World : WSM.ie: Iraq, Syria and the Islamic State By Gregor Kerr

The desperate plight of tens of thousands of Yazidi people stranded for the past week and 
a half on Mount Sinjar in Northern Iraq, having fled their homes in the nearby city, has 
focussed the world?s attention on what has been happening in that region. ---- Threats of 
airstrikes from U.S. president Barack Obama in a region where U.S. intervention in such 
recent memory has already been responsible for the killing of up to a million people and 
the injuring and displacement of many more causes alarm bells to ring in the minds of all 
who care about a fair and just world. This is further exacerbated by the knowledge that 
it is the stoking of sectarian tensions as a result of U.S. policy in Iraq that is largely 
responsible for the emergence of the fundamentalist and ultra-reactionary Islamic State 
organisation.

Getting a clear picture of exactly what is happening in the area of Syria and Iraq in 
which the Islamic State (the group previously known as ISIS) have recently established a 
new state called the Islamic Caliphate is very difficult. There are stories, reports and 
rumours of massacres (including reports of hundreds of people being buried alive), 
abductions, torture and displacement of tens of thousands of people. Many of these 
stories are true, some are rumour, some are exaggeration but sifting through them, it is 
almost impossible to separate fact from rumour or exaggeration.

One thing is for certain ? there is currently no good news story emerging from the region, 
and the fallout from the sectarian carve-up of Iraq seems likely to get a whole lot worse 
in the short term.

Anti-Assad protests
ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), as it was then known, first emerged from the chaos 
that was the anti-Assad protest movement in Syria. When the protests first broke out in 
March 2011, they consisted of mass popular peaceful uprisings which took their inspiration 
from the anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt. These protests were brutally repressed by 
Assad?s forces. Syrian army soldiers who refused to fire on peaceful protestors mutinied 
and formed the Free Syrian Army.

Regional Sunni monarchies took advantage of the protests and the fact that thousands of 
Sunnis were being tortured in Assad?s prisons to stir up sectarian divisions, and it was 
from this sectarian fundamentalism that the ultra-reactionary ISIS emerged. Economic and 
political discrimination against Iraqi Sunnis in the years since the fall of the Saddam 
Hussein regime meant that it quickly garnered support on the Iraqi side of the border too.

The Syrian Civil War has claimed 160,000 lives in the past 3 and a half years with huge 
parts of the country destroyed and an estimated 9 million people displaced from their 
homes. The war and destruction in Syria continues but the Islamic State have managed to 
gain control over up to a third of the country. They established the headquarters or 
capital of the Islamic Caliphate in the Syrian city of Raqqa in March 2013.

Iraq
It was only when Islamic State moved into Iraq in a real way, however, that the world 
began to sit up and take notice. In June the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Tikrit were 
overrun by IS forces, and weapons and military vehicles which had been supplied by the 
U.S. to the Iraqi army were seized. Within the space of a couple of weeks an area larger 
than Britain and home to more than 6 million people has been established as the Islamic 
Caliphate, with its frontiers expanding on a weekly basis.

Abu Bakr Al Balghadi has been installed as the Islamic State leader or ?the prince of the 
faithful? as he is referred to. Sharia law has been imposed and groups of armed men known 
as Hisbah (which translates as guarding against infringements) patrol the streets imposing 
everything from dress codes to alcohol bans to business and trading rules. There are 
reports of those found guilty of theft having their hands chopped off, and even reports of 
opponents of IS being beheaded and crucified.

Non-muslims have been given the ?choice? of converting to the Islamic State's version of 
Islam or paying a non-muslim tax. Those who refuse face execution. Unsurprisingly many 
have fled in face of the IS advance, with up to 30,000 Christians reported to have fled 
Mosul alone.

Shi?ite muslims have also found themselves under attack, with reports of Shi?ite mosques 
being attacked. The Iraqi army, the strong arm of outgoing president Nuri Kemal 
Al-Maliki, is dominated by Shi?ites and many Sunnis found themselves oppressed by its 
sectarian approach to law enforcement over recent years. Many saw the arrival of IS as 
the chance for revenge.

Yazidis
This then is the political climate and background which has led to tens of thousands of 
Yazidi people fleeing Sinjar city in Northern Iraq into the nearby mountain. The Yazidis, 
a people already well used to discrimination, faced a stark choice ? flee or stay to face 
certain massacre. In terms of a humanitarian crisis, this is huge as people are left 
stranded without food, water or shelter on the side of a mountain in baking temperatures.

