A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  The Globalization of Islamic Jihad

  There was another reason for mistaking the lull in local Islamist violence for victory, namely that the movement had been less crushed than chased abroad, where as in the early 1980s it set its sights on confronting a superpower. In the throws of the Afghan struggle in 1987, an imaginative young mujahid, Usama bin Laden, revealed his night-time ‘vision’ of the re-creation of an Islamic superstate. The Prophet Muhammad had defeated the two great empires of the day: first Persia, then Byzantium, he told his fellow brothers-in-arms; the Arab Afghans would overcome the Soviets, and then set their sights on America. Such foresight marked a radical departure from the norms of jihadi ideology. Hitherto, Qutb’s followers had focused on the local overthrow of their own leaders, or ‘Pharaohs’, and their replacement with a puritan Islamic state. Evincing parallels with President Bush’s speeches, bin Laden postulated the creation of a new (Islamic) world order in which Muslims were either with him, or against Islam.

  Had the Arab Afghans been integrated in their homelands following their victory over the Soviets, bin Laden’s reinterpretation of jihad might have been no more than the reverie of a dreamer. As it was, by 1993 the Arab veterans had dispersed to the four corners of the earth, where global reach fed the global idea. Hundreds of fighters found refuge in the poor warring peripheries of the Arab world, in Somalia and Sudan. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Salih recruited returning Afghan veterans in another anti-Marxist jihad against his leftist rivals in the former Soviet-backed state of South Yemen. But perhaps the largest number, an estimated 12,000, quietly slipped home to Saudi Arabia. Among them was bin Laden. He arrived in the kingdom shortly before the 1991 Gulf War, in time to watch Western forces of ‘unbelievers occupy Islamic soil’. He offered to mobilize his Arab Afghans to fight the Iraqi threat instead, and then, when spurned, returned in a huff to Afghanistan in spring 1991. Once again, he was chased out, this time by Afghans, who having rid the country of Soviet troops were less than enthused at the prospect of accommodating an arrogant foreign militia. He spent the next four years in Sudan, evading Arab secret police and an assassination attempt in his local mosque, before US and Saudi pressure persuaded Sudan to expel him. By now, his peregrinations had begun to echo those of Imru al-Qays, the wandering, mythical king of Arabian epic forced out of his ancestral valley into the harsh world of Byzantine–Persian superpower politics. In 1996, he arrived in Afghanistan as a guest of the newly ascendant Taliban and set about using his family wealth to revive al-Qaeda and build what one of his foot-soldiers later described as a ‘jihad camp for the world’.

  The Muslim periphery was not the only sanctuary for jihadi exiles. Britain’s reputation as a haven for foreign opposition groups, and for lax asylum laws, also made it an attractive destination. The first to arrive were injured Afghan veterans sent to Britain for rest and recuperation. But many mujahideen had grave misgivings about resorting to infidels to salvage their Islamic mission. In the summer of 1993, twelve jihadi scholars, including the Jordanian spiritual mentor of radical Islam, Abu Qatada, met in Peshawar to debate the question of whether Islamic law permitted a Muslim to seek asylum in a non-Muslim land. A few, including a preacher who had journeyed from London, argued that a non-Muslim society would tempt the true Muslim from the righteous path. But a majority consented, citing the precedent of the Prophet Muhammad’s flight to the then Christian haven of Abyssinia. ‘There’s no difference between British and Arab governments,’ Abu Qatada is said to have argued. ‘None of them are Islamic. As a Muslim, you must go where you feel secure.’

  Following this fatwa, or legal opinion, Arab Afghans flocked to London, initially flying British Airways direct from Karachi to London, until their false passports raised the suspicions of the British immigration authorities and they had to travel via the Gulf and Sudan instead. They were the latest in an incoming wave of Arab political émigrés who by the 1980s had turned Britain into an Arab media centre free from the clutches of the Middle East’s censors. Following suit, Arab Afghans dubbed London ‘the intellectual capital of Islamic Jihad’, and a plethora of Islamic groups, including bin Laden’s, set up their media operations in London, and indulged in the oxygen of publicity afforded by the presence of so many Arab newspapers and satellite channels. So important was London as a jihadi centre that the records of bin Laden’s satellite phone used as evidence in American court cases showed that by 1998 the bulk of his calls were made to Britain. In the mid-1990s, the Arab Afghans were joined by a fresh influx of Islamist politicians and fighters on the run from Middle Eastern governments. To the fury of Arab leaders, Britain dismissed official Egyptian, Saudi, Yemeni, Tunisian and Algerian requests for extradition as interference in its liberal traditions of asylum. But there is little doubt that at times London served as a logistical support base, as well as a soapbox, for the armed Islamist struggle, and some asylum seekers continued to illegally exit and re-enter Britain on false passports.

