African, as well as Western countries, and changing domestic policies in the West towards minorities, refugees and migrants.
Tribalism Meets Modernity
Tribal and sectarian identities and loyalty have been reinforced in Middle Eastern and North African nations as the fragility of nation states becomes increasingly evident and the future of nation states like Syria and Iraq in their post-colonial forms becomes ever more uncertain. Those identities are strengthened by youth bulges that see little prospect for social and economic opportunity and participation in politics against a backdrop of rising education levels. As a result, national identity is often an amorphous concept that positions the tribe with its traditional support mechanisms as a more responsive social and political entity. This trend is furthered by youth’s greater access to information through the Internet. Educated and Internet-savvy youth are conscious of vast income differences in their country and the failure of governments to provide public goods and services. Mounting frustrations drive calls for an end to corruption and greater rights.
The persistence of tribalism is evident in hiring policies in various Middle Eastern and North African countries that officially adhere to non-discriminatory policies but take into account tribal affiliation. It also emerges in low tribal inter-marriage rates and official government emphasis on the concept of tribal values that focus on maintaining peace, enforcing order, protecting the weak, honouring authority, ensuring an equitable hearing and enforcing justice. Cultural events promoted by governments reinforce the trend towards tribalism.[xi] Saudi TV’s popular poetry contest, Shaer al-Milyon, The Million’s Poet, features exclusively tribal contenders whose participation raises their tribes’ profile.[xii] Camel races and beauty contests serve a similar purpose. The emphasis on tribal values and culture is part of a larger focus on heritage intended to cement weak national identities.
Renewed emphasis on tribalism has forced tribes to redefine themselves in a 21st century world in which the issues they confront are no longer access to land and water but social and economic development as well as political stability. It involves striking a balance between being part of a national state and accommodating regional differences that often emulate tribal lines. Ironically, one of the most powerful national symbols that transcends tribal and other affiliations often is the national soccer team. “We all support the national team irrespective of who we are,” said a young Saudi.[xiii]
“Young people are finding living conditions harsh and they are asking, where has the money gone? The younger generation has started to use social media and it is they that will cause human rights problems, as they want to be part of government decision-making. It is the young people who are going back to the tribes because they cannot see anything to be proud about in central government. The older generation is content with the government but they are richer than their children will ever be and have benefited more from the country’s development of the last 40 years,” said a young Saudi.[xiv] “People are suddenly doing their family trees and looking for their origins. Their family lineages are being revived and they have family diwaniyyat (gatherings) every week with all the family who can come. This is happening right across Saudi Arabia, not just in the Hejaz. Tribalism is back now,” added another Saudi.[xv]
To accommodate the trend and ensure that it strengthens rather than weakens national identity and promotes greater identification with the state, youth across the Middle East and North Africa are agitating, to various degrees, for more inclusive governance, by introducing free and fair elections, elevating the fight against corruption, and adopting more equitable social and economic policies.[xvi] This is particularly true in the Gulf states and countries like Syria and Iraq, whose future national borders are in question as a result of civil war that stems from the fragility of a state formed on the colonial legacy of minority rule. The same issues minus tribalism are prevalent in countries like Egypt, a country with a millennial history and a strong sense of national identity.
Northern Iraq exemplifies the significant setbacks the Middle East and North Africa has suffered as a result of sectarian policies by states and non-state actor and the scars of war. A Yazidi mechanic shop owner, who in 2014 survived the slaughter and mass deportation of members of his sect, Ibrahim Hajj returned in mid-2015 to his abandoned village of Sinouni. His return was to be short-lived. Unwilling to contemplate the return of his Arab neighbours on whom his business depended, Hajj was opting to again become a refugee.
“If they (the Arabs) try to come back, and we don’t have weapons to kill them, we will tear them apart with our teeth and nails. I haven’t made a single cent since I came back — with them gone, I have no customers. I have to go back to the refugee camps,” he said.[xvii]
The picture repeats itself in Sunni Muslim towns like Rabea that are populated by tribes that supported the Kurds in their fight against IS. Authorities in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq have yet to connect the town to the power grid. Deep-seated distrust between Arabs and Kurds has replaced once close communal ties. A former Sunni Muslim policeman was rebuffed when he went to check on a Yazidi co-worker. “All of you Muslims are Isis,” the policeman was told.[xviii]
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December 9th, 2015
By James M Dorsey and Mushahid Ali.
As the threat from Islamic State (also known as IS or ISIS or by its Arabic acronym of Daesh) continued to grow, US-led coalition forces intensified their aerial attacks on IS militants and strategic installations in Syria and Iraq, in a concerted effort to destroy and degrade the self-styled caliphate. However, far from caving in, IS has expanded its territorial reach by moving across the Mediterranean Sea into Libya’s coastal region, the Sahel and West Africa.
Some scholars argue that the ability of IS to attract foreign fighters as well as idealistic Muslims from across the globe willing to become cannon fodder in suicide missions at home, make it a lethal force and very dangerous to any government willing to confront it. These analysts say that the militants’ ideology has been fuelled by the austere and puritanical interpretation of Islam by Saudi Arabia, a country which has significantly advanced Salafi-Wahhabi beliefs (a return to Islam as espoused by the first three generations of Muslims who are collectively known as the salaf).
German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, in a rare attack by a Western official, accused Saudi Arabia recently of financing extremist mosques and communities in the West that constitute a security risk and warned that it must stop. “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over,” Gabriel said in a German newspaper interview. “Wahhabi mosques all over the world are financed by Saudi Arabia. Many Islamists who are a threat to public safety come from these communities in Germany,” he said.
Algerian author and columnist Kamal Daoud wrote in The New York Times recently that the penchant of IS for beheading, killing, stoning, and amputating victims; and despising women and non-Muslims, mirrors the practice of Saudi Arabia. “The kingdom relied on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimises, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on,” Daoud declared.
The difference was that Saudi Arabia, governed by a labyrinthine ruling family-religious complex, was less crude in the way it presented itself to the global community. Daoud asserted that Saudi Arabia was what IS rule could look like once it had settled in and discarded its jihadist and expansionist tendencies.
Mainstream Muslim scholars, including those in Southeast Asia, have long warned that Wahhabism threatens other versions of Islam in countries where the Muslims are either a majority or a minority. British author and former intelligence officer Alastair Crooke believes that IS has undermined the legitimacy of the Saudi ruling family by returning to the rigours of the 18th century alliance between the founding fathers of modern Saudi Arabia and the fundamentalist Sunni preacher Sheikh Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab who rejected as innovation everything that had been introduced after the salaf.
To be sure, IS in its present reiteration, was not created by Saudi Arabia; it was forged in the wake of the US toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 by among others the disbandment of Saddam Hussein’s army, whose senior officers were mostly Sunnis who already had Islamist networks; the insurgency and civil war between Iraqi Shias and Sunnis that continues to this day; and the morphing of Al-Qaeda in Iraq into ISIS, which was in turn energised by civil strife in Syria and evolved into IS.
These militant groups expanded and consolidated under the umbrella of IS, culminating in the singular act of declaring a caliphate that covers Iraq and the Levant (which includes Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria). IS challenges Saudi Arabia for the allegiance of Sunnis across the Middle East. The group’s ultimate objective is to set up the first major caliphate since the demise of the last caliph with the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire by Western imperial powers in the wake of the First World War. IS strives to spread Salafi-Islamic rule across the globe.
Conscious of the enormous political and strategic fallout from IS’ affinity with Saudi Arabia’s religious, social and moral system as well as other forms of association with IS (such as the use of Saudi secondary school books in Mosul, Iraq, after its capture by IS in 2014), the Saudi government has come to view the militants as a threat. It has over the years condemned militants led by Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and IS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
In response to the November 2015 bloody rampage in Paris, the Saudi rulers have called on the international community to “eradicate this (referring to IS) dangerous and destructive plague”. Saudi Arabia clearly does not want the world to identify the kingdom’s puritan interpretation of Islam with IS and jihadism despite the fact that it has served as a breeding ground for ever more virulent strands of the faith.
That said, it was King Faisal bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, whose mother was a descendant of Abdul Wahhab, who advocated modernity in the conservative kingdom while at the same time launching Wahhabism’s global proselytisation campaign on the back of the huge cash revenues earned in the wake of the 1973 oil embargo that sent oil prices skyrocketing. Some reasoned that Faisal’s campaign was initially payback for the support of the ulama (religious scholars) in a protracted power struggle with his brother, King Saud that ultimately secured him the throne.
British author and religious scholar Karen Armstrong suggests that IS may have over-reached itself with its unsustainable policies and jihadist philosophy. A majority of Sunnis and Shias reject what IS stands for. Armstrong notes that Saudi Arabia, with its impressive counter-terrorist resources, has already thwarted IS attacks in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states nonetheless have made clear that dealing with IS does not top their priorities. The kingdom and its Gulf allies, bogged down in an intractable war in Yemen viewed by the Saudis as a proxy war against Iran, have effectively withdrawn militarily from the US-led campaign against IS.
The key to removing the challenge from IS has to be the realisation that the terror group’s appeal is not its alleged goal of an atavistic return to the glorious past of Islam, as Armstrong put it. Nor is Islam at the core of its multiple conflicts. The current appeal of IS is the opportunity it offers the socially, economically and ethnically disenfranchised to revolt and its ability with the help of technological advances to take the battle to historically new levels. Military defeat of IS will not soothe the anger of the disenfranchised. Addressing their concerns will.
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November 16th, 2015
By James M Dorsey.
Zouhair, a security guard of immigrant background, was one of several security officers, who on Friday prevented three of the Paris suicide bombers from entering the city’s Stade de France stadium. The bombers were forced to blow themselves up outside the stadium and at nearby McDonald’s.
Little is publicly known about the background of Mr. Zouhair who described to The Wall Street Journal what happened at the stadium where French President Francois Hollande was among 80,000 people watching a friendly between France and Germany.
What is clear however, is that Mr. Zouhair represents a significant view among members of France’s Muslim community, even if many migrants feel side lined, marginalized and hopeless in a country that has yet to come to grips with becoming an immigration society.
Like Ahmed Merabet, the police officer killed in Paris in January when two brothers attacked Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine that at times mocked his religion, Mr. Zouhair was standing guard for a symbol, the French national soccer team, that disillusioned Muslim youth have come to reject as not representing them.
Instead, they often support the national teams of Algeria and Morocco and in some cases of other African states. Their rejection is akin to notions among militant soccer fans in Egypt who in the past refused to support their national team because it was ousted President Hosni Mubarak rather than Egypt’s squad.
