America’s Iraq misadventure

G Parthasarathy

Jan 29 2015

Its legacy: Terrorism across Europe and violence across the Islamic world

The US-led military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 received widespread international support because it was clearly established that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC were planned and executed by Al Qaida, based in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The same cannot, however, be said of American military intervention in Iraq. Proclaiming that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime possessed “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMDs), the US and its allies mounted a land, air and sea invasion of Iraq on March 1, 2003. Not surprisingly, it was soon found that Iraq indeed did not possess a single WMD. With Iraq’s army disintegrating, the country was soon taken over by the US. On May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, aboard an aircraft carrying the banner “Mission Accomplished”. Matters did not end there. By the time the US withdrew from Iraq, 4,491 American soldiers and an estimated 1,50,000 Iraqis were killed. The aftershocks of this invasion are still being felt across the Islamic world and in Europe.

With a majority Shia-dominated government taking over in Baghdad following decades of the minority Sunni domination, old sectarian scores were sought to be settled. A bloody sectarian civil war was accompanied by the emergence of Sunni fighters led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, a veteran of the CIA-sponsored Afghan jihad, to challenge Baghdad's Shia-dominated regime. Matters worsened when a US-led alliance, backed by Sunni-dominated countries led by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, sought to violently overthrow the minority Shia dominated regime of Bashr Al Assad, in neighbouring Syria. Zarqawi’s followers and successors in Iraq joined this jihad against the Assad regime. Not surprisingly, Assad receives support from an alliance of Shia states and entities, including Iran, Iraq and the Hezbollah in Lebanon, with Russia providing the military muscle. 

These developments led to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is primarily Iraqi, but also a recipient of volunteers from Sunni Islamic countries and young Sunni Muslim immigrants in Europe and the US, for jihad against Shias, the Assad regime and also the Western world. Thousands of innocent civilians have perished in Syria and Iraq, with an estimated nine million Syrians fleeing to refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon and elsewhere. Animosity between Shias and Sunnis has now engulfed virtually the entire Muslim world. Shias in Sunni-dominated countries like Egypt are targeted by street mobs infuriated by vicious anti-Shia propaganda. They now feel increasingly insecure, even as a no-holds-barred media war gets under way. 

This vicious media war is now being waged through print, satellite television and even social media outlets like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Venom is being spewed against Shias and their beliefs and practices. This propaganda is largely financed by Gulf Arab States like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It is reinforced by immigrant-run television networks in cities like London. Some television channels in Egypt have also joined in. Influential Shia clerics are labelled as “Satan’s assistants,” with Syrian Shias being accused of raping Sunni women. This is being answered in ample measure by television networks operating out of Iraq. The political transformation in Iraq in 2006 led to Sunnis facing the wrath of the politically empowered Shia majority. The then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki and his Cabinet accused Saudi Arabia of backing the “genocide” in Iraq. It is difficult to agree on whether it is the ISIL, or Boko Haram in Nigeria, which today constitutes a greater threat to pluralistic societies

European countries with large Muslim immigrant populations from West Asia, North Africa and Pakistan have faced continuing terrorist challenges after the invasion of Iraq. The recent terrorist shootouts in France over the Charlie Hebdo controversy have received huge media attention and raised pertinent queries on whether the freedom of speech should include the right to publicly denigrate and ridicule the religious faiths of others. In March 2004, just after the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, 191 people were killed and over 1,800 wounded by synchronised bomb blasts in four trains in Spain, for which Al Qaida claimed responsibility. The UK has faced periodic terrorist threats involving members of its immigrant Muslim population, commencing with the bomb blasts in London underground Metro trains and a foiled plot to explode bombs in transatlantic flights. Chechen terrorist groups in Russia are known to have received support in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan.

The terrorist threats in Western Europe largely come from second-generation Sunni Muslim immigrants, who feel alienated from the mainstream of national life and confused on how to maintain their separate religious identity. These forebodings get reinforced when they face the prospect of prolonged unemployment, measures like a ban on headscarves, ridicule of skull caps, or aversion to the construction of minarets. In these circumstances, Muslim youth enter the electronic age through the internet and social media. Their minds are poisoned by vicious propaganda about Muslims being discriminated against and invaded by the Western forces in Iraq and Libya. The result has been that some 5,000 Muslim immigrants from the EU and a smaller number from the US have joined the ISIL with every possibility of some of them returning to their homes as hardened terrorists. This scenario is a nightmare for people across the Atlantic.

While Shia-Sunni tensions remain a fact of life in Pakistan, especially after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, they are now likely to get exacerbated. The Nawaz Shari government is known to have long-standing links with indigenous anti-Shia groups like Lashkar e Jhangvi and their mentors in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. India will have to strengthen its engagement with Arab Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE and retain the goodwill of Iran and Iraq if is to avoid getting drawn into the vortex of sectarian rivalries and tensions in the Islamic world. We have to address the challenges we face to our energy security and the safety of over six million Indian nationals in our neighbouring Gulf region with imaginative and pro-active diplomacy.