14 October 2015
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Professor Amin Saikal
This paper is the text of a Parliamentary Library Lecture
delivered by Professor Saikal on 14 October.
Amin Saikal AM FASSA, is University Distinguished Professor
of Political Science, Public Policy Fellow and Director of the Centre for Arab
and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia), and author of Iran
at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015); Zone of Crisis:
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014)
The Middle East is in the grip of multiple geopolitical and
humanitarian crises. The region is going through major balance of power shifts,
perhaps not seen since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the
British-French colonial orchestrations nearly a century ago. The old
correlation of forces maintaining the status quo has been altering. A set of
new alignments along multiple overlapping and contested fault-lines, including
sectarian divisions and geopolitical rivalries, is generating favourable
conditions for the rise of violent extremist groups; most importantly the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its self-declared Khilafat or
borderless Islamic State. This has come to redefine the region to such an
extent that it has already affected its traditional political and territorial
contours. Unless there is regional and international consensus on resolving
some of the fundamental problems that have made the region so volatile, extreme
political Islamism and conflicts may well continue to shape the regional
landscape.
Contents
Executive
summary
Introduction
‘Islamic State’
IS Strategy
The US-led Western approach
Russian Intervention
Conclusion
The Middle East, its Gulf component in
particular, is in the grip of multiple ideological, geopolitical and
humanitarian crises. The region is going through major balance of power shifts,
perhaps not seen since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the
British-French colonial orchestrations nearly a century ago. The old
constellation of forces in support of maintaining the status quo, especially
following the Iranian revolution of more than 36 years ago, is altering. A set
of new alignments and realignments along multiple overlapping and contested
regional and international fault-lines, including sectarian divisions and
geopolitical rivalries at different levels, has generated favourable conditions
for the rise of violent extremist groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and
Levant (ISIL). The region is redefined in ways that have affected its
traditional political and territorial contours. Russia’s latest expansion of
its military intervention in Syria, with backing from Tehran, Baghdad and
Lebanese Hezbollah, has introduced a further unsettling dimension to the
regional crisis. Unless there is an interlocking regional and international
consensus to resolve some of the fundamental problems that have made the Middle
East so volatile, extremist political Islamism and geopolitical tensions and
conflicts are set to feature in the regional landscape for the foreseeable
future.
The sudden rise of the extremist Sunni ISIL, its conquest of
vast swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territories, and its declaration in June 2014
of khilafat or borderless ‘Islamic State’ (IS) under the leadership of Abubakr
al-Baghdadi as Khalifa or ‘deputy to the Prophet of Islam’ and amir al-mu’minin
or ‘the commander of the faithful’ have fatally fractured an already
politically and territorially fragmented Iraq and Syria. IS’s Wahhabi/Salafist
rooted interpretation and application of Islam within an extremist narrative,
with utopian goals, and its declaration of violent jihad against all those who
oppose or disagree with its stance have caused a tsunami of reaction from
within and outside of the multifaceted Muslim world.
IS is disowned by a great majority of Muslims and rejected
as a qualified Islamic entity by most Islamic authorities. Al-Baghdadi and his
cohorts, including many experienced but aggrieved Ba’athist supporters of the
Saddam Hussein era, have nonetheless been able to skillfully manipulate a
number of variables to justify and enforce their khilafat, as temporary or
durable as it may turn out to be, and to make their jihad, against what IS has
called ‘crusaders’ and ‘usurpers’, actionable within a favourably resourceful
geographical zone.
Those variables consist of the war-torn conditions and
presence of a power vacuum in Syria and Iraq, the symbolism of khilafat and
other historical Islamic signs, the disenchantment of the Sunni segments of the
Syrian and Iraqi populations, the Saudi-Iranian geopolitically driven
Sunni-Shia sectarian rivalry, the socio-economic disparities and injustices and
the prevalence of largely Western backed authoritarian and corrupt regimes
across the Muslim Middle East. Highlighting the list are also Israel’s
repressive colonial settler occupation of the Palestinian lands, including the
third holiest site of Islam, East Jerusalem, and a general sense of
disempowerment and humiliation amongst Muslims in the face of repeated major
power, most importantly US, interventions to shape and reshape the Middle East
and the wider Muslim world according to their ideological and geopolitical
preferences. All this has helped al-Baghdadi’s leadership to consolidate IS, to
entice some Muslims to fall for IS’s extremist narrative, and to support its
institution of khilafat—a phenomenon that has had precedence in Islamic history
and nostalgically resonates with many Muslims since its abolition in 1924.
