Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  But the most powerful al-Qa'ida franchisees, notably in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Pakistan, have shown much more interest in attacking local targets, often Shia whom they see as heretics, than the US. Al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia carries out elaborate multiple suicide attacks against Shia and Iraqi government targets, but seldom against US troops in Iraq and never against US and European targets outside Iraq.

  Al-Qa'ida in Yemen has always been much more orientated towards assaults on US targets. On 12 October 2000, two suicide bombers steered a power boat packed with explosives into the side of the USS Cole off Aden harbour, blowing a hole in the destroyer's side and killing 17 sailors.

  This targeting of the US from Yemen has continued. It was from his base in Yemen that Awlaki influenced Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the army psychiatrist who carried out the shootings at the army base at Fort Hood, Texas in which 13 people were killed in 2009.

  Yemen was a good refuge for al-Qa'ida because its central government is weak and it is possible - particularly for those people with good tribal connections - to find safe havens in the country.

  The Yemeni government under President Ali Abdullah Saleh has always known more about the membership and locations of these groups than it cares to admit to the US. His Yemeni critics accuse him of manipulating and exaggerating the threat from AQAP, whom a Yemeni official says numbers only 300, to extract weapons and funding from the US.

  It was always in the interests of President Saleh in Sanaa to be America''s local ally against al-Qa'ida, but without being so successful that the group was eliminated, bringing an end to the Yemeni government's leverage over Washington. Pakistan played very much the same game after 9/11, handing over al-Qa'ida militants, but being much more protective of Taliban leaders.

  Will al-Qa'ida now be fatally weakened by the death of al-Awlaki? Probably less than would be expected, mainly because al-Qa'ida was never the structured guerrilla army that was portrayed by the Pentagon, CIA and the media. It has by now a highly depleted leadership cadre, but its significance in recent years has mostly been symbolic.

  Suicide bomb tactics and Jihadi ideology, once identified with al-Qa'ida, has now become a feature of other Islamic fundamentalist movements.

  Al Qa'ida cannot do much, but then it does not have to. Awlaki was accused by Yemeni officials of having contacts with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian engineering student, who tried to detonate a bomb sewn into his underpants in a plane landing in Detroit in 2009. But, although the attempt was a failure, it caused almost as much disruption and media attention as if it had succeeded.

  The group is therefore unlikely to wither away entirely. Too many people owe their jobs and their budgets to pursuing it. But could it become irrelevant in the changed political situation following the Arab Awakening? There was much optimism about this earlier in the year as regimes toppled in Egypt and Tunisia.

  Islamists in North Africa now had many other options for action than taking up arms and, if they do take arms, it may not be against the US and its friends. The indestructibility of dictators such as President Hosni Mubarak no longer seemed to be guaranteed by Washington and there is less reason to strike at US targets than 10 years earlier.

  This argument is partly true. There is less and less incentive for local insurgencies to adopt the al-Qa'ida franchise and many reasons for them not to invite US hostility. Al-Qa'ida's former allies in Libya are now part of the NATO-backed government in Tripoli. Al-Qa'ida itself is far less popular than it once was in countries such as Jordan after it started making attacks within the country against Jordanians.

  At the same time, President Obama's full-blown support for Israel and the US military presence in Afghanistan means that the anti-American motivation of Jihadi groups will not disappear.

  Al-Qa'ida itself may become weaker and weaker, but its tactics and also its aims may start to be adopted by other, less identifiable, groups.

  Sunday, 2 October 2011

  ARAB AWAKENING WILL NOT SUCCEED EAST OF EGYPT

  A war of extraordinary brutality is being waged across the Muslim world which is largely ignored by the media. It is a war in which victims are assassinated or massacred with no chance to defend themselves. Most of those who die are poor people murdered in obscure places without the world paying any attention. Few places are more obscure than a dusty road at Mastung, 30 miles south of Quetta in Balochistan province, Pakistan. But it was here late last month that between eight and 10 gunmen stopped a bus filled with Shia pilgrims on their way to Iran. According to the bus driver, the gunmen ordered the pilgrims off his bus and opened fire, killing 26 and wounding six. The Sunni fundamentalist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility. A year ago there was an even worse atrocity in the same area, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shia rally and killed 57 people.

  Earlier in the month, 1,500 miles away at Nukhayb in Al Anbar province, western Iraq, there was a similar incident to the massacre at Mustang. A bus carrying Shia pilgrims from Karbala to a shrine in Syria was stopped at a fake checkpoint and uniformed men told the women, children and old men to stand to one side. The rest of the pilgrims were taken to another location and slaughtered. It is fair to assume in overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar that the killers were Sunni.

  The conflict between Shia and Sunni has been becoming deeper and more dangerous ever since the triumph of militant Shi'ism in the Iranian revolution of 1979. Sectarian hostility became worse when, in 2005, Iraq became the first Shia dominated Arab state since the time of the Fatimids 800 years ago. The civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq which followed in 2006-7 has left a legacy of hatred and fear that has not abated. Tens of thousands were tortured and killed. Al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia slaughtered Shia, and the Mehdi Army and the Shia dominated security forces butchered Sunni and drove them out of most of Baghdad.

