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With the nuclear deal, Iran is no longer the strategic enemy of the US.
However, millions of Sunnis throughout the Arab world now perceive it to
be their strategic enemy as a result of Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran will
never, as its more conservative elements boast, control "four Arab
capitals". It is only powerful enough to fight and spread the chaos ...
These, then, are the three key events in the rise of IS - the
abandonment of power sharing in Iraq, the crushing of protest by Assad
and the military coup in Egypt. Taken together they constitute the core
of the Sunni political crisis. This crisis has brought IS to the fore.
It will continue to generate clusters of IS cells throughout the Arab
and Western world, long after the central political vacuum is filled.
Iran and the Sunni dictators are the best recruiters for IS
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/iran-and-sunni-dictators-are-best-recruiters-1536128851
David Hearst
Sunday 2 August 2015 22:14 UTC
The three key events in the rise of IS are the abandonment of power
sharing in Iraq, the crushing of protests by Assad and the coup in Egypt
John Allen, the retired marine general charged by US President Barack
Obama to coordinate the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) group,
is a man confident of his facts. Fresh from Turkey, which had just
agreed to enter the air campaign against the militants, he told the
Aspen Security Forum that IS are losing.
"I do believe that Daesh's momentum has been checked strategically,
operationally, and, by in large, tactically. But it isn't just a
military campaign. There's a counter-finance campaign, there's a
counter-messaging campaign, there's a counter-foreign-fighters campaign,
and then there's a humanitarian piece... It's very important that you
have that larger strategic perspective when you consider whether we've
had an effect."
Precisely. The larger strategic perspective. Where is it?
No sooner had Allen created this hostage to fortune, than the al Qaeda
affiliated group al-Nusra claimed to have created a few of their own -
two leaders and six members of Division 30, graduates of a train and
equip programme run by the Department of Defence. Al-Nusra called on
Division 30 to " return to the right path" urging its fighters to fight
the regime of Bashar Assad in defence of their families.
Finding the right path in Syria and Iraq is proving elusive,
particularly for a US president who is joined at the hip to the notion
that he has pulled out of Bush's "dumb" war. The US may have left Iraq,
but Iraq has yet to leave the US.
First, IS have endured their first year under bombardment. They have
lost territory but "we've seen no meaningful degradation in their
numbers," said a US defense official keen to douse Allen's optimism. The
official put the group's strength at between 20,000 and 30,000, the same
as last August when airstrikes began.
Second, what does victory look like? An Iraq permanently divided into
three, one of those portions in the firm grip of Iran? Assad in charge
of a rump coastal Alawite statelet, with the rest of Syria in the hands
of local militias? Does Washington even want Damascus to fall?
Without answers to these questions, bombs dropped from the coalition's
aircraft are about as precision-guided as the ones the RAF dropped over
Germany in the Second World War. Without a clear-sighted analysis of
where IS came from, and an appreciation of when its fortunes waxed and
when they waned, its defeat will never be certain. Crushed in Iraq, it
will transfer its attention to Egypt, where a brutal military dictator
is busy, with the full support of the US and EU, creating exactly the
right conditions for IS to grow.
To explain, but not to justify, IS has its own logic. Its theologians
and leaders are all persuasive, and adept at tailoring the medium to the
message and the message to the audience. The seeds of IS's extreme
sectarian theology germinated in a specific social incubator brought
about by the collapse of Sunni leadership, Iran's opportunistic
expansionism, and serial American misjudgment.
Two academics, Hasan Abu Hanieh, and Dr Mohammed Abu Rumman have gone
some way to describing the incubator that nurtured IS. In their small
book, published by the Friedrich Ebert Shiftung in Germany, lie clues
others have missed or downplayed. As the title suggests, The Islamic
State Organisation, The Sunni Crisis and the Struggle of Global Jihadism
charts the symbiotic relationship between the crisis of Sunni Arab
politics and the mushrooming of a tiny Al Qaeda splinter group.
On one level its Hollywood: How a group of no more than 80 followers and
their families at a camp in Herat, Afghanistan, established and run by a
young Jordanian called Ahmad Fadhil al-Khalayleh who came from the city
of Al- Zarqaa', wound up 15 years later controlling an area the size of
Britain. On another, it's Chekhov - one misjudgment hides another.
Zarqawi, the Iraq-based jihadist, understood something Bin Laden, the
internationalist, did not. Zarqawi got the true nature of identity
politics in an Arab world undergoing a transformational regional
revolution, where states were crumbling, and whose leaders no longer
represented their people.
