by PIERRE CONESA
MAP/The Iranian revolution of 1979 established the world’s first officially Islamic regime, but being exclusively Shia, it resurrected memories of the age-old conflict between Sunni and Shia. On coming to power, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini demanded that the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina be managed collectively. In Saudi Arabia this demand was seen as an intolerable challenge. (A young Sunni jihadist, Khaled Kelkal, involved in bombings in France in 1995, said he thought “Shiism was invented by the Jews to divide Islam” (1).) Violence against Shia by Saudi Wahhabis is nothing new: in 1802 the sack of Karbala (now in Iraq) led to the destruction of Shia shrines and tombs including that of the Prophet’s son-in-law Hussein, and the killing of many of the city’s inhabitants.
This war of religion is now tearing apart Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain. It surfaces sporadically in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In Malaysia, Shiism is officially banned. Around the world, indiscriminate bombings, some during pilgrimages, kill ten times as many Muslims as non-Muslims; the countries most affected are Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The umma (community of believers), which Salafist jihadis claim to defend, today covers a huge geographical area marked by numerous sectarian clashes. In this situation, it’s easy to see why Saudi Arabia is far quicker to use planes and ground troops to fight the Houthis in Yemen — whom they classify with the Shia — than to help the pro-Shia regime in Baghdad. It’s hard to see why the West should take sides, and how it can legitimise doing so.
The Kurds are at war to control their own destiny, especially in Turkey. The conflict began in the ruins of the Ottoman empire with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which divided Kurdistan among Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Rebellions in Turkish Kurdistan between 1925 and 1939 were crushed by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). Since the 1960s, all Kurdish uprisings in Turkey, Iraq and Iran have caused much bloodshed, to which the international community has appeared indifferent. Since 1984 this conflict has claimed more than 40,000 lives in Turkey, where 3,000 Kurdish villages have been destroyed. The material damage is estimated at $84bn (2).
No one should be surprised that Turkey has allowed would-be jihadists to travel freely to join the main forces with which they identify — the Al-Nusra Front and so-called Islamic State (ISIS) — because these are fighting the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, and the Syrian Kurds have very close links with Kurds in Turkey. The Turkish government considers the main threat to be the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is classed as a terrorist group by the European Union and the US and so cannot receive western military aid. As the only NATO member in the region and the only country with the ability to change the military situation on the ground, Turkey has ended up joining the anti-ISIS coalition. But its resources are concentrated on renewed clashes with the PKK, and it disapproves of the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds’ de facto independence.
A third conflict has divided rival Islamists since the Gulf war of 1990-1, and especially since the Arab uprisings of 2011. The best-known rivalry is between the Muslim Brotherhood (supported by Qatar) and the Salafists (supported by Saudi Arabia) in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. There is also a newer rivalry between Al-Qaida plus its franchises, and the followers of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al–Baghdadi. In the first months of 2014, ISIS overwhelmed the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, and 6,000 died (3). ISIS’s proclamation of a caliphate prompted many to rally to it, and the organisation now draws fighters from a hundred countries. By naming Al-Baghdadi as its principal enemy, the West has firmly steered would-be jihadists towards him.
Finally, Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad is fighting many opponents in a war that has killed 250,000 and created millions of refugees.
Shades of the colonial era
The battle the West is waging looks like a new episode in a much older war, which tries to justify itself historically in a way that is intolerable to people in the region. The conflict goes back to the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the division of the region between France and Britain after the fall of the Ottoman empire. It relates to the policies of Winston Churchill, who, as British secretary of state for war, had Kurdish towns and villages razed (and bombed with mustard gas) and two-thirds of the Kurdish inhabitants of Sulaymaniyah killed, and violently repressed Iraqi Shias between 1921 and 1925. It recalls the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-8, in which the West and the Soviet Union supported the attacker, Iraq, and imposed an embargo on the victim, Iran. Barack Obama is now the fourth US president to order airstrikes in Iraq, already wounded by 23 years of western military strikes. After the US-led invasion, between 2003 and 2011, nearly 120,000 civilians died (4). In 2006 the medical journal The Lancet estimated 655,000 deaths due to the war, with 500,000 caused by the international embargo between 1991 and 2002. Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright told CBS in 1996 the embargo had been “worth it”.
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