The juxtaposition of Mr. Zouhair, the security guard, and the three Muslim suicide bombers, suggests that the Stade de France was chosen as one of several targets for Friday’s attacks not simply because of the large number of people present. The juxtaposition was further thrown into sharp relief with an announcement by French midfielder Lassana Diarra that his cousin had been killed in the IS attacks while he was playing in the stadium
The targeting of the stadium fit the goals of the Islamic State (IS), which has claimed responsibility for the attacks, of polarizing communities, exacerbating social tensions, and driving the marginalized further into the margins.
Stade de France is one of ten French stadia slated to host next year’s Euro 2016, the first major international soccer tournament in France since the 1998 World Cup.
By focusing almost exclusively on stepped-up security and declaring war against the backdrop of mounting anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the Paris attacks on an Islamist group with which France and Europe were already at war for more than a year, European leaders risk becoming the Islamic State’s unwitting helpers.
By failing to adopt social and economic policies at home that would undermine IS’s attraction to disaffected youth who feel they have little to lose, they exasperate the very divide between Mr. Zouhair and the suicide bombers that has turned the French national soccer team, a reflection of France at both its best and its worst, into a divisive symbol.
Some analysts suggest that the Paris attacks may mark IS’s beginning of the end with calls for a far more robust military confrontation of IS in Syria and Iraq. The problem is that the battlefield stretches far beyond IS’s bases in the Middle East and would not be resolved by simply defeating the jihadist group.
The struggle against what IS represents needs to be waged as much in its Syrian capital of Raqqa as in the dismal banlieues or satellites of French cities that furnish the jihadists with the largest contingent of European foreign fighters; the populous neighbourhoods in Tunisia that account for the single largest group of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq; in Saudi Arabia, whose citizens account for the second largest number of foreign fighters and whose decades-long effort to propagate a puritan, intolerant, interpretation of Islam has been a far more important breeding ground for jihadist thinking than the writings of militant Islamist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb; and in Western capitals led by Washington who view retrograde, repressive regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
The fallout of the failure of French governments to wage war on discrimination and marginalization at home as fervently as Mr. Hollande is likely to wage war against IS in the wake of the Paris attacks is reflected in the ups and downs of the French national team. When the team made up of a majority of players with an immigrant Muslim background won the 1998 World Cup, it was feted as a model of successful French multiculturalism. The team’s success was celebrated by Frenchmen irrespective of their cultural and ethnic background.
Little was left of that success little more than a decade later when the team became an embarrassment for France during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Its players revolted, refused to train, and ultimately were denounced as having shamed France at the very moment that their German soccer rivals captured the crown of successful European multiculturalism.
In the 12 years between victory and humiliation, France witnessed its worst race riots in the heavily Muslim populated banlieues of major cities. Zinedine Zidane, widely viewed as one of his generation’s best players, was given the red card during the 2006 World Cup for head butting another player who had allegedly insulted the Prophet Mohammed. Last year’s celebrations in France of Algeria’s defeat of Russia in a 2018 World Cup qualifier sparked riots that prompted National Front leader Marine Le Pen to demand the reversal of a law that allows French citizens to have dual nationality.
“In this climate of terror, it is important for all of us who represent our country and its diversity to speak out and stay united in the face of a horror that has neither colour, nor religion. Let us together defend love, respect and peace,” Mr. Diarra said. His appeal is as much incumbent on Muslim leaders as it is on Mr. Hollande and European leaders in an environment of mounting Islamophobia and anti-migrant and anti-foreigner sentiment.
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August 25th, 2015
By James M. Dorsey.
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Reports that self-declared caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, was seriously wounded in a coalition strike in early 2015 has done little to weaken the group as it fights multiple battles in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State (IS), despite news reports that Al-Baghdadi was paralyzed in the attack has stood its ground in Syria, made advances in Iraq, and according to some Iraqi lawmakers as well as the group’s captured Baghdad bomb maker, infiltrated Baghdad that is regularly rocked by bombings.[1] A photo picturing Al-Baghdadi sitting knees crossed that was published by a Kurdish news agency in mid-July suggested that reports that he had been injured were false or that he had since recovered.[2] CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr at the same time quoted US officials as saying that Al-Baghdadi had been sighted in June in the Syrian city of Raqqa.[3]
Al-Baghdadi’s resilience is emblematic of the group’s ability to survive significant military pressure rather than collapse under its own weight as it licks its wounds in an environment in which the attitudes of some of the United States’ closest allies towards militant Islamist militias, including some associated with Al Qaeda, are ambivalent and in flux. A continued willingness to forge tactical alliances with groups considered by not only the West but also other major powers like China and Russia beyond the pale coupled with IS’s resilience raises the spectre of jihadist groups becoming a more permanent fixture on the Middle East’s political landscape.
The IS leader’s resilience is also a reflection of the murky, shifting politics of Saudi-led Gulf support of jihadist groups, including IS, despite the obvious danger of backlash as is evident in IS’s declared targeting of the kingdom as well as the Al Qaeda attacks in Saudi Arabia in the very first years of the 21st century,[4] and more recent IS attacks on Shiite mosques in the kingdom and Kuwait and on Saudi security personnel.[5]
In a speech in 2014, former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, recalled Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and former head of Saudi intelligence, warning him more than a decade ago that “the time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”[6] Dearlove left little doubt that Gulf states had contributed to the rise of IS as part of their bid to not only to counter Iran but to force the demise of Syrian president Bashar al Assad, “Such things simply do not happen spontaneously,” Dearlove noted. He said, referring to the kingdom’s austere interpretation of Islam, that Saudi strategic thinking was rooted in deep-seated beliefs that that there “can be no legitimate or admissible challenge to the Islamic purity of their Wahhabi credentials as guardians of Islam’s holiest shrines.” Dearlove argued further that Saudi leaders were convinced that they possessed a monopoly on interpretation of Islam that leads them to be “deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively challenge Shiadom.”[7]
Scholar Madawi al-Rasheed took Dearlove’s comments a step further, noting that attacks on Shiite mosques in 2015 in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had been perpetrated by Saudi nationals. “Such terrorism is not an export from the Levant to Saudi Arabia and its neighbours, but rather the return to its historical home of an indigenous trend of political violence. The justification for such sectarian terror was established in Saudi Arabia, where it has its ideological roots and has since seized the imagination of a new generation. It is thus unsurprising that the perpetrators were Saudis. ISIS is not simply a problem unfolding in the Levant but is in part an outcome of religious indoctrination and political conditions in Saudi Arabia… There is no doubt that hate preachers are an entrenched reality in Saudi Arabia. This is not a new phenomenon that was initiated by ISIS but is an important cornerstone of the Saudi-Wahhabi religious tradition. It flourished in the eighteenth century and continues to inflame the imagination of a wide circle of clerics and their followers today,” Al-Rasheed argued.[8]
Dearlove and Al-Rasheed’s comments on Saudi and Gulf ambivalence in the fight against IS by implication pointed to other equally fundamental factors that shape attitudes in the kingdom and other regional sheikhdoms. Leaving aside the merits of foreign intervention, the refusal of Saudi Arabia and other regional players with the exception of Iran to commit ground forces to the fight against IS highlights how the kingdom is blinded by a sectarian approach to a legitimate struggle for power.
Committing ground troops would mean Saudi troops fighting alongside the Iraqi military and Shiite militias that both answer to a Shiite government in Baghdad – a heresy in a Saudi world view that despite the arrest of hundreds of alleged IS operators in the kingdom sees Iran rather than IS as the greater threat to Saudi national security. In fact, if national security is defined as survival of the Saudi regime, both IS and Iran pose a mortal threat. Both challenge the Saudi claim as the Custodian of the Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina, to have developed the one and only legitimate form of Islamic rule.
The Islamic republic’s challenge is multi-fold: a republic rather than a monarchy established as the result of a truly popular revolt and legitimized by an institutionalized, albeit flawed, electoral process, that propagates a revolutionary instead of a status quo approach to geopolitics. For its part, IS’s declaration of a caliphate by implication dismisses the Islamic credentials of Saudi rulers and propagates political activism and jihadism rather than the kingdom’s adherence to quietist Sunni precepts of obedience to the ruler.
Moreover, Gulf engagement with jihadist groups was further part of what international relations scholars Bulent Aras and Richard Falk described as authoritarian leaders’ “learning process” in their desperate need “to develop new strategies…(and) cope successfully with recent geopolitical challenges,” making use “of concrete geopolitical reasoning to shape a problem-solving agenda designed to facilitate authoritarian survival.” Aras and Falk argued that the popular revolts had rewritten the political geography of the Middle East and North Africa with “the erosion of regional structures, alienation of non-Arab elements, empowerment of non-state actors and reproduction of old problems in a new context.”[9] IS in particular by challenging the notion that political conflict occurred exclusively within the boundaries of or between sovereign nation states called into question the regional order in the Middle East and North Africa. “New territorial entities are surfacing on the periphery of regional geopolitics…(that are)…directly challenging the stability of central powers acting within this regional system,” Aras and Falk said.[10]
In effect, IS, with its roots in the Islamic State of Iraq founded more than a decade ago by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is not simply a product of the United States’ ill-conceived invasion of Iraq but more importantly of a fundamental crisis of Sunni Arab politics. IS is “a true and genuine product of the current reality and is objectively indicative of the extent to which political, moral, cultural, and social conditions (in the Middle East and North Africa) have deteriorated… It as an ‘entity’ alien to the outcomes and consequences of corrupt authoritarian regimes, on the one hand, and deteriorating social contexts, on the other hand. These malaises are further exacerbated by the stagnation and defects of the intellectual and jurisprudential systems in the region as a whole… (It) is an expected product of the current Arab social and political reality, particularly in Iraq and Syria. IS has re-emerged and found a fertile chaotic climate, where sectarian and ethnic conflicts are raging, and the nature of the struggle has transformed into an identity-driven one, turning political processes into societal conflicts, rather than purely political or partisan competition,” concluded scholars Hasan Abu Hanieh and Mohammed Abu Rumman in a study of IS.[11]
Playing jihadists
The most recent IS attacks and Al-Baghdadi’s declaration of the caliphate, a direct challenge to the fundamental precepts of the kingdom, have recently swung the Saudi pendulum back to jihadist groups opposed to the Islamic State with Jabhat al Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate, in the forefront. Nusra and its allied have made significant advances in Syria and put the Assad regime on the defensive. Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states and Turkey appear willing to grant support despite the failure of Qatari efforts to persuade Nusra to break its ties to Al Qaeda.[12]
A flurry of meetings of various rebel groups; the recent dissolution of the Levant Front, the largest rebel alliance in Aleppo;[13] the unexpected presence of the leader of the Saudi-backed Islam Army that operates out of Damascus, Zahran Alloush, at a recent gathering of Syrian clerics and rebel groups in Istanbul;[14] and talk of Saudi efforts to bring rebel groups together in Riyadh to discuss the creation of some kind of representative political entity, suggests stepped up Saudi, Turkish and Qatari efforts to turn the tide in Syria’s four year-old civil war.[15]
Jamal Khashoggi, a well-connected Saudi journalist quipped in a recent tweet that Alloush’s visit “to Turkey removes the last obstacle for Saudi-Turkish-Qatar cooperation in Syria.”[16] Alloush’s cousin, a leader of the Revolutionary Command Council, an insurgent alliance that includes the Islam Army, added that Turkey was seeking to unite rebel groups across Syria.[17]
The Saudi-led efforts to defeat Assad involve playing jihadist groups against one another, a risky strategy that irrespective of the outcome of internecine jihadist struggle would ensure that jihadism remains deeply entrenched within the legal boundaries of Syria. It also means that IS, widely viewed as the world’s richest jihadist group despite reduced revenue streams as a result of curtailing by the US-led coalition of income from the sale of oil from captured Syrian and Iraqi oil facilities and diminished ransom returns from kidnappings, is likely to be a major player.
