Free The Rise of Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn Page B

really controlled by the government.” Asked why Iraq’s one-million-strong security forces had been so ineffective against the jihadists, another politician, who did not want to be named, said: “This is the harvest of total corruption. People pay money to get into the army [so they can get a salary]—but they are investors not soldiers.” These are harsh words, but evidence of their truth is provided by the fact that ISIS is now holding a large part of the country and the Iraqi army appears powerless to do anything about it.

6
Jihadists Hijack the Syria Uprising
    Just after the sarin poison gas attacks on rebel-held districts of Damascus in August 2013, I appeared on an American television program with Razan Zaitouneh, a human rights lawyer and founder of the Violations Documentation Center, who was speaking via Skype from the opposition stronghold of Douma in East Damascus.
    She gave a compelling, passionate, and wholly believable account of what had happened. “I have never seen so much death in my whole life,” she said, describing people breaking down the doors of houses to find that everybody inside had been killed. Doctors in the fewmedical centers wept as they tried in vain to treat gas victims with the scarce medicines they had. Bodies, fifteen to twenty at a time, were being tipped into mass graves. She contemptuously dismissed any idea that the rebels might be behind the use of sarin, asking: “Do you think we are such crazy people that we would kill our own children?”
    Zaitouneh had been defending political prisoners for a dozen years and was the sort of credible advocate that won the Syrian opposition so much international support in its first years. But on December 8, 2013, gunmen burst into her office in Douma and kidnapped her, along with her husband, Wael Hamada, and two civil rights activists: Samira al-Khalil, a lawyer, and Nazem al-Hamadi, a poet. None of the four has been heard from since. Although it denies any involvement, the group suspected of being behind the kidnapping is the Army of Islam, a group strong in rebel-held districts of Damascus that was created by Saudi Arabia as a jihadi counterbalance to JAN. Al-Khalil’s husband, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, told the online publication al-Monitor: “Razan and Samira were part of a national inclusive secular movement and this led them to collide with the Islamist factions, who are inclined towards despotism.”
    The kidnapping and disappearance of Ms. Zaitounehand the others have many parallels elsewhere in Syria, where Islamists have killed civil rights activists or forced them to flee. Usually, this has happened when the activists have criticized them for killings, torture, imprisonment, or other crimes. Revolutions are notorious for devouring their earliest and most humane advocates, but few have done so with the speed and ferocity of Syria’s.
    Why has the Syrian uprising, whose early supporters demanded that tyranny should be replaced by a secular, nonsectarian, law-bound, and democratic state, failed so completely to achieve these aims? Syria has descended into a nightmarish sectarian civil war as the government bombs its own cities as if they were enemy territory and the armed opposition is dominated by Salafi-jihadist fighters who slaughter Alawites and Christians simply because of their religion. Syrians have to choose between a violent dictatorship, in which power is monopolized by the presidency and brutish security services, or an opposition that shoots children in the face for minor blasphemy and sends pictures of decapitated soldiers to the parents of their victims.
    Syria today is like Lebanon during the fifteen-year-long civil war between 1975 and 1990. I was recently in Homs, once a city known for its vibrant diversity but now full of “ghost neighborhoods” where all the buildingsare abandoned, smashed by shellfire or bombs. Walls still standing are so full of small holes from machine-gun fire that they look as if giant