The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising (5 page)

The political landscape of Syria is much more variegated than it looks from the outside. For instance, in February 2014 in a town called Nabq on the Damascus-Homs road, which had just been recaptured, government forces organized a victory celebration guarded by their militia, the National Defence Force (NDF). However, local people told me that the rebels, who a week earlier had informed them they would all fight to the last bullet against Assad’s forces, were now all members of the NDF.

This pattern is repeated all the way up to Homs and then east along the Syrian border where the rebels have been losing villages or strong points like Krak des Chevaliers. Homs City itself has been under government control for some time, with the exception of a big area called al-Waer in the northwest, where several hundred thousand Sunni have taken refuge. The similarities between the situation in Homs province and Lebanon during the civil war are striking. Around Krak des Chevaliers, for instance, Christian villages are to be found next to Turkoman Sunni communities and, closer to the border with Lebanon, there are houses with statues of the Virgin Mary outside the door, indicating that the occupants are Maronites.

The farther north one travels, the less progress is being made by the government forces. Of course, here the rebels have the enormous advantage of the proximity of a border with Turkey that is essentially open to myriad smuggling operations, both commercial and military. Significantly, many of the intra-rebel battles have been fought over the control of border crossings that can be used to move men and weapons, and to provide a source of revenue.

Wide swaths of the country are devastated. The whole north of Damascus, for instance, looks like a picture of Stalingrad, where the buildings are blasted beyond repair or bulldozed. Refugees are not returning; there isn’t anything to come back to. The government does not offer much by way of reconciliation either. Politically, its main argument is that “at least we are better than the other side who chop off people’s heads if they belong to a different religion or sect.” This obviously frightens Alawites, Christians, Kurds, and others, but it also frightens Sunnis who work for the government. The great weakness of the opposition is the degree to which it has allowed or encouraged the conflict to become a vicious sectarian war. Christian opposition women are forced to wear the veil and dissenters are threatened by punishment of death. An important factor in the Syrian war, which makes it different from previous conflicts, is that the threat of death or torture by the other side is all the more terrifying since Syrians can see myriad examples of such atrocities on the internet. People who relate to their opponents largely through snuff movies are unlikely to be in a mood to compromise.

What could be done to end all of this? The theory that arming the opposition will bring Assad to discuss peace and his own departure presupposes a complete transformation of the situation on the battlefield. This would only happen, if at all, after years of fighting. It also presumes that Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah are willing to see their Syrian ally defeated. Given that the insurgency is now dominated by ISIS, JAN, and other al-Qa‘ida-type groups, it is unlikely that even Washington, London, and Riyadh now want to see Assad fall. But allowing Assad to win would be seen as a defeat for the West and their Arab and Turkish allies. “They climbed too far up the tree claiming Assad has to be replaced to reverse their policy now,” says one former Syrian minister. By insisting that Assad should go as a precondition of peace, while knowing this is not going to happen, his enemies are in practice ensuring that the war will go on. Assad may not want a peaceful compromise, but then neither is he being offered one.

If the war cannot be ended, could its impact on the Syrian people be mitigated? Given the current level of violence, negotiations are smothered at birth by what was once called in Northern Ireland “the politics of the last atrocity.” Hatred and fear are too deep for anybody to risk being seen making concessions. And, in any case, one must question whether JAN or ISIS are in the business of negotiating with anybody. Certainly, until recently, the answer seemed to be firmly negative. But in May 2014, the last 1,200 fighters and their weapons were evacuated from the Old City of Homs, while food was allowed into two Shia towns, Nubl and Zahraa outside Aleppo, by the besieging rebels. Pro-Assad captives were released elsewhere. Such local agreements and truces are becoming increasingly possible because of war weariness. They are unlikely to be more than temporary. However, as one observer in Beirut put it: “There were over 600 ceasefires in the Lebanese civil war. They were always fragile and people laughed at them but they saved a lot of lives.”

The Syrian crisis comprises five different conflicts that cross-infect and exacerbate each other. The war commenced with a genuine popular revolt against a brutal and corrupt dictatorship, but it soon became intertwined with the struggle of the Sunni against the Alawites, and that fed into the Shia-Sunni conflict in the region as a whole, with a stand-off between the US, Saudi Arabia, and the Sunni states on the one side and Iran, Iraq, and the Lebanese Shia on the other. In addition to this, there is a revived cold war between Moscow and the West, exacerbated by the conflict in Libya and more recently made even worse by the crisis in the Ukraine.

The conflict has become like a Middle East version of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany four hundred years ago. Too many players are fighting each other for different reasons for all of them to be satisfied by peace terms and to be willing to lay down their arms at the same time. Some still think they can win and others simply want to avoid a defeat. In Syria, as in Germany between 1618 and 1648, all sides exaggerate their own strength and imagine that temporary success on the battlefield will open the way to total victory. Many Syrians now see the outcome of their civil war resting largely with the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In this, they are probably right.

