As we board our next flight to anywhere, enter a large sports stadium or performance venue, or just plain wonder who is listening to our telephone calls, reading our emails and texts and tracking our movements through social media and through our measurable spending habits, on an off-line, just think of what life used to be like… when you could just “be,” meet airport arrivals at the gate, enter a sporting event or concert without the slightest trepidation and when you didn’t even have to think about whether or not some government agency or private commercial surveillance trackers were able to look at everything you did. The only place you noticed surveillance camera was in casinos, and nobody had a video camera small enough that you wouldn’t notice if they turned it on you. Now? We are defending against a very angry body of people in a harsh post-9/11/01 world. But if our lives are so deeply disrupted, who is the winner here?
Maybe you even remember when there weren’t increasingly frequent record-breaking temperature extremes, mostly heat waves, seemingly never-ending flows of super-storms and fires that inflict growing levels of mass destruction and when droughts eventually came and went? Perhaps you might even recall traveling to international historic, architectural and artistic sites and were able to spend some serious alone time taking it all in… no tour guides with little flags followed by long lines of tourists shoving and pushing to get a better view. Not worrying about getting blasted from a well-placed bomb, shot with automatic weapons fire from a strategically placed shooter or mowed down by a truck while walking along a sidewalk. Perhaps you even remember a time when extremists perpetrating ultra-violent mass killings just happened “over there,” and were the stuff of the evening news program.
Malthusian population growth? Meet accelerating climate change and the displaced people who are angry and just do not know what to do. Some turn to God. Some turn to blame and revenge. Some do both.
Forget about the old economic times, when adults could pretty much expect a job for life with a single employer, where bankruptcies were rare, corporate mergers and acquisitions relegated to the biggest companies “once in a great while,” where globalization was simply referred to a “trade” and automation didn’t really replace workers… they just made them more productive. Just think of the displacement and disenfranchisement of human beings, who have lived in a predictable patterns for generations, being told that, for one reason or another, theirs would be the last of their kind to live that pattern ever again. Farms withering into permanent desert from global climate change. Jobs replaced by robots.
Too many people facing the same crisis, seeking a new direction but simply craving for a return to the life they have always known, running scared from brutality, increasing poverty… too many mouths seeking the narrowing resources, military and political leaders who care little if anything for their misery. Old industries fading. Obsolescence ripping jobs from under folks with no other skills to offer. Erosion and climate changes tearing at agricultural productivity, literally reducing coastal land mass, as pollution and over-fishing, over-harvesting robs the planet, and the animals (including humans) who depended on those once-abundant resources for that sustenance.
I could be talking about a West Virginia coal miner, depressed and taking opioids to escape a world that will never return normalcy to his or her life. Or a rust-belt assembly line worker permanently replaced by a vastly more efficient robot. Or an evangelical in Alabama worrying about all those people with differing faiths, skin tone and cultural values challenging the comfortable way things “used to be.” But today, I am simply looking at a persecuted majority (in Syria) or minority (in Iraq) whose farms are now fallow desert, whose cities often lie in shambles from the bombings and artillery shells unleashed in regional conflicts. Sunnis. They just may share some of the same feelings of hopelessness and persecution.
While the Sunnis (literal believers in the words of the Qur’an) represent approximately 80% of the 1.6 billion Muslims on earth, in Iraq and Syria they are governed by Shiites (who believe that only senior clerics can discern the meaning of that holy book), who represent most of the remaining 20% of Islam. In the case of Syria, there is a tiny 10% layer of Shiites (Assad’s Alawite sect) at the top, while in Iraq it is 60% Shiite majority that governs. But both share a disdain for Sunnis and their plight.
As often as not, both Syria and Iraq practice outright discrimination and even frequent violence against these displaced Sunnis… or even Sunnis in general. The same displaced Sunnis, running for their lives, caught between the Assad regime in Damascus bombing and gassing them and the Iraqi Shiite militia (with direct Iranian support) creating misery all around them, who have tried to start new lives as refugees in Europe, a land that clearly no longer welcomes them. They still remember that in 2003, it was the United States that ousted their Sunni protector, the much-reviled Saddam Hussein. And what the Americans left is a government dominated by Shiites with hatred for Sunnis dominating their focus.
