Sectarian Bequest
Here are two very different opinion pieces about the escalating conflict in Iraq and the rise of the latest Islamist terror group, ISIS.
The first is by Ben McIntyre writing in The Times and is, in my view, quite thoughtful and reflective about the underlying reasons that have turned both Iraq and Syria into the failed states they are today.
The second is by Seamus 'Shameless' Milne from The Guardian stable which lays the blame for all the sectarian strife at the door of the West, as if the murderous instincts of the Islamist terrorists are uncontrollable somehow, as if they have no alternative or no option but to use extreme violence in pursuit of their religious and political aims, including the killing of fellow Muslims of course.
I am waiting with baited breath to hear Seumas' thoughts on Boko Haram and what terrible injustice the West has inflicted on Nigeria to justify that particular terrorist group kidnapping over 200 young (Christian) girls and forcing their 'conversion' to Islam before threatening to sell them off as sexual slaves.
We can’t let Iraq’s borders shift in the sand
By Ben Macintyre - The Times
The Isis jihadis want to redraw the region’s map with the same arrogance that the colonialists showed a century ago
Little is known about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Sunni militants in Iraq, who has emerged with terrifying suddenness as the world’s most powerful jihadi leader.
Baghdadi (a nom de guerre) is a “specially designated global terrorist”, according to the US, which is offering $10 million for information leading to his capture or death. He was born in Samarra in about 1971 and may have spent time as a prisoner of the US forces in Iraq.
But of the snippets of information about the man who leads Isis (the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham), perhaps the most intriguing is that he is a historian with a PhD in Islamic studies from a Baghdad university.
Dr Baghdadi and his brutal followers have already changed the future of Iraq by carving out a swathe of territory across northern Syria and Iraq as a new Islamic state, but the language and vision of Isis is steeped in the past.
The battle raging in Iraq is not new, but the latest in a series of symbolic historical events stretching back over the centuries: the disputed spiritual succession that set Shia against Sunni after the death of the Prophet in AD632; the medieval caliphate that the militants seek to resurrect; the 16th-century Persian empire that is the direct ancestor of modern Iran; and, above all, the colonial diplomats who carved up the region at the height of the First World War.
Baghdadi is not a historian but an anti-historian, willing (just as bin Laden was) to manipulate, distort and brutalise the past to foment violence and further his own narrow vision.
The Isis fighters herding soldiers of the Iraqi army towards mass graves refer to their captives as “Safavids”, a historical reference freighted with menace. The Safavid dynasty ruled one of the greatest Persian empires from the 16th to the 18th century, including all of modern Iran and most of Iraq. The Safavids established Shia Islam as the official religion of the empire, opposing Sunni encroachment.
Mocking their captives as “Safavids” sends a blunt message: you are the mercenaries of Shia Iran; you once oppressed us, now we dominate you. It is payback time, five centuries later.
Even more explicit, as the militants press towards Baghdad, are references to “smashing the Sykes-Picot conspiracy”. Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot were the British and French diplomats who in 1916 secretly drew up an agreement to divide the collapsing Ottoman empire into European spheres of influence. Sykes and Picot are almost forgotten in their own countries, but their agreement would lead to the artificial borders around Iraq and Syria.
The Ottomans had ruled by dividing the region into provinces, broadly following natural ethnic, religious, tribal, geographic and economic orientations. Sykes and Picot thought in straight colonial lines, concerned only with imperial interests. “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk,” declared Sykes as he pored over the map with a ruler.
One of the first acts of the advancing Isis forces was to blow up the earthworks marking the frontier between Syria and Iraq. This was more than merely a symbolic rejection of western influence. With the demolition of Sykes-Picot as a rallying cry, Baghdadi is demanding recognition that secular and geographic definitions no longer apply — he is the emir of a new, transnational, Islamic land.
The “al-Sham” in Isis is variously translated as “Syria” and “the Levant”, but might best be rendered as “Greater Syria”, for Baghdadi’s ambition is for a fundamentalist caliphate, without set borders, stretching from Aleppo to Mosul and beyond.
Sykes and Picot were far more concerned with oil and geostrategic influence than understanding the Middle Eastern patchwork, yet the old colonial lines have survived quite effectively, albeit in large measure through the use of force — colonial, then dictatorial. After Iraq, Syria and Lebanon came Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan. All have endured.