  Western exile had a profound impact on the jihadi movement. It broadened its horizons and spawned a fresh formulation of its mission. For guerrillas in Egypt and Algeria, jihad had been essentially a local armed struggle, a second war of national liberation. For the exiles in London, jihad was global, ideological and curiously Anglocentric. They saw individual Arab rulers not as towering Pharaohs, but as American puppets, and their rampant repression and corruption as a symptom of a larger evil, namely Western neo-imperialism. Their target audience was not a nation-state, but the worldwide umma, or nation, of one billion Muslims, and their goal was to spark a global Islamic rebellion. The new ideology sparked a bitter doctrinal rift between the nationalist jihadis and bin Laden’s ‘cosmopolitans’. The roots of the dispute dated back to the rout of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, when bin Laden had opposed the doctrine of takfir, or excommunication, and the declaration of a jihad in Muslim countries. In an echo of his Muslim Brotherhood roots, he argued that jihad was only legitimate when waged against non-Muslim rulers in the dar al-kharb (‘land of war’). Former brothers-in-arms denounced him as a renegade jihadi, and one group tried to assassinate him.

  The internal feud flared into the open in 1998, when to the shock of many of his followers, the exiled chief of Egyptian jihad, Ayman al-Zawahari, announced an alliance with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. The ideological partnership was signed with a joint fatwa declaring war on the United States and sealed with the marriage of the daughter of Zawahari’s deputy, Muhammed Ataf, to bin Laden’s son. Their fatwa called on all Muslims to ‘fulfil their duty [sic] to kill Americans and their allies’ – civilians and soldiers alike – ‘in order to liberate the al-Aqsa mosque and the Holy Mosque [Mecca] from their grip’. Entitled ‘Declaration of Jihad against Crusaders and Jews’, it listed three casus belli: the US bases in the Arabian peninsula where ‘the crusader armies are spreading like locusts’, US ‘dismemberment and destruction’ of Iraq, and finally American backing for ‘the petty state of the Jews’. The global movement wound up operations in Egypt, and opened new fronts against the non-Muslim dar al-kharb in Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines and Bosnia.

  The depiction of Western powers as wolves in sheep’s clothing struck a chord in the region. Following Desert Storm, the United States consolidated its military presence on a scale not seen in the region since the days of the British Empire. The US maintained it was protecting the Gulf states from the twin threats of Iran and Iraq, but the continuous footage of Western attacks on Palestine, Iraq and later Afghanistan convinced many that their supposed ally was in fact a foe. Nowhere was this view as deeply held as in Saudi Arabia, where the new prevailing mood of anti-Americanism attracted the interest of a powerful caucus of senior royals, apparently including that of Crown Prince Abdullah. Even during the Gulf War, he was reported to have expressed regret that his soldiers were being sent to fight Iraq, rather than joining Iraqis to ‘reclaim our usurped rights in Palestine’.

  Washington’s failure to appreciate the resentment engendered by its milit
ary presence in Saudi Arabia showed a distinct lack of historical perspective. Only a generation earlier, neighbouring Yemenis had fought to expel British troops from Aden, and the mood was as militant in Saudi Arabia. For centuries, the ruling puritanical Wahhabi sect had defended the al-Sauds from outside predators, and their zeal had ensured that Saudi Arabia was the only Arab state to escape European colonization. The Western thirst for oil and the heady pace of modernization made their task all the more urgent. Through their control of the kingdom’s education, media and mosques, ultra-orthodox prelates raised Saudi youth on a theological diet that taught good Muslims to combat kufr, or infidel, forces. Even in kindergarten, children learnt to recite the saying attributed to the second caliph, Omar: ‘I will purify the Arabian peninsula of Jews and Christians.’

