The influx of outside forces disturbed the region’s traditional social balance between Zaydism and Sunni orthodoxy. Fearing a religious assault, Zaydis took up arms in 2004 led by a young Najaf-trained Yemeni cleric, Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, who gave his name to the movement. From his mountainous redoubt of Um Issa, where the Imamate had made its last stand in the 1960s, Houthi rallied a public alienated by the regime’s corruption, subservience to Saudi and American foreign policies, and support of Wahhabi expansion, and called on Zaydis to rebel. Hundreds were killed in the army offensive that followed, including Houthi himself. His brothers took up the mantle, retreating deeper into the hills. Five years on, government onslaughts had yet to curb the insurgency, but had chased tens of thousands of displaced people into refugee camps.
Sunni Non-state Actors
Sunni Islamist movements also alternated between pursuing civic and violent routes to power. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood took 20 per cent of the vote in the November 2005 assembly elections, to emerge as the lower house’s largest opposition bloc. Two months later Hamas sought to cash in the political capital it had accrued as a resistance force during the Second Intifada by contesting elections for the first time, and won. Prospects for bringing Islamist groups within the constitutional order seemed high.
Their integration coincided with the aimlessness which characterized jihadi operations post-9/11. Having seemingly reached the apex in shock value with al-Qaeda’s attack on America, global jihadi cells appeared to struggle for ideas on where to go next. While tapping local grievances, they continued to strike symbols of Western cultural or military penetration inside the Muslim world. These included tourist resorts and hotels (Bali in 2001, Amman and Sinai each resorts in 2005, and Jakarta in July 2009); foreign residential compounds (Riyadh in 2003 and Doha in 2005); foreign financial centres (Istanbul in 2003 and Morocco in 2007); and Jewish sites (Tunisia in 2002, Morocco in 2003 and Istanbul in 2003). Further attacks on Western transport networks (Madrid in 2004, London in 2005 and Mumbai in 2006) highlighted the movement’s global reach. But the terrorist campaigns did little to affect the balance of power, and raised concerns amonst former firebrands about overstretch and maligning of the faith. In Saudi Arabia, 160 religious scholars published a manifesto in Riyadh proclaiming Islam to be a religion of tolerance. One-time firebrands such as Salman al-Awda switched camp, joining Shia intellectuals to condemn bin Laden and petition for elections and an end to sectarian discrimination. In Egypt, jailed leaders of the largest militant group, al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, renounced violence and former leader Ayman Zawahiri, and sought entry into civilian politics.
It is an irony of history that the Bush administration did more to rejuvenate Muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East than anyone since Ronald Reagan gave the CIA a green light to train mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. In contrast to the incoherence and nihilism of the post-9/11 attacks, the invasion of Iraq refocused jihadi efforts on combating their twin foes of Western expansionism and Shia revivalism, and restored the movement’s tarnished appeal amongst the Sunni masses as defenders against a Western onslaught. Even before the invasion, Arab veterans from Afghanistan began trickling back to Iraq, and by the time US forces entered Baghdad it had become a magnet for foreign fighters worldwide, replicating the role Afghanistan played in the 1980s. Led by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Palestinian whose thuggery waging the Afghan jihad even fellow fighters had found uncouth, thousands converged on Iraq. They fostered a new generation of trained fighters with active experience in combat. Recalling the Arab fighters from Afghanistan who had launched local uprisings after returning home, Arab governments awaited the blowback from their nationals trained in Iraq.
Traditional jihadi ideology found new inspiration from another strain of Islam, Salafism, a renewal movement that sought to purify Islam of the sediment of tradition and adhere precisely to the lifestyle of the followers of the Prophet Mohammed. Originating in the Wahhabi schools of Saudi Arabia, it spread rapidly, bankrolled by Saudi institutions and transmitted by the millions of migrant workers and students passing through the kingdom. It encompassed two broad trends both of which boycotted constitutional systems of government (including elections) on the grounds that they were man-made institutions, and preached a virulent anti-Shia creed: political quietists who focused on proselytising, and the practitioners of Salafiya jihadiya, who used violence to achieve their goals.
