Muqtada's biggest battle already
won By Sreeram Chaulia
A new study by the Washington DC-based
advocacy organization, Refugees International,
reveals that Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's
militant force, Jaish-al-Mahdi, is the largest
social welfare dispenser in Iraq.
It is a
tribute to the Mahdi Army's successful adaptation
of the model pioneered by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
When survival needs of food, water, housing,
electricity and protection are in short supply,
and the state apparatus is unable or unwilling to
come to the rescue of the population, radical
non-state actors can exploit the vacuum and step
in as provider of last resort.
The quid
pro quo here is that the militant outfit's
benevolence earns political legitimacy from the
poor who bear the brunt of war. In return for
rebuilding homes, hospitals, schools and places of
worship destroyed by the
enemy, the outfit wins fanatical loyalty from its
target constituency. Since militant armies rely on
guerrilla-style warfare, their core strength lies
in mass public approval and participation in their
ranks. Popularity is the treasury of a guerrilla
movement that sustains it in asymmetrical war
against conventionally superior foes. It is
arguably as crucial to a militant force as backing
from foreign state sponsors.
To be loved
by the people on whose behalf an armed struggle is
being waged is the dream of revolutionaries. It
satisfies their psychological need for
confirmation that the armed movement is indeed
benefiting those they claim to be emancipating.
Self-doubts can be costly for a guerrilla group,
opening the door to defections, apostasy or
factionalism. The government or foreign invading
army against which the struggle is being waged can
pounce on any signs of regret or introspection by
militants and sow internal splits that can undo an
outfit. Steady nurturing of mass popularity is an
existential necessity for militant groups to
remain cohesive and steadfast to their objectives.
Mao Zedong, the classic exponent of people's war,
highlighted another important function of
cultivating popular support. In his apt metaphor,
without the "ocean" of mass sympathy, the "fish"
of the revolutionary army would die asphyxiated.
However destitute and harassed, slum dwellers or
landless laborers can shelter guerrillas on the
run, offer local contacts and information, and
even join them in battle as an auxiliary force.
In effect, this sets up a symbiotic
relationship between militants and their
constituents. The former's humanitarian assistance
becomes a lifeline for the poor, and the latter's
affection becomes the shield for the guerrillas.
In insurrection theory, the two-way-street leads
to a merger of the party or rebel outfit and its
people to the extent that the two become
indistinguishable.
The Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, for instance,
use the slogan "LTTE is the Tamil people and the
Tamil people are the LTTE". A war on the outfit,
by extension, gets interpreted as a war on the
people it defends.
The American invasion
of Iraq in 2003 and the post-Saddam Hussein chaos
created the perfect conditions of desperation in
which the Jaish-al-Mahdi rose to astounding
prominence.
Although Muqtada's father,
Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, was a venerable grand
ayatollah during Saddam's dictatorship, it was not
expected that the son would go on to become a
kingmaker in Iraqi politics and a thorn in the
flesh for the American occupation forces.
His Mahdi Army, which began as a ragtag
band of 500 Shi'ite seminary students to enforce
vigilante justice in 2003, now boasts of over
10,000 dedicated mujahideen and millions of lay
sympathizers won over by charitable activities.
The rise of this new force is, in many
ways, the story of all that went horribly wrong
with the American neo-conservative roadmap of
remaking the Middle East. While Muqtada would
bristle at his description as an "American
creation", the fact is his outfit turned into a
state-within-a-state thanks to the George W Bush
administration's actions since 2003. Had there
been no American invasion to topple Saddam and
subsequent stationing of foreign troops on Iraqi
soil, the world would not have witnessed the
phenomenon that the Mahdi Army morphed into.
This observation is seconded by the
similar trajectories of two other Islamist
guerrilla groups in the Middle East - Hezbollah in
Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. Counter-factually,
we would not have had these movements if there
were no Israeli aggressions on Lebanon or the
Palestinian territories. Islamist militancy is
essentially reactionary - a spiritual and temporal
response to perceived oppression by foreign or
homebred enemies. Once the reaction sets in and
takes an organized form, it becomes a Janus-faced
humanitarian-cum-terrorist machine. On the one
hand, the outfit is the very epitome of kindness
and Samaritanism to its own people. On the other
hand, it strikes fear into the heart of the
enemies with alleged Koranic sanction.
The
usage of the charity model by Islamists is not
limited to the Middle East. When a devastating
earthquake shook Pakistan in October 2005, the
banned Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) launched its own
independent relief efforts, bypassing the
corruption and red tape typical of governmental
responses to disasters. The visible and efficient
services of LeT and its sister religious bodies
won instant appreciation among the suffering
victims and furthered the sentiment in Pakistan's
frontier and Kashmir regions that the government
in Islamabad was incapable of succoring its
citizens.
The delegitimization of the
state, a civic authority mandated to care for its
citizens, went in tow with extra legitimization of
jihadi ideology among ordinary Pakistanis. As was
to be expected in the relief-for-loyalty exchange,
LeT operatives took hundreds of orphaned children
under its wing for indoctrination in its extensive
network of orphanages and madrassas
(seminaries). LeT was also found to be offering
"employment" to several people who lost their
livelihoods in the natural calamity. It was no
coincidence that a spate of LeT-ascribed terrorist
attacks occurred in India shortly after the
earthquake in Pakistan.
While the usage of
humanitarian garb to recruit despondent youth for
terrorist purposes is not unique to Islamist
outfits, the special theological emphasis in Islam
on charity (zakaat) is unmatched among
world religions. Saudi Arabian charities are
particularly notorious for fundraising in the name
of social service and channeling enormous sums to
wherever there is a jihadi cause to be aided.
The International Islamic Relief
Organization, proscribed by the United Nations in
2006, used to be one major outlet of Saudi Arabian
zeal for charity that boosted jihad in the
Philippines and Indonesia. The al-Rasheed Trust,
exposed in 2001, was run by Pakistan's
Jaish-i-Muhammad. It was the brainchild of the
Inter-Services Intelligence to fudge finances for
terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and
Indian-administered Kashmir in the guise of social
work.
As long as Jaish-al-Mahdi harnesses
its religiously enjoined humanitarian image among
downtrodden Shi'ites in Baghdad and southern Iraq,
no frontal military assaults by the US and Iraqi
armies can succeed in displacing Muqtada from his
perch as the country's Robin Hood.
Israel
is learning this lesson the hard way against its
bete noires, Hezbollah and Hamas. Actions like the
present blockade of the Gaza Strip, purportedly
aimed at weakening terrorist movements, cause
humanitarian crises that drive sufferers closer
into the embrace of the movements. Punitive
expeditions like the military assault on the
Jaish-al-Mahdi will likewise exacerbate the
protection deficit in Iraq and vindicate the
success of the militant social work model.
Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher
on international affairs at the Maxwell School of
Citizenship in Syracuse, New York.
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