BackISIS and the muddle in West Asia
The ISIS has been the world's favourite bogeyman since mid-2014, having definitively dethroned the Al Qaida from that position
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What exactly is the ISIS/ISIL? We know that it stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—or alternatively, the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIL). We know it is the most virulent—and most violent—manifestation of jihadist extremism today. And we know that it’s currently at the number 1 spot in the American Billboard Top Twenty of the world’s baddest bad guys.
The ISIS has been the world’s favourite bogeyman since mid-2014, having definitively dethroned the Al Qaida from that position. Its Nigerian cousin, Boko Haram, briefly hogged the limelight earlier this year, but subsequently the only competition the ISIS had to beat off has been non-human—the Ebola virus.
But with the Ebola successfully quarantined, off the front pages at least, the civilized world is in agreement that all stops must be pulled and no stone left unturned until the ISIS is defeated and erased from the face of the earth.
But how did the ISIS come into existence in the first place? More to the point, how could a few thousand militants destroy the 350,000-strong Iraqi army, an army trained and armed by the Americans over a period of three years at a cost of $41.6 billion? We know that the ISIS militants can be barbaric torturers. But were they also military geniuses, a marauding band of modern-day Genghis Khans?
The truth, as always, is banal. Dispatches from the Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn, one of the few sensible voices tracking the ISIS, reveal that the Iraqi army was not so much a conventional army of soldiers and generals as a business venture headed by investors, where you could buy a colonel’s post for $200,000, or be a divisional commander for $2 million. These investor-commanders would recover their investments through kickbacks from private contractors who sold supplies and weapons to the army.
When the ISIS laid siege to Mosul, these so-called colonels and generals, who were not fighters in the first place but businessmen, fled the scene. Where there ought to have been 30,000 Iraqi soldiers guarding Mosul, there was reportedly just one-third of that number. The remnants of the Iraqi army, already softened by chilling videos of ISIS atrocities disseminated efficiently by the group’s social media managers, melted away, handing over the city to ISIS on a platter.
The ISIS is basically an ultra-extremist, militarily-empowered offshoot of the Sunni Wahhabi school of Islam, whose primary sponsor and exporter is Saudi Arabia, along with Qatar and Kuwait—all of them key US allies in the region. This entity now controls large parts of Iraq beyond Baghdad, and most of Syria’s oil fields as well.
As all the civilized people outraged by the ISIS’ doings never tire of pointing out, the group is a monster. But how often have we seen the same old script of the West unleashing a monstrosity in the third world, only to turn around and tell us that since the monster is out of control, we need another war to bring it to heel, thereby perpetuating a cycle of never-ending military conflict?
In recent history, we’ve seen this script play out with Saddam Hussein, with Osama bin Laden, with the Taliban, with the Al Qaida—every single one of them either a one-time American ally or a full-fledged American creation. And today, we see it again with the ISIS.
While it cannot be denied that the ISIS is an abomination, it cannot be denied either that this abomination currently enjoys mass support in large parts of Iraq and Syria. How could that be? Is it possible that millions of Iraqis have overnight become adoring fans of an army of bloodthirsty criminals?
Well, the mind-boggling rise of the ISIS can only be understood in the context of American military adventurism in the region.
When Saddam Hussein was in power, Iraq had a secular government. There were no jihadists running amok, because Hussein would not let them. Jihadist Islam, and its latest avatar, the ISIS, is America’s gift to Iraq.
In the early days of the American occupation of Iraq, there was armed resistance from both Shia and Sunni camps. Cockburn has spoken about how the American generals were worried about the Shias and Sunnis coming together to resist the occupation.
But the tentative unity between the Shias and Sunnis unravelled, helped in no small measure by the sectarian nature of the Nouri al-Maliki regime propped up by the Americans. About 20% of the Iraqi population are Sunnis. The al-Maliki regime systematically persecuted them—they couldn’t get jobs, they were dispossessed of their lands, they were picked up at random and put in jail, and frequently executed for crimes for which someone had already been executed.
As Cockburn puts it, the ISIS enjoys the support of the Sunnis because, “for all its bloodthirstiness, for a lot of the Sunni community, it’s better than the Iraqi army and the Iraqi Shia militias coming back."
This scenario has a parallel in Syria, which is a Sunni-majority country controlled by an Alawite (Shia) regime. The ISIS was just one of several rebel groups, apart from the Free Syrian Army (FSA), that were, with the backing of the US and NATO, battling to oust the Assad regime.
This strategy—of promoting religious extremism, especially jihadist Islam, as a useful weapon against adversaries—is a time-worn American strategy straight out of the days of the Cold War, when it was used to great effect against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
After the Cold War, the US has selectively used political Islam to destabilize intransigent regimes, and then used the ensuing chaos to justify long-term military involvement in the region, either directly or covertly. We have seen this model most clearly in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria—where the US is desperate to oust the Bashar al-Assad regime, which has been a long-standing irritant to Israel, as well as being an ally of two of America’s adversaries in the region, Russia and Iran.
But if the US and its allies appear to be in two minds, and dithering somewhat in their response to the ISIS, it is because the finely balanced mess in Iraq and Syria is exactly what they’ve long aimed at, and any seemingly rational decision they might be expected to take now—such as do what is necessary to eliminate the ISIS—would end up adversely impacting some interest of their own.
To take an obvious example, the Americans want Assad out of Syria. But the ISIS is Assad’s biggest headache right now. Destroying the ISIS would actually help Assad. So what must the US do?
Considered purely in terms of military strategy, the best way to subdue the ISIS right now is one that will never be taken seriously: help Assad. The Assad regime is the main enemy of ISIS. And the ISIS’ main command centres are in Syria. The US cannot itself directly bomb ISIS installations in Syria without violating Syrian air space, which the Russians have already warned the Americans against. The only feasible option left is to help Assad deal with the ISIS on Syrian soil.
But the Americans cannot help the Syrian army without displeasing Israel and making Russia happy. The other option is to let the ISIS run loose with its beheadings and rapes and mass executions, in the hope that it will eventually finish Assad for them. Turkey, another US ally, has been actively helping the ISIS. But this strategy is clearly not working for the US-Israel-NATO axis right now.
Alternatively, the US could engage in aerial bombing of ISIS strongholds in Iraq, as it has begun to do. But this would inevitably involve civilian casualties, besides leaving the ISIS installations in Syria intact.
So the Assad regime cannot be helped because the US and Israel consider it their main enemy. But is it an evil worse than the ISIS? While military pundits and think-tank experts smartly bypass this question, the humanitarian and refugee crisis in the region is deteriorating with every passing day. And so the West Asian muddle continues.
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