The failure of humanity in the Middle East paints a grim picture of a dystopian world of perpetual war, an enduring global refugee crisis and collapsing states.
"Singapore or Darfur": The escalating ferocity of the Gaza Wars
The Children of the Caliphate
WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS DISTURBING IMAGES
You can find them in the front row during public beheadings and crucifixions held in Raqqa and in all the cities under the control of ISIS. They are used for blood transfusions when fighters of the Islamic State are injured. They are paid to spy and are trained to become suicide bombers without hesitation. Are the children of the caliphate, the future soldiers of ISIS's envisaged caliphate?
Mohammad is a spy, a teenager of 14 years used by jihadists to "listen to" the chatter in the markets and streets of Mosul reporting to his bosses when someone breaks the rules. In exchange for his collaboration and loyalty, he benefits financially for each "tip". Omar is one of the many young people who helped to maintain ISIS's intelligence network in the vast territory under the control of the group between Iraq and Syria since 2013.
In contrast, there is Omar, whose refusal to enlist in the ranks of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi resulted in the removal of his hand and foot designed as a clear warning to all other teenagers who thought differently from the militia group. The grisly message and reminder to them those aged sixteen and over are expected to serve the Caliphate as spies, fighters and suicide bombers. ISIS continues to indoctrinate and train thousands of children and adolescents in the territories under its control and invests huge sums to the military training and ideological induction of children with the aim of shaping the next generation of jihadist assault troops.
“The stories reveal an organised and structured military training which aims to cultivate an army of loyal warriors who are ideologically pure for the future Caliphate.”
According to rumours across the Arab media, the children of the Caliphate would be trained to become spies in their homes and family-life, gathering information on relatives and parents who do not support Baghdadi's cell. This dehumanising process results in the removal of individual, personal feelings which are sighted as weaknesses should they take precedence or oppose the general objective of the creation of the Caliphate.
The testimonies of children collected by the international media indicate an estimated (and disturbing) change for the future of the Middle East: thousands, if not tens of thousands, of teenagers, have been drafted and sent to fight under a sub-state ideology of messianic and megalomaniacal inspiration with a clear and well-defined political and military strategy.
Nor is it simply a male prerogative. Even young girls are a very important cog in ISIS's war machine. Testimonies revealed relate to how the children are being indoctrinated from primary school to seek death as their religious duty. The stories which are picked reveal an organised and structured military training process that aims to cultivate an army of loyal warriors and ideologically pure generation of supporters for the future of the Caliphate.
Fred Abrahams, a special adviser at Human Rights Watch, interviewed several members of Iraq's Yezidi community who escaped capture by ISIS. According to reports, many have reported seeing militiamen separate the boys from their families to send them in schools for indoctrination and military training.
Vice News produced a report from Raqqa, the capital of ISIS. This documentary on life inside the city dominated by the group was chilling as the second of the special episode focused predominantly the feverish way with which ISIS manipulated and trained children through public performances and repeated sermons with obsessive perseverance. One man declared during the reportage: "We believe that this generation of children is one of the Caliphate. God willing, this generation will fight the infidels and apostates, the Americans and their allies."
To monitor the whole "system", a network of former military and intelligence officers keep a close eye on civilians, collaborators and dissidents. Many of these officers operated with Saddam Hussein's fearsome Da'irat al Mukhabarat al Amah, the internal services of the former dictator and his Ba'athist party. The officers of Saddam have been and continue to be a potent part of the strength of ISIS structure and operations and played a crucial role in the victories of the group in 2014. Iraqi Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd who spent years opposing Saddam, recently revealed that former Ba'athists who work with ISIS have equipped the militia with the know-how of all respect, especially with regard to collecting intelligence. "They know who is who, by clans, name by name." Everything else is history.
Saddam's former intelligence's management of ISIS's internal affairs has created a sub-state apparatus which regards the indoctrination of children as its lifeblood and long-term guarantor of war against the West, takfiri Arab regimes and leaders, and Shiites. The convergence of the interests between jihadists and members of the former Ba'athist party has catalysed the absorption of thousands of these military cadres. This has significantly strengthened ISIS and its inner circle's strategy, honed its battle tactics and strengthened the process of nation-building in Iraq. They have become an indispensable part in the self-proclaimed caliphate's survival.
The Nice Attack: Europe's slide into an era of hybrid terror and hyper-security
WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES
The massacre of civilians in Nice by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhel, a French-Tunisian national, as they celebrated on Bastille Day continues to demonstrate that ISIS's unconventional but violent war in Europe is grimly flourishing. The continent joined at the hip with the Middle East consumed by violence, faces severe security and humanitarian crisis. ISIS's devastating terrorist campaign has compounded these problems by injecting fear, uncertainty, and polarisation into an already potent mixture, as nation's states across Europe stand divided politically, economically and socially.
The costs of ISIS's suicide bombings and nihilistic attacks have been stark. Belgium has lost thirty-nine civilians in attacks in Brussels airport, the Jewish Museum of Belgium, and Maalbeek Metro station. In one coordinated attack in May in the Syrian towns of Jableh and Tartous, ISIS murdered one-hundred and seventy-nine people. In 2016 alone, major suicide bombings have killed over nine-hundred civilians and security personnel in Iraq, the most horrific of which, conducted on 2 July, killed over three-hundred and cemented itself as Iraq's second-worst terrorist attack in history.
