Islamism On The Move

NATO felt pretty good about itself when it decided, at the initial urging of France and Britain, to intervene in the Libyan civil war. Declaring that it was time to become involved when a terrorist-supporting regime that oppresses its own people began to brutally do just that and more to put down an uprising, those two countries persuaded NATO member-countries and a reluctant U.S. that imposing an air war on Libya in support of the tribal Libyan insurgents was the right thing to do.

First came the no-fly zone, then the naval blockade, then Western countries warned their citizens to leave Libya, and the attacks from the air against Libyan armed forces began. The Libyan insurgents fought against the merciless might of the Gadhaffi war machine, and the NATO air strikes pummelled the Gadhaffi war machine into smithereens. An arms embargo was imposed and the civil war was fully engaged.

Big surprise, all the action taking place while Moammar Gadhaffi insisted that terrorists were behind the uprising and that he had always pledged to defeat the terrorists and keep them at bay, was ignored. And on came the jihadis from neighbouring North African states, flooding into Libya to become involved in fighting, as well. And looting government military arms caches, gaining valuable and sophisticated arms to further their interests.

A protestor walks in front of burning tyres as they block a street in Libya’s second city of Benghazi on February 26, 2014 (AFP Photo)

Doesn't it sound familiar ... say, for example, another Arab Muslim country, this one a little bit further away from Africa, located in the Middle East, where yet another dictator reigned supreme in a tribal, sectarian wretchedness of tyranny. There was Iraq, where a minority Sunni Baathist party headed by a butcher by the name of Saddam Hussein victimized the majority Shiite Iraqi population, and a fire-breathing United States attacked with its allies to remove Saddam and normalize Iraq.

And there is Iraq to the present day, with its sectarian violence renewed -- who knows, perhaps that can be seen as 'normalization' ... but the government has been reversed; the majority Shia-led government oppressing and marginalizing the minority Sunni Iraqi population. During the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, that country was also flooded with jihadis eager to fight in the name of Allah, and to become blessed martyrs.

In Syria, another Baathist regime headed by a minority Shia Alawite family of dynastic al-Assad tyrants that held its majority Sunni population in thrall suddenly saw itself opposed and struck brutally to thwart any thoughts of rebellion. That move toward committing atrocities by a government against its people saw no response of any practical assistance offered from NATO which had experienced its fill of intervening in Arab/Muslim affairs.

In Syria, as in Libya, as in Iraq, conflict was seen by jihadists as an invitation to join a large party of liberation; liberating Muslim countries from the corrupt rule of quasi-Muslims whose embrace of Sharia law was never sufficiently strenuous enough. Pakistan and Afghanistan had already exhausted the forbearance and humanitarian impulses of NATO attempting to stem the tide of Islamist butchery against its own.

It is always the West expected to ride in on their white horses of liberation; somehow the Arab League and the Muslim league for all their oil riches and expenditure on weapons and militarization never consider it feasible that they should extend themselves to solving their own regional problems.

All those failed countries have been well infiltrated -- in some instances aided by the connivance of government authorities or agencies -- by Islamist violence, by Islamist jihadis yearning to achieve the glory of martyrdom. The weapons that had been looted during the Libyan uprising found their way from Gadhaffi's arsenals of conventional weapons and surface-to-air-missiles to Mali, Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere as Salafists took pride of ownership.

Training camps established in southern Libya ensure that the country remains hugely destabilized, those areas in Libya represent a safe haven. Egypt's Sinai peninsula has become yet another staging ground for violent assaults, as well as a safe haven to groups as disparate as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Bedouin Salafis, Islamic Jihad and other al-Qaeda-linked terror groups. And parts of Syria, lost to the regime have become an Islamist terrorist stronghold.

From North Africa to the Middle East, the geography has been transformed to a stinking morass of brutalization in the name of a religion that espouses peace and enjoins its members to commit to the daily and life-time values of Islam. While man-portable air defense systems and anti-tank guided missiles are in continual shuffle between terror-supporting regimes like that of Iran, Pakistan and Hezbollah's Lebanon.