The capture of Damascus by the radical Islamic forces resulting in the flight of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to Moscow for political asylum on December 8 was seemingly a sudden development but it marked the culmination of what had been happening in Syria and Iraq for years signifying impact of religion on the old superpower rivalry in the region that was somewhere also changing the geopolitics at the global level.

It may be recalled that way back in 1928, a Muslim thinker Hasan Al Banna had founded Ikhwanul Musalmeen or Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria to oppose the regimes of Gamal Abdul Nasser and Hafez Al-Assad—father of Bashar Al-Assad—who were looked upon as pro-Soviet “nationalist” Arab leaders.

Banna believed that the Quran was the best Constitution for Muslims and that an Islamic state could live “in competition, not conflict with the West”. The US-led West appreciated the Muslim Brotherhood movement and even encouraged it.

When Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, an admirer of Hasan Al Banna, launched Jamaat-e-Islami at Lahore in 1940, this pro-West Islamic stream spread to the Indian subcontinent too and became the ideological anchor of Nizam-e-Mustafa defined by President Zia-ul-Haq as the goal for Pakistan.

In the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Iranian Revolution of 1978, there was a wave of Pan-Islamism in the 1980s supported by the Saudi Arabia-led Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC).

At the fourth Islamic Summit held at Casa Blanca in 1984 under the auspices of OIC, Zia-ul-Haq declared that Muslims from “Morocco to the Philippines” were one community who must stand together to solve any common problems.

Pan-Islamism as a movement sought to counter the influence of Communism and was blessed by the US whose closest ally in the Muslim world, Saudi Arabia, was pioneering it. However, there was a much older anti-West sentiment in the Muslim world—flowing from the historical memory of the “Wahhabi Revolt”—the name given to the Jehad launched by the leading Ulema of the times in the 19th century against Western encroachment of Muslim lands.

Developments in Afghanistan following the invasion of that country by the Soviet army facilitated the ascendancy of radical fundamentalists in the Afghan territory and this was to influence the course of events in the conflict-prone Middle East in subsequent years.

The anti-Soviet armed campaign in Afghanistan was operationally led by the CIA-Pakistan’s ISI combine and was run on the warcry of Jehad in which apart from the Pakistan-controlled Islamic militant outfits and Saudi-funded Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), radical forces headed by Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden also took part.

The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1991 led to the dismemberment of the USSR and the demise of International Communism on one hand and put Afghanistan in the throes of anarchy on the other because of the feud among the warlords—primarily the contest between General Ahmad Shah Masood heading the nationalistic Northern Alliance and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hizbe Islami who was supported by US and Pakistan.

In 1993 Benazir Bhutto, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, sent the Taliban—products of the Deobandi madrasas known for practising a ruthless fundamentalist line—to Afghanistan to control the situation there and they managed to install the Taliban Emirate at Kabul in 1996 under Mullah Mohammad Omar—a close relative of Osama bin Laden.

Taliban carried the historical memory of the Wahhabi movement—Darul Uloom Deoband was established near Saharanpur in India by the protagonists of the failed anti-British Jehad, in 1867—and the Emirate soon bared its fangs against the US which had to work for bringing down the Emirate by 2001.

This laid down the turf for 9/11 which was planned by Osama bin Laden taking shelter in Afghanistan. The 'war on terror' that the US-led Coalition launched against Islamic radical forces first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, created worldwide repercussions and not unexpectedly paved the way for the spread of “radicalization” in the two theatres.

Al Qaeda held on in Afghanistan and its competitor—not an opponent—appeared in the Iraq-Syria region in the form of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), later known as ISIS since the Levant stood basically for Syria. Bashar al-Assad had inherited the legacy of his father so far as the hostility of the US is concerned and had the consequent advantage of securing Russian support.

Also, the fact of his being an Alawite—which is a Shia sect—got him the backing of Iran and Hezbollah on grounds of religion even as Iran-US antagonism had already existed on a strong footing at the political level as well. Bashar’s regime allowed Shiites to dominate levers of power disregarding the Sunni majority and this added to the strengthening of radicalization among the disgruntled Sunnis.

Syria ran into a “civil war” kind of situation internally because the Assad regime had become suppressive in economic distress facing the population and also because it was confronted by Islamic radical forces of Al Qaeda and ISIS on one side and the pro-West Islamic groups on the other.

Developments in Syria should be seen in the backdrop of the Arab Spring of 2011 which was a movement for democracy against dictatorial Arab regimes.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was in the lead and that pleased the US.

