Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/404410
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2014 13 claimed to be the true believers… but it was not an entire, centuries-long orchestrated war against Islam. The conflict was: which group claimed to have a monopoly on the truth?" The recent dramatic political changes of the Middle East have only served to exacerbate these internal tensions, he continues. "What is happening now between Shia and Sunni? For centuries, Shia and Sunni somehow had always co- existed; maybe not always peacefully, true. But now, following the fall of Saddam Hussein and the war with Assad, there has been a complete overhaul of the balance of power that had been there for centuries. For the first time in the history of that region, a Shia government in Baghdad rules an Arab country. The only other example is Iran… but Iran is not an Arab country. Before that – with a few minor exceptions that only historians know about – the Shia had never been in government anywhere in the Arab world. Arab states were always ruled by Sunni. They are a minority in Iraq, but they had always ruled." The destabilisation brought about by this sudden change created fertile ground for IS to recruit volunteers. "IS represents the tip of the iceberg. It has to do with two or three inter- related phenomena which have been around for decades, maybe even cen- turies. First and foremost, we have unhappy migrants who belong to the Middle East somehow, but who have lived in Europe: where they did not make it, and often found them- selves on the periphery of society. Maybe they suffered racism. Maybe they had their own personal failures. Maybe they could not cope with life in the West, which is demanding. There are higher levels of skills re- quired to survive in Europe. Being in France is not the same as being in Syria. These people have a problem with hegemony, with the elite of so- ciety… in fact, more than half of IS fighters are multinational. They are people who lived in the UK, France, Germany, Australia. Many lived in the US. What allowed these people to have a base from which to fight? That's the most delicate point. These are the same people who have been around since the days of Al Qaeda. One might also ask, who created Al Qaeda…?" This makes the phenomenon more of an international than a local or- ganisation; and Alshinawi argues that it follows the same pattern set by other similar ideological move- ments of the past. "You can draw parallels with the Maoist revolution in China, the armed struggles in El Salvador, Nica- ragua… it is a movement of young people who are ready to die, this time in the name of Jihad. Why did it set- tle in Iraq and Syria? Largely because of two phenomena superimposed on each other: there were jihadists who were already fighting against what they perceived to be injustice in Af- ghanistan and elsewhere. And then, in 2003, the old order that had existed for thousands of years was suddenly toppled. The Sunni, for the first time ever, became the underdogs, under the control of the Shia…" There were economic factors also. "For me, economy is at the heart of all conflicts. The oil in Iraq is con- centrated in the Shia and Kurdish regions. Sunni are poor in terms of their own region. Now: when the Shia came to power in 2003, led by Al Maliki, the Sunni were marginal- ised. The Shia had been persecuted by the Sunni for centuries. It was a time of payback, a time of revenge. Suffice to say that previously, Al Ma- liki's party had been banned. Anyone related to the Dawa party was elimi- nated within a couple of days. No law courts were necessary: it was enough to say that someone was a member of the Shia Dawa party, which wanted to overthrow Saddam, to have him killed. So for the first two years after 2003, leading to the civil war in 2007, thousands of Shia went to look for the Sunni to take revenge. Families who knew where a former security officer, who had reported their sons, was hiding… they went to find him and shoot him. The law was taken into their own hands. It was a rewrit- ing of history. There was no time for these societies to reach a politi- cal formula. Millions of Sunnis were marginalised. They were excluded from any share in the writing of the Constitution." Law and order was not the only structure to crumble: economically the country was crippled by the controversial decision to outlaw all structures associated with the former regime. "People who worked for Saddam Hussein – and everybody worked for Saddam Hussein: there was no choice, that was the entire system – were told they couldn't work any- more. Iraq became a naked man in the desert." The result was fragmentation; and while it seems to have taken the West by surprise, Alshinawi views it as an inevitable consequence of the overthrow of the 'old world order'. "Today it is easy to say that Iraq no longer exists as a single country. The central government of Baghdad con- trols only the Shia territory. Iraq is de facto three countries now: the Kurds in the north, with their own army, their own budget, their own auton- omy; the Shia region, from Baghdad to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi. All the eastern part of the country is Sunni land… inhabited by millions who have been displaced, marginal- ised and persecuted." It is perhaps inevitable, then, that some of these people would welcome the arrival of mostly foreign jihadists to take up their cause. Interview Baghdad-born Dr ARSALAN ALSHINAWI, a lecturer in International relations at the University of Malta, gives a Middle Eastern perspective on the rise of Islamic State (IS) in his home country tip of the iceberg PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAY ATTARD