It was this isolation and feeling of drifting abandonment that gave terrorists like al Qaeda, the al Nusra Front, Islamic State (ISIS) and the latest bad boy on the Sunni block - Hayy'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) (Assembly for the Liberation of the Levant; get used to their flag, pictured above) – the message that “God has not abandoned you, we are your new defenders and we will punish the non-believers and your persecutors with merciless death and destruction… The Sunni faith will rise, and we will make that belief Great Again.” For lots of impoverished and hopeless farmers and bombed out city-dwellers, the message resonated. But as ISIS won territory, its reign of suppression and ultra-violence terrified those same abandoned Sunnis.
ISIS has been decimated, its coffers pretty much empty and its territorial holdings recaptured by… er… the Syrian and Iraqi governments. The end? Not even of ISIS that will coordinate with other Islamist terrorist groups around the world to return to the strategy of random attacks and covert recruiting of angry locals living in more open societies. What’s worse are displaced Sunnis who still live under unsympathetic regimes that perpetrate daily persecution and violence against them. Still, these displaced Sunnis remain without a voice or a champion to fight for their rights. It is a festering sore that cannot do anything but redirect that violence somewhere else with another group that will claim to represent these voiceless, impoverished, hopeless and unrepresented masses of Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis. Who exactly, other than these violent extremists, is lifting finger to rebuild their cities and find new fertile farmland for them to till?
“Fourteen years after the American invasion ended decades of Sunni dominance in Iraq, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs are struggling to reclaim relevance and influence. After they were ousted from government jobs and from the military by the post-Saddam Hussein government, their powerlessness and rage gave rise to Sunni militant movements like Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State.
“Now that those militants are being driven from the Sunni heartland, how the government responds to Sunnis trying to rebuild their lives is likely to have long-term consequences for the country’s stability and security…
“There were high expectations when Haider al-Abadi became [Iraqi] prime minister in 2014 that he could turn the page after the divisive sectarian rule of his predecessor, [vehement Shiite] Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and win the confidence of the Sunnis.
“Instead, Sunni leaders say, he has forsaken them as he forged closer ties with Iran, the hard-line Shiite theocracy next door. Iran now wields tremendous influence over Iraq’s economy, military and government.” New York Times, October 26th. Effectively, Iraq has become a clear puppet of Iran (where over 90% of the population are Shiite). And most of the displaced Sunnis believe passionately that Iran is their mortal enemy. The policies of the George W Bush administration destabilized the region with the Iraq War back in 2003, and since then the region has spiraled into one of the most dangerous areas on earth…
“The power of Sunni politicians was greatly diminished by the power-sharing agreement adopted after the American invasion. Under its formula, the prime minister’s post, along with the interior and foreign ministries, are reserved for Shiites. Kurds get the presidency and finance ministry. Sunni Arabs get Parliament speaker and defense minister, but the prime minister is commander in chief, and Shiite army commanders and militia leaders wield significant influence.
“Iranian-trained Shiite militias are part of Iraq’s armed forces and have battled Islamic State militants since they seized nearly a third of Iraq in 2014. The militias have been accused of atrocities against Sunni civilians, and their presence near Sunni areas has alarmed many residents… Some Sunni politicians have advocated an autonomous Sunni region, but those proposals have gone nowhere amid partisan bickering.
“‘Sunnis have no unified leadership,’ said Wathiq al-Hashimi, the head of the Iraqi Group for Strategic Studies, an independent research group in Baghdad. ‘And Sunni politicians seem to care only about narrow personal interests.’” NY Times.
If recent history is any guide, and it certainly should be, that power vacuum among Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis will soon be filled, mostly likely by one or more extremist groups, an explosive threat not just to the region but to the world. And while we are distracted by domestic issues and the existential threats from North Korea, as our rather obviously under-thought global strategy (if there is one) fails to deliver, we just may wake up one day and get slammed in the teeth by the next whack-a-mole jihadist terrorist building their power on the backs of these disenfranchised Sunnis.
I’m Peter Dekom, and absent the most focused and complete understanding of all the serious threats around us, we are likely to be consumed once again by the unthinking seeds we planted in Iraq 14 years ago.
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