By Mark Tomass, Ph.D.
“By God, we will eradicate it” were the last words uttered by a captured Syrian soldier seconds before an ISIS Holy Warrior sprayed him with a hail of bullets; it was the soldier’s determined response to the latter commanding him to say “The Islamic State is staying.”[1] This brief exchange between the two was made public on August 25, 2014, while the ISIS hordes were expanding their hold on territories in the Mesopotamian regions of Syria and Iraq. They released an execution video of two soldiers on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs as part of their strategy to demoralize the Syrian Army, but they didn’t pay attention to what the soldier had said. The two executed conscripts were Yahya Shughari, a Sunni Muslim from Lattakia and Tareq Shammas, a Greek Orthodox from the Valley of the Christians. It was Yahya (Arabic for John) who vowed that ISIS would be eradicated after seeing his comrade shot. Despite the Syrian Army’s retreat on multiple fronts, the video had the opposite effect to what ISIS intended. Instead, the fallen soldiers became a symbol of the resistance to the Salafi-Wahhabi onslaught by the multi-religious, multi-sectarian, and multi-ethnic inhabitants of Syria and Iraq.
The Trump administration’s resolve to cooperate with anti-ISIS forces, including Russia, has produced effective results on the ground. As of today, the ISIS Caliphate is on its way to being eradicated as it loses control of real estate and territories. However, its underground networks, its value system, and the states promoting it will continue to produce similar groups under different appellations.
Indeed, on June 9, 2017, President Trump addressed the world by stating “The nation of Qatar unfortunately has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level… We have to stop the funding of terrorism, stop teaching people to kill other people, stop teaching hate and intolerance. I won’t name other countries [i.e. Saudi Arabia and Turkey], but we are not done solving the problem, but we will solve that problem.”[2]
However, short-term financial expediency has again taken precedence over long-term security concerns. In return for hundreds of billions of dollars of arms sales,[3] both the terror-producing Saudi-Wahhabi alliance and Qatar were forgiven and it was back to business as usual with them. As the previous administration’s alchemists promised us that their magic would turn the religious fundamentalists of the Middle East into Jeffersonian freedom fighters, our new administration’s alchemists promise to provide enhanced security by selling the two terror-sponsoring states more weapons.
Granted, those sales of weapons generate jobs to American labor and profits to the military industries employing them, which in turn get recycled back into the U.S. economy. Yet, those sales do not have to be of weapons. The Gulf States are not purchasing U.S. weapons voluntarily. They are doing so in return for U.S. protection of their regimes, as witnessed in Qatar. After President Trump’s aforementioned June 9th speech, Qatar swiftly sent its defense minister to the United States where he signed a $12 billion weapons purchase on June 14th.[4]
But, ironically, why should we be dependent on weapons sales to promote security or employment? Instead of selling weapons, couldn’t we exchange our protection services for university education, medicine, automobiles, software, and many other non-lethal technologies that will push those societies to recover from the medieval mentality in which they are trapped?
Too much blood has been spilled in the Middle East under false pretenses. It is time to start tackling the root causes of religiously inspired violence. Weaponizing Islam must stop. Religiously inspired intra-Muslim hate and inter-religious hate can be eradicated by education, not by more weapons sales. In remembrance of Yahya: “By God, we will eradicate it.”
[1] https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=816_1409008754
[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/video/trump-the-time-has-come-to-confront-qatar-s-terror-ties-964053571661
[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-saudi-arabia-arms-deal-sale-arab-nato-gulf-states-a7741836.html
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-qatar-move-toward-arms-deal-estimated-at-12-billion-1497484240
Mark Tomass, Ph.D., will teach a one-time lecture, “Assessing the War on Terror: Western and Middle Eastern Perspectives,” on Tuesday, October 24, 2017, at 9:30 a.m. To register, click here.
Recent Books:
The Religious Roots of the Syrian Conflict: The Remaking of the Fertile Crescent (2016)
https://tinyurl.com/Religious-Roots-of-Syrian-Conf
A link to the complete text of: Assessing the War on Terror (2017) with Charles Webel
https://tinyurl.com/Assessing-the-War-on-Terror
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