THE FUNDAMENTALIST SURGE

The lightning surge of the Sunni militant ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a.k.a. ISIS) that took shape earlier this month appears to demonstrate that both Western-leaning Iraqi authorities and US intelligence have sorely underestimated this fundamentalist threat and extremist leaders’ capability to make good on it. In Mosul, the Arab country’s second largest city, over the past few days many defending officers and troops have thrown down their weapons and fled before the advance of a few thousand determined and well-seasoned militants, many of whom are believed to have previously been fighting in Syria’s civil war—neither on the side of the  repressive Bashar al-Assad regime nor for the pro-western rebels of the Syrian National Militia, but against all comers for their own cause: the establishment of a pan-Arabian fundamentalist Islamic state.

Embattled Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki

By the end of this week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was under pressure to resign, in the face of the ISIL’s sweeping victories. US President Barack Obama didn’t go as far as to join Iraqi opposition leaders in calling for Maliki to step down, but said that “only leaders that can govern with an inclusive agenda are going to be able to truly bring the Iraqi people together and help them through this crisis.” And it was obvious that his comment didn’t include the current head of the Arab country’s government, when he added, “We've said publicly, that whether (al-Maliki) is prime minister or any other leader aspires to lead the country, that there has to be an agenda in which Sunni, Shiite and Kurd all feel that they have the opportunity to advance their interest through the political process.”

The ISIL is a militant Jihadist movement, but not just any militant movement. It is a fairly large, well-organized network that has declared itself a state and takes that role very seriously despite remaining unrecognized by anyone but its members. Nevertheless, it has long claimed the territories of Iraq and Syria and is obviously now seeking to materialize those claims—and succeeding substantially in its efforts, as it now advances on Baghdad. As the name suggests, the inclusion of the region known as the Levant means that the ISIL also lays latent claim to Lebanon and Jordan, to Cyprus, to parts of Turkey and, theoretically, to Israel.

The fundamental difference between the ISIL and other Islamic extremist organizations is that it is becoming less and less identifiable as a “terrorist group” and is acting increasingly as an authentic army. Where terror cells deal in lightning strikes, small-scale mayhem, hit and run bombings and guerrilla-type offensive action against superior opponents, this Sunni militant organization has mounted and carried out large-scale battle plans and has developed the networking and strategies necessary to defend the ground gained in the latest fighting.   

Although when it first was formed a decade ago, growing out of an alliance of several smaller Jihadist organizations that merged in the face of the US-led Iraq War aimed at bringing that oil-rich region under tighter Western control, the ISIL was loyal to America’s nemesis, al-Qaeda. But of late, the leaderships of these two extremist organizations have been at almost constant odds, and, earlier this year, within the context of the Syrian Civil War, al-Qaeda made it known that it had broken ties with the ISIL.

The two organizations are now rivals for favor among Jihadists everywhere, as well as for resources of every kind necessary to continue their extremist actions. For the ISIL, many of those resources come from looting that they carry out as they advance along their strategic path: As the forces of the ISIL take over towns and cities they rob local banks and confiscate stockpiles of weaponry and ammunition left behind by fleeing government troops and security forces. The fact that ISIL leaders have put out their first official annual report in which they proudly detail the atrocities committed in taking over the territories won so far—providing explicit details of bombings, knifings, executions and assassinations—and apologize for collateral damage among their Sunni brothers, makes it clear why, in the face of defeat, Iraqi forces haven’t stuck around to be taken prisoner by the advancing Jihadists. The speed and brutality with which they are making their push into the heart of Iraqi territory has clearly struck terror in the hearts of local residents, while fostering grave concern elsewhere.

AP photo of ISIL fighters in Syria

For instance, the ISIL’s swift takeover of nearly a score of Iraqi towns and cities in recent weeks has, overnight, pushed long-estranged Iran and the United States to as yet informally consider the possibility of a kind of strategic alliance that would have been unthinkable a month ago. Though neither Teheran nor Washington has talked openly about such cooperation in the face of a mutual threat to their material and political interests, powerful conservative US Senator Lindsey Graham said publicly in recent days that he couldn’t imagine any way in which the United States could mount a defense against the formidable threat that the ISIL poses without the help of Iran. Nor is that the only example of how the aggressive ISIL push is affecting diplomatic policies and the future map of the Middle East. US ally Turkey, for example, has long been one of the main opponents to Kurdish self-determination and to the formation of an independent Kurdistan, since this would mean the partitioning of Turkey’s national territory.

