The British Gift to Terrorists | Critical Analysis |Axisoflogic.com

Islamic State group fighters | Photo: AFP

The desire for vengeance against the Islamic State group is understandable, but bombing simply feeds into the cycle of violence.

This month saw the release of yet another chilling Islamic State group video. The video featured a young man with a British accent calling for terror in the U.K., calling for the deaths of non-believers. It forewarned retribution for British bombing in Syria and comes shortly after British Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative government authorised air strikes in the country As the Labour Party opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, warned, the Islamic State group's response is sadly predictable. As such, it is all the more heartbreaking, as those in power play with our vulnerabilities and increase our insecurity.

In as early as 2006 spy agencies warned governments in the U.S. and U.K. that in spreading military action from Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 they had fueled further terrorism. An April 2006 U.S. intelligence agency report titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ asserted that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, had metastasized, defused, and spread across the globe. The so-called ‘War on Terror’ had increased the threat of terrorism. Analysts recognized a pattern and had forecast the rise of the Islamic State group.

In her new book, ISIS and Syria: The New Global War on Terror, Phyllis Bennis, Middle East expert and Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, clearly summarises why we are facing an increased risk of terror in Britain. She says ,“You can’t bomb extremism – you can only bomb people. And even if some of the people you bomb are extremists, those bombing campaigns cause more extremism, not less. We need to move away from war as an answer to extremism, and instead build a new approach grounded in diplomacy and negotiation, arms embargoes and international law.”

This echoes Chelsea Manning’s 2014 warnings, based on her experience as a U.S. military all-source analyst in Iraq during ISIS’s relative infancy, that “ISIS cannot be defeated by bombs and bullets”. Yet, the British and French governments’ responses to the terrible Nov. 13, 2015, terrorist attacks in Paris were to repeat past mistakes. Rather than respond to Islamic State group propaganda with the assertion of human rights, the U.S., Britain and France have responded with the very violence that the Islamic State group sought and which it feeds off of.

The recently released Islamic State group video, focusing on bringing the impacts of war to Britain, also features a 4-year-old British boy, thought to be Isa Dare. The boy is seen carrying a kalashnikov gun and heard saying “We are going to kill the kaffir (non-believers) over there.” His mother, from Lewisham, South London, is said to have moved to Syria two years ago. In the circumstances, the desire to revert to vengeance is tempting, but sadly misguided and simply feeding into the cycle of outrage at Western military intervention in the Middle East that the Islamic State group depends on for its recruitment and organizing.

The Islamic State group uses family imagery in its aggressive and polished online recruiting on social media, including videos showing fighters pushing children on swings and distributing toys, and children playing on bouncy castles and bumper cars, riding ponies and eating pink cotton candy. At the same time, the U.N. has documented women and girls, particularly from minority groups, being stoned to death, or sold into prostitution or sex slavery for its fighters.

Mannings’s 2014 suggested “Step 1” (of many) for building a serious long-term strategy to disrupt the growth of the Islamic State group – which did not rely on bombs – was to counter the narrative in online Islamic State group recruitment videos to avoid, as best as possible, the deliberate propaganda targeting of desperate and disaffected youth.

Having failed to do this, we have seen a rapid recruitment of regional and western Islamic State group members. Youth facing discrimination, alienation and unemployment in the U.K. and France have flown to Syria. This could have been prevented.

The birth of the Islamic State group is directly a result of the “War on Terror” which began in 2001. We are reminded that diplomacy – and accepting prisoner transfers offered by Afghanistan for the suspected perpetrators of 9/11 in 2001 – could have avoided cycles of escalating violence.

In her new book, Bennis goes back 12 years and carefully unpicks the birth of the Islamic State group in Iraq, its spread to Syria, and charts its global reach. The origins and influence of the Islamic State group in Iraq lie in the 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by U.S. troops, led by former U.S. President George W Bush. The rise of the Islamic State group – initially in Iraq – says Bennis, was “directly linked” to the continuing sectarian marginalization and repression against Sunnis by the U.S.-backed and Shiite dominated government in Baghdad.

Indeed, it was Nouri al-Maliki, (Prime Minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014, and current Vice President) Iraq’s first post-Saddam leader, who authorised a surge in U.S. troop numbers that targeted suspected Sunni militants, quickly increasing sectarianism between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim communities. This included the creation of U.S. trained death squads, modelled on death squads in 1980's El Salvador, targeting Sunni groups. This eventually caused a revival and renewal of Sunni support for the Islamic State group. Many Sunni’s see alliance with the Islamic State group as the strongest opposition to the U.S.-backed government in Iraq. The Islamic State group’s spread from Iraq to Syria can be traced back to U.S. actions which replicate the same mistakes made decades ago in the same region, specifically in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the mujahideen – funded and supported by the U.S. in its fight against the Soviet Union in the 1990s – transpire to become the very al-Qaida that orchestrated the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Similar patterns emerge in Syria.

The U.S., U.K., Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been shipping guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Bashar Hafez al-Assad is the President of Syria (supported by Russia) – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. Yet, what was started as a covert U.S. programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including for Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria) and the Islamic State group. Various U.S. and other intelligence reports found that there is no armed viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad. Reports have found, therefore, that the U.S. is arming extremists. Warnings from intelligence services have again been ignored.

It is often said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. There is nothing farcical about the brutality of the Islamic State group. Yet, the failure of Western governments to learn from past mistakes and refrain from perpetrating the violence that has produced the Islamic State group is bad for the people of the Middle East, and bad for civilians of the Western world who have often vocally opposed the violence their governments have perpetrated in the name of “national security.”

Despite all the intelligence, lost lessons from history and forecasts, the macabre circle of violence is replicated. In 2014 Manning stated that the Islamic State group’s center of gravity is, in many ways, the United States, the United Kingdom and those aligned with them in the region. U.S. drones and bombs fuel hate, while at the same time the U.S. arms anti-Assad extremists that threaten further brutality against civilians in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the U.S., Egypt, France, U.K., and beyond.

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