Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  The Saudis’ experience of modernity had been very different from that of the Egyptians, Pakistanis, or Palestinians. The Arabian Peninsula had not been colonized; it was rich and had never been forced to secularize. Instead of fighting tyranny and corruption at home, therefore, Saudi Islamists focused on the suffering of Muslims worldwide, their pan-Islamism close in spirit to Azzam’s global jihad. The Quran told Muslims that they must take responsibility for one another; King Feisal had always framed his support for the Palestinians in these terms, and the Saudi-based Muslim World League and the Organization of Islamic Conferences had regularly expressed solidarity with member states in conflict with non-Muslim regimes. Now television brought images of Muslim suffering in Palestine and Lebanon into comfortable Saudi homes. They saw pictures of Israelis bulldozing Palestinian houses and in September 1982 witnessed the Christian Maronites’ massacre, with the tacit approval of the IDF, of two thousand Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. With so much suffering of this kind in the Muslim world, pan-Islamist sentiment increased during the 1980s, and the government exploited it as a way of distracting their subjects from the kingdom’s internal problems.18 It was for this reason too that the Saudis encouraged the young to go to the Afghan jihad, offering airfare discounts, while the state press celebrated their feats on the frontier. The Wahhabi clerical establishment, however, disapproved of the Afghans’ Sufi practices and insisted that jihad was not an individual duty for civilians but was still the ruler’s responsibility. Yet the Saudi king’s civil government supported Azzam’s teaching for its own temporal reasons.

  A study of Saudis who volunteered for Afghanistan and later fought in Bosnia and Chechnya shows that most were chiefly motivated by the desire to help their Muslim brothers and sisters.19 Nasir al-Bahri, who would become Bin Laden’s bodyguard, gave the fullest and most perceptive explanation of this concern:

  We were greatly affected by the tragedies we were witnessing and the events we were seeing: children crying, women widowed, and the high number of incidents of rape. When we went forward for jihad, we experienced a bitter reality. We saw things that were more awful than anything we had expected or had heard or seen in the media. It was as though we were like “a cat with closed eyes” that opened its eyes at these woes.20

  This was, he said, a political awakening, and the volunteers began to acquire a global sense of the ummah that transcended national boundaries: “The idea of the umma began to evolve in our minds. We realised we were a nation [ummah] that had a distinguished place among nations.… The issue of nationalism was put out of our minds, and we acquired a wider view than that, namely the issue of the umma.” The welfare of the ummah had always been a deeply spiritual as well as a political concern in Islam, so the plight of their fellow Muslims cut to the core of their Islamic identity. Many were ashamed that Muslim leaders had responded so inadequately to these disasters. “After all those years of humiliation, they could finally do something to help their Muslim brothers,” one respondent explained. Another said that “he would follow the news of his brothers with the deepest empathy, and he wanted to do something, anything, to help them.” One volunteer’s friend remembered that “we would often sit and talk about the slaughtering to which Muslims are subjected, and his eyes would fill with tears.”21

  The survey also found that in nearly every case, there was more sympathy for the victims than hatred for their oppressors. And despite the United States’ support for Israel, there was as yet not much anti-Americanism. “We did not go because of the Americans,” insisted Nasir al-Bahri. Some recruits longed for the glamour of a glorious martyrdom, but many were also lured by the sheer excitement of warfare, the possibility of heroism, and the comradeship of brothers-at-arms. As ever, the warrior’s transcendence of mundane circumstance seemed very much akin to the believer’s spiritual transcendence. Nasir al-Bahri remembered how they idolized the volunteers: “When we used to look at the Afghan suits that the mujahidin who returned from Afghanistan wore as they walked the streets of Jidda, Mecca or Medina, we used to feel that we were living with the generation of the triumphant companions of the Prophet, and hence looked up to them as an example.”22

  When finally the Soviets were forced to withdraw from Afghanistan in February 1989 and the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991, the Arab-Afghans relished a heady, if inaccurate, sense of having defeated a great world power. They now planned to fulfill Azzam’s dream of reconquering all the lost Muslim lands. Throughout the world at this time, political Islam seemed in the ascendant. Hamas had become a serious challenge to Fatah. In Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had won a decisive victory over the secular National Liberation Front (FLN) in the municipal polls of 1990, and the Islamist ideologue Hassan Al-Turabi had come to power in the Sudan. After the Soviet withdrawal, Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda, which began humbly as an alumni organization for those Arab-Afghans who wanted to take the jihad forward. At this point the entity, whose name simply means “the Base,” had no coherent ideology or clear goal. And so some of its affiliates returned home as freelances with the aim of deposing corrupt secularist regimes and replacing them with an Islamic government. Others, still committed to Azzam’s classical jihadism, joined local Muslims in their struggle against the Russians in Chechnya and Tajikistan and the Serbs in Bosnia. Yet to their dismay, they found that they were unable to transform these national conflicts into what they considered a true jihad. Indeed, in Bosnia they were not only de trop but a positive liability.

