A Road Unforeseen

by Meredith Tax

  While war crimes by YPG-YPJ members are not impossible, from all accounts of how the Rojava cantons operate, if they occurred, they would have been taken very seriously. As Sahgal noted, the Rojava administration has been unusually open to human rights investigators and, far from waiting for pressure from international agencies, the YPG-YPJ investigates and prosecutes possible human rights violations themselves.

  For example, the fighter interviewed on Reddit during the siege of Kobane blew up a house that had been booby trapped by ISIS and the fire spread and burned down half the village. He was arrested and jailed until an investigation showed the property destruction had been accidental.63

  It was no surprise that members of the Syrian opposition who believed, with the Muslim Brotherhood, that “Islam is the solution,” would become uneasy when facing the very different solution being developed by radical Kurds. Rojava represents a secular, democratic, and feminist way forward in a region stereotyped by many as hopelessly backward.

  Salih Muslim proudly summed up the first two years of the autonomous cantons: “We have created, in the middle of the civil war in Syria, three independent cantons in the Rojava region that function by democratic, autonomous rule. Together with the ethnic and religious minorities of the region—Arabs, Turkmen, Assyrians, Armenians, Christians, Kurds—we have written a collective political structure for these autonomous cantons: our social contract. We have established a people’s council including 101 representatives from all cooperatives, committees, and assemblies running each of our cantons. And we established a model of co-presidency . . . and a quota of 40 percent gender representation in order to enforce gender equality throughout all forms of public life and political representation. We have, in essence, developed a democracy without the state. That is a unique alternative in a region plagued by the internally conflicted Free Syrian Army, the Assad regime, and the self-proclaimed Islamic State.”64

  Rojava has also taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees in a flood that seems neverending, while the aid to refugees that was supposed to reach them has been siphoned off by the Syrian opposition or blocked at the border by Turkey. To date, there has been no significant economic investment in Rojava by anyone, and certainly no open political support, least of all from the US. Instead, NATO has fretted over how to make Turkey behave without finding an answer, and the attention of world leaders has been fixed on either war or great power negotiations. Through it all, Rojava has continued to struggle to support and protect its people. Hawzhin Azeez, an Australian Kurdish academic and member of the Kobane Reconstruction Board, posted a cry from the heart in January 2016 that echoed the appeal from Afrin Canton:

  “There is a big difference between bags of cement and iron and glass not being allowed to come to Kobane across the borders versus lifesaving medicine and equipment. I was just informed by the health board that they are desperately running out of medicine. They have equipment to conduct surgery but no medicine for the surgery. They have ambulances but there is no point in sending sick people from villages to hospitals empty of medication where their lives can’t be saved. . . . We have boxes and containers of medicine and equipment that are sitting on the Basur [Iraqi Kurdistan] and Bakur [Turkey] borders but deliberately not allowed through, and the medicine expires and babies die and we are left feeling unbearable anguish—a state of permanent emotional existence for the choiceless, the colonized, those whose lives and that of their communities are designated as worthless by invisible hands, voices, and faces but who determine our fates every day.”65

  These conditions helped create the massive refugee crisis in Europe. Rather than trying to bribe Turkey to keep the refugees from fleeing, a far better solution would have been for the EU to pressure the KRG and Turkey to open their borders, so the Rojava cantons could rebuild and some of those who thought they could only find a better life in Europe could try to make one where they were.

  Captured Daesh flag, Tel Hamis, Cizire Canton, Rojava.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Birth of Daesh

  NO ONE WOULD CALL the members of Daesh “moderate Islamists.” But while Daesh is a grotesquely violent version of Islamism, its beliefs on the subject of women differ only in degree, not in kind, from those of the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey’s AKP, and Iran’s Shia militias. This is why distinctions between violent and non-violent Islamists do not hold up for feminists; both kinds are purposefully violent against women.

  Like other fundamentalists—Christian, Hindu, or Jewish—Islamists do not believe there should be any separation between religious and civil law. They want to impose their own codes on everyone else. Their goal is a caliphate—a state founded upon the strictest possible interpretations of seventh century laws that systematically discriminate against women along with sexual and religious minorities.

  Some Islamists, like those of al Qaeda, think only a world war with the US could bring the caliphate into being. Others, like the Muslim Brotherhood, believe in a strategy of charity work and organizing as a means to win power through elections; once in power, they can impose their version of sharia law on others. The deposed government of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt followed that plan. Its politicization of religion became so unpopular that a million people turned out in a demonstration calling for its removal, which ended up bringing the military back into power a year after it had been overthrown. Turkey’s AKP, a similar party, has exhibited the same combination of grandiosity, paranoia, and authoritarianism. But whether their strategy is to seize power by force or to win it through elections, Islamist groups share a certain set of beliefs. In The Looming Tower, his book about al Qaeda, journalist Lawrence Wright explains:

  They believe that the five hundred Quranic verses that constitute the basis of Sharia are the immutable commandments of God, offering a road back to the perfected era of the Prophet and his immediate successors—although the legal code actually evolved several centuries after the Prophet’s death. These verses comment upon behavior as precise and various as how to respond to someone who sneezes and the permissibility of wearing gold jewelry. They also prescribe specific punishments for some crimes, such as adultery and drinking, but not for others, including homicide.