Initially fringe, the Salafi jihadi movement found growing regional currency, and not only because of Iraq. Unnerved by Islamist success at the ballot box, Arab regimes sharply cracked down on Islamist political action. Thwarted in their efforts to participate in government and with little to show for their pragmatism, Islamist political wings came under mounting pressure from armed jihadi militias opposed to collaborating with secular Western-backed regimes.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the jihadis had evolved from isolated cells into a region-wide presence. After Iraq, their most substantial base was in Yemen, where tribal homelands beyond government control provided similar room for activity to the lawless tribal tracts of Pakistan where al-Qaeda’s leaders held sway. Building on an existing base of a first generation of veterans who had fought in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, incoming jihadis merged with Saudi counterparts to establish the headquarters of al-Qaeda’s Arabian peninsula chapter in January 2009. In August later that year they carried out its first major attack, when a Saudi returning from Yemen attempted to assassinate Prince Muhammad Bin-Nayef, Saudi’s deputy interior minister responsible for counterterrorism. Under heavy Saudi and American pressure, in December 2009, President Salih – already fighting on multiple fronts – gave his assent to US bombardment of jihadi positions in eastern Yemen.
Salafi jihadi groups acquired a further armed presence on the Mediterranean coast. In Gaza Salafi leaders grew increasingly disenchanted with Hamas after the latter sued for ceasefires with Israel, contested elections (within the framework of the Oslo Accords) and, following its takeover of Gaza, backtracked on moves to declare an Islamic state. From pulpits inside and outside Gaza, particularly from Iraq, they repeatedly chided Hamas for selling out and called on its rank-and-file to rebel. In August 2009, a respected preacher in the border town of Rafah, claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda, declared an Islamic emirate. Hopes that followers inside Hamas’s armed wing as well as amongst Gaza’s clans might join him proved vain. Hamas stormed his mosque and killed him and his followers. But though quickly and brutally suppressed, Salafi discourse continues to erode the monopoly on Islamist activity Hamas craves.
Salafi fighters tried to make similar inroads in Lebanon, particularly around Tripoli and in Palestinian refugee camps. In September 2007, after six months of clashes, Lebanon’s armed forces – assisted by covert French forces – succeeded in crushing a jihadi group, Fatah al-Islam, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, but only after destroying much of the camp in the process. Having assisted Salafi-oriented insurgents in Iraq and Lebanon in an effort to retain regional leverage, Syria too feared their support might boomerang. Syria’s strategic posture – its close ties to Hamas and its promotion of the narrative of resistance against Israel and in Iraq – fuelled the growth of jihadi preaching, particularly in mosques. With a majority Sunni population, much of it turning increasingly religious, Syria’s social cohesion and stability faced mounting pressure. Turning Syria into a theatre of operations, Lebanon-based jihadi groups car-bombed a military intelligence base in Damascus in September 2008, and a year later blew up a busload of Iranian pilgrims visiting Sayyida Zeinab, a Shia shrine.
As significant as the violence was the percolation of Salafi thought into hitherto reformist Islamist groups. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which over the previous two decades had looked to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party as a model for operating within a secular system, came under increasing internal pressure from rural hardliners to reduce interaction with the state. In 2009, the movem
ent’s 81-year-old Supreme Guide, Mohammed Mehdi Akef, resigned after failing to bring a young advocate of political engagement on to the executive board, and Mohammed Badie, a veterinary professor and ideological sceptic of the political process was elected successor. With Salafi streams and conservatives suspicious of political pluralism and relations with Coptic Christians gaining the upper hand against urban modernizers, a once marginal trend appeared increasingly mainstream.
