In June 2014, global public opinion was shocked and disgusted at the news that after conquering Mosul, the army of the Islamic State turned against Shia women and children in nearby villages. Using machine guns, they killed hundreds of innocents, dumping the bodies in mass graves. They looted Shia homes and confiscated Shia property. In the town of Tal Afar, for example, al Baghdadi’s warriors confiscated 4,000 houses as “spoils of war.”106 They bombed and burned shrines and mosques with the intent to wipe away all sign of Shia presence in their territory. This type of destruction has been repeated in every corner of the Caliphate to implement the religious cleansing that many believe the most radical interpretation of Salafism demands.
As we shall see, however, the bloody sectarian civil war that the Islamic State has initiated has less to do with the radical doctrine of Salafism and more with the use of genocidal warfare as a tactic to gain control of the insurgency, a strategy that al Zarqawi engineered in 2003, soon after coalition forces invaded Iraq.
Whatever the aim of these heinous acts, the word genocide seems well suited to describe what has been happening in recent years in Syria and, since the beginning of the summer of 2014, in Iraq. Indeed, today, to be a Shia or a member of a related sect, such as the Syrian Alawati, comes very close to being a Jew in Nazi Germany. Following in al Zarqawi’s footsteps, the Islamic State appears inclined to eradicate the Shia population from the Caliphate by any means possible, including extermination.
Against this backdrop, many believe that al Baghdadi’s involvement in Syria in 2011 had nothing to do with the removal of the Assad regime, but rather was motivated by a desire to ethnically cleanse the Alawati from the region destined to become the cradle of the new Caliphate. Again, the parallel with Nazi Germany and the supremacy of the Aryan race cannot be avoided. While Hitler justified the extermination of the Jews with a fictive eugenics, the Islamic State uses the concept of takfir, apostasy, to carry out the religious “purification” of Islam. Shias, and the followers of all creeds but Salafism, are heretics guilty of a sin so serious as to demand death.
Before exploring the true motivations for this genocide, it is imperative to understand the power that the concept of tafkir exercises in the collective imaginations of both Shias and Sunnis.
Al Takfir
The genesis of takfir can be traced back to the first violent clash between the Sunnis and Shias, the Great Fitna, the first civil war among Muslims. Ignited in 655 AD, a year before the assassination of Caliph Uthman, this feud broke when the followers of Mohammed fought over the issue of succession. Uthman was charged with apostasy by the supporters of Ali, who claimed that Ali was the direct descendent of the Prophet, hence he should be Caliph. The Great Fitna gave birth to the schism between the Shias, the followers of Ali, and the Sunnis, the followers of Uthman. Ever since, each of these two branches of Islam has accused the other of apostasy, of takfir, in its respective bids for political power.107
Since the seventh century, the concept of takfir has remained solidly anchored to political and economic issues. Possibly, because the Prophet was both a religious and a political leader, the boundaries between the material and spiritual domain within Islam were blurred from the start. Hence takfir became an instrument, a tool of politics dressed in religious garb. In the eighteenth century, for example, Abd al Wahhab, a Saudi preacher and the founder of the Wahhabi movement, accused the Ottoman Empire of apostasy; he claimed that it had departed from the true source of legitimacy, the word of God. The accusation of takfir that Wahhab launched at the Turks allowed the House of Saud to take up arms against its rulers, the Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula.108 For the next two centuries, the war of conquest conducted by two powerful allies, the House of Saud and the Wahhabists, was fought with economic and political weaponry dressed up as religious zeal.
Defining takfir, much like defining terrorism, has always been slippery, and this explains why the concept represents a powerful tool in the hands of Muslim armed organizations and sectarian powers to justify their claim to legitimacy. As we have seen in previous chapters, in the 1950s and 1960s members of the Muslim Brotherhood reformulated it to justify their opposition to Nasser, whom they claimed had pushed them into the underworld of illegality, a case of Sunnis employing takfir as a weapon against other Sunnis
Originally, the final aim of takfir was not the exclusion of heretics from the spiritual community, nor their extermination, but rather their eviction from the material community: removing them from the system of social rights and privileges and from the economy. Hence, they were pushed outside the boundaries of political legitimacy. The concept of the extermination of the Shias was not introduced until 2003 when al Zarqawi launched several suicide attacks against Shia targets.
The Blindness of the West
The first such suicide mission in Iraq took place on August 29, 2003, targeting the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf. This event represented a watershed in the Iraqi conflict, opening a second front against the Shia population. It had already been justified by a propaganda campaign launched months before and bankrolled by key Sunni players in the region, including Saudi Arabia and several oligarchs from the Gulf states. The Iraqi Shias were accused of having forged alliances with foreign powers seeking a regime change in Iraq, acts that Salafists considered mukaffir, or grounds for takfir.