In 1932, as Iraq prepared to join the League of Nations, one official report predicted its break-up, as “Sunnis and Shias, cities and tribes, sheiks and tribesmen, Assyrians and Kurds, Pan-Arabists and Iraqi nationalists, all fought vigorously for places in the emerging state”.
With Sykes-Picot destroyed, the future map of the region may well comprise a fundamentalist emirate straddling Syria and Iraq, a Kurdish state in the north, a rump Syria in Damascus run by Assad and his fellow Alawites, and a Shia-dominated Iraq in Baghdad and the south, backed by Iran.
To applaud such a break-up as a return to some ancient natural pattern is to ignore the appalling bloodshed it would entail and how nationhood has taken root since the colonial map-makers went to work. The vast majority of Iraqis adhere to a robust national identity.
More than any flammability in the composition of Iraq itself, responsibility for the current crisis lies largely with the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, for reverting to a sectarian, anti-Sunni form of government, and the failure to build an inclusive political system.
For all their imperfections, the existing national borders are preferable to letting the region shatter into a series of sectarian states at daggers drawn. Only the swift establishment of a genuinely cohesive, multi-ethnic government in Baghdad can save what remains of Sykes-Picot.
The alternative is to let the likes of Baghdadi redraw the map with the same arrogance and self-interest as the Europeans did a century ago.
More US bombs and drones will only escalate Iraq's horror
The Arab world has endured a century of western attempts to control the region. Only Iraqis can shape their future
By Seumas Milne - The Guardian
Truckloads of Shia volunteers head for a Baghdad training camp in northern Baghdad on 17 June, to prepare to fight Isis forces. Photograph: Transterra Media/Barcroft Media
Nothing has exposed the delusionary disaster of the war on terror like the past week's eruption of its mutant progeny across Iraq. David Cameron declared today that the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, rejected as too extreme and sectarian by al-Qaida itself, is now the most serious threat to Britain's security.
As Isis forces were reported to have seized Iraq's largest oil refinery at Baiji, Barack Obama was said to be considering demands from both Baghdad and Washington hawks for air attacks to halt the sweeping advance of the jihadist-led rebellion. Hundreds of US troops have already been dispatched to prepare the ground and defend the 5,500-strong American embassy.
Eleven years after the US and Britain launched their onslaught on Iraq as the centrepiece of the terror war, they are once again considering a return to the scene of their strategic humbling, as its gruesome consequences are played out across an already devastated country.
Isis are in reality the shock troops of a wider Sunni Arab revolt – backed by ex-Ba'athists and other former resistance groups – against the Shia-led government of Nouri al-Maliki. Such are the contortions of western policy that, while the US and fellow travellers are effectively allied with Isis and other Sunni Islamist rebels fighting the Assad regime, in Iraq they stand with the Shia Islamist Maliki battling the same groups.
It was his US-trained forces that melted away when Isis took Iraq's second city, Mosul, last week. The collapse was smoothed by sympathetic or corrupt commanders, as well as tacit deals with Kurdish forces who used the chance to take control of the contested city of Kirkuk and the northern oilfields.
Now Isis is coming up against more serious resistance on the way to Baghdad. The sectarian takfiri group was originally the al-Qaida franchise holder under the US-British occupation, but was rejected by the bulk of the resistance. It then moved into Syria to join the anti-Assad uprising, with tacit backing from Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia.
Since last summer it has controlled a swath of Syrian territory near the Iraqi border, amassing wealth and foreign recruits. But it was the Maliki regime's brutal suppression of a Sunni protest movement last year – culminating in the massacre of dozens of demonstrators in Hawija – that gave Isis a new opening in Iraq. By January it had taken over Falluja, scene of some of the worst US occupation atrocities, and unleashed carnage on Shia communities across the country.
The idea that this horror story can be disconnected from the US-led military occupation of Iraq that preceded it, as the war's apologists still try to maintain, is an absurdity. It's not just that there was no al-Qaida or Isis in the country before the invasion, or that the occupiers deliberately dismantled the Iraqi state and army and destroyed the country's infrastructure in the process. It's that colonial divide-and-rule sectarianism was deliberately fostered from the first day of the occupation.
Not only was a religious and ethnic carve-up enforced across public life, but US commanders were directly involved in sponsoring an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to undermine the armed resistance.