IS is aided by the fact that confrontation of the jihadist group does not constitute the top priority of any of the forces arrayed against it. “None of its enemies considers defeating ISIL to be its paramount priority. All…have at least one other enemy or goal that it firmly believes is more important. Hence a band of terrorist maniacs – who seem almost as suicidal as they are homicidal – is surviving armed conflict with everyone else simultaneously. The prioritising of something or someone else constantly holds these parties back from fully attacking ISIL or provides it with some kind of backdoor out of calamity,” argued Gulf scholar Hussein Ibish.[18]
Lebanon’s Shiite militia Hezbollah needs to take its position at home into account and keep an eye on Israel with pundits predicting that another war with the Jewish state is inevitable; Iraq needs to get its own house in order before being able to focus all its energies on IS; Jordan is struggling economically as a result of the influx of Syrian and Iraqi refugees and is dealing with fallout of the Palestinian issue; Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are fighting a troublesome war in Yemen; Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is happy to see the US-led coalition do its dirty work while he concentrates on confronting other Syrian rebels; and Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish rebels are seeking to strengthen enclaves of their own as Turkey targets primarily the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) rather than IS.
Recent IS attacks in Gulf states like the mosque bombings in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia should make confronting the group a higher priority for the conservative sheikhdoms. Successfully challenging IS would however would have to entail a fundamental change of policy that alongside counterterrorism would allow Gulf autocrats primarily in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to launch a sincere dialogues with citizens of different religious beliefs and adopt inclusive policies that no longer marginalize Shiite communities. No Gulf state appears willing to embrace the kind of reforms that would be needed to confront IS on levels more effective than the military battlefield.
In that void, IS has the space to entrench itself and carry out well-prepared plans for the creation of a revolutionary state. A cache of documents belonging to one of the architects of IS that were obtained by German magazine Der Spiegel illustrates how a former Iraqi Baathist military officer designed in neat diagrams the structure of a future Islamic state divided into provincial councils that are dominated by intelligence and security services.[19]
The plan involved the provision of financial service and the operation of schools, day care centres, media and public transportation. It envisioned a state and institutions that has the making of sociologist Ervin Goffman’s concept of a ‘total institution’ in which “all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority…, each phase of the member’s daily activity will be carried out in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together… all phases of the day’s activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at a prearranged time into the next, the whole circle of activities being imposed from above through a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials… (and) the contents of the various enforced activities are brought together as parts of a single overall rational plan purportedly designed to fulfil the official aims of the institution.”[20]
Der Spiegel’s analysis of the cache of documents concluded that “it is true that jihadist experiments in ruling a specific geographical area have failed in the past. Mostly, though, that was because of their lack of knowledge regarding how to administer a region, or even a state. That is exactly the weakness that IS strategists have long been aware of — and eliminated. Within the ‘Caliphate,’ those in power have constructed a regime that is more stable and more flexible than it appears from the outside… Within IS, there are state structures, bureaucracy and authorities.”[21]
An Al Jazeera Center for Studies analysis of IS’s state structure mapped its government as being made up of councils, including the advisory Shura Council that in theory has the power to depose the caliph, but in practice makes recommendations for senior appointments and offers non-binding advice on issues of war and peace and day-to-day issues that are not explicitly covered by the Quran or the Sunnah, teachings, deeds and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed. Ahl al-Hal wal Aqd (Those Who Loosen and Bind), the equivalent of a parliament that is rooted in Islamic jurisprudence and includes members of the Shura Council as well as local leaders, was the institution that appointed Al-Baghdadi as caliph. Other councils deal provide Islamic guidance, operate the judiciary, oversee media policy, manage finance and budgets, supervise the military, oversee security and intelligence, and administer IS’s provinces.[22]
Some Iraqi officials believe nonetheless that the Baathist contingent in IS’s power structure could also prove to be the group’s Achilles Heel. The officials argue that the jihadists had dashed Baathist hopes that they would be the dominant force and instead have exploited the skills of the former officers and officials of the regime of Saddam Hussein for their own purposes. “The plan of the former Baathists was to use ISIS as a Trojan horse to derail the political process and to take over. But in the end, it is ISIS that used them instead,” Maj. Gen. Tariq al-Asal, a senior Iraqi Interior Ministry officer and the former police chief for overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province, told The Wall Street Journal.[23]
The officials point to signs of divergence between the Baathists and the jihadists, including a number of statements by one, major group of Baathist insurgents, Jaish Rijāl aṭ-Ṭarīqa an-Naqshabandiya (The Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order) founded by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was reportedly killed by Iraqi troops in April 2015.[24] As Saddam’s right hand, Al-Douri had been responsible under the former Iraqi leader for forging ties with militant Islamist groups.
Nonetheless, by linking the name of his group of insurgents to a Sufi order, Al-Douri was putting on public display the differences between the Baathists and the jihadists with their austere interpretation of Islam. The group condemned in February 2015 the burning alive by IS of a captured Jordanian pilot and has taken issue with the group’s destruction of religion and heritage sites and persecution of minorities. It also paid condolences for the death of Saudi King Abdullah and congratulated King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a sworn enemy of IS, on his ascension.[25]
Talking the talk, walking the walk
Visits to Lebanon by Syrians residents of IS-controlled territory highlight problems in how the international community copes with an entity that holds out the prospect of longevity despite being a pariah and under continuous military, economic, and political attack. The visitors often in Lebanon to visit family are frequently stopped by security forces on suspicion of being jihadist operatives because they carry identity cards issued to every resident by IS. The visitors are caught in a bind being unable to travel in or out of the Islamic State without those identity cards.[26] Similarly, IS’s neighbours have turned a blind eye to smuggling that contributes significantly to its income stream.[27]
“IS has done what others talked of. It has an army comprising highly equipped regular forces as well as guerrilla forces, it controls a large territory, it has an oil industry, it has a tax system, it has a system of local government and a system of justice. It fights like a state, it sees like a state and it punishes like a state. It carries conviction and meets with belief. It doesn’t care that it horrifies us; it knows that millions of Muslims have been horrified by what our governments have been doing to them,” said Middle East historian Hugh Roberts.[28] The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that IS had introduced the licensing of Internet cafes and ordered them to ensure that their wireless was only available in the confines of their premise rather than also to their neighbours in an effort to control access to information.[29]
IS has proven capable of institutionalizing taxation and levies and administering Sharia’a justice. Absentee landlords who receive rents from property owned in IS-controlled territory report that they receive payments with officially documented taxes deducted by the group’s administration.[30] IS has further fixed power lines, dug sewage systems and painted sidewalks in northern Syria. It enforces food security controls, searching markets for expired food and sick animals. It runs a regular bus service across what was once the border between Syria and Iraq and recently reopened a luxury hotel in Mosul. Newlyweds were offered a free three-night stay, meals and all. It has advised wounded residents that they no longer need to travel to Turkey to acquire prosthetic limbs because they are now produced domestically in the Islamic State. In doing so, IS offers a semblance of order, albeit a harsh one, in a region that has succumbed to mayhem and bitter sectarian warfare.[31] “It is not our life, all the violence and fighting and death. But they got rid of the tyranny of the Arab rulers,” said a worker and IS resident.[32]
Perhaps, more fundamentally, IS has focused on shaping its next generation through education in a model that not dissimilar to the system implemented in the 1970s by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia that saw children as less corrupted by bourgeois values and more able of adopting its system of values. To that affect, teachers in IS-controlled territory are forced to sign statements of repentance, retrained and indoctrinated; foreign fighters are recruited as instructors; and curriculums have been rewritten. Music, art, science, biology, history, philosophy and sports have been replaced with Islamic studies, mathematics, Arabic and physical and military training. Boys and girls, who are obliged to wear a hijab from the age of six, are segregated. [33] IS’s jihadist ideology and military training is at the core of the Islamic State’s education system. The product is frequently on display in
IS video clips that show children cheering IS forces, attending execution, training to fight, and learning how to use automatic weapons in ambushes and plant an improvised explosive device (IED).
“They are giving them lessons in jihad. It was brainwashing. They were teaching the children to rebel and inform against their parents, telling them to put Islam first and encouraging them to disobey their parents as blasphemers… This generation has no culture, no education, no future,” said Wissam, a Syrian who fled to Turkey from Raqqa.[34] Wissam was echoing conclusions of a United Nations report that noted that IS “ISIS prioritises children as a vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty, adherence to their ideology and a cadre of devoted fighters that will see violence as a way of life.” The report said some schools had been turned into training camps. “In Raqqa city, children are gathered for screenings of videos depicting mass executions of Government soldiers, desensitising them to extreme violence. By using, conscripting and enlisting children for active combat roles, the group is perpetrating abuses and war crimes on a massive scale in a systematic and organised manner,” the report said.[35]
In focusing on education, IS is following in the footsteps of newly independent states that after throwing off the shackles of colonialism needed a new national narrative that countered the allegedly civilizing mission of the former colonial power, introduced an element of heroism as part of the development of a national identity and vision, and allowed the new rulers to consolidate power. IS’s narrative is articulated, according to scholar Laurie A. Brand,[36] in its educational curriculum directive that replaces Syria’s official designation as the Syrian Arab Republic with the Islamic State and bans the Syrian national anthem. Concepts of patriotism and Arab nationalism make way for adherence to Islam, the community of the faithful, strict monotheism and Muslim land on which God’s path governs. Homeland is God’s rather than that of its inhabitants.
