Daily Times

Lately, it has become a habit of Orientalist apologists of Western imperialism to offer reductive historical and theological explanations of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region to cover up the blowback of ill-conceived Western military interventions and proxy wars that have reignited the flames of internecine conflict in the Islamic World.

Some self-anointed “Arabists” posit that the division goes all the way back to the founding of Islam, 1400 years ago, and contend that the conflict emerged during the reign of the fourth caliph, Ali bin Abi Talib, in the seventh century AD.

In modern times, the Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region is essentially a political conflict between the Gulf Arab autocrats and theocratic Iran for regional dominance, which is being presented to lay Muslims in the veneer of religiosity. Saudi Arabia, which has been vying for power as the leader of Sunni bloc against the Shi’a-dominated Iran in the regional geopolitics, was staunchly against the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration in 2003.

If the Sunni and Shia Muslims have been so thirsty for each other’s blood since the founding of Islam, then how have they managed to survive as distinct sectarian groups for 1400 years?

The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein constituted a Sunni-Arab bulwark against Iran’s meddling in the Arab World. But after Saddam was ousted from power in 2003, and subsequently when elections were held in Iraq that were swept by Shi’a-dominated parties, Iraq has been led by a Shi’a-majority government that has become a steadfast regional ally of Iran. Consequently, Iran’s sphere of influence now extends all the way from territorially-contiguous Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast.

Moreover, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration took advantage of the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq and used the Kurds and Shi’as against the Sunni-led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. During the occupation years, from 2003 to 2011, the once dominant Sunni minority was politically marginalised, which further exacerbated the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq.

The Saudi royal family was resentful of Iran’s encroachment on the traditional Arab heartland. Therefore, when protests broke out against the Shi’a-dominated Assad regime in Syria, in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Gulf Arab States along with their regional Sunni allies – Turkey and Jordan, and the Western patrons gradually militarised the protests to dismantle the Iranian axis.

According to reports, Syria’s pro-Assad militias are comprised of local militiamen as well as Shi’a foreign fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and even the Hazara Shi’as from as far away as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Similarly, Sunni jihadists from all over the region have also been flocking to the Syrian battlefield for the last seven years. A full-scale Sunni-Shi’a war has been going on in Syria, Iraq and Yemen which will obviously have its repercussions all over the Islamic world where Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have coexisted in relative peace for centuries.

The proximate cause behind the rise of the Islamic State, Al Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and numerous other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq has been the Obama administration’s policy of intervention through proxies

In order to create a semblance of objectivity and fairness, the American policymakers and analysts are always willing to accept the blame for the mistakes of the distant past that have no bearing on their present policy, however, any fact that impinges on their present policy is conveniently brushed aside.

In the case of the creation of the Islamic State, for instance, the US policy analysts are willing to concede that invading Iraq back in 2003 was a mistake that radicalised the Iraqi society, exacerbated sectarian divisions, and gave birth to an unrelenting Sunni insurgency against the heavy-handed and discriminatory policies of the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government.

Similarly, the war on terror era political commentators also “generously” accept the fact that the Cold War era policy of nurturing al-Qaeda and myriads of other Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” against the erstwhile Soviet Union was a mistake, because all those fait accompli have no bearing on their present policy.

The mainstream media’s spin-doctors conveniently forget, however, that the creation of the Islamic State and myriads of other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq has as much to do with the unilateral invasion of Iraq back in 2003 under the Bush administration. It has been the legacy of the Obama Administration that funded, armed, trained and internationally legitimised the Sunni militants against the Shi’a-dominated Assad regime since 2011-onward in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa region.

In fact, the proximate cause behind the rise of the Islamic State, Al Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and numerous other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq has been the Obama Administration’s policy of intervention through proxies in Syria.

The border between Syria and Iraq is highly porous and poorly guarded. The Obama administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Assad regime in Syria was bound to have its blowback in Iraq sooner or later. Therefore, as soon as the Islamic State consolidated its gains in Syria, it overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011. And now, the wretched inhabitants of those regions are once again in the line of fire from the Islamic State’s suicide blasts and car bombings, on the one hand, and the US-backed artillery shelling and aerial bombardment, on the other.

Apart from Syria and Iraq, two other flashpoints of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region are Bahrain and Yemen. When peaceful protests broke out against the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain by the Shi’a majority population in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, Saudi Arabia sent thousands of its own troops across the border to quell the uprising.Similarly, when the Iran-backed Houthis, which are also an offshoot of Shi’a Islam, overran Sana’a in September 2014, Saudi Arabia and UAE mounted another ill-conceived Sunni-led offensive against the Houthi militia in March 2015. The nature of the conflict in Yemen is sectarian to an extent that recently the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda’s leader, Qasim al-Raymi, has claimed that al-Qaeda has been fighting hand in hand with the Saudi-led alliance against the Iran-backed rebels for the last couple of years.

The revelation does not come as a surprise, however, because after all al-Qaeda’s official franchise in Syria, Al-Nusra Front, has also been fighting hand in glove with the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition against the Assad regime for the last seven years of the Syrian civil war.

Now, when the fire of inter-sectarian strife is burning on four different fronts in the Middle East and the Sunni and Shi’a communities are witnessing a merciless slaughter of their brethren in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Bahrain.What kind of an Orientalist shill would have the time and luxury to look for the cause of the conflict in theology and medieval history? If the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have been so thirsty for each other’s blood since the founding of Islam, then how come they managed to survive as distinct sectarian groups for 1400 years?

Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the phenomena of Islamic radicalism, jihadism and the consequent Sunni-Shi’a conflict are only as old as the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the late seventies and eighties, when the Western powers with the help of their regional allies trained and armed Afghan jihadists to battle the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the 1980-1988 war between the Sunni, Baathist-led Iraq, and the Shi’a-dominated Iran after the 1979 Khomeini revolution sowed the seeds of dissension and discord among the Sunni and Shi’a communities of the region for the first time in modern history.

And finally, the conflict has been further exacerbated in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, when the Western powers and their regional client states once again took advantage of the opportunity and nurtured militants against the Arab nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the Baathist-led Assad regime in Syria.

The writer is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism

Published in Daily Times, September 22^nd 2017.