The 9/11 Wars (42 page)

Abu Laban did not give up, however. He and a group of other Danish clerics put together a dossier including the cartoons published by the
Jyllands-Posten
, three far more offensive images of Mohammed from an unidentified source, clippings and hate-mail allegedly sent to Muslims in Denmark and travelled to the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) that was being held in Mecca. The clerics then passed around their file, calling for action. With no alternative, the OIC issued a condemnation and demanded United Nations action against Denmark. Still not satisfied, a new delegation of Danish clerics then set off around Middle Eastern capitals, presenting their dossier to religious and political leaders, claiming, as they had done before, that all the cartoons it contained had been published repeatedly in the Western press. On January 10, 2006, a Christian publication in Norway reprinted the three original images, allowing the clerics to claim a concerted campaign in the West to slight Islam. With this new publication, Abu Laban and his associates began finally to make some progress. Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Denmark and declared a consumer boycott. On January 30, the Danish prime minister and the
Jyllands-Posten
tried to defuse the growing row by expressing their regret at any offence caused to Muslims. Their carefully worded semi-apology – ‘we learned that in Arabic “regret” isn’t very easily understood, so we made a semantic change, but nothing changed in substance because we could not apologize for something we did not believe was wrong,’ said Rose – triggered a backlash in Europe, and a number of newspapers in France, Spain, Germany, Holland and Italy republished the images.
⁸⁵
The cycle of escalation soon developed a momentum of its own, helped by reporting of the story in the Middle East in particular that was often inflammatory and inaccurate.

Within a few days, there were riots in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Nigeria and elsewhere. In the West, the row was once more cited as evidence of a clash of civilizations and an augur of violence on the streets of Europe. In the Muslim world, it was seen as further proof that a belligerent and aggressive West was incapable of ‘respecting’ Islamic faith and culture. Once more, however, there were deeper forces at work. A close look at the demonstrations organized around the world and at the origins of the more inflammatory statements that fuelled the cycle of escalation reveals that those hurling stones, burning flags and chanting slogans may have been less representative of entire communities than they might have looked at the time. For, as had been the case during the Rushdie affair seventeen years before, different Middle Eastern governments, religious leaders and movements all sought to exploit events, seeking to outdo each other in indignation and to use the opportunity offered by the crisis to reinforce their otherwise often shaky religious credentials. After the local Danish clerics, it was the turn of the major international religious figures. Following relatively moderate early statements, the immensely influential Egyptian university of al-Azhar issued a statement signed by its Grand Sheikh, Mohammed Tantawi, which said the cartoons showed ‘contempt [for] the religious beliefs of more than one billion Muslims around the world’. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the conservative Islamist scholar who had tried to dissuade the Taliban from destroying the Buddhas almost exactly five years earlier and who had a following of tens of millions, used his programme on al-Jazeera to call for secular rulers to keep on stoking ‘the awakening of the Muslim nation’ after various rivals used their own broadcasts to voice more extreme statements.
⁸⁶
Clerics in Saudi Arabia, particularly aware of the importance of not letting the government take the lead in the campaign against the cartoons, told their congregations to ‘rise up … grab swords … they have trampled on the Prophet’.
⁸⁷

If there was competition between clerics, it was nothing in comparison to that between states. The Rushdie affair had been played out in a context of vicious rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran for the symbolic leadership of Islam. Nearly twenty years later, that rivalry still existed along, of course, with many others. Few states in the Middle East or further afield could allow themselves to be seen as soft on those who insulted the Prophet. In Syria, where any unauthorized political demonstration would have faced violent repression, ‘spontaneous’ crowds sacked the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus. Denmark’s embassy in Tehran was attacked by another ‘spontaneous’ crowd hours after the Iranian government announced a suspension of trade links with Denmark. Kuwait and Egypt organized a consumer boycott and allowed demonstrations of a violence that would normally have brought a crushing police response. In the Palestinian Occupied Territories elements of the more secular Fatah, fresh from a heavy defeat in elections in January 2006, made statements far more inflammatory than those of their victorious electoral opponents, the Islamists of Hamas.
⁸⁸
In Lebanon, as ever, a more complicated agenda fuelled events. In Beirut, Christian shops were sacked and the Danish consulate attacked by a crowd containing significant numbers of Syrian citizens, prompting observers to point out how Damascus had an interest in destabilizing the incumbent Lebanese prime minister.
⁸⁹
The cycle continued for several weeks until well over 100 people had been killed (mainly by police firing on crowds), the al-Qaeda senior leadership had issued a statement threatening reprisals against Denmark, and, according to polls in the West, several tens of millions more Europeans and Americans had been convinced that Islam was either a threat or incompatible with democracy or both.
⁹⁰
The issues raised by the cartoons affair – of free speech in largely secular societies, of the place of Muslims within European nations – were important and difficult ones. They were also unlikely to find an easy resolution in the near future. ‘We found ourselves involved in a story where people had to make tough choices about what they believed was right and take the consequences,’ Flemming Rose told the author. Abu Laban, the man who had fuelled the furore in the first place, explained that ‘though these riots were not on our agenda … it might be good for the West to know what happens when you insult Mohammed.’
⁹¹

