Credit: Mauro Biani (http://maurobiani.it/)/Il Manifesto. All rights reserved.At the end of last year, as politicians and
pundits cheered on coalition airstrikes in Syria, I wrote
this:
“The war on ISIS has already been lost. As
regional instability escalates predictably as a direct consequence of the US-UK
led non-strategy, ISIS will become stronger, and reactionary terrorist violence
against western targets will proliferate – in turn fuelling reactionary and
militant responses from western foreign policy establishments.”
Less than a year later, 129 people have
been confirmed dead, and 352 injured, from terrorist attacks in Paris.
‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) acolytes conducted a
sophisticated operation involving three coordinated teams, striking multiple
targets simultaneously, demonstrating a considerable degree of training and
planning.
Yet the airstrikes that began last year had
been justified by our leaders precisely on the pretext that they would be
necessary to prevent ISIS from striking the west.
Although the attacks appear to have been
triggered by the drone strike against ‘Jihadi John’, their sophistication
reveals that preparations for the operation had been going on for months, at
least.
ISIS, in other words, activated sleeper
cells with a longstanding presence in France.
But the attacks in Paris must not be viewed
in isolation.
So far, world governments have responded as
if the ISIS attack came entirely out of the blue, “an act of war” in Hollande’s
words, targeted “against France, against the values that we defend everywhere
in the world, against what we are: a free country that means something to the
whole planet".
While there is truth to Hollande’s words,
they are also misleading.
The Paris attacks have occurred on the
tail-end of an escalating series of massacres.
On 22 May, an ISIS militant blew himself up
at a mosque in Qatif, Saudi Arabia, killing 21 people.
On 20 July, a female suicide bomber killed
31 students in Suruc, a Turkish city close to the Syrian border.
On 13 August, an ISIS bomb detonated at a
farmers’ market in an impoverished district of Baghdad killed 80 people, and
wounded over 200.
The Paris attacks have occurred
on the tail-end of an escalating series of massacres.
On 2 September, an ISIS bombing killed 28
people and wounded 75 at a mosque in northern Sanaa, the capital of Yemen.
Another suicide bomb attack at Sanaa’s
al-Balili mosque three weeks later took the lives of at least 25 people, and
injured over 36.
On 10 October, ISIS suicide bombers in the
Turkish capital, Ankara, killed 102, and wounded 400.
The night before the attacks on Paris, ISIS
suicide bombers slaughtered 43 people in Beirut, and injured 250.
The following morning, an ISIS suicide
bomber killed at least 19 people and injured 41 at a funeral in Baghdad.
Then, that evening, ISIS militants
coordinated the attacks on Paris.
ISIS’s choice of targets reveal a range of
ideological motives – sectarian targeting of minorities like Shi’as, Kurds and
Yazidis; striking in the heart of Muslim regimes that have joined the anti-ISIS
coalition; as well as demonstrating the punitive consequences of attacking ISIS
to western publics by hitting them at their most vulnerable, in bars,
restaurants and music venues.
The goal, of course, is to inflict trauma,
fear, paranoia, suspicion, panic and terror – but there is a particularly
twisted logic as part of this continuum of violence, which is to draw the
western world into an apocalyptic civilizational Armageddon with ‘Islam.’
Islamic State flag. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.ISIS recognizes that it has only marginal
support amongst Muslims around the world. The only way it can accelerate
recruitment and strengthen its territorial ambitions is twofold: firstly,
demonstrating to Islamist jihadist networks that there is now only one credible
terror game in town capable of pulling off spectacular terrorist attacks in the
heart of the west, and two, by deteriorating conditions of life for Muslims all
over the world to draw them into joining or supporting ISIS.
Both these goals depend on two constructs:
the ‘crusader’ civilisation of the ‘kuffar’
(disbelievers) pitted against the authentic ‘Islamic’ utopia of ISIS.
In their own literature shortly after the
Charlie Hebdo attacks, ISIS shamelessly drew on the late Osama bin Laden’s
endorsement of the words of President George W. Bush, to justify this
apocalyptic vision: “The world today is divided into two camps. Bush spoke the
truth when he said, ‘either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’
Meaning either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam.”