Twelve days after the destruction of a jet which killed two-hundred and twenty-four on a Russian airliner and one day before the November Paris attacks, a series of coordinated attacks in Beirut killed forty-three. In 2015, the beaches of Sousse in Tunisia, Seifeddine Rezgui Yacoubi gunned down thirty-nine British tourists while in 2016 Omar Mateen slaughtered forty-nine party-goers in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The growing list of countries' citizens who have been butchered and maimed by ISIS extends into Yemen, Afghanistan, the wider Syrian and Iraqi conflicts, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Kuwait and Turkey. These attacks have been supported by smaller acts of militancy in Ottawa, Lyon, Copenhagen, San Bernandino, Jakarta, Dakha, Sydney and beyond.
France lies at the heart of ISIS's campaign against major Western and Middle Eastern cities. Since the cell declared a caliphate in 2014, three major attacks in Paris and Nice and a series of smaller attacks have claimed the lives of two-hundred and thirty-nine French civilians and security personnel and wounded over seven-hundred and fifty. The statistics pouring out of France in themselves indicate how deeply the blowback of the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars and catastrophic adventurism of Western policymakers since 9/11 and Arab revolutions are cutting into states, societies and cities across North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
Equally the atrocities in Nice illustrate how the Western wars against ISIS in Syria and Iraq are continuing to fail to crush ISIS's insurgency at a local, regional and global level through conventional military action absent political and socio-economic solutions. ISIS's conventional military operations and ambitions as a state may have stalled, but it has merely switched back to its most potent and honed strategy of war; sowing political, communal and societal divisions and altering national politics and military policy for the worst through urban terrorism and asymmetrical warfare. ISIS's territories may have shrunk in Syria, Iraq and Libya in conventional combat, but ISIS's strength lies in its decentralised structure.
“ISIS is a terrorist group, sub-state, and army supported by a movement of freelance militants, self-fashioned jihadists, and non-violent extremists driven by an ultra-violent revolutionary ideology.”
ISIS's classic formula of savage urban terrorism is producing its best results and cementing its reputation of terror in the imaginations of policymakers, societies, individuals, and worst of all inspiring extremists. Suicide bombings derailed the Americans ill-fated attempts at regime change in Iraq and proved to be a lethal catalyst for tit-for-tat Shiite and Sunni pogroms and religious-nationalist violence.
Attacks across Europe, as seen in the aftermath of the Paris and Nice attacks, are precisely designed to foment racial and religious war, civil unrest, hate crimes in a self-serving cycle of violence, and bolster the destructive 'War of Civilisations' narrative fed by violent and non-violent extremists, nationalists, secularists, and religious zealots from across the spectrum. It is impossible to forget the most devastating application of this formula was conducted by Al-Qa'ida, whose murder of nearly three-thousand civilians led to the misapplication of American political and military power across the globe, the most devastating consequences of which were felt in the Middle East.
To brand ISIS's ideology and violence as harkening back to medieval brutality is a gross oversimplification. The groups prescription of puritanical violence is propelled forward by the technological revolution, the unprecedented ascension of information and developments driving a hyper-modern world woven together by globalisation. ISIS may be bi-product of the instability across vast swathes of the Middle East and South Asia, but it has also successfully tapped into contemporary socio-political and economic grievances across the world. ISIS is a terrorist group, sub-state, and army supported by a movement of freelance militants, self-fashioned jihadists, and non-violent extremists driven by an ultra-violent, anti-establishment revolutionary ideology.
Conventional warfare, air-raids and a covert war waged against ISIS's citadels in Raqqa, Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah, Tikrit, Sinjar, and Palmyra cannot destroy ISIS because it is not a conventional terrorist group such as the Taleban nor can intelligence thwart all attacks and track all these individuals who have pledged themselves to ISIS's revolutionary movement.
Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, however, the way ISIS conducts its operations and gain such traction at a series of different levels is unprecedented. ISIS is several entities at once, it creates terror through spectacular acts of violence yet is also shrouded in ambivalence. It is a defined yet undefined threat. In medieval times, a Middle Eastern militia (which effectively what ISIS started as) would not have been able to accomplish such a thing.
ISIS's most significant success, while rooted in its blood-stained onslaught upon the Middle East and Europe, is that it has bridged the gap between being a terrorist organisation and a movement and made its culture of violence mainstream. Whether or not Bouhel, a petty criminal, was following direct orders from ISIS's elite operating in Syria does not matter. Bouhel was a member of this movement and this is the most consequential aspect of ISIS's existence. Its sanctified, anti-establishment, and sectarian brand of brutality which targets everyone is in mainstream currents of political and ideological violence.
“ISIS has bridged the gap between being a hierarchical terrorist organisation and a mass movement.”
The movement has attracted tens of thousands of fighters, affiliates, collaborators and sympathisers who subscribe to their ideology. Many thousands of these individuals have not even gone to the Middle East to fight with ISIS, many are home-grown European, Russian or American nationals who have been living in their countries for several generations. While these numbers are poultry when measured against the billions of Muslims who despise ISIS worldwide these numbers are enough to be significant as Mehdi Hasan notes:
The narratives of terrorism and Islamic militancy dominate mainstream political, military and media discourse across the globe. At the other end of the spectrum, ISIS has constructed equally potent narratives which glorify in slaughtering infidels and takfiri and exports Holy War across the globe.
The thousands of people which comprise ISIS's movement are more than enough to do serious damage as its self-created freelance jihadists and groups of young men and women staging attacks bask in the theatre of terror which 24/7 hour news provides. It is a tit-for-tat cycle which has gained almost unstoppable momentum. These distorted and poisonous narratives feed off of each other, they misguide and they breed stereotypes while segregating and alienating communities from each other. It is a tit-for-tat cycle which has gained almost unstoppable momentum.