Maliki was himself selected by the US as a suitable strongman to protect its interests. That's not to suggest that any transition from Saddam's dictatorship wouldn't have been painful, or that Iraqis have had no agency in what took place. But much of the western debate of the past week has glossed over the scale of the human and social catastrophe unleashed by the US-led war. The most recent US academic estimate of the death toll isat least half a million, while Iraq Body Count has recorded a minimum of 190,100 violent deaths as a result of the invasion – 4 million became refugees.
That wasn't a "tragic error", as some claim, or a problem of post-invasion planning. It was a barbarous crime whose predicted consequences Iraqis are living with today. The idea that Tony Blair – who helped launch the war on a false pretext and now says we need to "liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this" – remains Middle East peace envoy is beyond parody.
The apologists say US troops left too soon, that Iraq is now a democracy, and that Syria shows non-intervention can carry its own costs. But post-occupation Iraq is an institutionalised kleptocracy, a US-Iranian condominium where voting is by enforced sectarian and ethnic blocs, torture is rampant, and thousands are imprisoned without trial.
If such democracy is the yardstick, it was the Iraqi government that demanded the withdrawal of foreign troops. As for Syria, the US and its allies are bleeding it by funding and arming rebel forces, while withholding the means for a decisive breakthrough. Without doubt, direct western military intervention would escalate the death toll to Iraqi proportions.
The arguments about how Iraq reached today's breakdown matter precisely because the backlash from the last intervention risks being used to justify yet another – and not just in Iraq. Since its launch in 2001, the war on terror has spread and spawned support for jihadist terror groups across the Muslim world, from al-Qaida to the Pakistani Taliban. The pattern of blowback couldn't be clearer. US bombing or drone attacks on Isis in Iraq, embedded in urban areas, won't break its grip on cities such as Mosul or Tikrit. But it will certainly kill large numbers of civilians and inflame the country, and the region, still further.
A narrow, violent takfiri group such as Isis is unlikely to be able to hold large urban centres for long – experience suggests its Sunni allies will turn against it – let alone continue its advance into Baghdad or Shia heartlands. But its dramatic successes have certainly put the survival of Iraq itself at stake. Like Syria, the country is already effectively partitioned – and Islamist groups are very far from being alone in rejecting the artificial "Sykes-Picot" borders imposed by Britain and France on the Arab world at the end of the first world war.
Only a determined break by a major Iraqi political force with the sectarian and ethnic politics bequeathed by Bush and Blair could now halt the fragmentation. The entire Arab world is living with the fallout from a century of attempts to control their region and resources. More intervention will only deepen the crisis. Only Iraqis can shape their future.
The Isis jihadis want to redraw the region’s map with the same arrogance that the colonialists showed a century ago
Little is known about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Sunni militants in Iraq, who has emerged with terrifying suddenness as the world’s most powerful jihadi leader.
Baghdadi (a nom de guerre) is a “specially designated global terrorist”, according to the US, which is offering $10 million for information leading to his capture or death. He was born in Samarra in about 1971 and may have spent time as a prisoner of the US forces in Iraq.
But of the snippets of information about the man who leads Isis (the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham), perhaps the most intriguing is that he is a historian with a PhD in Islamic studies from a Baghdad university.
Dr Baghdadi and his brutal followers have already changed the future of Iraq by carving out a swathe of territory across northern Syria and Iraq as a new Islamic state, but the language and vision of Isis is steeped in the past.
The battle raging in Iraq is not new, but the latest in a series of symbolic historical events stretching back over the centuries: the disputed spiritual succession that set Shia against Sunni after the death of the Prophet in AD632; the medieval caliphate that the militants seek to resurrect; the 16th-century Persian empire that is the direct ancestor of modern Iran; and, above all, the colonial diplomats who carved up the region at the height of the First World War.
Baghdadi is not a historian but an anti-historian, willing (just as bin Laden was) to manipulate, distort and brutalise the past to foment violence and further his own narrow vision.
The Isis fighters herding soldiers of the Iraqi army towards mass graves refer to their captives as “Safavids”, a historical reference freighted with menace. The Safavid dynasty ruled one of the greatest Persian empires from the 16th to the 18th century, including all of modern Iran and most of Iraq. The Safavids established Shia Islam as the official religion of the empire, opposing Sunni encroachment.
