Back to Fallujah

Published January 8, 2014

ONE can only wonder whether there was an element of déjà vu involved in this week’s urgent despatch of armaments by the US to the Iraqi military as the latter prepared to re-conquer Fallujah.

After all, it was 10 years ago that four American contractors working for Blackwater were ambushed by one of the many armed groups resisting the US occupation, and their charred corpses were subsequently suspended from a bridge across the Euphrates. This grotesque display led to some of the most vicious battles of the Iraq war. It was several months before Fallujah could be retaken.

The names Anbar and Ramadi — the western governate encompassing about one-third of Iraq, and its capital city — may also ring a bell. The province was insurgency central until the occupying army coerced, cajoled and bribed tribal leaders into what was dubbed the Sunni Awakening, which made it much harder for the outfit known as Al Qaeda in Iraq to use the area as a base for its operations.

That modus vivendi was falling apart even before the US completed its military withdrawal, with the successor regime of Nouri al-Maliki reluctant to cultivate the tribal sheikhs it viewed as sectarian adversaries, just as it diverged more broadly from American recipes for relative Shia-Sunni harmony.

Resentments have consequently been building up, and the attack by government forces on a Sunni protest camp in Ramadi — not for the first time — brought matters to a head. It also offered an opportunity for the reincarnation of Al Qaeda in Iraq, now known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham (ISIS), which stepped into the breach and occupied large parts of Fallujah and relatively smaller segments of Ramadi.

Maliki responded by threatening military action unless local forces drove out what is invariably referred to as an Al Qaeda affiliate. It appears, though, that many of the tribal sheikhs are as wary of Baghdad’s army as they are of the jihadists aiming at a caliphate encompassing Iraq, Syria and possibly even Lebanon.

When ISIS took control of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi at the turn of the year, an Iraqi government source suggested its immediate intent was to declare a caliphate encompassing Anbar and segments of Syria. Nothing of the sort had come to pass at the time of writing, but it wasn’t an inaccurate assessment of the ISIS aim, with the ‘Al Sham’ part of its nomenclature assumed to include Lebanon.

It is widely believed that during the initial Iraq conflict, Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad facilitated the influx of Salafist jihadis into the war zone. It is possible, of course, that he merely turned a blind eye to the phenomenon. The point, however, is that the Iraq-Syria border hasn’t become particularly less porous in the interim (although it has been reported that Turkey has been the most popular conduit for jihadis into Syria), and ISIS has long been active on the Syrian side.

It has lately encountered a few road bumps, though, with even Salafist elements in the Syrian opposition choosing to combat it in rebel-held areas of the country. Internationally, though, its leading role in the Syrian conflict has prompted some rethinking, with the likes of Ryan Crocker — a former US ambassador in Damascus, Baghdad, Kabul and Islamabad — suggesting that Assad should not be written out of the picture, and vociferous local opponents of the Syrian president admitting that, given a choice between ISIS and Assad, they would opt for the latter.

During the Iraq war, it was claimed more than once that Al Qaeda had been more or less eliminated from the country, without, not surprisingly, any mention of the fact that its very genesis in Iraq was a direct consequence of US intervention. That claim was at the very least a gross exaggeration.

It could be argued that ISIS and its predecessor organisation were only whimsically offshoots of Osama bin Laden’s and Ayman Al Zawahiri’s outfit, given that neither Abu Musab Al Zarqawi nor Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi were inclined to strictly follow instructions, but that is somewhat besides the point in view of the broad ideological convergence. Notwithstanding the strategic and tactical differences, the obscurantist goal is generally the same.

It was a long time ago, or so it seems, that US determination to invade Iraq spurred warnings of what it would mean for the ‘Arab street’. That street remained fairly quiet for a while. And when it erupted, it did so in a manner that threw Washington off balance. The crucial venue, it has turned out, is not the street but the battlefield, where the Islamist equivalents of the ideologically driven American neocons are now determined to have their way.

Hopefully, in this case too, their ambitions will ultimately be thwarted. As before, though, it may take a while.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

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