Notwithstanding its violent and repressive theocratic
nature, IS now functions as a relatively consolidated political and territorial
entity. It has developed an identifiable system of governance, under the
command of a Governing Council, presided over by al-Baghdadi, although it is
not known how often and in what manner the Council meets. Whilst the office of
khalifa stands supreme and its edicts are absolute, a chain of intertwined
civilian and security command features in its operations. IS has mastered
sufficient resource capability to be able to combat, defend and expand its
territory from Ramadi in Iraq to Raqqa in Syria—a territory about the size of
France. Moreover, it has harnessed a capacity to provide some basic municipal
services to many of the 6 to 8 million people under its control and to enforce
elaborate processes of indoctrination and recruitment.
In addition to its $2 billion dollars worth of assets,
resulting largely from its initial conquests, IS has boosted its revenue
sources through a number of other coercive and illegal measures. They include
taxes and cross-border trade through both Turkey and Lebanon, involving the
selling not only of oil from the fields under its control, but also the
peddling of invaluable relics and artefacts from the historical sites that it
has destroyed and vandalised in both Iraq and Syria. It has even put one Roman
coin up on eBay for $100. The more IS has become shaped as a quasi-state, the
more it has become vulgar and strident.
Of those who have opted to actively participate in IS’s
declared jihad, most are from within the zone of the conflicts and the Arab
world; but a good number have also come from across the globe. Some have joined
IS out of deep religious convictions. Others include many fringe and misguided
elements from Muslim communities, who have had no more than a mundane
understanding of Islam, have suffered from a void or purpose in life, and are
grieved by a sense of dispossession and alienation for different reasons and
are therefore vulnerable to IS’s slick social media propaganda. IS’s male
foreign fighters are now estimated to number around 30,000.
Despite its patriarchic, misogynic, discriminatory and
brutal treatment of women, particularly those from non-Sunni Muslim minorities,
a sizeable number of Muslim girls and women have also been lured to IS. They
have become participants in its jihad—either in an active or supporting role.
Reportedly, there are some 3,000 women from the Arab and Muslim domain as well
as the West in the service of IS. Most are tasked as morality activists and
police, and rule enforcers, with some also wearing the mantle of ‘Jihadi brides’.
They include a number of Malaysians and Indonesians. There are also non-Muslim,
especially Yazidi, women who have been coerced to serve as comfort providers
and slaves.
In this context, IS has evidently pursued an integrative
strategy of action on three fronts.
First, it has drawn on an extremist version of Islam to
invent an ideological narrative that has focused primarily on two objectives.
One is to legitimise the application of brutal theocratic measures to enforce
its rule. Another is to invoke those causes that could resonate with not only
the Sunni segments of the Iraqi and Syrian populations, but also a good number
of Sunni Arabs and fellow Muslims around the world. When it comes to the use of
the politics of brutality, IS is not too far ahead of some other extremist
groups, such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram, some of
whose elements have declared allegiance to IS.
Second, it has deployed the concept of khilafat to endear
itself with those Muslims who either naively or nostalgically believe that a
return to the unity of all Muslim countries under a single supreme religious
and political leader is the answer to the deep-seated problems that have come
to beset the Muslim world. Its anti-Shia and anti-Kurdish stance has aimed at
fuelling sectarian and ethnic divisions within the region and beyond. Whereas
some Arab states have taken solace in IS’s opposition to Shia Islam and
therefore to Iran and its allies, IS’s anti-Kurdish posture has led Turkey to
view it as a deterrent to the Iraqi Kurds’ aspirations for an independent state
that could have overflow effects on the large Turkish Kurdish minority.
