Phyllis Bennis: ISIS Is Filling The Holes Left
By The US War On Terror
What gave rise to ISIS and how is the group holding onto power? To
answer these questions, journalist, activist and political
commentator Phyllis Bennis connects the dots between the fall of
Iraq, the U.S. “War on Terror,” and oil.
By Sean Nevins
September 14, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "MintPress"
- WASHINGTON — ISIS is not a guerrilla
organization that popped up out of nowhere, figured out how to hold
onto territory, and take on the Iraqi and Syrian armies all by
themselves, says Phyllis Bennis, director of
the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies,
a progressive multi-issue think tank in Washington.
ISIS is powerful, she argues, because the group
enjoys political and military support from the Sunni communities in
Iraq that were left defenseless against the Shiite-dominated
government the United States put into power following its occupation
of Iraq in 2003.
“The Sunni, who are a large minority, around 20 to
25 percent, have been kind of isolated from any kind of access not
only to major power but to any part of [Iraqi] society,” Bennis said
in July at
Busboys and Poets, a restaurant and community organizing spot in
Washington.
“So there’s a great deal of antagonism towards the
government, and for a lot of people there’s a sense of, ‘Look I
don’t like these guys, but maybe they can be the one force that can
fight back,’” she said during a discussion of her new book, “Understanding
ISIS and the New Global War on Terror: A Primer,” which asks and
addresses basic questions about ISIS and the U.S. “War on Terror.”
As MintPress News reported in
a February analysis of the terrorist group, ISIS emerged as one
of a number of Sunni organizations fighting the American occupation
of Iraq.
However, in 2008 al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), as it was
then known, was in
a state of “extraordinary crisis” as a result of Sunni tribes
joining coalition forces during
the Anbar Awakening movement.
It was reported in April
2010 that AQI’s top leaders, Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar
al-Baghdadi, were killed by U.S. troops.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
who had been radicalized while imprisoned in Camp Bucca, a U.S.
prison in Iraq, was appointed the new leader of the group the
following month. It is at this point that Bennis launches into her
exploration of the group’s power.
A diversified economy
Illustrating Phyllis Bennis’ point that ISIS has
the support of former state officials, is that, unlike al-Qaida and
other terrorist groups, ISIS gets its funds not only from donations
from abroad, but from a diversified economy.
George Kiourktsoglou, visiting lecturer at the
University of Greenwich in London, told MintPress that the group
represents the next evolutionary step in global jihadism. While
al-Qaida was primarily funded by donors, he said, “ISIS is a
different beast.”
“ISIS does receive donations, but it’s practically
a syndicate of crime bankrolling an ideology, smuggling crude oil,
antiquities, human trafficking, weapons trafficking, extortion,
everything you can think of,” Kiourktsoglou explained, emphasizing
that ISIS’ economic strength comes from a variety of sources.
Kiourktsoglou and his colleague Alec D. Coutroubis,
principal lecturer at the University of Greenwich, wrote ”ISIS
Export Gateway to Global Crude Oil Markets,” a paper about one
source of ISIS’ funding, smuggled oil, which is possibly being sold
on the global market.
Their research into ISIS’ oil smuggling took place
between July 2014 and February 2015. They looked into the
extraction, transportation, and sales of oil on the black market by
the terrorist group.
They found that ISIS, in the best-case scenario,
is selling about 30,000 barrels of oil a day. At current market
rates of
approximately $50 a barrel, that equals roughly $1.65 million
daily, though it is widely believed that ISIS sells oil below market
rates.
Additionally, they report that oil exports from
Ceyhan, Turkey, routinely spike whenever ISIS is fighting in an area
that holds oil assets. Kiourktsoglou and Coutroubis wrote: “This may
be attributed to an extra boost given to crude oil smuggling with
the aim of immediately generating additional funds, badly needed for
the supply of ammunition and military equipment.”
Al-Baghdadi and former Baath Party military support
In March, MintPress was in Lebanon, where we spoke
with Ali Hashem, who had recently finished an investigative
documentary about ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Hashem is the
chief correspondent for Al Mayadeen, a pan-Arab news channel based
in Beirut, and his investigation backed up Phyllis Bennis’ claims.