With institutionalization, IS has put in place the building blocks it needed to obtain at least the consent, if not the support, of significant segments of the population it controls, including the ability to establish order in areas where anarchy disrupted livelihoods, police a territory effectively and identify and punish distractors and reward supporters, and govern and supply the local population with public goods and governance.[37] “ISIS has the capacity to deploy an organization staffed by motivated cadres, and this goes a long way toward explaining its success and its ability to prevail over its more fragmented rivals… Like other revolutionary groups in the past, ISIS (IS’s past designation that was changed in June 2014 with the declaration of the caliphate) has profited handsomely from the infusion of foreign fighters in its ranks, a feature of rebel groups that have had the capacity to rely on a diffuse transnational social movement. However, the strength of ISIS cannot be reduced to the contribution of foreign fighters, who remain primarily in the organization’s lower ranks, but instead is derived in part from its ability to link up with the population, once it becomes its de facto ruler.,” noted political scientist Stathis N. Kalyvas.[38]
Kalyas’ assertion appeared to be borne out by a resident of Raqqa, the IS capital, who referring to IS ability to provide security and albeit unevenly ban corruption, told The New York Times that “you can travel from Raqqa to Mosul and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million. No one would dare to take even one dollar.” Added an antiques dealer who fled Raqqa: “Honestly, both are dirty, the (Syrian) regime and Daesh,” But IS “is more acceptable here in Raqqa.” Much like the harsh order imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, the dealer argued that IS was “implementing God’s regulations. The killer is killed. The adulterer is stoned. The thief’s hands are cut.”[39]
Institutionalization in territories controlled by IS coupled with the group’s battlefield resilience and the fact that the state’s neighbours are forced to deal with the reality of its existence as evidenced by the problems posed by travellers suggests the irredentist entity is a fixture that is not about to be vanquished. The entity’s continued existence calls into question the goal of the US-led alliance announced with the launch in 2014 of airstrikes of degrading and destroying the Islamic State. It also punctures the notion that Iraq and Syria can be restored as nation states in their status ante quo. The US effort to definitively defeat IS are further undermined by the fact that allies like Iraq and Saudi Arabia represent models of governance that have failed to deliver and have fuelled the proliferation of Sunni jihadist sympathies.
“It’s time to ponder a troubling possibility: What should we do if the Islamic State wins?… An Islamic State victory would mean that the group retained power in the areas it now controls and successfully defied outside efforts to ‘degrade and destroy’ it… (Political scientist Barry R.) Posen says that the United States (as well as others) should deal with the Islamic State the same way it has dealt with other revolutionary state-building movements: with a policy of containment. I agree,” said international relations scholar Stephen M. Walt.[40]
Ineffective wars
Underlying the debate between realists like Posen and Walt who root their argument in the alliance’s unwillingness to commit ground troops to the fight, the inherent weakness of the Iraqi armed forces and past experience of revolutionary states like the Soviet Union, China, and most recently Iran – all states that were initially ostracized but ultimately integrated into the international community — and proponents of a military-focused approach is a straight forward question: What constitutes the greatest threat to regional and international stability, IS’s disruptive expansionary goals or its ideology? Is the confrontation with IS primarily a war in the traditional sense of the word or a war of ideas?
Lawrence Rubin argues in a book published in 2014 that transnational ideologies present a greater and more immediate national security threat than shifts in the military balance of power.[41] “An internationally recognized Islamic State would create an ideational security dilemma with its neighbours in which ideological power, not military power, would be the primary trigger of threat perception and policy. Even if IS did want to become a legitimate state, the internal threat it poses through the potential recruitment and mobilization of the citizens of Sunni Arab states would make its socialization within the Middle Eastern order extremely difficult and unlikely,” Rubin wrote.[42]
The problem with the debate is that it focusses on the nature of the threat and ways to neutralize it rather than on what has sparked not only an immediate threat but one that has been emerging and mushrooming over a period of decades. The debate ignores the fact that radicalisation is being fuelled by misguided foreign policies and diplomacy as well as repressive, exclusionary domestic strategies that produced social marginalization, huge gaps in income distribution and dislocation of resources in corrupt autocracies with youth bulges that populate a swath of land stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Indian Ocean. It also ignores the fact that IS is equally a product of an epic power struggle in the Middle East and North Africa being waged by some of the closest allies of the US in its campaign to defeat the group.
At the bottom line, neither military action nor intellectual engagement is likely to defeat IS without a questioning of the notion that autocracies irrespective of their ability to provide goods and services and ensure that citizens regardless of ethnicity or faith have a stake in society either guarantee stability in the Middle East and North Africa or are the better of two evils. Policy and academic debate has seemingly chucked aside the realisation in 2011 that governments, analysts and pundits were caught off guard by a wave of mass anti-government protests and popular revolts because of a false belief that the region was characterized by popular apathy in the face of strong regimes.
Retrograde forces lead transition
If anything, IS despite its unprecedented brutality and intolerant ideology, suggests a radicalization of what initially were peaceful attempts at regime change as a result of counterrevolutionary policies by autocrats who are equally brutal in their repression of dissent and no less willing to risk the region being engulfed in sectarian strife in their bid to retain absolute power. The brutal suppression with the help of Saudi troops of an initially non-confessional popular revolt in Bahrain in 2011 and the Assad regime’s violent forcing of the transition of peaceful anti-government protest into bloody civil war are prime examples.
Developments in the region suggest that rather than approaching the Middle East and North Africa in terms of an Arab Spring that has transformed into an Arab Winter, there is a need to recognize that the region remains in transition, albeit one that is messy, ugly and bloody as much because of retrograde forces like IS that have taken the lead in response to counterrevolutionary forces determined to avert change at whatever cost.
As a result, a defeat of IS with or without a bringing in from the cold of Jabhat al Nusra would do little to halt radicalization or prevent the emergence of a yet more extreme group in much the same way that IS eclipsed Al Qaeda. Containing IS rather than seeking to defeat it may be riskier in the short-term and involve a far greater effort to achieve real change but is likelier to produce greater and more sustainable stability in the middle and long-term.
In many ways, containment would build on key lessons learnt from confrontation with politically violent groups, particularly religiously motivated ones, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Palestine’s Hamas, Pakistan’s Lashkar e-Taibe and Afghanistan’s Taliban. By creating a state, IS has taken the success formula of militant politicized religious groups – the provision of social services, education, health, and enforcement of law and order – to new heights.
Proponents of containment note that some two decades of military efforts to defeat jihadism has failed to dampen the ideology’s appeal and has probably enhanced the ability of militant Islamist groups to recruit. “Case studies from Algeria and lessons learned from the Cold War suggest that if the strategic goal truly is the complete defeat of IS, success will likely come more from IS internal failings rather than external military force,” said Middle East scholar Clint Watts.[43] Containment’s success depends however on significant segments of IS’s population not only becoming disillusioned with the group’s ideology and practices but also being offered credible alternatives. That again would have to involve fundamental change in countries across the Middle East that have joined forces against IS. Essentially arguing in that vein, scholar Marc Lynch warned that defeated insurgencies and movements “often rise from the ashes even stronger and better adapted than before.” Lynch pointed to the resurgence of al-Qaeda after its 2001 defeat in Afghanistan and IS itself after having suffered significant setbacks in in Iraq in the years between 2007 and 2010.[44]
Shared strategies
In a 2009 study, Eli Berman, a former member of the Israeli military’s elite Golani brigade-turned-University of California economist, argued that it was not religion that turned the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas into some of the world’s most lethal and seemingly sustainable militant groups, but their creation of a mutual aid environment that limits the ability of those under their control to seek economic and social opportunities elsewhere.[45] IS fits Berman’s definition of such militant groups as economic clubs that cater to the spiritual and material needs of their dependent members. It is a lesson that has seeped into the doctrine of counter terrorism and counter insurgency hearts-and-minds strategy but appears to be have been lost in the debate between realists and those that put the emphasis on the war of ideas.
As a result, in a twist of irony, IS and the US military have adopted similar approaches, which involve a “clear, hold, build” strategy that is dependent on the buy-in of a local population. IS focuses on resource-rich areas and urban centres where it can impose taxation and introduce a governance structure that excludes its Islamist competitors. “The provision of services is a key tool through which IS initially appeals to people in its area of command, and it has sometimes dismantled existing institutions and sought to implement its own state structure by establishing courts, police and schools and imposing sharia law… IS sometimes appropriates schools and other institutions, giving those working within them the ‘option’ of keeping their positions, but under its control,” noted Middle East analyst Lina Khatib.[46] In doing so, IS relies on the fact that security and safety in war-battered Syria is a more important concern than democracy and liberal freedom. Its continued sway is enforced by intimidating brutality in an environment where resistance is barely an option.[47]
Exclusively military-focussed efforts like initiatives to confront IS on the battlefield of ideas fail to take IS strategy into account weaken the ability of the group’s opponents to exploit its weaknesses. This failure increase the likelihood of IS’s state becoming a more permanent fixture. Neither addresses the fact that popular support for IS is less ideological and more because its residents either don’t have alternatives or see it as the best of a set of bad options; growing discontent with public brutality and a governance system that remains in flux and contradictory as it develops; differences within the administrative and military ranks of IS as a result of ideological fluidity; resentment against the undermining of tribal authority; and complaints about favouritism accorded foreign fighters in terms of income, housing and access to goods and services.[48] In perhaps the first indication that IS is sensitive to public opinion, Al-Baghdadi in July 2015 banned further publication of videos showing beheadings in an effort source “to be considerate of Muslims and children’s feelings who may find these scenes grotesque,” according to Arab media reports.[49]
“People hate them, but they’ve despaired, and they don’t see anyone supporting them if they rise up. People feel that nobody is with them,” a 28-year-old Syrian with family in IS-controlled Mosul who asked to be identified only by the nickname he uses in political activism, Adnan, told Associated Press. Adnan was one of 20 Syrians and Iraqis interviewed by the news service about life under IS that they backed up with leaflets, application forms, and other paperwork documenting restrictive rules and regulations that were brutally enforced by the Hisba, the state’s religious police.[50]
The international community’s piecemeal approach rooted in concern about overreach in confronting IS in select geographies like Iraq rather than globally as an expansionary phenomenon alongside the military and ideological focus effectively gives the group and its state space to dig in. A recent Institute of War study based on war simulations concluded that “ISIS (IS’s former designation) likely will expand regionally and project force globally in the medium term… Avoiding or delaying action against ISIS will not necessarily preserve strategic options in the future. Instead, US strategic options may narrow as adversaries grow in strength and potential allies suffer losses and turn to other partners… Military planners in the simulation perceived that the United States does not have enough armed forces to undertake a multi-theatre campaign to degrade and defeat ISIS on its own. The U.S. therefore must choose between increasing its armed forces, relying on coalition partners to achieve the defined mission, or changing the defined mission against ISIS.” [51]
The United States, in an effort that critics say is hindered by a history of broken promises in Iraq, has more recently sought to forge alliances with potential opponents of IS in Syria. Modelled on the US-sponsored Sunni Awakening that in 2006 drove IS’s predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq, out of predominantly Sunni Anbar province, US officials have begun to U.S. officials have begun to map the social and economic landscape of northern and eastern Syria with a focus on the region’s intricate Sunni tribal and clan relationships, including family ties to IS.[52] US officials hope the mapping exercise will enable them to forge a force capable of confronting IS on the battlefield.
