PREFACE
FOR OUR DRIVE into northern Iraq, Dr. Azar Mirkhan changed from his Western clothes into the traditional dress of a Kurdish Peshmerga warrior: a tight-fitting, short woolen jacket over his shirt, baggy pantaloons, and a wide cummerbund. He also thought to bring along certain accessories. These included a combat knife that tucked neatly into the waist of his cummerbund, a loaded .45 automatic, and sniper binoculars. Should matters turn particularly ticklish, his M4 assault rifle lay within easy reach on the backseat, with extra magazines in the footwell. The doctor shrugged. “It’s a bad neighborhood.”
Our destination that day in May 2015 was the place of Azar’s greatest sorrow, one that haunted him still. The previous year, ISIS gunmen had cut a murderous swath through northern Iraq, brushing away an Iraqi army vastly greater in size, and then turned their attention to the Kurds. Azar had divined precisely where the ISIS killers were about to strike next, knew that tens of thousands of civilians stood helpless in their path, but had been unable to get anyone to heed his warnings. In desperation, he had loaded up his car with guns and raced to the scene, only to come to a spot in the road where he saw he was just hours too late. “It was obvious,” Azar said, “so obvious. But no one wanted to listen.” On that day, we were returning to the place where the fabled Kurdish warriors of northern Iraq had been outmaneuvered and put to flight, where Dr. Azar Mirkhan had failed to avert a colossal tragedy—and where, for many more months to come, he would continue to battle ISIS.
Azar is a practicing urologist, but even without the firepower and warrior getup, the forty-one-year-old would exude the aura of a hunter. He walks with a curious loping gait that produces little sound, and in conversation has a tendency to tuck in his chin and stare from beneath heavy-lidded eyes, rather as if he were sighting down a gun. With his prominent nose and jet-black pompadour, he bears a passing resemblance to a young Johnny Cash.
The weaponry also complemented the doctor’s personal philosophy, as expressed in a scene from one of his favorite movies, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, when a bathing Eli Wallach is caught off guard by a man seeking to kill him. Rather than immediately shoot Wallach, the would-be assassin goes into a triumphant soliloquy, allowing Wallach to kill him first.
“ ‘When you have to shoot, shoot; don’t talk,’ ” Azar quoted from the movie. “That is us Kurds now. This is not the time to talk, but to shoot.”
Azar is one of six people whose lives are chronicled in these pages. The six are from different regions, different cities, different tribes, different families, but they share, along with millions of other people in and from the Middle East, an experience of profound unraveling. Their lives have been forever altered by upheavals that began in 2003 with the American invasion of Iraq, and then accelerated with the series of revolutions and insurrections that have collectively become known in the West as the Arab Spring. They continue today with the depredations of ISIS, with terrorist attacks, and with failing states.
For each of these six people, the upheavals were crystallized by a specific, singular event. For Azar Mirkhan, it came on the road to Sinjar, when he saw that his worst fears had come true. For Laila Soueif in Egypt, it came when a young man separated from a sprinting mass of protesters to embrace her, and she thought she knew the revolution would succeed. For Majdi el-Mangoush in Libya, it came as he walked across a deadly no-man’s-land and, overwhelmed by a sudden euphoria, felt free for the first time in his life. For Khulood al-Zaidi in Iraq, it came when, with just a few menacing words from a former friend, she finally understood that everything she had worked for was gone. For Majd Ibrahim in Syria, it came when, watching an interrogator search his cell phone for the identity of his “controller,” he knew his own execution was drawing nearer by the moment. For Wakaz Hassan in Iraq, a young man with no apparent interest in politics or religion, it came on the day ISIS gunmen showed up in his village and offered him a choice.
As disparate as these moments were, for each of these six people they represented a crossing-over, passage to a place from which there will never be a return. Such changes, of course—multiplied by millions of lives—are also transforming their homelands, the greater Middle East, and, by inevitable extension, the entire world.
But for all the abruptness with which these changes occurred, they didn’t come completely without warning. History is always a result of seemingly random currents and incidents, the significance of which can be determined—or, more often, disputed—only in hindsight. In trying to parse out what has happened in the Middle East, one can point to some clues that are very recent, others that are centuries old.
WHILE ABSENTLY FIDDLING with his homemade fly whisk—several sprigs of dried rosemary held together with a piece of aluminum foil—the sixty-year-old man in the brown-tinted sunglasses gazed meditatively up at the shadowing palm fronds.
