Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Tomgram: Mark Danner, Generals Bin Laden and Bush, March 25, 2008

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to “take stock” of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts.

Heavy fighting in southern Iraqi oil hub | World | Reuters, March 25, 2008

BASRA, Iraq Reuters - Heavy fighting erupted on Tuesday in the southern oil city of Basra where Iraqi security forces launched a major operation at dawn against powerful militias, military officials and witnesses said.

A Reuters witness in the city reported seeing black smoke over northern districts and hearing explosions and machinegun fire. A hospital source said “tens of wounded” were arriving at hospitals with some too busy to accept more casualties.

Television pictures showed Iraqi troops running through empty streets and helicopters flying overhead.

“There are clashes in the streets. Bullets are coming from everywhere and we can hear the sound of rocket explosions. This has been going on since dawn,” resident Jamil told Reuters by telephone as he cowered in his home.

Military officials said “many outlaws” had been killed.

Two powerful factions of Iraqs Shiite majority, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Mehdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr, are fighting for power in Basra along with a smaller Shiite party, Fadhila.

Basra is Iraq’s second city and gateway to the Gulf. Its oil fields are the source of most government revenues.

Bin Laden in Palestinian call, BBC, March 21, 2008

“The nearest jihad battlefield to support our people in Palestine is the battlefield of Iraq,” the speaker said.

The message, aired on al-Jazeera TV, comes a day after the al-Qaeda leader threatened the EU over the reprint of a cartoon deemed offensive to Muslims.

The messages coincide with the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.

BBC defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says they follow a familiar pattern, with Bin Laden touching on an issue he knows resonates with many Muslims

‘Fire and iron’

In the second message in two days, the speaker dismissed attempts at reconciliation in the Middle East.

“Palestine cannot be retaken by negotiations and dialogue, but with fire and iron,” he said.

New Bin Laden tape threatens EU, BBC, March 20, 2008

In a new audio message purportedly from Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader threatens the EU over the re-printing of a cartoon offensive to Muslims.

The voice on it says the cartoon, re-published recently in all major Danish newspapers, was part of a crusade involving Pope Benedict XVI.

The drawing, first published in 2005, depicts the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

The voice on the audio has not yet been verified as belonging to Bin Laden.

The message comes on the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

But the BBC’s Jonathan Beale in Washington says that the message was probably released to not to mark that anniversary, but rather the anniversary of the birth of Prophet Muhammad, which Sunni Muslims mark on Thursday.

It appeared on a Islamist website that has carried al-Qaeda messages in the past.

Over the audio is a graphic with a still image of Bin Laden holding an AK-47 and bearing the logo of al-Sahab, the media wing of al-Qaeda. There is a written translation of the message in English.

‘Crowd pleaser’

John Pike, director of the defence think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said bin Laden had chosen to talk about the cartoon in an effort to remain relevant and provide direction to followers.

“His judgement is that it’s a consistent crowd-pleaser, and that if he has any hope of getting people stirred up, this is probably a good way to try to do it.”

Last month, Denmark’s leading newspapers reprinted one of 12 cartoons that first angered many Muslims when they were originally published in September 2005.

Anger in the Muslim world peaked in 2006 as newspapers in other countries published the cartoons.

McClatchy Washington Bureau, 03/17/2008, Cheney cites phenomenal Iraqi security progress as bombing kills 40

BAGHDAD — Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday made a surprise visit to Baghdad, where he pledged that U.S. forces would “not quit before the job is done” and said that a massive troop buildup had achieved “phenomenal” improvements in security.

At sunset Monday, however, a female suicide bomber killed at least 40 people and injured more than 50 when she blew herself up in a crowded pedestrian area near a Shiite Muslim shrine in the southern holy city of Karbala, according to government and hospital officials. Among the victims were several Iranian pilgrims whod come to worship at the Imam Hussein shrine, one of Islams most sacred sites.

And the U.S. military announced the deaths of two soldiers who were killed Monday when their Humvee struck a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, bringing the number of American troop deaths to at least 3,990 since the war began.

Cheney told a news conference in Baghdad that the invasion of Iraq five years ago this week was a “difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor.” However, he said that obstacles remain and that the decision on whether to begin reducing forces depends on political reconciliation and the ability to preserve the hard-won security gains of the past year.

Nir Rosen, The Myth of the Surge : Rolling Stone, March 6, 2008

It’s a cold, gray day in December, and I’m walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city’s no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

AP, Iran Says God Protects Nuclear Program - washingtonpost.com, Feb. 17, 2008

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Sunday that God would punish Iranians if they do not support the country’s disputed nuclear program, state radio reported.