A chilling five-minute film made by ISIS shows its fighters stopping three large trucks on what looks like the main highway linking Syria and Iraq. A burly, bearded gunman inspects the ID cards of the drivers who stand nervously in front of him.

“You are all Shia,” he says threateningly.

“No, we are Sunni from Homs,” says one of the drivers in a low, hopeless tone of voice. “May Allah give you victory.”

“We just want to live,” pleads another driver. “We are here because we want to earn a living.” The ISIS man puts them through a test to see if they are Sunni. “How many times do you kneel for the dawn prayer?” he asks. Their answers vary between three and five.

“What are the Alawites doing with the honor of Syria?” rhetorically asks the gunman who by this stage has been joined by other fighters. “They are raping women and killing Muslims. From your talk you are polytheists.” The three drivers are taken to the side road and there is gunfire as they are murdered.

The armed opposition in Syria and Iraq has become dominated by Salafi jihadists, fundamentalist Islamic fighters committed to holy war. Those killing non-Sunni drivers on the Damascus-Baghdad road are an all-too-typical example of this. Western governments may not care very much how many Shia die in Syria, Iraq, or Pakistan, but they can see that Sunni movements with beliefs similar to the al-Qa‘ida of Osama bin Laden have a base in Iraq and Syria today far larger than anything they enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11 when they were subordinate to the Taliban.

The pretense that the Western-backed and supposedly secular Free Syrian Army was leading the fight to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad finally evaporated in December 2013 as jihadists overran their supply depots and killed their commanders.

Saudi Arabia was centrally involved in this ascendancy of jihadists in the opposition movement. It had taken over from Qatar as the main funder of the Syrian rebels in the summer of 2013. But Saudi involvement had been much deeper and more long-term than just increased funding, with more fighters coming to Syria from Saudi Arabia than from any other country. 

Saudi preachers called vehemently for armed intervention against Assad, either by individual volunteers or by states. The beliefs of Wahhabism, the puritanical literalist Saudi version of Islam recognized exclusively by the Saudi educational and judicial system, are not much different from those of al-Qa‘ida or other Salafi jihadist groups across the Middle East. Wahhabism wholly rejects other types of Islamic worship as well as non-Muslim beliefs. It regards Shi’ism as a heresy, in much the same way Roman Catholics in Reformation Europe detested and sought to eliminate Protestantism.

There is no doubt that well-financed Wahhabi propaganda has contributed to the deepening and increasingly violent struggle between Sunni and Shia. A 2013 study published by the directorate-general for external policies of the European Parliament called “The involvement of Salafism/Wahhabism in the support and supply of arms to rebel groups around the world” begins by saying: “Saudi Arabia has been a major source of financing to rebel and terrorist organizations since the 1980s.” It adds that Saudi Arabia has given $10 billion (£6 billion) to promote the Wahhabi agenda and predicts that the “number of indoctrinated jihadi fighters” will increase.

The origins of Saudi Arabia’s anti-Shia stance can be traced back to the alliance between the Wahhabis and the House of Saud dating from the 18th century. But the key date for the development of the jihadist movements as political players is 1979, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini turned Iran into a Shia theocracy.

During the 1980s, an alliance was born between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan (or more properly the Pakistani army), and the US which has proved extraordinarily durable. It has been one of the main supports of American predominance in the region, but also provided a seed plot for jihadist movements, out of which Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa‘ida was originally only one strain.

The shock of 9/11 provided a Pearl Harbor moment in the US when public revulsion and fear could be manipulated to implement a pre-existing neo-conservative agenda by targeting Saddam Hussein and invading Iraq. A reason for waterboarding al-Qa‘ida suspects was to extract confessions implicating Iraq rather than Saudi Arabia in the attacks.   

The 9/11 Commission report identified Saudi Arabia as the main source of al-Qa‘ida financing but no action was taken on the basis of it. Six years after the attack, at the height of the military conflict in Iraq in 2007, Stuart Levey, the Under Secretary of the US Treasury in charge of monitoring and impeding terror financing, told ABC News that, when it came to al-Qa‘ida, “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia.” He added that not one person identified by the US or the UN as funding terrorism had been prosecuted by the Saudis.

Despite this high-level frustration at the Saudis for not cooperating, nothing much had improved a couple of years later. As previously mentioned, in a cable released by WikiLeaks in December 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote: “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa‘ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups.” She complained that insofar as Saudi Arabia did act against al-Qa‘ida, it was as a domestic threat and not against its activities abroad.

A further point that came across strongly in leaked American diplomatic traffic was the extent to which the Saudis gave priority to confronting the Shia. Here the paranoia ran deep. Take Pakistan, Saudi Arabia’s most important Muslim ally, of which a senior Saudi diplomat said that “we are not observers in Pakistan, we are participants.” Pre-9/11, only Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had given official recognition to the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.

There is something hysterical and exaggerated about Saudi fear of Shia expansionism, since the Shia are powerful only in the handful of countries where they are in the majority or are a strong minority. Of 57 Muslim countries, just four have a Shia majority.

