My petty employment concerns aside, what is currently taking place in Syria and Iraq is a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. I recently had a Skype conversation with a friend based in Baghdad. Her normally stoic demeanour was nowhere to be seen, in its place, a teary-eyed, expletive-ridden tirade about the “modern day barbarians” inflicting so much suffering on her country and its people. In late June ISIS declared the establishment of a new “Islamic Caliphate” spanning the estimated 35,000km of contiguous territory under their control in vast swathes of Syria and Iraq. The declaration – the biggest affront to the arbitrary borders imposed by the British and French Sykes-Picot agreement since their inception – occurred on the heels of ISIS’s surprise blitzkrieg offensive earlier that month, in which the group seized around a third of Iraq – including its second largest city – along with a treasure trove of sophisticated US-made weaponry that was abandoned by the Iraqi army.
This is no rag-tag group of mindless fanatics. ISIS’s military success on both sides of the border has evidenced a level of strategic and tactical astuteness that would impress Sun Tzu. Furthermore, most analysts now believe ISIS has achieved complete financial self sufficiency – through a combination of extortion, taxation, old fashion pillaging, kidnapping and oil revenues, ISIS has become the richest terrorist organisation in history. With tangible gains and money on its side, the group has attracted thousands of fighters from around the world and continues to attract thousands more. Its savvy use of social media to spread propaganda and sew fear in its enemies is indicative of a Jihadi outfit aimed at the
millennial generation.
In the words of US Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel, “ISIS is beyond anything we’ve seen.”
A good news day in the Middle East is pretty much an oxymoron. Virtually every night our television screens bombard us with a morbid collection of images and sound bites from the three or four Middle Eastern countries that suffered enough that day to be deemed newsworthy. Context is always elusive. In its place we learn death tolls, see bloodied bodies, and hear a never-ending procession of angry Arabs chanting and grieving. The end result of all of this is banal expectation. Few horrors that emerge from this seemingly cursed corner of the world cause us to bat an eyelid – we expect them to happen. A sigh of sympathy followed by prolonged indifference is the best response most of us can muster. And that is a completely
understandable reaction.
War, revolution and political turmoil are (almost always) complex social phenomena to explain. Myriad casual factors, competing narratives and highly fluid situations often render such events inaccessibly complicated for the casual observer. The Middle East embodies this rule of thumb; narratives are oversimplified out of journalistic necessity or, by default, omitted altogether.
Enter ISIS (a.k.a evil incarnate), if I attempted to detail all of the group’s (growing) catalogue of atrocities it would consume the rest of my word limit – indiscriminate bombings, beheadings, the mass enslavement of woman and children, the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, attempted genocide, the list, unfortunately, goes on. Herein lies ISIS’s unique position within the stream of bad news emanating from the Middle East. Rarely has a news story been so morally unambiguous, the narrative so unanimously condemning across different, ideologically opposed news sources as the ascendance of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. This is reinforced by the fact that ISIS has precipitated an unlikely unity of purpose between long time geopolitical foes; Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah – even Al Qaeda – are just as invested in the demise of ISIS as the US, EU, Israel, and Arab Gulf states. So now the Syrian regime (who the US has been actively trying to oust) and the US are simultaneously bombing the same organisation on different sides of a now redundant border while Al-Qaeda sits back and quietly hopes they succeed. Welcome to the world of Middle Eastern politics, never boring and always full of plot twists!
For the remainder of this article I want to try and place ISIS in context. Most coverage to date has focussed on their brutality and/or the day-to-day ebb and flow of the battlefield (which looks set to change dramatically due to intensified US involvement). The following will instead attempt to identify and explain some of the major long-term and proximate casual factors behind the group’s meteoric rise. Fittingly, the ascendance of ISIS is a direct consequence of the two most cataclysmic events in modern Middle Eastern History – both in terms of geopolitical ramifications and human suffering: The 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the on-going Syrian Civil War.
Iraq.
Iraq is comprised of three main groups: Sunni Muslim Arabs (20 per cent); Kurds (20 per cent); and Shia Muslim Arabs (65 per cent). Prior to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, Sunni Arabs had maintained a stranglehold on power since Iraq’s independence – often employing extreme violence to keep the Kurds and Shia in check. It was fairly obvious to many observers that the removal of Saddam would likely lead to sectarian score-settling as a new internal balance of power took hold. In a stunning example of great power hubris, it seems this possibility did not occur to the war’s key architects; George W. Bush reportedly learnt of the Sunni/Shia divide only weeks before the invasion began. To make matters worse, the Bush administration – blinded by overconfidence – adopted a criminally minimalistic plan for the post-war occupation of Iraq. As a consequence of this, the country descended into chaos in the invasion’s aftermath. Thus, in the absence of a functional state, sectarian identities became the new organising principle of Iraqi society, militias proliferated on all sides, and a bloody civil war ensued.A secondary pretext for the invasion put forward by the Bush Administration was the dubious suggestion that Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda. Anyone vaguely familiar with the region knew this was an absurd claim. Saddam, whose regime was a secular dictatorship, considered Islamic extremists to be an existential threat and treated them as such. Ironically, the imagined anti-American Jihadist threat in Iraq became very real as the occupying US forces attracted thousands of Islamic militants from around the region begging for a crack at the “far enemy” in their own backyard. It is here we can locate ISIS’s genesis: Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
Founded in 2003, AQI successfully exploited Sunni fears of Shia domination and resentment towards the US occupation allowing it to establish large safe havens in the Western part of the country. Their puritanical brand of Sunni Islam held that all Shia were heretics who deserved nothing less than death. Accordingly, AQI split their energy between attacking the occupying forces and slaughtering Shia by the thousands, stoking the flames of a then nascent civil war. Despite only ever constituting a small percentage of the overall insurgency, AQI’s penchant for spectacular attacks and the West’s obsession with all things Al-Qaeda led to the group dominating media coverage of the conflict.
