Free The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising by Patrick Cockburn

and Syria are being emptied of Christians who have lived there for almost 2,000 years.
    Dr. Allawi says that it is naïve to imagine that small Shia minorities in countries such as Malaysia or Egypt were not frowned upon in the past by the majority Sunni, but it is only recently that they have been ostracized and persecuted. He says that many Shia now live with a sense of impending doom, “like Jews in Germany in 1935.” As with European anti-Semitic propaganda down the ages, Shia are demonized for supposedly carrying out abominable practices such as ritual incest. In a village near Cairo in 2013, four Shia men were murdered by a mob while carrying out their usual religious ceremonies in a private house.
     
    “The Wahhabi try to ignore the entire corpus of Islamic teaching over the last 1,400 years,” says Dr. Allawi. The ideology of al-Qa‘ida-type movements in Iraq and Syria is not the same as Wahhabism. But their beliefs are similar, just carried to a greater extreme. There are bizarre debates about whether it is forbidden to clap or whether women should wear bras. As with Boko Haram in Nigeria, militants in Iraq and Syria see no religious prohibition in enslaving women as spoils of war.
    There are signs that the Saudi rulers may now be coming to regret giving quite so much support to the jihadis trying to overthrow President Assad in Syria. For instance, early in 2014 they invited the Iranian foreign minister to visit the kingdom. But it may be too late: having heard their government denounce Assad as the root of all evil in Syria, Saudi jihadis will see it as a betrayal and the height of hypocrisy if that same government now threatens them with prison terms when they return home.

5:
     

IF IT BLEEDS IT LEADS
     
    The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria over the past twelve years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition has been hard-core jihadi fighters. Whatever the real issues at stake, the interventions have been presented by politicians as primarily humanitarian, in support of popular forces against dictators and police states. Despite apparent military successes, in none of these cases have the local opposition and their backers succeeded in consolidating power or establishing stable states.
    But there is another similarity that connects the four conflicts: more than most armed struggles, they have all been propaganda wars in which newspaper, television, and radio journalists played a central role. In every war there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during these four campaigns the outside world has been left with misconceptions, even about the identity of the victors and the defeated.
    In 2001, reports of the Afghan war gave the impression that the Taliban had been beaten decisively, even though there had been very little fighting. In 2003, there was a belief in the West that Saddam Hussein’s forces had been crushed when in fact the Iraqi army, including the units of the elite Special Republican Guard, had simply disbanded and gone home. In Libya in 2011, the rebel militiamen, so often shown on television firing truck-mounted heavy machine guns in the general direction of the enemy, had only a limited role in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, who was mostly brought down by NATO air strikes. In Syria in 2011 and 2012, foreign leaders and journalists repeatedly and vainly predicted the imminent defeat of Bashar al-Assad.
    These misperceptions explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001, I was able to drive, nervously but safely, from Kabul to Kandahar. But when I tried to make