Zarqawi writes:
"Our fight with the Americans is a simple matter; the enemy is visible
and its back is exposed, ignorant of the land and ignorant of the
reality of the Mujahideen, because of the weakness of its intelligence
information. And, we know with certainty that these Crusader forces will
dissipate tomorrow or the day after."
As for the Shia, Al-Zarqawi adds:
"Al-Rafidha (the rejecters referring to the Shia), (are) the challenging
obstacle, the lurking snake, cunning scorpion, the malicious and
creeping enemy and drenching poison."
He considers their danger to be ongoing and their ambition extensive,
and adds:
"With the passing of days, their hopes grow greater to establish the
state of "Rafdha" (Shia), which would span from Iran, passing through
Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and extend into the cardboard-ish Gulf
kingdoms."
As a prediction dated February 2004 (in a letter to Bin Laden), that is
not bad.
Zarqawi seized on the central political fact that while the Iraqi Shia
had Iran, the Sunni felt they had no one. Their rulers were either venal
oligarchs, or absolute rulers whose only loyalty was to their close kin.
The rise of IS was anything but linear. When a political alternative
presented itself in the elections which followed the Arab Revolution,
both al-Qaeda and IS were on their uppers. If they were mortally wounded
by the rise of political Islam, IS was quick to see the recruitment
potential of Egypt's military coup. That coup was fully supported and
funded by Sunni Arab dictatorships, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates to defeat the Muslim Brotherhood. In contrast, Iran gave its
full support to the Shia groups across the Arab world.
On 31 August, 2013 in a recording entitled "Al-Silmiyya Dinu Mann?" (The
Peaceful Approach is the Religion of Whom?), IS spokesperson Abu
Muhammad al-Adnani issued a statement that resonated far and wide:
"You should know, O Sunnis revolting everywhere, that our plight is not
the governing systems but rather the Shirki (idolatrous) laws that
govern you. There will be no difference between one ruler and the next
unless we change the law; there is no difference between [Husni]
Mubarak, Mu'ammar [Gadafy], and [Zine El Abidine] bin Ali, and between
[Mohammad] Morsi, [Mustafa] Abdul Jalil,and [Rachid] al-Ghanouchi; they
are all tyrants who govern with the same laws."
Adnani called the crushed Muslim Brotherhood "a secular party in an
Islamic cloak". The key part of the message which he addressed to the
"People of the Sunna" was: "Renounce peaceful calls, bear arms, and wage
Jihad for the sake of God; to ward off the aggressors of the Egyptian
army and the Safavid (Iraqi) army."
This was more than a religious injunction. It was a political response
to a situation where politics - constitutions, elections, parliaments -
had disappeared. Zarqawi by then was long dead, but two sectarian
dictators one backed by the US and Iran, the other by Iran and Russia,
performed the invaluable service Zarqawi needed to rise from the dead:
Nouri al-Maliki and Bashar al-Assad. Each should be given the Jihadi
version of la Legion d'Honneur.
Both Maliki and Assad reinforced the message that politics is dead by
responding with overwhelming force to political and peaceful challenge.
In Iraq, the moment the Americans left, their policy of attempting to
preserve a power sharing deal with the Iraqiya bloc, which won the
elections, was in tatters.
Ali Khedery, the longest continuously serving US official in Iraq
published an insider's account of these events in the Washington Post
last year. As one of those American Iraqi officials who introduced
Maliki to the Americans, Khedery felt responsible for the man's
behaviour.
"Sunni Arabs - who had overcome internal divisions to form the secular
Iraqiya coalition with like-minded Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and
Christians - were outraged at being asked to abdicate the premiership
after pummeling al-Qaeda and winning the elections. Even Shia Islamist
leaders privately expressed discomfort with Iraq's trajectory under
Maliki, with Sadr openly calling him a "tyrant." Worst of all, perhaps,
the United States was no longer seen as an honest broker."
Maliki not only refused to honour the commitments he made to pay the
Sahawat , the Sunni fighters responsible for al-Qaeda's defeat. Within
hours of the withdrawal of US forces in December 2011, Maliki sought the
arrest of his longtime rival Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, sentencing
him to death in absentia. The purge of Finance Minister Rafea al-Essawi
followed a year later.
Khedery concluded:
"In short, Maliki's one-man, one-Dawa-party Iraq looks a lot like
Hussein's one-man, one-Baath Party Iraq. But at least Hussein helped
contain a strategic American enemy: Iran. And Washington didn't spend $1
trillion propping him up. There is not much "democracy" left if one man
and one party with close links to Iran control the judiciary, police,
army, intelligence services, oil revenue, treasury and the central bank.