Initial US success in marshalling Sunni tribal forces benefitted from the presence of US troops in the country, frequent on the ground meetings that created an environment of trust, US financial and military support, and a US pledge to ensure that Sunni Muslims would have a stake in the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, which would include the integration of their militias into the Iraqi armed forces. More than four years into the Syrian civil war, the US lacks the assets it was able to leverage in Iraq. Sunni tribal leaders moreover recall that US failed in making good on its promise to ensure their inclusion in the post-Saddam power structure. They also remember that President George H. W. Bush effectively called on Iraqis in the wake of the 1991 liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation to revolt against Saddam only to then allow the Iraqi leader to brutally repress a predominantly Shiite revolt. Those memories are reinforced by the US refusal in its confrontation of IS in Iraq to arm Anbar’s Sunni tribes because it fears that would undermine the authority of the Iraqi government. In talks with US and Arab official, Syrian tribesmen contrasted the US refusal with its willingness to arm the Kurds in northern Iraq.[53]
Conclusion
Current military and ideological confrontation of IS will at best contain it and hinder its plans at global expansion. The likelihood that defeat of IS being unachievable in the foreseeable future is compounded by counterrevolutionary and sectarian policies fundamental to US allies, foremost among which Saudi Arabia for which opportunistic support of jihadist groups is a tool to box in Iran and ensure regime survival. As a result, IS more likely than not to remain an irredentist force not only in the immediate vicinity of its territorial entity but far beyond. Containment rather than eradication will therefore inevitably become the goal of the US-led coalition. That could deprive IS of its revolutionary appeal that has served it well as a recruitment tool but at the same time threatens to give rise to an even more extremist and brutal force as difficult as that may be to envision.
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August 19th, 2015
By James Dorsey.
Discontent is bubbling over among the majority Shiite population in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, home to the kingdom’s major oil fields and petrochemical industry. This could affect the Saudi Family Visit Visa of people trying to visit the nation. Disgruntlement is no less in the Iranian province of Khuzestan where up to 90 percent of Iran’s oil reserves are located. Iranian Arabs, who account for approximately half of the four million inhabitants of Khuzestan, chafe at perceived cultural and ethnic abuse and repression.
The fact that dissatisfied minorities populate the oil-rich regions of Iran and Saudi Arabia creates an ironic parallel in which in the rivalry between two of the Middle East’s larger powers often amounts to the pot calling the kettle black. Rather than recognising that protests and mounting incidents of violence are the result of government failure to address legitimate grievances, both Iran and Saudi Arabia have blamed each other for the unrest in their strategic backyards.
It’s often hard to distinguish fact from fiction in the murky world of Middle Eastern politics. There is however little doubt that Saudi Arabia and Iran have an interest in kindling unrest in each other’s backyard. By the same token, discriminatory policies against and repression of minorities in both countries are at the core of discontent that could spiral out of control at any moment. Similarly, both Iran and Saudi Arabia could effectively prevent foreign meddling by adopting policies that ensure that their minorities are fully integrated as equals rather than treated as potential fifth columns.
Integrative policies would also weaken the ability of jihadist groups like Islamic State from exploiting the sectarian divide. That is particularly true in predominantly Sunni Saudi Arabia where the group that controls a swathe of Syria and Iraq has thrice bombed Shiite mosques in the last eight months. Two attacks in May that killed some 25 people prompted the kingdom’s minority that constitutes 10-15 percent of the kingdom’s population to form a civil defence.
IS has since also targeted Saudi security forces to aggravate tension and demonstrate the kingdom’s vulnerability. The group boasted it was responsible for the bombing of a mosque inside a headquarters of the Saudi special forces.
The Shiite civil defence groups reflect a widespread sentiment among Saudi Shiites that the government has failed to protect its minority population. That sentiment is reinforced by prominent Saudi religious leaders depicting the Saudi air war in Yemen against the Shiite Houthis as a just war and the government’s projection of its military campaign as an assault on an Iranian proxy.
The Saudi Shiite sense of exposure is exacerbated by the fact that a protest movement that started in 2011 at the beginning of the Arab popular revolts, has largely been weakened by a harsh government response that led to the shooting by security forces of some 25 Shiite youths and the sentencing to death of a prominent Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr. Not to mention, the Saudi-backed crushing of a predominantly Shiite popular revolt in 2011 in neighbouring Bahrain.
Multiple checkpoints in predominantly Shiite towns like Qatif, designed to pre-empt the eruption of protests, as opposed to relaxed security at Shiite mosques in mixed Sunni-Shiite cities in the Eastern Province, suggest to many Shiites that the government is more concerned about securing the survival of the Saudi regime than ensuring the security of its Shiite minority.
The government’s failure to act against hate speech, as well as the framing of its struggle with Iran for regional dominance in often anti-Shiite terms, further calls into question what stake Shiite Saudis have in a kingdom dominated by Wahhabism, a puritan, anti-Shiite interpretation of Islam. Wahhabism has meant that Shiite Saudis are barred from serving in the military and security forces or working in the interior ministry while school books describe Shiites as rejecting core principles of Islam. Moreover, a Shiite has yet to be elevated to a Cabinet position and has only once in the kingdom’s diplomatic history been appointed as an ambassador.
In contrast to Saudi Arabia, Iran has been careful not to couch its regional battles or approach to minorities in sectarian terms. But rhetoric aside, Sunni Muslim grievances in Khuzestan constitute a mirror image of those of Shiites in the Eastern Province. Iranian Arabs have long complained that the government has failed to reinvest oil profits to raise the region’s standards of living. The World Health Organization (WHO) identified Ahwaz in 2013 as Iran’s most polluted city.
The shadowy Movement for the Liberation of Al Ahwaz has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on Iranian security forces and other government symbols in recent months. Soccer brawls have quickly morphed into anti-regime protests. Emulating the 2011 self-immolation of Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller who sparked the Arab revolts, an Iranian Arab vendor, Younes al-Asakirah, set himself on fire earlier this year to protest the allegedly unlawful confiscation of his wares. The incident sparked a wave of protest that were squashed by security forces.
Given their political geographies, Iran and Saudi Arabia resemble two opponents sitting in glass houses throwing stones at one another. Disgruntled minorities and intermittent violence in their resource-rich provinces highlight their vulnerability. Their pursuit of discriminatory and repressive policies that are at the root of the Middle East’s multiple conflicts, and have turned inevitable political transition into a bloody, destructive process, undermine their claims of legitimacy in the struggle for regional dominance.
Comments Off on Saudi Arabia and Iran: Volatile Political Geography of Oil and Minorities
August 4th, 2015
By James M Dorsey.
Synopsis
The Saudi military intervention in Yemen against Houthi rebels has repercussions in the kingdom amid cracks appearing in the ruling families in Riyadh and United Arab Emirates.
Commentary
SAUDI ARABIA’S four-month old bombing campaign against Houthi rebel forces in Yemen has had mixed results beyond devastation in the region’s poorest country. The insertion of Saudi-trained Yemeni ground forces that support exiled president Abd Rabbah Mansour Hadi led last month to the capture of the port city of Aden from the rebels.
The Yemen war and the prominent role of Saudi Arabia’s powerful defence minister, Mohammed Bin Salman, have nevertheless, sparked unease among some members of the Saudi ruling family. Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen has also brought to the fore cracks within the kingdom’s ruling family at a time that fissures are also becoming public among rulers of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Internal Saudi repercussions
Critics of the Yemen civil war within the Saudi royal family worry that even if the Houthis can be driven back to their northern redoubt of Saada, they will be embittered and likely to pose a continued threat to Saudi border towns populated by non-Wahhabi Muslim communities and tribes. Indeed a number of Saudi princes are said to have questioned the wisdom of the bombing campaign launched by King Salman’s son, Defence Minister Mohamed.
There is moreover unease at the King’s reliance on his 34-year-old son, who is Deputy Crown Prince and serves as Second Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs besides being Chief of the Royal Court. Among the dissenters are royal family members affiliated to the late King Abdullah, such as his sons Mitaib, Minister and Head of the National Guard; Turki, who was removed as Governor of Riyadh; Mishaal, removed as Governor of Mecca, and Abdul Aziz, Deputy Foreign Minister.
Also eased out last February was Khaled bin Bandar, Deputy Defence Minister and Head of Intelligence, while earlier, Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz retired, making way for Prince Mohamed bin Nayef, Minister of Interior to become Crown Prince and First Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Political and Security Affairs Council.
The ascent of King Salman, along with Mohamed bin Nayef and Mohamed bin Salman as Crown Princes, affirm the return of the Sudairi branch of the family of Ibn Saud (King Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Ibn Saud), the founder of the Saudi kingdom, following the decade-long reign of King Abdullah. He had succeeded King Fahd, the first of the Sudairi Seven, while two other brothers, Sultan and Nayef, died as Crown Princes. Salman is the second Sudairi to be king.
Three other Sudairis, Turki, Ahmad and another, are not in the running. Turki was in exile for being “liberal”, while Ahmad retired as a Deputy Minister of the Interior. Intriguingly Turki’s son, Sultan, has recently emerged to lodge a complaint in a Swiss court against Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, a son of the late King Fahd and Religious Affairs Minister Saleh Al Sheikh, for his abduction and forced repatriation to the kingdom from Switzerland in 2003. He claims to have been kidnapped and sedated from a Saudi villa in Geneva, after he announced plans to expose widespread corruption in the Saudi defence and interior ministries.
While the incident may have occurred over a decade ago the timing of the legal suit has significance. Though he is from the same Sudairi lineage as the king and his two crown princes, as well as King Fahd’s son, Sultan bin Turki could represent a group of dissenting members of the ruling family who resent the concentration of power in the Salman and Nayef clans.
Fissures in the Emirates
The Saudi prince’s complaint came as reports surfaced that a senior prince in the UAE, with the backing of several younger members of the ruling Al Nahyan family, had allegedly plotted in 2010 to overthrow the country’s leaders and transform the autocratic Gulf state into a constitutional monarchy. The UAE is ruled by the eldest son of the founder, Sheikh Khalifa bin Shekih Zayed Al Nahyan, and his 10 brothers and half-brothers with Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed as the strongman.
According to Middle East Eye (MEE), a respected UK-based online publication, Sheikh Hamdan, the fourth brother, had considered abdicating and fleeing the country. MEE said the plot had been revealed by people close to Hamdan, including one who has since seen his prospects diminish as a result of business disputes. Hamdan, a former minister of state for foreign affairs and deputy prime minister, has reportedly been exiled to a desert oasis and banned from travel.