Defending the Old Order: Reviving the Region’s Security States
Buffeted by external and internal challenges, the region’s regimes looked ever more vulnerable. Ravaged by civil war, Iraq was falling apart and region-wide, Islamist, clan and ethnic non-state actors garnered strength. After experimenting with co-option through partial and controlled democratic liberalization, the region’s regimes retreated into the tried-and-tested formula of repression. Basic civil liberties were routinely infringed, and the communications revolution curbed. Security operatives closed Saudi chat-rooms, interrupted Iranian phone networks, blocked Syrian websites, and fired Jordanian editors. A leading civil rights activist in Cairo, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, was sentenced to seven years’ jail for ‘tarnishing the image of Egypt’.
Tellingly, Iraq set the pace. Elected in spring 2006, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki entered office as the archetypal weak American puppet: beset by numerous plots to unseat him, a set of powerful cabinet ministers over which he had scant control, a country in the midst of implosion, and above all a US presence which, though bereft of its viceroy, included over 100,000 soldiers and thousands of advisors in ministries and government departments who choreographed his every move. But Maliki’s brokerage of a Status of Forces Agreement with Washington marked his first step in boosting his nationalist kudos. Under the agreement, the US committed to withdrawing combat troops by August 2010, and all forces by the end of 2011. Iraq also gained jurisdiction over thousands of advisors and mercenaries Washington planned on leaving behind, tempering fears of continued indirect US rule.
Thanks to the judicious use of US firepower and an injection of oil revenues, Maliki also recovered some of Iraq’s central authority. With Shia militias having largely suppressed Sunni armed groups in Baghdad, he sought to rein in their excesses. In April 2008 he defeated the Mahdi Army in Basra and subsequently mastered the Shia slums of Sadr City, and forced Sadr to sue for a ceasefire. Having shored up his credentials as a nationalist willing to face down Shia paramilitary forces, he backed Washington’s programme to lure 100,000 Sunni fighters into joining the US-funded Sons of Iraq paramilitary groups. As Iraq recovered a semblance of calm, he dismantled the blast-walls that disfigured and divided Baghdad. Despite sporadic spectacular jihadi bombings, by the end of 2009 casualty rates fell to their lowest levels since the invasion. Outside of Baghdad and Mosul, murder rates were lower than most American cities. Iraqis ventured back to restaurants.
The revival of central authority as opposed to the authority of sectarian and often criminalized gangs won him a semblance of popular appeal. His coalition, Dawlat al-Qanun, or ‘State of Law’, fared well in the January 2009 provincial elections. Touting support for a united Iraq and playing the nationalist card, he outflanked ethnic and confessional rivals including the Kurdish and Shia factions, who favoured federation or partition. While he won nine out of fourteen participating provinces, the support for SCIRI, hitherto the largest Shia faction in Baghdad, collapsed from 39 per cent in 2005 to 5 per cent. In a further sign of a recovery of central authority, Sunni groups returned to the political fold with turnout in Anbar province rising from 2 per cent in 2005 to 40 per cent four years later.
As violence subsided, investors tiptoed back to Iraq. In mid-2009, Iraq began auctioning tenders for its vast untapped reserves. Only partially deterred by a major bomb attack in Baghdad three days before the auction, major oil companies – including BP, China National Petroleum Company, Royal Dutch Shell, Petromas (Malaysia) and Total (France) – bid for the vast oilfields in the more stable south, and left the East Baghdad oilfield, part of which lay beneath Sadr City, for another day. With a touch of hubris, Iraqi officials predicted production, still limping at pre-war levels of around 2 million barrels a day, would double within three years, and rise to 12 million in a decade – close to Saudi capacity, and outstripping Russia and Iran. Thirty years after Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq’s oilfields, the region’s sleeping energy giant was slowly awakening from its slumber. In the meantime, corruption became the biggest challenge to rebuilding Iraq. Transparency International placed Iraq third after Somalia and Myanmar in its list of most corrupt countries. Despite the vast billions of dollars spent on paper, virtually nothing had been rebuilt.