In a time when Europe and the United States is witnessing the reemergence of far-right politics, hate crime against European and American Muslims and other minorities, economic stagnation, racist rhetoric against migrants and refugees fleeing war zones, and a fast-growing list of demagogues promising security and demonising Muslims for covert political agendas, the implications for Europe and the wider Western world are disturbing.
An ISIS army will not charge into Europe on horseback, they will not plant the flag on the White House, and Baghdadi will not be triumphantly overlooking the Pacific after capturing the final American fortress in Hawaii. Such alarmist thinking overshadows the more sinister and complex threats as Western communities grapple with its identities and values like never before in this cruel post-9/11 world.
The likes of ISIS are simply banking on policymakers and the public to keep undermining our own civil societies and liberties while promoting demagogues like Trump, Farage and Le Pen as each attack pushes us closer to disorder and unrest. ISIS's ideology thrives on the disorder, it is a war of attrition and ideas which will last decades and Western states are playing into their hands as ISIS simultaneously forces their hand with each attack. The tragedy of Nice will be remembered as another chapter in Europe's seemingly unstoppable slide into an era of hybrid terror and hyper-security.
The Chilcot Report: A timely reminder for a change in British policy in the Middle East
Photo by Levi Clancy on Unsplash
The unveiling of the long-awaited Chilcot report has reconfirmed the devastating political and geo-political consequences of Britain's military support for the United States' war in Iraq. In a month which promises to be significant in British political, military and sporting history and the United Kingdom's future, the Chilcot report is the latest condemnation against a catastrophic war.
Seven years of occupation in Iraq gravely damaged British foreign policy, invited international condemnation and cost it dearly in blood and treasure. The estimated number of Iraqi civilians, security and military personnel dead are difficult to calculate and have been argued to range from 150,000 to over 1,000,000. 179 British servicemen and women are dead and £4.5 billion was expended while our American counterparts lost 4497 servicemen and women and lost a staggering $1.7 trillion.
The death toll for British in Iraq, while ultimately senseless in the pursuit of a fruitless and poorly prepared campaign, was limited when compared to other British military affairs in the Middle East. However the self-created quagmire in which British troops found themselves between 2003 - 2009 carried immense geo-political consequence in the latest chapter of a history laden with decades of British interference in Middle Eastern politics and conflict.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's promise to to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 guided his decision-making. Between 2001-2003 his key role in boosting support for deposing the dictator Saddam Hussein was using the story which alleged that Iraq possessed and was developing weapons of mass-destruction which, he argued, necessitated a preemptive strike. In 2003, Blair alongside George W. Bush embarked on the invasion without the approval of the United Nations. The invasion, while initially successful in removing the Ba'athist regime from power, received condemnation as claims before, during and after the war proved that the claim by American and British intelligence services that Saddam was hoarding chemical and biological weapons were flawed. Equally the claims that Saddam was harbouring members of Al-Qa'ida was equally disputed. Bush stated on 18th March, 2003: "The regime...has harboured terrorists, including operatives of Al-Qa'ida. The danger is clear; using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfil their ambitions and kill hundred of thousands of innocent people."
The narrative promoted by Blair and Bush to invade Iraq on the basis of the presence of terrorist groups was twisted truth. The organisation they eluded to, Ansar al-Islam, while certainly existing in Iraqi Kurdistan was focused on limited local objectives and showed little interest in waging Bin Laden's proclamations of global jihad.
As the occupation dragged on it became clear that coalition promises for the new Iraq were failing to live up to expectations. There was no democracy, no electricity, dire sanitation, nearly half the population remained unemployed and coalition forces killed, harassed and tortured Iraqi men, women and children as the stress of urban combat in an alien environment took its toll on soldiers. The dismantlement of the Ba'athist military and political institutions sent thousands of angry young men into various rebel groups across Iraq. The coalition, targeted by an enemy it barely knew, became an actor in a complex war not a guarantor of peace. As they fought the rebellion, coalition policy 'unconsciously amalgamated the worst of colonial experiences at state-building in the 1920s: the forceful integration of the three governates of Iraq and the sectarian re-partition of power' to Islamist Shiites (Filiu, From Deep State to Islamic State, 240). This was to prove calamitous for years to come.
Blair, alongside Bush, denied the existence of such failings and dismissed and labelled all insurgents under one stereotype: Islamic fundamentalism, fanatical sectarians, 'terrorists' or affiliates of Al-Qa'ida. Both administrations in the White House and Parliament also began accusing Iran and Syria of hijacking their plans for Iraq. While Iranian and Syrian involvement cannot be denied, they were supporting actors. The Iraqis were the primary actors in destroying Bush and Blair's vision for their country as anti-colonial, nationalist and anti-Western narratives become stronger and stronger the longer the brutal occupation continued.
This collapse of the state-building project continued to be dismissed by British and American politicians as Saddam's deposition, capture, trial and execution brought nationalist and religious-nationalist politics, insurgency and civil war to the streets of Baghdad. Little did policymakers realise that British and American soldiers inadvertently acted as the function which returned mass politics to Iraq and ignited a revolution in Iraqi society while set the stage for a wave of violence in post-Saddam Iraq. As Blair emphasises the true lesson of the Iraq War is that state-building, absent an effective strategy and in a society which had been long-conditioned for revolutionary politics and which was anti-Western would be an impossible procedure.
