Ghastly fallout of the Iraq invasion

The US-led military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 received widespread international support because it was clearly established that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC were planned and executed by the Al Qaeda, based in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

The same cannot, however, be said of the US military intervention in Iraq. Proclaiming that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the US and its allies mounted a land, air and sea invasion of that country on March 1, 2003.

Not surprisingly, it was soon found that indeed, Iraq did not possess a single weapon of mass destruction. However, with Iraq’s army disintegrating, the country was soon taken over by the US. On May 1, 2003, President George W Bush landed on the aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, aboard an aircraft carrying the banner ‘Mission Accomplished’. But by the time the US withdrew from Iraq, 4,491 American soldiers and an estimated 1,50,000 Iraqis had been killed.

The aftershocks of this invasion are being felt across the Islamic world and in Europe.

With a majority Shia-dominated government taking over in Baghdad, following decades of minority Sunni domination, old sectarian scores were sought to be assuaged and settled. A bloody sectarian civil war was accompanied by the emergence of Sunni fighters led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, a veteran of the CIA-sponsored Afghan jihad, to challenge Baghdad’s Shia-dominated regime.

Matters worsened when a US-led alliance, backed by Sunni-dominated countries led by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, sought to violently overthrow the minority Shia-dominated regime of Bashar Al Assad in neighbouring Syria. Zarqawi’s followers and successors in Iraq joined this jihad against the Assad regime.

Not surprisingly, Assad is supported by an alliance of Shia states and entities including Iran, Iraq and the Hezbollah in Lebanon, with Russia providing the military muscle.

These developments led to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is primarily Iraqi but also includes volunteers from Sunni Islamic countries and young Sunni immigrants in Europe and the US for jihad against Shias, the Assad regime and the western world. Thousands of innocent civilians have perished in Syria and Iraq, with an estimated nine million Syrians fleeing to refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and elsewhere. Animosity between Shias and Sunnis has now engulfed virtually the entire Muslim world. Shias in Sunni-dominated countries like Egypt are targeted by street mobs.

A vicious media war is now being waged through print, satellite television and even social media outlets such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Venom is being spewed against Shias and their beliefs and practices. This propaganda is largely financed by Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It is reinforced by immigrant-run television networks in cities like London. Some television channels in Egypt have also joined in.

The political transformation in Iraq in 2006 led to Sunnis facing the wrath of the politically empowered Shia majority. The then Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al Maliki and his cabinet accused Saudi Arabia of backing “genocide”.

European countries with large immigrant Muslim populations from West Asia and North Africa have also faced terrorist challenges after the invasion of Iraq. The recent terrorist shootings in France over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons have received huge media attention and raised pertinent queries on whether the freedom of speech should include the right to publicly denigrate and ridicule the faith of others.

In March, 2004, just after the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, 191 people were killed and over 1,800 injured by synchronised bomb blasts in four trains in Spain, for which Al Qaeda accepted responsibility. Chechen terrorist groups in Russia are known to have received support in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan.

The attacks and threats in Western Europe largely come from second generation Sunni immigrants who feel alienated from the mainstream. Their insecurities are reinforced when they face the prospect of prolonged unemployment, and measures such as banning the veil, or when they are ridiculed for wearing skull caps, or when the aversion to the construction of mosques is palpable.

On social media, their minds are poisoned by vicious propaganda about Muslims being discriminated against and the invasion by western militaries of Iraq and Libya. The net result has been that some 5,000 Muslim immigrants in the EU and a smaller number in the US have joined the ISIL, with every possibility of some of them returning to their homes as hardened terrorists.

While sectarian Shia-Sunni tensions remain a fact of life in Pakistan, more so since the Iranian revolution in 1979, they are now getting worse. The Nawaz Sharif government is known to have long-standing links with indigenous anti-Shia groups such as the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and their mentors in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

India will have to strengthen its engagement with Arab Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE, and retain the goodwill of Iran and Iraq if is to avoid getting drawn into the vortex of sectarian rivalries and tensions in the Islamic world.

Any interruption in the flow of oil supplies and any violence or instability affecting the over six million Indians living in the Gulf region will have serious implications for our economy and challenge regional stability.

The author is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan