Decoding the crISIS

“This is a piece of poetry
Heavily disguised as prose:
The higher the monkey climbs
The more him parts expose!”
From Jamaican Graffiti
- by Bachchoo

International journalism has let us all down. Not one newspaper, British, American or Indian has attempted to explain to us what’s going on in West Asia. The developments there are at least as significant to the future of the world and to geo-political settlements as the “communist” revolutions of the last century or the genocide of the Jews initiated by the Nazis.

I appreciate the fact that the labyrinthine complexity of West Asia, its alliances with the West and within, its sources of income and the operative principle of an enemy’s enemy being, with severe reservations, a friend makes the mission to inform near impossible.

Even so, I see the news of ISIS incursions, their siege of cities, their beheadings of hostages and other developments on TV. After the beheadings of Western journalists, I am in complete sympathy with the BBC, who may be unwilling to risk the lives of even daredevil reporters by challenging them to report from there.
Now I am, as my grandmother would have said, a reasonably intelligent individual, but I am somewhat bewildered as to who is doing what to whom. I got the elementary stuff. A Chechen called Baghdadi leads a group which began as a Sunni guerrilla insurrection in Iraq.

Originally a man called Zarkawi who was killed by the US troops, it took its war to Syria’s regime, fighting the Alawites and evolving into the Universal Islamic Caliphate which has now captured oil resources and several towns in Syria and Iraq, killed and crucified the Shia troops of Iraq’s Army, murdered large numbers of the population causing survivors to flee to Jordan, Turkey and declared their intention to take over the world and impose Sharia law.

But even as I digest this much, the questions proliferate. Who are the Alawites? How do they differ from Shias and Sunnis? How if they are a minority in Syria did they get to be governing and discriminatory?

In the early reports of the victories and spread of IS or ISIS or ISIL as it was then called, I became aware of a whole population called the Yezidis whom the ISIS were intent on slaughtering. I admit I had never heard of them before and gathered that ISIS probably had some theological objection to their beliefs. But what are these beliefs? Are the Yezidis Muslims? Where do they come from?

I have also deduced rather that the fighters of ISIS are Sunni rebels from Syria who have been joined by the likes of foreign insurgents like Mr Baghdadi and our own British “Jihadi John” who appears on their podcasts in a black hood and threatens to behead British and Western hostages. They have been joined by Sunni army personnel of the Iraqi Army of Saddam Husain which was disbanded by the Allies.

The town of Kobane on the Syrian-Turkish border has been under fire from ISIS who is threatening to capture it. Reports say that the people defending the town against ISIS are Kurds. The US is bombing ISIS positions in and outside the town but a considerable force of Turkish tanks and artillery are standing by on their side of the border and despite having signed up to a US-led alliance against ISIS are doing nothing to help the Kurdish forces. Why?

It’s not that Turkey is just standing by. It has two million refugees from Syria which it has to feed. My speculation, and it’s no better than that, is that the Turkish state believes that a Kurdish victory in Kobane would lead to an insurrection by the Kurdish population within their own borders. Perhaps they see ISIS as a lesser threat as it is possible that the rubble of this war will leave a Kurdish state carved out of the Kurd areas of Syria, Iraq and Turkey, whereas ISIS will be wiped out.

As with the Yezidis and other sects that receive mention I have never been definitively informed as to who the Kurds are. While Sunnis, Shias, Wahhabis, Salafis and others are defined by their religious beliefs, the Kurds seem to be defined by race. What shade of Islam do they profess? And why are there three rival factions amongst the Kurds? Are they the distinct armies of warlords or do they differ in their ideologies?

I have sought the answers to these questions on the Internet. The problem with that source is it is unedited and has led me into reading the clearly slanted opinions of nationalists, fanatics and opinionated propagandists. Untangling that is in itself bewildering.

In all the complexities of the present mess, the role of Qataris is clearly ambiguous. Various bits and pieces of information and opinion from US think tanks and publications such as The Atlantic lead us to believe that, despite the Qatari regime having signed up to the coalition to destroy ISIS, the financing of extremists who form the ISIS network from Syrian and Iraqi ISIS to Tunisia, Libya and Boko Haram comes from Qatari individuals. Qatar and its financing links are not yet a war zone. Can’t they be investigated and exposed?