Excessive militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, North and West Africa are spreading at a pace faster than previously thought. The alarming part is the absence of a strategy or a common vision and trust among countries in the Middle East to contain the threat of violent militancy perpetuated by Islamic State (IS). Saudi Arabia, the main regional power, has not forged any effective regional alliance or a viable strategy to combat IS. Terror is now a global phenomenon and requires a global response, yet such a response is hardly visible. The 60-nation coalition formed by the US to degrade and destroy IS in September 2014 was ineffective from the start and now is all but nonfunctional. The Turkish decision on July 24 to bomb IS was well received, but only for a single day. The next day, the Turkish air force bombed Kurd camps in northern Iraq. Kurds in Iraq and Syria are the only credible fighting force against IS. Critics are sceptical of Turkey over the aerial bombing of Kurds. The threat of IS, in the wisdom of rulers in the Middle East, is not receiving the priority it is due.
This is how IS has managed to grow: because of incoherent policies in the Middle East. Further facilitating the growth of IS are the incompetent and repressive governments in most of the Middle East and North Africa. These regimes represent a bold travesty of governance. Over the decades autocrats in Egypt, Syria and Algeria deployed all the instruments of state power to contain extreme militancy like Muslim Brotherhood. On this pretext there was repression of untold proportions, fully supported by the west, and autocrats like Hosni Mubarak became the favourites as they gave a deceptive sense of containing the Muslim Brotherhood and ensuring deceptive stability. Even today the regime of President Sisi in Egypt does not have a firm grip over extreme militancy despite thousands of Muslim Brotherhood activists in Egyptian jails.
The response of the Iraqi government to IS ever since 2012, when it was a small, unknown group, was pathetic. This reflected the poor state of armies in many countries in the Middle East. In June last year, IS overran two divisions of the Iraqi army and seized vast territories in Iraq with maybe as few as 2,000 fighters. Then again, in May, the Iraqi army quietly withdrew from Ramadi. On both occasions it left behind arms and ammunition worth billions, enough to equip a few army divisions. This equipment was part of the $ 35 billion the US had spent from 2003 onwards to train and equip the new Iraqi army. The corrupt and inefficient government of the former prime minister (PM) of Iraq, Nouri al Maliki, is the immediate cause behind creating a global problem of IS and leaving Iraq defenceless.
On completing the first year of self-professed statehood in June, IS showed its morbid capacity to carry out coordinated attacks. In May this year, coordinated attacks were carried out to capture the ancient town of Palmyra in Syria and the Ramadi in Iraq. Then simultaneous attacks were carried out in June on a Friday inside a Mosque in Kuwait killing 27 and on a beach in Tunisia, killing 38 people; those killed were mostly UK tourists. These attacks were shortly followed by assassination in Cairo of the Egyptian prosecutor general.
Some more damaging terror attacks were to follow in Egypt in July, which exposed the state of preparedness of the Egyptian security forces and their intelligence apparatus. Military check posts and the town of Sheik Zuweid in the Sinai Peninsula were attacked by an IS affiliate, the ‘Sinai Waliyat’ or the Sinai Province, of 300 terrorists who managed to engage the Egyptian army during a 10-hour siege in which 17 Egyptian soldiers lost their lives. The Egyptian air force’s jets and helicopters had to be called in to repulse the attack. About 100 militants were killed in this operation. A few days later, an Egyptian naval vessel in the Mediterranean was destroyed by a rocket by Sinai Province. A recent suicide bomber struck in the mostly Shia populated town of Bani Saad on the outskirts of Baghdad killing about a 100 unsuspecting people who had gathered around an explosives laden truck supposedly selling ice.
The rule of repressive dictators and fierce civil wars in North Africa gave rise to excessive militancy. The influence of IS has now spread in North and West Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and then onto the Indian Ocean. The Kenyan coast alongside the Indian Ocean has been the target of attacks by Al Shabab, where the terror group has formed a quasi-local government. In April, 150 students belonging to Garcia University College in Kenya were killed by Al Shabab. Mali narrowly missed being occupied by Boko Haram in 2012. Intervention by the French army prevented the capital from being overrun by terror groups. Boko Haram, now an IS affiliate, controls large areas in Northern Nigeria. Civil wars and raging massacres that have lasted for decades in Somalia and Sudan have contributed to the rise of extreme militancy. The former president of Chad, Hissene Habre, was charged in July, to be tried by judges from the African Union, for the massacre of 40,000 people during his eight-year regime that ended in 1990.
The chaos of civil war in Libya, after the ouster of Colonel Gaddafi, has already facilitated training camps there. Libya is now a focal country for the spread of IS into Tunisia, Algeria and African countries like Cameroon, Eretria and Chad. The spread of IS can be gauged from these facts. On the other hand, no country has formulated a comprehensive strategy to counter IS.
The spread of IS is now being felt in Russia and even in Moscow from where youth have started travelling to Syria and further into IS territory. Chechnya, Northern Caucasus and Dagestan have shown a large number of recruits leaving for Syria to join IS. The Russian language is the third most spoken language within IS, after Arabic and English.
Recently, 3,000 US trained troops from the Iraqi army were launched in combat around Fallujah. This is a good beginning but the problem appears to be much larger than just training a few thousand soldiers. It concerns winning the trust of the people by honestly performing governments in the Middle East and Africa. The many unrepresentative regimes in the Middle East and North Africa do not have the will or coherent strategy to fight extremism. A section of the population in these regions is radicalised and attracted towards IS, hence weak regimes cannot afford to annoy the radicalised sections of their populations. But time is of the essence. The survival of regimes now requires honest, responsive governance along with economic reforms whereby the gains reach the population and reforms are introduced that reward honest work. Mostly the regimes in the Middle East or North Africa do not have the traditions or the capacity to carry out such reforms and any other alternative to contain extreme militancy might not work.
The writer is a former member of the police service of Pakistan. He can be reached at [email protected]