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| Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. |
Confirming the deaths of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the
Islamic State’s spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, who was killed in a US
airstrike in northwest Syria a day after the killing of al-Baghdadi, the
Islamic State’s al-Furqan media has announced Abu Ibrahim Hashemi al-Quraishi
as the new caliph of the terrorist organization.
Al-Quraishi is such an obscure jihadist that even national
security analysts tracking the details of militant movements in the Middle East
don’t have an inkling about his origins or biography. Even his name appears to
be an assumed alias rather than a real name. Abu Ibrahim basically means
“father of Ibrahim” in Arabic whereas Banu Hashem was Prophet Mohammad’s family
and Quraishi means the tribe of Quraish. Both are common surnames in the
Islamic World.
In any case, identifying individual militant leaders by name
is irrelevant because as in the case of the Taliban and several other jihadist
groups, the decisions are collectively taken by the Shura Council of the
Islamic State. Excluding al-Baghdadi and a handful of his hardline Islamist
aides, the rest of Islamic State’s top leadership is comprised of Saddam-era
military and intelligence officials. According to a Washington
Post report [1], hundreds of ex-Baathists constitute the top- and mid-tier
command structure of the Islamic State who plan all the operations and direct
its military strategy.
The title caliph of the Islamic State is simply a figurehead,
which is obvious from the fact that al-Baghdadi remained in hiding for several
years before being killed in a Special Ops raid on October 26, and the
terrorist group kept functioning autonomously without any guidance or
directives from its purported chief.
Here, let me try to dispel a myth peddled by the corporate
media and foreign policy think tanks that the Islamic State originated from
al-Qaeda in Iraq. Many biased political commentators of the mainstream media
deliberately try to muddle the reality in order to link the emergence of the Islamic
State to the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the Republican Bush administration.
Their motive behind this chicanery is to absolve the Obama administration’s
policy of nurturing the Syrian opposition against the Syrian government since the
beginning of Syria’s proxy war until June 2014, when the Islamic State overran
Mosul in Iraq and the Obama administration made a volte-face on its previous “regime
change” policy of providing indiscriminate support to Syrian militants and
declared a war against a faction of Syrian rebel groups, the Islamic State.
Mainstream media’s duplicitous spin-doctors misleadingly try
to find the roots of the Islamic State in al-Qaeda in Iraq; however, the
insurgency in Iraq died down after “the Iraq surge” of 2007. Al-Qaeda in Iraq
became an impotent organization after the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi in June
2006 and the subsequent surge of troops in Iraq. The re-eruption of insurgency
in Iraq was the spillover effect of nurturing militants in Syria, when the
Islamic State overran Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in January 2014 and
subsequently reached the zenith of its power by capturing Mosul in June 2014.
The borders between Syria and Iraq are highly porous and
it’s impossible to contain the flow of militants and arms between the two
countries. The Obama administration’s policy of providing money, weapons and training
to Syrian militants in training camps located at the border regions of Turkey
and Jordan bordering Syria was bound to backfire sooner or later.
Notwithstanding, over the decades, it has been a convenient
stratagem of the Western powers with two-party political systems, particularly
the US, to evade responsibility for the death and destruction brought upon the
hapless Middle Eastern countries by their predecessors by playing blame games
and finger-pointing.
For instance, during the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the 1980s,
the Carter and Reagan administrations nurtured the Afghan jihadists against the
Soviet-backed government in Kabul with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence
agencies. The Afghan jihad created a flood of millions of refugees who sought
refuge in the border regions of Pakistan and Iran.
The Reagan administration’s policy of providing training and
arms to the Afghan militants had the unintended consequences of spawning
al-Qaeda and Taliban and it also destabilized the Af-Pak region, which is still
in the midst of lawlessness, perpetual anarchy and an unrelenting Taliban
insurgency more than four decades after the proxy war was fought in
Afghanistan.