Critics of British and American policymakers decisions, while riddled with errors during the invasion and occupation, rarely consider that they 'introduced a new language and new era of contentious politics' (Gerges, The New Middle East, 1) to Iraq, a prototype of the current revolutions and subsequent violent trends across the Arab Middle East. As Blair argued on 6th July and an essay in 2014, while revolution swept the Arab world in 2010-2011 was it really conceivable that Saddam's regime, the most violent and hated of all the despotic Arab regimes would have been at peace surrounded by such turmoil?
““We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that ‘we’ have caused this. We haven’t. We can argue as to whether our policies a points have helped or not: and whether action or inaction is the best policy. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.””
The frequent revolts by Kurdish, Sunnis and Shiites alike, which culminated in the genocidal slaughter of the Al-Anfal campaign (1986 - 1989) and the butchering of 150,000 Iraqis (predominantly Shiite) in 1991 following the First Gulf War, serve as a reminder of Saddam's chilling record. Saddam's cruelty and his wars of aggression in Kuwait (1990) and Iran (1980 - 1988) made him numerous enemies at a regional and international level. These military defeats were married to botched government policies in the 1990s to secure the loyalty of rural areas at the expense of the urban classes produced socio-economic ruin, a blackmarket economy, and rampant unemployment. Saddam's carefully constructed tribal relationships and networks of patronage ensured the concentration of political and economic power. While Blair's point is certainly counter-factual, it is fair to argue that Saddam's Iraq would have descended into civil war if his regime had existed following the Arab Spring. While Blair and Bush's dire policies shaped the conflicted post-2003 Iraq of today, Saddam's 'U-turns, blunders and megalomanic whimsies...wreaked havoc on the region and the world, but above all on Iraq itself.' Saddam's legacy remains potent and powerful and his impact upon Iraq's diverse communities both harrowing and profound.
Nonetheless while Saddam's removal was entirely welcome on humanitarian grounds, the decision of Blair and Bush to invade without an effective strategy and initiate military operations unsuited for sustained and savage guerrilla and urban combat was fool-hardy. The inevitable problem facing the coalition is that as it unleashed an array of powerful socio-political forces and reinvigorated political conversations, it established an occupation which became widely despised by Iraqi civilians almost instantaneously. Instead of giving power to the Iraqi people, the Coalition Provisional Authority attempted to fashion a Jeffersonian democracy and Weberian state. The British and Americans signalled that they would determine future of Iraq, a notion which was intolerable to the Iraqi people and in the context of Middle Eastern politics.
British and American policymakers woefully underestimated the historical factors stacked against them and the strength of non-state agencies, agencies which even Saddam struggled to control at times such as the tribe, clan, and patronage. Equally they did not consider the radicalising effect of Western policies adopted in the 1990s to drive Saddam from power including draconian sanctions, the destruction of the First Gulf War, and bombing sorties over Iraq and the impact they would have on the perceptions of the Iraqi people. The result was a bloodbath as coalition forces were stranded in a power vacuum and locked in a confrontation with multiple Iraqi, Shiite and Sunni insurgencies fighting for the future of the country simultaneously.
““America’s ideological dream sank amidst suicide bombs, jihadist and militia atrocities, and violent U.S-sponsored counterinsurgency and torture. Blair’s government ensured Britain was on the same sinking ship.””
Nor did Washington and London consider the geo-political implications of occupation. The invasion, spearheaded by the Bush doctrine sought, to create a domino-effect and revolutionise Middle Eastern politics by democratising the region in an effort to combat extremism. States such as Iraq, Iran, and Syria were to be the recipients of exported Western democracy. However, regime change in Baghdad, resulted in Damascus and Tehran entrenching their political establishments and increased their determination to insure Iraq became the graveyard for Western ambitions in the region. As Iran and Syria fed the insurgencies in southern Iraq, the 'Sunni triangle' and northern Iraq, America's ideological dream, nothing short of a forced revolution, floundered in the face of the realities of Middle Eastern politics and finally sank amidst suicide bombs, jihadist and militia atrocities, and violent U.S-sponsored counterinsurgency and torture. Blair's government ensured Britain was on the same sinking ship as the Bush administration.
The invasion and the subsequent collapse of authority also allowed extremist cells such as Al-Qa'ida in Iraq to flourish as foreign fighters from across the Muslim world flocked to Iraq to fight the invaders and Iraqis alike. The rise of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi (and eventually Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), leader of the brutal subcell Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, carried long-term significance as it planted the seeds for the rise of ISIS and their caliphate which was founded in 2014 upon Zarqawi and Baghdadi's hard-line and intolerant doctrine of pan-Islamic nationalism and neo-Wahabbism. Such revolutionary ultra-violence could only have been nurtured in an atmosphere of war and this was provided to Zarqawi by the mistakes of American and British policymakers.
““The Chilcot report raises an important question, the question which matters most: Has the British government strived to learn its lesson from Iraq in how it conducts policy in the Middle East?””
While Blair argues that the Surge (2007-2008) led by General Petraeus led to the defeat of Al-Qa'ida, such a statement should be subject to scrutiny. In 2007, American and British policymakers had no alternatives in Iraq at this point. The Surge took place at a time when American and British credibility had been critically damaged by an inflexible military strategy, the outbreak of civil war in Baghdad, and inflammatory political policy before 2007. Credit can only be given to Petraeus for his ability to sell the spectacular collapse of the Iraq project as a success. The Surge created short-term stability and paved the way for the coalition's withdrawal from the mess it had created. The long-term consequences of the Surge, supported by the British, were dire as they reinforced by violent resistance against the state by arming warlords, tribes and Sunni groups while reinforcing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's state-sponsored sectarian violence. Such a strategy was always going to lead to a renewed wave of violence and create conditions of violence in which Al-Qa'ida in Iraq (now known as ISIS) would eventually reemerge. The warnings to Blair that an invasion would "increase the threat from Al-Qa'ida to the UK and UK interests" have become very real as ISIS militants have murdered British humanitarian workers and thirty tourists in Tunisia. Al-Qai'da and ISIS's violent ideologies have never had more influence on the policymaking and the public imagination.
