Away from Chaos by Gilles Kepel

Author:Gilles Kepel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS026000, History/Middle East/General, POL059000, Political Science/World/Middle Eastern
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

From the Syrian Uprising to Jihad in the Levant

The war in the Levant brought into focus all the dramas and tensions released by the Arab uprisings. It fashioned them into an incredible horror show symbolic of the early twenty-first century. This war combined the most archaic, poisonous ethnic and sectarian throwbacks in a novel way with the most advanced communication technologies. It splashed religious extremism onto Facebook walls, Twitter feeds, and encrypted messaging apps. Apocalyptic fanaticism and cruelty thus rose to a crescendo in the virtual world, in the process luring a global audience with voyeuristic staging and social media tools. Starting with a democratic revolt against the arbitrary Syrian regime, the movement in a few months evolved into an armed insurrection that set the Levant ablaze. But once again it was rapidly hijacked by the regional conflict between the Salafist-dominated Sunnis and the Shiites, which would soon pull in all of the surrounding powers.

Blending with the preexisting Sunni rebellion in Iraq, the Syrian uprising ended up in the proclamation on June 29, 2014 of the ISIS caliphate, which erased the border between the two countries in the name of the Umma, the worldwide community of Muslim believers. The caliphate then turned into the epicenter of third-stage international jihadism. Propelled by the ideology of the two Abu Musabs—al-Suri and al-Zarqawi—it would plunge the planet into mourning, from Paris to Nice, from Berlin to Brussels and their disenfranchised banlieues, from the Mediterranean sea to the Euphrates valley. In their push to make a clean sweep of all non Islamic civilization, ISIS even tore down the remnants of the ancient cities of Nineveh and Palmyra. On their rubble, ISIS planned to have global Islam triumph on this earth, in a vision its followers gleaned from a Salafist reading in the Sunni version of the Holy Scriptures.

The conflict also drew in the great powers of the United States, Russia, and Europe, which projected their forces into the Syria-Iraq space. There they linked up with the regional powers—Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. A number of local militias also joined the conflict, some of which fought on the side of the armed insurrection. Others supported the regime—Shiites from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, or Lebanon, and the Kurds pursuing their own national interests. The mushrooming of these parastatal military actors is one of the conflict’s most prominent features. It also represents one of the major obstacles to reestablishing peace in the Levant.

The most ominously symbolic obstacle among them was ISIS. The caliphate it proclaimed on a vast territory lasted from 2014 to 2017, during which it stepped up terrorist acts throughout the world. Its capital of Raqqa fell on October 17, 2017, to an improbable ad hoc coalition of otherwise mutually hostile forces that had united against ISIS and its outrages. As it became the West’s priority objective, the eradication of ISIS and assorted other jihadists was a game-changer. It let the West avoid the issue of Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow, a perspective that had prevailed at the start of the Syrian uprising.

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