(Luca Foschi) – You do not fix history with a drone. What we are witnessing today in Iraq is a frame in the slow collapse of a century-long geopolitical partition drawn in a secret document by United Kingdom and France in perhaps their last and most durable act as imperial powers. In May 1916 the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Gorges Picot signed an agreement that reshaped the Near East, previously ruled by the Ottoman Empire that was siding with Austria-Hungary and Germany during the First World War. A vast melting pot of peoples, of political and religious traditions was coerced within the lines of “interest” and “control” by both countries. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan were born.
In the very same days colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence successfully prepared the first “Arab uprising”. Backed by the high commissioner Henry Mc Mahon he convinced al-Husayn ibn Alì, sheriff of La Mecca and descendant of the Prophet Mohammad himself, to rebel against Istanbul’s tyrannical hegemony. Tribes from the Arab peninsula, Transjordan and Syria fought against the empire’s troops. They were promised freedom and dignity, the dream of a nation. In the meantime Paris and London bickered over Mosul’s oil wells. One year later Mr. Balfour completed the historical scam, promising the Jewish people a national homeland in the recently acquired colony, Palestine.
Today the West Bank is under siege. The abduction of three young Israeli students in Hebron unleashed all Netanyahu’s government’s disillusionment about a peace process already endangered by the reconciliation of Fatah and Hamas, divided since the 2006 bloody elections in Gaza. Lebanon’s difficulty in finding a convergence on the president’s name shows the eternal fractures of a confessional state, whose war with Tel Aviv is prevented only by the presence, in the south, of the UN’s mission UNIFIL II. In the north Tripoli lives a fragile truce between the two opposing neighborhoods of al- Tabbeneh an Jabal Moshen, ruled by the Sunni Salafist and the Assad supporters alawites (president’s Shia sect) respectively.
Hezbollah’s Shia army is, since 2012, a fundamental pawn in the Damascus regime’s survival. Syria has gone in feudal splinters: the government struggles to regain fragments of territory wrenched in 2011 by what we then called the Free Syrian Army. Now Assad has to fight against the most fluid, ghostly, medieval constellation of religious extremism, controlling vast portion of the country and able, with its notorious vanguard, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, to disperse the brittle and corrupted Iraqi army, custodian of the state’s integrity after the hasty American getaway in 2011.
A disguised defeat that has deeps roots. Lead by the US, western powers supported the secular Saddam Hussein in fighting the newly born Islamic state in Iran, in a war (1980-1988) that caused one million dead and saw the Iraqi army adopting chemical weapons, gently provided by US and Germany. Two years later, in Kuwait, Saddam became a cruel enemy. Bush father was tempted by uprooting the Baathist regime, heir of Sunni minority’s hegemony that lasted since the 18° century. He therefore convinced the Shia majority to rise up in arms, only to abandon them allowing Saddam to go back to power when the operation seemed too costly. Shia opposition faced harsh punishments and mass imprisonments.
So, after years of sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people leaving intact the Saddam regime, in 2003 US and UK invaded the country to prevent the modern Saladin from using the notorious weapons of mass destruction. A sheer lie true only in Colin Powell’s and Tony Bair secret reports and public speeches. And, when the umpteenth western protectorate had to elaborate the process of state building obviously decided to give all the power to the Shia minority, keen to softly avenge three centuries of marginalization.
But as the ex-prime minister wrote in a concerned essay on June 14 (published on his website), “The reality is that the whole of the Middle East and beyond is going through a huge, agonising and protracted transition. We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that ‘we’ have caused this. We haven’t”.
As for the Afghan and al- Qaeda case, the West proved to be a clumsy sorcerer, brilliant in evoking new demons. That is why, in august 2013, we were supposed to shell Damascus in support of the very same terrorist Mr. Blair is now willing to annihilate. For when the enigmatic 6000 strong ISIS army descended through the porous Syrian border last week, it was able to engage in its miscellaneous horde all the Sunni’s frustrated militias hiding in the country, swelling its ranks and enjoying the almost comic break of the Iraqi army, which the western intelligence has spent huge amounts of time and money (5.6 billion dollars per year) to train. Only the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, protected by its Peshmerga, was able to repulse the “irresistible” descent, taking control of Kirkuk, a city always considered as belonging to the Kurdish state.
Money is not an issue for the ISIS. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, US’s precious allies, provide all the funds and technologies necessary to dismantle the Shia axis represented by Iran, Syria and the Lebanese Hezbollah. Israel, quietly, enjoys the fertile chaos. While the battle is raging 90 miles away from Baghdad and ISIS conquers town after town, including few relevant oil wells and refineries, Shia prime Minister Nuri al- Maliki, recent winner of the general elections, called for volunteers to join the army, supported by the powerful voice of the supreme ayatollah al-Sistani. Muqtada al-Sadr Brigades rallied in thousands through the street of Bagdad, where secretary of state John Kerry is in these very hours trying to convince Maliki to step down. The unbalanced and sectarian Shia government has to leave power. An unforgivable mistake, indeed. The price to pay for the American drones to intervene with the usual chirurgical strikes.
At the same time few hundreds Pasdaran counselors from Teheran are organizing the resistance in the capital, in what could became the most unexpected military collaboration in the last 35 years, that of US and Iran. A true new Middle East, a perfect nemesis for Bush Junior’s hawks in Washington and Blair’s pets in London, the last advocates of colonialism in a century of deceits, exploitation, and death.
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Luca Foschi (Italy, 1981) is a freelance war correspondent who focuses his reporting on conflicts. He wrote and shot for newspapers like Corriere della Sera, Il Fatto Quotidiano, The London Economics and L’Unione Sarda. In 2011 Luca covered the Arab spring and the Tottenham’s riots in London. In 2012 he was embedded with the Italian army in Lebanon and Afghanistan. In 2013 Luca covered the main topics in the Middle East, reporting, in Lebanon, the ongoing civil war in Tripoli and the bomb attack in Beirut. In Jordan he witnessed and described the dire conditions of the Syrian refugees. He also wrote about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the West Bank. Luca Foschi obtained an MA in Humanities at the University of Cagliari with specialization in Contemporary History (2007). In London (2011) he got the “Postgraduate Diploma in General Journalism” at the London School of Journalism.