As it proceeded in the Arab world, however, the stir allowed radical forces to come to the fore and the Western support to the ruling dispensation in the Arab countries became dependant on whether it was friendly towards the US or not.

Muslim societies in general tend to fall back upon their own God in times of difficulties and while this may be true of others as well, they yield to a fundamentalist line or even to the call of Jehad more readily because of the “pull of exclusivism” of faith that worked on them in those situations. Those behind the faith-based militancy used social media for indoctrination and this is what ultimately made “radicalization” a source of terror threat at the global level.

Radical Islam has a place in the spectrum of faith and cannot be totally discarded by Muslim societies.

In the Middle East, the conflict is both political and faith-based and that is how the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are broadly in convergence against the Russia-China-Iran axis—fundamentalist Shiism is ideologically opposed to Capitalism.

An anti-Assad block comprising of Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia has also been a key factor in the regional politics.

Radicalized Hamas has been embraced by Iran because both are anti-US politically while the Iran-Israel confrontation reflects to an extent the historical conflict between Zionism and Islam.

The recent terror attack of ISIS-K on a Moscow concert in which at least 130 persons were killed was primarily a retaliation against the earlier Russian missile attacks on ISIS establishments in Syria and Iraq.

For ISIS both the US and Russia with their godless ideology were on the same footing as far as encroachment on Muslim territories was concerned.

The US-led West and the China-Russia alliance want a competitive presence in West Asia for political and economic reasons.

The US has been countering its primary enemies in the region—Al Qaeda and ISIS—by taking out their leadership in Intelligence-based operations.

Osama bin Laden was killed in a military operation at midnight carried out at his residence at Abbottabad near Islamabad in May 2011 while his successor Ayman al Zawahiri was eliminated based on precise intelligence in a drone attack in Afghanistan in 2022.

Interestingly, the present chief of Al Qaeda—Saif Al Adel—is said to be operating out of Iran. ISIS emerged as an offspring of Al Qaeda having been created by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in 2013 to operate in Iraq and Syria.

Nusrat Front, another Al Qaeda affiliate active in Syria, continued to work there independently. Its leader, Abu Mohammad Al Julani who had renamed Nusrat Front as Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, has emerged as the new figure of power in Damascus after the departure of Bashir Al Assad.

Al Julani also had organizational links with the Islamic State. It may be mentioned that in Iraq the US had launched air strikes to prevent ISIL from expanding into northern Iraq, as it wanted to shield Christians and Yazidis—who believed in both the Quran and the Bible. The US also released videos showing how ISIL fighters beheaded Western aid workers and journalists.

In 2019 Baghdadi was killed in Syria in a US raid during which he exploded his suicide vest.

After Baghdadi, ISIS-K—“K” standing for Khorasan—became the main face of the parent organization.

Khorasan is the region covering Afghanistan, Persia and Turkmenistan. The whole scene in the Iraq-Syria region was marked by violence along sectarian lines. Such conflicts always tended to become unending and indeterminate.

From the Indian perspective, it is a challenge to maintain bilateral relations with the major powers in the Middle East-Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel and advocate the cause of global peace and human development.

There are signs of a new Cold War on the horizon between the US and the China-Russia combine and in this setting India's strategy would be to remain “independent” in counselling for stoppage of armed confrontations and commencement of negotiations for peace.

India has done this in the case of both the Ukraine-Russia armed conflict and Israel's operations in Gaza.

India had no hesitation in promptly condemning the terror attack of Hamas on Israel on October 7 last year.

This country must be firmly against faith-based violence and must continue to call for condemnation of terrorism in all its forms, from different multi-lateral forums of which it is a part—ranging from BRICS and Quad to G20.

The problem for India regarding radicalization is substantially linked to the dubious role of Pakistan which had found a way of remaining on the right side of the US despite its proven track record of harbouring Islamic radical outfits and using terrorism as an instrument of state policy.

Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) operates from Pakistan and ISIS-K elements are said to have been seen on the Kashmir front.

The Sino-Pakistan alliance is known to be working for covert operations against India.

The use of Chinese drones for dropping arms and narcotics in Kashmir and Punjab has been reported multiple times and the two hostile neighbours were also in concert in the sphere of anti-India cyber operations.

The flux in West Asia in general and in Syria and Gaza in particular, is a reminder for India that developments in the Islamic world have to be closely watched for their impact on the internal security of this country.

(The writer is a former Director of the Intelligence Bureau. Views are personal)

—IANS

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