Over the past decade, civil wars, terrorist sectarian attacks, civilian dislocation and misery, and a loss of social, political, and economic stability have shaken much of the Muslim world in North Africa and the Middle East. In many ways, these problems were the results of recent historical events. Yet the turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East, along with Islamic challenges to Western interests and policies, had a much deeper history, which included the legacies of European colonialism and the mandate system established after World War I, Cold War power plays, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Radical political Islam, a mixture of traditional religious beliefs and innovative social and political reform ideas, was at first a reaction against the foreign control and secularization represented by the mandate system established in the Middle East after World War I (see Chapter 25). Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, called for national liberation from European control and a return to shari’a law (based on Muslim legal codes), and demanded land reform, extensive social welfare programs, and economic independence. The appeal of such ideas crossed class lines and national borders. By the 1960s the Brotherhood had established chapters across the Middle East and North Africa, and a variety of other groups and leaders advocated similar ideas about the need for Islamic revival and national autonomy. The broad spectrum of Islamist ideas is difficult to summarize, but adherents tended to fall into two main groups: a moderate or centrist group that worked peacefully to reform society within existing institutions, and a much smaller, more militant minority willing to use violence to achieve its goals.

Decolonization and the Cold War sharpened anti-Western and particularly anti-U.S. sentiments among radical Islamists. As the western European powers loosened their ties to the Middle East, the Americans stepped in. Applying containment policy to limit the spread of communism, and eager to preserve steady supplies of oil, the United States supported secular, authoritarian regimes friendly to U.S. interests in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere. Such regimes often played on U.S. concerns about communism or the threat of radical Islam to bolster American support.

U.S. policies in the Middle East at times produced “blowback,” or unforeseen and unintended consequences. One example was the Iranian revolution of 1979, when Islamist radicals antagonized by Western intervention, state corruption, and secularization overthrew the U.S.-supported shah and established an Islamic republic. The successful revolution encouraged militant Islamists elsewhere. So did the example of the mujahideen, the Muslim guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan who successfully fought off the Soviet army from 1979 to 1989 (see Chapter 29). U.S. military aid and arms, funneled to the mujahideen during the war, also generated blowback. Many of the U.S.-armed mujahideen would go on to support the Taliban, a militant Islamist faction that came to rule Afghanistan in 1996. The Taliban established a strict Islamist state based on shari’a law that denied women’s right to education and banned Western movies and music. The Taliban also provided a safe haven for the Saudi-born millionaire Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

1048

As a result of these policies, the United States, along with western Europe, became the main target for Islamist militants. During the 1990s bin Laden and al-Qaeda mounted several terrorist attacks on U.S. installations, leading up to the horrific September 11 assault. After that attack, President Bush declared with some justification that the terrorists “hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote.”15 In public calls for jihad (or struggle) against the United States and the West, however, bin Laden gave a more pragmatic list of grievances, including U.S. support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the sanctions on Iraq that followed the Persian Gulf War, and the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia — seen as an insult to the Muslim holy sites in Mecca and Medina.16

The Bush administration hoped that the invasions of Afghanistan — a direct response to the September 11 attacks — and Iraq would end the terrorist attacks and bring peace and democracy to the Middle East, but both brought chaos instead. The military campaign in Afghanistan quickly achieved one of its goals, bringing down the Taliban, and the United States installed a friendly government. But U.S. troops failed to find bin Laden or disable al-Qaeda, and Taliban insurgents mounted a determined and lasting guerrilla war.

With heavy fighting still under way in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Bush administration turned its attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, arguing that it was necessary to expand the war on terror to other hostile regimes in the Middle East. U.S. leaders effectively played on American fears of renewed terrorism and charged that Saddam Hussein was still developing weapons of mass destruction in flagrant disregard of his 1991 promise to end all such programs. Some Americans shared the widespread doubts held by Europeans about the legality — and wisdom — of an American attack on Iraq, especially after UN inspectors found no weapons of mass destruction in the country. Though they failed to win UN approval, in March 2003 the United States and Britain, with token support from a handful of other European states, invaded Iraq.

