Exploiting the War on Terror

Our world today lives in the shadow of a universal priority named the “global war on terror,” which the U.S. has imposed and led. This is particularly true for the people of our region. Despite the amount of ink and blood that has flowed around this subject, not enough has been said about the way in which the real danger that al-Qaida poses has been used for the purpose of preserving the Arab regimes and renewing their “legitimacy” in the eyes of the international community.

After the attack on Afghanistan, the threat of al-Qaida was used as a justification to attack, destroy and occupy Iraq for eight years, even though no connection between the organization and Saddam’s intelligence services was ever proven. Yet the U.S. occupation of Iraq turned into a magnet for jihadists, and hundreds of thousands poured in from every direction. The occupation forces have withdrawn, but the takfiri jihadists have not.* Iraq’s national reconciliation has not occurred. Instead, the Anti-Terrorism Law has come to dominate the political process [in Iraq], becoming a deadly weapon in the hands of a prime minister with extensive powers. He is using that weapon to build despotic and autocratic governance, strengthen his sectarian alliance and terrorize his opponents.

In Libya, Moammar Gadhafi failed to stay in government despite his service to the Western powers in the “global war on terror” and in preventing poor Africans from using the shores of the Mediterranean to arrive in Europe. The NATO invasion forces, the vanguard of the “global war on terror,” showed no restraint in calling on Libyan jihadist leaders to head one of the key factions in the armed opposition.

In Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh summoned hundreds of the Afghan Arabs and then, by opening the country’s borders to the U.S.’s sniping war by unmanned drones, used the danger of al-Qaida and the war against the organization to obtain an abundance of money, weapons and economic aid from the West and to acquire “legitimacy” for his regime internationally. The most prominent “employer” of the jihadists had been Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, Saleh’s right-hand man in the government at the time and one of the pillars of the current U.S.-Saudi-Gulf [states] solution. The Sanaa regime also used al-Qaida’s terrorists to assassinate adversaries. Those terrorists then went on to form, in 1994, the vanguard of the regime’s war against southern Yemen. Religious scholars subordinate to the Reform Party released fatwas for them, which declared the war to be a war against communism. By indiscriminately considering the people of southern Yemen to be atheists, these fatwas sanctioned their murder, violation and capture, as well as the plundering of their possessions.

Even when Saleh was forced to step down, security imperatives in the name of the “global war on terror” turned into a justification for the forces of the Yemeni elite, led by the ousted president’s sons and relatives, to stay in power. Those imperatives allowed the delay of national discussion for more than a year and permitted the causes and demands of the revolution to be ignored. Instead, the escalating pressures on Yemen’s youth, the soul and driving force of the revolution and the hope for the country’s future, warranted the clearing of the streets and public squares.

The Syrian regime has used the same formula in dealing with al-Qaida. During the phase of reluctant flirtation with the U.S. after Sept. 11, 2001, cooperation between the Syrian intelligence service and the CIA flourished. This occurred through the handing over of lists detailing terrorist networks and the interrogation and torture of al-Qaida prisoners in Syrian prisons. The pattern was reversed after the invasion of Iraq, when the regime began allowing the takfiri jihadists to use Syria’s border to cross into Iraq and fight U.S. forces. But when the popular opposition in Syria, after condemning the killing of the students of Daraa, started to demand that the state of emergency be abolished, the regime was not content to respond with just bloody repression. Rather, it jumped on the back of the “global war on terror” and dubbed its war against a peaceful, popular uprising a war against “armed terrorist groups.” It took more than a year for tens of thousands of peaceful activists and tens of thousands of defectors from the regime’s army to take up arms, and for enough of the al-Nusra Front’s jihadists and takfiris to infiltrate Syrian territory, after which the conflict was publicly framed as a war against al-Qaida.

By making this switch and reversal, the Syrian regime is joining the “global war on terror” encampment. With that comes the allusion and proclamation that the regime is defending, in this war, not just Syria and the rest of the Arabs, but also the “West.” Having turned a war against an armed and civilian opposition representing a large portion of the Syrian people into a war against foreign terrorism, the regime has taken its “externalization” of the bloody crisis to a new peak; according to the [Syrian foreign] minister Walid al-Moallem, terrorists from 28 different countries are now participating in the war. Despite that, he is devoted to the words that the Maronite patriarch expressed during his last visit to Damascus: “Reform won’t come through bloodshed, but through dialogue.”

Weeks ago, President Assad said that the U.S. isn’t ready for a settlement in Syria. Is it ready now, on the cusp of the new secretary of state’s international tours? Moallem has anticipated the visit by announcing that the forthcoming dialogue could include the opponents that he calls the “arms bearers.”

The multiple ways in which the al-Qaida threat and the act of joining the “global war on terror” have been used have not always saved the rulers and regimes in the course of the Arab revolutions. However, they have provided the U.S. and Arab regimes being targeted by their peoples with the opportunity and exceptional grounds to turn security concerns — the security of Israel’s boarders, the security of oil and the security imperatives of the “global war on terror” — into a tyrant that oppresses entire peoples along with their interests, aspirations and dreams. Will the “war on terror” save the Syrian president, his regime or any part thereof?

Security is strangling hope in these countries. Certainly, it won’t lead to stability.

We await an answer to the question: Oh al-Qaida, with all the crimes you commit yourself — from beheading both humans and statues, including the head of the great statue of [Abul ʿAla] al-Maarri, and destroying the shrines of saints, Christian tombs and places of worship, to detonating booby-trapped cars in sectarian attacks in the streets and markets of Baghdad and Damascus, not to mention the takfiri oppression that you employ against the people in places where you are able to control them — how many more crimes against the peoples and their future are being committed in your name and in the name of the war being waged against you?

*Translator’s note: The author is referring to Islamists of a particular Sunni political-ideological trend who excommunicate Muslims who do not subscribe to it.