Nevertheless, the Saudis were highly suspicious of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and made clear they would have much preferred a military dictatorship in Pakistan. The reason for the dislike was sectarian, according to UAE foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, who told the Americans that “Saudi Arabia suspects that Zardari is Shia, thus creating Saudi concern of a Shia triangle in the region between Iran, the Maliki government in Iraq, and Pakistan under Zardari.”

Sectarian hostility to the Shia as heretics is combined with fear and loathing of Iran. King Abdullah continuously urged America to attack Iran and “cut off the head of the snake.” Rolling back the influence of the Shia majority in Iraq was another priority. Here was another reason why so many Saudis sympathized with the actions of jihadists in Iraq against the government.

The takeover of Iraq by a Shia government—the first in the Arab world since Saladin overthrew the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt in 1171—caused serious alarm in Riyadh and other Sunni capitals, whose rulers wanted to reverse this historic defeat. The Iraqi government noticed with alarm in 2009 that when a Saudi imam issued a fatwa calling on the Shia to be killed that Sunni governments in the region were “suspiciously silent” when it came to condemning his statement.

The Arab uprisings of 2011 exacerbated sectarianism, including in Saudi Arabia, which is always highly conscious of the Shia minority in its Eastern Province. In March 2011, 1,500 Saudi troops provided back-up for the al-Khalifa royal family in Bahrain as they crushed pro-democracy protests by the Shia majority on the island. The openly sectarian nature of the clampdown was made clear when Shia shrines were bulldozed.

In Syria, the Saudis underestimated the staying power of the Assad government and the support it was receiving from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But Saudi involvement, along with that of Qatar and Turkey, de-emphasized secular democratic change as the ideology of the uprising, which then turned into a Sunni bid for power using Salafi jihadist brigades as the cutting edge of the revolt. Predictably, the Alawites and other minorities felt they had no choice but to fight to the death.

In the period that followed, there were signs of real anger in Washington at actions by Saudi Arabia and the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf in supplying and financing jihadi warlords in Syria. The US was increasingly fearful that such support would create a situation similar to that in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when indiscriminate backing for insurgents ultimately produced al-Qa‘ida, the Taliban, and jihadi warlords. The head of US intelligence, James Clapper, estimated the number of foreign fighters in Syria, mostly from the Arab world, at around 7,000,

US Secretary of State John Kerry privately criticized Prince Bandar bin Sultan, head of Saudi intelligence since 2012 and former Saudi ambassador in Washington, who had been masterminding the campaign to overthrow the Assad government. Prince Bandar struck back by denouncing President Obama for not intervening militarily in Syria when chemical weapons were used against civilians.

But it was clear that the Saudis too were concerned that jihadis whom they had previously allowed to leave to join the war in Syria might return home and turn their weapons against the rulers of the kingdom. During February and March 2014, in an abrupt reversal of previous policy, Saudi Arabia sought to stop Saudi fighters departing for Syria and called on all other foreign fighters to leave that country. King Abdullah decreed it a crime for Saudis to fight in foreign conflicts. The Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who had been in charge of organizing, funding, and supplying jihadi groups, was unexpectedly removed from overseeing Saudi policy towards Syria, and was replaced by interior minister Mohammed bin Nayef, who had a better relationship with the US and was chiefly known for his campaign against al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, son of the Saudi King Abdullah and head of the Saudi National Guard, would also play a role in formulating a new Syrian policy. Saudi Arabia’s differences with some of the other Gulf monarchies were becoming more explicit, with the Saudis, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates withdrawing their ambassadors from Qatar in March of 2014. This was primarily because of Qatar’s backing for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but also for its funding and supplying of out-of-control jihadi groups in Syria.

By March 2014, the US Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, David Cohen, was praising Saudi Arabia for progress in stamping out al-Qa‘ida funding sources within its own borders, but warning that other jihadist groups could still access donors in the kingdom. He also pointed out that Saudi Arabia was not alone among the Gulf monarchies in supporting jihadists, stating sourly that “our ally Kuwait has become the epicenter for fundraising for terrorist groups in Syria.” He complained particularly about the appointment of Nayef al-Ajmi as both Minister of Justice and Minister of Islamic Endowments (Awqaf) and Islamic Affairs, noting that: “Al-Ajmi has a history of promoting jihad in Syria. In fact, his image has been featured on fundraising posters for a prominent al-Nusra Front financier.” Under US pressure, he was forced to resign.

It is likely to be too late for Saudi Arabia to manage a clear cut reversal in its support for the jihadis in Syria. Jihadist social media is now openly attacking the Saudi royal family. A picture of King Abdullah giving a medal to President George W. Bush in earlier years is scathingly captioned: “Medal for invading two Islamic countries.” Another more menacing photo on a Twitter account is taken in the back of a pickup truck. It shows armed and masked fighters and the caption reads: “With God’s will we’ll enter the Arabia Peninsula like this. Today the Levant and tomorrow al-Qurayat and Arrar [two cities in northern Saudi Arabia].”