The 9/11 Wars (73 page)

A similar situation to that in Egypt prevailed in Morocco, where the young Mohammed VI, dubbed ‘His Ma-Jet Ski’ following reports of playboy antics, was attempting a hugely ambitious infrastructural and social ‘great leap forward’ all while retaining a grip on power in the face of a similarly rising social and cultural conservatism among, in particular, the lower and newly urbanized middle classes. ‘We are in the middle of trying something that lots of people have said is impossible. It is absolutely essential that we make it work … I don’t even want to imagine the consequences if we fail,’ Mohammed el’Ghass, the minister for youth, told the author in an interview in his immense office in the capital, Rabat.
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Walking through the housing estates and commercial streets of towns like Salé, just outside Rabat, where all women wore scarves and maintained strict segregation as they waited for the overcrowded buses, made clear how, as in Pakistan and elsewhere, it was the lower middle classes who were driving the new trend of non-violent moderate or mild Islamist activism coupled with a renewed reassertion of a religious identity. In Morocco too, as in Pakistan, the dynamics were intertwined with cultural issues. The Islamists – such as Abdelwahed Motawakil, the secretary general of ‘the Union of Faith and Social Charity’ – preferred to speak English as an alternative to Arabic when interviewed rather than French, the language of the elite and the former colonial rulers. El’Ghass, like most ministers, preferred the latter.
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At elections in late 2007, the biggest and most moderate Islamist party had won forty-seven out of 325 seats, coming second only to the main regime-sponsored secular nationalist party. Even this relatively impressive result was largely seen as disappointing, and officials of the Justice and Development Party blamed a record low turn-out and rigging. Local and international commentators argued that it was in fact the more radical Islamist groups – such as that led by Motawakil – which had boycotted the poll that were its true beneficiaries.
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Yet though there had been several further spasms of violence including new suicide bombings, by the end of 2008, it was clear that the fears of a major internal insurrection or of Morocco becoming a launching pad for systematic Islamic militant assault on Europe were very unlikely to be realized.

Close parallels with developments in Morocco and Egypt could be found too in Libya. There, again despite a range of political circumstances and social and economic conditions very similar to those in neighbouring countries, militants were also very much on the back foot. Networks formed to send volunteers to Iraq and to fight the regime had been repeatedly broken up between 2004 and 2006. In 2007, there had been disturbances and rioting in the poor coastal cities of Benghazi and Darnah. But since then there had been no real sign of militant activity, let along widespread extremism.
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The leadership of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group remained split between firebrand radicals who had chosen to remain in Afghanistan or Pakistan after the war of 2001 and an imprisoned local leadership. While the former faction claimed that the LIFG was now part of al-Qaeda and was increasingly visible among the upper ranks of bin Laden’s organization, the latter rejected violence entirely, publishing in July 2009 a 417-page document which argued that ‘arms are not for use to … bring about change in Muslim countries’. This was perhaps the most exhaustive scholarly repudiation of jihadi doctrine by former militants yet seen in the 9/11 Wars.
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There was plenty of resentment and discontent at the rule of Muammar Gaddafi – whispered carefully to the author by waiters, taxi drivers, students, professionals and even archaeologists in Tripoli during celebrations in September 2007 of the thirty-eighth anniversary of the military coup that had brought the Supreme Guide of the Revolution to power – but it was not being channelled into radical Islam.
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In Jordan, in Syria and in the Levant too, it was the same story: the peak of Islamic militancy appeared to have passed.
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In the Lebanon, the most notable incident of violence associated with radical Sunni militancy, the uprising of the Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp of May 2007, had not been repeated. In neighbouring states too, support for the violent extremists had dropped, as elsewhere sublimated to some extent into a new social conservatism and increased support for the more classic political Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its various offshoots.
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In Jordan, where before the hotel bombings in Amman in November 2005 support for suicide bombing (outside Israel-Palestine) stood at 57 per cent, this figure had declined to just 12 per cent by 2009.
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One of the most interesting and revealing incidents came in the Gaza Strip in August 2009, when Hamas launched a bloody military operation against one of a number of emerging pro-al-Qaeda groups.
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The latter were few in number, and their support depended very heavily on local tribal or clan dynamics, but nonetheless Hamas felt it necessary to direct the full force of their security apparatus against them. Twenty-four ‘Jund Ansar Allah’ fighters were killed when the Ibn Tamiyya mosque in Rafah, the city on the Egyptian border with Gaza, was stormed in perhaps the biggest direct armed confrontation between forces loyal to a local political Islamist organization and Salafi jihadists for many years.
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Again, if anyone in the region was benefiting from the polarization caused by the previous years’ violence it was the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, not the extremists loyal to, or inspired by, bin Laden.

