The US military presence in any terror-hit region only prolongs and exacerbates the conflict

1.    Recent jailbreak in Syria by the ISIS inmates was the sign of growing influence of IS in the region.

2.    Killing of Laden or ousting of IS from Mosul did not mean elimination of terrorism.

3.    Even after destroying large parts of Syria and Iraq, the US cannot claim to have eliminated IS and Al Qaeda.

4.    Millions of people were displaced and had to migrate to other countries despite five years of war against ISIS.

New Age Islam Edit Desk

Praveen Swami’s analysis of the situation in Iraq and Syria post withdrawal of US troops is true to the ground. Now gradually the US game in Iraq and Syria is becoming clearer. Recently, the ISIS attack on a jail in Syria and escape of hundreds of hardcore IS terrorists is an indication that the IS is regrouping in the region while the US has its two thousand plus troops still stationed there. It has also been observed that the presence of the US army, one of the most powerful and sophisticated armies of the world only gives rise to terrorism and the terrorist groups only get stronger in place of losing strength. In 2014, the Iraqi army while advancing towards Mosul, had intriguingly escaped leaving tanks and other weapons which were seized by the IS. Soon, ISIS captured power in Mosul and a caliphate was established.  The Arab Spring was hijacked by ISIS with the covert help of the US so that Bashar al Asad government could be toppled to hit Iran’s political ambitions in the region and to harm Russia’s trade and economic ties with Syria. Saudi Intelligence Minister Bandar Bin Sultan had admitted before Putin that the terrorist groups fighting in Syria were patronized by Saudi Arabia and it is known to all that the US was an ally of Saudi Arabia during the civil war in Syria. A long civil war ensued causing millions of lives and displacement of Syrians and Iraqis and mass migration to European countries.  The rise of the ISIS again after their exit from the region raises many questions on the real intent of the US and its commitment towards elimination of terrorism. It is only a recent example of the US encouraging militant Islamic groups that it helped Taliban come to power in Afghanistan after destroying Afghanistan in the name of fighting Taliban and terrorism.  

Islamic State leader’s death being cast as a milestone against terrorism. Truth is muddier 

Celebrating ISIS leader’s death in US raid as big victory ignores past experience.

PRAVEEN SWAMI

6 February, 2022

An ISIS convoy (Representational image) | Twitter/@Intlatm

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Prisoner M060108 — dark-skinned, his captors recorded, 218.5cm, 101kg — was driven past the wire soon after New Year’s Day in 2008, into the dust-blown prison camp at Umm Qasr, Iraq. In coming weeks, declassified interrogation records show, M060108 betrayed his comrades in al-Qaeda, one after one. Exactly why, the documents do not record; otherprisoners were beaten with rifle-butts, sexually humiliated, pepper-sprayed, left hog-tied under the blazing sun.

For a few seconds last week, United States Special Forces caught sight of that prisoner again, before the self-described caliph of the Islamic State blew himself up with his family.

Like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, or that of the Islamic State’s (IS) first caliph, Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, in 2019, the killing of Amir Muhammad Abdul-Rahman—also known as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashmi—is being cast as a critical milestone in the fight against terrorism. The truth is muddier.

Even as former US president Donald Trump bragged of the “100 percent” defeat of the caliphate in 2019, the IS was regrouping under Abdul-Rahman in Iraq and Syria, and expanding across Africa and Asia. In recent weeks, the terrorist group has staged sophisticated attacks in its Iraq-Syria heartlands. IS-inspired movements have flowered in two continents.

The destruction of Iraqi despot Saddam Husain’s regime in 2003 was heralded as the beginning of a new age of democracy and peace in the Middle East. Instead, a long, grinding insurgency ensued—the consequence of the destruction of State institutions, religious and ethnic conflicts, poverty and foreign occupation.

How American ultra-violence bred jihadism 

Like so many other armies, the US and its key ally, the UK, responded to barbarism with barbarism.  Following a 2005 bombing in the Iraqi town of Haditha, US and British troops were alleged to have killed dozens in cold blood. Fallujah was levelled, then levelled again, as American and British soldiers fought to recapture it from insurgents. In 2009 alone, 33 separate allegations of torture and sexual abuse were brought against British troops.

“It is well that war is so terrible,” General Robert Lee had said in December 1867, as he surveyed the carnage on the battlefields of Fredericksburg, “otherwise we would grow too fond of it”. President George Bush, though, didn’t flinch.

