Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (12 page)

What Baghdadi was proposing was the creation of an “Islamic State” right here and now by means of military conquest. It wasn’t as rash an idea as it seemed, for two of bin Laden’s essential conditions had already been met: the infidel “Crusaders”
had
invaded Iraq, and the Sunnis of Iraq were pretty radicalized already as a result. Keep
pushing down the same road for a few more years, be utterly ruthless in using violence to frighten people into submission, and there really could be an Islamic State here and now. It was a tremendously seductive message, delivered by someone far better educated in Islamic theology than most of his audience, and nobody minded that it would all have to be done by force. Practically all the states in the world before the twentieth century had been built by war (and well over 90 percent of them had ultimately been destroyed by war).
Every
traditional Islamic caliphate had been built by conquest, not by sweet persuasion. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Baghdadi would have known that taking this course would inevitably mean an eventual break with al Qaeda, but he didn’t necessarily dwell on that with his audience. He presumably already had the vision of the apocalyptic End Times that would be unleashed by the recreation of the caliphate, which now drives the whole ISIS project, but he wouldn’t necessarily have gone deeply into that at Camp Bucca either. What the troops needed was a vision of a glorious victory that could be achieved before they were too old, and—since they were very angry men—theological license to use extreme violence in the service of that goal. Baghdadi gave it to them, and by the time he left Camp Bucca in December 2004 he was a made man.

When Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was released by the U.S. occupation authorities as a “low level prisoner,” he immediately joined al Qaeda in Iraq. (Almost every militant who left Camp Bucca carried with him a list of useful contacts to help him rejoin the jihad; most had the telephone numbers written on the elastic of their boxer shorts.) By 2006 he was the general supervisor of the Islamic State of Iraq’s Shari’ah committee and a member of the group’s senior consultative council. After the death of Zarqawi in mid-2006 he became a senior adviser to the two men who shared the succession, Abu Ayyub al Masri and Abu Omar al Baghdadi, and when they blew themselves up to avoid capture in May 2010 he was elected leader of the ISI by a Shura council (a religious consultative assembly) in Iraq’s northern province of Nineveh. Nine of the eleven members voted in favour of Baghdadi.

The organization he inherited was certainly not doing well. It continued to assassinate people and blow things up in crowded places, but it no longer controlled substantial chunks of Iraq territory as it had in 2005–07. Certain things were moving in its favour, however: the American troops were finally pulling out of Iraq; the Maliki government in Baghdad, in its second term after an election in 2009, was more corrupt and incompetent than ever but relentless in its anti-Sunni bias—and elsewhere in the Arab world revolutions were stirring. Not Islamist revolutions, but non-violent democratic revolutions against the sclerotic dictatorships that had ruined their people’s
lives for so long. The first came in Tunisia in December 2010. Less than two weeks after that revolution succeeded in overthrowing President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011 (after twenty-four years in power), the Egyptians came out in the streets against their own dictator, Hosni Mubarak, the last of three generals who had ruled the Arab world’s biggest country and cultural capital for an unbroken forty-seven years. Further non-violent protests broke out in Morocco and Jordan (where the kings quickly offered major concessions to protesters), in Yemen, in Bahrain, and—most important for Abu Bakr al Baghdadi—in Syria.

The wonder is that it took so long for non-violent revolutions to come to the Arab world. The phenomenon only started to spread after the Philippine revolution of 1986, but by 2010 it was a quarter-century old and everybody knew (in principle) how to do it. Non-violent revolutions had brought down dictatorships similar to those of the Arab world in Thailand, Bangladesh and South Korea. Non-violent protests very nearly brought down the Chinese Communist dictatorship in 1989, and they did bring down all the Communist regimes of Europe in 1989–91. Others ended almost all of the dictatorships in Latin America, and the apartheid regime in South Africa was forced to negotiate its own retreat from power by the mere threat of one. As a result, for the first time ever, more than half of the world’s people lived in more or less democratic countries with free speech, the rule of law, and all the usual appurtenances of
democracy. The Arab world was bringing up the tail of the parade, but that was all the more reason why the Arab Spring should have succeeded. Unfortunately, apart from the admirable exception of Tunisia, it did not.

The Egyptian revolution did succeed in removing Mubarak from power, writing a new constitution and holding free elections, but the result, to the dismay of the protesters who had brought about the revolution, was a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. This was hardly surprising, since rural people and the urban poor make up over half of Egypt’s voting population. In general they are socially conservative and deeply religious, so most of them would of course vote for the Muslim Brotherhood.

The right strategy for the disappointed Egyptian liberals in the cities would have been to wait four years and then vote out the new president, Mohamed Morsi, for the Brotherhood had accepted a poisoned chalice: the first democratically elected Egyptian government was bound to become extremely unpopular with time, given the parlous state of Egypt’s post-revolution economy. They should also have understood that Morsi had to walk a narrow line between respecting Egyptians’ constitutional rights and satisfying his own supporters, who expected their votes to translate into a more “Islamic” Egypt. Nothing Morsi was doing was extreme or irreversible, and he was doomed to be a one-term president. So if you don’t like it, grit your teeth and wait for the next election. That is how
democracy is actually supposed to work, but the heroes of the revolution (or most of them) couldn’t wait. They asked the army to get rid of this problem for them, and the army was only too happy to oblige.

