The jihadist group called the Islamic State (IS) has been dominating news headlines around the world with its rapid military advance across swathes of Iraq and Syria earlier this summer, and more recently its persecution of Christian and Yazidi minorities in areas it has overrun, and the gruesome videos of the beheadings of US journalist James Foley and an Iraqi Kurd soldier.
Originally called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the Sunni jihadists of the IS are a breakaway group from al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who has proclaimed a caliphate over the territory it now controls in Iraq and Syria. The group has been joined by foreign jihadist volunteers, from elsewhere in the Middle East but also from European countries and the US.
After taking the Syrian city of Raqqa last year, IS took control of the western Iraqi town of Fallujah, in January this year, and in June overran Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. In August the jihadists suffered their first major military setbacks after Kurdish and Iraqi government forces, with the key support of US air strikes, regained control of some strategic sites captured by IS, notably the Mosul dam in northern Iraq.
But the situation remains highly uncertain, and the heavily armed IS forces, which also control oil fields in eastern Syria, remain a major threat to the immediate region and beyond. “There is evidence that these extremists, if left unchecked, will not be satisfied at stopping with Syria and Iraq,” wrote US Secretary of State John Kerry in an op-ed article published in the New York Times on Friday, adding: “Airstrikes alone won’t defeat this enemy. A much fuller response is demanded from the world.”
While France, Britain and Germany began last month supplying arms to the Iraqi Kurd forces opposing the IS militants, French President François Hollande also called for a “global strategy” against a group which he said “disposes of significant finances and very sophisticated weapons and which threatens countries like Iraq, Syria and the Lebanon”.
Jean-Pierre Filiu is a former French diplomat and government advisor who is now professor of Middle East Studies at the Paris School of International Affairs, part of the political studies institute Sciences Po. An internationally-recognised specialist in Arabic affairs, he held visiting professorships at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. In this interview with Mediapart, he explains the origins and aims of the IS, warning of an immense danger ahead: “The threat of the Islamic State has become so monstrous that it justifies leaving aside other disputes of the moment in order to deal with it as a priority, and collectively”, he argues. But he also explains why he believes “the key to the jihadist defeat lies much more in Syria than in Iraq”, and why the non-jihadist, popular resistance fighting both Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and the Islamist militants should receive proper international support.
Mediapart: The lightening military progress of the Islamic State forces has taken the world by surprise. What exactly do we know about the organization, its projects and the way it functions?
Jean-Pierre Filiu: The Islamic State is the posthumous victory of [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi over [Osama] Bin Laden. A victory in which class issues are not absent. Zarqawi was, until his death in 2006, the leader of the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida, from which the Islamic State comes. He was originally a small-time gangster. This repented and tattooed thug had a relationship with power, to violence, much less ethereal than bin Laden. Bin Laden held a vision of global and abstract jihad, whereas that of Zarqawi is anchored in a precise territory, Greater Syria, Bilad al-Sham, and Iraq.
This is what in fact makes this organization so worrying for someone who, like me, has worked of apocalyptic movements. Because this territory is in Muslim eschatology, Sunni and Shiite texts come together on this – the land of the ‘Great Battle’, that of the end of the world. Every battle that is fought there is worth a thousand battles elsewhere. That becomes terribly attractive to jihadist recruits.
For Sunnis, the return of Mahdi will come about on this territory. He will fight the Masih ad-Dajjal there, and everything will end with victory over the enemies of Islam, who will be either converted or massacred. These common superstitions have a sense even for the uncultured volunteers who go there.
On the part of the Islamic State, there is an apocalyptic opportunism. The warlords, without necessarily believing in it themselves, know that calling upon these myths works perfectly to attract recruits. Zarqawi understood it and [IS leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi continues in the same line.
Mediapart: Who is Abu Bakr, this self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State?
J.-P. F.: We don’t know very much about al-Baghdadi. He was a village sheik, probably a little mediocre, but who possesses an Islamic culture well above the average among jihadists. He notably has this capacity for preaching that neither Bin Laden nor al-Zarqawi had. In the Iraqi cauldron, Baghdadi also rapidly became a hardened military figure.
