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By Patrick Cockburn
Though able to staging extraordinary assaults like 11th of September, jihadist firms weren't an important strength at the floor once they first turned infamous within the form of al-Qa‘ida on the flip of century. The West’s preliminary successes within the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan weakened their aid nonetheless further.
Today, as well known center East commentator Patrick Cockburn units out during this explosive new e-book, that’s all replaced. Exploiting the missteps of the West’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, in addition to its misjudgments with regards to Syria and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, jihadist corporations, of which ISIS is an important, are speedily increasing. They now regulate a geographical territory larger in dimension than Britain or Michigan, stretching from the Sunni heartlands within the north and west of Iraq via a huge swath of north-east Syria. at the again in their trap of Mosul and lots more and plenty of northern Iraq in June 2014, the chief of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been declared the top of a brand new caliphate that calls for the allegiance of all Muslims.
The secular, democratic politics that have been supposedly on the fore of the Arab Spring were buried by way of the go back of the jihadis. because the Islamic country introduced by way of ISIS confronts its enemies, the West will once more turn into a objective. Cockburn cites an observer in southern Turkey interviewing Syrian jihadi rebels early in 2014 and discovering that “without exception all of them expressed enthusiasm for the Sept. 11 assaults and was hoping an analogous factor might ensue in Europe in addition to the US.”
How may issues have long past so badly mistaken? Writing in those pages with regular calmness and readability, and drawing on unequalled event as a reporter within the quarter, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of 1 of the West’s maximum international coverage debacles and the increase of the recent jihadis.
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Extra resources for The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising
Sample text
Iraq has long suspected the hidden hand of Wahhabism, the variant of Islam espoused by Saudi Arabia, as being behind much of its troubles. ” There was considerable truth in Maliki’s charges. A proportion of aid from the Gulf destined for the armed opposition in Syria undoubtedly goes to jihadist militants in Iraq. Turkey allows weapons and jihadist volunteers, many of them potential suicide bombers, to cross its 510-mile-long border into Syria. Inevitably some of the guns, fighters, and bombers go to Iraq.
After Mosul, Maliki was blamed for refusing reform that might have blunted the appeal of ISIS, but he was not the only Shia leader who believed that the Sunni would never accept the loss of their old dominance. The general Sunni hostility to Maliki as a proponent of sectarianism had enabled ISIS to ally itself with seven or 31 PATRICK COCKBURN eight Sunni militant groups with which it had previously been fighting. Mr. Maliki is not to blame for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, but he played a central role in pushing the Sunni community into the arms of ISIS, something it may come to regret.
Meanwhile, JAN fighters run some of the suburbs of Damascus and a variety of villages and towns stretching up to the Turkish border. The fighting between ISIS and the other jihadis is really a battle over the spoils, more of a reflection of how strong they are than of any differences with respect to their long-term aims. A primary reason for this is that Western governments and their security forces narrowly define the jihadist threat as those forces directly controlled by al-Qa‘ida central or “core” al-Qa‘ida.