Shahid Islam
Every crisis offers new perspectives to ponder. The Paris tragedy is no different. While perspectives change, many underlying questions remain unanswered. How does one deal with a bunch of ideology-driven fanatic hell bent on killing innocent people to avenge any perceived wrongdoing against them, or their country, or faith? Above all, who decides what’s wrong and what’s right?
Such inquisitions have begun to vex many in the aftermath of the barbaric carnage that’d devastated Paris on November 14, killing 132 people and injuring 349. As probing continues into who did it and how, a baffling tangle of international teamwork emerges gradually, which is no different than the manner in which al-Qaeda operated in years past.
IS has exposed itself
The Islamic State (IS) is not a conventional military force that can be over powered by conventional military methods. The group uses slipper cells to recruit and organize activists willing to die for the causes they espouse. Their professed raison de’tre is to create an Islamic empire, or a Khilafat, comprising the Muslim-predominant nations, and beyond, if possible.
In the aftermath of this latest carnage, the group’s honeymooning with its main interlocutor – reportedly Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries – is unlikely to linger, although, over the years, the group has grown phenomenally; despite having failed to entice a single recruit from among the 100 million Shia Muslims inhabiting mostly in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, Lebanon and elsewhere.
Now IS is exposed, nakedly, and its barbaric intents are too conspicuous to be condoned by any sane human being. No wonder its relevance is facing tough scrutiny among emigrant Muslims living in the West, as well in Muslim-predominant nations.
This is a major setback for the group, which, according to what the French police had discovered so far, managed to take on board for suicide mission four of the five attackers who were French citizens. Police think the fifth attacker used a Syrian passport to enter the EU in October, via Greece.
Further attacks on Western countries, as threatened, will become problematic due to a concerted global effort to track down the group’s activities everywhere. According to a Turkish security official, Turkey had arrested more than half a dozen suspects based on records of messages exchanged with the Paris attackers. Other countries are following suit.
In the political front, the group’s desire to remove President Bashar al Assad from power has become almost impossible amidst the global community’s inexorable effort to cripple it while Russia standing firm beside Assad. As well, the NATO members have always been opposed to the IS’s mission of creating an Islamic Khilfat stretching from the Mediterranean coast to the Indian Ocean, and beyond. That chimera will fizzle out soon.
Perspective of Levant politics
Most importantly, since the Paris carnage, a hitherto perfunctory military mission of NATO countries, led by the USA, has begun to attain traction, speed and devotion. Make no mistake that the human carnage seen in Paris had united the world against the IS. The group is on the run, with its tail folded.
That having said, the historic and the existential perspectives of the Levant politics must not be trivialized. Comprising mostly of Syria and Lebanon, the Levant has been a French backyard since the conclusion of the First World War and the dismembering of the last Muslim Khilafat known as the Ottoman Empire.
In the Levant, French involvement is much more ubiquitous than the USA or Russia. Consequently, the backdrop to the Paris attack is as convoluted as it is conspiratorial and conundrum-like.
For months, the IS has been threatening the French, but the Russian attacks against the group being more surgical, devastating and haunting, it went into a revenge spree against Russia first; a homemade bomb planted by the group in the Russian Metrojet airliner over Egypt’s Sinai desert on October 31 killing all the 224 passengers.
Meanwhile, an attack on France was already in the card since the early summer, according to a reliable source. The plan of the attack followed the news of France’s beginning of delivery since June of military hardware worth $3 billion to the Lebanese army to fight the IS and Al-Nusra fighters in Syria, said the source.
Insisting on anonymity, the source confirmed that the fund came to France as a contribution from Saudi Arabia that wanted to beef up Lebanon’s ability to counter threats posed by the Shia Muslim movement, Hezbollah, which also supports President Bashar al Assad and which Saudi Arabia wants overthrown, by force.
Saudi-funded armaments
Since June 2015, according to the source, “about 20 French companies started delivering to Lebanon shiploads of armoured vehicles, heavy artillery, anti-tank missiles, mortars, helicopters and assault weapons; provoking the IS to issue threats against France.” Intelligence and surveillance material, as well as lightly-armed patrol boats, were part of the deal, it was learnt.
The Saudis’ weaved a two prong strategy: Using the Lebanese army and French military hardware, defeat Hezbollah and remove President Assad from power too. Investigation reveals this French-Saudi collaboration is an extension of what the Wikileaks exposed in 2010. Quoting US diplomatic cables, the whistleblower claimed, “Saudi Arabia has proposed setting up an Arab force to fight Hezbollah group in Lebanon with the help of the US, the UN and the NATO.”
The leaked cable quoted Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, as saying in a meeting with the US ambassador to Iraq, David Satterfield, in May 2008 that “a security response was needed to the military challenge posed to Beirut by the Iran-backed group,” referring to Hezbollah.
If the IS wanted to confront France for this and many other reasons, it should have been mindful of what is permissible in any armed confrontation. Indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians are not the ways to achieving political goals.
The Paris attack was an act in desperation, perhaps the last gasp one. Hemmed in by Russian military intervention on President Assad’s behalf and the apparent tilt of the region in favour of Iran and Hezbollah had made the marauding group mad. The downing of the Russian jetliner and the killing of more innocents in droves in Paris are events that will consign the group to the periphery of the Middle East politics.
None should forget terrorism is an anti-humanity antidote; using which as a means to an end avails little dividend in the end. Along with France, the entire humanity is in tears while the IS itself is getting swept by the sweeping torrent of empathy flowing from the heart of the global humanity collectively.
Source: Weekly Holiday