Using a timeless, apocalyptic rhetoric, a parallel was drawn between the forthcoming invasion of Iraq and the thirteenth-century invasion of the Mongols. Images of Mongols and Tartars sacking the splendid city of Baghdad in 1258 are, for Sunni Iraqis, evocative of shameful memories.109
Soon after the fall of Saddam’s regime, a vast literature became available on the internet about the new Mongol invasion. In the virtual magazine Bashaer, the reader learned that, before reaching Baghdad, the Mongols had invaded the kingdom of Khwarizm (in today’s Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), just as Coalition forces had attacked Afghanistan before invading Iraq.110 Mongols and Tartars forged an alliance to wage war against Baghdad, as had the United States and the United Kingdom. In both circumstances, Baghdad was attacked from the east and west, the siege lasted twenty-one days, the military superiority of the invaders was enormous, and people were so afraid that they did not pray on the first Friday after the attack had begun. In the thirteenth century, as in modern Iraq, the rivalry between Shiite and Sunni weakened central power. Mongols and Tartars advanced with armies of mercenaries who participated in the invasion and sacked the city; Coalition forces stood by as their Iraqi supporters looted libraries and cultural institutions and killed women and children.
Bashaer’s analogy ends with a prediction drawn from the historical close of the Mongol invasion: two years after the sacking of Baghdad, the Syrian and Egyptian armies, together with groups of Arab volunteers, defeated the Mongols and the Tartars at Ayn Jalut. “We are sure that God will punish America for good,” the editorial concludes. “When will the new Ayn Jalut take place?”111 Today the Islamic State is carving out its Caliphate, having launched its offensive from Syria. In so doing it hopes to build toward a contemporary Ayn Jalut.
In the summer of 2003, al Zarqawi used the analogy of the Mongol invasion to justifiy his offensive against the Shia. As al Zarqawi explained it, Ibn al Alqami, the Shia vizier of Baghdad, had helped the Mongols in their conquest of the city, urging his followers to do the same.112 In a similar fashion, the Shias had conspired with the Americans and welcomed them into Iraq. This was the first time that sectarian infighting between Sunnis and Shias surfaced within the Iraqi insurgency.
The attack in Najaf, which marked the beginning of al Zarqawi’s active fight against the Shias in Iraq, represents the first manifestation of the clash between Sunnis and Shias, a civil war that the Islamic State still carries on. As al Zarqawi explained to bin Laden in a rich correspondence from 2003 to 2005, the fitna against the Shias was only a tactic to prevent the formation of a united secular front against Coalition forces from which the jihadist would be excluded, similar to the one that decades earlier had led the Iraqi struggle for independence from the United Kingdom.113
But in 2003, Coalition forces had failed to appreciate the significance of a war between Sunnis and Shias—a serious oversight. At the time, the motives for the bombing seemed incomprehensible, its perpetrators unknown. In the summer of 2003, Coalition forces were battling al Sadr’s militia—considered the primary armed opposition in Iraq. At that time, the Sunni insurgency, composed primarily of remnants of the Baath party and Muslim nationalists, did not pose a serious threat. Yet a close look at how Islamic radicalization had advanced in Iraq during the economic sanctions would have offered useful clues to the fact that a major civil and sectarian war was brewing, with the potential to destabilize the entire Muslim world.114
The West had not paid attention to the profound changes that swept over in Iraq during the economic sanctions of the 1990s. Under the patronage of Saddam Hussein, modern Salafism had taken hold across Iraq, and become a source of powerful radicalization. The new religious fervor of the Iraqi dictator aimed at appeasing the Sunni tribes in times of great economic difficulties. During the UN economic sanctions, religion had become a source of comfort for the impoverished Sunni middle class, the backbone of Saddam’s regime, and Islam a spiritual means of coping with prolonged economic hardship. At the same time, the radicalization of Iraq helped Saddam hide the economic failures of his regime. For example, by prohibiting women from working in public places and subsequently even at home, he quickly halved unemployment.
Unlike Western powers, jihadists knew that for a decade many in the Sunni Triangle had been harboring radical Salafist religious beliefs. Hence, soon after Saddam’s fall, they flocked to this area from all over the Middle East. Some were even linked to local Iraqi Salafist groups, all based inside the Sunni Triangle in places like Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul, which became prime breeding grounds for the jihadist Sunni insurgency. Al Zarqawi was among these new arrivals.
Much as Coalition forces had virtually ignored the changes that a decade of economic sanctions had produced in Iraq, those same nations ignored too the danger that the proliferation of jihadist and insurgent groups in Syria, bankrolled by Gulf sponsors, posed to the entire region. The West and the world conveniently dismissed the radicalization of Iraq and Syria as a product of religious fanaticism.