Al-Qaeda—drawing legitimacy from nationalist rage against atrocities, as well as Sunni fears of being marginalized by Iraq’s Shi’a majority—grew larger than it had ever been before 9/11, powered by the storm-winds of violence.

The rise of the caliph

The most authoritative biography of Abdul-Rahman, written by journalist Feras Kilani, tells us that the to-be caliph was born in 1976 to a cleric in Mosul, the youngest of his father’s seven children by two wives. Abdul-Rahman finished eighteen months of mandatory military service in Saddam Husain’s army, before completing a masters’ degree in Islamic theology.

From 2003, as anarchy spread across Iraq, Abdal-Rahman seems to have drifted towards the Ansar ul-Islam, which soon after merged itself into al-Qaeda. Later, after the death of the key al-Qaeda commander, Jordanian Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal, Abdal-Rahman followed the rank-and-file into the IS.

In 2007, Abdal-Rahman’s interrogation records show, he took charge of running religious-courts in Mosul, ruling among other things on kidnappings and ransoms.

Taken prisoner from his home in 2008 by Kurdish Peshmerga militia, Abdal-Rahman ended up in prison alongside other key figures in the IS. Following Camp Bucca’s closure in 2009, its alumni would go on to become the backbone of the IS.

Little about Abdul-Rahman’s life is documented thereafter. For a while, he was given charge of establishing an institute for training religious judges and clergy at the al-Imam al-Adham College in Mosul. He is alleged, in some accounts, to have provided religious legitimacy for the killing of Yazidis, and the capture of Yazidi women as slaves, after Sinjar fell in 2014.

Extremism, it should have been clear, flourished in conditions where government and social structures were destroyed by violence. Washington, though, wasn’t listening.

The Arab Spring Turns Arab Summer

From 2010, mass protests erupted against authoritarian regimes across the Middle East, in what came to be known as the Arab Spring. The United States threw its weight behind one key uprising, in Syria, hoping to depose arch-enemy Bashar al-Asad’s regime, and to contain Iranian influence in the region. Like the European revolutions of 1848, from which the Arab Spring got its name, the uprisings had very different outcomes in each country. In Syria, jihadists—the best organised force—won.

The seeds of this disaster were, ironically, in part laid by Bashar al-Asad himself. Fighting youth anger brought on by his liberal economic reforms—which created growth, but not jobs—al-Asad moved to accommodate the Islamist political vanguard, the Muslim Brotherhood, and allowed Iraqi jihadists safe havens.

For its part, the US enabled the rise of the IS through benign neglect, seeing it as a tool to use against Iran’s influence in Iraq, and an instrument to bring down the Syrian regime.

Even though some semblance of order has been won back, large swathes of Syria and Iraq remain outside of meaningful State control. The IS still has an estimated 10,000 fighters, and controls significant territory. Its example has inspired jihadists across Asia and Africa.

Last year, the United Nations recorded that Islamic State violence is up across Africa, spilling from northern Mali into the country’s central region, as well as Niger and Burkina Faso. In oil-rich Mozambique, jihadists successfully stormed the town of Palma; the 14-year war against al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia has made no discernible progress towards stabilising the country.

Nigeria, similarly, has had little success in fighting Boko Haram, a jihadist group which has claimed thousands of lives in terrorist attacks since 2002. The insurgency has expanded into Niger and northern Cameroon.

Tiring of these endless wars, western governments are withdrawing from the chaos they sparked off after 9/11. Last year, French President Emmanuel Macron announced his intention to wind down Operation Barkhane, his country’s small-scale edition of the 9/11 war in Afghanistan. No one knows for certain how long the 2,500 US troops deployed in Iraq, or 900 in Syria, will stay.

Like Afghanistan, those countries might well implode—sending shock waves through a region critical to India’s energy security. Few Indians—just 66, by one estimate—fought with the IS, but some among them are known to have received advanced training, and conducted suicide attacks in Afghanistan. Should communal tensions in India engender large-scale violence in the future, Islamic State’s conceivable recruitment will rise, with grave consequences.

There’s no lesson in Abdul-Rahman’s story barring the one mothers teach little children: Don’t play with matches. The fires lit by America’s Iraq war will likely rage on for many years more.

The author tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)

 URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islamterrorism-jihad/role-u-s-war-terror-doubtful/d/126327

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