“The history of mankind is not fixed,” he muttered after a time, “and it does not go at one pace. Sometimes it moves at a steady pace, and sometimes it is very fast. It is very flexible all the time.” He set the fly whisk on the cheap plastic patio table and turned in my direction. “The past stage was the era of nationalism—of the identity of one nation—and now, suddenly, that has changed. It is the era of globalization, and there are many new factors which are mapping out the world.”
On the topic of changing times, the man in the sunglasses could speak with a certain authority. He was Muammar el-Qaddafi, the dictator of Libya, and by the time I met with him in October 2002, he had successfully navigated the shifting geopolitical shoals of the region to remain in power for thirty-three years. That agility also helped explain my presence at the Bab al-Azizia barracks in Tripoli. By late 2002, the drumbeat for war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq was reaching a crescendo in Washington, and there was talk in President Bush’s inner circle that, once the Iraqi despot was dispensed with, the troublesome Libyan would be next. To forestall that, Qaddafi had recently taken a number of steps to bring himself in from the cold, and these included a fledgling public relations push. That autumn, the famously reclusive dictator granted some of his first foreign media interviews in over a decade.
But if by his actions Qaddafi exhibited some nervousness about his relations with the Bush administration, he displayed none at all when it came to his standing with the Libyan people. After over three decades in power, he had become such an omnipresent figure in the lives of his countrymen that they rarely even referred to him by name anymore. He was simply “the Leader.” One measure of his confidence showed when, after I asked how he wished to be remembered, he chose to have some fun with the answer, turning it into a joke both self-aware and cynical. “I would hope that people would feel that I haven’t been selfish,” he began, “that I have even forsaken myself in order to please and to help others. I do hope people would say that.” He leaned close and gave a low chuckle. “And I do hope that I have actually been like this in reality.”
The irony, of course, is that the Americans didn’t come for Qaddafi—at least not then. Instead, the Leader would remain on his perch in Tripoli for another decade, only to be done in by a danger he didn’t foresee: a revolt by his own people. In the series of popular insurrections and revolutions that began sweeping the Middle East in the first days of 2011, Muammar el-Qaddafi was destined to be one of its most famous—and most gruesomely dispatched—victims, murdered by a lynch mob on the shoulder of a Libyan highway.
THE EVENT CREDITED with setting off the Arab Spring could hardly have been more improbable: the suicide by immolation of a poor Tunisian fruit-and-vegetable seller in protest over government harassment. By the time Mohamed Bouazizi succumbed to his injuries on January 4, 2011, the protesters who initially took to Tunisia’s streets calling for economic reform were demanding the resignation of the nation’s strongman president of twenty-three years, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. In subsequent days, those demonstrations grew in size and intensity—and then they jumped Tunisia’s border. By the end of January, antigovernment protests had erupted in Algeria, Egypt, Oman, and Jordan. That was only the beginning. By November, just ten months after Bouazizi’s death, four long-standing Middle Eastern dictatorships had been toppled, a half dozen other suddenly embattled regimes had undergone shake-ups or had promised reforms, and antigovernment demonstrations—some peaceful, others violent—had spread in an arc across the Arab world from Mauritania to Bahrain.
By the time of the Arab Spring revolts, my familiarity with the Middle East dated back nearly forty years. As a young boy in the early 1970s, I had traveled through the region with my father, a journey that sparked both my fascination with Islam and my love of the desert. The Middle East was also the site of my first foray into journalism when, in the summer of 1983, I hopped on a plane to the embattled city of Beirut in hopes of finding work as a stringer. In journalistic pursuits over the subsequent years, I had embedded with Israeli commandos conducting raids in the West Bank; dined with Janjaweed raiders in Darfur; interviewed the families of suicide bombers. Ultimately, I took a five-year hiatus from magazine journalism to write a book on the historical origins of the modern Middle East.
From these experiences, I initially welcomed the convulsions of the Arab Spring—indeed, I believed they were long overdue. In my professional travels over the decades, I had found no other corner of the globe to rival the Arab world in its utter stagnation. While Qaddafi set a record for longevity in the area with his forty-two-year dictatorship, it was not that different elsewhere; by 2011, any Egyptian younger than forty-one—and that was roughly 75 percent of the population—had only ever known two heads of state, while a Syrian of the same age had lived his or her entire life under the control of the father-and-son al-Assad dynasty. Along with political stasis, in many Arab nations most levers of economic power lay in the hands of small oligarchies or aristocratic families; for everyone else, about the only path to financial security was to wrangle a job within fantastically bloated public-sector bureaucracies, government agencies that were often themselves monuments to nepotism and corruption. While the sheer amount of money pouring into oil-rich, sparsely populated nations like Libya or Kuwait might allow for a degree of economic trickle-down prosperity, this was not at all the case in more populous but resource-poor nations like Egypt or Syria, where poverty and underemployment were severe and—given the ongoing regional population explosion—ever-worsening problems.
