Iraq: Taming the Orient (I)

but if his angry rebuttal to Western representation of the Oriental is supposed to be a wake-up call, it has signally failed. And for the Near Eastern Oriental, postcolonial reality had caught up and agreed with pre-colonial representation—and was living up to Said’s disapproving caricature of it.And history is coming full circle. After the Arab […]

but if his angry rebuttal to Western representation of the Oriental is supposed to be a wake-up call, it has signally failed. And for the Near Eastern Oriental, postcolonial reality had caught up and agreed with pre-colonial representation—and was living up to Said’s disapproving caricature of it.
And history is coming full circle. After the Arab Spring the world witnessed the rise of insular Salafi groups that seemed to believe it were the only rightly guided groups waging war against everyone to establish what they imagine will be an Islamic state. The Arab Revolt was succeeded by the founding of Saudi Arabia, and extended by this kingdom that spawned the Salafi precursor that was to fire the new jihadists.
The actors might have been different and the religious context not so comparable, but the geopolitical considerations and the tactics employed—and the fifth columnists used—by the powers that set Muslim against Muslim were the same; and, what’s more, the latter-day players were but descendants of the former and their religious ideology identical—only now more virulent.
Indeed, throughout its long and chequered history, Islam has suffered at the hands of incompetent handlers—bloodthirsty kings and monarchs who turned it into hereditary despotism; at the hands of rapacious scholars and schooled charlatans who, for the sake of worldly gain, had broken up a united, peaceful religion of peace into a multiplicity of warring factions and fighting sects; and, today, it is suffering its greatest and bitterest tragedy at the hands of the zealots who had turned a religion of peace into one of hatred and bloodshed—virtually at war with almost the whole world.
As Britsh-born American scholar Hamid Algar said, “Wahhabism, a peculiar interpretation of Islamic doctrine and practice that first arose in mid-eighteenth century Arabia, is sometimes regarded as simply an extreme or uncompromising form of Sunni Islam. This is incorrect, for at the very outset the movement was stigmatized as aberrant by the leading Sunni scholars of the day, because it rejected many of the traditional beliefs and practices of Sunni Islam and declared permissible warfare against all Muslims that disputed Wahhabi teachings.”
When it reared its head during the First Saudi State, but especially after the annexation and incorporation of the Hijaz into the new kingdom, the Saudi Wahhabi ideology was condemned as being outside the pale of Sunni Islam, and today, with the Salafi rejection of the four Sunni mazahib, the self-excommunication has become even more obvious. And since then, nothing has changed in the idea to warrant reconsideration, except the addition and justification for Muslim-on-Muslim violence and unjustified hatred for Christians and Jews to its repertoire of religious observances—and, of course, billions of petrodollars pumped to fund propaganda abroad. It is still the same disembowelled Islam, a faith emptied of its humanity and with a self-righteousness that has graduated into a blind and uncreative misanthropy.
From its creation by Jordanian Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi in 2006, the main objective of Islamic State of Iraq and [Greater] Syria, ISIS, has been to create a state in Iraq, and later to include Syria, founded on Wahhabism. On January 3, 2014, it proclaimed the establishment of such an Islamic state in Fallujah and on January 25 it announced the creation of its new specifically anti-Shi’a Lebanese arm, promising to fight Hizbullah and kill the Shi’a wherever they find them. With attacks mounted and claimed by the al-Qaida in Iraq against such targets as the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf in 2003, the bombings on the Day of Ashura in Karbala and Najaf in 2004, the bombing of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra in 2006, the November 2006 bombing in Sadr City in which 215 people were killed on that single day, the violent urban bombing campaigns of 2007, and the bombing of the Imam Hussein Shrine in Karbala in 2008, Iraq came close to descending into sectarian anarchy, that being exactly what al-Qaida had always wanted.