Mocking their captives as “Safavids” sends a blunt message: you are the mercenaries of Shia Iran; you once oppressed us, now we dominate you. It is payback time, five centuries later.
Even more explicit, as the militants press towards Baghdad, are references to “smashing the Sykes-Picot conspiracy”. Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot were the British and French diplomats who in 1916 secretly drew up an agreement to divide the collapsing Ottoman empire into European spheres of influence. Sykes and Picot are almost forgotten in their own countries, but their agreement would lead to the artificial borders around Iraq and Syria.
The Ottomans had ruled by dividing the region into provinces, broadly following natural ethnic, religious, tribal, geographic and economic orientations. Sykes and Picot thought in straight colonial lines, concerned only with imperial interests. “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk,” declared Sykes as he pored over the map with a ruler.
One of the first acts of the advancing Isis forces was to blow up the earthworks marking the frontier between Syria and Iraq. This was more than merely a symbolic rejection of western influence. With the demolition of Sykes-Picot as a rallying cry, Baghdadi is demanding recognition that secular and geographic definitions no longer apply — he is the emir of a new, transnational, Islamic land.
The “al-Sham” in Isis is variously translated as “Syria” and “the Levant”, but might best be rendered as “Greater Syria”, for Baghdadi’s ambition is for a fundamentalist caliphate, without set borders, stretching from Aleppo to Mosul and beyond.
Sykes and Picot were far more concerned with oil and geostrategic influence than understanding the Middle Eastern patchwork, yet the old colonial lines have survived quite effectively, albeit in large measure through the use of force — colonial, then dictatorial. After Iraq, Syria and Lebanon came Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan. All have endured.
In 1932, as Iraq prepared to join the League of Nations, one official report predicted its break-up, as “Sunnis and Shias, cities and tribes, sheiks and tribesmen, Assyrians and Kurds, Pan-Arabists and Iraqi nationalists, all fought vigorously for places in the emerging state”.
With Sykes-Picot destroyed, the future map of the region may well comprise a fundamentalist emirate straddling Syria and Iraq, a Kurdish state in the north, a rump Syria in Damascus run by Assad and his fellow Alawites, and a Shia-dominated Iraq in Baghdad and the south, backed by Iran.
To applaud such a break-up as a return to some ancient natural pattern is to ignore the appalling bloodshed it would entail and how nationhood has taken root since the colonial map-makers went to work. The vast majority of Iraqis adhere to a robust national identity.
More than any flammability in the composition of Iraq itself, responsibility for the current crisis lies largely with the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, for reverting to a sectarian, anti-Sunni form of government, and the failure to build an inclusive political system.
For all their imperfections, the existing national borders are preferable to letting the region shatter into a series of sectarian states at daggers drawn. Only the swift establishment of a genuinely cohesive, multi-ethnic government in Baghdad can save what remains of Sykes-Picot.
The alternative is to let the likes of Baghdadi redraw the map with the same arrogance and self-interest as the Europeans did a century ago.
More US bombs and drones will only escalate Iraq's horror
The Arab world has endured a century of western attempts to control the region. Only Iraqis can shape their future
By Seumas Milne - The Guardian
Truckloads of Shia volunteers head for a Baghdad training camp in northern Baghdad on 17 June, to prepare to fight Isis forces. Photograph: Transterra Media/Barcroft Media
Nothing has exposed the delusionary disaster of the war on terror like the past week's eruption of its mutant progeny across Iraq. David Cameron declared today that the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, rejected as too extreme and sectarian by al-Qaida itself, is now the most serious threat to Britain's security.
As Isis forces were reported to have seized Iraq's largest oil refinery at Baiji, Barack Obama was said to be considering demands from both Baghdad and Washington hawks for air attacks to halt the sweeping advance of the jihadist-led rebellion. Hundreds of US troops have already been dispatched to prepare the ground and defend the 5,500-strong American embassy.
Eleven years after the US and Britain launched their onslaught on Iraq as the centrepiece of the terror war, they are once again considering a return to the scene of their strategic humbling, as its gruesome consequences are played out across an already devastated country.