He described al-Baghdadi’s ascent to power as
linear and logical. He also said that his investigation runs
contrary to conspiratorial theories surrounding the organization
that involve the U.S. and Israel. Facts, he said, do not support
those claims.
“People, especially in the Middle East, do not
want to believe they have such people among them,”
Hashem told MintPress. “They always want to blame it on the West
or on Israel.”
Speaking in Washington in July, Bennis also
explained that ISIS gets massive military support from Saddam
Hussein’s disbanded army generals, who the U.S. dismissed from their
positions upon occupying the country in 2003.
In a process known as
“de-Baathification,” the U.S. fired everybody in the military
and the civil service, she explained.
“All of these people were sent home with no job,
no money, [and] no way to support their family,” she said. “And what
happens, they’ve been waiting for 10 years or more to figure out a
way to get back at this government that they hate, and they have
become the military leaders of ISIS.”
Indeed, almost all of ISIS’ top leadership are
former Iraqi officers, according to Ahmed S. Hashim, associate
professor of Strategic Studies and deputy coordinator in the
Military Studies Program at the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies in Nanyang Technological University in
Singapore.
In a December 2014 policy paper,
he wrote: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi thus allowed Iraqis, mostly from
the military and security establishments of the former Ba’thist
regime, to fill in the top layers of ISIS and then of the IS.”
Likewise, an investigative report by The
Independent in April explained that Baghdadi spearheaded the
initiative to revive ISIS by recruiting former Baath party
officials.
The newspaper reported:
“Tasked with rebuilding the greatly weakened insurgent organization
after 2010, Baghdadi embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the
former officers, drawing on the vast pool of men who had either
remained unemployed or had joined other, less extremist insurgent
groups.”
Discrimination against Sunnis
Phyllis Bennis told the audience at Busboys and
Poets that it’s important to note that the Iraqi government does not
simply discriminate against the Sunni minority and privilege the
Shiite majority.
“It’s that their discrimination against Sunnis has
been so profound that it included mass killings in the streets, the
bombing of a Sunni protest camp killing who knows how many people,
[and] the arrest on a massive scale of Sunni activists of various
sorts,” she said, emphasizing that people have been suffering
enormously at the hands of the government.
In 2014, then-Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki
was forced out of office because of his radical opposition to
Sunnis, as well as many of the human rights violations mentioned by
Bennis. With the support of both the U.S. and Iran, Haider al-Abadi
took over as prime minister. But, according to Bennis, he’s not much
different than his predecessor.
“The new prime minister sort of talks a much
better talk than his predecessor,” Bennis said. “But he doesn’t walk
the walk,” she asserted, signaling that the reshuffling of Iraq’s
government won’t make much difference to Sunnis who support ISIS out
of a sense of desperation.
Institutionalized sectarianism in Iraq
The extreme sectarianism that poisons Iraq,
Phyllis Bennis argues, is the result of the American occupation and
its institution of a sect-based political system.
Referring to the Americans, she said: “They
created a whole new political system that was based on new parties
that were established not on the basis of people that had different
ideas or something, but based on the basis of religious identity,
sectarian identity.”
Parties were set up to represent “the Sunnis” and
“the Shiites,” as if all Sunnis or all Shiites have one interest, or
as if class and other issues are of little consequence.
“What it did was to institutionalize a level of
sectarianism in Iraq that had not been a feature of Iraqi society
for a century,” she said, “and it’s shocking that … what the U.S.
puts into place is designed to divide people along sectarian lines.”
And it is precisely this political system that has
led to the rise of ISIS, Bennis says.
In February, she described to MintPress that three important
constituencies in Iraq support ISIS, contributing to the group’s
rise and empowerment. The first group is made up of Sunni generals,
who lost their jobs; the second is Sunni tribal leaders, who are
also angry about sectarianism; and the third is ordinary Sunnis, who
are upset by ethnic cleansing, mass arrests, and neglect of basic
services, such as electricity, in their communities.
American hegemony in the Middle East
As far as the U.S. is concerned, Phyllis Bennis
told the audience at Busboys and Poets, conflict in the Middle East
is not so much about who wins and who loses, it’s about how to
maintain the United States’ position as a global superpower.