He has managed his organisation in a Stalinian manner, with bloody and repeated purges. Which means that today he has a phalanx of about 20,000 men on the ground that is totally in his hands, devoted and fanaticised. On Bin Laden’s death in May 2011, he refused to swear allegiance to his successor [Ayman] Zawahiri and demonstrated his will for independence. He wants to put roots down and to create his ‘Islamic State’ of which the ‘constitution’, on dozens of pages, mentions only duties, and not one right. He had already condemned, in February 2011, the revolutionaries in Egypt, declaring their demand for pluralism to be impious, whereas al-Qaeda’s new leader, Zawahiri, tried to win them over.
Mediapart: How can 20,000 men defeat Kurdish forces and an Iraqi army made up of one million soldiers?
J.-P. F.: The taking of Mosul in June 2014 was a real turning point. The American arsenal left by the Iraqi army is colossal, and the control of oil infrastructures constitutes a true war chest.
We have, moreover, borrowed their terminology by talking of an ‘Islamic State’, it’s a large victory for them, but it must be understood that this ‘state’ is only a war machine that feeds itself from its own progress. If they need infrastructures to continue functioning, and for that pay those who look after them (or constrain them by terror), it is uniquely to feed the war machine. For them, there is no place for dissidence. We see that with the recent massacre of 700 members of a Sunni tribe in [the eastern Syrian province of] Deir Ezzor. Only ideology counts for them. Life has no value. I think that this totalitarian character will be their undoing in the end. But before that, I don’t dare imagine the toll.
Mediapart: In what way has the surge of the Islamic State in Iraq been connected to what is happening in Syria?
J.-P. F.: It should be understood that Baghdadi, when he took leadership of his ‘Islamic State’ in 2010, had virtually no further control over any territorial base in Iraq. He had a clandestine presence in Mosul and, thanks to the faithful of the former [ruling] Ba’athist party, he has access to some hidden weapons from the regime of Saddam Hussein. That’s how he could continue carrying out terror attacks in Baghdad. In the Anbar Province [of west Iraq], which was for a longtime Zarqawi’s fiefdom, he had to retreat in face of the anti-jihadist Sunni Sahwa militia, known also as the Awakening. Thus, Syria will become like a rear base for the Islamic State.
When he was confronted with the start of peaceful opposition in Syria in March 2011, [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad did everything to favour the jihadists who he rightly believed were the worst enemies of the revolutionaries. That’s why the Syrian [security] services freed jihadist prisoners and allowed the growth of the al-Nusra Front http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-18048033 , which is nothing other than the prolongation on Syrian territory of the ‘Islamic State’.
Faced with increasingly large massacres, the revolution in Syria progressively moved to armed struggle. But without a clear vision of this militarisation, it fell in a certain manner into Assad’s trap. In this context, the jihadists valorised their experience in anti-American guerilla warfare, and their heavy weapons. The Syrian revolutionaries fighting Bashar al-Assad underestimate Baghdadi’s Machiavellianism. To their loss, he took hold of the first ‘liberated’ provincial capital, Raqqa, where in April 2013 he proclaimed his ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’.
In Iraq, the Sunni intifada against tha Baghdad government has just begun. The ‘Islamic state’ then fights on two fronts, both Syrian and Iraqi,and this situation is very favourable to it because no player in Iraq or Syria has its regional vision. Thus it is that when Baghdadi’s troops takeover the strategic town of Fallujah, in Anbar province, the indiscriminate bombings by the [Iraqi] army mean that all the local forces form a coalition with the jihadists.
Mediapart: Have the jihadists of the Islamic State been underestimated? Why do you argue that the key to this regional conflict lies today more in Syria than Iraq?
J.-P. F.: The blindness of these last years will be paid for dearly. Eyes were turned elsewhere at the time when decisions should have been taken, decisions that are always painful, imperfect, but which would at least have corresponded with the size of what’s at stake. Just one year ago, the West’s stand of abstention before the chemical [weapons] carnage by [the Assad regime in] Damas gave the jihadists a huge opportunity.
