Political observers in the Middle East are stunned by the western world’s slow response to the calls for help by Iraq’s Christian and Yazidi minorities from persecution by Islamic militants who have driven them out of their towns and threatened to kill them.
“What has happened to the world to make it so helpless towards what has been going on in Iraq and jeopardising the entire region?” asked the columnist Rozanna Abu Monsef in the Lebanese daily Annahar.
For months, European countries did nothing to stop the ongoing demographical triage in the region. It wasn’t until after US president Barack Obama’s recent decision to strike the Islamic State group as it advanced towards the Kurdish capital, Erbil, that France and the United Kingdom expressed readiness to join in the military effort.
“Europe – which stood for long as the world’s conscience and the defender of liberties and human rights – seems to have relinquished its values and principles,” she wrote. “And President Obama’s decision to help protect Erbil with aerial military strikes came only to protect US interests that came under threat.”
In fact, Mr Obama would have found himself in an embarrassing position had he not given the order to strike the Islamic State’s forces. America’s verbal ultimatums and threats have lost their lustre in recent months as Washington has been striving to avoid military intervention in the region, especially with the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“US intervention in Iraq didn’t face any objection from Russia, China or Iran, especially because Iraq continues to be America’s responsibility at some level,” she observed.
The motives behind the US intervention was not so much to deter the Islamic State from nibbling away at additional Iraqi territories as much as it was to protect its interests and its diplomatic and non-diplomatic presence in Kurdistan.
The international and regional communities have yet to demonstrate whether they will be able to form a unified front to put an end to the Islamic State group.
The US offensive in recent days seemed more like a localised surgical operation than a comprehensive military intervention. There are no signs to indicate that the Obama administration is planning to go back on its decision to withdraw from the Middle East.
Ghassan Charbel, the editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab Al Hayat newspaper, said that while this is going on, the storm continues to rage across international maps and borders. Millions are displaced and minorities are uprooted.
“This isn’t the way to the abyss, this is the abyss itself, and we are wallowing in it,” he wrote.
“Yes, we have fallen into the pit, but it puts us at a crossroads: either we find a way out or we allow ourselves to slip even deeper.
“It is a fateful battle where the moderate camp needs to regain the reins of initiative or allow the whole region to go into years and possibly decades of darkness,” Charbel opined.
“But the region can’t be rescued from the outside. The US can either trim the Islamic State’s fingernails or cut off its fingers.
“Only the region’s governments can prevent the Islamic State and its affiliates from sprouting and spreading, by choosing to resort to moderation. It is the sole responsibility of the region’s powers,” the writer added.
A way out of this dark pit is possible as long as the principle of partnership is upheld, Charbel said. Monopoly of power leads only to extremism.
There are those who consider that the Islamic State group was born out of widespread frustration within Sunni communities towards Tehran’s exaggerated clout in Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut.
With its involvement on so many fronts, Iran is finding its resources depleted. Its only solution will be to choose partnership over monopoly.
“The choice is clear: either a return to moderation and collaboration or drowning in a sea of gloom,” Charbel concluded.
rmakarem@thenational.ae
