The origins of so-called Islamic State can be traced to George W. Bush’s ill-judged, illegitimate and ill-conceived invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, the subsequent Sunni backlash against the newly enfranchised Shias, and the appalling civil war in Syria.
The US and the UK wanted to overthrow Saddam and rebuild the Iraqi state. Instead they destroyed it, unleashing a sectarian civil war – Sunni against Shia against Kurd – that alienated the entire Sunni population from the Shia-dominated Baghdad government. It led the Sunni tribes in the north to greet so-called Islamic State as liberators, only to discover too late that liberation was enforced with rape, torture and beheadings.
The so-called Islamic State movement is the product of a long-running dispute among jihadists: whether to take on the ‘far enemy’, the US, as Al-Qaeda did, or the ‘near enemy’, that is Arab states in the region (as it is doing in Iraq and Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere).
Related to this, is the question of how much brutality should be applied, particularly against the Shias. The so-called Islamic State’s answer to this is unremitting: maximum bloodshed and savagery. These are the “professionals in terror”.
But first, let us be clear about terminology, for guidance on which I am again indebted to Justin Marozzi, eminent author and historian. In a recent letter to The Spectator he wrote: “We shouldn’t call the homoerotic, narcissistic death cult ‘Islamic State’ – not because it offends ordinary Muslims, nor because it has nothing to do with Islam (it has everything to do with Islam), but because it legitimises and validates the preposterous project. …Let us take our lead from the Arabs, who understand the Middle East rather better than we do, and call them Daesh – precisely because the terrorists don’t want to be called by this pejorative word”.
Daesh is the Arabic acronym for Dawlat al Islamiyah fil Iraq wal Sham. It is a far more demeaning word, with a strong sense of crushing people underfoot and of intolerant bigots. This is why the Islamic jihadists dislike it intensely and kill people for using that term. It is precisely why we should call them that. Henceforth, it is the word I shall be using.
To go back to the start of this jihadist death cult, on June 10, 2014, 6,000 Sunni fighters, hardened by years of battling against the Americans in Iraq and against the Assad regime in Syria, captured Mosul, the second largest city in Baghdad. Soon their numbers were swelled by as many as 15,000 radicalised foreign fighters flocking in from London, Paris, Sydney, New York and other western cities.
By the end of 2014, Daesh had erased the border between Iraq and Syria and had consolidated control over about six million people in a self-proclaimed ‘caliphate’, the size of Great Britain.
Daesh affiliates have sprung up in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia and Afghanistan, each seeking to establish a wilayat, or province, of the new so-called caliphate.
The real caliphate was almost everything that the terrorists of Daesh are not
What was the real caliphate? Quite simply, it was the Islamic Empire, a unitary Muslim authority governed by its ruler, the Caliph. Between the 7th and 20th centuries, there were six caliphates. At its height under the Umayyad dynasty, from 661 to 1258, the caliphate stretched from the shores of the Atlantic in Spain to the snow-capped mountains of Central Asia in the East. For about 220 years, from 870 to 1090, Malta formed a part of that caliphate.
Daesh talks repeatedly about restoring the caliphate. But they seem to have little idea what were the values and ideas which lay at its heart, and made it so successful. The caliphate was cosmopolitan (attracting some of the best minds); multi-faith (Jews and Christians thrived); tolerant; progressive and intellectually curious (discoveries in astronomy, maths, science and medicine abounded); and outward looking, dynamic and prosperous. The real caliphate was almost everything that the terrorists of Daesh are not.
For the first time in modern history, liberal democracies, as well as authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, are facing Islamic terrorists in possession of defen-sible territory, heavy weapons, oil revenues and the grandiose vision of recreating the sweep of empire of medieval Islam.
This may turn out to be the defining event so far in the 21st century Middle East, as well as for the West. The chilling recent warning made by Daesh’s chief spokesman says it all: “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”
The collapse of state order in Syria and Iraq, the consolidation of a terrorist ‘state’ that threatens all its neighbours, and the emergence of a malign objective, the ‘caliphate’, which draws Islamic malcontents from every corner of the planet, constitute a geostrategic convulsion.
It is a direct consequence of broader American and European mistakes in the battle against Al Qaeda. Once Osama bin Laden had been killed, western leaders mistakenly thought that they had beheaded the snake.
On the contrary, it has become clear that Al Qaeda was an idea, rather than an organisation, whose adherents are self-recruited and can emerge anywhere. In reality Daesh and Al Qaeda are clones rather than rivals, although there are signs that some Middle Eastern states – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar – may have chosen Al Qaeda as their new ally in Syria and elsewhere against Iranian-backed forces in the region, as well as against Daesh.
Al Qaeda might never have been allowed to mutate into Daesh if the US and its European allies had decided actively to oppose its Saudi and Pakistani paymasters some years ago. Instead, the Americans enlisted both the Saudis and Pakistanis as allies. The Saudi regime, in a perverse attachment to the maxim “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, simply continued exporting extremist ideology and weapons to Sunnis throughout the region to counter the resurgent Shia regimes in Iran and Syria.
These follies have cost the Saudis, the Pakistanis and the Americans and their western allies dearly. The Saudi and Pakistani regimes’ support for Islamic extremism has given birth to a Frankenstein monster. Daesh is their creation since it was Saudi money that spread Salafist extremism (adherents of a strict form of orthodox Sunni Islam) throughout the region. And it was Saudi and Gulf weapons shipments that armed Daesh.
The final irony of all this is that there can be little doubt that the ultimate aim of Daesh is to drive the House of Saud from the holy places of Mecca and Medina.
Nor can there be any doubt that the objective of Al Qaeda cells sheltering in the north-west territories of Pakistan is to overthrow the Pakistani governmentin Islamabad.
No less than the US, when they armed the Afghan mujaheddin in the 1980s – with the tacit approval or active connivance of other western allies – the Saudi and Pakistani regimes’ support for Islamic extremism is now reaping what they have sown.
Next week, Daesh’s propaganda war and the battle for hearts and minds.