“The Iranian people openly announce that they will defend their rights… God will reprimand them if they do not do so,” state radio quoted Khamenei as saying.

The 68-year-old ayatollah, who has final say on all state matters, said Washington’s claim that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon is false. The Iranian government has long insisted its nuclear activities are only for peaceful generation of fuel.

Carolyn Drake for the New York Times

In Turkey, Is Tension About Religion? Class Rivalry? Or Both? - New York Times, Feb. 19, 2008

ISTANBUL — When two women in Islamic head scarves were spotted in an Italian restaurant in this citys posh new shopping mall this month, Gulbin Simitcioglu did a double take.Covered women, long seen as backward peasants from the countryside, “have started to be everywhere,” said Ms. Simitcioglu, a sales clerk in an Italian clothing store, and it is making women like her more than a little uncomfortable. “We are Turkeys image. They are ruining it.”

As Turkey lurches toward a repeal of a ban on head scarves at universities, the countrys secular upper middle class is feeling increasingly threatened.

Religious Turks, once the underclass of society here, have become educated and middle class, and are moving into urban spaces that were once the exclusive domain of the elite. Now the repeal of the scarf ban — pressed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, passed by Parliament and now just awaiting an official signature — is again setting the two groups against each other, unleashing fears that have as much to do with class rivalry as with the growing influence of Islam.

Heba Saleh, Pleas for condemned Saudi ‘witch’, BBC, February 14, 2008

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft.

In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.

Human Rights Watch said that Ms Falih had exhausted all her chances of appealing against her death sentence and she could only now be saved if King Abdullah intervened.

‘Undefined’ crime

The US-based group is asking the Saudi ruler to void Ms Falih’s conviction and to bring charges against the religious police who detained her and are alleged to have mistreated her.

Its letter to King Abdullah says the woman was tried for the undefined crime of witchcraft and that her conviction was on the basis of the written statements of witnesses who said that she had bewitched them.

Human Rights Watch says the trial failed to meet the safeguards in the Saudi justice system.

The confession which the defendant was forced to fingerprint was not even read out to her, the group says.

European Pressphoto Agency

Tens of thousands of secular Turks demonstrated in Ankara against the lifting of a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves at Turkey’s universities.

Turkey’s Parliament Votes to Lift Head Scarf Ban - New York Times, Feb. 9, 2008

ISTANBUL — Turkey’s parliament took a major step toward lifting a ban against women’s head scarves in universities on Saturday, setting the stage for a final showdown with the country’s secular elite over where Islam fits in the building of an open society.

Turkish lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of a measure supported by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to change two articles in Turkey’s Constitution that they say would guarantee every citizen the right to go to college regardless of how they dress. Turkish authorities imposed the ban in the late 1990’s, arguing that the growing numbers of covered women in colleges threatened secularism, one of the founding principles of modern Turkey.

Secular opposition lawmakers voted against the change, with about a fifth of all ballots cast. Large crowds of secular Turks backed them on the streets of Turkey’s capital, Ankara, chanting that secularism, and women’s right to resist being forced to wear head scarves by family members or religious authorities, was under threat and demanding that the government step down.

AFP: Afghanistan may plunge into ‘failed state,’ experts warn, January 30, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Insurgency-wracked Afghanistan will become a failed state if urgent steps are not taken to tackle a deteriorating security situation and lackluster reconstruction and governance efforts, experts warned in separate reports Wednesday.

The reports came amid new concerns over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s commitment to providing more troops to fight a resurgent Taliban militia, with Canada’s prime minister warning in talks with US President George W. Bush that it might pull troops from Afghanistan unless NATO boosts support.

“Urgent changes are required now to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a failing or failed state,” cautioned one report from the Atlantic Council of the United States, led by retired Marine Corps general James Jones.

Taliban control of the sparsely populated parts of Afghanistan was “increasing” and civil reforms, reconstruction, and development work “have not gained traction” across the country, especially in the south, it said.

“To add insult to injury, of every dollar of aid spent on Afghanistan, less than ten percent goes directly to Afghans, further compounding reform and reconstruction problems,” the report said.

Southern Afghanistan has seen the worst violence since the Taliban were ousted from power in the US-led invasion in 2001 following the September 11 terror attacks masterminded by Al-Qaeda, whose leaders were given sanctuary by the Taliban.

As US and NATO-led troops wage an uphill battle now to keep the Taliban at bay, civil sector reform “is in serious trouble” despite immense resources poured into the country and nearly seven years of efforts, the report said.

BBC NEWS, Afghan MPs back blasphemy death, January 30, 2008

The upper house of the Afghan parliament has supported a death sentence issued against a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan.

Pervez Kambaksh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge.

The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case.