Just over a year after Morsi became president, the army arrested him and took over. The military government dealt with the inevitable protests by killing around a thousand Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the streets, a massacre of non-violent protesters comparable in scale to Tiananmen Square in 1989. So now yet another general, Abdel Fattah al Sisi, is running Egypt, although he at least had the tact to hold an election before assuming the presidency. The Egyptians won their revolution, but then they threw their democracy away.

The non-violent protests in Bahrain were ended violently in 2011 by the Saudi Arabian army, which entered the country allegedly at the request of the king, Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa, to put down the demonstrations. Saudi Arabia had no intention of allowing a democratic revolution to occur on an island just off the coast of its own Eastern province. The protests in Yemen were reduced to irrelevance by the spreading civil war in the country. And the protests in Syria turned into a war that has already killed a quarter of a million Syrians and reduced much of the country to rubble.

This overall failure begs for an explanation, since the success rate for non-violent revolutions is generally much higher than that. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, in
their remarkable book
Why Civil Resistance Works
,
²²
presented a statistical survey of all the violent and non-violent revolutions of the past century, including failed attempts as well as successful ones, and concluded that the success rate for non-violent revolutions in each of the past three decades has been higher than 50 percent (which is far higher, by the way, than the success rate for violent revolutions). One success out of five tries in the Arab Spring therefore seems low, but actually the Egyptian revolution
did
succeed; it was the follow-through that failed. If Egypt were still a genuine democracy today, we would probably count the Arab Spring as a generally positive event, and Syria as the tragic exception. But Syria is the exception that concerns us most, since the Syrian civil war created the opportunity for Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s organization to expand beyond its Iraqi origins and become a phenomenon of real international significance.

Syria, like Iraq until 2003, was ruled by the Ba’ath Party, a party organized along Leninist lines whose original goal was a single Arab socialist nation. The party was founded in Syria in the 1940s, and both its Iraqi and its Syrian wings managed to gain power in their respective countries by the mid-1960s. The two countries never united, however, as the two ruling Ba’ath parties promptly split apart in 1966, and remained hostile ever after. Indeed,
the hostility between the two former sister parties was so intense that the Syrian government actually backed Iran in the Iran-Iraq war.

Hafez al Assad, an ex-air force officer, took over the leadership of the Syrian Ba’ath Party in a military coup in 1970, and ruled the country as president until his death in 2000—whereupon the presidency went to his son, Bashar al Assad. But Syria was a very difficult country to rule: Sunni Arabs account for 60 percent of the population, but traditionally for less of the urban population. Other Sunnis, mostly Kurds and Turkmens, make up another 12 percent of the population, but will not necessarily be found on the same side of any given argument as Sunni Arabs. Shia Arabs are 13 percent of the population, a large majority of them being from the Alawite sect (which other Shias tend to see as heretical). Christians are 10 percent of the population, but are divided into many sects, including Antiochian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Catholics of many Eastern varieties, and Protestants. In addition there are 750,000 Druze, plus small numbers of Yazidi, Mandaeans and Baha’i. But all real power was concentrated in the hands of the Alawite minority, some 10 percent of the whole.

This situation had come about because the French colonial authorities, building their own local military units (
troupes spéciales
) in Syria between the First and Second World Wars, had chosen to recruit almost exclusively from the minorities on the grounds that they were more likely to be loyal to the imperial power because they did not wish
to be dominated by the Sunni Arab majority. These minorities included Alawites, Christians, Druze and Kurds, but the infantry regiments were almost all Alawite, so when France withdrew from Syria in 1946, Alawites dominated the section of the army most useful for political intervention. It was three Alawite officers who led the 1963 coup that brought the Ba’ath Party to power, and Syria has essentially been ruled by Alawites ever since. Sunni Arabs are often appointed to very senior positions, but the key military, police and intelligence posts have always remained in Alawite hands.

Running a tough dictatorship for half a century gives you time to accumulate quite a lot of enemies, especially if your rule has included episodes like the bloody suppression of the revolt in Hama in 1982. When the Arab Spring reached Syria in 2011, therefore, the Alawites were genuinely afraid that they would suffer severely from revenge-taking if they lost power, and clung to it more fiercely than other Arab regimes facing non-violent protests. Moreover, both Saudi Arabia and Turkey (probably not in coordination with each other) began supplying arms and money to militant groups who would actually fight the Assad regime. At a somewhat later date it is likely that the United States began funnelling weapons into the hands of Syrian rebels from the ample stocks left in Libya after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, although it never publicly admitted it. The net result, at any rate, was that the non-violent tactics which had brought down the
Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships and so many others elsewhere in the world were never properly tried in Syria, and by October 2011, when the Syrian government first used artillery and air strikes against rebel-held sections of its own cities, the confrontation had turned into a full-scale civil war.