The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising (6 page)

Certainly, Shia leaders are doubtful that the Saudi U-turn is happening at a deep enough level. Yousif al-Khoei, who heads the Center for Academic Shia Studies, says: “The recent Saudi fatwas de-legitimizing suicide killings is a positive step, but the Saudis need a serious attempt to reform their educational system which currently demonizes Shias, Sufis, Christians, Jews and other sects and religions. They need to stop the preaching of hate from so many satellite stations, and not allow a free ride for their preachers of hate on the social media.”

Shia leaders cite a number of fatwas issued by Saudi clerics targeting them as non-Muslims. One such declares: “To call for closeness between Shia and Sunni is similar to closeness between Islam and Christianity.”

Christian churches are considered by adherents of Wahhabism as places of idolatry and polytheism because of pictures of Jesus and his mother and the use of the cross, all of which show that Christians do not worship a single God. This is not a view confined to Saudi Arabia: in Bahrain, 71 Sunni clerics demanded that the government withdraw its permission for a Christian church to be built. When the al-Khalifa royal family crushed pro-democracy protests by the Shia majority in Bahrain in 2011, the first act of the security forces was to destroy several dozen mosques, shrines, and graves of Shia holy men, on the grounds that they had not received the correct building permits.

The “Wahhabisation” of mainstream Sunni Islam is one of the most dangerous developments of our era. Ali Allawi, the historian and authority on sectarianism, says that in country after country, Sunni communities “have adopted tenets of Wahhabism that [were] not initially part of their canon.” A crucial feature in the rise of Wahhabism is the financial and political might of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Allawi says that if, for example, a pious Muslim wants to found a seminary in Bangladesh, there are not many places he can obtain £20,000 other than from Saudi Arabia. But if the same person wants to oppose Wahhabism, then he will have “to fight with limited resources.” The result is deepening sectarianism as Shia are targeted as non-Muslims, and non-Muslims of all descriptions are forced to flee, so that countries such as Iraq and Syria are being emptied of Christians who have lived there for almost 2,000 years.

Dr. Allawi says that it is naïve to imagine that small Shia minorities in countries such as Malaysia or Egypt were not frowned upon in the past by the majority Sunni, but it is only recently that they have been ostracized and persecuted. He says that many Shia now live with a sense of impending doom, “like Jews in Germany in 1935.” As with European anti-Semitic propaganda down the ages, Shia are demonized for supposedly carrying out abominable practices such as ritual incest. In a village near Cairo in 2013, four Shia men were murdered by a mob while carrying out their usual religious ceremonies in a private house.

“The Wahhabi try to ignore the entire corpus of Islamic teaching over the last 1,400 years,” says Dr. Allawi. The ideology of al-Qa‘ida-type movements in Iraq and Syria is not the same as Wahhabism. But their beliefs are similar, just carried to a greater extreme. There are bizarre debates about whether it is forbidden to clap or whether women should wear bras. As with Boko Haram in Nigeria, militants in Iraq and Syria see no religious prohibition in enslaving women as spoils of war.

There are signs that the Saudi rulers may now be coming to regret giving quite so much support to the jihadis trying to overthrow President Assad in Syria. For instance, early in 2014 they invited the Iranian foreign minister to visit the kingdom. But it may be too late: having heard their government denounce Assad as the root of all evil in Syria, Saudi jihadis will see it as a betrayal and the height of hypocrisy if that same government now threatens them with prison terms when they return home.

The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria over the past twelve years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition has been hard-core jihadi fighters. Whatever the real issues at stake, the interventions have been presented by politicians as primarily humanitarian, in support of popular forces against dictators and police states. Despite apparent military successes, in none of these cases have the local opposition and their backers succeeded in consolidating power or establishing stable states.

But there is another similarity that connects the four conflicts: more than most armed struggles, they have all been propaganda wars in which newspaper, television, and radio journalists played a central role. In every war there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during these four campaigns the outside world has been left with misconceptions, even about the identity of the victors and the defeated.

In 2001, reports of the Afghan war gave the impression that the Taliban had been beaten decisively, even though there had been very little fighting. In 2003, there was a belief in the West that Saddam Hussein’s forces had been crushed when in fact the Iraqi army, including the units of the elite Special Republican Guard, had simply disbanded and gone home. In Libya in 2011, the rebel militiamen, so often shown on television firing truck-mounted heavy machine guns in the general direction of the enemy, had only a limited role in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, who was mostly brought down by NATO air strikes. In Syria in 2011 and 2012, foreign leaders and journalists repeatedly and vainly predicted the imminent defeat of Bashar al-Assad.