  The Bosnian War (1992–95) saw one of the last genocides of the twentieth century. Unlike the two preceding it, the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, this mass killing was conducted on the basis of religious rather than ethnic identity. Despite the widespread assumption in the West that the divisions in the Balkans were ancient and ingrained and that the violence was ineradicable because of its strong “religious” element, this communal intolerance was relatively new. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had lived together peacefully under Ottoman rule for five hundred years and continued doing so after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, when Serbs, Slovenians, Slavic Muslims, and Croats had formed the multireligious federation of Yugoslavia (“Land of the South Slavs”). Yugoslavia was dismantled by Nazi Germany in 1941 but was revived after the Second World War by the communist leader Josip Broz Tito (r. 1945–80) under the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity.” After his death, however, the radical Serbian nationalism of Slobodan Milosevic and the equally assertive Croatian nationalism of Franjo Tudjman pulled the country apart, with Bosnia caught in the middle. Slavic nationalism had a strongly Christian flavor—Serbs were Orthodox and Croatians Roman Catholic—but Bosnia, with a Muslim majority and Serbian, Croatian, Jewish, and Gypsy communities, opted for a secular state that respected all religions. Lacking the military capacity to defend themselves, Bosnian Muslims knew they would be persecuted if they remained part of Serbia, and so in April 1992 they declared independence. The United States and the European Union recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina as a sovereign state.

  Milosevic depicted Serbia as “a fortress, defending European culture and religion” from the Islamic world, and Serbian clerics and academics similarly described their nation as a bulwark against the Asiatic hordes. Another radical Serbian nationalist, Radovan Karadzic, had warned the Bosnian Assembly that if it declared independence, it would lead their nation “into hell” and “make the Muslim people disappear.” But this latent hatred of Islam dated only to the nineteenth century, when Serbian nationalists had created a myth that blended Christianity with a national sentiment based on ethnicity: it cast Prince Lazlo, defeated by the Ottomans in 1389, as a Christ figure; the Turkish sultan as a Christ slayer; and the Slavs who converted to Islam as “Turkified” (isturciti). By adopting a non-Christian religion, they had renounced their Slavic ethnicity and become Orientals; the Serbian nation would not rise again until these aliens were exterminated. Yet so deep-rooted were the habits of coexistence that it took Milosevic three
years of relentless propaganda to persuade the Serbs to revive this lethal blend of secular nationalism, religion, and racism. Significantly, the war began with a frantic attempt to expunge the documentary evidence that for centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims had enjoyed a rich coexistence. A month after the Bosnian declaration of independence, Serbian militias destroyed the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, which housed the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in the Balkans, burned down the National Library and National Museum, and targeted all such manuscript collections for destruction. Between them, Serbian and Croat nationalists also destroyed some fourteen hundred mosques, turning the sites into parks and parking lots to erase all memory of the inconvenient past.23

  While they were burning the museums, Serbian militias and the heavily armed Yugoslav National Army overran Bosnia, and in the autumn of 1992 the process that Karadzic called “ethnic cleansing” began.24 Milosevic had opened the prisons and recruited petty gangsters into the militias, letting them pillage, rape, burn, and kill with impunity.25 No Muslim was to be spared, and any Bosnian Serb who refused to cooperate must also die. Muslims were herded into concentration camps, and without toilets or other sanitation, filthy, emaciated, and traumatized, they seemed scarcely human either to themselves or to their tormentors. Militia leaders dulled the inhibitions of their troops with alcohol, forcing them to gang-rape, murder, and torture. When Srebrenica, a UN “safe area,” was turned over to the Serb army in the summer of 1995, at least eight thousand men and boys were massacred, and by the autumn the last Muslims were either killed or expelled from the Banja Luka region.26

  The international community was horrified but made no urgent demand for the killing to be stopped; rather, the prevailing feeling was that all parties were equally guilty.27 “I don’t care two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents,” said New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “The people there have brought on their own troubles. Let them keep on killing one another and the problem will be solved.”28 To their credit, the Arab-Afghans were the only people to provide military help, but the Bosnian Muslims found them intolerant, were baffled by their global jihadism, and adamantly rejected all their plans for an Islamic state. Unfortunately, the Arab-Afghans’ presence gave the impression abroad that the Bosnian Muslims were also fundamentalists, though in fact many wore their Islam very lightly. Stereotypical views about Islam and fears of an Islamic state on the threshold of Europe may well have contributed to the Western reluctance to intervene; Serbian rhetoric of defensive walls may not have seemed such a bad idea to some Europeans and Americans. Nevertheless, in August 1995, NATO did intervene with a series of air strikes against Bosnian Serb positions, which finally brought this tragic conflict to an end. A peace agreement was signed in Dayton, Ohio, on November 21, 1995. But the world was left with a troubling memory. Once again there had been concentration camps in Europe, this time with Muslims in them. After the Holocaust, the cry had been “Never again,” but this did not seem to apply to Europe’s Muslim population.

