THE ROVING EYE Welcome to
civil war By Pepe Escobar
Undeclared civil war in Iraq has been
raging for months. Now it's "official": using the
customary audio clip on a website, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi - who may or may not be a cipher, but
is certainly the leader of Monotheism and Holy
War, or al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers -
has declared "all-out war" on Iraqi Shi'ites.
To prove it, he unleashed Black Wednesday
- including a horrendous attack in the Kadhimiyah
neighborhood in Baghdad, with at least 112 dead
and more than 200 wounded, all of them poor,
helpless Shi'ite construction workers, many of
them enticed toward the killer with promises of
jobs before he detonated his lethal load. Baghdad
was paralyzed on Wednesday, trying to cope with
more than 150 dead and more than 500 wounded in a
string of coordinated attacks marking the
bloodiest day in the country since the end of
major combat two years ago.
According to
the Zarqawi audio, "The al-Qaeda Organization in
the
Land of Two Rivers [Iraq] is
declaring all-out war on the Rafidha, wherever
they are in Iraq". Rafidha is the pejorative
Arabic term referring to Shi'ites as apostates.
"As for the government, servants of the crusaders
headed by [Prime Minister] Ibrahim al-Jaafari,
they have declared a war on Sunnis in Tal Afar."
So, following Zarqawi's logic, the civil war
against Shi'ites is a response to what happened in
Tal Afar.
Tal Afar is a poor northern town
in the middle of the desert whose majority
population of roughly 200,000 is 70% Sunni Turkmen
and 30% Shi'ite Turkmen. Just as former prime
minister Iyad Allawi was responsible for the
ethnic cleansing of Fallujah, current prime
minister Jaafari ordered what amounts to ethnic
cleansing in Tal Afar.
Tal Afar
revisited Yet one more heavily hyped
Pentagon/Baghdad production yielded no box office
results - for obvious reasons. The Salafi jihadis,
reportedly a couple of hundred, who were holed up
in Tal Afar easily melted away, like the fish in
Mao Zedong's pool of resistance. And the "pool"
itself - most of the civilian population - turned
into a stream of refugees. The operation was
doomed to failure from the beginning because the
Iraqi "army" involved consisted basically of
Kurdish Peshmerga militias supported by local
Shi'ite Turkmen informers. They may be Turkmen,
but they are allied with Sunni Arabs.
Once
again, the Sunni Arab Salafi jihadis got away by
using classic guerrilla tactics: while the
Pentagon/Jaafari armory was chasing shadows in
empty Tal Afar, they mounted spectacular, deadly,
highly visible attacks against Shi'ites in
Baghdad, the heart of power.
So the
pattern is always the same. The Baghdad/Pentagon
axis unleashes massive, highly publicized
repression - in Fallujah, in Tal Afar (many times
over), in Qaim near the Syrian border, soon in
Ramadi (it has been already announced); the Salafi
jihadis melt away and later regroup.
The
palpable effect is always the same, as University
of Michigan professor Juan Cole suggests:
de-urbanization of the Sunni Arab heartland. In
other words, ethnic cleansing. Yet it's folly to
believe that the Pentagon/Jaafari axis will be
able to depopulate or destroy every major Sunni
city opposed to the new, emerging Shi'ite-Kurd
majority in power. Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two
Rivers has fully capitalized on the matter. The
voice on the Zarqawi tape warns Sunni Arabs to
"wake up from your slumber ... the war to
exterminate Sunnis will never end".
Who
profits from all this? Certainly al-Qaeda in Iraq,
with its agenda of keeping permanent chaos and
anarchy. But also the Pentagon - as undeclared
(and now declared) civil war is the perfect excuse
for an indefinite American military occupation. In
the long run, this ghastly state of affairs will
profit "the crusaders" - in Zarqawi lingo - those
hawks in the Bush administration who dream of the
breakup of once-unified Iraq into a Kurdish north,
a southern "Shi'iteistan" (both swimming in oil
and allied with the US) and an enfeebled, dried
out Sunni center.
What does al-Qaeda
want? "Zarqawi" - cipher or not cipher,
performing or not performing miracles with just
one leg and a US$25 million bounty on his head -
has caused tremendous havoc since pledging
allegiance to al-Qaeda in October 2004 , when his
network adopted its current denomination, al-Qaeda
in the Land of the Two Rivers (Tanzim al-Qaeda
fi Bilad al-Rafidayn) and Osama bin Laden
recognized him as the jihadi-in-chief in Iraq in a
December 2004 audiotape.
The long-term
strategy of al-Qaeda in Iraq is not Jordanian,
like Zarqawi himself: it is dictated by the Saudi
branch of al-Qaeda. The strategy has been spelled
out in a series of documents supervised by Sheikh
Yussef al-Ayeeri. The most strategic of these
documents is called Iraq al-jihad, awal wa
akhtar (The jihad in Iraq, hopes and dangers).