While the inscrutability of the Gulf rulers makes independent assessment of the power balance between different factions difficult, rumblings of policy difference have been observed by various foreign governments that interact frequently with their Gulf counterparts. The policy debates are significant as they reflect sensitivity on the part of some younger members of ruling families of UAE and Saudi Arabia to the restiveness among the region’s young population, following the Arab Uprisings and the subsequent civil wars and insurgencies in the Middle East and North Africa the past four years.
The emergence of fissures in secretive ruling families takes on added significance at a time that they are seeking to repress dissent. Saudi Arabia last month arrested hundreds of alleged supporters of Islamic State (IS) while the UAE this week announced that they were putting on trial 41 people charged with seeking to overthrow the government.
Pundits and scholars have long argued that the Arab monarchies constituted bedrocks of stability in a region embroiled in a lengthy transition that is messy and bloody. In that vision, uprisings by the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province and the brutally suppressed popular revolt in Bahrain in 2011 were merely small blips on the radar.
IS and threat to Gulf solidity
The rise of IS with its bloody attacks on Shia mosques in the Saudi kingdom and Kuwait has brought the threat closer to home. Gulf rulers frame the threat as a terrorism problem that the international community should confront kinetically and ideologically.
Western officials from President Barack Obama to scholars and pundits have acknowledged that IS and other jihadist groups will only really be defeated once the root causes that power their rise are addressed. They have however done little to match words with deeds.
The recent cracks in the Saudi ruling family as well as earlier dissent by Prince Sultan and the UAE’s Sheikh Hamdan suggest that the autocratic rule of Gulf families is being challenged, and has been for a longer period of time, by a minority that so far has successfully been outmanoeuvred. Nonetheless, it raises questions about the solidity of Gulf rule as the oil-rich states of the region confront multiple political and security challenges.
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July 16th, 2015
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
Protests in Turkey against alleged repression of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang have put China’s sensitive relationships with the Muslim world to the test. The protests raise the spectre of China’s restrictive policy towards the Uighurs muddying relations with other Muslim nations as well.
Commentary
CHINA AND TURKEY had high hopes when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on a 2010 visit to Ankara negotiated a strategic partnership, that envisioned Turkey helping China quell a simmering insurgency in its north-western autonomous region of Xinjiang.
The deal, a year after then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused China of genocide in Xinjiang, involved a halt to Turkish support for Uighur secessionist groups. It promised mutual economic benefit and Turkish leverage at both ends of the Silk Road Economic Belt that Beijing hopes to revive across the Eurasian land mass. Together with the Maritime Silk Road in what Beijing calls the “One Belt One Road” project, this comprises a network of roads, railways, ports and pipeline that China expects will link it to the Middle East and Europe via Central, Southeast and South Asia.
High hopes
In recognition of the fact that Uighurs historically have always looked West towards their Turkic cousins rather than East at the Han Chinese, China encouraged Turkey to invest in Xinjiang on preferential terms in the hope that greater Turkish influence would dampen nationalist sentiment in the region that has been on the rise since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Chinese expectations of Turkey’s potentially moderating influence were also reflected in China’s decision to send religious students to Turkey rather than to Islamic centres of learning in the Arab world.
Close relations were further highlighted by Ankara considering the acquisition of a Chinese surface-to-air missile system and Turkey becoming the first country in which a Chinese bank would operate an overseas business with the acquisition of Tekstilbank by Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank.
China had hoped that by enlisting Turkey it would be able to counter US support for Uighur activists that it viewed as an effort to create problems for Beijing in its own backyard. Chinese concerns have since been heightened by the fact that an estimated 300 Chinese Muslims have joined the Islamic State (IS) in Syria whose leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, described China as one of the worst violators of Muslim rights.
War of words
Those hopes now threaten to be mired in a war of words between Beijing and Ankara sparked by Uighur nationalist protests against Chinese discrimination, including a ban on fasting during Ramadan and the forced opening of restaurants during daytime fasting hours.
The ban was introduced at the tail end of a failed year-long government campaign against what it termed “terrorism” and “illegal religious activity” that involved strict controls of sermons in mosques, closure of a number of Islamic schools and restrictions on traditional dress.
Nationalist Turks see the ban that applies to government employees, students and teachers – a significant segment of the Uighur population — as the latest of a series of restrictive measures aimed at weakening Uighur identity and religiosity. Chinese authorities have defined illegal religious activity among others as refusing to shake a woman’s hand; rejection of inter-ethnic marriage; boycotting government social programmes, and closing restaurants during Ramadan. Women’s headscarves and beards are viewed with suspicion.
The measures have also sparked protests in Malaysia and Cairo. The 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) expressed concern and called on Beijing to respect Uighurs’ religious rights. The Qatar-backed International Union of Muslim Scholars headed by prominent Islamic scholar Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi put out a similar, more strongly worded statement.
Turkish passions were fuelled by sensationalist reports in pro-government media of a massacre of Uighurs while fasting and others being forced to consume alcohol. These came amid domestic Turkish politicking as Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu sought to forge a coalition government in the wake of last month’s parliamentary election that failed to produce an absolute majority for the ruling Justice and Democracy Party (AKP).
A pro-government newspaper, catering to nationalist sentiment, published a bloodied map of Xinjiang as part of its coverage of a visit to Beijing by a delegation from the left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the first pro-Kurdish party to be represented in the Turkish parliament. The newspaper said the HDP had gone ahead with the visit “despite the East Turkestan torture,” a reference to Xinjiang by its Uighur and Turkic name.
Chinese policy as core driver of unrest
In response, Chinese officials have revived accusations that Turkey is encouraging Uighur radicalism. Tong Bishan of the Chinese public security ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department recently told foreign correspondents that Turkish diplomats in South-east Asia had facilitated passage of hundreds of Uighurs to Turkey from where they were being sold to IS as “cannon fodder”.
Tong was referring to the issuing of Turkish passports to 173 Uighur refugees in Thailand to prevent their return to China. The issue of Turkish passports has however become sensitive after the perpetrators of an attack last year at a train station in Kunming in Yunnan province in which 33 people were killed, were found to have been travelling on Turkish documents.
China’s focus on external forces fuelling unrest in Xinjiang was however called into a question by a clash with police last month in the ancient city of Kashgar in which 28 people died. The clash’s background suggested that Chinese policy rather than Islamist ideology may be a core driver fuelling nationalist violence.
The attackers were reportedly members of one family whose land had been confiscated and given to a Han Chinese. Impoverished, the family turned to religion, only to be tackled by authorities who forced female members to bare their hair and males to shave their beards.
The government, rather than heed warnings of the impact of Chinese policies, has sought to silence its critics. Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti warned in a lengthy article published after he was arrested last year that because Chinese policies “do not address deep-seated problems, we cannot afford to be sanguine about Xinjiang’s future, nor can we be certain that violence will not erupt again”.
Tohti’s warning appears to be something that China accepts as a principle to counter jihadism anywhere but in Xinjiang. In a recent debate on US-Chinese cooperation in the Middle East, Yang Jiemian, a senior fellow at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, argued that “tackling root causes” was the key to combatting extremism but that “China has other ways” that include a “strong medicine with side effects”.
It is the strong medicine that threatens to complicate China’s relations with key players in the Muslim world, as seen in the protests by the OIC and global Islamic leaders as well as in countries such as Malaysia and Egypt.
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July 9th, 2015
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
The Middle East’s multiple conflicts, with Islamic State (IS) in the forefront, are altering the contours of the Middle East in more ways than one. After effectively redrawing the map of Iraq and Syria with the creation of an entity of its own, IS’ impact in Kurdistan is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the region’s demographics.
Commentary
THE SYRIAN civil war and Iraqi sectarian conflicts involving Islamic State (IS) have had far-reaching consequences for the demographics across the region. Once a relatively ethnically homogeneous autonomous region, Iraqi Kurdistan has seen its demography change radically as large numbers of Arab refugees pour into what was once an independent Kurdish state-in-waiting. The influx of refugees fleeing areas of Iraq controlled by IS and fighting across the country, has pitted the Iraqi military and Shia militias against the jihadists.
As a result, it is in Kurdistan where the impact of IS on borders and demographics is likely to have the most immediate and far-reaching consequences. That is all the more true given that neither Syria nor Iraq are likely to remain the nation states that they were since achieving independence.
Consequences for Kurdish independence
That has consequences for Kurdish aspirations for independence that peaked in the immediate wake of last year’s sweep of northern Iraq in which IS captured Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Initially, Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), responded to the IS blitzkrieg by seizing control of the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk and speeding up his timetable for a referendum in which the Kurds would vote on declaring independence.
However, with non-Kurdish refugees who are likely to stay for the foreseeable future, if not sprout roots, now accounting for almost a third of Iraqi Kurdistan’s population of 5.2 million, prospects for independence have been significantly complicated. The stream of refugees is imposing a mixed complexion on what was once a region with an almost exclusively Kurdish identity. This unintended fallout of the refugee stream ironically fits IS’ anti-nationalist vision of a pan-Islamic empire (caliphate).
The continuous military threat posed by IS has also forced Barzani to temper his aspirations. Ironically the reverse is happening in north-western Syria, where Arab Sunnis accuse Syrian Kurds, who have recently scored significant victories against IS, of cleansing areas they control in preparation of a future Syrian Kurdish state.
Multiple sensitivities
The refugee influx involves multiple sensitivities. Like in Jordan and Lebanon where refugees from Syria and Iraq have already changed demographic balances and are putting severe strains on the countries’ service infrastructures, Arabs are competing on Kurdistan’s job market at often far lower wages than the local Kurdish population had become accustomed to. Similarly, rents and real estate prices have skyrocketed limiting access to local Kurds who no longer can afford the hikes.
Potential social tensions that have already become visible in Lebanon and Syria could take on an extra dimension in Iraq where Kurds and Arabs have long co-existed uneasily. Kurds have not forgotten that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein employed chemical weapons in his bid to subdue Kurds who were seeking autonomy. Immediately after Saddam’s fall in 2003, Kurds forced the departure of Arabs who had settled in Kurdistan with Saddam’s encouragement.
Signs of bubbling tension are becoming visible among a Kurdish population sympathetic to those fleeing discrimination, repression and violence because of their own history of suppression. Kurds are beginning to voice resentment that they are having to fight IS on the frontline to protect the Arabs seeking refuge in their midst.
The threat of social tensions is enhanced by IS’ interest in stoking problems between Kurds and Arabs. A Kurdish student admitted responsibility in April for a car bomb that exploded near the US consulate in the KRG capital of Erbil.