Consequently, the Arab countries and Turkey have had reasons to be somewhat
lenient towards IS, as long as the entity is contained and does not pose a real
threat to them.
Third, IS’s opposition to the US-led West and Israel as ‘the
exploiters and occupiers’ allegedly causing Muslims’ humiliation and
disempowerment through either direct or indirect means, has had its own twisted
logic. It has focused on persuading all those Muslims that have grievances more
specifically against the US and its allies for various reasons—some personal
and others political and social in nature—either to view and in some cases
support the new khilafat as a force of salvation.
As such, IS has generated three concentric ideological,
political and military circles of operation at the national, regional and
international levels within a religious narrative that enables it to exploit
the weaknesses and loopholes at each of those levels. In the age of digital
communications, it has managed to secure effective recruiters to disseminate
its propaganda widely to those who are vulnerable to its messages. No wonder so
many young Muslim men and women have fallen prey to IS’s propaganda.
In contrast, the US and its allies have not been able to
come up with an effective counter-narrative and a military campaign which would
be part of a comprehensive political strategy to deal with those IS causes that
defy military solutions. Their emphasis on the primacy of the use of brute
force, mostly through an air campaign, and on de-radicalisation and harsher
anti-terrorism measures at home and abroad have fallen terribly short of countering
IS’s strategy. Western governments’ desire to extract political mileage for
domestic purposes and listen to those instant experts on combating terrorism
and radicalization who lack a clear understanding of the complexities of what
IS and its arena of operations are all about, have left them bare vis-à-vis an
entity that has surprisingly managed to be one step ahead of them. Intensified
bombardment of the IS positions and provision of substantial aid to the Iraqi
forces and the Kurdish sub-national militia, Peshmerga, to do the ground
fighting, have so far produced no tangible results. The United States has
lately found it necessary to ditch an important plank of its policy of
combating IS: that is raising a sizable fighting force from the ranks of the moderate
Syrian opposition.
Apart from the lack of a coherent and viable strategy, it is
important to mention three other factors that have impeded the US-led efforts
to the delight of IS and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its
supporters.
The first factor relates to the fact that the US-led Western
backed Iraqi government has proved to be persistently incompetent, corrupt and
dysfunctional. Whereas Prime Minister Nur al-Maliki catered primarily to his
base of power amongst Iraq’s Shia majority and in close cooperation with Tehran
at the cost of marginalizing the Iraqi Sunnis, his successor Haider al-Abadi,
who took the reins of power in July 2014 following IS’s routing of what was the
best American trained and equipped Iraqi military, has not done much better.
Al-Abadi comes from the same Shia group, Da’wa, as al-Maliki. He cannot afford
to make more than cosmetic concessions to the Iraqi Sunnis, given his concerns
about not antagonising his Shia compatriots and Tehran. Also, like al-Maliki,
he has been unable to prevent Iraq’s other substantial minority, the Kurds,
from consolidating an extensively autonomous state of their own in northern
Iraq. The position of this state is reinforced by the US and its allies
providing military assistance to Peshmerga as an anti-IS force, despite its
repercussions for Iraq’s national unity.
The second factor was the inability or unwillingness of the
United States and its allies to intervene in Syria early enough to accelerate
the fall of Assad’s regime, which has committed as much, if not more,
brutalities as IS against the Syrian people. President Obama’s 2013 back down
from intervening even when the regime had crossed the ‘redline’ by using
chemical weapons, in return for a Russian proposal to get rid of Syria’s WMD,
was a survival victory for Assad and a diplomatic and strategic triumph for
Russia, as well as for Iran and Hezbollah.
The third is the resilience of the Assad regime and its
shrunken military and security forces to stay in the fight, although with important
support from its external supporters, and to maintain its non-negotiating
position vis-à-vis the Western and Arab backed moderate opposition forces.
Assad’s staying power has ultimately prompted the US and its allies to make an
about-face and drop their demand for Assad’s removal as part of a solution to
the Syrian crisis. They have lately offered to negotiate with Assad for a
transitional phase.
It is important to note that the popular uprisings of
Syria’s Sunni majority against Assad’s Alawite minority-dominated rule in the
wake of the so-called Arab Spring nearly five years ago were all very peaceful.
