A New Axis of Terror
By Omer Aziz
February 12, 2014
Last summer, in the oppressive Middle Eastern heat, I found myself in Iraq. Technically, I was in “the other Iraq” — that is, Iraqi Kurdistan, a tiny island of stability in an otherwise tumultuous region. With innumerable cranes giving life to what will soon become hotels and businesses, perfectly paved roads, and crisp air yet to be polluted by industrial growth, this Other Iraq seemed a miracle. Yet, even then, amid the reflective solitude of Ramadan, anxiety over the creeping Jihadism in both Iraq and Syria was palpable, from Kurdistan’s de facto foreign minister down to the young merchants I met.
If you travel south from the Kurdish capital of Erbil for about five hours, you reach the Iraqi capital. Baghdad today may be liberated from the suffocating shroud of the Ba’athist flag, but it is witnessing the bloodiest assault on civilians since 2008. Almost a thousand people died last month. A further 759 died in December, including 34 Christians in a bombing on Christmas Day. A month ago, the unfathomable happened, as the menacing black flag of Al-Qaeda was hoisted over Fallujah and Ramadi, the largest cities in Anbar province. Across Iraq’s increasingly porous border with Syria, the same Al-Qaeda affiliates have become a vicious force in the fight for that country’s future.
Both Iraq and Syria — perhaps more accurately termed Iraq-Syria, as recently proposed by Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books — require an intensive international diplomatic and, yes, military effort to target Al-Qaeda and end the geopolitical death games being played by their respective leaders, both with support from Iran’s paramilitary Al Quds force. The “international community” — a term we may now rightly abandon — has failed utterly with respect to Iraq-Syria and has combined the feckless with the contradictory, resulting in a noxious incoherence as Iraq’s death toll climbs and the UN stops counting Syria’s fallen.
The fall of Fallujah is especially ominous because of the great expense at which its original liberation came. U.S. forces funded and armed Sunni tribal leaders to rout the Al-Qaeda insurgency. Nuri al-Maliki’s government in Baghdad, overtly sectarian and dictatorial, has since then discriminated against Sunnis, arresting their leaders and charging them on dubious grounds. As Osama al-Nujaifi, speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, said: “After gaining victory over Al-Qaeda, those tribesmen were rewarded with the cutting of their salaries, with assassination and displacement.” Is Iraq to remain a state for Sunni, Shia and Kurd, or is it to become a Shiite autocracy?
Beyond Iraq’s imperious premier is an even more nefarious force, and the ostensible reason why the United States has not intervened further in Syria. Stephen Harper’s remarks in Israel highlight that Canada is even more pessimistic. The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is the successor to Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a murderous group that killed untold numbers of coalition forces and civilians. ISIS overtook the Syrian city of Al-Raqqa in March 2013, drove the police from Anbar in Iraq, and today controls part of Idlib, Aleppo, Hama and Deir ez Zour. It emerged in Syria only in April 2013, but like a malignant tumor turned cancerous, has increased in size and scope across Iraq-Syria, metastasizing and multiplying precipitously.
ISIS has not only enraged Syria’s moderate rebels, but has also inflamed rival Islamist entities and even Al-Qaeda’s leadership. When ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — who has a $10-million bounty on his head — unilaterally announced the merger of his group with Jabhat al-Nusra, the “official” Al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, he was firmly rebuffed by Al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri. Like a corporate marauder, Baghdadi brazenly rejected the ruling, saying the merger was to go forward, and was finally disowned by Al-Qaeda Central last week.
ISIS’s objective is the imposition of an Islamic state across Iraq and Syria. Despite estimates putting its manpower at a modest 7,000, it is the most savage force in both countries. It has imposed Shariah in the towns it controls, kidnapped local activists and journalists, destroyed Shiite shrines, beheaded rival Islamists, and even tortured and executed children. Since early January, ISIS has been fighting other Syrian rebel groups, both Islamist and secular. One report put the casualties caused by rebel infighting at 1,000 in a mere two weeks. As the Geneva negotiations proceed, Syria’s civil war has transmogrified into a war within a war: one pitting Assad against the rebels and one pitting rebels against each other. (In reality, there is a third war: the regional-sectarian one, with Iran and Hezbollah backing Assad and Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia funding the rebels).
There is an even darker story with ISIS, one murmured about in Syria and Iraq but far too conspiratorial to suggest until recently. This story is the potential collaboration between Assad and ISIS. Following the U.S. invasion in 2003, Assad allowed jihadists from Syria to enter Iraq and join Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In 2007, West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center published a report looking at the background of 700 foreign Al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq. Because all of the jihadists examined had entered Iraq from Syria within a year, the source of their patronage was clear.
Assad’s old chickens may be coming home to roost, or they are being coddled and nurtured for future eggs. The Daily Telegraph recently reported on the ISIS-Assad collaboration, citing anonymous Western intelligence sources and Al-Qaeda defectors. Assad allegedly released jihadists from Syrian prisons and is currently co-operating with ISIS militants on oil shipments. This thesis is not implausible: Assad has all along called the rebels “terrorists” in an effort to paint them as dangerous jihadis the West would be foolish to support. Patronizing the worst rebel group would be a cold, strategic maneuver, but one Assad is capable of given his diplomatic dexterity on the chemical weapons issue. The tragic irony is that the Ba’athist-Al-Qaeda link — the original justification for America’s invasion of Iraq — may finally have materialized.
Just as Afghanistan’s problems were — are — inextricably linked to Pakistan’s (the premise of the term “AfPak”), Iraq’s death squads cannot be viewed separate from the crisis in Syria. American strategy is at best confused: the U.S. is supporting al-Maliki’s government and its war against militants while U.S. allies in the region financially support Syrian rebel factions allied with Al-Qaeda in Iraq-Syria. A concerted strategy will admittedly be difficult and will require much diplomatic finesse, but without it, both crises will worsen.
Two decades ago, the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya published Republic of Fear, a harrowing account of life in Ba’athist Iraq captured so vividly in his title. So all-encompassing and all-consuming was this republic that ordinary Iraqis would be reduced to ghost-like phantoms at the mere mention of Saddam Hussein’s name. Assad’s mercenaries — called Shabiha, a term that means “ghost” in Arabic — and the ISIS are known to induce similar reactions among Syrians. Today, Iraq-Syria are less republics of fear than in permanent states of fear, both representing the crumbling of an order imposed at gunpoint after the First World War. That this pillage is occurring in the very cradle of human civilization is perhaps the greatest of tragedies in a region that has witnessed one too many of them.
National Post
Omer Aziz is a writer, journalist, and recent Commonwealth and Pitt Scholar at Cambridge University.
Source: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/02/12/omer-aziz-a-new-axis-of-terror/
URL: https://newageislam.com/war-terror/a-new-axis-terror/d/35755