  Since the start of the Arab uprisings this year, Shia-Sunni hostility has deepened again wherever the two communities seek to live side by side. Rulers have appealed to the Sunni and Shia loyalties of their people to stay in power. In Syria and Bahrain the democratic movement against authoritarian rule, the Arab Awakening, has been thwarted by officially sponsored sectarianism.

  In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has been clinging to power by playing the sectarian card for all it is worth. The ruling elite, drawn from the Alawites, an offshoot of Shi'ism, is being told that they must sink or swim with the Assad regime or face elimination or exile. Assad and his family rely on Alawite officers and Alawite-dominated units to shoot demonstrators and control the main towns and cities. The Sunni majority understandably react by holding Alawites as a whole responsible for the atrocities.

  The same thing has happened in Bahrain. Cherif Bassiouni, the American-Egyptian lawyer conducting an inquiry sponsored by the Bahrain government into the events of earlier this year, told me he had seldom seen a more polarised society. He compared the situation to Sarajevo in 1992 when Serb gunners firing at Muslim civilians told him they were avenging the defeats suffered at the hands of the Turks by their Christian ancestors over the past 600 years.

  Sectarianism in Bahrain pervades every aspect of life. When repression started in March, the government portrayed democratic protests as a Shia coup d'etat orchestrated by Iran. Respected consultants at Salmaniya hospital were tortured to make them confess that they had stored weapons, splashed blood on uninjured demonstrators, and even secretly killed patients by deliberate neglect. Shia shrines and mosques were bulldozed.

  Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa is finding the sectarian genie is difficult to get back in the bottle. In a speech at the end of last month he spoke of Bahrainis' "common future, regardless of the diversity of our sects" and "the inevitability of co-existence". But last week the Bahraini government closed the door on compromise when a military court gave 20 medical practitioners long sentences for helping those injured in the protests. Thirteen received 15 years in prison and two others were sentenced to 10 years. This can only sugges
t that the al-Khalifa royal family intends either to remain in a state of simmering war with the majority of Bahrain's Arabs or that it plans to drive them out and replace them with Sunnis. Either way, the violence is likely to get worse.

  While decrying sectarianism, the United States and its allies have done their bit over the years to pump it up. In Iraq, US ambassadors and generals were continually pretending that Shia militants were the pawns of Iran. This fed into the extreme and not so extreme Sunni claim, made in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, that any drive by the Shia for civil and political rights, is an Iranian inspired plot. Communities which benefit from Sunni or Shia sectarianism find it hard to give up. In Iraq, it determines the chances of staying alive and getting a job. The two are intertwined: a few years ago I had a Sunni driver in Baghdad who, through various connections, was offered a well-paid Interior Ministry job as a computer specialist.

  I remember him agonising for weeks over whether to take the job in this mainly Shia ministry until deciding it was just too dangerous and he would probably be killed if he did. A similar pattern is repeated elsewhere.

  In Bahrain, sacked Shia point out that Sunni who have taken their jobs are in no hurry to give them back. In Syria, Alawites provide not just most of the senior army officers but some 60-70 per cent of ambassadors, 50 per cent of university professors and a majority of oil and gas executives, according to the opposition. Given that Alawites are some 12 per cent of the Syrian population, equal rights for the Sunni means that a lot of these people will be out of a job.

  Sectarianism is likely permanently to enfeeble Iraq and Syria, two of the Arab states who once helped determine the region's future. It will absorb the attention of the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf and put them at odds with Iran and Iraq. It explains why the democratic uprisings that succeeded in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are faltering east of the Egyptian border.

  Sunday, 20 November 2011

  FALL OF LIBYA WAS A PIECE OF CAKE COMPARED TO SYRIA

  President Bashar al-Assad's enemies are closing in for the kill. The Arab League is suspending Syria, and Turkey, once a close ally, is leading the pack in seeking to displace the government that has ruled for 40 years. Arab leaders are talking to West European states about deploying the same mix of political, military and economic sanctions against Syria that was used in Libya.

  This final assault is already producing convulsions across the Middle East and beyond, because the outcome of the struggle will have an explosive impact on the entire region. By comparison, the overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was a marginal event. Complex though these developments are, the media's coverage has been misleadingly simple-minded and one dimensional, giving the impression that all we are witnessing is a heroic uprising by the Syrian masses against a brutal Baathist police state.

  This is certainly one aspect of the crisis. Brutal repression is continuous. Death squads roam the streets. Foreign journalists, banned from Syria and reliant on information from the opposition, report this. But manipulation of the media by the opposition is also made easy by the lack of information from the country. Opposition claims, such as one last week that an air force intelligence centre near Damascus had been stormed, are credulously accepted and published, although other accounts suggest that all that happened was that the building was hit by rocket-propelled grenades that scorched its paintwork.

  The line-up of the Syrian government's opponents should make it clear to anybody that there is more at stake here than Arab and international concern for human rights. The lead is being taken by Saudi Arabia - its repressive regime one of the few absolute monarchies left on the planet. In March, it sent 1,500 troops into Bahrain to crush protests very similar to those in Syria. Unstinting support was given by the Saudis to the Bahraini authorities as they tortured distinguished hospital consultants whose only crime was to treat injured protesters. Is it really conceivable that Saudi Arabia should be primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns?