The Afghan government has said that the sentence was not final.

A government spokesman said recently that the case would be handled “very carefully”.

Now the Afghan Senate has issued a statement on the case - it was not voted on but was signed by its leader, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, an ally of President Hamid Karzai.

It said the upper house approved the death sentence conferred on Mr Kambaksh by a city court in Mazar-e-Sharif.

Radio Australia - Asia Pacific - AFGHANISTAN: Journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy, January 28, 2008

In Afghanistan, a young journalism student has been sentenced to death for blasphemy, after allegedly distributing an article on why Muslim women can’t have more than one husband. Judges in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif accuse 23-year-old Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh of humiliating Islam by giving copies of the article to his fellow students. But the media advocacy group which employs Mr Kaambakhsh’s brother Yacoub says the young student’s being targeted to persuade his brother to stop reporting on human rights abuses in Afghanistan.

Presenter - Corinne Podger Speaker - Jared Ferrie, Institute of War and Peace Reporting in Kabul

FERRIE: He’s accused of downloading a number of copies and articles from the internet. My understanding is that the article was critical of the way that women are treated according to Islam. So he’s been accused of downloading this article, printing it out and distributing it at the university. And so the charge against him is blasphemy.

PODGER: IWPR believes his sentence has nothing to do with distributing an article about gender in Islam, but it’s rather a punishment or intimidation aimed at his brother who workers with you?

FERRIE: Right, he denies that he downloaded this article and distributed it. What he and his brother Yacoub are assuming is that this is actually an indirect attack at Yacoub, and Yacoub is a journalist with IWPR, and he’s done a number of controversial stories over the years. For example, on warlord essentially who are, one in particular is a member of parliament and he’s been accused of all sorts of abuses, basically Yacoub in his stories has exposed a number of human rights abuses that have taken place and his stories points a finger at this fellow in particular. Another one was on the sexual exploitation of young boys, it’s apparently a common practice in certain parts of the country where warlords will actually take a young boy of maybe 13 or 14 and essentially use the young boy as a sex slave. So Yacoub did a story which indicated that the practice is actually quite widespread and growing in certain parts of northern Afghanistan. Certainly Yacoub has faced intimidation and threats over the years. He’s thinking that this is actually an indirect act at him, after his brother was imprisoned the authorities came to Yacoub’s home and they demanded to see his notes for particular stories, his sources, they wanted him to open up his computer and show them his information, which he refused to do. Certainly there are connections between warlords and people in the government, some of whom are warlords and the judicial system which is in Afghanistan known to be quite corrupt. So it certainly is possible, I’m not saying this, we don’t have the facts at this point, but it certainly is possible that the judiciary is being used by certain powerful people to actually persecute Yacoub and his brother.

Fawaz Gerges, Iraq War Fuels Global Jihad, Yaleglobal, December 21, 2007

Ordinary Muslims, not just Islamists and jihadists, view the “war on terror” as a war against their religion and values. Many Muslims who had initially condemned Al Qaeda and 9/11 are having second thoughts about bin Laden’s fight against the Americans and their allies. Bin Laden has gained credibility in their eyes. “Now he is defending the Ummah,” confided a young rising poet, Massoud Hamed.

Top American policymakers – as opposed to intelligence officers – have little appreciation for how their military involvement in Iraq, as well as their staunch support of Israel, is radicalizing mainstream Muslim opinion and legitimizing radical groups that wage armed struggle in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere. “Al-Muqawama,” or resistance, is the most popular slogan in the Muslim world today, resonating deeply among men and women of all ages with religious and nationalist orientation alike. The plight of the Palestinians and Iraqis, in particular, echoes widely.

I have yet to hear a Friday sermon in which believers are not reminded to lend a helping hand to their beleaguered Palestinian and Iraqi counterparts.

Andrew Bacevich, Surge to Nowhere, washingtonpost.com, January 20, 2008

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that “Iraq is sovereign,” that sovereignty remains a fiction.

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that the United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in Germany and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina. Even today, Iraqi electrical generation meets barely half the daily national requirements. Baghdad households now receive power an average of 12 hours each day — six hours fewer than when Saddam Hussein ruled. Oil production still has not returned to pre-invasion levels. Reports of widespread fraud, waste and sheer ineptitude in the administration of U.S. aid have become so commonplace that they barely last a news cycle. (Recall, for example, the 110,000 AK-47s, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets intended for Iraqi security forces that, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon cannot account for.) U.S. officials repeatedly complain, to little avail, about the paralyzing squabbling inside the Iraqi parliament and the rampant corruption within Iraqi ministries. If a primary function of government is to provide services, then the government of Iraq can hardly be said to exist.