Be that as it may, Huseyin Celik, an official spokesman for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, recently told CNN’s Turkish-language Internet affiliate Rudaw that “the Kurds, like any other nation, have the right to decide their fate,” adding that the Kurdish people should be able to “decide for themselves the name and type of the entity they are living in.”

This might not sound like a very definitive statement to Western ears, but it is indeed significant since, despite the autonomy hard-won by the Kurds in Iraq (where they were persecuted and massacred under Saddam Hussein’s regime) as well as in Turkey, Ankara has staunchly rejected the idea of an independent Kurdish state for fear that eastern Turkey would be incorporated into any such new Kurdish national territory. This latest statement by the ruling party is ostensibly, then, a major diplomatic concession. But it would appear to have very little to do with any real change of heart and more to do with security demands.

With the stunning advances of the ISIL in neighboring Iraq, it seems only logical that Turkey would want a friendly buffer between it and the potential for a radically aggressive Jihadist state. Nor is it any coincidence, considering the tenuous situation in the rest of Iraq, that Turkey has recently signed a long-term oil trade deal with the semi-autonomous government of Iraqi Kurdistan, as a means of seeking to ensure that the Turkish government will be able to continue to count on Iraqi petroleum imports for some time to come.

Meanwhile, Western intelligence services appeared to have been caught with their proverbial pants down in terms of how they perceived the ISIL prior to this year and, in fact, prior to this month. The New York Times quotes former CIA official Bruce Riedel—who currently works for the Brookings Institution, an independent Embassy Row think-tank in Washington DC—as saying that the ISIL’s lightning insurgency successes “seem to have shocked not only the American intelligence community but intelligence communities across the globe.”  Riedel told the newspaper that the United States had “a tendency to underestimate Sunni extremists in Iraq” and added that the US had significantly reduced its intelligence presence in Iraq when it withdrew its combat troops in 2011.     

However, another NYT source, former US Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey, is quoted as saying that “There was reporting that something like this was likely to happen. People had some idea it was going to happen.” But obviously not to the extent that it has.

So just how fundamentalist is the ISIL? Scale of one to ten? Perhaps eleven. So far, it has demonstrated itself to be unconscionably violent and vengeful, rigidly repressive and absolutely unyielding in its fundamentalist goals. And what are those goals? According to its own fundamentalist manifesto, and in the opinion of recognized Middle East experts, the top goal of the war that the ISIL is waging is the imposition of a medieval Islamic vision. The enforcing of the strictest fundamentalist dictates within the framework of a vast Muslim caliphate heads its list of post-conquest priorities. Its manifesto places the physical and economic well-being of the peoples that will come under its control is of only relative importance within its plan. It clearly states that “improving their conditions is less important than the condition of their religion.”  

The ISIL advances tend to show that those who said the Arab Spring wouldn’t necessarily bring democracy to the region were on target. And that is largely the fault of the West, headed up by the United States. The Middle East has long been an example of how the world’s major democracies consider that way of life to be an integral part of their own internal policies, but not necessarily a system of freedom and human rights that should be extended to the entire world. And even in cases like Iraq, where an attempt to establish some form of democracy has been made, the West continues to fail to understand that the tools of peaceful democratic coexistence are education and diplomacy, not war. Instead, Western leaders (and Russia as well) have consistently supported and (when they were no longer convenient for them) toppled some of the most nefarious regimes imaginable, for the sake of protecting their own vast political and economic interests in the region. In doing so, they have assured the peoples that lived under those regimes of cruelty, ignorance and poverty rather than freedom, education and civil and human rights. And their latest war-like actions and all too frequent atrocities in the region have stripped Westerners of credibility and made them hated in the very region where the ISIL is now so increasingly influential and entrenched.

None of this bodes well for successful local resistance to the advance of religious fundamentalism and the kind of extremist regimes that the ISIL is seeking to impose. But it will require an enormous change of mindset for the West to realize how much to blame it is for the current situation and what it needs to do to right the wrongs of the past.