It's all there: centralized resistance in
Sunni Arab cities and villages; close
collaboration with Saddam's former Mukhabarat
intelligence officers; attacks against other
members of the coalition to isolate the Americans
and the new Iraqi defense forces; keeping an
atmosphere of chaos at all costs; and crucially
disrupting by all means the flow of oil. Another
point of the document is now becoming clear: the
setting up of jihadi networks in the Shi'ite south
capable of protecting Sunni minorities in case of
civil war - a de facto situation with the
escalation of sectarian killings.
Last
month in Amman, Jordan, Asia Times Online came
across a book by Fouad Hussein, an Amman-based
journalist who has shared jail time with Zarqawi.
The Arabic-language book, "Al-Zarqawi - al-Qaeda's
Second Generation", aims to detail nothing less
than al-Qaeda's strategy toward establishing an
Islamic caliphate before 2020. The key source that
lends credence to the book is Saif al-Adl.
Mohammad Ibrahim al-Mekkawi, aka Saif
al-Adl, a colonel in the Egyptian armed forces,
was the former number two of the Egyptian al-Jihad
and an instructor in al-Qaeda's training camps in
Afghanistan. He became al-Qaeda's military chief
after Palestinian Abu Zubayda al-Filastini was
arrested. In late 2001, he managed to flee from
Afghanistan and found refuge in Iran. The US
offers $5 million for his head. Iranian diplomats
refuse to admit on the record that al-Adl is in
the country, although they admit they hold a
number of al-Qaeda operatives.
In his
book, Hussein uses his personal knowledge of
Zarqawi as well as privileged information passed
to him by al-Adl, including heated debate between
bin Laden and Zarqawi, to uncover what would be
the master plan of global jihad. The book has
received extensive coverage in the
Persian-language Iranian media and has been
analyzed very seriously in Tehran.
Hussein
lists seven crucial stages. The first, dubbed "the
awakening" (of the Muslim world), has already
happened: from September 11 to the fall of Baghdad
in April 2003. The second stage is dubbed "opening
eyes": it involves al-Qaeda blossoming into a
movement (it is already an idea), with Iraq as its
headquarters; it should last until 2006. The third
stage, dubbed "Arising and Standing up", should
last until 2010, with a focus on jihad inside
Syria, and increased attacks on Turkey, Jordan and
Israel. All these stages make sense when
confronted with the progression of facts on the
ground.
Then it gets fuzzy. The fourth
stage lasts until 2013 and it involves the total
defeat by al-Qaeda of all Western-supported Arab
governments, as well as a series of attacks
against the global flow of oil and sophisticated
cyber-terrorism designed to debilitate the
American economy. The fifth stage is the
proclamation of an Islamic caliphate between 2013
and 2016 - as Western interference in the Arab
world should be by this time reduced to a minimum.
The sixth stage, starting in 2016, will be "total
confrontation", with an "Islamic army" fighting
infidels all over the world. And the seventh
stage, to be completed by 2020, should be nothing
less than the triumph of the caliphate.
The year 2020, by the way, is the date
former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad set for
Malaysia - a moderate Muslim nation - to become a
fully developed, globally integrated country, ie
the total antithesis of the al-Qaeda utopia. It is
also the date many economists believe will mark
the point when China's economy will become the
world's number one - and would have taken decisive
steps to free itself from dependence of Arab oil,
striking major supply deals with Iran and
Kazakhstan.
Hussein in his book lists
these seven stages as the field manual for global
jihadis. He interprets - correctly - the attacks
on Manhattan, Madrid and London as just a means to
an end: provoking a paranoia about security in
major Western capitals as one of the privileged
tools in building up the Islamic caliphate. The
problem is Hussein regards "al-Qaeda" as a
centralized brain delivering instructions: that's
not the case since Tora Bora in late 2001, with
"al-Qaeda" becoming a nebula, a virus constantly
mutating with lethal speed.
The idea of
al-Qaeda reenacting a caliphate in the whole
Islamic world, Shi'ite Iran included, may be seen
by Westerners, Asians and moderate Muslims alike
as an absolute lunacy. But Franco-Lebanese
historian Ghassan Tueni considers "bin Laden's
utopia, as monstrous as its form reveals", as
steeped in history, "a morbid rejection of one
century of defeat and impasse, with plenty of
frustration and humiliation".
Utopias can
become deadly. Up to now, the Bush
administration's "war on terror" has done nothing
to puncture the myth. Four years after September
11, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri -
both apparently alive and well - continue to
inspire Salafi jihadis with their iconic status,
while "Zarqawi" causes increasing havoc in Iraq.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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