  A showdown between the opposing forces was only a matter of time. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, a hundred prominent preachers presented King Fahd with the first in a series of increasingly vehement petitions attacking his ‘illegitimate foreign alliances’. ‘What is happening in the Gulf is part of a larger Western design to dominate the whole Arab and Muslim world,’ warned one of their most prominent preachers, Safar al-Hawali, in a taped 1991 sermon for which he was jailed. The authorities oscillated between intermittent crackdowns in deference to their American allies and forbearance, noting that acceptance of a Western military presence had led to the downfall of Arab monarchies in Egypt, Iraq and Libya. In 1994, bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and soon after hundreds of his followers were imprisoned. Bin Laden replied with an open letter to King Fahd in which he admonished the Saudi leader for marrying his ‘destiny to that of the crusader Western governments’. In late 1995 a car bomb destroyed the US military training mission in the centre of Riyadh: the opening shot in his war on America.

  Islamist guerrillas in Algeria and Egypt had both attacked foreigners as part of their local armed struggle; bin Laden’s jihad was the first to make them its primary objective. His targets were initially either military or official, audaciously simple and spectacularly high-profile. In 1996 a truck bomb devastated an American military barracks in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar, injuring or killing nearly 400 Americans (although Washington pinned the blame on Iranian-backed Shiite groups), and two years later the same method was used to destroy two US embassies in East Africa in simultaneous attacks on 7 August 1998. Saudi political columnists noted that the operation coincided with the eighth anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia. For the first time, Washington hit back at bin Laden, lobbing cruise missiles at Afghan caves and Khartoum, which did little to damage al-Qaeda but wrecked a Sudanese plant manufacturing medicines. Two years later, al-Qaeda packed a motorboat with explosives and rammed it into the side of an American destroyer, USS Cole, docked off the southern Yemeni port of Aden. In what bin Laden interpreted as a sign of success, the United States abandoned the Yemeni refuelling depot for its Fifth Fleet and pulled its military personnel out of Aden.

  Over the following months, Western expatriates in the peninsula continued to fall victim to small-scale attacks inspired but not planned by al-Qaeda. By now Washington was fully appraised of the threat, and bin Laden was named as the United States’ most wanted terrorist. Under American pressure his cadres were chased from Yemen, Sudan and Britain back to the safe haven accorded them by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Armed with their laptops they wrote treatise after treatise of Islamist theory. One intellectual, Abu Walid al-Masri, typed his 100,000th page on the history of the jihad movement, and Zawahari finished his partially published opus, Knights Under the Flag of the Prophet, forewarning the onset of the final showdown with the ‘evil empire’ of the United States on its home turf.

  14. Bellum Americanum

  For jihadis who had long despaired of their impotency in the face of outside forces, al-Qaeda’s coordinated crashing of hijacked planes into Manhattan’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 recaptured their imagination and revived respect for Islamist militancy. From Java to New Jersey, small groups of worshippers performed the Qunut – an additional supplication, accompanied by the words, ‘May God destroy America’. At the same time it triggered horror, within the Muslim world as well as without, over the morality of a cause which claimed to act in accordance with divine will. Iran’s President Khatami publicly denounced the killing of 2,976 people as a crime against humanity and its perpetrators as beyond the pale of Islam.

  Washington’s response – the war on terror – deepened the divisions where there was scope for healing. The Orwellian terminology was apt for a campaign which was multi-pronged, global and ongoing. In their own countries, Western powers swiftly cracked down on émigré Muslims, chasing jihadi support groups underground. Abroad, US planes waged war on Afghanistan, overthrowing bin Laden’s hosts, the Taliban, and bombing his mountainous Tora Bora hide-out.

  Middle Eastern regimes initially hoped to merge their own local struggles against their Islamist opposition with Washington’s global campaign. Their leaders took succour from watching Western powers replace the civil liberties discourse they had advanced in the 1990s with that of counter-terrorism. Led by Washington, Western governments applied the same measures they had once berated Arab states for – military and in camera tribunals, internment, indefinite detention, guilt by association – and tightened asylum procedures. ‘Join the approach that has long been charted by Syria,’ Bashar al-Assad advised visiting American congressmen. Egypt’s prime minister, Atif Obeid, called on the US ‘to use our model to fight terror’.