These misperceptions explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001, I was able to drive, nervously but safely, from Kabul to Kandahar. But when I tried to make the same journey in 2011, I could go no farther south on the main road than the last police station on the outskirts of Kabul. In Tripoli two years ago, hotels were filled to capacity with journalists covering Gaddafi’s fall and the triumph of the rebel militias. But state authority still hasn’t been restored there. In the summer of 2013, Libya almost stopped exporting oil because the main ports on the Mediterranean had been seized as a result of a mutiny among militiamen. The Prime Minister, Ali Zeidan, threatened to bomb “from the air and the sea” the oil tankers the militiamen were using to sell oil on the black market. Soon Zeidan himself was forced to flee the country

Libya’s descent into anarchy was scarcely covered by the international media. They had long since moved on to Syria, and more recently to Egypt. Iraq, home a few years ago to so many foreign news bureaus, has also dropped off the media map, although up to a thousand Iraqis are killed each month, mostly as a result of the bombing of civilian targets. When it rained for a few days in Baghdad in January, the sewer system, supposedly restored at a cost of $7 billion, couldn’t cope: some streets were knee-deep in dirty water and sewage. In Syria, many opposition fighters who had fought heroically to defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves.

It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term “war reporter,” though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho overtones, it gives the misleading impression that war can be adequately described by focusing on military combat. Irregular or guerrilla wars are always intensely political, and none more so than the strange stop-and-go conflicts that followed from 9/11. This doesn’t mean that what happened on the battlefield was insignificant, but only that it requires interpretation. In 2003, television showed columns of Iraqi tanks smashed and on fire after US air strikes on the main highway north of Baghdad. If it hadn’t been for the desert background, viewers could have been watching pictures of the defeated German army in Normandy in 1944. But I climbed into some of the tanks and could see that they had been abandoned long before they were hit. This mattered because it showed that the Iraqi army wasn’t prepared to fight and die for Saddam. It also pointed to the likely future of the allied occupation. Iraqi soldiers, who didn’t see themselves as having been defeated, expected to keep their jobs in post-Saddam Iraq, and were enraged when the Americans dissolved their army. Well-trained officers flooded into the resistance, with devastating consequences for the occupying forces: a year later the Americans controlled only islands of territory in Iraq.

In one respect, war reporting is easier than other types of journalism: the melodrama of events drives the story and attracts an audience. It may be risky at times, but the correspondent talking to a camera with exploding shells and blazing military vehicles behind him knows his report will feature prominently in any newscast. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old American media adage. The drama of battle inevitably dominates the news, but is oversimplified if only part of what is happening is disclosed. These oversimplifications were especially stark and deceptive in Afghanistan and Iraq, when they dovetailed with political propaganda that demonized first the Taliban and later Saddam Hussein as evil incarnate. They helped cast the conflict in black and white, as a struggle between good and evil, something that was particularly easy in the US amidst the hysterical atmosphere following 9/11. The crippling inadequacies of the opposition in these countries were simply ignored.

By 2011, the complexity of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was evident to journalists in Baghdad and Kabul, if not necessarily to their editors in London and New York. But by then the reporting of the wars in Libya and Syria was demonstrating a different, though equally potent, form of naïveté. A version of the spirit of 1968 prevailed: antagonisms that predated the Arab Spring were suddenly said to be obsolete; a brave new world was being created at hectic speed. Commentators optimistically suggested that, in the age of satellite television and the internet, traditional forms of repression—censorship, imprisonment, torture, and execution—could no longer secure a police state’s power; they might even be counterproductive. State control of information and communication had been subverted by blogs and mobile phones; YouTube provided the means to expose, in the most graphic and immediate way, the crimes and violence of security forces.

In March 2011, mass arrests and torture effortlessly crushed the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Innovations in information technology may have changed the odds marginally in favor of the opposition, but not enough to prevent counterrevolution, as the military coup in Egypt on July 3, 2013 underscored. The initial success of street demonstrations led to over-confidence and excessive reliance on spontaneous action; the need for leadership, organization, unity, and policies that amounted to more than a vague humanitarian agenda all went by the wayside. History, including the histories of their own countries, had little to teach this generation of radicals and would-be revolutionaries. They drew no lessons from what had happened when Nasser seized power in Egypt in 1952, and didn’t ask whether the Arab uprisings of 2011 might have parallels with the European revolutions of 1848, easy victories that were swiftly reversed. Many members of the intelligentsia in Libya and Syria seemed to live and think within the echo chamber of the internet. Few expressed practical ideas about the way forward.

Conviction that a toxic government is the root of all evil is the public position of most oppositions, but it is dangerous to trust one’s own propaganda. The Iraqi opposition genuinely believed that Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic problems stemmed from Saddam and that once he was gone all would be well. The opposition in Libya and Syria believed that the regimes of Gaddafi and Assad were so demonstrably bad that it was counterrevolutionary to question whether what came after them would be better. Foreign reporters have by and large shared these opinions. I recall mentioning some of the failings of the Libyan militiamen to a Western journalist: “Just remember who the good guys are,” she replied reprovingly.