The Religious Alibi
It is surreal that Western powers believed that what is taking place in the Middle East is a war of religion motivated by a feud started in seventh-century Arabia. Indeed, when similar conflicts have been waged by Christians, religion has rarely been more than a pretext for politics. In fifteenth-century Europe, apostasy was a crime that commanded a gruesome death by fire. Europe was alight with the auto-da-fé, as bodies were burned in the name of God. Today, the Caliphate uses decapitation and crucifixion in a similar fashion.
The greatest danger faced by fifteenth-century Europe was the possibility of a civil war between Catholics and Protestants, one fought along religious lines, but with roots in the Continent’s ancient, vicious power struggles. Today, the accusation of apostasy, or takfir, against the Shiite population aims at triggering just such a civil war (fitna) in Iraq, Syria and beyond—that is, a war which at first glance appears to be motivated by religion, in which political and economic interests are obscured. But as in fifteenth-century Europe, the true motivations are political and economic and their roots are found in the power struggle to control the entire region.
The Caliphate is well aware that to build a new state, and to construct legitimacy through consensus, much more than a sleek campaign of religious propaganda promulgated on social media is needed. In particular, cleansing its territory of Shias from its territory offers many advantages for nation-building, guaranteeing the support of local Sunni populations, producing a more homogeneous populace with fewer opportunities for sectarianism, and freeing up resources to offer fighters as spoils of war. In a word, the extermination of the Shias makes things easier for the leadership of the Caliphate both economically and politically, while at the same time satisfying a deeply rooted desire for revenge among the Sunnis, which can only help build consensus within and loyalty to the new state.
The warfare, therefore, far from reflecting a religious mission, is in fact a political tactic implemented by a highly pragmatic leadership. Unlike the Taliban or the Nazis, the Islamic State shows flexibility: those willing to convert are welcomed into the new state, while those able to pay the jizyah, a tax linked to their heresy, can leave freely. The Caliphate is even willing to release hostages to foreign powers for ransoms.
Pragmatism springs from the hard task of nation-building, which is the Islamic State’s top priority. To successfully rule regions plagued by decades of war requires a complete reconstruction of all socio-economic infrastructures, keeping foreign Arab interests at bay while waging a war of conquest. More than a functioning religious alibi, what is most needed is a steady and large flow of money.
The Islamic State has transcended the mythology and rhetoric of previous jihadist groups. It has shown pragmatism and modernity in developing the strategies required to pursue its ambitious dream of nation-building. It has privatized the business of terrorism very quickly, gaining independence from its sponsors and establishing an economics not entirely dependent upon war. It has created partnerships with local Sunni tribes to quell opposition and share revenues generated by the exploitation of key resources. It has been circumspect, even clever—something we cannot say of the Assad or Maliki regime.
Footnotes:
106 “How Saudi Arabia helped Isis take over the north of Iraq,” http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/how-saudi-arabia-helped-isis-take-over-the-north-of-iraq-30435038.html.
107 Mike Schuster, “The Origins of the Shiite-Sunni Split,” http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2007/02/12/7332087/the-origins-of-the-shiite-sunni-split.
108 “The Saud Family and Wahhabi Islam,” http://countrystudies.us/saudi-arabia/7.htm.
109 Nassima Neggaz, “The Falls of Baghdad in 1258 and 2003: A Study in Sunni-Shi’i Clashing Memories,” https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/707405.
110 Bashaer, no. 26, December 27, 2004. For more information on the concept of Americans as the new Mongols see also “Iraqi Vice President: ‘Thousands of Suicide Attackers Will Fight Against US,’” Der Spiegel, February 1, 2003; Sam Hamod, “The New Mongols,” al Jazeera, November 19, 2004.
111 Ibid.
112 On April 28, 2003 Saddam Hussein declared that Bush had entered Baghdad with the help of Alqami; see al Quds al Arabi, April 30, 2003.
113 Loretta Napoleoni, “The Myth of Zarqawi,” http://www.antiwar.com/orig/napoleoni.php?articleid=7988.
114 Back in 2003, the presence of foreign fighters and of suicide bombers in the Sunni Triangle was one of the key elements that differentiated the Sunni resistance from the Shiite insurgency. Another was the backgrounds and motivations of the two groups. While the latter was essentially a class struggle, the former was a counter-Crusade against Coalition forces and a civil war against the Shias. From the outset, Moqtada al Sadr’s Shiite revolt had sought political recognition for his followers, theretofore excluded from key political positions, and a share of the political pie for al Sadr himself. Indeed, the Shias managed to attain full control of a “democratic Iraq;” Sunni insurgents, instead, were busy fighting a full-fledged war against occupying powers and, after the suicide attack against the Imam Ali Mosque, a civil war against Muslim heretics.