  Other Arab-Afghan veterans found that when they returned home, they were too radical for the local Muslims who had not shared their experience in Afghanistan. The vast majority vehemently rejected their ruthless militancy. In Algeria, Afghan veterans had high hopes of creating an Islamic state, because the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) seemed certain to gain a majority in the national elections in 1992. But at the last moment, the military staged a coup, and the liberal secularist FLN president Benjedid, who had promised democratic reforms, suppressed the FIS and imprisoned its leaders. Had a democratic process been thwarted in such an unconstitutional manner in Iran or Pakistan, there would have been worldwide outrage. Yet because it was an Islamic government that had been blocked by the coup, there was jubilation in some sectors of the Western press, which seemed to suggest that in some mysterious way this undemocratic action had made Algeria safe for democracy. The French government threw its support behind the new hard-line FLN president Liamine Zeroual and strengthened his resolve to hold no further dialogue with the FIS.

  As we have seen elsewhere, when suppressed, these movements tend almost invariably to become more extreme. The more radical members of the FIS broke away to form a guerrilla organization, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and were joined by the returning Arab-Afghans. At first the veterans’ military training was welcome, but their unsparing methods soon shocked the Algerians. They began a terror campaign in the mountains south of Algiers, assassinating monks, journalists, and secular and religious intellectuals as well as the inhabitants of entire villages. There are indications, however, that the military not only acquiesced but may even have participated in this violence to eliminate populations sympathetic to the FIS and to discredit the GIA. There was also a chilling preview of future events, when the GIA hijacked a plane flying to France intending to crash it over Paris to prevent the French government from supporting the Algerian regime. Fortunately, the plane was captured by commandos at Marseilles.29

  The returning Egyptian Arab-Afghans also found that they had become too extreme for their fellow countrymen. Zawahiri founded Islamic Jihad (IJ) with the intention of assassinating the entire Mubarak government and establishing an Islamic state. In June 1995 IJ attempted but failed to murder the president. In April 1996 it killed a busload of thirty Greek tourists—the intended targets had been Israelis who had switched buses at the last moment—and finally, to weaken the economy by damaging the all-essential tourist industry, it massacred sixty people, most of them foreign visitors, at Luxor in November 1997. IJ discovered, however, that it had wholly misjudged the mood of the country. Egyptians saw this violent obsession with an Islamic state as blatant idolatry that violated core Muslim values; they were so appalled by the Luxor atrocity that Zawahiri had no option but to rejoin Bin Laden in Afghanistan and merge his Islamic Jihad with al-Qaeda.

  Bin Laden fared no better than the other veterans when he returned to Saudi Arabia.30 When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he offered the royal family the services of his Arab-Afghan fighters to protect the kingdom’s oil fields, but to his fury they turned him down in favor of the U.S. Army. This began his estrangement from the Saudi regime. When in 1994 the Saudi government suppressed Sahwa (“Awakening”), a nonviolent reformist party that shared Bin Laden’s disapproval of American troop deployment in Arabia, his alienation was complete. Convinced now that peaceful resistance was futile, Bin Laden spent four years in Sudan, organizing financial backing for Arab-Afghan projects. In 1996, when the United States and the Saudis pressured the Turabi government to expel him, he returned to Afghanistan, where the Taliban had just seized power.

  After the Soviet withdrawal, the West lost interest in the region, but both Afghanistan and Pakistan had been gravely derailed by the long conflict. A flood of money and weapons had flowed into Pakistan from the United States as well as from the Persian Gulf, giving extremist groups access to advanced armaments, which were simply stolen as they were being unloaded. These heavily armed extremists had therefore broken the state’s monopoly on violence and henceforth could operate outside the law. To defend themselves, nearly all groups in the country, religious and secular, developed paramilitary wings. Moreover, after the Iranian Revolution, Saudi Arabia, aware of the significant Shii community in Pakistan, had stepped up its funding of Deobandi madrassas to counter Shii influence. This enabled the Deobandis to educate even more students from poorer backgrounds, and they sheltered the children of impoverished peasants, who were tenants of Shii landlords. These entered the madrassas, therefore, with an anti-Shii bias that was greatly enhanced by their education there.

  Isolated from the rest of Pakistani society, these “students” (taliban) bonded tightly with the three million Afghan children who had been orphaned during the war and were brought to Pakistan as refugees. They had all arrived traumatized by war and poverty and were introduced to a rule-bound, restricted, and highly intolerant form of Islam. They had no training in critical thought, were shielded from o
utside influence, and became rabidly anti-Shii.31 In 1985 the Deobandis founded the Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet in Pakistan (SCPP) specifically to harass the Shii, and in the mid-1990s two even more violent Deobandi movements emerged: the Army of Jhangvi, which specialized in assassinating Shiis, and the Partisan Movement, which fought for the liberation of Kashmir. As a result of this onslaught, the Shii formed the Soldiers of the Prophet in Pakistan (SPP), which killed a number of Sunnis. For centuries Shiis and Sunnis had coexisted amicably in the region. Thanks to the United States’ Cold War struggle in Afghanistan and to Saudi-Iranian rivalry, they were now tearing the country apart in what amounted to a civil war.