  The shifting Western focus allowed Arab regimes to back-pedal on democratic reforms and consolidate their security regimes. Jordan, a rare shining star of reform through the 1990s, suspended parliament, delayed elections, ruled by decree (promulgating a ban on the playing of religious cassettes in buses and taxis) and dispatched intelligence agents to take up editorial posts at the kingdom’s newspapers. Israel, Egypt, Libya and Algeria all handed Washington and London lists of local Islamists, and by linking them to al-Qaeda garnered Western support for their campaigns against their exiled oppositions. After a twenty-year boycott, Libyan leader Qaddafy was rehabilitated as a new recruit to the war on terror, and Algeria’s president was fêted at the White House in 2001, for the first time in fifteen years. ‘[Arab] dictators have never been so well regarded in the world as they have since September 11,’ bemoaned Moncef Marzouki, a prominent Tunisian dissident forced into exile.

  Washington, however, was rife with debate on the wisdom of tying its colours to the region’s dictators. A vocal and increasingly prominent view argued that security regimes were less the panacea of global jihad than its cause. Jihadi violence was a product of internal and unaddressed ills inside the Arab world; had Arab regimes ruled less brutally and more equitably, they would not have exported their ills to the West. Regime-change, engineered externally, argued these ideologues known as neo-conservatives, would liberate populations from their current tyranny, install democracies, turn the population into stakeholders in their societies, and spread Western values. The neo-cons allied themselves with American imperialists and business interests inside the Bush Administration to plan the reconfiguration of the Middle East and its vast oil wealth.

  The time was propitious for grand ventures. Flushed from its initial conquest of Afghanistan, Washington felt buoyed to tackle the region where the nineteen hijackers originated. Saudi Arabia initially seemed a fitting target since fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi citizens. The kingdom’s alliance with the US – which had strengthened throughout the Cold War, when the Saudi brand of Islam had served to unsettle the Muslim underbelly of the Soviet bloc – faced severe strain. Post 9/11, US officials scoffed at their erstwhile allies as ‘Arab Taliban’, and wondered whether there might not be more reliable guarantors of US interests than the Al Sauds. The US–Saudi annual review of military relations was cancelled, and a $10 million gift from a Saudi prince to the victims of the World Trade Center les
s than politely returned.

  Anger in the Arab world was also on the rise. Schoolchildren in the kingdom distributed lists of US goods to boycott. In a rare admission of vulnerability, the then Saudi ambassador to Washington, Bandar bin Sultan, defended the kingdom’s reluctance to join America’s anti-Taliban alliance. ‘In a Western democracy, when you lose touch with your people, you lose elections,’ he said. ‘In a monarchy, you lose your head.’

  All the same, rather than destabilize the world’s prime energy supplier, Washington focused its sights on Iraq, a more tangential front of jihad. None of the hijackers were Iraqis; none of the hundreds of calls Western intelligence agencies monitored on bin Laden’s satellite phone stemmed from Iraq. In fact, Iraq’s programme of weapons of destruction, not its support for global jihad, was the US’s casus belli.

  That said, Iraq offered many attractions for a comparatively low cost. Ten years of sanctions had whittled away its former strength, leaving its military arsenal, so impressive on paper, wasting and obsolete. Iraq also made an apt starting point for instituting regional change, and rebalancing America’s regional alliances away from autocrats and towards broader-based social forces. But, in the name of democracy, America opened the Pandora’s box of sectarianism. By toppling Saddam Hussein and ousting his narrow powerbase rooted in a security force drawn from Iraq’s central Sunni tribes, the US overturned four centuries of Sunni dominance of Shias.

  While Sunnis comprised 85 per cent of Muslims worldwide, within the Middle East Sunni and Shia populations were more finely balanced. From the borders of Afghanistan to the Levant, Shias constituted 140 million people, or half the population. In Lebanon they were the largest single confessional group, officially estimated at 38 per cent. They formed 65 per cent of Bahrain’s population; 42 per cent of Yemen’s, 35 per cent of Kuwait’s and 15 per cent of the UAE’s. In Saudi Arabia, they numbered 1.6 million, or 10 per cent of the population. There were also substantial Shia minorities in Syria, Turkey and Pakistan. But the largest Shia population of all was in Iraq.