The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution by Patrick Cockburn

Author:Patrick Cockburn [Cockburn, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-02-02T22:00:00+00:00

7

Saudi Arabia Tries to Pull Back

A chilling five-minute film made by ISIS shows its fighters stopping three large trucks on what looks like the main highway linking Syria and Iraq. A burly, bearded gunman inspects the ID cards of the drivers who stand nervously in front of him.

“You are all Shia,” he says threateningly.

“No, we are Sunni from Homs,” says one of the drivers in a low, hopeless tone of voice. “May Allah give you victory.”

“We just want to live,” pleads another driver. “We are here because we want to earn a living.” The ISIS man puts them through a test to see if they are Sunni. “How many times do you kneel for the dawn prayer?” he asks. Their answers vary between three and five.

“What are the Alawites doing with the honor of Syria?” rhetorically asks the gunman who by this stage has been joined by other fighters. “They are raping women and killing Muslims. From your talk you are polytheists.” The three drivers are taken to the side road and there is gunfire as they are murdered.

The armed opposition in Syria and Iraq has become dominated by Salafi jihadists, fundamentalist Islamic fighters committed to holy war. Those killing non-Sunni drivers on the Damascus-Baghdad road are an all-too-typical example of this. Western governments may not care very much how many Shia die in Syria, Iraq, or Pakistan, but they can see that Sunni movements with beliefs similar to the al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden have a base in Iraq and Syria today far larger than anything they enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11 when they were subordinate to the Taliban.

The pretense that the Western-backed and supposedly secular Free Syrian Army was leading the fight to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad finally evaporated in December 2013 as jihadists overran their supply depots and killed their commanders. Saudi Arabia was centrally involved in this ascendancy of jihadists in the opposition movement. It had taken over from Qatar as the main funder of the Syrian rebels in the summer of 2013. But Saudi involvement had been much deeper and more long-term than just increased funding, with more fighters coming to Syria from Saudi Arabia than from any other country.

Saudi preachers called vehemently for armed intervention against Assad, either by individual volunteers or by states. The beliefs of Wahhabism, the puritanical literalist Saudi version of Islam recognized exclusively by the Saudi educational and judicial system, are not much different from those of al-Qaeda or other Salafi jihadist groups across the Middle East. Wahhabism wholly rejects other types of Islamic worship as well as non-Muslim beliefs. It regards Shi’ism as a heresy, in much the same way Roman Catholics in Reformation Europe detested and sought to eliminate Protestantism.

There is no doubt that well-financed Wahhabi propaganda has contributed to the deepening and increasingly violent struggle between Sunni and Shia. A 2013 study published by the directorate-general for external policies of the European Parliament, called “The involvement of Salafism/Wahhabism in the support and supply of arms to rebel

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