The Syrian revolutionaries, who had not called for foreign intervention, felt totally abandoned when the air strikes announced by Washington were finally never launched. It is this feeling of impotence and, just as much, of betrayal, that played into the jihadists’ hands. Because Baghdadi’s propaganda never stopped hammering on that the United Nations, America and Europe were all lined up against the Muslimùs, leaving Assad and Russia to massacre them.
The West has certainly supplied some weapons, but just enough to avoid the liquidation of the resistance, and never enough to change the power balance. In the end we didn’t want choose between the two monsters, pretending that aiding the revolutionaries would be playing into the hands of the jihadists, and today we’ve delivered Syria to these two monsters [that are] Assad and the jihadists.
I have never believed in a military solution for Syria. If I was for targeted strikes after the chemical bombings by Damascus it was precisely in order to favour a political solution, by bringing all the Syrian patriots to disassociate themselves from a criminal regime.
The challenge from the Syrian dictatorship remains whole. Faced with the jihadist threat, the revolutionary force today exists only in Syria, moreover it made it possible earlier this year to push the Islamic State out of [the town of] Alep and its region. In Iraq, after 11 years of American occupation and of civil war, I fear that the people no longer fight except for ethnic or community reasons. That is why the key to the jihadist defeat lies much more in Syria than in Iraq.
Mediapart: What is the situation regarding the rebellion in Syria? Alep is now threatened with become encircled by the jihadists.
J.-P. F.: Alep suffered greatly from the government’s ‘barrel bomb’ campaign which has caused at least 2,000 deaths since the start of the year. I stress that that was how Bashar al-Assad bombed a town which had been freed of jihadists, demonstrating that his target remains the revolutionaries more than Baghdadi’s partisans.
In the summer of 2013 I stayed in the [revolutionary] ‘liberated’ part of Alep, which at that time had about one million inhabitants. It now houses less than 300,000 because of the devastation of the barrel bombs, which was carried out amid general indifference [abroad]. Today, it’s the jihadists who want to take their revenge on Alep, which they have threatened to cut off from supplies via Turkey.
The Syrian revolutionaries are fighting on two fronts, against the dictatorship and the jihadists, in unbelievable conditions. If they didn’t have real popular support they’d have been swept away a long time ago. What is fundamentally bearing up to the shock is the resistance of neighbourhoods and villages, where local guys are fighting. That’s why they couldn’t stand the jihadists anymore, these foreigners who they welcomed as brothers and who wanted to teach them what Islam is.
It’s this popular resistance upon which support should be leant, rather than chatting away at international conferences in Geneva or elsewhere. To justify his passivity in Syria, Barack Obama recently stated that one cannot build an army from former doctors and peasants. His misunderstanding is total, for it is precisely civilians up in arms who have been standing up to Bashar al-Assad for the past three years. This incomprehension is also part of a larger incapacity to see the Arab world to come, to have confidence in the people of the region.
In this respect, military intervention cannot be a solution in itself. The challenge must be met in its globality, as [French President] François Hollande so proposed with foresight. In the same spirit, there must at all costs be Russian-American cooperation in face of the jihadist challenge. The threat of the Islamic State has become so monstrous that it justifies leaving aside other disputes of the moment in order to deal with it as a priority, and collectively.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Mediapart: Looking back at what happened in Iraq and Libya, do you not think, even so, that it was the way the West intervened that added disorder to the disorder and created the conditions for the monsters?
J.-P. F.: Today, there are no more good solutions. But if you judge a possible intervention in Syria in relation to what happened in Libya, and Libya in relation to Iraq, and Iraq in relation to Afghanistan, you will never get anywhere. The jihadists are always one war ahead, and we are always one war behind. We are currently considering how to intervene in Iraq when the real stakes are in Syria, which is the only theatre where we can hope to dismantle the jihadists in a durable way.
We didn't choose this [situation], but we have got both dictators and al-Qaida – two faces of the same monster. There are today two alternative poles of resistance that should be supported: in Iraq, [Masoud] Barzani's Kurdistan, even if we must hope that one day it will function in a less clan-like way, and in Syria, the revolutionaries of Aleppo who, remember, are fighting on two fronts.