What I also found heartening in the Arab Spring’s early days was the focus of the people’s wrath. One of the Arab world’s most prominent and debilitating features, I had long felt, was a culture of grievance. These societies seemed to me to be defined less by what people aspired to than by what they opposed. They were anti-Zionist, anti-West, anti-imperialist. For generations, the region’s dictators had been adroit at channeling public frustration toward these external “enemies” and away from their own misrule. But with the Arab Spring, that old playbook suddenly didn’t work anymore. Instead, and for the first time on such a mass scale, the people of the Middle East were directing their rage squarely at the regimes themselves.
Then it all went horribly wrong. By the summer of 2012, two of the “freed” nations—Libya and Yemen—were sliding into anarchy and factionalism, while the struggle against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria had descended into vicious civil war. In Egypt the following summer, the nation’s first democratically elected government was overthrown by the military, a coup cheered on by many of the same young activists who had taken to the streets to demand democracy two years earlier. The only truly bright spot among the Arab Spring nations was the place where it started, Tunisia, but even there, terrorist attacks and feuding politicians were a constant threat to a fragile government. Amid the chaos, the remnants of Osama bin Laden’s old outfit, Al Qaeda, gained a new lease on life, resurrected the war in Iraq, and then spawned an even more murderous offshoot: Islamic State, or ISIS.
WHY DID IT turn out this way? Why did a movement begun with such high promise go so terribly awry?
The difficulty in coming up with a single answer is the very scattershot nature of the Arab Spring, the lack of apparent pattern between those nations radically transformed by its upheavals and others, often right next door, that were barely touched. Some of the nations in crisis were wealthy by regional standards (Libya), others crushingly poor (Yemen). Some countries with comparatively benign dictatorships (Tunisia) blew up along with some of the area’s most brutal (Syria). The same wide range of political and economic disparity is seen in the nations that remained stable.
If not a complete answer, at least a clue came to me when I recalled a conversation I had with a Jordanian man in the early days of the turmoil.
I had hired Hassan as my driver for an extended tour of Jordan, and over the course of five days together we became friends. Gregarious and well educated, he prided himself on his modernity and took every opportunity to denounce the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. One striking facet of Hassan’s personality was an abiding adoration of Jordan’s king, Abdullah II, his face lighting up at the mere mention of his name. But even this was tied to Hassan’s modernist outlook. “He is very progressive and has done many things to enlighten the people,” he would say of Abdullah. “Because of him, Jordan is now the most Western of all Arab nations.”
In view of such pronouncements, I was caught a bit off guard by Hassan’s comments when, one evening, we fell to discussing the role of tribalism in the region and the braking effect it often exerted on the liberal ideas he embraced. After agreeing this was an enormous problem, Hassan took a deep pull on his cigarette. “I am not at all proud to say this,” he said, “but if ever I were forced to choose between the king and my family”—by which he meant his tribe—“then of course I would choose my family. In fact, it isn’t even a matter of choice. Whatever the reason, if my family went against the state, then so would I.”
It was a statement I might have expected in Yemen or rural Sudan, but not from this “modern man” in one of the Middle East’s most cosmopolitan nations. But it was a reminder that in much of the Arab world, the ancient pull of one’s tribe, of one’s blood, still remains just beneath the surface of things. It also offered a starting point, an organizing principle of sorts, with which to consider the Arab Spring.
While most of the twenty-two nations that make up the Arab world have been buffeted to some degree by the Arab Spring, of the six most profoundly affected—Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen—none are monarchies. All are republics. Might this reveal inherent fault lines in the structure of Arab republics? Put another way, as corrupt and repressive as many of the Arab monarchies are, could it be that they withstood the pressures of the Arab Spring because of a kind of internal tribal compact that some of their republican neighbors lacked?
These questions become especially salient with regard to the three Arab republics that have disintegrated so completely as to raise doubt that they will ever again exist as functioning states: Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Although separated by geography, history, economics, and any number of other factors, what all three share is membership in that small list of Arab countries artificially created by Western imperial powers in the early twentieth century. In each, little thought was given to national coherence, and even less to tribal or sectarian divisions. Certainly, these same internal divisions exist in many of the region’s other republics, as well as in its monarchies, but it would seem undeniable that those two elements operating in concert—the lack of an intrinsic sense of national identity, joined to a form of government that supplanted the traditional organizing principle of society—left Iraq, Syria, and Libya especially vulnerable when the storms of change descended.