After the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1988, however,
and the subsequent change of guard in Washington, the Clinton administration
dissociated itself from the ill-fated Reagan administration’s policy of
nurturing Afghan militants with the help of Gulf’s petro-dollars and Pakistan’s
intelligence agencies and laid the blame squarely on minor regional players.
Similarly, during the Libyan so-called “humanitarian
intervention” in 2011, the Obama administration provided money and arms to
myriads of tribal militias and Islamic jihadists to topple the Arab-nationalist
Gaddafi regime. But after the policy backfired and pushed Libya into
lawlessness, anarchy and civil war, the mainstream media pointed the finger at
Egypt, UAE and Saudi Arabia for backing the renegade general, Khalifa Haftar,
in eastern Libya, even though he had lived for more than two
decades [2] in the US right next to the CIA’s headquarter in Langley,
Virginia.
Regarding the Western powers’ modus operandi of waging proxy
wars in the Middle East, since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the
eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of master strategists at NATO to raise
money [3] from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and
Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms
markets [4] in the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and
guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the victim country
by using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries.
Whether it’s Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya or Syria, the same playbook was
executed to the letter.
Raising funds for proxy wars from the Gulf Arab States allows
the Western executives the freedom to evade congressional scrutiny; the benefit
of buying weapons from unregulated arms markets of the Eastern Europe is that
such weapons cannot be traced back to the Western capitals; and using jihadist
proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of
“plausible deniability” if the strategy backfires, which it often does.
Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan
jihad, and the Islamic State and its global network of terrorists are the
blowback of the proxy war in Syria.
On the subject of the supposed “powerlessness” of the US in
the global affairs, the Western think tanks and the corporate media’s
spin-doctors generally claim that Pakistan deceived Washington in Afghanistan
by providing safe havens to the Taliban; Turkey hoodwinked the US in Syria by
using the war against Islamic State as a pretext for cracking down on Kurds;
Saudi Arabia and UAE betrayed the US in Yemen by mounting ground offensive and
airstrikes against the Houthis rebels; and once again Saudi Arabia, UAE and
Egypt went against the ostensible policy of the US in Libya by destabilizing
the Tripoli-based government, even though Khalifa Haftar is known to be an American
stooge.
If the US policymakers are so naïve, then how come they
still control the global political and economic order? This perennially whining
attitude of the Western corporate media that such and such regional players
betrayed them, otherwise they were on top of their game is actually a clever
stratagem that has been deliberately designed by the spin-doctors of the
Western mainstream media and foreign policy think tanks to cast the Western
powers in a positive light and to vilify adversaries, even if the latter are
their tactical allies in some of the regional conflicts.
Fighting wars through proxies allows the international power
brokers the luxury of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” in their
defense and at the same time they can shift all the blame for wrongdoing on
minor regional players. The Western powers’ culpability lies in the fact that
because of them a system of international justice based on sound principles of
morality and justice cannot be built in which the violators can be punished for
their wrongdoing and the victims of injustice, tyranny and violence can be
protected.
Leaving the funding, training and arming aspects of
insurgencies aside, but especially pertaining to conferring international
legitimacy to an armed insurgency, like the Afghan so-called “freedom struggle”
of the Cold War, or the supposedly “moderate and democratic” Libyan and Syrian
insurgencies of the contemporary era, it is simply beyond the power of minor
regional players and their nascent media, which has a geographically and
linguistically limited audience, to cast such heavily armed and brutal
insurrections in a positive light in order to internationally legitimize them;
only the Western mainstream media that has a global audience and which serves
as the mouthpiece of the Western deep states has perfected this game of
legitimizing the absurd and selling Satans as saviors.
Footnotes:
[1] Islamic State’s top command dominated by ex-officers in
Saddam’s army:
[2] Leaked tapes expose Western support for renegade Libyan
general.
[3] U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian
Rebels.
[4] Billions of dollars weapons flowing from Eastern Europe
to Middle East.
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