Good guys they may have been, but there was something troubling about the ease with which oppositionists provided media-friendly locations, whether in Tahrir Square or at the frontlines in Libya. Protesters in Benghazi would hold up placards written in perfect English, which they often could not read themselves, for the benefit of television viewers. At Ajdabiya, two hours’ drive along the main coast road south of Benghazi, foreign journalists often outnumbered opposition fighters, and cameramen had to maneuver their correspondents so the predominance of the press wasn’t evident to their audience. The main danger there was being run over by a pickup truck fitted with a heavy machine gun: the drivers often panicked when a shell exploded in the distance. The Libyan militiamen were effective when they were fighting for their own cities and towns, but without an air umbrella they wouldn’t have lasted more than a few weeks. Media focus on colorful skirmishes diverted attention from the central fact that Gaddafi was overthrown by military intervention on the part of the US, Britain, and France.

There is nothing surprising about all this. Public appearances by Western leaders with smiling children or cheering soldiers are invariably contrived to show them in a sympathetic light. Why shouldn’t Arab rebels have the same public relations skills? The problem was the way war reporters so quickly accepted and publicized opposition atrocity stories. In Libya one of the most influential stories described the mass rape of women in rebel areas by government troops acting on orders from above. A Libyan psychologist claimed to have distributed seventy thousand questionnaires in rebel-controlled areas, out of which sixty thousand were returned. Some 259 women volunteered that they had been raped; the psychologist said she had interviewed 140 of them. That such precise statistics could have been collected in the anarchy of eastern Libya was implausible, but her story was uncritically repeated, doing much to turn Gaddafi into a pariah. Largely ignored were reports a few weeks later from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a UN commission saying that there was no evidence for the story, which appears to have been nothing more than a highly successful propaganda ploy. On another occasion, the rebels showed off the bodies of eight government soldiers: they claimed the men had been executed by their own side for trying to defect to the opposition. Later, Amnesty International unearthed a video showing the eight men alive after being captured by the rebels; clearly, they had been killed soon afterwards and their deaths blamed on pro-Gaddafi forces.

The essential ingredients of a good atrocity story are that it should be shocking and not immediately refutable. In 1990, it was widely reported that Kuwaiti babies had been tipped from their hospital incubators by invading Iraqi soldiers and left to die on the floor. Immensely influential at the time, the story was only discredited when the person who claimed to have witnessed it turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington; she had not been in the hospital at the time. Reporters may have their suspicions, but they can seldom disprove such tales straightaway. They also know that news editors don’t welcome being told that a colorful news story, which their competitors will very likely run, is probably false. It’s easy to put the blame on the “fog of war” and it’s true that fighting involves confusing and fast-moving events, reports of which can’t be checked. Everybody in a war has a more-than-usual strong motive for misrepresenting their achievements and failures, and it’s usually difficult to disprove their claims. This is scarcely new. “Did it ever occur to you, sir, what an opportunity a battlefield affords liars?” the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson once remarked to an aide.

When people are shooting at one another, it is, of course, often dangerous to hang around long enough to establish what’s really going on. In Syria in June 2014, I was interviewing the governor of Homs when he unexpectedly claimed that the Syrian army had taken over a town on the Lebanese border called Tal Kalakh, previously held by the opposition. He suggested I go there to see for myself. The opposition was saying that fierce fighting was continuing and al-Jazeera reported that smoke was rising from the town. I spent three hours driving around Tal Kalakh, which was certainly under full government control, and didn’t hear a shot fired or see any smoke. Part of the town had been badly damaged by shelling and the streets were empty—though a government sympathizer claimed this was because “people are taking their siesta.”

While in Damascus I stayed in the Christian district of Bab Touma, which was being hit by mortar bombs fired from rebel-held districts. A friend rang to say that four people had been killed by a suicide bomber a few hundred yards away. I went there at once and saw a body under a white sheet; on the other side of the street was a small crater that looked as if it had been made by an exploding mortar round. Syrian state television kept claiming that the dead man was a suicide bomber who had been targeting a Christian church; they even named him. For once, it was possible to know exactly what had happened: CCTV footage taken from the street showed a falling mortar bomb outlined for an instant against the white shirt of a passerby. He was killed instantly and wrongly identified as the bomber. Syrian TV later apologized for its mistake.

In each of these cases, political bias and simple error combined to produce a misleading version of events, but it had little to do with the “fog of war.” All it really establishes is that there is no alternative to first-hand reporting. Journalists rarely fully admit to themselves or others the degree to which they rely on secondary and self-interested sources. The problem is compounded because people caught up in newsworthy events often convince themselves that they know more than they do. Survivors of suicide bombings in Baghdad would describe to me in minute detail the bomber’s facial expression moments before he detonated his explosives, forgetting that if they had been that close they would be dead. The best witnesses were small boys selling cigarettes, who were always on the lookout for customers.