Despite this, Patrick Cockburn contends 'the demonisation of Tony Blair is excessive and simple-minded and diverts attention from what really happened in Iraq...in going to war in alliance with the United States, Blair was not doing anything very different from his predecessors or successors.' Equally, Cockburn's point raises an important question, the question which matters most: Has the British government strived to learn its lesson from Iraq in how it conducts policy in the Middle East? Britain's direct involvement in the deposition of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the aerial bombardment of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, its contribution to a disastrous Western policy in the Syrian War, its blood-soaked war in Afghanistan, its support for Saudi Arabia's brutal military campaign in Yemen and interference in the Arab Revolutions suggest not. If anything, we have expanded our wars and remain entangled, for better or for worst, in the region.
The consequences are clear and increasingly dangerous. Stretching from Pakistan to Tunisia, an assortment of states have been critically destabilised. British policies which have promoted and supported regime change through invasion, covert war, occupation, channelling weapons and resources into volatile anti-regime insurgents and propping up regimes despised by the wider population which has helped catalyse the disintegration of the geopolitical order. Large areas of the Middle East and North Africa lie in ruins or consumed by violence and beneath the rubble of Western policies lie the corpses of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians while millions more have been dislocated from their homes. British foreign policy in the Middle East since the 9/11 attacks has largely been an unmitigated failure of policy and humanity. Britain has indirectly fed a refugee crisis, death, and tragedy while its unconditional support for its regional allies and a fractured Syrian opposition (many of its members showing sectarian or separatist agendas) has culminated in a surge in casualties, the elongation of conflict in Syria and the rise of ISIS. Military solutions are absent from political solutions.
While military action must be utilised by Parliament to combat violent groups such as ISIS, but the government refuses to adequately challenge and debate its role in creating the conditions Iraq finds itself in. Such conditions have extended to Syria and Libya, wars which Britain have found themselves deeply involved in, a role both contradictory and destructive. Equally the generation of politicians who led us to war refuses to come to terms with its historic role in Iraq and the wider region. Contemporary Iraqi violence is the product of a century of social arrangement and rearrangement of tribal, class and ethnic lines by successive, ideologically conflicting regimes. Britain has played an essential role in keeping Iraq in a permanent conflict in the pre-Saddam and post-Saddam eras.
The consequences of the Iraq War continue to carry great gravity for the United Kingdom and its conduct in foreign policy. However, the Chilcot report comes at a timely juncture as Britain reconsiders its relationship with the rest of the world. Blair's failures in Iraq cannot mask the errors of judgement made by David Cameron's government since the onset of the Arab revolutions. Nor can it mask Britain's long-term and short-term actions over the 20th and 21st century which have gravely destabilised Iraq. However, in a region of disorder, revolution, and significant geopolitical shifts, Britain's role as a major international power determines that it cannot turn away from the historical events unfolding in the Middle East.
The lessons of the Iraq War and the United Kingdom's continued entanglement in the Middle Eastern wars highlight a need to reevaluate foreign policy. The policy must be reshaped into a balance between securing Britain's security abroad and at home from threats such as ISIS and Al-Qa'ida while using soft power to challenge the status quo, former Cold War policies, traditional alliances and our country's colonial legacy. This does not mean breaking from the past completely, however, the core pillars of traditional British policy in the Middle East must be reevaluated and shaped by contemporary problems and future threats and opportunities. The policy must be realistic, pragmatic, and forward-thinking, a combination of old and new and certainly not driven by the ideological myth that democratic values and Western institutions are always necessarily the endgame for a stable Middle East.
The Middle East is swiftly changing with far-reaching short-term and long-term significance for global order. Britain must adapt quickly in the midst of a geopolitical earthquake and the Chilcot report and the Iraq War served as a timely signal for a change in policy and strategic thinking. Britain cannot become 'Little Britain' in the wake of Brexit and changing policy does not mean disengaging militarily or politically from the region. However, the Chilcot report and the tragic consequences of Britain's recent wars in the Middle East indicate a drastic need for a more nuanced and flexible approach to the region. The maintenance of a rigid diplomatic, military and political approach rooted in Cold War calculations and the events which initiated and shaped the original 'Global War on Terror' are no longer tenable and swiftly proving to be outdated in the face of regional and global challenges.
The Syrian War: From Revolution to Regional Conflict
Photo via Presidency_Syria
Bashar Assad's regime has brutalised large segments of the Syrian population to survive the Syrian revolution and the government's strategy to survive has created dire consequences for its neighbours. The regime is the antithesis of the Arab Spring, yet its capacity to survive and navigate multiple threats since protests spread across Syria has defied expectations.
Syria's neighbour Iraq has demonstrated the dire consequences of creating conditions for ethno-nationalist and sectarian conflict by empowering extremist groups on the fringes of politics.
The Assad government has used sectarian fault-lines to entrench its violent institutions which were despised by the Syrian people before and after the 2011 revolution. Nevertheless, the Syrian government gained support by placing itself as the check against extreme fundamentalists and terrorist organisations (despite the fact it has historically supported many extremist cells).
There should remains no illusions as to the consequences of the Syrian government's current actions which have facilitated sectarian and jihadist narratives and circumvented blood-feuds to maintain a firm grip on power.
