ISIS problem can only be solved by regional Sunni powers
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim/Al Arabiya/December 07/15
Should the West be involved in Syria? Or get more involved, as is now planned? It is certainly true that ISIS poses a threat to security in the West. After the recent scenes in Paris and Brussels, there is no longer any doubt about that. But we have long known that the West cannot solve the ISIS problem itself. The more it intervenes, the more it gives credence to the ISIS narrative that there is a war between Western Crusaders and Muslims in ‘Muslim Lands’. The West could, if it had the motivation, simply crush ISIS. But if it just went in and did that, a new ISIS would just spring up from the ashes – and though we may yet lack the imagination to foresee how, that new ISIS may well turn out even more brutal and malignant.
Local population
The war in Syria and Iraq is not going to go away. And it probably won’t be solved by the “big powers” posturing about in conference halls. There are tens of thousands of ISIS fighters. They rule over a territory with an estimated population of up to 10 million. The same way that Sunni ISIS cannot hold Kurdish and Shia territory, the Sunni lands that ISIS control will not accept Shia government from Damascus or from Baghdad, and submission to leaders like Assad, or indeed Malaki, both of whom have dropped cluster munitions on Sunni civilian populations and, in the case of Assad, much, much worse.
The main problem is that for the Sunni states, defeating ISIS would bolster the governments of both Assad and Malaki – both of whom are clients of its arch-nemesis, Iran. The fact of the matter is that many in the local population in the ISIS controlled lands, though they may not be too keen on the ideological excesses of ISIS, feel safer under ISIS administration and protection than they would from either of the Shia governments. Or indeed, under any kind of Western-backed administration, given our propensity to drop bombs on them or support brutal dictators (see Sisi in Egypt).
Regional Sunni powers
No, the ISIS problem can only be solved by the regional Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and the Emirates. And on paper at least, there really shouldn’t be too much to stop these countries from intervening. They certainly have overwhelming numbers and the technological edge – even though their capacity to use those numbers and the technological edge can be reasonably questioned. Unfortunately, what they also have are conflicting interests. The main problem is that for the Sunni states, defeating ISIS would bolster the governments of both Assad and Malaki – both of whom are clients of its arch-nemesis, Iran. Turkey is making a similar calculation. It may not be a huge fan of ISIS, and it is particularly incensed by the ISIS attacks in Turkey this year. But it certainly hates Assad’s regime just as much, and it fears the Kurds much more – both of whom would benefit from the destruction of ISIS.
So the Saudis have preferred to wade into a messy civil war in Yemen against the Iran-backed Shia Houthi rebels, where at least it has some kind of an idea of what it is trying to achieve. And with its resources thus distracted, the Saudis are said to have not carried out any airstrikes against ISIS since September.
Turkey, for its part, has just about managed to persuade itself to get involved after much U.S. pressure and the ISIS attacks on its soil, but it has still preferred to focus its attention on the people it considers its primary strategic enemy, the Kurds. In principle, everyone is fighting ISIS. In practice, everyone – Assad, the Turks, the Saudis, the Russians and so on – are using ISIS as a pretext to hit other groups hard, by way of associating them with ISIS. At this point, the Kurds and the Iran-led Shia militias may well be the only groups actually fighting ISIS, with U.S. and Western air support. But so long as this remains the case, this is a war of the Crusaders and of the Shia heretics against “good [Sunni] Muslims”. As long as Europe and the U.S. try and fail to cope with the mass migration triggered by this conflict – while many Arab Gulf states take no refugees at all – ISIS can credibly tap into that pernicious Muslim victimhood narrative that Islamists have so carefully cultivated for decades. And as long as that happens, ISIS can be crushed, but they will not be defeated.
Why should Muslims take responsibility for the extremists?
