New Delhi, March 16 (IANS) The conflict-ridden Middle East is affecting geopolitics, particularly because developments there suggest a convergence between political alignments and religious divides and a dangerous drift of the world towards faith-based confrontations.
Perhaps the biggest evidence of this is the fact of a fundamentalist Iran taking the radicalised Hamas in its embrace because they both were driven by their political opposition to the US.
Shia fundamentalism is ideologically against the US, for it rejects Capitalism and even glorifies poverty, while Sunni radicals carried the historical memory of the 19th century Wahhabi Jehad launched by the leading Ulema of the time, against the Western encroachment on ‘Muslim lands’. Jehad is described as a fundamental duty of faithful Muslims to make the supreme sacrifice for the defence of Islam if it was ‘in danger’.
The continually disturbed Middle East is at the edge of catastrophe because the leading players there — Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq and even Israel — seem to be keeping their respective faiths above the state policy. This evidently came at the cost of ‘liberalism’ and prevented a move of the region towards democracy.
Democratisation was the key to a return to normalisation in the Middle East. Democracy mandates that the state would not carry a denominational stamp and would provide equality of political rights to all ‘communities’.
An ‘Islamic Republic’ may subscribe to the view that the ‘Quran is the best Constitution’ — this was propounded by the Islamic thinker Hasan Al Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt in 1928 to oppose the nationalist pro-Soviet Arab leaders there, but it is the grant of equal political rights to the religious minorities that marked the essence of ‘democracy’ even where there was no express declaration of commitment of the state to ‘secularism’.
Banna made a political statement that an “Islamic State could live in competition, not conflict with the West” which kept the Muslim Brotherhood on the right side of the US. As late as 2011, when the Muslim Brotherhood led the Arab Spring movement in Egypt, it was quietly appreciated by the US.
Currently, Abdel Fattah el Sisi of army background elected as President after an interim period, is ruling Egypt and the US is tolerating him. There is no denying the fact that the Middle East must make stable progress towards adopting the spirit of ‘democracy’ if a larger geopolitical disruption is to be averted.
No significant diplomatic efforts to bring peace to the Middle East have apparently been made, possibly because the region was torn into conflicting alignments caused by the reappearance of a new Cold War between the US-led West, on one hand, and the Russia-China combine, on the other.
Iran is now firmly with Russia and China in a strategic alliance, Saudis remain in the US camp, and Israel continues to have unflinching support of President Donald Trump against Hamas to a point where the new US President wants Israel to ‘clean up’ Gaza in quick time.
Trump seemed to have a friendly disposition towards President Vladimir Putin but the relations of the US with China were already facing added tension and these would keep up the Cold War kind of divide between the two powers. While the UAE and Saudi Arabia were inclined to have the Abrahamic Accord with Israel under the influence of the US, the military conflict between Iran and its proxies with Israel had reached a new level of escalation.
The Shia-Sunni discord always impacted Iran-Saudi relations, but the Iran-Hamas alliance could be interpreted as a mark of antipathy between Islam and Zionism at the level of faith. This happened in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attack of Hamas on Israel in 2023 and the subsequent move of Iran to bring the radicalised Hamas into its fold against the US-Israel combine.
Hamas, it may be mentioned, had originally represented the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood — a militant organisation known to be in the good books of the US during the Cold War and had turned radical in the course of the US-led ‘war on terror’ in reaction to the perceived high- handedness of Israel in Gaza and West Bank. Today, radical Sunnis and Shiites seem to be forging an axis against the ‘Zionist power’ that Israel represents.
The conduct of the US-led ‘war on terror’ that was launched in the wake of 9/11 — first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq — strangely saw Islamic radical forces growing further in various parts of the Muslim world. While Al Qaeda sustained itself in Afghanistan, forming Al Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) arose as a competitive, not a contradicting, Islamic radical force in the second theatre of this ‘war,’ in 2004.
A country like Pakistan, which had joined the ‘war on terror’ only under coercion from President George Bush, was always accommodative towards Islamic radical outfits. This was amply proved by the way Pakistan worked to install the Taliban Emirate in Kabul in 1996 and then helped to reestablish that Emirate in 2021.
Taking advantage of the situation, Pakistan pretended to be a mediator in the Doha talks that were held to facilitate the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. President Joe Biden was desperate to pull out the US army from a messy territory, and Pakistan managed to retain the goodwill of America in the process.