“The U.S. is supporting the Shia government in
Iraq, and opposing the Shia Alawite government in Damascus,” she
said. “What does that mean? How does that work?”
It’s confusing, she says, because it’s not really
about which faction or which sect is in power in any particular
place, it’s about maintaining U.S. power.
“The Middle East is the one part of the world
where if you control the territory you can attack three continents.
You can go after Africa, you can go after Asia, you can go after
Europe from that very strategic place,” she said.
Referring to Syria, Iraq and Yemen, she urges
vigilant thinking about the situations in those countries, which she
says are more than civil wars between the government and opposition
forces.
“There’s a bunch of ways in which the wars that
are being fought right now have far less to do with the people of
Syria, the people of Iraq, [and] the people of Saudi Arabia, than it
does about elites fighting it out,” Bennis said.
She gave as an example that part of what’s going
on in Syria relates to a conflict between the U.S. and Russia over
the control of sea lanes and naval bases.
Disarming the US and its allies
In order to figure out what can be done not only
to stop ISIS but also U.S. militarism in the Middle East and all
over the world, Phyllis Bennis urges that people ask one critical
question: “Who benefits?”
The answer, according to Bennis, is the CEOs of
the corporations that produce the bullets, the bombers, the planes,
the drones and the bombs that are used in these wars.
“They’re making a killing, literally,” commented
Andy Shallal, the moderator of last month’s discussion and owner of
Busboys and Poets.
According to
an Institute for Policy Studies study of war profiteers between
the years of 2001 and 2004, following the onset of the Iraq War,
CEOs at defense manufacturers in the U.S. raked in a 200-percent pay
raise while their counterparts at average large companies averaged 7
percent.
One CEO, David H. Brooks of DHB Industries, got a
3,349-percent pay raise between those years, when the company was
manufacturing what were supposed to be bulletproof vests for
American troops. His pay in 2004 was $70 million.
“Some might argue that Brooks is worth every penny
if his products are saving lives in Iraq. But in May, the Marine
Corps recalled 5,277 DHB Interceptor armored vests after questions
were raised about the vests’ ability to stop 9-mm pistol rounds. By
that time, Brooks had personally pocketed $250 million-plus in war
windfalls,” wrote Sarah Anderson, the author of the IPS report.
Brooks has since been sentenced
to 17 years in prison for insider trading, fraud, lying to auditors,
and obstruction of justice.
Bennis says it is the war profiteers who work for
Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and other defense contractors who need to
be called out. They need to be “named and shamed,” she urged.
People need to call Congress, she says, but first
and foremost there needs to be outreach to the mainstream public to
educate everyday citizens about what’s really going on.
“That means we have to be writing letters to the
editor, calling into radio talk shows, doing all the stuff that you
think, ‘Oh my God, do I have to do that again?’ The answer is, yes
you do,” she said.
“We have to reach people in the schools,” she
continued. “We need to change the curriculum of how our children are
educated so they grow up looking at what role the U.S. could play as
a bastion of disarmament, not just non-proliferation, starting with
our own arms, our own disarmament.”
Disarming ISIS
As far as disarming ISIS and creating a more
stable situation in the Middle East overall, Phyllis Bennis argues
that Washington has to take to heart the Hippocratic Oath, which
states, “First, do no harm.”
President Obama said last
year: “There is no American military solution to the larger crisis
in Iraq.”
Referring to this statement, Bennis says the U.S.
should make good on this claim and stop trying to find military
solutions to the problems in the Middle East. She argues that the
U.S. should withdraw the troops, stop the drones, and put an end to
everything that’s killing and antagonizing people in the region.
The U.S. also needs to return to diplomacy, she
says. While that doesn’t necessarily mean talking to ISIS, it means
talking to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan,
and Turkey, and everyone else who is allied with the U.S. and
selling weapons to various opposition forces, including ISIS and
al-Qaida, she added.
“You need to have serious negotiations with those
people to say, … ‘We need an arms embargo. We need to stop flooding
the region with arms,’” she said.
If that happens, she says, the U.S. can then go to
Russia and Iran, and tell them to stop arming the Assad government
in Syria. But until then, she concludes, the U.S. has no credibility
when negotiating with those powers.