Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (2 page)

There’s an obvious explanation for why the Christian religious wars happened when they did: they were triggered by the second great schism in Christianity, which involved all of Western and Central Europe. It’s less obvious why Sunnis and Shias should be at each others’ throats right now, given that the schism between the two main branches of Islam happened thirteen centuries ago. There were many bloody clashes between them at that time, but in most subsequent generations, in places where the population was mixed, ordinary Sunnis and Shias lived in peace. In modern secular states like pre-invasion Iraq, even intermarriages between the two communities were commonplace.

Moreover, nine out of ten Muslims are Sunni. You can imagine that this might lead to an occasional massacre of Shias, but certainly not to a stand-up fight. However, in the Middle East the Sunni-Shia ratio is much less lopsided. In the space between Egypt and Iran, Sunnis have a two-thirds overall majority, but the country-by-country ratios range from 85 percent Shia in Iran to 90 percent Sunni in Egypt. And in the countries bordering on the Gulf—Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf kingdoms and emirates—Shias have an overall majority of at least a two-to-one, due mainly to the very big population of Iran.
(This large body of water used to be known in English as the Persian Gulf, but that annoys Arabs so much that tactful people now say simply “The Gulf”.)

The trigger for the current Sunni-Shia confrontation was the 1979 revolution in Iran, which became an “Islamic Republic” ruled to a large extent by Shia clerics. The overthrow of the Shah and Iran’s successful defiance of the West made the Iranian revolution very popular among Arabs, even Sunni Arabs, who were living under dictators and absolute monarchs who were for the most part in thrall to the West. The alarmed rulers of some Arab countries, especially those in the Arabian peninsula, sought to counter this trend by emphasizing that Shia are heretics deserving punishment (from a Sunni point of view), and in this enterprise they were greatly aided by the tens of billions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has spent in spreading its particular version of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, throughout the Arab world (and the broader Muslim world as well). Wahhabism has been virulently anti-Shia ever since its emergence in northern Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century.

If we were talking about Christian sects, we would classify Wahhabism as fundamentalist. It is deeply conservative, even to the point of retaining traditional punishments like beheading and stoning that had largely disappeared in other parts of the Muslim world. It is very concerned with ridding Islam of what it sees as later distortions of the original faith and getting back to the values that it believes were embodied in the lives of the first
generations after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. This fundamentalism naturally intensifies the Wahhabis’ hostility towards the Shias, whose split with the Sunnis dates from the first generation after the death of Muhammad in the seventh century.

Wahhabi leaders have been closely allied with the Saudi ruling house since 1744, and Saudi Arabia’s enormous wealth now gives their ideas great influence in Muslim communities everywhere, even among people who would not describe themselves as Wahhabis. A 2012 study by Pew Research, a non-partisan “fact tank,” revealed that 40 percent of Sunni Palestinians, 50 percent of Sunni Moroccans, and 53 percent of Sunni Egyptians now say that Shias are not Muslims. No opinion polls were done on this topic fifty years ago, but a mass of circumstantial evidence indicates that as recently as the 1960s such extreme views were very rare among Sunnis.

Other varieties of Sunni believers who will crop up in this book are Salafis and takfiris. The Salafis share the basic Wahhabi conviction that it is necessary to get back to the early values of Islam, and are similarly puritanical and literalist in their approach to religion—indeed, some Wahhabis actually prefer to be called Salafis—but they do not have ties with the house of Saud. Some are militant and willing to use violence to further their cause; others work peacefully towards the same goals. Takfiris also espouse the basic Wahhabi beliefs, but are distinguished by their conviction that any Muslim who does not share
them is an “apostate” whom it is lawful and even necessary to kill. They also believe quite strongly in the need to kill Shias and expunge this great heresy from the planet. They are not exactly a sect, but it is they who populate the Sunni extremist movements now fighting to overthrow Shia-dominated governments in Syria and Iraq.

On the Shia side there are also various sects with different beliefs, though none as extreme as the Sunni takfiris. The Alawites, who dominate the regime of Bashar al Assad in Syria, are a divergent and secretive sect of Shia Islam that incorporates elements of Christianity and other religions, and is seen even by some other Shias as not really Muslim. Another group sometimes mistakenly seen as an even more divergent Shia sect are the Druze, who also live mostly in Syria. However, their faith, while it is a monotheistic religion largely in the Abrahamic tradition, incorporates elements of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and even Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, and they do not see themselves as Muslims.

Sorry that took so long, but you really can’t tell the players without a programme.

CHAPTER 1

TO UNDERSTAND ALL IS NOT TO FORGIVE ALL …

… b
ut it does help to predict the terrorists’ actions and respond intelligently. Unfortunately, the West has been spectacularly bad at doing that.

We will conduct a systematic campaign of air strikes against these terrorists
.

– U.S. president Barack Obama on ISIS, 2014

This is about psychopathic terrorists who are trying to kill us. Like it or not they have already declared war on us
.

[So bomb them in Iraq.]

– U.K. prime minister David Cameron on bombing ISIS, London, 2014

We cannot stand on the sidelines while ISIL continues to promote terrorism in Canada as well as against our allies and partners, nor can we allow ISIL to have a safe haven in Syria
.

[Bomb them in Syria too.]

– Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, Ottawa, 2015

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran …

– U.S. Senator John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign
²

To be fair, Senator McCain has not actually advocated bombing Iran for the past few years. He has been too busy advocating bombing Syria. At first he only wanted to bomb the regime’s troops, but latterly he has urged the Obama administration to bomb
both
Syrian president Bashar al Assad’s forces and the new “Islamic State” founded by ISIS on Syrian and Iraq territory. Why not? Two enemies for the price of one.

John McCain comes close to self-parody, but the distance between him and more “serious” Western leaders is not very great. Some of them (probably including Barack Obama) privately understand that bombing generally makes more new enemies for the West than it kills old ones, but domestic politics usually trumps foreign policy, and the domestic audience wants its leaders to “do something.” Bombing people in the Middle East is something Western governments can do without incurring significant casualties on their own side, so it is politically safe and answers the public demand for action. More often than not the action ends up being counter-productive in foreign policy terms, but that is a lesser consideration.

A more serious approach would begin by trying to understand the motives, goals and strategies of the disparate terrorist groups that allegedly threaten us. That is not easy, because their perspectives on history, their political values, and their understanding of their religion are all quite unfamiliar to most people in the West. Indeed, parts of their belief system still seem pretty bizarre (if no longer
unfamiliar) to a majority of mainstream Sunni Muslims as well. (Shia Muslims, by and large, do not indulge in terrorist attacks on Western targets.) To make matters more complicated, the Islamist terrorist groups have differing theological views and different specific goals, although they all have a lot in common.

In order to get a sense of just how complex the situation is, consider the range of attacks and initiatives by Islamist fighters between March 18 and April 3, 2015. (I chose this period simply because that’s when I was writing this chapter.)

March 18:
Two young Tunisians who had crossed the border into Libya for weapons training return home and attack cruise-ship tourists visiting the Bardo Museum in Tunis. Twenty-two people are killed, all but three of them foreign tourists, before the terrorists run out of bullets and are killed by Tunisian police. ISIS claims responsibility for the attack two days later, saying it was a “blessed invasion of one of the dens of infidels and vice in Muslim Tunisia.”

March 22:
ISIS in Yemen sends four suicide bombers to attack two Shia mosques in Sana’a, killing 137 people. Houthi (Shia) rebels from the north, having already taken central Yemen, including the capital, push south to drive the incumbent government from its last stronghold, Aden. Fighters from AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) also approach Aden from the east, causing U.S. Special Operations troops who controlled drone strikes in the
region to blow up their heavy equipment at a nearby airbase and flee across the Red Sea to Djibouti. Now no American troops remain in Yemen.

March 25:
Libya’s Tobruk-based government-in-exile announces an offensive to retake the city of Derna from ISIS and other militant groups. It presumably fails, as nothing further is heard about it.

March 26:
Saudi Arabia, convinced that the Houthi rebels in Yemen are controlled by Shia Iran, creates a coalition that includes most Sunni-ruled Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco) plus Pakistan, and begins bombing targets across the whole of Houthi-controlled Yemen. A ground invasion by Egyptian, Saudi and Pakistani troops will follow, the Saudis announce, if deemed necessary.

March 27:
Syrian rebel forces dominated by the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front capture Idlib, only the second Syrian provincial capital to fall in almost four years of war.

March 28–29:
Boko Haram gunmen kill at least forty-three voters during the Nigerian national elections. Earlier in the month, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, formally declared his organization’s allegiance to Islamic State, the ISIS-run “caliphate” in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

March 31:
ISIS rebels gain control of much of the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, a southern suburb of Damascus. It is the first foothold of ISIS forces in the Syrian capital.

April 2:
Al Shabaab gunmen from Somalia make a pre-dawn attack on Garissa University College in northeastern Kenya (near the Somali border) and kill 148 people, the overwhelming majority of them students. The students are asked their religion and Christians are killed at once, while Muslims are spared. Kenyan authorities say the attack was organized by Mohamed Mohamud, a Somali-speaking Kenyan citizen who was a lecturer at the college.

April 2:
Attacks on army checkpoints by Islamist militants of the Ansar Beit al Maqdis group in Egypt’s northern Sinai region kill ten soldiers and two civilians. In November 2014, the group had declared its allegiance to Islamic State: “In accordance with the teachings of the Prophet, we announce our allegiance to the Caliphate, and call on Muslims everywhere to do the same.”

April 2:
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula forces seize the port city of Mukalla and the largest army base in eastern Yemen, effectively establishing AQAP control over the sparsely populated eastern half of the country.

April 3:
The Iraqi government announces that it has recaptured the almost entirely Sunni city of Tikrit, the first
significant loss of territory by ISIS since it overran western and northwestern Iraq in July 2014. But it takes Iraqi government forces almost a month to retake the city, and the fighting is done mostly by Shia militias, not by the Iraqi regular army (which collapsed during the ISIS offensive in 2014 and still has only a few units that are fit for combat).

The Shia militias celebrate their victory by lynching not only captured ISIS fighters but also some of the few Sunni civilians who had stayed in their homes (on the grounds that they must have been ISIS supporters if they hadn’t fled). They also loot and burn hundreds of businesses and private homes. On April 4 Iraq finally pulls the militiamen out of the city, but the damage has been done: their behaviour will produce even more Sunni recruits for ISIS forces in the rest of the Iraqi territory controlled by Islamic State, and make its recapture even more difficult.