The Daesh debate

No matter how one attempts to wrangle with Daesh’s rise in Iraq and Syria, desperately seeking any political or other context that would validate the movement as an explainable historical circumstance, things refuse to add up.

Not only is Daesh to a degree an alien movement in the larger body politic of the Middle East, it also seems to be a partly Western phenomenon, a hideous offspring resulting from Western neocolonial adventures in the region, coupled with alienation and demonisation of Muslim communities in Western societies.

By “Western phenomenon” I refrain from suggesting that Daesh is largely a creation of Western intelligence, as many conspiracy theories have persistently advocated.

Of course, one is justified to raise questions regarding funds, armaments, black-market oil trade, and the ease with which thousands of Western and Arab fighters managed to reach Syria and Iraq in recent years.

The crimes carried out by the Assad regime, his army and allies during the four-year long civil war in Syria, and the unquenchable appetite to orchestrate a regime change in Damascus as a paramount priority, made nourishing the anti-Assad forces with wannabe “jihadists” justified, if not encouraged.

The latest announcement by Turkey’s foreign minister, Meylut Cavusoglu, of the arrest of a spy “working for the intelligence service of a country participating in the coalition against ISIS [Daesh]” — presumably Canada — allegedly for helping three young British girls join Daesh, was revealing.

The accusation feeds into a growing discourse that locates Daesh within a Western, not Middle Eastern discourse.

Still, it is not the conspiracy per se that I find intriguing, but the ongoing, albeit indirect conversation between Daesh and the West, involving French, British and Australian so-called “Jihadists”, their sympathisers and supporters, on one hand, and various Western governments and intelligence services, on the other.

Much of the discourse — once located within a narrative consumed by the “Arab Spring”, sectarian divisions and counterrevolutions — has now been moved into another sphere that seems of little relevance to the Middle East.

Regardless of where one stands on how Mohammad Emwazi morphed into a “Jihadi John”, the conversation is oddly largely removed from its geopolitical context.

In this instance, it is an essentially British issue concerning alienation, racism, economic and cultural marginasliation, perhaps as much as the issue of the “born, raised and radicalised” attackers of Charlie Hebdo is principally a French question, pertaining to the same socio-economic fault lines.

The conventional analysis on the rise of Daesh no longer suffices.

Tracing the movement to October 2006, when the Islamic State of Iraq, uniting various groups including Al Qaeda was established, simply suggests a starting point to the discussion, but the roots of the movement go back to the dismantling of Iraq and its army by the US military occupation authority.

Just the idea that the Arab republic of Iraq was promoted from May 11, 2003, until June 28, 2004, by Lewis Paul Bremer III is enough to delineate the unredeemable rupture in the country’s identity.

Bremer and US military chiefs’ manipulation of Iraq’s sectarian vulnerabilities, in addition to the massive security vacuum created by sending an entire army home, ushered in numerous groups, some homegrown resistance movements, others alien bodies who sought in Iraq a refugee, or a rally cry.

Also conveniently missing in the rise of “jihadism” context is the staggering brutality of the Shiite-dominated governments in Baghdad and militias throughout Iraq, with full backing by the US and Iran.

If the US war (1990-1991), blockade (1991-2003), invasion (2003) and subsequent occupation of Iraq were not enough to radicalise a whole generation, brutality, marginalisation and constant targeting of Iraqi Sunnis in post-invasion Iraq did the job.

The conventional media narrative on Daesh focuses mostly on the politicking, division and unity that happened among various groups, but ignores the reasons behind the existence of these groups in the first place.

The civil war in Syria was another opportunity to expand, sought successfully by Daesh, whose capital until then was Baquba, Iraq.

Daesh was headed by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, a key player in the establishment of Jabhat Al Nusra.

The highly cited breakup between Baghdadi and Nusra leader Mohammed Al Golani is referenced as the final stage of Daesh’s brutal rise to power and ISI becoming ISIL or ISIS, before settling finally for the current designation of simply Daesh.

Following the division, “some estimates suggest that about 65 per cent of Jabhat Al Nusra elements quickly declared their allegiance to Daesh. Most of those were non-Syrian jihadists,” reported Lebanon’s Al Safir. 

Militants’ politicking aside, such massively destructive and highly organised occurrences are not born in a vacuum and do not operate independently from many existing platforms that help spawn, arm, fund and sustain them.

For example, Daesh’s access to oil refineries says nothing about its access to wealth.

To obtain funds from existing economic modes, Daesh needed to tap into a complex economic apparatus that would involve other countries, regional and international markets.

In other words, Daesh exists because there are those that have a vested interest in their existence, and the highly touted anti-Daesh coalition has evidently done little to confront this reality.

Particularly interesting is the rapidly changing focal point of the debate, from that pertaining to Syria and Iraq to a Western-centric discussion about Western-styled jihadists that seem removed from the Middle East region and its political conflicts and priorities.

In a letter signed by over a hundred Muslim scholars that was published last September, the theologians and clergymen from around the Muslim word rightly disowned Daesh and its bloodthirsty ambitions as un-Islamic.

Indeed, Daesh’s war tactics are the reverse of the rules of war in Islam, and have been a God-send to those who made successful careers by simply bashing Islam, and advocating foreign policies that are predicated on an irrational fear of Muslims.

But particularly interesting was the Arabic version of the letter’s emphasis on Daesh’s lack of command of the Arabic language, efficiency which is a requirement for making legal Islamic rulings and fatwas.

The letter confronts Daesh’s intellectual arrogance, which is based mostly on a misguided knowledge of Islam that is rarely spawned in the region itself.

But that intellectual arrogance that has led to the murder of many innocent people, and other hideous crimes such as the legalisation of slavery — to the satisfaction of the numerous Islamophobes dotting Western intellectual landscapes — are largely situated in a different cultural and political context, outside of the Middle East.

In the post-September 11 attacks period, a debate concerning Islam has been raging, partly because the attacks were blamed on Muslims, thus allowing politicians to create distractions and reduce the discussion into one concerning religion and a purported “clash of civilisations”. 

Despite various assurances by Western leaders that the US-led wars in Muslim countries is not a war on Islam, Islam remains the crux of the intellectual discourse that has adjoined the military “crusade” declared by former president George W. Bush, starting with the first bomb dropped on Afghanistan in 2001.

That discourse is too involved for a transitory mention, for it is essential to the Daesh story. It is one that has involved various schools of thought, including a breed of Muslim “liberals”, a term used conveniently in juxtaposition with an “extremist” bunch.

Yet between the apologists and the so-called jihadists, a genuine, Muslim-led discussion about Islam by non-coopted Muslim scholars remains missing.

The intellectual vacuum is more dangerous than it may seem.

There is no question that while the battle is raging on in the Middle East, the discourse itself is growingly being manipulated and is becoming a Western one.

This is why Daesh is speaking English, for its language, complete with authentic Western accents, methods, messages and even the orange hostage jumpsuits, is centred in some other socio-political and cultural context. 

The writer, www.ramzybaroud.net, is an internationally syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.