Who is Bombing Whom in the Middle
East?
By Robert Fisk
May 03, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Independent" - Let me try to get this right.
The Saudis are bombing Yemen because they fear the Shia Houthis are
working for the Iranians. The Saudis are also bombing Isis in Iraq and the
Isis in Syria. So are the United Arab Emirates. The Syrian government is
bombing its enemies in Syria and the Iraqi government is also bombing its
enemies in Iraq. America, France, Britain, Denmark, Holland, Australia and –
believe it or not – Canada are
bombing Isis in Syria and Isis in Iraq, partly on behalf of the Iraqi
government (for which read Shia militias) but absolutely not on behalf of
the Syrian government.
The Jordanians and Saudis and Bahrainis are also bombing
Isis in Syria and Iraq because they don’t like them, but the Jordanians
are bombing Isis even more than the Saudis after their
pilot-prisoner was burned to death in a cage. The Egyptians are
bombing parts of Libya because
a group of Christian Egyptians had their heads chopped off by what
might – notionally – be the same so-called Islamic State, as Isis refers
to itself. The Iranians have acknowledged bombing Isis in Iraq – of
which the Americans (but not the Iraqi government) take a rather dim
view. And of course the Israelis have several times bombed Syrian
government forces in Syria but not Isis (an interesting choice, we’d all
agree). Chocks away!
It amazes me that all these warriors of the air don’t
regularly crash into each other as they go on bombing and bombing. And
since Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines is the only international carrier
still flying over Syria – but not, thank heavens, over Isis’s Syrian
capital of Raqqa – I’m even more amazed that my flights from Beirut to
the Gulf have gone untouched by the blitz boys of so many Arab and
Western states as they career around the skies of Mesopotamia and the
Levant.
The sectarian and theological nature of this war seems
perfectly clear to all who live in the Middle East – albeit not to our American
chums. The Sunni Saudis are bombing the Shia Yemenis and the Shia Iranians are
bombing the Sunni Iraqis. The Sunni Egyptians are bombing Sunni Libyans, it’s
true, and the Jordanian Sunnis are bombing Iraqi Sunnis. But the Shia-supported
Syrian government forces are bombing their Sunni Syrian enemies and the Lebanese
Hezbollah – Shia to a man – are fighting the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s
Sunni enemies, along with Iranian Revolutionary Guards and an ever-larger number
of Afghan Shia men in Syrian uniforms.
Over the past three days, by the way, Hezbollah members in
Lebanon have been told to stand by to return to Syria in the next two weeks to
fight a great battle in the Qalamoun hills – across the north-east border of
Lebanon – lest Isis tries to push into Lebanon itself and cut Hezbollah’s supply
line from Hermel to Baalbek and southern Lebanon.
And if you want to taste the sectarianism of all this, just
take a look at Saudi Arabia’s latest
request to send more Pakistani troops to protect the kingdom (and possibly
help to invade Yemen), which came from the new Saudi Crown Prince and Defence
Minister Mohammed bin Salman who at only 34 is not much older than his fighter
pilots. But the Saudis added an outrageous second request: that the Pakistanis
send only Sunni Muslim soldiers. Pakistani Shia Muslim officers and men (30 per
cent of the Pakistani armed forces) would not be welcome.
It’s best left to that fine Pakistani newspaper The Nation –
and the writer Khalid Muhammad – to respond to this sectarian demand. “The army
and the population of Pakistan are united for the first time in many years to
eliminate the scourge of terrorism,” Muhammad writes. But “the Saudis are now
trying to not only divide the population, but divide our army as well. When a
soldier puts on a uniform, he fights for the country that he calls home, not the
religious beliefs that they carry individually… Do they (the Saudis) believe
that a professional military like Pakistan… can’t fight for a unified justified
cause? If that is the case then why ask Pakistan to send its armed forces?”
It’s worth remembering that Pakistani soldiers were killed by
the Iraqi army in the battle for the Saudi town of Khafji in 1991. Were they all
Sunnis, I wonder?
And then, of course, there are the really big winners in all
this blood, the weapons manufacturers. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin supplied
£1.3bn of missiles to the Saudis only last year. But three years ago, Der
Spiegel claimed the European Union was Saudi Arabia’s most important arms
supplier and last week France announced the sale of 24 Rafale fighter jets to
Qatar at a cost of around £5.7bn. Egypt has just bought another 24 Rafales.
It’s worth remembering at this point that the Congressional
Research Services in the US estimate that most of Isis’s budget comes from
“private donors” in – you guessed it – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait.
But blow me down if the Yanks are back to boasting. More than
a decade after “Mission Accomplished”, General Paul Funk (in charge of reforming
the Iraqi army) has told us that “the enemy is on its knees”. Another general
close to Barack Obama says that half of the senior commanders in Isis have been
liquidated. Nonsense. But it’s worth knowing just how General Pierre de
Villiers, chief of the French defence staff, summed up his recent visits to
Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraq, he reported back to Paris, is in a state of
“total decay”. The French word he used was “decomposition”. I suspect that
applies to most of the Middle East.