  Islamists say the Sharia cannot be improved upon, despite fifteen centuries of social change, because it arises directly from the mind of God. They want to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a more authentically Islamic legal system that is untainted by Western influence or any improvisations caused by the engagement with modernity. Non-Muslims and Islamic modernists, on the other hand, argue that the tenets of Sharia reflect the stringent Bedouin codes of the culture that gave birth to the religion and are certainly not adequate to govern a modern society.1

  Sunni fundamentalists are often called salafis, because they want to return to the time of the “salaf” (past) and discard the entire body of interpretation since. Those who want to get there by making war—jihad—are called salafi-jihadis. Salafis are extremely intolerant of other versions of Islam and have a deeply conservative and patriarchal view of the family, gender, sexuality, and women.2 They stand against the politics and culture of the modern world (though they are happy to adopt its weapons and social media), which is to them a corrupt world of unbelief called jahiliyya, tainted by materialism, secularism, and women’s liberation.

  In addition to other salafi beliefs, jihadis embrace the notion of the “defense of Muslim lands,” meaning not only the lands of the historical caliphate but any country where a lot of Muslims live, including places where people practice other forms of Islam and therefore must be brought to the correct path. Some Muslim groups, such as the Shia, Sufis, and Ahmadis, are considered kuffar (unbelievers) who must convert or be killed. Christians and Jews, the “people of the book,” must also convert or else be made to pay a special tax on non-Muslims called jizya; Hindus, atheists, and polytheists—like the Yazidis—are so low they must be killed or enslaved.

  The salafi-jihadis of al Q
aeda and, later, Daesh, view jihad in military terms, as a physical fight, not a spiritual one, and make no distinction between killing civilians and noncivilians. In their view, every believer is obligated to take up military jihad, and not just for defense. They are expected to use the sword to make converts to the faith. In the words of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born jihadi killed by US drones in Yemen, the intention of jihad is to establish the Muslim community or umma as a global caliphate in which unbelievers would either be “wiped out” or live under Sharia law as religious minorities, second-class citizens with few rights.3

  Conservatives and anti-immigrant bigots in the West attribute salafi beliefs to all Muslims. They say jihad is intrinsic to Islam because the Koran is full of references to it. By the same logic, one could say that polygamy is intrinsic to Judaism because the first five books of the Bible are full of patriarchs with multiple wives, or that all Catholics believe heretics should be burnt at the stake because that’s what they did in the early Church.

  But if most Sunni Muslims are not fundamentalists, how did Islamists get so strong?

  While there are many answers to this question, including dictatorships, stagnant economies, and US-led wars, one is certainly Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and their oil money have played a seminal role in spreading Islamism around the world. According to Vali Nasr of Georgetown University, “Saudi Arabia has been the single biggest source of funding for fanatical interpretations of Islam, and the embodiment of that interpretation in organizations and schools has created a self-perpetuating institutional basis for promoting fanaticism across the Muslim world.”4 In cables released by Wikileaks in 2010, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that Saudi donors were the most significant source of support for jihadi groups worldwide, and that, despite the US-Saudi alliance, the US had not been able to put a dent in this support.5

  Saudis were essential to the development of al Qaeda, the parent group of Daesh—as were the US and Pakistan. In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, a radical Islamist scholar named Abdullah Azzam—a key figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, who was originally from Palestine but had taught in Saudi Arabia and was then teaching in Pakistan—issued a fatwa, or Islamic legal ruling, “Defense of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation after Ima[n].”6 Azzam said that defending Muslim lands against invaders was an absolute duty and called upon young men to make jihad by coming to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. With money and help from Osama bin Laden, a rich Saudi, he set up the Afghan Services Bureau, which recruited thousands of foreign fighters and bought air tickets for them to come to Peshawar in Pakistan, where he established military training camps and guest houses for them. The US and Saudi Arabia helped finance and equip these jihadis, channeling most of their aid through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).7

  In 1989, the USSR, exhausted and at the point of dissolution, pulled its troops out of Afghanistan. By that time, Osama bin Laden was already looking farther afield. In February 1988, he and Abdullah Azzam had organized a secret meeting with leaders of the Egyptian group, Islamic Jihad, and others at which they agreed to internationalize the struggle once the Soviets left. This was the founding meeting of al Qaeda, whose long-term goal was to build a caliphate, but whose immediate strategy was to provoke a US invasion of Muslim countries that would radicalize believers and make them want to fight.8

  While al Qaeda had a strong desire to injure the West and start a world war between the US and Muslims everywhere, it had no clear strategy for doing so. Its leaders assumed that if they could design actions that would terrify the West and make it seem vulnerable, Muslims would rise up and the caliphate would follow.