Isis are in reality the shock troops of a wider Sunni Arab revolt – backed by ex-Ba'athists and other former resistance groups – against the Shia-led government of Nouri al-Maliki. Such are the contortions of western policy that, while the US and fellow travellers are effectively allied with Isis and other Sunni Islamist rebels fighting the Assad regime, in Iraq they stand with the Shia Islamist Maliki battling the same groups.
It was his US-trained forces that melted away when Isis took Iraq's second city, Mosul, last week. The collapse was smoothed by sympathetic or corrupt commanders, as well as tacit deals with Kurdish forces who used the chance to take control of the contested city of Kirkuk and the northern oilfields.
Now Isis is coming up against more serious resistance on the way to Baghdad. The sectarian takfiri group was originally the al-Qaida franchise holder under the US-British occupation, but was rejected by the bulk of the resistance. It then moved into Syria to join the anti-Assad uprising, with tacit backing from Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia.
Since last summer it has controlled a swath of Syrian territory near the Iraqi border, amassing wealth and foreign recruits. But it was the Maliki regime's brutal suppression of a Sunni protest movement last year – culminating in the massacre of dozens of demonstrators in Hawija – that gave Isis a new opening in Iraq. By January it had taken over Falluja, scene of some of the worst US occupation atrocities, and unleashed carnage on Shia communities across the country.
The idea that this horror story can be disconnected from the US-led military occupation of Iraq that preceded it, as the war's apologists still try to maintain, is an absurdity. It's not just that there was no al-Qaida or Isis in the country before the invasion, or that the occupiers deliberately dismantled the Iraqi state and army and destroyed the country's infrastructure in the process. It's that colonial divide-and-rule sectarianism was deliberately fostered from the first day of the occupation.
Not only was a religious and ethnic carve-up enforced across public life, but US commanders were directly involved in sponsoring an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to undermine the armed resistance.
Maliki was himself selected by the US as a suitable strongman to protect its interests. That's not to suggest that any transition from Saddam's dictatorship wouldn't have been painful, or that Iraqis have had no agency in what took place. But much of the western debate of the past week has glossed over the scale of the human and social catastrophe unleashed by the US-led war. The most recent US academic estimate of the death toll isat least half a million, while Iraq Body Count has recorded a minimum of 190,100 violent deaths as a result of the invasion – 4 million became refugees.
That wasn't a "tragic error", as some claim, or a problem of post-invasion planning. It was a barbarous crime whose predicted consequences Iraqis are living with today. The idea that Tony Blair – who helped launch the war on a false pretext and now says we need to "liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this" – remains Middle East peace envoy is beyond parody.
The apologists say US troops left too soon, that Iraq is now a democracy, and that Syria shows non-intervention can carry its own costs. But post-occupation Iraq is an institutionalised kleptocracy, a US-Iranian condominium where voting is by enforced sectarian and ethnic blocs, torture is rampant, and thousands are imprisoned without trial.
If such democracy is the yardstick, it was the Iraqi government that demanded the withdrawal of foreign troops. As for Syria, the US and its allies are bleeding it by funding and arming rebel forces, while withholding the means for a decisive breakthrough. Without doubt, direct western military intervention would escalate the death toll to Iraqi proportions.
The arguments about how Iraq reached today's breakdown matter precisely because the backlash from the last intervention risks being used to justify yet another – and not just in Iraq. Since its launch in 2001, the war on terror has spread and spawned support for jihadist terror groups across the Muslim world, from al-Qaida to the Pakistani Taliban. The pattern of blowback couldn't be clearer. US bombing or drone attacks on Isis in Iraq, embedded in urban areas, won't break its grip on cities such as Mosul or Tikrit. But it will certainly kill large numbers of civilians and inflame the country, and the region, still further.
A narrow, violent takfiri group such as Isis is unlikely to be able to hold large urban centres for long – experience suggests its Sunni allies will turn against it – let alone continue its advance into Baghdad or Shia heartlands. But its dramatic successes have certainly put the survival of Iraq itself at stake. Like Syria, the country is already effectively partitioned – and Islamist groups are very far from being alone in rejecting the artificial "Sykes-Picot" borders imposed by Britain and France on the Arab world at the end of the first world war.
Only a determined break by a major Iraqi political force with the sectarian and ethnic politics bequeathed by Bush and Blair could now halt the fragmentation. The entire Arab world is living with the fallout from a century of attempts to control their region and resources. More intervention will only deepen the crisis. Only Iraqis can shape their future.