Assad's strategy has strong parallels to the conduct of Saddam Hussein in response to the Sha'aban Intifada (March - April 1991) in the immediate aftermath of the First Gulf War. The nationalist uprising, arguably a prototype of the current Arab revolutions, was much shorter and swiftly crushed by military loyalists(Shiite and Sunni) leaving an estimated 100,000 dead.
The 1991 uprising against Saddam combined with the devastation brought about by the First Gulf War, the legacy of the Iran-Iraq war, and the imposition of sanctions which starved hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to death changed Iraq.
Saddam's political power was deteriorating as illustrated by the rise of terrorist organisations in northern Iraq, the national revolt and the emergence of new socio-political forces (secular and religious). These new political voices were increasingly unable to identify with the ideology of Saddam's Ba'athist Party. However Saddam manipulated religious fundamentalism, tribalist politics and sectarian narratives to maintain power and began to use Ba'athist ideology to create an illusion of collective action and stability.
As Charles Tripp argues 'Saddam and his dictatorship were the manifestation of a potent narrative...one in which exclusivity, communal mistrust, patronage and the...use of violence were the main elements woven into a system of dependence and conformity' (Tripp, A History of Iraq, 186-187). This blueprint for maintaining power throughout Saddam's tenure was pushed to its extreme in the twilight years of his reign as the Ba'athist's decentralised the Iraqi state, but maintained a strong grip on the monopoly of violence and the country's wealth.
The Syrian government has replicated this blueprint as it struggles for survival. The use of violence to suppress revolt in response to demands for reform and liberalisation which threatened the wealthy elite and military loyalists as well as their entrenched interests in Assad's regime ensured the revolution would be a painful procedure, if not a failure. Assad's original mistake as Hugh Roberts writes lay in his reaction to the protests:
The Syrian revolution began as spontaneous protest catalysed by class divisions, years of failed reforms, the hatred of the Mukhābarāt (secret police), dire unemployment, a burgeoning under-25 population with limited prospects, food insecurity and years of sanctions. However pro-government protests demonstrated that the Assad regime maintained considerable support from many people and communities as Syria became divided over how to proceed in shaping Syria's future.
Despite this division, Syria was conditioned for revolutionary upheaval for many years and the tipping point proved to be the Arab Spring. Revolutions, however, rarely end with those who initiated them ending up in power particularly if the regime reacts violently to crush activism and moderate dissent. Without a clear strategy and unity, the Syrian revolution was doomed to fail and as with many revolutions across history monsters have emerged from the ashes with different agendas and many of these agendas have been a far-cry to what the majority of the Syrian people envisaged for their nation.
The Arab revolutions, except for Tunisia, have largely followed this trend. Far from bringing stability and democracy to Libya, Muammar Gaddafi’s vicious lynching has brought the renewed civil war between loyalists, Islamists and the new government (de-facto controlled by militia groups) and created a grave refugee crisis as thousands flee and drown in the Mediterranean. Saddam Hussein’s deposition, capture, trial and execution brought nationalist and ethnic-nationalist politics, insurgency and civil war to the streets of Baghdad.
In Egypt under Sisi, the country has descended into authoritarian military rule, where human rights organisations, activists and journalists alike are imprisoned, repressed and tortured while armed groups, human traffickers and terrorists run amok in the Sinai.
The Assad family's addiction to power has all but destroyed Syria. Government authority over its territories has diminished and the regime resembles a shadow state. Contextually, however, there remain some important differences between Saddam and Assad. Saddam's wars of aggression in Kuwait (1990) and Iran (1980-1988) made him numerous enemies at a regional and international level while decades of U.S policy, the most recent being the occupation and the Surge, are factors which are impossible to ignore in catalysing Iraq's slide into turmoil.
Damascus's response to the revolution is forcing Syria along a similar path as it combines radical policies with systematic repression to drive a wedge between the opposition and the public seeking political change.
Assad and Saddam are no different in demonstrating a capacity to survive at any price, even when the ultimate price is paid by destroying their own state, dividing its communities and creating the conditions for extremism to emerge. The Syrian people have become caught between the various warring factions and are growing weary and angry with rebel and government forces while feeling betrayed by outside powers.
The release of jihadists in 2012 by Assad provided the catalyst for the expansion of jihadist groups' power in Syria and encouraged foreign groups such as AQI (now Islamic State) in Iraq to hone its combat ability on the battlefields of Syria and realise unnerving strategic ambitions. Explicitly fundamentalist and jihadist militant groups and movements began to dominate the opposition and extremists such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (Islamic State) and Abu Mohammed al-Julani (JAN) poisoned international perceptions of the opposition while Assad's brutality radicalised segments of the opposition.
The surge in foreign fighters from across North Africa and Europe and the influx of weapons increased the potency of this mixture already unleashed by Assad. As with the relationship between Jordanian Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi and Iraqis, normal Syrians were largely repulsed by the horrific violence, naivety, and cultural and national insensitivity displayed by foreign fighters. However the brutality of Assad has pushed many of them into the arms of ISIS and extremist groups as either fighters, indifferent onlookers or a reluctant 'protectorates'. The reality is that while the rebels groups are supported by powers such as the Gulf States, the people in under rebel control largely suffer, starve and struggle.
The splintering of the Syrian insurgency between Kurdish nationalists, moderate Islamists, al-Qaeda affiliates, Islamic State militants and an array of extremist foreign fighters was a coup for Assad.