H.A. Hellyer/Al Arabiya/December 07/15
“In the aftermath of yet another atrocity carried out by vigilante violent fanatics in the name of religion…”In any article beginning with those words one has to be referring, of course, to Islam. Because it couldn’t be the case that one would be talking about the recent mass shooting in Colorado, by a radical fanatic who claimed to be a committed Christian. Indeed, he justified those who attacked abortion clinics, claiming they were doing “God’s work”, and gave the appellation of “heroes” to members of the “Army of God”, a radical group that claimed responsibility for bombings and killings. When we compare the way in which some parts of the media establishment treated the Colorado attack, with another atrocity carried out in California by other radical fanatics who claimed to be committed Muslims, the comparison could not be more stark. Critically, there was a call for “taking responsibility” – a call that invariably falls upon Muslim communities, but seldom upon Christian communities.
A dangerous logic
That call is not limited to far-right sectors of American society or across the European continent. It’s far more prevalent than that – it’s been mainstreamed tremendously. So much so that one can find the insistence that Muslims should “take responsibility” for such extremists, even within some sections of Muslim-majority societies themselves. The ease in which the logic of collective responsibility is accepted as normal is worrying indeed. We should encourage Muslim communities to build up resilience. But to claim they are somehow culpable for the extremism of a tiny minority is rather bizarre. But it is a dangerous logic indeed. It is the logic that led, for example, a radical extremist to stab someone on the London Underground a few days ago – declaring his action was “for Syria”, even though that Londoner had probably never been there or engaged in any way on Syria. But the victim was British, and the perpetrator deemed all Britons culpable for the decisions of their government, which he took such umbrage against – and behaved accordingly. It is the logic that would mean, for example, that due to the actions of the Colorado shootings, Christian Americans en masse would be expected to denounce terrorism. Or, indeed, that Egyptian or Lebanese Christians would be required to condemn the killings in the United States at the hand of their supposed co-religionist in the name of their religion. Rightly so, no such call is really taken seriously – because the Colorado shooter is not seen as speaking for his community, nor his religion.
Still a role to play
No one should imagine, nevertheless, that there are no roles for Muslim communities in tackling radicalization and extremism. After all, there should be roles for American Congressmen to pass gun control laws that would make the United States a country that didn’t have more guns than citizens, making the Colorado killings and other mass shootings that much easier to carry out. (Actually, there are such roles – it’s just that American Congressmen don’t want to play them.) Of course, roles for Muslim communities in these debates and discussions exist. Muslim religious authorities have a responsibility, as religious authorities, to teach their religion to those who want to learn it, so that they might be better informed about their faith, and also so they might recognize when someone is trying to preach them a dud version. But that’s a far cry from the culpability that so many seem to implicitly – and explicitly – claim.
In the aftermath of the July 7 attacks in London in 2005, I was asked by the UK government to participate in a working group on tackling radicalization and extremism. In those days, the public debate was all about “why haven’t the Muslims done more to tackle the wacky preachers in their community”, which were presumably taking young Muslims onwards to blow themselves up. But nearly all studies showed that the overwhelming majority of Muslim Britons who were recruited into radical, extremist groups did not do so by way of engaging in Muslim British institutions. They weren’t recruited in mosques or Muslim community centers. On the contrary, the recruitment had to take place outside of those institutions. Muslim communities across Europe suffer from a broad variety of socio-economic problems, which makes recruitment more possible in certain cases – most certainly. In others, the ideological component completely overrides. But in either case, we’re asking Muslim communities to do more than they are capable of. When it comes to addressing the social and economic disparities in their communities, Muslim religious authorities and Muslim lobby groups have little ability of their own to act – they can only do so in conjunction with society at large. When it comes to addressing radical recruitment, they are even less able to effect direct change – that’s something the security services are responsible for. We can and should encourage Muslim communities to build up resilience – true enough. But to claim they are somehow culpable for the extremism that a tiny minority of them partakes of is rather bizarre. It is also something we wouldn’t presume to do on other communities, and nor should we. If collective responsibility exists, it is the collective responsibility of societies to find solutions that they all partake in building together. As for apportioning blame for crimes and hatred, that should be rather easy – it ought to be apportioned to those who carry out the crime and those who inspire the hatred. No one else – regardless of whether the crime was carried out by a Caucasian Christian in Colorado, or a Pakistani Muslim in California.
