The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising (9 page)

Furthermore, the US is unlikely to want to appear as the preserver of Shia dominance over the Sunni minority, especially when exercised by a government in Baghdad that is as sectarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional as Saddam’s ever was. There may be less state violence than before 2003, but only because the state is weaker. The Maliki government’s methods are equally brutal: Iraqi prisons are full of people who have made false confessions under torture or the threat of it. Sunni villages near Fallujah are full of families with sons on death row. An Iraqi intellectual who had planned to open a museum in Abu Ghraib prison so that Iraqis would never forget the barbarities of Saddam’s regime found that there was no space available because the cells were full of new inmates. Iraq is still an extraordinarily dangerous place. “I never imagined that ten years after the fall of Saddam you would still be able to get a man killed in Baghdad by paying $100,” an Iraqi who’d been involved in the abortive museum project told me.

As Iraq disintegrates into separate Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish regions, the process is likely to be painful and violent. Sectarian confrontations will be unavoidable where there are mixed populations, such as in and around Baghdad with its seven million people. It seems unlikely that the country could be partitioned without extensive bloodshed and several million refugees. A possible outcome is an Iraqi version of the wrenching violence that accompanied the partition of India in 1947.

The situation is equally bleak in Syria. Too many conflicts and too many players have become involved for any peace terms to be acceptable to all. Comparison is frequently made with the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, with the comforting moral drawn that, bloody though that conflict was, all sides eventually became exhausted and put away their guns. But the war did not quite end like that: it was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and Syria’s decision to join the US-led coalition to evict him that led Washington to tolerate Syria extinguishing the last resistance to its rule in Lebanon. It is not a very comforting parallel.

There is no doubt that the Syrian people, both inside and outside the country, are utterly exhausted and demoralized by the civil war and would do almost anything to end it. But they are no longer in a position to determine their own fate. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming and training a new “moderate military opposition” that will supposedly fight Assad and ISIS and other al-Qa‘ida-type groups. But it is not clear that the “moderate” military opposition has any substance except as a tightly controlled cat’s paw of foreign powers.

Only time will tell if President Assad is strong enough to break the current stalemate in Syria, though this seems unlikely. The combat forces of the Syrian army have hitherto been able to fight on only one front at a time, while it has become increasingly obvious that al-Qa‘ida type movements, notably ISIS, JAN, and Ahrar al-Sham, can operate freely across Syria’s borders with Iraq and Turkey. They have a vast hinterland in which to maneuver.

So long as the civil war continues, fanatical groups such as ISIS, with legions of fighters who are prepared to sacrifice their lives, will continue to hold the upper hand over moderates who might be more open to negotiations. In this situation, the importance of Syrian public opinion is diminishing steadily. However, it still counts for something. One of the few positive events to occur in Syria in the early summer of 2014 was the evacuation of the Old City of Homs by 1,200 fighters, who were allowed to bring their personal weapons to rebel-held territory, while, at the same time, two pro-regime Shia towns, Zahraa and Nubl, besieged for two years by the opposition, were able to receive humanitarian convoys. In addition, 70 hostages taken in Aleppo and Latakia were released. Encouragement can be drawn from the fact that different rebel groups were sufficiently coherent to negotiate and implement an agreement, something that had been deemed impossible. This kind of local peace negotiation cannot stop the overall conflict, but it can save lives along the way.

None of the religious parties that took power, whether in Iraq in 2005 or Egypt in 2012, has been able to consolidate its authority. Rebels everywhere look for support from the foreign enemies of the state they are trying to overthrow. The Syrian opposition can only reflect the policies and divisions of its sponsors. Resistance to the state was too rapidly militarized for opposition movements to develop an experienced national leadership and a political program. The discrediting of nationalism and communism, combined with the need to say what the US wanted to hear, meant that they were at the mercy of events, lacking any vision of a non-authoritarian nation state capable of competing with the religious fanaticism of the Sunni militants of ISIS and similar movements financed by the oil states of the Gulf. Now the results of this have spread across the border to Iraq. The Middle East is entering a long period of ferment in which counterrevolution may prove as difficult to consolidate as revolution itself.

This book was originally conceived as a description of the growing power of jihadi movements similar to al-Qa‘ida in northern Syria and Iraq, the importance of which seemed to me to have been missed by Western politicians, the media, and the public. I particularly wanted to trace the swift rise of ISIS, the growing anger of the Sunni community in Iraq, and the government’s inability to combat a powerful new insurgency. In Syria I wanted to stress that the armed opposition was now dominated by Jihadi movements while the moderates, whom the West is seeking to boost, have little influence on the ground.

What seemed a marginal opinion in 2013 and early 2014 was borne out by ISIS’ capture of Mosul on June 10, 2014 and its declaration of a caliphate spanning the Iraqi-Syrian border later that month. The main conclusions of this book, written beforehand, seemed to be spectacularly confirmed by these events. But the war is not over and the battle lines will move backward and forward. Many players inside and outside the country are involved and Iraq and Syria have a way of delivering unexpected events and nasty surprises.

I developed many of the themes in this book while giving lectures for Alwan for the Arts Foundation in New York in 2014, as well as in articles for
The Independent
and the
London Review of Books
. Many thanks to all for their encouragement and support.

Patrick Cockburn is currently Middle East correspondent for
The Independent
and worked previously for the
Financial Times
. He has written three books on Iraq’s recent history as well as a memoir,
The Broken Boy
, and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia,
Henry’s Demons
, which was shortlisted for a Costa Award. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. He was named Foreign Commentator of the Year by the Comment Awards in 2013.

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