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Seven hundred miles west, Israel’s military also re-established its hegemony. It quelled the intifada, in part by removing the Palestinian command. It assassinated Hamas’s leaders, including its paraplegic spiritual mentor, Ahmed Yassin, and by natural or other causes disposed of President Arafat. Israeli tanks reoccupied Palestinian towns and pulverized infrastructure funded by earlier European largesse, and with it much of the architecture of the Oslo process. Amid the destruction, the diplomacy limped on. A series of foreign-generated plans – the US-engineered ‘Roadmap’, King Abdullah’s Arab Initiative and the Geneva Initiative – all put the onus on Israel to accept a Palestinian state.
To sidestep them, Sharon crafted his own plan: disengagement from Gaza. There was much debate about his intentions. Some argued he sought to exclude Gaza and its 1.4 million people from the Palestinian equation and shift the demographic balance between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River back in Israel’s favour. Others opined he sought to maintain an aerial occupation, using drones in place of soldiers, while retaining control of Gaza’s air, sea and borders. Still others claimed that Gaza was just the first stage in a phased pull-out which would include the West Bank, unilaterally ending Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. In January 2006, Sharon collapsed into a coma, leaving the answer pending.
Most likely he sought to forestall international efforts to achieve a Palestinian state, bifurcating its putative territory into two distinct and geographically separated entities – Gaza and the West Bank. The severe limitations Israel imposed on travel accentuated the distance, as did its subsequent siege of Gaza. The Gaza withdrawal further set the two territories on separate stages of political development. While the Palestinian Authority continued to nominally rule in both, the West Bank remained under Israeli occupation. Gaza was spared the presence of Israeli troops. As Israeli intelligence officers had predicted before the withdrawal, Hamas filled the vacuum. Israel’s decision not to facilitate the smooth handover of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority quickened the Islamist rise.
Nevertheless the world, desperate for any sign of progress, applauded. Over the space of three weeks, Sharon, the father of Israel’s settlement policy, demolished the Strip’s twenty-one settlements, and relocated its 1,700 settler families inside Israel. By September 2005, the last Israeli soldier was out. When his party, Likud, protested, he dumped it and formed a new faction, Kadima.
Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert – a wheeler-dealing lawyer – promised to continue the work begun in Gaza with a second unilateral pullout from the West Bank. In April 2006, he headed to elections and won convincingly, reducing Likud’s representation from a third to a tenth of the Knesset’s seats. But despite strong parliamentary backing, outside the Knesset he had to contend with a once pampered but now embittered settler public and the Jewish religious right, opposed to a further pull-out. The demolition of a few houses in Jewish settlements in the West Bank triggered a series of violent clashes and broke his resolve. Rather than confront his internal foes, he embarked on a war against external ones. Intended to rally a divided Jewish public behind him, it did the reverse.
Ostensibly a response to Hizbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, the rush to war was initially popular. But poorly planned and lacking in a clear objective, it quickly
dragged. Undefeated, Hizbollah’s missile salvos sent hundreds of thousands of Israelis fleeing from their homes, and its militia inflicted significant losses on Israeli troops. Popular anger prompted an official commission, which condemned the war’s inept prosecution; a series of corruption investigations further sullied Olmert’s tenure. Attacked on all fronts, Olmert shied from further action against the assets of the religious right, limiting himself to rhetorical barbs on settlers (whose attacks on Palestinians he called pogroms) while giving free rein to their continued construction. By the end of his tenure there were half a million Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Rather than tackle the reality on the ground, he opted for a politically safer burst of diplomatic activity, negotiating the virtual reality of the final arrangements for an end of conflict. In November 2007 international dignitaries gathered in the American city of Annapolis to celebrate the renewal of Israeli–Palestinian talks and applauded Olmert’s promise to deliver a deal within a year. But at home he failed to convince Israelis or Palestinians he was engaged in anything more than a charade.
Pursued by corruption allegations, Olmert bowed out of office, but not before ending his tenure as he had begun it, with another war, this time an attack on Gaza in December 2008. Over the course of a month, Israel killed over a thousand people, as in the 2006 Lebanon war, and destroyed Gaza’s government complex, parliament, manufacturing base, and 3,500 homes. The Gaza war and early elections in February 2009 following Olmert’s resignation terminated negotiations long before they had reached fruition.
A History of the Middle East Page 52