I should add that if there were to be an intervention – and again, I do not believe in a military solution in itself – it would not be conducted in the name of the 'protection' of one group or another. We are fragile societies in deep crisis, and we urgently need to transmit abroad the values that give a collective sense to our way of living together.
Mediapart: How do you rate French diplomacy in all this?
J.-P. F.: I can only praise the coherence of the French position on Syria, which was undermined by Obama's U-turn on bombing Syria last year. There is also coherence over Iraq in Laurent Fabius's pioneering role within the European Union, whose collective impotence would have been damning without it. The fact that we now have a UN Chapter 7 resolution is thanks to France's actions. Hats off for that. On the Kurdish question, I consider that Fabius put up an almost faultless performance.
Regarding Gaza, I find it much more troubling. The position held at the highest levels of government, of solidarity with Israel, has in fact produced the very 'importing' of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that it was claimed would be averted. And the worst import, an import of resentment, a deep refusal of so-called 'double standards' that I have never seen until now. The recent inflection in official statements should imperatively be translated into action, with a French initiative in favour of lifting the blockade of the Gaza Strip, because this blockade imposed on 1.8 million men and women is in itself an act of war.
The conflict in Gaza is even more serious because, for the first time, an Israeli offensive in Palestinian territory has de facto support from most Arab regimes, with the notable exception of Qatar. This is a fantastic windfall for Baghdadi, who can recruit in the Arab world and beyond by capitalising on indignation provoked by the massacres in Gaza.
Finally, I would like to understand our policy towards Turkey better. I do not see how you can fight jihadist channels if you do not have strong cooperation with the Turkish services, because all jihadists pass through Turkey to go and to come back. The legal and police measures adopted in France against the jihadist threat are efficient in the French context, but we are not dealing with looking ahead or [what happens] beyond our borders.
Mediapart: You are certainly sounding the alarm about the jihadist dynamic and risk of terrorism. Why?
J.-P. F.: I am very worried because over the quarter of a century that I have been working on this phenomenon, I have never seen this. The degree of jihadist mobilisation, its coverage in space and time, is without precedent. Because of his war chest of more than a billion dollars, Baghdadi now has the resources to perpetrate the equivalent of a thousand 9/11 attacks. As a totalitarian organisation the jihadists are capable of affecting a part of their resources to a long-term project, so to recruitment, planning, or even the establishment of dormant cells.
Of course there is propaganda on the internet, which is significantly amplified by Western media. On that, the martyrdom of James Foley was entirely foreseeable. He had been kidnapped precisely to be sacrificed in circumstances like those today, with a media impact aggravated by the barbarity of this murder. On this subject we should also pay tribute to the French authorities, which have worked tirelessly so as not to leave a single French person in the hands of Islamic State.
A foreign recruit of Baghdadi's must themselves recruit three or five people on pain of sanctions. So that person posts messages on social networks to extol their experience and invite [others] to join them. This is why the growth of jihadist recruitment is exponential. In addition, we are now seeing family-based emigration, with women producing a kind of travel guide full of practical advice for jihadist families.
The other strength of this propaganda is its insistence on the notion of spoils, ghanima. That is something that attracts criminals, here and elsewhere. If it is for jihad, you can rob, do a credit card or consumer credit fraud, and so on. Over there they are told to take the spoils, for example during expulsions of Christians or so-called 'exemplary' killings.
The lure of spoils is a powerful incitement to jihadist indoctrination. My worst fear is that these Western 'volunteers', who are poorly trained militarily, are not much use to jihadist commandos over there. So they will send some back to Europe to perpetrate terrorist acts, copying Mehdi Nemmouche and the killing at the Brussels Jewish Museum. They know that the climate in Europe has deteriorated and is xenophobic, with a real risk of an escalation in racism if there were to be an attack from within the [Muslim] community. Baghdadi's plan is to take Europe’s Muslims hostage as he has done in Iraq and Syria.
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- The original French text of this interview can be found here.
English version by Sue Landau and Graham Tearse