Pakistan, keen to maintain ‘strategic depth’ against India in Afghanistan, arranged a ‘give and take’ between the Taliban Emirate and China, benefiting in terms of the extension of its Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) to Afghanistan.
The Sino-Pak strategic alliance is a major security threat to India, making this country even more vulnerable to cross-border terror attacks in J&K and elsewhere.
The Biden Administration seemed to have some comfort of distance in relation to the Pak-Afghan belt, but President Trump hopefully will not tolerate Islamic terror of any kind and at any place — judging from his pronouncements so far. This will be a major factor — besides the shared concerns of the US and India against China, that would keep up the strategic friendship between the two countries.
Syria is a case study of how a political objective and a religious motivation could combine to determine the course of events. The capture of Damascus by the radical Islamic forces, resulting in the flight of Bashar Al Assad to Moscow for political asylum on December 8, 2024, was the culmination of what had been happening there for some time.
Bashar had inherited the legacy of his father Hafez Al Assad, whose regime was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood much to the satisfaction of the US-led West. Bashar consequently found it easy to secure Russian support. Also, the fact of his being an Alawite — which is a Shia sect — got him the backing of Iran and its proxy the Lebanon-based Hezbollah. Iran-US antagonism had already existed on strong political grounds.
The Bashar regime allowed Shiites to dominate the state and disregarded the Sunni majority, which was drawn towards radical forces of Al Qaeda and ISIS. These forces confronted the regime even as a pro-US Islamic stream separately took on the Syrian President independently in the ongoing civil war. Russians supporting the Bashar regime for political reasons made a missile attack on ISIS establishments in Syria and Iraq, which was the reason why ISIS-K — a Tajik-dominated offspring of the main outfit — carried out a daring attack on a concert hall at Moscow in March 2024, killing 145 people.
The US, on its part, launched air strikes to prevent ISIS from expanding in north Iraq and to protect Christians and Yazidis there — Yazids believe in both the Quran and the Bible. Meanwhile, Nusrat Front — an Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria having links also with ISIS — under the leadership of Abu Mohammad Al Mulani, renamed itself as Hayat Tahrir Al Sham and became the power centre in Damascus after the departure of Bashar Al Assad. Al Mulani changed his name to Al Sharaa and became the new President of Syria.
The whole scene in the Syria-Iraq region is marked by violence along sectarian lines. Such conflicts tended to become indeterminate and unending.
At present, the conflict between the US and Israel, on one hand, and Iran and its proxies, on the other, is the main reason why the Middle East remains in turmoil. Iran’s terrorist proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — have been militarily dented, and the Iranian ballistic missile fleet has proved to be ineffective against Israel’s air defences that were backed by the US.
Syria once an ally of Iran is now ruled by an anti-Iranian coalition. The US sanctions and low oil prices have weakened Iran economically. It is to be seen how President Trump deals with Iran and uses military pressure as well as the offer of a civil nuclear deal with the US, to get that country to move away from a dictatorial Ayatollah regime. The pull of Shia fundamentalism on Iranians may not be easy to scale down.
Trump has threatened Hamas with “hell” if it did not hand over all hostages and fully backed Israel’s plan to eliminate Hamas from Gaza. He has upheld the first arrest of a Palestinian Green Card holder who had led a pro-Hamas demonstration at Columbia University in New York and warned that all such pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic and anti-American elements, will be deported.
The logic of a Palestinian homeland may not appeal to the Jewish state, however, and without a 2-state solution in Palestine, peace may continue to elude the Middle East. The role of Arab countries, friendly towards the US, has become crucially important at the moment for making a contribution to the possible return of peace in the region.
Trump’s Presidency does have an opportunity to reduce tensions in the Middle East with the help of these countries. It is significant that Jedda was the venue of talks between US and Ukrainian delegations, where an agreement was reached on March 11 that Ukraine would observe a ceasefire for 30 days to prepare the groundwork for Ukraine-Russia peace talks.
Meanwhile, the flux in West Asia in general and in Iran, Syria and Gaza in particular, is a reminder for India that developments in the Islamic world would have to be closely watched for their impact on this country’s internal security.
(The writer is a former Director of the Intelligence Bureau. Views are personal)
–IANS
pathak/sd/
