What goes around, comes around. This is demonstrated by the militants the Syrian regime once sent to Iraq to fight against the US who have now returned to Syria to fight against the regime that conceived them and that now threatens its very existence, observed the columnist Jihad Al Khazen in the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat.
In the same way, the sectarian rule that Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al Maliki has pursued for years in Iraq has backfired and has returned to torment him in the form of a civil war in which Al Qaeda will be the prime beneficiary.
As for the militants-turned-terrorists, they are paying the price in Iraq and Syria where the opposition and the regime have turned against them. The Americans too are paying the price of their decision to dissolve the Iraqi army, the writer noted.
In the latest development, tribes in provinces with a Sunni majority and which defy the ruling regime in Baghdad are now cooperating with the regime against Al Qaeda militants.
It would be difficult for the current Iraqi army and Al Maliki’s government, backed by Iran, to conquer the Sunni revolution in Al Anbar and Samara, where Sunni officers and troops from the army during Saddam Hussein’s era were left jobless and hopeless without any retirement pensions after the 2003 US invasion.
“These are the best trained and the most committed military officers in Iraq today. They will fight in the ranks of any uprising against the government in Baghdad,” the writer noted.
Military officers who were driven to destitution after 2003 are back in the forefront of events in what looks like an undeclared civil war. There is no shortage of Arab states willing to finance and arm them.
“I reckon that the current Iraqi armed forces and security forces wouldn’t be able to quell the insurgents in Sunni provinces. Saddam’s troops, who were wrongly persecuted by the US and Nouri Al Maliki, possess significant amounts of weapons from the past and present armies, and they are the most skilled at using them in Iraq,” he wrote.
Nearly 8,000 people were killed in Iraq in 2013, the highest toll since 2008.
Mr Al Maliki could be accused of many things, but lacking intelligence isn’t one of them. It is hard to imagine that he did not expect a reaction to his deliberate head-butting with Sunni leaderships.
In fact, an insurgency or a religiously-driven civil war would give him an opportune excuse to delay the elections slated for next April and allow him to remain in power without risking to lose the parliamentary majority that got him to the premiership.
“These developments don’t augur well for Iraq,” Al Khazen concluded.
“They herald an extreme catastrophe that will eventually spill over borders.”
‘Leader of necessity’ argument is doubtful
The popular notion that Egypt’s army chief, General Abdul Fattah El Sisi, is a man of necessity is questionable, Fahmi Huwaidi argued in the Cairo-based newspaper Al Shorouk.
Saddam Hussein used to be described as the leader of necessity for 28 years, during which he turned into a leader of catastrophe, the writer said.
The concept of the leader as a saviour is both out of date and risky, although this does not rule out the idea of a historic leader who might emerge once in a blue moon.
The excuses put forward as grounds for the “necessity” leader in the Egyptian political arena include a lack of popular alternative candidates, the political vacuum due to weak political parties, turmoil and economic decline.
The 2011 revolution has been criticised as failing to produce a popular leader. The unity of the public was around the single goal of toppling Hosni Mubarak.
While there is some truth in this, history shows that there has never been a revolution that achieved the transition to democracy without counterrevolutions by the old regimes, seeking to destroy alternatives and thus create a political vacuum.
Alternatives emerge when the public is given the opportunity to choose their representatives. The absence of alternatives, remember, was frequent under Mubarak as propaganda to justify transfering power to his son, Gamal.
Al Qaeda, from ‘service desk’ to ‘supermarket’
In an opinion piece for the regional daily Asharq Al Awsat, the columnist Abdul Rahman Al Rashed sheds lights on Al Qaeda’s 30 years of existence.
It all began with military activities from what was known as the “Service Desk”, a base camp for Ossama bin Laden in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.
With the Soviets out of the picture, it morphed into the notorious terrorist organisation known as Al Qaeda.
It raised the banner of Islam, enlisted youth and remotely waged wars, and operated almost everywhere but Iran and Israel.
In doing so, it went from being a centralised “desk” and adopted the “supermarket” model as its factions branched out regionally.
While it originally fought the Soviets, today Al Qaeda is itself being used on several fronts by Iran and the Syrian regime, he wrote.
“To avoid direct confrontations with the great powers and regional states, the Iranians, in cooperation with the Assad regime, have been handling and directing Al Qaeda without leaving any fingerprints,” he observed.
“At the behest of Iran, Al Qaeda has targeted countries such as Egypt, Saudi, Jordan and the US.”
Iran successfully made use of extremist groups against its adversaries, threatening the Middle East and particularly the Gulf.
* Digest compiled by The Translation Desk
translation@thenational.ae
