When mosques of one faction in Pakistan, where Islam is a religion, are attacked everyday by another, jihadi brain-washing comes home to roost against Islam itself. This is what must be learnt from the london attack
The Islamist terror strike on Parliament building in london was the way this global menace that calls itself the Islamic State (IS), kicked the US-led West-Gulf states combine’s fight to eradicate the self-styled Caliphate. How limited the West’s understanding of the threat posed by radical Islam is evident in the reaction of General John Allen, a President Obama appointee from the American Army to build a coalition of Western and Gulf states against the self-appointed Caliphate based in Iraq-Syria.
Allen told at a Qatar conference, “It is a regional problem tending towards global implications”. Is this just a regional menace threatening to spread across the worldIJ
As several analysts, with insight into the working of aggressive Islam have pointed out, there is inadequate appreciation of the brain washing this so-called IS is doing across the world. This enables the IS to use the appeal of Islam globally to resonate itself in the imagination of the Muslim population and also its recent converts from other religions.
More often than not, the recruits for terror in the West come from these very converts as well as from migrant Islamic groups to Europe and America. The attack that IS recruits in the UK have mounted on the Mother of Parliament no doubt will remind us in this country the similar attack on our Parliament by Pakistan’s so called non-state actors like lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammad.
So, when the anti-terror coalition, led by US, deals with this attack as a IS perpetration and confines the coalition’s action only against the IS, it is most likely to bound to fail to provide an effective strategy to come to the roots of the problem. For the last 12 months, the security apparatus in every European country, including the UK, has been on high alert but it could not foresee the planning and execution of this attack.
The reason seems to be the new techniques of the Islamist movement to use radicalised individual Muslims, especially the recent local converts to deliver telling damage on the rest of the world.
Though the national security apparatus in each country, including India, has been able to prevent some of these prospective attacks, the fact is that just one successful attack by individual zealots is enough to mock at claims that anti-terror forces are succeeding in curbing terror strikes.
As Newsweek wrote last September after the drone strike eliminated one of the top second rung leader of the IS, Abu Mohammed al-Abani, the journal wondered whether this type of attacks on the terrorist organisation was effective in ending the menace.
“When leaders of terrorist organisations are killed, the group tends to become more radical” with more civilian groups of its target country. The call to indulge in indiscriminate and brutal killings gets intensified.
Some observers of the Syria-Iraq based IS also believe that the global action against IS is hampered by the internal conflict in Syria against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad whose Shia regime is being target by the Sunni regimes around the Shias. That the IS is a Sunni organisation imports a disturbing element in the area where Sunni and Shia followers and their kings are in conflict in perpetuity.
There is suspicion that the Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries like Qatar, Bahrain, are more interested in setting up a Salafistan within the Iran- Iraq part of the IS occupied territory which is largely Shia, than in fighting the IS.
This faction is wanting to get the Assad regime ousted from Syria and continues to support the Syrian rebels against the Assad regime than in securing the territory occupied by the IS.
It was when the rebellion was going on, with the US on one side and the Russians on the other, that IS emerged as a force with its own army. The then US President Barack Obama had to work with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who was supporting Assad with arms and Russian power to enable a unified approach to contain and eliminate the IS threat. That effort to work out with Russia has received greater result after Trump became the US President as he is reported to have closer relationship with President Putin of Russia.
However, the ceasefire between various rebel forces against Assad and the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia is unstable and breaks upon and off enabling the IS to get a breather to resist the West led attack against it. That is why IS was able to recapture the key town of Ramadi from where the Iraqi forces were able to get it vacated.
Iraq backed by Iran does not want what is described as a Sunni led ‘Salafistan’ to be established in the Shia area of Syria-Iraq — the IS is Sunni force and the two Islamic factions are at each other’s throat with IS that claims to lead Islamism not hesitating to brutally kill Shias caught in the battleground. The international fighters for Islamist regime get to the IS-held territory through Turkey-Syria border.
It is this reality of the inner working of the Islamist jihad in the context of rival Islamic states that the international effort to drive out the extremist threat is failing in its task.
Islamic states themselves are promotingjihadi terror on the one hand while working to contain the IS jihad on the other. The consequences of the US success in tracing out and eliminating Osama bin laden, the Al Qaeda boss whom Pakistan had given sanctuary and who was operating from Jalalabad, has exposed the myth of the Islamic states being opposed to terroristjihadi at official level. Saudi Arabia, for instance, may be opposed to IS. But we must also remember it was opposed to laden and his Al Qaeda who was a Saudi citizen.
At the same time, it is the Saudi funds and encouragement in opening across many non-Islamic countries the religious schools calledmadrassas that encourage an exclusivist world conquering version of Islam to be taught to Muslim children in India and elsewhere.
Whilejihadi terrorism at one level is publicly opposed by Islamic Governments and institutions, the same state-level forces fund and promote Islam as a world conquering religion in private. Whether in the UK or Germany or France or India, it is this brainwashing of Islamic students that prepare them to resonate the calls of such forces as IS; some go beyond mere idea and take up militancy.
In Kashmir or london it is this dominating vision that every Muslim has an obligation to be ajihadi warrior that feeds a mental empathy with terror; in some it goes beyond the mind and become a call to arms.
When mosques of one faction in Pakistan, where Islam is the state religion, are attacked on a day-to-day basis by another, jihadi brain washing comes home to roost against Islam itself. That is what london event is warning all of us.
(The writer is a former Rajya Sabha MP from BJP and a Delhi-based political and social analyst)