Continuing in its English-language
magazine, Dabiq, ISIS forecasted the
“extinction” of the “grey zone” between these two camps:
“One of the first matters renounced by the
hypocrites abandoning the grayzone and fleeing to the camp of apostasy and kufr after the operations in Paris is
the clear-cut obligation to kill those who mock the Messenger [Muhammad]. The
evidences [religious justification based on Islamic sources] for this issue are
so abundant and clear, and yet some apostates, who abandoned the grayzone,
claimed that the operations in Paris contradicted the teachings of Islam!… There
is no doubt that such deeds are apostasy, that those who publicly call to such
deeds in the name of Islam and scholarship are from the du’āt (callers) to apostasy, and that there is great reward
awaiting the Muslim in the Hereafter if he kills these apostate imāms…”
The strategy behind this call to “kill”
apostate Muslims who reject ISIS is also laid out candidly: to terrorise
western countries into genocidal violence against their own Muslim populations:
“The Muslims in the West will quickly find
themselves between one of two choices, they either apostatize and adopt the kufrī [infidel] religion propagated by
Bush, Obama, Blair, Cameron, Sarkozy, and Hollande in the name of Islam so as
to live amongst the kuffār [infidels]
without hardship, or they perform hijrah
[emigrate] to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the
crusader governments and citizens… Muslims in the crusader countries will
find themselves driven to abandon their homes for a place to live in the Khilāfah, as the crusaders increase
persecution against Muslims living in Western lands so as to force them into a
tolerable sect of apostasy in the name of 'Islam' before forcing them into blatant
Christianity and democracy.”
While Hollande’s reactionary declaration of
war is understandable, it falls into the ideological trap laid by ISIS.
France’s new state of emergency grants the government extraordinary powers
that effectively put an end to democratic accountability, and give
law-enforcement and security agencies unaccountable authority to run amok.
Hollande’s reactionary
declaration of war falls into the ideological trap laid by ISIS.
This includes being able to enforce
curfews, close public spaces, and even exert control of media. Authorities can
now “prohibit passage of vehicles or people,” establish “protection or security
zones, where people’s presence is regulated,” exclude from a public space “any
person seeking to obstruct, in any way, the actions of the public authorities,”
and detain anyone in their homes “whose activity appears dangerous for public
security and order.”
The problem is in the open-ended way such
vague precepts can be interpreted and executed. Obstructing “in any way” the
actions of the state, or activity that “appears dangerous” for “security and
order” could, crucially, be used to shut down public criticisms of the French
government’s response to the Paris attacks.
Dissent against past or present French
foreign and counter-terror policies can easily be construed as “dangerous” or
obstructive to those policies. The language also perpetuates the Bush-era ‘with
us or against us’ mantra, which ISIS sees as central to its agenda of
fracturing what it calls the "grey zone."
Such a sweeping approach to countering
‘extremism’ – interpreted essentially as any ideological threat to the state –
has already fuelled social polarization in Britain, where the ‘Prevent’ duty,
for instance, is being used to police
the thoughts of children as young as three years old.
Leaked government training documents reveal
that the British government’s Prevent programme views political
activism in general as a potential ‘extremist’ threat to the state’s
hegemonic construct of ‘British values’, including environmental, animal rights
and anti-nuclear campaigning. These measures are already going some way to
fulfil ISIS’s objective of eroding the "grey zone" in the west.
According to Yahya Birt, an academic at the
University of Leeds who is part of #EducationNotSurveillance – a national
network of parents, teachers, educationalists, activists and academics – cases
of unwarranted targeting of Muslim students under the Prevent duty are becoming
legion.
“Muslim students are being profiled
disproportionately under the government’s mandatory programme simply for
displaying an interest in their own faith, or for holding political opinions
critical of government foreign policy,” Birt told me. “Far from upholding
democratic values, the programme is eroding them, and making perfectly normal,
decent British Muslim citizens feel that they are under siege.”
Documented cases include
a fifteen-year-old Muslim boy being questioned by police officers on his views
about ISIS simply for wearing a ‘Free Palestine’ badge to school and handing
out leaflets calling for sanctions on Israel.
The officers told him that he had “terrorist-like beliefs”, and warned
him against speaking about his views in school. Another Muslim child was
questioned after a classroom lesson about ISIS in which he aired his support for
environmental activism.
In the US and France, similar
programmes are also underway.
David Frum. Flickr/Policy Exchange. Some rights reserved.Neoconservatives on both sides of the
Atlantic, however, want more.
David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter
turned senior editor at the Atlantic,
took to Twitter to demand the
forcible mass deportation of Arabs who had migrated to Europe over the past two
years.
In Britain, Douglas Murray, a director at
the Henry Jackson Society in London, told his fellow guests on BBC Sunday
Morning Live that “any percentage of Muslims you like” in Britain are ISIS
sympathisers.
In a blog
in the Spectator the day before, he
had claimed: “Islam is not a peaceful religion. No religion is, but Islam is
especially not.” Though acknowledging that there are “many peaceful verses in
the Quran which – luckily for us – the majority of Muslims live by,” Islam, he
went on, is “by no means, only a religion of peace” and “this is the verifiable
truth based on the texts.”
Murray’s conception of ‘Us’, it seems, does
not include ‘Them’, “Muslims” whom, he believes, are not ISIS suicide bombers
purely because they follow their faith selectively.
Islamic theologians who specialize in those
very texts unanimously disagree with Murray.
But that matters not, for Murray has
previously endorsed
the very same policies of forced mass expulsion of European Muslims advocated
by Frum – not entirely surprising given that Murray praises Frum profusely in
his book, Neoconservativism: Why We Need
It (2006).
Pundits like Frum and Murray provide a
critically powerful PR service for ISIS. Parading themselves as liberals
seeking to defend western civilisation, they call for precisely what ISIS
wants: the equation of ‘Islam’ with the ‘Islamic State’; the impossibility of
‘Islam’ co-existing peacefully with ‘the West’; the inherent threat posed by
Muslims residing in the west due to their faith; and the need to therefore
discriminate against and persecute Muslims in particular.
Pundits like Frum and Murray
provide a critically powerful PR service for ISIS.
This sort of far-right sympathizing
subsists in direct symbiosis with ISIS’s divisive ideology. It also serves to
obscure the deeper more uncomfortable reality that ISIS has emerged and thrived
precisely in the context of the ‘war on terror.’
When Hollande declared that the Paris
massacre constituted an “act of war”, he appeared to have forgotten that we
have been engaged in perpetual war for the last decade and a half, with no end
in sight.
The kneejerk relapse to the familiar is
understandable – more surveillance, more airstrikes, more thought-policing. Yet
it is merely a reversion to what we think we know, rather than a recognition
that what we think we know has clearly failed.
It is psychologically easier to frame the
Paris attacks as even further evidence of the unfathomable evil of ‘Them’,
which must be even more ruthlessly flushed out by ‘Us’.
But the truth staring us in the face is
that the Paris attacks offer incontrovertible proof that all our efforts at
ruthlessly flushing out terror through mass surveillance, drone strikes, air
strikes, ground troops, torture, rendition, the Prevent agenda, and so on and
so forth, have produced the opposite result.
AC-130H Howitzer. Flickr/US Air Force. Some rights reserved.What we really need is a fundamental
re-assessment of everything we have done since 9/11, a full-on, formal
international public inquiry into the abject failure of the ‘war on terror.’
The facts, which most pundits and
politicians continue to avoid mentioning, speak for themselves. We have spent well
over $5 trillion on waging the ‘war on terror’, not just in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan, but across the Middle East and central Asia. Over
that period, US State Department data shows that terror attacks have
skyrocketed by 6,500 percent, while the number of casualties from terror
attacks has increased by 4,500 percent.
*2004 terrorism estimates from CIA figures.Journalist Paul Gottinger, who analysed
the data, noted that spikes in these figures coincided with military
intervention: “…. from 2007 to 2011 almost half of all the world’s terror took
place in Iraq or Afghanistan – two countries being occupied by the US at the
time.” And in 2014, he found, “74 percent of all terror-related casualties
occurred in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Syria. Of these five, only
Nigeria did not experience either US air strikes or a military occupation in
that year.”
Simultaneously, even as the US-led
anti-ISIS coalition has accelerated attacks on the group in Iraq and Syria, the
group has only grown in power. Latest figures suggest
the group now has some 80,000 fighters at least, up from last year’s estimates
of around 20,000 to 31,500.