TOUCHING THE BOTTOM

If you had marked with a red spot every violent incident justifiably linked to radical Islam on a map of the world in 2001, most would have been clustered on Afghanistan with a sprinkling elsewhere and four key markers on the east cost of the USA. In 2003, the affected areas would have been much greater. Though there would have been nothing in America, a thick red line would have stretched across North Africa, broadening into a bloody smear across Iraq and the Arabian peninsula, before arcing across south-west Asia and on into the Far East. The map would have shown a noticeable and worrying increase on 2001. Yet this increase would be nothing compared to what was coming. By late summer 2006, as the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approached, whole swathes of the globe would have been covered in red: red across parts of the UK; red across parts of western Europe; red across the Maghreb, where counter-terrorism services and newly re-energized radical movements in Morocco, Libya and Algeria played a deadly game of survival, torture, conspiracy and killing; red across Lebanon, where hopes of a democratic revolution had rapidly faded to be replaced by a vicious and hard-fought short war between Hezbollah and Israel; red across Gaza, where Hamas was increasingly powerful; red across Saudi Arabia, where authorities continued to round up militants responsible for a series of bloody attacks and from where hundreds continued to head for jihad in an Iraq that itself was apparently plunging deeper and deeper into a terrible savage violence; red across the Yemen, where senior militants planned attacks on oil refineries and Western interests; red across Pakistan and Afghanistan and into India, where for the first time in recent decades there were indications of problems of extremism among the nation’s 150-million-strong Muslim minority. More than 200 had died in bombings in Mumbai, the country’s commercial centre, organized by Pakistani-based groups and the local Students Islamic Movement of India working together. There was red too in Africa, where in the dust and gravel of the great empty wastes of the central Sahara troops from Mauritania and Niger backed by American special forces fought a running battle with a growing number of semi-criminal militants and where, in Somalia, Islamic militias in part inspired by the Taliban fleetingly seized Mogadishu before being forced out by Ethiopian troops. As for the Far East, in Thailand a long-running insurgency pitting Muslims of Malay ethnic stock against an often brutal and exploitative government seen as representing only the interests of the Buddhist majority population had flared back into life with radical Islam now replacing revolutionary Marxism as the dominant discourse. And in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority state, Jemaa Islamiya, though weakened, was still dangerous, and violence continued. Australian security services were extremely nervous and there were even reports – ludicrously overblown as it turned out – of activity in South America. It was a picture grimmer than had been seen for many decades, and little augured well for the future.

There had, of course, been a few glimmers of something more positive – or at least less negative. Actually quantifying the menace al-Qaeda posed was very hard, and the numbers involved in radical activism remained a minuscule fraction of Muslim communities, particularly in the West, and of the world’s Muslim population. In the USA, despite a few isolated influences, the better-integrated, -educated and -accepted Muslim community posed no obvious problem for the moment despite the febrile atmosphere. As more became known about the real reasons for the French riots of the autumn before and about the machinations of clerics and Middle Eastern regimes during the cartoons crisis, more measured analyses of what the two episodes meant for Europe began to roll back some of the hysteria. After all, the riots had led to only two deaths, and in Europe the cartoon crisis had seen nothing but largely legal protests through traditional channels.
⁹²
But the bad outweighed the good. The French riots may not have seen the worst predictions fulfilled, but community relations across much of Europe had nonetheless reached a long-term low, with evidence of a growing and potent trend of the consolidation of sectarian and ethnic identities. The cartoon crisis had shown the power of crowd violence and crowd psychology, how hysterical populism could resonate among anxious and insecure populations and the ease with which rumours and myths could become the received wisdom for millions. A major initiative launched by the Bush administration in 2004 to promote democracy in an overconfident bid to ‘drain the swamp’ of support for terrorism in the ‘Greater Middle East’ had foundered on the entrenched interests of local regimes and those who benefited from them and on the gap between what the Americans were promising and what was being delivered in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In Cairo in June 2005, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, had pledged a new era in relations with the Muslim world. For too long, Rice told her audience, the United States had pursued ‘stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East’. In the future, she said, ‘supporting the democratic aspirations of all people would be the touchstone of the administration’s policies in the region’.
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However, exactly what had been happening in Guantanamo, Bagram, Kandahar and in secret ‘black prisons’ was increasingly clear as was the true extent of the CIA’s rendition programme, and when it came to a genuine choice between supporting a long-favoured ally such as Hosni Mubarak or backing a nascent reform movement, it was fairly clear where the White House’s priorities lay. Polls showed that around 7 per cent of the global Muslim population – 100 million or so people – believed the 9/11 attacks were ‘
completely
justified’.
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Security authorities appeared at best nervous, at worst trigger-happy and paranoid. A young Brazilian called Jean Charles de Menezes had been shot dead by British anti-terror police at a tube station in London the day after the abortive 21/7 attacks – they mistook him for a fugitive bomber – and hundreds of innocent citizens continued to be caught in massive dragnets in the US and in Europe. And all the while the steady background drumbeat of increased and more extreme violence, horrific videos of executions viewed by hundreds of thousands and communiqués from the senior al-Qaeda leadership continued.
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As 2006 ground on, the 9/11 Wars seemed to be showing no signs of doing anything other than broadening to new parts of the globe, deepening further in terms of their intensity and intractability and causing more pain, destruction and hate all while inflicting long-term scars that would take decades to heal if they were to heal at all. As autumn turned to winter and the end of 2006 approached, there was one faint light just visible in the gloom. It shone from a very unlikely direction: Iraq.

PART FOUR

Iraq and the Turning: 2005–7

10
The Awakening

A BAD YEAR, A BOMB IN A SHRINE … AND CIVIL WAR

On the night of February 21, 2006, six men wearing police uniforms entered the huge al-Askariya shrine in the town of Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad.
¹
The leader of the group was a local Islamic extremist called Hathim al-Badri. With him were four Saudis and a Tunisian. The men rapidly overpowered the policemen guarding the complex, tied them up and then set about wiring several large bombs underneath its gilded main dome.
²