A final example of the failure of al-Qaeda to successfully provoke a conflict or to lever local conditions and tensions in the Middle East was Saudi Arabia. The first signs of the strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula had, as elsewhere, in Europe and much of the Islamic world, been evident by the middle of the decade, as previous chapters described. By the summer of 2009, militancy in Saudi Arabia was still a problem but not one that threatened in any way to destabilize the state. The storm of 2003 to 2004 had apparently been weathered, and as early as April 2007, the Saudi militants’ own
Sawt al-Jihad
publication had glumly noted that ‘none of the Jihadi fronts were deserted as much as the Jihadi front in the Arabian peninsula.’
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Successive waves of arrests were announced, but the high numbers involved – 701 terrorist-related detainees in one single sweep, according to a single communiqué of June 2008 – owed more to the authorities’ desire to maintain a useful level of anxiety and thus vigilance among the general population and to continue to attract support for the House of al-Saud as the guarantor of local order against the extremists than anything else.
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Certainly, the jihadi effort in Saudi Arabia had singularly failed to split the religious establishment of the kingdom – indeed it had rather unified clerics behind the regime – or to garner any real popular support. Though cash continued to flow to extremist organizations and charities engaged in activities overseas, polls in December 2007 put the level of Saudi Arabian citizens viewing bin Laden favourably at 15 per cent, one of the lowest levels in the entire region.
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At the same time a series of effective policies had squeezed the militants’ resources. Authorities had progressively filled the many loopholes in the charitable and financial sectors that had enabled the militants to obtain funds, cracked down on the previously extensive illegal arms market and increased border control, making explosives and detonators more difficult to procure. A series of month-long general amnesties, in part inspired by the Algerian example, had also helped thin militant ranks, as did discreet mediation initiatives involving influential clerics with radical credentials. Considerable resources continued to be devoted to a media campaign aimed at bolstering the now broad consensus in the kingdom that the militants were terrorists – a ‘misguided sect’ as they were called in official media.
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A further useful measure was the sacking of over a thousand of the more radical imams and the retraining of tens of thousands more.
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But anyone searching for signs of a genuine spirit of liberal reform among rulers in Riyadh or among the population more generally would be disappointed. Those governing Saudi Arabia had long recognized that their survival depended to a significant extent on a skilful balancing of the demands of Western interlocutors and the inherent conservatism of most of the people they governed. Changes such as allowing the occasional risqué satire or the creation of an effectively secular national holiday to celebrate the 1932 unification of the country (to the dismay of irritated conservatives, who insisted that Islam forbids anything but religious celebrations) did not signal any great shift, significant though they were in their context. If there had been some changes to textbooks which promoted anti-Semitism and a deeply intolerant worldview, Saudi schoolchildren were nonetheless still taught that it was wrong to say hello to non-Muslims.
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As the threat from militants internally had subsided and the memory of the 9/11 attacks receded, so the reform process, which had appeared at one time to be picking up some small momentum, slowed.
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Nor did there appear to be any significant lessening of the efforts made by Saudi religious establishments and private individuals to further the spread of rigorous Salafist Islam, largely at the expense of broader, less dogmatic and more moderate strands of practice, across the Islamic world. Such proselytism was carefully differentiated from the violent ideologies of bin Laden and his kind and had been an integral part of the kingdom’s foreign policy – originally to counter the influence of Shia Iran and Communism – since the early 1980s. It had been part of the deal struck by the house of al-Saud with the ‘Ikhwan’ religious warriors whose swords, guns and faith had brought them to power in the Arabian peninsula. Despite the contradictions inherent in a deeply conservative country bankrolling and directing a programme of religious preaching and teaching that had revolutionary effects, such as changing how tens of millions worshipped across much of the Islamic world, the fundamentals of the grand bargain which underpinned the structure of the kingdom remained unquestioned.

By the summer of 2009, however, the vast proportion of militants in the Arabian peninsula were based in the Yemen, not active in the strategically crucial Saudi Arabia. The growing prominence of the Yemen and to a lesser extent east Africa, where the ‘al-Shabab’ movement had broken away from the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia to pursue an increasingly radical agenda, was sometimes taken as evidence of the protean indestructibility of contemporary Islamic militancy. Instead, it showed the extent to which, by 2009, radical activism had been marginalized geographically as well as socially, politically and culturally across almost the entire Middle East.
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Then, of course, there was Iraq.

IRAQ: AN UGLY PEACE

By around 5 a.m. in Baghdad in the pre-Ramadan weeks of August 2008, the temperature had dipped to a still brutal 33 degrees, and the city began to wake. In the poor working-class Shia areas, small knots of the faithful walked through the rubbish-strewn streets to morning prayers, and the bakers, no longer working with an AK-47 by their sides as had been the case during the worst of the civil war, began to pound their dough and stoke their ovens. As the first rays of sunlight slanted across the city, the taxis began to circulate, and those who had been sleeping on the roofs of their apartments to escape the heat stowed their bedding. Another day was beginning. The lights of the Green Zone, as bright as ever during the night in a city with patchy electricity, faded into the bright early morning.

By 7 a.m. there was heavy traffic on the roads, choked around the barricades, the checkpoints, the gaps in the blast walls, stalled in long lines on the bridges over the Tigris. The queues were growing outside the petrol stations. Children played football on patches of wasteland before the heat and school. On Mutanabi Street, as they had under Saddam, booksellers were laying out their wares, a greater range of publications than anyone could have dreamed of under the dictator. Soon the officials were arriving in the ministries, unlikely to stay much longer than a few hours. One was Abu Mujahed, the insurgent whom the author had interviewed back in 2004 and whose formation of ‘resistance cells’ to lay mines for American convoys or mortar their bases featured in
Chapter 6
. Abu Mujahed had not only stayed alive but had kept his job in his ministry through all the upheavals of subsequent years. A year after the invasion, he could no longer afford a chicken for his family’s dinner. Now, with a raised salary, he was relatively comfortable. By ten o’clock, he and the office workers and bureaucrats were sipping tea at their desks, and the shops were opening too, shutters clattering up where there were any and awnings pulled down to provide some shade. For an hour or so, there was life in Sadr City, the vast and overcrowded poor Shia suburb in eastern Baghdad and the site of heavy fighting only a few months before, as housewives in black chadors clustered around vegetable sellers haggling over the price of aubergines and tomatoes and toddlers played with makeshift toys in the dust and dirt. By late morning, with the temperature climbing, the streets emptied, the stall-holders and the police and soldiers on the checkpoint fled the blinding white light of midday, the football players disappeared, and the city settled to wait out the long, harsh afternoon.