By late 2006 AQI’s marriage of convenience with Western Iraq’s disenfranchised Sunni tribes came to an end. The group’s imposition of its medieval world view on the local population ultimately proved to be its undoing. Fed up, the tribes pragmatically opted for the lesser of two evils, reconciled with US forces, and turned their weapons on their former allies. The organisation persisted to cause significant trouble, but its operational capacity was greatly diminished and it continued to decline over time.
Fast forward to 2011, after seven years of bloody conflict the Iraq War ended and the US swiftly wiped their hands clean of what had been a traumatic ordeal. Although militant attacks remained a daily occurrence, a modicum of stability had been achieved and the ball was firmly in the Shia-dominated government of Nouri-Al Maliki’s court. Tragically, instead of trying to quell Sunni anxieties with a conciliatory approach to governance, Maliki surrounded himself with sycophants and pursued a narrow sectarian agenda – alienating the Sunni minority back to the point of open rebellion.
Inspired by the Arab Spring, Iraq’s Sunnis began a sustained protest movement demanding fairer treatment from the government. Their demands were met with harsh repression and after a particularly brutal government crackdown in late 2012, the situation began to spiral out of hand with the central government effectively losing control over parts of the country. Against this backdrop of increasing tension AQI – who had now rebranded themselves as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) – began steadily intensifying their attacks on Shia civilians and the Iraqi state. Once again, Iraq’s disillusioned Sunni majority areas became fertile recruitment grounds for AQI, and as things continued to deteriorate, a resurgent AQI – thriving on renewed social and political tensions – sprang back into the spotlight.
In sum - whatever your opinion on the merits of the war is - it is an indisputable fact that the forces unleashed by the US’s illegal invasion of Iraq and its subsequent gross mismanagement of the occupation, directly led to the creation of the now out of control Jihadi Frankenstein terrorising the region. Another important interrelated outcome of the invasion’s fallout, perhaps the war’s main legacy, is how sectarianism has since established itself as the dominant prism through which regional developments are analysed and understood.
Syria.
As the years have passed by, the apocalyptic carnage taking place every day in Syria has predictably receded out of the headlines. With at least 190,000 dead (the real toll likely much higher), nine million displaced, and no end in sight, the Syrian Civil War is perhaps the greatest man-made disaster of our time. What began as a popular uprising against a brutal dictator has transformed into a multi-layered, internationalised conflict of daunting complexity. A couple of years ago, few would have picked that Bashir al-Assad would not only still be in power now, but also be slowly winning – street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood – in a gruesome battle of attrition. This is largely a result of the enormous amount of political and material support Assad has received from Russia and Iran, both of whom consider Assad to be an indispensible strategic ally; Kaddafi may well have still been in power if these two states considered him so useful.Like Iraq, Syria’s population is comprised of a diverse sectarian makeup. Since the early 1970s, Assad’s Alawite sect (an offshoot of Shia Islam) has enjoyed disproportionate representation in the upper echelons of state power – an inadvertent legacy of French colonial policy. Around 30 per cent of the population are a mixture of Christians, Shia, Alawii, Druze and Kurds, while the remaining seventy per cent are Sunni Muslims. Therefore, the political situation in Syria parallels Saddam-era Iraq, except the sectarian dynamic is reversed; a Shia minority dominates power at the expense of the Sunni majority.
The regime responded to the protests that erupted across Syria in March 2011 with bullets, mass detentions and torture. Because working class and rural Sunnis were both a majority of the population and the most alienated from power, civil disorder was most acute in areas where they were concentrated. During their calls for freedom, democracy and social justice, protesters went to great lengths to emphasis tolerance and unity in order to address fears of a sectarian agenda. In turn, Assad labelled them terrorists hell-bent on the extermination of Syria’s minorities. After braving bullets day after day, for six months to no avail, members of the revolution began taking up arms against the regime. Between late 2011 and late-2012 the majority of the armed opposition fought under the banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) – made up of ordinary Syrians who felt armed struggle was their only alternative after non-violent action had failed so miserably.
This situation started to change in the latter half of 2012. Syria had become the new Iraq, attracting thousands of jihadists from both the region and wider globe. In addition, as the West continued to debate the merits of arming the FSA, huge influxes of Gulf Arab money flowed into the pockets of hard-line Islamist groups, swelling their ranks and giving them a huge material advantage on the battlefield. Islamist groups – of all stripes and sizes – gradually began to supplant the FSA as the dominant fighting force on the ground.