Separatism on the rise
Analysts have praised Jordan and Lebanon for maintaining calm despite mounting tensions between Syrian refugees, who account for up to 25 percent of the population, and the local population despite regular flareups between them. Tensions are visible in Turkey too but with a population of 75 million, Turkey has less demographic and identity problems in absorbing the refugees.
The rise of IS has moreover not only created a puritan Islamist entity in the heart of the Middle East that is irredentist and expansionary in nature, it has also fuelled long-standing Kurdish nationalist aspirations and sparked separatist trends among many other groups.
Iraqi Sunnis are divided with scores fleeing to Kurdistan while others fearful of rising anti-Sunni Shia nationalism see IS as the lesser of two evils. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority may see a retreat to its heartland on the Syrian coast as the only way to escape the wrath of his opponents should he be unable to hold on to the capital Damascus. Separatist tendencies are also emerging in Iraq’s relatively safe and oil-rich Shia south that is the economic engine for the government in Baghdad.
Across the Middle East, IS and violent conflict are changing realities on the ground and forcing multiple ethnic and religious groups to reconsider their options. In Kurdistan collapsing oil prices add to the cost of accommodating refugees and have altered what Patrick Osgood, the Kurdistan bureau chief for the Iraq Oil Report, calls “the mathematics of when the KRG can exit Iraq”. Osgood notes that “the (demographic) numbers (now) weigh in favour of doing a deal within the federal system” of Iraq rather than opting for independence.
As noted by Fuad Hussein, Barzani’s chief of staff: “You cannot sleep if ISIS is your neighbour. You will have many nightmares. The reality is now different. We are facing a threat … the bubble has burst.”
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June 29th, 2015
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
Nations across Europe, North Africa and Middle East have responded to recent attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait with lofty condemnations of violent extremism and kneejerk security measures that in isolation are unlikely to solve what is becoming a festering problem. To drain the swamps of radicalization, governments will have to embed security measures in policies that give disaffected youth a stake in society.
Commentary
EUROPEAN OFFICIALS, describing recruitment efforts by the Islamic State in Bosnia Herzegovina, mired in a toxic mix of economic malaise and ethnic tension, reportedly fear they may regret having failed to tackle the country’s structural problems in the two decades since the end of the Yugoslav wars.
The regret could apply to any number of failures to tackle root problems that have prompted lone wolves to strike fear in major European cities, at tourist attractions in North Africa, and in Shiite mosques in the Gulf. They also persuaded thousands of Europeans, Arabs and others to join the Islamic State as foreign fighters; and tens of thousands to seek refuge in Europe from civil war, brutal repression, and economic despair.
Band-aid solutions, knee jerk responses
Across the board, democracies and autocracies alike are experiencing the blowback of decades of Band-Aid solutions, policies that failed to give youth prospects for a future with a stake in society, and repression largely unchallenged by Western governments that pay lip service to adherence to political pluralism, inclusiveness, and human and minority rights in various parts of the world, particularly the Middle East and North Africa.
In the latest examples of kneejerk responses, Tunisia is deploying 1,000 armed policemen to tourist sites even as tourists leave the country en masse, and closing 80 mosques suspected of hosting radical clerics that is likely to push militants further underground. Kuwait, which displayed a remarkable degree of inclusivity with Sunnis and Shias joining hands in their condemnation of the bombing of a Shiite mosque that left 27 people dead and more than 200 others wounded, is mulling adoption of a stringent anti-terrorism law while France is passing legislation that would authorise sweeping surveillance.
None of these measure address the sense of hopelessness that pervades predominantly Muslim minorities in Europe and is reinforced by increased prejudice sparked by violence and brutality perpetrated by Muslim extremists. That hopelessness is matched by despair and existential fears among youth, minorities, and alienated sects in the Middle East and North Africa.
In an article in the London Review of Books, Patrick Cockburn quoted a 29-year old Syrian who fights for the Islamic State as saying: “We are fighting because both the regime and the opposition failed us, so we need an armed organisation to fight for our rights.” His words could just as well have been spoken by a European or a fighter from anywhere else in the Arab world.
A display of cynicism
Rather than reducing political violence, more than a decade of war on terrorism has produced ever more virulent forms of extremism and flows of refugees. The WOT had framed efforts to counter radicalization and persuaded Western governments to revert to support of Middle Eastern and North African autocrats in the name of ensuring stability.
In a display of cynicism, Western governments have exploited their support of autocracy to secure lucrative arms deals while failing to ensure levels of aid that would credibly address social and economic malaise in a country like Tunisia that is struggling with the transition from autocracy to democracy.
The result of exclusively security-focussed approaches coupled with the exploitation of economic opportunity, is an increasingly insecure world in which Western and regional powers have proven incapable of defeating non-state actors like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), multiple militant militias in Libya, Islamist insurgents in Egypt’s Sinai, and rebel Houthis in Yemen.
Said an Egyptian militant whose non-violent anti-government activism is as much aimed at opposing the regime of general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi as it is designed to persuade increasingly frustrated youth that there are alternatives to nihilistic violence: “The strategy of brutality, repression and restricting freedom has failed to impose subservience. It hasn’t produced solutions. Governments need to give people space. They need to prove that they are capable of addressing the problems of a youth that has lost hope. We have nothing to lose if they don’t”.
Shouldering responsibility
Meanwhile, European nations are struggling to cope with an onslaught of refugees forced in part to flee their homelands by the policies of the very autocracies the West supports. At the same time, those autocracies refused to absorb some of those fleeing conflicts in for example Syria, Yemen and Iraq that they have helped fuel.
Obviously, Western governments have a responsibility to put their own homes in order by matching lofty words of inclusiveness with actions that address high youth unemployment in migrant communities, lack of equal opportunity, and ensure that minorities are embraced as full-fledged members of society rather than perceived as a fifth column.
At the same time, Western governments would have to take a lead in pushing Middle Eastern and North African autocrats to change or drop policies that fuel radicalization and take measures that would address widespread grievances. Such measures would include:
• A halt to the global propagation of intolerant ideologies by some Middle Eastern governments and state-sponsored groups such as Saudi Arabia’s interpretation of Wahhabism that contrasts starkly with that of Qatar, the world’s only other Wahhabi state;
• Abolition of sectarianism in state rhetoric;
• Recognition of minority rights;
• Reform of brutal police and security forces that are widely feared and despised;
• Granting of greater freedoms to ensure the existence of release valves for pent-up anger and frustration and the unfettered voicing of grievances;
• A crackdown on corruption;
• Reform of education systems that produce a mismatch between market demand and graduates’ skills.
To be sure, there is no magic wand that will overnight turn the tide or definitively eradicate extremism. But there are a host of steps that governments could take that go beyond desperately needed social and economic policies that would create jobs and give youth a prospect for the future. Such measures would start addressing root causes of extremism in a bid to persuade those segments of society susceptible to radicalisation that they have a stake in working within the system.
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May 15th, 2015
By James M. Dorsey.
It’s almost a year since a US-led coalition launched air strikes and increased support of Iraqi and Kurdish military forces in a bid to degrade and destroy the self-styled Islamic State; yet the jihadist group that has conquered a swath of Syria and Iraq has demonstrated resilience despite suffering significant losses.
The limited impact of the airstrikes and Iraqi ground operations raises the spectre of a longer term existence of a disruptive entity in the heartland of the Middle East. It also raises the question of how the international community will deal with it in the absence of political will to employ the kind of force that could potentially destroy it.
Few officials and analysts expect the reportedly serious wounding of self-declared caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State – also known by its Arabic contraction Daish – to weaken the group as it fights multiple battles in Iraq and Syria. There have been news reports that Al-Baghdadi was paralysed in a US air strike two months ago and that his day-to-day responsibilities have been taken over by his deputy, Abu Alaa al-Afri, who in turn has reportedly been killed in a recent US air strike. Prior to this, IS has stood its ground in Syria, made advances in Iraq, and according to some Iraqi lawmakers, infiltrated Baghdad which has been rocked by bombings in recent days.
IS has so far demonstrated its ability to withstand significant military pressure rather than collapse under its own weight even as it licks its wounds in an environment in which the attitudes of some of the United States’ closest allies towards militant Islamist militias, including some associated with Al Qaeda, are changing. A greater willingness to forge tactical alliances with groups long considered beyond the pale, coupled with IS’ resilience raises the spectre of jihadist groups becoming a more permanent fixture in the Middle East’s political landscape.
Predominantly Islamist rebel forces with Jabhat al Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate, in the forefront have made significant advances in Syria and put the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on the defensive. The Gulf states and Turkey appear willing to grant support despite the failure of Qatari efforts to persuade Jabhat al Nusra to break its ties to Al Qaeda.
A flurry of meetings of various rebel groups; the recent dissolution of the Levant Front, the largest rebel alliance in Aleppo; the unexpected presence of the leader of the Saudi-backed Islam Army that operates out of Damascus, Zahran Alloush, at a recent gathering of Syrian clerics in Istanbul; and talk of Saudi efforts to bring rebel groups together in Riyadh to discuss the creation of some kind of representative political entity, suggests stepped up Saudi, Turkish and Qatari efforts to turn the tide in Syria’s four year-old civil war.
Jamal Khashoggi, a well-connected Saudi journalist quipped in a recent tweet that Alloush’s visit “to Turkey removes the last obstacle for Saudi-Turkish-Qatar cooperation in Syria”. Alloush’s cousin, a leader of the Revolutionary Command Council, an insurgent alliance that includes the Islam Army, added that Turkey was seeking to unite rebel groups across Syria.
Ironically, the rise of a more united, more effective anti-Assad front may ultimately pose the most serious threat to IS whose relations with rival groups in Syria are at best tenuous. Jabhat al Nusra and IS have fought numerous battles for turf in the war-torn country.
Nonetheless, IS, widely viewed as the world’s richest jihadist group despite reduced revenue streams as a result of curtailing by the US-led coalition of income from the sale of oil from captured Syrian and Iraqi oil facilities and diminished ransom returns from kidnappings, has proven capable of institutionalising taxation and levies and administering Shariah justice. Absentee landlords who receive rents from properties owned in IS-controlled territory report that they receive payments with officially documented taxes deducted by the group’s administration.
Similarly, a cache of documents belonging to one of the architects of IS that were obtained by German magazine Der Spiegel illustrates how a former Iraqi Baathist military officer designed in neat diagrams the structure of a future Islamic state divided into provincial councils dominated by intelligence and security services. The plan involved the provision of financial service and the operation of schools, day care centres, media and public transportation.
“It is true that jihadist experiments in ruling a specific geographical area have failed in the past. Mostly, though, that was because of their lack of knowledge regarding how to administer a region, or even a state. That is exactly the weakness that IS strategists have long been aware of – and eliminated. Within the ‘Caliphate’, those in power have constructed a regime that is more stable and more flexible than it appears from the outside… Within IS, there are state structures, bureaucracy and authorities,” Der Spiegel concluded.