From this, it would appear that Muammar el-Qaddafi had it precisely backward when he opined that the age of nationalism was giving way to a new age of globalization. Instead, in “artificial” Arab countries like his own, the Arab Spring meant a reversion to the most basic of social orders, in which ancient loyalties would sweep away not only him but also the very nationalism he had tried to instill. In fact, all but one of the six people profiled in this book are from these artificial states, and their individual stories are rooted in the larger story of how those nations came to be.
In the context of this history, the 2011 suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi seems less the catalyst for the Arab Spring than a culmination of tensions and contradictions that had been simmering under the surface of Arab society for a long time. Indeed, throughout the Arab world, residents are far more likely to point to a different event, one that occurred eight years before Bouazizi’s death, as the moment when the process of disintegration began: the American invasion of Iraq. Many even point to a singular image that embodied that upheaval. It came on the afternoon of April 9, 2003, in the Firdos Square of downtown Baghdad, when, with the help of a winch and an American M88 armored recovery vehicle, a towering statue of Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was pulled to the ground.
While today that image is remembered in the Arab world with resentment—the symbolism of this latest Western intervention in their region was quite inescapable—at the time it spurred something far more nuanced. For the first time in their lives, what Syrians and Libyans and other Arabs just as much as Iraqis saw was that a figure as seemingly immovable as Saddam Hussein could be cast aside, that the political and social paralysis that had gripped their collective lands for so long might actually be broken. Not nearly so apparent was that these strongmen had actually exerted considerable energy to bind up their nations, and in their absence the ancient forces of tribalism and sectarianism would begin to exert their own centrifugal pull. Even less apparent was how these forces would both attract and repel the United States, tarnishing its power and prestige in the region to an extent from which it might never recover.
Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi in Tripoli, October 2002
But at least one man saw this quite clearly. For much of 2002, the Bush administration had laid the groundwork for the Iraq invasion by accusing Saddam Hussein of pursuing a weapons-of-mass-destruction program and obliquely linking him to the September 11 attacks of Osama bin Laden. In my interview with Muammar el-Qaddafi that October, six months before Firdos Square, I had asked him who would benefit if the Iraq invasion actually occurred. The Libyan dictator had a habit of theatrically pondering before answering my questions, but his reply to that one was instantaneous. “Bin Laden,” he said. “There is no doubt about that. And Iraq could end up becoming the staging ground for Al Qaeda, because if the Saddam government collapses, it will be anarchy in Iraq. If that happens, actions against Americans will be considered jihad.”
THIS BOOK IS in the form of six individual narratives, which, woven within the larger strands of history, aim to provide a tapestry of an Arab world in revolt. The account is divided into five parts, which proceed chronologically. Along with introducing several of these individuals, part 1 focuses on three historical factors that are crucial to understanding the current crisis: the inherent instability of the Middle East’s artificial states; the precarious position in which U.S.-allied Arab governments have found themselves when compelled to pursue policies bitterly opposed by their own people; and American involvement in the de facto partitioning of Iraq twenty-five years ago, an event little remarked upon at the time—and barely more so since—that helped call into question the very legitimacy of the modern Arab nation-state. Part 2 is primarily devoted to the American invasion of Iraq and to how it laid the groundwork for the Arab Spring revolts. Part 3 follows the explosive outcome of those revolts as they occurred in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. By part 4, which chronicles the rise of ISIS, and part 5, which tracks the resulting exodus from the region, we are squarely in the present, at the heart of the world’s gravest concern.
I have tried to tell a human story, one that has its share of heroes, even some glimmers of hope. But what follows, ultimately, is a dark warning. Today the tragedy and violence of the Middle East have spilled from its banks, with nearly a million Syrians and Iraqis flooding into Europe to escape the wars in their homelands, and terrorist attacks in Dhaka, Paris, and beyond. With the ISIS cause being invoked by mass murderers in San Bernardino and Orlando and Munich, the issues of immigration and terrorism have become conjoined in many Westerners’ minds, and proved a key political flash point in both the June 2016 Brexit vote in Great Britain and the 2016 American presidential election. In some sense, it is fitting that the turmoil in the Arab world has its roots in the First World War, for like that war, it is a regional crisis that has come quickly and widely—with little seeming reason or logic—to influence events at every corner of the globe.