The Islamic State of Iraq entered the fray in early 2013, changing their name to ISIS soon after. Initially welcomed by an opposition desperate to receive whatever help it could get, ISIS quickly proved themselves to be a potent fighting force. But by the end of the year relations had soured, and a war within a war broke out between an alliance of Syrian rebels and the extremist group. Although ISIS’s brutal tactics and behaviour towards the local population played a part in this, the primary reason for the conflict was a divergence of objectives. Despite the ideological pluralism of Syria’s various rebel groups, which range from secular nationalist to groups similarly fanatical to ISIS, their shared primary objective is the overthrow of Assad’s regime. In contrast, ISIS is predominantly concerned with the creation of an Islamic State across the Sunni majority areas of Syria and Iraq (which it has since effectively achieved). After consolidating its grip on North-eastern Syria, ISIS redirected its energy back towards Iraq, merging the two conflicts in the process.
Assad deliberately played the sectarian card to secure the continued loyalty of Syria’s minorities in the early stages of the uprising. Despite being self-serving propaganda, it worked and they coalesced around his rule out of fear of the unknown. Subsequently, Assad’s intransigence has imposed an atrocious war on the Syrian people, and because of this, Assad’s initial narrative – of Sunni terrorists trying to take over Syria – has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nowhere has Assad’s Machiavellian cynicism been more apparent than in his treatment of ISIS. Until recently, a mutual understanding between ISIS and the Assad regime resulted in little actual fighting occurring between the two.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, ISIS provides the ultimate bogeyman for Assad to contrast himself against in the eyes of both Syrians and the international community. Secondly, the areas of Syria ISIS controls are of secondary strategic importance to the survival of his regime. And thirdly, ISIS’s on-going war against Syrian rebel groups relives some of the burden on the army, reduces the capacity and presence of more moderate groups, and in doing so further delegitimizes the struggle against the regime. The recent spike in regime attacks on ISIS is likely better explained as a PR stunt by Assad – positioning himself as an ally in the war on terrorism – than action out of
military necessity.
A major debate is currently occurring in Western foreign policy circles about what could have been done to prevent the rise of ISIS. The main argument put forward is that if the West had armed the Syrian opposition with the weapons they needed during the early period of the war, before radical Islamists took centre stage, they could have overthrown Assad, ending the conflict and denying ISIS an operational safe haven. I was in Syria and Lebanon in early 2012 – just as the armed conflict started to dramatically expand. During my time there, and through a very fortuitous set of circumstances, I had the privilege of meeting a young opposition activist from Homs called Danny. The victim of a recent assassination attempt, Danny had become somewhat of a spokesman for the opposition and FSA in Western media due to the fact he was half British. When we first met in downtown Beirut, he had just returned from a meeting with several European governments in Brussels, his primary concern: weapons. He was incredibly specific about the kind of weapons needed to turn the tide, and emphasised the unanimous desire within the rebel ranks for urgent and large-scale foreign assistance. The weapons never came – not in decisive quantities anyway – and, unfortunately, hindsight does not enable us to know what would have happened if they did.
In general terms, ISIS is symptomatic of much wider problems afflicting the Muslim and Arab world. The group is an extreme manifestation of a disturbing undercurrent within Sunni Islam, which has steadily grown in strength since the 1980s. The conservative Arab Gulf states bear much responsibility for this. Using their immense resource wealth, they have vigorously exported their puritanical brand of Sunni Islam around the world. In doing so, traditional religious authorities have often been subverted by a new wave of Gulf-bankrolled hardliners – whose exploitation of young Muslims justified anger at aspects of Western foreign policy, has had profound consequences. It is an uncomfortable reality that the gap between Saudi Arabia’s official ideology and that of ISIS is far smaller than some may think. Thus, the religious environment that incubates groups like ISIS can only be combated through a process of deep introspection within the Sunni Muslim community.
During a recent conversation with an Egyptian friend he talked about the Arab world’s tendency to externalise blame and avoid realistic self-assessment. This notion is perhaps best captured by the prevalence of conspiracy theories on the Arab street. For example, the idea that ISIS is a deliberate US creation has gained traction in recent times. Robert Fisk aptly refers to this phenomenon as “the Plot” – the hidden hand behind all of the region’s misfortunes. It reflects the general malaise of the Arab world; a product of the sentiment that events are irrevocably beyond the Arab street’s control. There is an element of truth to this. Few parts of the globe can claim the degree of external meddling suffered by the Middle East. The initial promise of the Arab Spring bucked this trend, instilling a renewed sense of agency and hope in the Arab masses that were intent on reclaiming the right to control their own destiny. Tragically, subsequent events have largely extinguished that flame and ordinary Arabs, who merely desire the chance at a dignified existence, are increasingly caught between two unpleasant extremes: Islamic extremism and brutal authoritarianism.
One thing is for sure, in the current socio-political climate, so long as Sunnis remain down trodden and disenfranchised in their own countries, groups like ISIS will continue to occupy our headlines.