As with the Iraqi insurgency (2003 - 2011) against the U.S occupation, the opposition was unified in its hatred of the regime, however, the ideas to replace the government ranged from the genocidal caliphate of Islamic State to a call to separatism from Kurdish radicals in the YPG and PUK or the call for an inclusive democratic government amongst moderates. Over 1,500 different rebel factions are operating in Syria and competing for financial and military support. Such a broad range of actors has driven the conflict's complexity while greatly limiting the likelihood of a unified rebel front.
Assad retains support among significant sections of the Syrian population including Alawites, non-Islamist Sunnis, Christians and Druze, who oppose the ascension of an Islamist regime. These fears were exacerbated as early as 2012 when fundamentalists, neo-Salafists and neo-Wahabbists began to slowly dominate the opposition politically and militarily.
The resurgence of Al-Qa'ida and ISIS have worsened these fears as the threat of ethnic cleansing and genocide looms over these communities. However the regime's calculations to weaken, split and militarise the nationalist movement has not been without considerable risk.
While the regime has used the threat of sectarian cleansing as political and military leverage amongst minorities to help enable its survival, it remains a short-term check against internal threats and the necessity for political change and compromise. As one diplomat stated in March, "We understand that Putin is not tied inextricably to Assad," while another argued "The Russians know he's a destabilising force. If there's going to be a peaceful transition, he ain't staying."
It is unlikely that the Russian military will allow a similar fiasco to that of the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989) to repeat itself in Syria as exemplified by its scale-down of personnel in March 2015. Equally not all Alawites, Christians and Druze support the regime as demonstrated by the release of a document by the Alawite sect.
The document "implies a dissociation from Iran and the regime there, but also...to disconnect the Alawite community from the Assad family" and that there is only so much time that the Alawites and other minorities will be held hostage to the narrative which perpetuates the slaughter of minorities by Syrian Sunnis and extremists such as Islamic State. While the authenticity of the document has come into question, it remains important. The statement was issued in April 2016, a time when the regime was operating from a position of strength following Russian and Iranian coordinated intervention in autumn 2015 following the fall of Idlib in March 2015.
The statement came from a position of relative strength and this should exclude the conduct of the regime before the release of this document; the regime has frequently used coercion, the threat of execution, torture, intimidation, and short-term threats to recruit unwilling members of the populace to strength its drive to crush the revolt including members of the Alawite community.
Many within Syria have been desperate to remain neutral throughout the violence despite the ruthlessness of the regime. However vicious control of the cities, it ruthless transition from counterinsurgency to scorched earth has alienated and turned communities against Assad. These strategies, it must be noted, are not new.
Like his son, Hafez Assad understood the importance of using minorities in realpolitik while relying on a small group of trusted military units to carry out his will. However adopting his father's strategies has not been without cost as it has caused mass defections, desertion and exacerbated the regime's ability to support its combat power.
Pro-Assad militias (shabiha) have become the most significant source of armed reinforcement for the Syrian Army. The shabiha have largely been responsible for the worst excesses against the moderate protesters, activists and forces within the Syrian opposition as well as Sunni communities (for example Houla and Al-Qubeir). Their absorption of the militia/mafia gangs into Assad's forces has only led to an escalation in violence. The majority of ordinary Syrians caught between divided rebels and the regime support the notion of a unified nation and are swift to denounce sectarian narratives of the regime, extremist rebel groups and the international media outlets.
However outside intervention in Syria by NATO, Russia and regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran, much like Western policy in Iraq, has accelerated Syria's death toll and exacerbated the sectarian and fundamentalist narratives. The Kremlin is unwilling to relinquish its long-standing strategic alliance with the regime nor will Iran and Hizbullah tolerate an unstable fundamentalist Sunni government to rule a future Syrian state. The Russian-Iranian coalition's support for Assad, while repugnant from a humanitarian and moral perspective, is grounded in geopolitical interests and designed to counteract Western attempts to force regime change in Syria.
While Western governments have rightfully trumpeted Assad's cruelty and his military's grotesque violation of human rights, their connivance in the destruction of Syria cannot be ignored. Beneath the rhetoric, Western policymakers have played with fire and engaged in a dirty war to remove Assad. Western officials, like Middle Eastern actors, have shown little concern in using extremists to achieve short-term military success.
The moment they decided to support a fractured opposition of which many moderates collaborated or fought alongside extremists with explicitly sectarian or separatist agendas, the West gambled that jihadists and Kurdish groups would support the military drive to oust Assad and be removed from the political picture once the regime had fallen.
This support was maintained despite reports emerging from Syria that opposition forces were committing war crimes and horrific acts of violence against regime soldiers and civilians as early as 2012. For regional allies such as Turkey and the Gulf States, they viewed these violent jihadist groups as useful (but containable) proxies in the war against Assad, Iranian influence and (in the case of Turkey) Kurdish aspirations for independence.
The consequences of shaping Syria's war into a sectarian war have been staggering. Jahbat al-Nusra and Al-Qa'ida hijacked and began to slowly dominate the military campaign. ISIS attempted to subvert Jahbat al-Nusra to its hyper-aggressive strategy sparking an intra-jihadist civil war and a deadly intra-rebel conflict in northern Syria and Iraq.
The terrorist narrative concocted by the Assad regime in the opening stages of the Syrian revolution was now a reality as black bannered ISIS, a hybrid of Al-Qaeda's violent ideology, surged across the Syrian landscape. For the West, ISIS's establishment of a caliphate was a humiliating blow.
The United States' stuttering and contradictory Syrian policy and the wave of attacks across Europe since 2014 have convinced European leaders such as Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel to seek closer cooperation and more assertive action with the Kremlin in tackling ISIS and solving the Syrian Civil War, rather than removing Assad. This closer alignment with European security interests is allowing Assad, supported by Putin, to 'execute his war on revolutions both on a practical level and as a battle of ideas.'
