A new show is on display, and, it’s called Islamic Military Alliance (IMA). Led by Saudi Arabia, the IMA is a newly formed military umbrella of 34 Muslim-predominant countries that aims to fight the Islamic State (IS) and other terrorist outfits threatening political status quo in many of the Muslim nations across the globe.
The mission of this motley alliance is to safeguard a political status quo that’s otherwise faulty, mostly illegitimate, and, seldom defensible. The countries where Islamic militancy is most acute are governed by despots, demagogues, puppets and unelected hereditary rulers. These are otherwise vulnerable nation-states panting on the brink of political and social desperation and chaos. Many of them are groaning and festering under intense civil wars too.
Mission and mandate
For too long, the US had insisted upon Muslim nations to act collectively to thwart the menace of Islamic extremism which it and its western allies cajoled and pampered once and now find hard to put down. Under the post-Paris imbroglio, Saudi Arabia too felt the need of doing something as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina. Especially after the horrific and alleged IS attack in Paris, pressure mounted on the Saudi monarchy to rein in religious extremism like the IS which is alleged to have a nexus with Riyadh due to its exclusive Sunni denomination.
Thus came into being the IMA, and, in its debut proclamation, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Tuesday that “the 34-nation Islamic military coalition will combat terrorism.” Reports say, ten other Muslim countries, including Bangladesh, had expressed their intent to join the coalition.
Little is known as yet with respect to the specific mandate of the coalition, but, asked in a news briefing in Paris whether the newly formed coalition would put troops on ground in troubled nations, al-Jubeir said, “Nothing is off the table,” adding, “It depends on the requests that come; it depends on the need and it depends on the willingness of countries to provide the support necessary.”
Meanwhile, sources said Riyadh cobbled this distinctively Sunni-predominant coalition of Islamic nations to placate the US and the West on one hand, and to rebuild its dwindling image in the Muslim world, on the other.
The efficacy of a stratagem depends on its usefulness in achieving the intended objectives. Devising stratagem is easy, deriving desired dividend is not, as the US had learnt the hard way.
The US-led coalition went to invade Iraq to install democracy. Instead, it had set ablaze an inextinguishable cauldron and fomented Shia-Sunni rivalry to destroy regional and global peace.
A Fractured region
The IS was born in April 2013 amidst intense Shia-Sunni fighting in Iraq, by a Saudi-backed Sunni faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq. They named the outfit Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and, lately renamed it as the Islamic State (IS). It’s the main jihadist group fighting government forces in Syria and Iraq.
The group is brutal and vindictive, but it holds sway over vast swath of territory in both Iraq and Syria. In Iraq alone, it controls 30,000 sq km territory while about 77,000 sq. km. is held by government forces and another 56,000 sq. km. by Kurdish forces. In Syria, the IS controls over half of the country (over 100,000 sq. km.), including large segments of the Homs Desert, the northern city of Aleppo, up to IS’s declared capital Raqqa, and, all the way to the Iraqi border.
Since the Paris attacks, Saudi Arabia and its GCC allies had begun to distance away from the IS, or so is being propagated. But the IS seems least bothered as its popularity is based partly on its ability to knock of some of the detestable hereditary rulers to create a larger Muslim khilafat.
As well, according to reliable regional sources, the IS gets over 45% of its revenue from zakat in controlled territory (call it toll seeking) while rest of the fund comes from oil smuggling, ransom and other illicit activities. Hence the move is counterproductive in the context of the prevailing ground realities.
More ominously, the new coalition neither consulted Iran and its client regimes in Baghdad and Damascus, where the IS is most active, nor had reckoned how the Shia-predominant Hezbollah guerilla of Lebanon would react to such a move. With Russia openly siding with, and having intervened militarily on Bashar al Assad regime’s side, a dangerous escalation could plunge the region into a bigger war.
Regional dimension
This regional dimension obtains more precariousness for other reasons. For over nine months, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab neighbors have been waging war against the Iran-allied rebels in Yemen, launching hundreds of air strikes almost routinely.
Although the Saudi move to form the IMA coincided with the declaration of a ceasefire in Yemen on Tuesday—as parties to the civil war began the UN-sponsored peace talks in Switzerland in a new dash to ending fighting that has killed nearly 6,000 people – the Yemeni civil war will rage on further due to knotty internal ethnic undercurrents and undeterred external meddling by regional and global powers.
No wonder the US had welcomed the Saudi move. U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter said upon arriving at Incirlik airbase in Turkey on Tuesday, at the start of a regional tour designed to drum up support for the U.S.-led campaign against the IS, that, “We look forward to learning more about what Saudi Arabia has in mind in terms of this coalition.”
He added, “In general, it appears it is very much in line with something we’ve been urging for quite some time, which is greater involvement in the campaign to combat ISIL (Islamic State) by Sunni Arab countries.”
Dhaka’s dilemma
For years, Dhaka had pegged its fortune with the Russia-India axis where neither much of its export, nor the remittance, heads to or flow from. Now its decision to join the new Islamic Alliance seems pragmatic due to Saudi Arabia being the fountain of much of the remittance flowing into the country, as well as a place of veneration for predominant Muslim Bangladeshis.
But the decision will test Dhaka’s loyalty with Russia and India on one hand, and, will increase the risk of reprisal attacks by the IS and its affiliates inside Bangladesh, on the other.
Dhaka’s joining of the Saudi-led alliance will also acknowledge the existence of IS’s presence in Bangladesh, which the government denied repeatedly. And, amidst the growling of a devil and the torment of the deep sea, the Hasina regime is certainly being sucked into a pool of dithering that could prove consequential for regional peace and stability.
Source: Weekly Holiday