The response to this humanitarian crisis and attempts at ethnic cleansing has been 
pathetically poor. On top of that, the U.S. airstrikes and threatened further 
intervention will inevitably result in the deaths of even more civilians.

Understand
Without in any way intending to give support of any sort to Islamic State, it is important 
that we try to understand where this organisation has come from, and how and why it seems 
to have such a bedrock of support. It appears that one of the principal reasons for such 
support is that IS is imposing a system of ?law and order? which in comparison to what has 
existed in the region over the past number of years appears ?fair? and seems to bring a 
degree of stability.

Looking at it from the relative comfort of the West, to describe what is happening as in 
any way ?fair? or ?stable? at first reckoning seems crazy. But when we consider the 
horror and chaos that people have lived through for the past couple of decades or more, it 
is possible to see why a group promising stability could garner support. The situation 
should perhaps be compared to that in Afghanistan at the time of the Taliban. Many 
aspects of what go on are horrific, but what has gone before was also often horrific, and 
more unpredictable.

Into this mix we must also add the fact that what we see in our media and what gets 
reported in the West is selective. The brutal patriarchal rules that are imposed by what 
are seen as ?our enemies? (i.e. Islamic fundamentalism) are laid before us but similarly 
brutal patriarchal rules imposed by those seen as ?friends of the West? are not exposed to 
our view. There is, for example, very little difference between what IS is trying to 
impose and what is seen as the ?rule of law? in Saudi Arabia.

When we look at pictures of beheadings and crucifixions, and especially see the way in 
which IS fighters seem to revel in gory killings, we should of course rightly be 
horrified. But if we want to understand why this is happening ? why people are doing this 
and why they seem to have a degree of support - we have to move past the concept that is 
so often thrown at us through our media and political ?analysis? that portrays the peoples 
of the region as some strange 'other' forever manipulated by irrational emotions and 
sinister rulers.

We have to take into account that these horrors are happening in places that have seen 
brutal organised mass murder for the past 20+ years. It is well documented that as far 
back as the 1991 Gulf War the U.S. buried alive huge numbers of Iraqi troops who wished to 
surrender and were in trench systems that were bulldozed. In addition, U.S. troops burned 
alive thousands or tens of thousands of Iraqi troops retreating down the highway from Kuwait.

Fallujah
It is probably far from coincidental that one of the places that IS emerged from is 
Fallujah, a city on which the U.S. army launched 3 brutal assaults, each considerably more 
ferocious than the recent Israeli assault against Gaza. It is such ?interventions? and 
the unleashing of such military brutality on civilians that create the conditions which 
lead to the emergence of groups such as IS. Long term warfare has the impact of 
escalating brutality as the horrific becomes routine and so new horrors are invented. If 
you've seen family members burned alive by white phosphorus in Fallujah then beheading 
enemy prisoners probably looks quick & humane. The idea that U.S. intervention now can be 
part of the solution, when it was those interventions and their brutality that created 
the conditions from which further brutality emerged is clearly preposterous.

In a region with huge poverty and wealth disparity, the crude wealth re-distribution 
(administered through one of the five pillars of Islam, Zakat ? charitable giving) which 
IS practices obviously makes them popular with the poor, as does their setting up of a 
system of arbitration for resolving disputes between neighbours. This fits into a pattern 
seen elsewhere where Islamist organisations though providing basic charity are able to 
build a popular base in places where previous regimes were only interested in syphoning 
bribes off (witness the enormous wealth the US fed into Iraq that vanished into the 
pockets of the elite).

As I said at the outset of the article, there appears to be no good news emanating from 
the region. All that can be said is that the idea that the U.S. will ?fight terrorism? 
and protect the Iraqi people given the previous history of U.S. intervention is laughable. 
It is incumbent on us though to try to understand what is happening and not to buy 
either crude right-wing Islamophobic (?sure what would you expect from there?) caricatures 
or ?liberal? responses that see the people of the region as victims in need of western 
intervention to save them.

Those of us that care about working for a fair and just society should oppose any U.S. 
intervention but the question that really faces us is what we can do in a practical way to 
further understanding of what is happening and ultimately to help halt the advance of 
sectarian fundamentalism and to provide a humanitarian response to the ethnic cleansing 
and barbarity of the IS forces.