Mr. Chair, distinguished members of the committee, thank you for having invited me to appear before you today. I would also like to thank the Canadian High Commission in London for having made this video conference possible.
My testimony today will focus on the context within which ISIL has emerged, with a view to identifying the policies that are required for a meaningful long-term solution to the calamities afflicting the peoples of the region.
By now, we have all become familiar with the beheading of western hostages transformed by ISIL into a social media spectacle. We've also witnessed the mass murder, not only of Christians, Yezidis, and Shia populations, but also of defiant Sunni tribes. The fact that not even children are spared demonstrates the genocidal nature of these killings based solely on the victims' religious identity. Those who are spared, the women and girls, are sold into slavery. It is reported that the price for a Christian or Yezidis woman is $43 if she is between 40 years of age and 50 years of age, $86 if she is between 20 years of age and 30 years of age, $129 if she is between 10 years of age and 20 years of age, with the highest price of $172 for girls up to the age of nine. ISIL has been rightfully called the “caliphate of barbarism”, or simply a death cult. Its cruelty toward the innocent is beyond belief and it is still happening as we speak here today.
Under these circumstances, it is not difficult to declare the Islamic State as the enemy. It is not difficult to bomb them in disgust. There may be the rational objective of degrading their military capabilities, but there's also the emotional appeal, a certain moral clarity, to this relatively effortless micro-crusade against savagery. Therein lies the danger of self-delusion, of historical amnesia, of failing to appreciate the circumstances that have brought us to this nightmare in the first place. Without understanding this context, there can be no meaningful long-term solution.
The battle of Kobani has demonstrated that ISIL's will to fight cannot be underestimated. It is clear that ultimately they can only be defeated by transformation of the same short-sighted policies and circumstances that they have successfully exploited in order to impose their extremist ideology. It was in the recent historical past that prominent western pundits and policymakers spoke of the Islamic arc of crisis as an opportunity to contain Soviet expansion in the region and to incite jihadist fury against Moscow among Soviet Muslims.
Extremism was seen as a weapon of the Cold War, and it played out in theatres such as Afghanistan, where the mujahedeen proved to be a useful instrument until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, after which a country, brimming with jihadists, was abandoned because it ceased to have any geopolitical value—that is, until September 11, 2001.
It played out in Iran, where many fantasized that Ayatollah Khomeini would become the Iranian Gandhi, presiding over a pragmatic government—that is, until the American hostage crisis.
It played out in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which received unconditional western support throughout the Iran-Iraq war, even during the genocide of Kurdish civilians by poison gas, until he decided to invade Kuwait. Today it is the same Kurdish Peshmerga forces, that Iran supported at the time, that are the ground forces fighting ISIL. It proved easy to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the American-led invasion of 2003, but misguided policies, such as entrenchment of sectarian power-sharing and rampant corruption among the political leadership, contributed in significant measure to alienation and armed insurgency.
In the context of the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the post-Saddam vacuum was filled by sectarian violence with both sides supporting proxy extremist militia based on the Shia-Sunni divide reflecting their respective ideologies. It was against this backdrop that Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, defied his master Zawahiri by encouraging sectarian war against the Shia, and today it is al-Baghdadi who leads this expanded movement, joined by other forces in the region, including the spillover of the Syrian conflict.
Let us not forget that the Iranian-backed Badr and other Shia militia respond by committing similar atrocities against Sunnis.
In Syria, meanwhile, the mass murder of peaceful protestors by forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad, including the use of chemical weapons and the extermination of Sunnis by the notorious Alawite shabiha militia, was a policy of deliberate incitement of sectarian violence as a survival strategy. As Iran and Hezbollah fought to preserve the Assad regime, Turkey and Saudi Arabia supported Islamic rebels. There are even accounts of Damascus helping the rapid rise of ISIL through prisoner releases and other measures. Apparently, this has proved to be a successful strategy of transforming Assad into the lesser of two evils, making him the beneficiary rather than the target of western air strikes.
To make matters more complicated, the bombing of ISIL in this tacit military alliance between the west and the Assad regime has resulted in more sympathy and more recruits for the extremists, even from the ranks of the Free Syrian Army, once the main rebel movement and competition to ISIL. Against this backdrop, to say that politics makes strange bedfellows would be an understatement. There is a dialectic of extremism at play. The cynical, short-sighted instrumentalization of religious identity by regimes espousing hateful and discriminatory ideologies will continue to rip the region apart and provide a fertile ground for sectarian violence, whether by ISIL or other forces whose atrocities against civilians are not much better, even if they are less internet-savvy at broadcasting their crimes.
Beyond military strikes and the necessity of a renewed peace process in Syria or humanitarian assistance to refugees, Canada should consider a meaningful long-term engagement in the region. In particular, Canada, together with like-minded nations, should use its diplomatic influence and other resources to discourage and dis-incentivize regional powers from using extremism as an instrument of power. Canada can also make efforts in concert with other nations to balance commercial interests with measures against the rampant corruption, which is yet another breeding ground for extremism.
Finally, Canada can invest in programs to strengthen civil society, independent media, and educational resources that help promote pluralism and tolerance, and I am aware that the government has taken certain steps in this regard. Although the world noticed ISIL only last year, it was a long time in the making. Any lasting solution will require a new vision for the Middle East based on pluralism and interdependence. It cannot be accepted that it is this region alone that is somehow immune to the historic forces of integration that have shaped the world elsewhere.
The forging of a new, unified Middle East can be achieved through either sustained engagement and courageous leadership or, otherwise, after more yet unimaginable calamities leave us with no other choice.
Thank you.