  A more convincing motive for international involvement is the decades-old but escalating struggle against Iran by the US, its NATO allies, Israel and the Sunni states of the Middle East. But the last few years have shown the limits of effective action against Iran, short of war, which, for all the bluster from Washington and Tel Aviv, they are wary of fighting. But Syria is a different matter. "If you can't beat Iran, the second best option is to break Syria," says the Iraqi political scientist Ghassan Attiyah, who points out the absurdity of Saudi Arabia presenting itself as a defender of human and democratic rights in the Middle East.

  The US has been carefully keeping in the background, although one senior Arab official says that Damascus had sent emissaries to talk to the Americans to see if Washington would ease up on the campaign against it. The US price was that Syria must break with Iran, but the Syrians were dubious about what exactly they would get in return for giving up their sole ally. "We are being asked to jump into a swimming pool with no water in it," they said.

  The struggle for Syria is the latest arena for the sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia. Its modern origins lie in the Iranian revolution of 1979, deepened during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, and reached new depths of hatred in Iraq during the Shia-Sunni civil war in 2005-07. In 2005, Iraq became the first Arab state since the Fatimids in Egypt in the 12th century to have a predominantly Shia government. In Lebanon, the Shia political-military Hezbollah movement became the leading political player and withstood an Israeli military assault in 2006. In post-Taliban Afghanistan, the Hazara, a Shia ethnic group which was once oppressed as virtual serfs, grew in political and economic strength.

  The Arab Spring at first seemed to work in favour of the Shia and Iran by deposing some of their most notable opponents, such as President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. The 70 per cent Shia majority in Bahrain demanded democratic rights in February and March, only to be brutally repressed. Those tortured say their torturers continually demanded they confess to links to Iran. Underlining the sectarian nature of the repression, the Bahraini authorities demolished Shia mosques and desecrated the graves of Shia holy men.

  The gathering alliance against the Assad government is both anti-Iranian and anti-Shia. It is based on the correct assumption that the fall of the present regime will be a blow to both. The Alawites, the heteredox Shia sect to which 12 per cent of Syrians belong, dominate the ruling elite. A senior Middle East diplomat says: "The Alawites have decided they must do or die with Assad." The Christians and Druze likewise do not expect much mercy from a triumphant Sunni regime, while Hezbollah will be weakened in Lebanon and Syria's 30-year alliance with Iran will end. Not surprisingly, the Iranians see the assault on Syria primarily as an anti-Shia and anti-Iranian counter-revolution wearing a human rights mask.

  How will Iran and Iraq, the two most important Shia states, respond to the growing likelihood of the fall of the government in Damascus? The Iranians will do all they can to prop it up, but already suspect this may not be enough. Consequently, they will respond to the loss of their Syrian ally by increasing their influence in Iraq. "They will do everything to hold Iraq as their last line of defence," Dr Attiyah says, "but the country will become a battleground."

  Baghdad has its own reasons for fearing the outcome of the crisis in Syria. The Sunni minority in Iraq, politically marginalised by the Shia and Kurds, will be strengthened if a Sunni regime takes over next door in Damascus.

  The withdrawal of the last US troops at the end of the year means that Washington has less reason to defend the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki. The Iraqi leader should be under no illusion about the hostility of his Sunni neighbours.

  The fall of the government in Syria will not be confined to one country, as happened in Libya. It will throw the whole Middle East into turmoil. Turkish leaders say privately they have been given a free hand by the US and Britain to do what they want. But the Saudis have no wish to see Turkey become the champions of the Muslim world. The battle for Syria is already prod
ucing fresh rivalries and the seeds of future conflicts.

  Saturday, 10 December 2011

  IRAQ GETS READY FOR LIFE AFTER AMERICA

  As the last US troops begin to leave Iraq so that all are out by the end of the year, what sort of Iraq do they leave behind them? Does the American departure mean that Iraq might revert to turmoil or even civil war? US officials are seeking to avoid any suggestion this is a military retreat. They even prefer to avoid the use of the word "withdrawal" and term the final pull-out of a US army that once numbered 170,000 men in 550 bases as a "reposturing" of forces.

  Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous country. Since the US invasion eight-and-a-half years ago, scarcely a day has passed when an Iraqi has not been killed or wounded. Casualties may be much less than at their peak of 3,000 dead a month in 2006, but they are by no means negligible.

  High points of violence over the past fortnight include an attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, five suicide bomb attacks on a single day that killed 21 and injured 100 Shia pilgrims, and an attack on a prison north of Baghdad that left 18 dead. Aside from these incidents, there has been the daily drum-beat of shootings and bombings. In November alone some 255 Iraqi civilians, soldiers, police and insurgents were killed, according to Iraqi government figures.

  Asked how they react to the US departure, Iraqis express a sense of unease, but are warily philosophical about what happens next. Many blame the US for the all-consuming violence that followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and has not yet finished. "I was young when the Americans first came here," says Mohammed Zaid, a 19-year old technology student.