Under these circumstances, renewed ethno-sectarian civil war in Iraq was
not a possibility. It was a certainty."
Not according to another Maliki sponsor Condoleezza Rice. A keen golfer,
Bush's former national security adviser and secretary of state, blew
through the offices of The Guardian on her way to the links courses of
Scotland. I asked her at the time about the death squads Maliki launched
against Anbar province. She looked at me as if I were from another
planet. She called Nouri al Maliki, "a great Iraqi patriot " and her
"personal friend".
Of course there was another winner in Maliki's soft coup - Iran. Khedery
called General Qassim Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force unit of
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful man in Iraq and the
Middle East. He could have added Syria.
Assad was the perfect partner of IS in two respects. Before the Syrian
uprising in 2011, Assad and his intelligence held the conviction that
Jihad could be manipulated for the benefit of the regime. During this
time, foreign fighters entered Syria and created the networks they use
today. Then when the revolution started in Dera'a, Assad responded to
peaceful protest with total force, prompting substantial numbers to
defect from the Syrian army to form the Free Syrian Army to protect the
demonstrators.
Assad encouraged the militarisation of the revolution by releasing
detainees from Sidnaya Prison, one of the most notorious housing
Islamist inmates. The three main figures there were Zahran Alloush
(founder and commander of Liwaa' al-Islam (The Islam Brigade) which
later became Jaysh al- Islam; Hassan Abboud (known as Abu Abdullah
al-Hamawi, who emerged as the commander of Ahrar al-Sham), and Issa
al-Sheikh (who became the commander of Liwaa' Suqour al-Islam "The Hawks
of Islam Brigade).
Hezbollah's entry into the Syrian civil war acted as final proof, if
proof were needed, of Iran's role in it. It took some time before Hassan
Nasrallah acknowledged the role his fighters were playing in Syria. In
October 2012, he said they were fighting as individuals not under the
party's direction. His former Hezbollah Secretary General Sheikh Sobhi
Tufayli has hinted more than once that Nasrallah nurtured misgivings
about Hezbollah's role in propping up Assad in Syria and says that
Hezbollah has come under Iran's total control.
He told Al Arabiya:
"Hezbollah's project as a resistance party that works to unify the
Islamic world has fallen. [Hezbollah] is no longer that party that
defends the Umma [Islamic nation]; instead it plagues the Umma." Tufayli
noted that Hezbollah has "provoked the whole world" and started a
sectarian war that "opened the door for a ferocious period of sedition."
With the nuclear deal, Iran is no longer the strategic enemy of the US.
However, millions of Sunnis throughout the Arab world now perceive it to
be their strategic enemy as a result of Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran will
never, as its more conservative elements boast, control "four Arab
capitals". It is only powerful enough to fight and spread the chaos. If
and when the IRGC retreats from its foreign adventures, Iran could
resume its traditional role as an honest broker, a neighbour and a
partner. But it will have to abandon its role as a proxy warrior first.
There is no evidence that Iran sees this, though.
These, then, are the three key events in the rise of IS - the
abandonment of power sharing in Iraq, the crushing of protest by Assad
and the military coup in Egypt. Taken together they constitute the core
of the Sunni political crisis. This crisis has brought IS to the fore.
It will continue to generate clusters of IS cells throughout the Arab
and Western world, long after the central political vacuum is filled.
Hanieh and Abu Rumman wrote:
"IS' weakest point, and perhaps its Achilles heel, remains its
relationship with the Sunni community. If a large segment of this
community turns against it, as they did before, whether for political
reasons or in rejection of its religious and ideological dictates upon
society, then the very factor behind its rise will turn into the factor
behind its downfall. "
The Sunni political crisis will only be solved when the vacuum of
politics is filled by democratically elected leaders, who can truly
represent the Sunni masses and when Iran recognises that there are
geographical limits for its ambitions. A political alternative for
Sunnis as well as Shia is the sine qua non of reconciliation in the
region. No one in Iraq or Syria, however, is holding their breath.
- David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief
foreign leader writer of The Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor,
European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent, and
Ireland Correspondent. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where
he was education correspondent.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: Iraqi police forces stand behind men suspected of being linked to
the Islamic State during an operation in Kirkuk on 2 July (AFP)
- See more at:
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/iran-and-sunni-dictators-are-best-recruiters-1536128851#sthash.kVclB9WO.55QwM3ak.dpuf
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