On March 8, 2014, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of openly funding and arming ISIS. Some American officials have denied this on behalf of the Saudis, but it is clear that since the Arab Spring, the kingdom had conducted a liberally-funded, activist foreign policy in defence of its threatened throne. The kingdom might have reached conclusion with the Americans that their interests would be best served by creating permanent tension in the region; and nothing could guarantee this more than stoking sectarian divisions. Indeed, a recent report has exposed the fact that the so-called jihadists of the ISIS were actually trained by the CIA in secret camps inside Jordan; and, therefore, as far as the Americans are concerned, to all intents and purposes, Iraq is a goner. After tasting mock independence for more than decade—with Israel dug in, in the north; with cadres of ISIS mercilessly attacking non-Salafi Sunnis even in Kurdistan; with the US encouraging Mustapha Barzani to insist on an independent Kurdistan
But as Dr Kevin Barrett, the well-known Arabist-Islamologist and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror,, said, “They are not necessarily trying to take over these countries anymore, they are just trying to massively destabilize them and even split them up, balkanize them along ethnic and sectarian lines. And groups like ISI[S] are [the] perfect [vehicle] for this.”
The departure of American troops from Iraq and in particular President Barack Obama’s reluctance to bomb Syria as they urged provided Saudi Arabia with the excuse to go it alone, perhaps not without America’s tacit approval. As the American political commentator Randy Short said, “What props up Saudi Arabia? It would not stand if it didn’t have foreign people holding up the government it has and that’s in exchange for them being essentially a pseudo-Islamic yard dog for Western imperialism and oppression of people who are in that region for the benefit of the West and for few people who happen to be in the right families in these monarchies that are Wahhabi in orientation.”
It opened the floodgates of cash and weaponry so much so that today ISIS is regarded as the richest and best armed terrorist group in the world. But prior and up to 2011 it was virtually a spent force. So, why and how did it come to acquire its current resilience? Money cannot be the only answer. First, the departure of the Americans was a good opportunity. Second, the failure of the government of President Nuri al-Maliki to run an inclusive government alienated Sunni tribal leaders and their followers who extended support to ISIS who are seen as liberators. Iraq’s real problem lies in the inability of al-Maliki’s government to forget and put behind –and exorcise the ghost of two and a half decades of Saddam Hussein’s anti-Shi’a terror. Third, the Americans were not ready to help al-Maliki because he literally sent American troops out of the country in 2011. Fourth, he could have got all the help he wanted from Iran, but both he and Iran were cautious and wanted to avoid giving the impression that this was a Shi’i onslaught against the Sunni as ISIS portrayed it.
The Saudis let them loose. On June 9, 2014, ISIS took control of most of Mosul, the second most populous city in Iraq and looted the Central Bank, absconding with over $429 million; and the following day it captured Fallujah. Next, it occupied Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein. Not long afterwards, it took a strategic border crossing between Iraq and Syria. With its supply route secured and secure, it set its sights on Baghdad.
On June 12, 2014, Human Rights Watch issued a statement about the growing threat to civilians in Iraq; and the following day, a statement by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed alarm at reports that ISIS fighters “have been actively seeking out—and in some cases killing—soldiers, police and others, including civilians, whom they perceive as being associated with the government”.
A few days after this statement, ISIS militants captured and executed 1,700 Iraqi soldiers even after they had surrendered to them; and, by way of proof, they released videos of the soldiers’ mass executions via their Twitter feed and on various websites. Earlier cadres of ISIS had cut open the chest of those they killed and eaten their liver, in imitation of the sunnah of Hind.
Referring to ISIS, Dr. Barret said: “Thanks to the[se] CIA’s [jihadists], most of the Western public now believes that ‘jihad’ means raping nuns, crucifying priests, devouring the livers of corpses, mass-executing people whose only crime is to profess a different religion or school of thought, and generally engaging in criminal aggression and wildly un-Islamic battlefield behaviour. No wonder much of the West thinks Muslims are crazy. No wonder much of the West supports an endless war on Islam whose only beneficiary is global Zionism.”
As in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Arabia, self-appointed handlers of Islam have successfully turned the anger of Muslims against each other, leaving their tormentors and invaders to do as they wished with Muslim land and resources.