The support for the Syrian opposition by outside powers 'in such circumstances, is the belief that liberal values are on "the right side of history". This has proven to be an expression of blind faith.' In the context of the Syrian War, this blind faith has been on display and policy has been contradictory, at worst hypocritical.
The failure of regime change through organic protest and bottom-up activism in 2011 has been replaced by the determination of Washington to cripple Assad's Syria as it did to Saddam's Iraq following the First Gulf War. Such actions against the Syrian regime were calculated to weaken the influence of Iran, Hizbullah and Syria and alleviate allies' fears of an emerging 'Shiite Crescent' ranging from Israel and Jordan to the Gulf States and Turkey. In practice, this strategy has been catastrophic and ignited a series of wars which resemble the Thirty Year's War (1618 - 1648) were 'a set of interlocking political-religious struggles at local and regional levels...provoked and enabled external interference, which in turn exacerbated and prolonged conflict.'
While the Iranian-Saudi rivalry is far more complex than the sectarian schism between Shiite and Sunni and has long prevailed since the Iranian Revolution (1979), it has not prevented both countries utilising these narratives for political ends, international adventurism and undermining each other in proxy wars in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. This regional conflict is inextricably connected to the wider international community.
The internal-external security dilemma created by the vacuum in Syria has become increasingly dangerous to international security as multiple actors have driven the Syrian War to deeper levels of savagery and destruction. The Assad regime, indisputably, is one of those actors. However the splintered Syrian insurgents backed by the Western powers, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan and Turkey have contributed to the bloodbath.
The results of the Syrian War have been catastrophic for the region, created an increasingly volatile geopolitical situation and created an array of security nightmares at a regional and international level including an arms race, proxy warfare, a new haven for transnational and regional terrorism, and the potential for confrontation between NATO and the Russian coalition. Commentators such as Patrick Cockburn and John Bew have argued that the Syrian War is the precursor to a serious international conflict as the Middle Eastern wars have ushered in the return of great power politics.
The escalation of the Syrian War into a regional war is impacting Europe. The Syrian refugee crisis, alongside Libya and Iraq, is slowly eating away the continent's security and stability and allowed demagogues, populism, fascism, nationalism and xenophobic rhetoric to enter mainstream political discourse across Europe. The series of terrorists attacks by ISIS against European and U.S civilians have had enormous political repercussions across Europe and the stability of the EU (as exemplified by the recent departure of the United Kingdom in recent days).
The belief that the deposition of Assad by force will bring stability to Syria is deeply flawed as is the belief that Assad remaining in power will benefit the Syrian people. Neither the rebels or Assad represent the majority, their people have prided themselves on being a secular, diverse nation. The militias, the jihadists, the soldiers kill for the sake of killing because the violence has become senseless, a way of life for some. Syria has become everyone's battlefield.
Syria is not the scene of one war, but many complex wars. Caught in the cross-fire is the innocent who are indiscriminately slaughtered by barrel bombs, mown down by attack helicopters and fighter jets, cut down by militia and jihadist fighters, starved by siege and displacement and live each day in fear, tragedy and uncertainty. These conflicts largely remain unresolved, are worsening, and more people will die amidst the carnage.
Rebels and loyalists fight a violent war of attrition and entire districts of some of Syria's greatest cities have been levelled while the death toll closes on half a million. The Syrian War is one of the most terrible conflicts of our generation, one which many have become desensitised to in the face of massacre, mass-killings, displacement and starvation. This desensitisation to the immense suffering of the average civilian walks hand in hand with the war's mutation which, with each passing year, carries greater significance for a region which is rapidly Balkanising.
Thousands of videos and images across the Internet have systematically conveyed the numbing horrors of Syria’s conflict and carry considerable emotional power absent censorship. ‘They are shocking and distressing. Even if we don’t watch them, their very existence is upsetting. This is crucial. We watch human beings begging for their lives and we feel complicit.’ Cheap and easy-to-use video cameras, digitalisation and social media bring Syria’s theatre of war to our computers and phones.
However as Francesca Borri damningly conveys in Syrian Dust "Five years on, our readers barely remember where Damascus is, and the world instinctively describes what’s happening in Syria as “that mayhem,” because nobody understands anything about Syria—only blood, blood, blood. And that’s why the Syrians cannot stand us now."
We see the suffering of Syrian men, women and children, we are fed information about the suffering of Syrian men, women and children, yet we do not contextualise, humanise or delve deeply enough into this suffering which has produced such remarkable emotions exacerbated by the war such as despair, love, anger, bitterness, terror, determination, and hope.
What the international community see is crimson, a Syria awash with blood and tears, information absent context, families, friends, lovers and individuals labelled as 'foreign fighter', 'refugee' or 'migrant' absent deep, personal, and frequently interconnected stories of struggle and survival. We do not see the authenticity of war, the humanity and inhumanity created by war and all the emotions it produces, emotions that all of us can relate to as well as their consequences and potential.
Without exploring important questions, without systematically understanding the complex layers of this war, without important scrutiny over policy, and without hearing the voices of ordinary Syrians, without understanding grass-roots and top-level political and geopolitical factors driving this war, the civil war's cycle of violence will continue as the outside world squabbles and feuds over the Syrian people's future.
Whether or not the Syrian War ends tomorrow or drags on for years, a fate suffered by its neighbour Lebanon, we have failed the Syrian people and their nation's tragedy is our shame.