Assad had ample opportunity to reach a negotiated settlement with the
opposition. However, he chose to crush it by force. He did so in the tradition
of the authoritarian political culture that has historically dominated the
Muslim Middle East; and also in the context of the counter-Arab Spring’s
efforts launched by the Arab conservative forces, led by Saudi Arabia, and
acquiesced to by the United States and many of its allies. This was exemplified
vividly in the case of Egypt.
It is not surprising that the calculated and unpredictable
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently found a unique opportunity to make a
daring show of force in a direct military intervention in support of the Assad
regime against not just IS but all opposition forces, including those backed by
the West and the Arab world. For Putin, it is not only the issue of saving the
regime that could enable Russia to maintain and expand a strategic foothold in
a vital region of the world. It is also about reasserting Russia’s position and
strengthening its bargaining power on the world stage. Predictably, the Russian
intervention, whilst emboldening the Assad regime and its supporters, can only
alarm the US and its Western allies and Arab partners as well as Turkey, which
has historically viewed Russia as a source of security concerns. They have
condemned the Russian intervention as dangerously one-sided, fuelling and
widening rather than solving the Syrian conflict and assisting IS.
The Russian intervention is indeed risky. This is the first
time that Russia has engaged in a direct military action outside the perimeters
of the former Soviet Union. It carries the potential not only for accidental
clashes in the air with the US and allied planes, but also for landing Moscow
in a very costly quagmire, similar to that confronted by the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan following its invasion of the country three and a half decades ago.
The Syrian intervention is admittedly not on the same scale as that of the
Soviet invasion, and Putin has vowed to confine Russia’s involvement to air
operations. It has, nonetheless, been launched for the purpose of primarily
saving an allied regime and projecting Russian power. This also underpinned the
Soviet motives in relation to its Afghan adventure. Yet, the Soviet invasion
offered the US and its allies a unique opportunity to inflict a fatal blow to
the Soviet Union by assisting their Afghan proxy forces, the Mujahideen or
Islamic freedom fighters. The defeat of the Soviet Union after a decade of
fighting in Afghanistan substantially contributed to the country’s
disintegration in late 1991.
The same scenario could be repeated in Syria, should the US
and its allies decide to act in the way that they did in Afghanistan. In the
medium to long run, Russia’s weakening economy, caused partly by Western
sanctions over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, its meddling in eastern Ukraine,
the decline of income from its oil exports due to a spectacular drop in oil
prices, and its second rate military, may not be able to cope with such a
development, a factor that also affected the Soviet Afghan adventure. The
Russian intervention has certainly bolstered Assad’s position and that of its
other main backer, Iran. However, the apparent Moscow–Tehran–Baghdad, Damascus–Hezbollah
axis draws a formidable line between what may be regarded as the northern and
southern Middle East. This can potentially complicate further Iran’s regional
position, and its process of the possible normalization of ties with the West.
It can invite a united Sunni Arab-Turkish front, with the US not only backing
this front, but also becoming more incremental in its approach to the
implementation of the historic nuclear agreement between Iran and the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, which was signed on
14 July 2015.
As the situation stands, there are now two international
coalitions—one led by the United States and another by Russia—against a common
enemy, IS, but concurrently in competition with one another by supporting
opposite sides in at least the Syrian conflict. This can only augur well for
IS’s survivability and provide a recipe for a perfect Middle Eastern storm,
with serious regional and global implications.
An interlocking regional and international consensus is now
needed amongst the key players—Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey—as well as the US
and Russia to deal collectively not only with IS, but also with a host of
issues that have aided IS and fragmented Iraq and Syria. If accompanied by such
national reforms that could lift the blanket of authoritarianism or concealed
authoritarianism from the region, along with a US–Iranian rapprochement, one
could hope for a more stable and less volatile Middle East in the medium to
long run. Otherwise, for the time being, while there is no effective
counter-strategy to roll it back, IS has a strategy possibly to survive.
This paper has been provided by a presenter in the
Parliamentary Library’s Seminar and Lecture Series. The views expressed do
not reflect an official position of the Parliamentary Library.
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