It would be naïve in the extreme, then, to
pretend that the rise of ISIS has nothing to do with the string of failed or
failing states that have been wrought in the region in the aftermath of such
interventions, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
But more than that, there is the far more
uncomfortable question of the regional geopolitics that continues to feed ISIS
under the nose of coalition airstrikes.
There is the far more
uncomfortable question of the regional geopolitics that continues to feed ISIS.
The leading players in the anti-ISIS
coalition, many of whom are Muslim regimes considered to be staunch allies of
the west, have provided billions of dollars of funding and military support to
the most extreme Islamist militants in Syria.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait and
Turkey played lead roles in funneling support to groups affiliated with
al-Qaeda, including the ISIS precursors al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda in Syria
(Jabhat al-Nusra), in their western-backed bid to oust Bashir al-Assad.
Due to porous links between some Free
Syrian Army (FSA) rebels, other Islamist groups like al-Nusra and Ahrar
al-Sham, and ISIS, there have been prolific weapons transfers from ‘moderate’
to Islamist militant groups, to the extent that the German journalist Jurgen
Todenhofer, who spent 10 days inside the Islamic State, reported
last year that ISIS is being “indirectly” armed by the west: “They buy the
weapons that we give to the Free Syrian Army, so they get western weapons –
they get French weapons… I saw German weapons, I saw American weapons.”
Meanwhile, it is not even clear whether our
own allies in the anti-ISIS coalition have stopped funding the terror entity. In
his testimony
before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2014, General Martin
Dempsey, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by Senator
Lindsay Graham whether he knew of “any major Arab ally that embraces ISIL”. General
Dempsey replied: “I know major Arab allies who fund them.”
Senator Graham, clearly taken aback by the
blunt response, quickly attempted to play down the damning implications: “they
were tried [sic] to beat Assad. I think they realise the folly of their ways.
Let’s don’t [sic] taint the Mideast unfairly.”
Never mind that the most senior US military
official confirms the Pentagon’s full awareness that its own allies in the
anti-ISIS coalition are simultaneously “funding” ISIS while purportedly bombing
the group.
Paris tribute. Demotix/David Pauwels. All rights reserved.Such linkages between our geopolitical
allies and the terrorists we are purportedly fighting in Iraq-Syria came to the
fore when it emerged that Syrian passports discovered near the bodies of two of
the suspected Paris attackers were fake.
Police sources in France had told Channel 4
News that the passports were likely forged
in Turkey.
French officials now concede
that one of the suicide bombers, Omar Ismail Mostefai had been on a “watch
list” as a “potential security threat” in 2010, and was known to have links
with “radical Islam.”
But according to a Turkish official,
Turkish intelligence had tipped
off French authorities “twice” about Mostefai before the Paris attacks.
Earlier this year, the Turkish daily
Today’s Zaman reported
that “more than 100,000 fake Turkish passports” had been given to ISIS.
Erdogan’s government, the newspaper added, “has been accused of supporting the
terrorist organization by turning a blind eye to its militants crossing the border
and even buying its oil… Based on a 2014 report, Sezgin Tanrıkulu, deputy
chairman of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) said that ISIL
terrorists fighting in Syria have also been claimed to have been treated in
hospitals in Turkey.”
But it is far worse than that. A senior western
official familiar with a large cache of intelligence obtained this summer
told the Guardian that “direct
dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now
‘undeniable’”.
ISIS, in other words, is
state-sponsored.
The same official confirmed that Turkey is
not just supporting ISIS, but also other jihadist groups, including Ahrar
al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. “The distinctions
they draw [with other opposition groups] are thin indeed,” said the official.
“There is no doubt at all that they militarily cooperate with both.”
Turkey has played a key role in
facilitating the life-blood of ISIS’s expansion: black market oil sales. Senior
political and intelligence sources in Turkey, Iraq, and the Kurdistan Regional
Government confirm
that Turkish authorities have actively facilitated ISIS oil sales through the
country.
ISIS, in other words, is state-sponsored –
indeed, sponsored by purportedly western-friendly regimes in the Muslim world
who are integral to the anti-ISIS coalition. Turkey, for instance, plays a
central role in both the CIA and Pentagon-run rebel training and assistance
programmes.
