The New Threat from Islamic Militancy
by Jason Burke
(Bodley Head, £16.99)
Osama Bin Laden once noted that the Spanish economy was larger than the Arab economies, taken together. Most Arab countries are economic laggards, unable to generate employment for a rapidly-expanding population. As a result the region is full of bored, frustrated young people.
To satisfy a yearning for fulfilment many of them have inevitably been drawn to ISIS. The militant group offers recruits status and a sense of mission, but also access to cars, and can even help them find a wife or husband. Many other Sunni extremist groups, not all of them necessarily advocates of violence, are competing for the attention of young, disaffected Muslims, in the Middle East and beyond.
Considered
In a considered and well-sourced book, Jason Burke, The Guardian’s South Asia correspondent, sites ISIS within the wider frame of increasing Sunni militancy. To a large extent Sunni extremism is a product of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The Shia clerics who came to power in Iran that year declared their hostility to the Gulf monarchies, creating a deep and besetting sense of insecurity in Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab state.
Riyadh has reacted by investing billions of dollars in the export of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist, sectarian strain of Sunni Islam that prevails in the Kingdom.
In Saudi-funded mosques across the Middle East, and beyond, preachers revile the Shia ‘apostates’ as furiously as they condemn Christians and Jews.
In recent years, wealthy extremists in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia have donated vast sums to ISIS, an overtly sectarian Sunni organisation.
Sunni extremism is on the rise partly because there is nothing to challenge it. The Arab Spring has ushered in chaos and repression, not robust democracy; the ideologies that dominated in the past – nationalism, pan-Arabism, socialism – have not delivered the change and progress promised by their exponents.
ISIS encourages its sympathisers around the world to bomb and kill in their own countries rather than come to the ‘caliphate’. But Burke notes that only a small minority of militants have the resolve – if that is the word – to commit acts of violence. Those who do are often young men from chaotic backgrounds who crave the sense of purpose, the certainty that only an extreme ideology can provide.
Burke is careful in his assessment of IS.
The jihadis will continue to pose a threat, especially to the peoples of the Middle East, for years to come. But they have already had to cede territory to determined Kurdish fighters. ISIS does not have the expertise to operate much of the sophisticated weaponry at its disposal, or to assemble and launch nuclear weapons.
The ‘caliphate’ must expand to survive, but if its enemies manage to contain it, or roll it back, or if they succeed in assassinating the charismatic ‘caliph’, Al Baghdadi, then factionalism, desertions and demoralisation may hasten the demise of the Islamic State, the inspiration for Islamic militants around the world.