Shades of the Khilafat movement (1919-1924) when Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress high command joined the Ali brothers, Muhammad and Shaukat, in an opportunistic alliance in defence of the Ottoman Caliphate, some Islamists now proclaim a new “caliph” in the person of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi. They also boast of “Wilayah of Hind”, apparently their very first “province” in India. This cannot be forgotten at a time when some Muslims may feel that the Ayodhya verdict adds insult to the injury of Kashmir.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has been weakened by military reverses, territorial losses and the killing of its self-proclaimed first caliph, the Iraqi Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai who became Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi al-Qurayshi. But the murderously malign organisation is not dead. Its tentacles seem to be creeping into South Asia – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and, now, India which designated the IS a terrorist organisation in December 2014. But evil as the IS might be, it is a product of injustices West Asia has suffered since before the Ottoman empire collapsed. The region will know no peace until uprooted and dispossessed Palestinians receive justice and fundamental abuses such as those that have provoked the current riots in Iraq and Lebanon are removed.
Cause and effect cannot easily be separated in this tragic sequence. The Arab Spring, a series of protests, uprisings and armed revolts across much of the Islamic world in the early 2010s, was one response to misery. The IS is another. The Arab Spring was fuelled by the Western powers, notably the United States, which dangled illusions of democracy and human rights before the Arab masses to get rid of inconvenient rulers like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Released from the bottle, the genie of violence won’t go back. It is no accident that Iraq is OPEC's second-biggest oil producer, but, as the World Bank says, one in five Iraqis lives in poverty. Youth unemployment stands at 25 per cent. The United Nations says 40 per cent of Libyans live below the poverty line, not benefitting from oil reserves which are the largest in Africa and ninth largest in the world.
The IS gained global prominence in early 2014 by driving Iraqi government troops out of key cities like Mosul and massacring thousands of men, women and children. The Americans probably thought at the end of October, when Donald Trump announced al-Baghdadi’s death that the movement would peter out. This was a clumsy piece of one-upmanship. Since the credit for eliminating Osama bin Laden, the last larger-than-life global terrorist and head of the Al-Qaeda network, in 2011 went to his predecessor, Barack Obama, Mr Trump had to claim his own achievement.
He tried to extract the maximum drama from it by claiming at a gathering of police chiefs in Chicago that the 48-year-old “Caliph Ibrahim”, as some called al-Baghdadi, had died "whimpering and crying and screaming", and "like a dog and a coward", adding that the IS leader and "the losers" under his command "were very frightened puppies". This account seems to have been grotesquely exaggerated. Most probably, the caliph, who carried a price of $10 million on his head, blew himself up when the net closed in. Whatever the manner of his end, the IS lost no time in proclaiming a new caliph who is described as a deeply religious veteran anti-Western fighter and an experienced commander. The al-Qurashi clan surname suggests that like al-Baghdadi, he also belonged to the Prophet Mohammad's Quraysh tribe, a lineage that gives him legitimacy in some quarters. His al-Hashimi name is believed to be a nom de guerre, his real name being unknown although there is some speculation that it is Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal Rahman al-Mawla, and that he was also known as Hajji 'Abdallah, al-Baghdadi’s senior-most aide before he was killed.
Incidentally, al-Baghdadi claimed responsibility for the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka that killed over 250 people. A video that his regime released sought to emphasise the international nature of IS operations. IS propaganda resonates more strongly in Muslim Bangladesh where a faction of the Salafi-Jihadist Jama’atul Mujahideen is known to have targeted a police outpost and a police vehicle in two locations in the capital. Bombings in Sylhet are blamed on them and on August 8 the Bangladeshi authorities arrested five self-radicalized pro-IS youth in the capital Dhaka. Nor has the IS given up the aim, announced in 2015, of setting up an expanded Islamic state called Khorasan as its Central Asian province, a region that straddles parts of modern Iran, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The IS never lacks recruits because of the festering grievances throughout the Arab world. The demonstrators in both Iraq (where the current death toll is more than 300) and Lebanon complain of corruption, nepotism and high unemployment. Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq’s prime minister, heads an embattled government threatened by the largest and deadliest grassroots protests in decades. The 77-year-old Mr Mahdi, who came to power last year through a shaky alliance between the populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and Hadi al-Amiri, a leader of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary network, faces a leaderless, economically driven mob demanding not just his resignation but a complete overhaul of the sectarian system of government that the US established after invading Iraq in 2003 and overthrowing Saddam.
Lebanon’s problems are less directly traceable to the West except that the country fractured along sectarian lines is the most pro-Western in the region, with a regime that generally stands aloof from Arab concerns. The unusually wide geographic reach of these protests has been seen as a sign of deepening anger with politicians who have led Lebanon into crisis. Sectarian politicians, many of them civil war veterans, have long used state resources for their own political benefit and are reluctant to cede prerogatives while capital flows are slowing down to an economy that has long depended on remittances from its diaspora to meet financing needs, including the state's deficit. The financial crunch has added to the impetus for reform but foreign donors who have offered billions in financial assistance conditional on reforms have yet to be convinced of change.
Meanwhile, the IS claimed in May to have inflicted casualties upon Indian forces in Amshipora town of Shopian district in the so-called “Wilayah of Hind” province in what has now become the union territory of Kashmir. The police confirmed that an IS-linked militant was killed. It was a minor conflict as these things go but does indicate the global ambitions of a deadly organisation. Licking their wounds, Kashmiris might be even more receptive now to IS propaganda.
The writer is a comedian, TV anchor, theatre personality, satirist, podcaster and an author.