  Meanwhile, in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban took power and imposed an extreme form of Islamist rule in which women were forbidden to work outside the home, go to school, or leave the house without being accompanied by a male relative, even if they had no living male relatives or were being rushed to the hospital. Kite flying, music, and mixed gatherings were forbidden, and men were forced to grow beards. In 1996, with military support from Pakistan and money from Saudi Arabia, the Taliban moved north and proclaimed the Emirate of Afghanistan. A new civil war ensued, during which the Taliban committed a number of massacres, notably against Shia Muslims, many of whom belonged to the Hazara ethnic minority. Some eight thousand Shia were murdered in 1998 when the Taliban captured Mazar-e-Sharif.9

  During this civil war, more foreign fighters found their way to Afghanistan. The Taliban re-opened training camps that had been set up by the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service and began to train young men from places as far away as China, Bosnia, Algeria, and Chechnya, among others. These young men came to Afghanistan for many reasons: religious fervor, anger at Serbian atrocities against Muslims during the Bosnian war, unemployment, lack of a future in their own countries, idealism, disenfranchisement, racism, a desire for adventure—reasons similar to those that brought foreign fighters to Syria more than a decade later. Some had already fought in Islamist militias in Algeria or Bosnia. They saw Afghanistan as a utopia in the process of being created and wanted to fight alongside the Taliban to make this vision real. Once there, they made contacts that would enable them to eventually bring the war home to their own countries.

  When Kabul fell to the Taliban in 1996, Afghanistan became a secure base from which al Qaeda could plan attacks on the West, including the 1998 truck bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya; the 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen; and the September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. After the US invaded Afghaistan in response, al Qaeda was forced to regroup in Pakistan but continued to stage operations: the 2002 bombing of a historic synagogue in Tunisia and an Israeli-owned hotel and plane in Kenya; four 2003 bomb attacks in Istanbul targeting two synagogues, the British consulate, and the HBSC Bank; the 2004 bombing of the Madrid train station; and the 2005 London suicide bomb attacks on trains and a bus.

  These attacks were meant to ignite a world war—and they succeeded after 9/11, when President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror,” and the US invaded Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden. The US-led coalition then followed with the disastrously ill-conceived and mismanaged invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on cooked evidence of “weapons of mass destruction” and fantasies of a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Seizing the opportunity, al Qaeda’s foreign fighters brought their skills and weapons to the Middle East.

  The year before the American invasion, a Jordanian named Abu Musab al Zarqawi had left Afghanistan to set up an al Qaeda branch in Iraq. By this time bin Laden, hunted by the Americans, was less visible than he had been, and operational leadership had been assumed by an Egyptian, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  Bin Laden and Zawahiri had no problem with killing Muslims they considered kuffar but they didn’t make it their main emphasis. They assumed that al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) would focus, as they did, on driving out the American imperialists.10 But Zarqawi had other ideas. He belonged to a school of salafi-jihadism called Takfir, which believes that Islam itself must be purified before it can take on external enemies. After 2003, Takfirism gained support among al Qaeda’s middle leadership and rank and file, and under Zarqawi’s leadership, the major emphasis of al Qaeda in Iraq became to kill as many Shia as possible.11

  The writer David Ignatius described what happened next. When the Americans invaded Iraq, “[Zarqawi] proved willing to ally with remnants of Saddam’s intelligence network. Four months after the US invasion, Zarqawi’s organization attacked three well-chosen targets—UN headquarters in Baghdad, the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, and the Imam Ali Mosque, a Shia shrine, in Najaf—that signaled the dirty war ahead. These bombs shattered the ground for reconciliation: Iraq would be a no-go zone for the international organizations that might have lightened the burden of US occupation; Iraq’s links would be severed with its mainstream Sunni patron, Jordan; and Iraq would be cleaved apart by a vicious sectarian war between
Sunni and Shia Muslims, whose coexistence had been a feature of modern Iraqi life.”12

  Al Qaeda in Iraq might not have made so much headway had the American authorities behaved more intelligently. The Iraqi Army soon crumbled and Saddam went on the run, but nobody in Washington seemed to have made any real transition plan. George W. Bush put Paul Bremer, a not particularly distinguished diplomat with no Middle East expertise, in charge. His first two acts in power were to disband the Iraqi Army and to bar all members of the Baath party from professional positions—which meant, essentially, that he dissolved the government. As journalist Dexter Filkins reported, “Overnight, at least two hundred and fifty thousand Iraqi men—armed, angry, and with military training—were suddenly humiliated and out of work. This was probably the single most catastrophic decision of the American venture in Iraq. In a stroke, the Administration helped enable the creation of the Iraqi insurgency. . . . We’ll never know for sure how many Iraqis would have stayed in the Iraqi Army—and stayed peaceful—had it remained intact. But the evidence is overwhelming that former Iraqi soldiers formed the foundation of the insurgency.”13

  The new dispensation put in place by the US was based on a thoroughly sectarian view of politics: Sunnis had been in charge under Saddam so now Shia should run the government. Paul Bremer handpicked members of the new Iraqi Governing Council, including a number of members of Shia Islamist parties. Among other things, these men declared they planned to change the family law or “personal status” code, which had been written in 1959 by a fairly left-wing government and was one of the most progressive family law codes in the region—it limited divorce proceedings to civil courts, gave women child custody and inheritance rights equal to men’s, restricted child marriage, and required that a man get the permission of his first wife before he could take a second one.14