Visits to Lebanon by Syrian residents of IS-controlled territory highlight problems of how the international community copes with an entity that holds out the prospect of longevity despite being a pariah and under continuous military, economic, and political pressure. The visitors in Lebanon are frequently stopped by security forces on suspicion of being jihadist operatives because they carry identity cards issued to every resident by IS. The visitors are caught in a bind being unable to travel in or out of IS-controlled territory without those identity cards.
Iraqi Advisory Group chairman Norman Ricklefs recently raised the question at an RSIS seminar of how the international community would deal with IS five years down the road. It is a question few analysts have entertained on the increasingly questionable assumption that IS will either be defeated by the US-led coalition or will collapse under its own weight. So far, that has proven to be wishful thinking.
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April 3rd, 2015
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
The Saudi-led intervention in Yemen designed to prevent Iranian-backed forces from gaining power symbolises the Gulf’s new assertiveness. Potential US-Iranian agreement on resolving the nuclear crisis has fuelled concern among Arab Gulf states about the reliability of the United States as the region’s ultimate security guarantor.
Commentary
THE CURRENT SAUDI-led intervention in Yemen designed to prevent Iranian-backed forces from gaining power symbolises the Gulf’s new assertiveness. This is unfolding as the various Gulf states seek to hedge their bets with different strategies that complement rather than replace the regional US security umbrella.
Qatar this month signed a military agreement with Turkey which gives the two parties the right to deploy soldiers in each other’s territory. Qatar is the latest Gulf state to seek alliances as a way to enhance security in a world in which a post-nuclear agreement Iran would join Turkey and Israel as the region’s foremost military powers. The agreement is rooted in shared attitudes towards tumultuous developments in the Middle East that potentially threaten long-ruling autocrats and spawned civil wars and spiralling political violence and could rewrite the region’s nation state cartography.
Subtle and not-so-subtle strategic shifts
If invoked in a time of crisis, the likelihood is that tiny Qatar’s alignment with the second largest standing army in NATO would mean that Turkish forces would be sent to aid the Gulf state and recognises that Qatar’s 12,000-man military will never be capable of defending the emirate. The agreement supplements Qatar’s soft power strategy that seeks to embed the Gulf state in the international community through sports, arts, airline connectivity, investment and high-powered mediation of regional disputes in a way that it could call on it in times of emergency.
While the Qatar-Turkey agreement is between governments that are politically aligned on one side of the Middle East and North Africa’s multiple political divides, concern among Gulf states has also sparked subtle shifts that are bringing erstwhile opponents closer together. Qatari and Turkish relations with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt had soured since the military coup in 2013 that toppled Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi because of the two states support for Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
The subtle realignment of alliances prompted by fears that the United States will conclude a deal with Iran that they believe fails to ensure that the Islamic republic will not become a nuclear power was first noticeable in the willingness of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to be more open about their political and security relations with Israel. The two Gulf states refuse to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state because of its unresolved conflict with the Palestinians but share Israel’s perception of Iran as an existential threat.
“Everything is underground, nothing is public. But our security cooperation with Egypt and the Gulf states is unique. This is the best period of security and diplomatic relations with the Arabs,” said General Amos Gilad, the Israeli defence ministry’s director of policy and political-military relations, during a visit to Singapore last year. Gilad played a key role in forging Israel’s alliance with Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.
Unprecedented moves
In unprecedented public moves, Saudi officials reached out to Israel they had long shied away from. Saudi officials, contrary to past practice, refrained in December from commenting on unconfirmed news reports that quoted Saudi oil minister Ali Bin Ibrahim al-Naimi as saying the kingdom would be willing to sell oil to Israel.
Six months earlier former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to the US and UK Prince Turki Al Faisal called on Israel to resolve the Palestinian issue as a way of facilitating enhanced Israeli-Saudi relations. Besides opening direct flights between Riyadh and Jerusalem, “commerce, medicine, science, art, and culture between our two peoples would develop,” Turki wrote in the first ever op-ed submitted by a member of the Saudi elite to an Israeli newspaper.
A second indication was a decision last December by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain to paper over their differences with Qatar over the Muslim Brotherhood. The three states had nine months earlier withdrawn their ambassadors from the Qatari capital in a failed attempt to force Qatar to break its ties with the Brotherhood and expel Brothers from the country.
Similarly, Saudi Arabia, which views Iran as a far greater threat than the Brotherhood, has signalled that its attitude towards the Brotherhood was changing despite its backing for Sisi’s brutal crackdown on the group in Egypt and the kingdom’s banning of the Brothers as terrorists. The moves are part of a Saudi effort to forge a Sunni Muslim alliance against Iran that paved the way for this month’s visit to Riyadh by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A recent conference in Mecca that brought together Muslim clerics to denounce terrorism was hosted by the Muslim World League, a body established by Saudi Arabia but long associated with the Brotherhood. Earlier, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud bin Faisal declared that the kingdom has “no problem with the Muslim Brotherhood”.
Creating opportunity for China
Gulf states’ fears of Iran are likely to create further opportunity for China to strengthen its soft military ties in the region in a balancing act that is designed to ensure that it does not challenge US hegemony in the region. China said this month it had agreed to sell Turkey a US$3.4 billion surface-to-air missile system that could prove difficult to integrate with its NATO allies.
China’s approach could potentially further involve temporary deployment of armed forces for overseas military exercises as well as the deployment of military patrols, peacekeeping forces, military trainers and consultants; also the building of overseas munitions warehouses, joint intelligence facilities, aerospace tracking facilities, earthquake monitoring stations, technical service, military replenishment stops, maintenance bases, and military teaching institutions.
The nibbling at the fringe of the Middle East’s security architecture is however unlikely to improve regional security as long as it includes policies by states like Saudi Arabia that exacerbate rather than soften sectarian divides and that seek to box in regional powers rather than include them on equitable terms.
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January 15th, 2015
By James M. Dorsey
Synopsis
The jihadist assaults in Paris on Charlie Hebdo have sparked allegations of a failure by French intelligence and security agencies. Jihadists beyond the Middle East are also portrayed as coordinated by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). A closer look suggests those assertions are at best speculation.
Commentary
THE ATTACKS in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket as well as two French police officers have prompted analysts and the media to often jump to hasty conclusions. Terms such as intelligence failure and Al Qaeda are liberally employed with no clear definition of what they mean or refer to. Defining how those terms apply is crucial to understanding the events of recent days in Paris.
There is little doubt that Cherif and Said Kouachi, the two brothers suspected of killing 12 people in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, had long been on the radar of French police and intelligence. So was Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman, who is believed to have shot two French police officers a day after the Charlie Hebdo assault and then took hostages in a Jewish supermarket a day later. Similarly Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly’s wife, who is reported to have escaped to Syria, was long known for her association with radical groups.
Cherif Kouachi spent 18 months in French prison for helping foreign fighters join jihadist groups in Iraq. Like his brother Said, Cherif was on a US no-fly list. Cherif moreover was known to have spent time in a training camp in Yemen of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Coulibaly was with the Kouachi brothers a member of Buttes-Chaumont, a network that recruited radicalised French youths to fight in Iraq in the early 2000s. Pictures of Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly’s wife, dressed in the full black dress worn by some religious Muslim women firing a weapon have emerged in recent days.
Falling beneath the radar
The three men and Boumedienne were in contact with Djamel Bhegal, a disciple in London of Abu Hamza al Masri, an Egyptian cleric who was sentenced to seven years in prison in the United Kingdom and last year extradited to the United States on terrorism charges. Bhegal was released from French prison in 2011 after serving time for planning an attack on the US embassy in Paris.
The obvious question is how known Islamist militants who were on the radar of French and other security services could have prepared for three lethal attacks within a matter of days in Paris without having attracted attention. The obvious conclusion is that the attacks constitute a massive intelligence failure. Indeed, it was. But then every successful politically motivated violent attack on civilian or government targets constitutes an intelligence failure.
That is a relatively useless conclusion without knowing whether the failure was the result of negligence, faulty intelligence, laxness, culpable faulty judgement or overstretched resources. To establish that, one would have to evaluate the various threats intelligence and security services were dealing with at a given point in time and pass judgement on the evaluation of their seriousness and prioritisation of those threats. One would also have to know the results of initial surveillance of someone like Cherif after his return from Yemen. Finally, insight into the degree of intelligence sharing between the US and France given the US targeting of AQAP is a key factor.
To be sure, the services’ resources are stretched with up to 1,000 Frenchmen having joined jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. Many of them have become disillusioned and an unknown number may have returned to France. With no intelligence or security service being legally or physically able to monitor suspected radicals 24/7 around the clock, intelligence failures are par for the course. As a result, to establish the nature of the failure, a classified inquiry would have to be launched which could establish to what degree intelligence and security forces are to blame.
Perhaps, the most solid indictment of the French services is the fact that the Kouachi brothers were able to collect a cache of arms in their apartment in a country in which assault rifles and rocket launchers are not easily available. That failure is however as much an intelligence one as it is of a government policy that has failed to ensure that North African immigrants are made to feel that they are an integral and welcome part of France.
Lone wolves
Similarly, the role in and degree of responsibility of AQAP in the Paris attacks is perceived as absolute by analysts and the media following the revelation that Cherif had trained in Yemen and AQAP’s claiming credit for the attacks. AQAP’s responsibility given its relationship with Cherif is beyond doubt.
Analysis of past Al Qaeda-inspired attacks on Western targets suggests, however, that the group is often not operationally and logistically involved in the preparation of an operation despite its insistence that it signs off on any operation outside an affiliate’s immediate area of activity.
Militants who were trained by an Al Qaeda affiliate like AQAP often act on a general directive issued by the group rather than in close cooperation with it. These militants act at a time and place of their own choosing. The fact that attacks are often locally conceived and planned complicates detection by intelligence and security services. That appears to have been the case in Paris.
On the assumption that the Paris perpetrators operated on their own rather than under the immediate command and control of AQAP, they are in some ways more motivated and better trained and better equipped lone wolves, local nationals operating on their own whether as individuals or members of a local group.
Building trust
For policymakers and intelligence and security services that means timely information and law enforcement is not sufficient. Confronting threats will have to involve building relationships of trust that are solidified by minorities believing that they are an integral part of society. Those relationships are tenuous in France.
The sense of unity displayed in mass demonstrations in Paris and other French cities in recent days in which immigrants and their descendants participated offers French authorities an opportunity to start a process that could further and truly isolate people like the Kouachis in their own communities and ensure that the threat they pose is brought to the attention of authorities in a timely fashion.
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