To what extent, then, did our
unquestionable geopolitical alliance with Turkey, our unwavering commitment to
empowering allies like Turkey to fund Islamist militants of their choice in
Syria, contribute to the freedom of movement those militants used to execute
the Paris operation?
Gare de Lyon. Flickr/Jon Siegel. Some rights reserved.All this calls for a complete re-think of
our approach to terrorism. We require, urgently, an international public
inquiry into the colossal failure of the strategies deployed in the ‘war on
terror.’
How has over $5 trillion succeeded only in permitting
an extremist terror-state, to conquer a third of Iraq and Syria, while carrying
out a series of assaults on cities across the region and in the heart of
Europe?
The re-assessment must accompany concrete
measures, now.
First and foremost, our alliances with
terror-sponsoring dictatorships across the Muslim world must end. All the talk
of making difficult decisions is meaningless if we would rather sacrifice civil
liberties instead of sacrificing profit-oriented investments in brutal
autocracies like Saudi Arabia, which have exploited western dependence on its
oil resources to export Islamist extremism around the world.
Addressing those alliances means taking
decisive action to enforce punitive measures in terms of the financing of
Islamist militants, the facilitation of black-market ISIS oil sales, and the
export of narrow extremist ideologies. Without this, military experts can give
as much lip-service to ‘draining the swamp’ as they like – it means nothing if
we think draining it means using a few buckets to fling out the mud while our
allies pour gallons back in.
Secondly, in Syria, efforts to find a
political resolution to the conflict must ramp up. So far, neither the US nor
Russia, driven by their own narrow geopolitical concerns, have done very much
to destroy ISIS strongholds. The gung-ho entry of Russia into the conflict has
only served to unify the most extreme jihadists and vindicate ISIS’s
victim-bating claim to be a ‘David’ fighting the ‘Goliath’ of a homogenous “kafir”
(infidel) crusader-axis.
Every military escalation has been followed
by a further escalation, because ISIS itself was incubated in the militarized
nightmare of occupied Iraq and Assad-bombed Syria.
Thirdly, and relatedly, all military
support to all actors in the Syria conflict must end. Western powers can
pressurise their Gulf and Turkish state allies to end support to rebel groups,
which is now so out of control that there is no longer any prospect of
preventing such support from being diverted to ISIS; while Russia and Iran can
withdraw their aid to Assad’s bankrupt regime. If Russia and France genuinely
wish to avoid further blowback against their own citizens, they would throw
their weight behind such measures with a view to force regional actors to come
to the negotiating table.
Talk of ‘solidarity’ is not merely empty sloganeering.
Fourthly, it must be recognized that contrary
to the exhortations of fanatics like Douglas Murray, talk of ‘solidarity’ is
not merely empty sloganeering. The imperative now is for citizens around the
world to work together to safeguard what ISIS calls the "grey zone" – the arena
of co-existence where people of all faith and none remain unified on the simple
principles of our common humanity. Despite the protestations of extremists, the
reality is that the vast majority of secular humanists and religious believers
accept and embrace this heritage of mutual acceptance.
But safeguarding the "grey zone" means more
than bandying about the word ‘solidarity’ – it means enacting
citizen-solidarity by firmly rejecting efforts by both ISIS and the far-right
to exploit terrorism as a way to transform our societies into militarized
police-states where dissent is demonized, the Other is feared, and mutual
paranoia is the name of the game. That, in turn, means working together to
advance and innovate the institutions, checks and balances, and accountability
necessary to maintain and improve the framework of free, open and diverse
societies.
It is not just ISIS that would benefit from
a dangerous shift to the contrary.
Incumbent political elites keen to avoid
accountability for a decade and a half of failure will use heightened public
anxiety to push through more of the same. They will seek to avoid hard
questions about past failures, while casting suspicion everywhere except the
state itself, with a view to continue business-as-usual. And in similar vein,
the military-industrial complex, whose profits have come to depend
symbiotically on perpetual war, wants to avoid awkward questions about lack of
transparency and corrupt relationships with governments. They would much rather
keep the trillion-dollar gravy train flowing out of the public purse.
There is an acute and growing tension between the concern for safety and the protection of our freedoms. How do we handle this? Read more from the World Forum for Democracy partnership.