The U.S.-led invasion quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army, and Saddam’s dictatorship collapsed in April, but America’s subsequent efforts to establish a stable pro-American Iraq proved difficult. Poor postwar planning and management by administration officials was one factor, but there were others. Iraq, a creation of Western imperialism after the First World War (see Chapter 25), was a fragile state with three distinct groups: non-Arab Kurds, Arab Sunni Muslims, and Arab Shi’ite Muslims. By 2006 deadly sectarian conflicts among these groups and against the United States and its Iraqi supporters had taken hold. Casualties in Iraq began to decline after President Bush sent additional troops to the country in 2007, and when President Obama took office in 2009 his administration moved forward with agreements to withdraw all U.S. forces in 2011. The shaky Iraqi government continued to struggle with ethnic divisions and terrorist violence, however.

Although U.S. commandos finally killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, the apparently unwinnable guerrilla war in Afghanistan became increasingly unpopular in the United States and among NATO allies in Europe. Though the conflict continued, President Obama withdrew U.S. combat troops from the country in 2014.

In early 2011 an unexpected chain of events that came to be called the Arab Spring further destabilized the Middle East and North Africa. In a provincial town in Tunisia, a poor fruit vendor set himself on fire to protest official harassment. His death eighteen days later unleashed a series of spontaneous mass protests that brought violence, chaos, and regime change; six weeks later, Tunisia’s authoritarian president fled the country, opening the way for reform. Massive popular demonstrations calling for more open democractic government and social tolerance broke out across the Middle East. In Egypt, demonstrators forced the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S.-friendly leader who had ruled for thirty years. An armed uprising in Libya, supported by NATO air strikes, brought down the dictatorial government of Muammar Gaddafi that October. A civil war broke out in Syria in July 2011, but dragged on into 2016 as Bashar al-Assad, with Russian support, hurled his army at the rebels and Western powers disagreed about what to do. Protests arose in other countries in the region as well, evoking a mixed response of repression and piecemeal reform.

1049

As the popular movements inspired by the Arab Spring faltered, the emergence of the Islamic State (sometimes called ISIS or ISIL) suggested that events in the Middle East had spiraled out of control. The Islamic State, an extremist Islamist militia dedicated to the establishment of a new caliphate to unify Muslims around the world, grew out of al-Qaeda and the various other insurgent groups fighting in Iraq and the Syrian civil war. By summer 2015 Islamic State soldiers had taken control of substantial parts of central Syria and Iraq — including Mosul, Ramadi, and Fallujah, cities central to U.S. combat missions in the Iraq war. Over 4 million Syrians and Iraqis lost their homes during the fighting, and hundreds of thousands streamed north in attempts to find asylum in Europe (see “Changing Immigration Flows”).

In the territories under their control, Islamic State militants set up a terroristic government based on an extremist reading of shari’a law. Islamic State terror tactics included the violent persecution of sectarian religious groups; use of sexual assault and rape as tools of conquest; mass executions and beheadings of military, political, or sectarian enemies; and the “cultural cleansing” (destruction and looting) of ancient cultural monuments and shrines that failed to meet its stringent religious ideals, most recently in the classical city of Palmyra in Syria. All these actions were well documented in widespread Internet propaganda campaigns; videos recorded by militants, intended to demonstrate their power and entice recruits, were regularly posted on the Internet.

In summer 2016, as this was being written, the outcome of the turmoil in the Middle East was difficult to predict. The Arab Spring seemed, for the most part, a dismal failure. The young activists who sought greater political and social liberties from authoritarian regimes quickly lost control of the changes they unleashed. Multiple players now vied for power: military leaders and old elites, local chieftains representing ethnic or sectarian interests, and moderate and radical Islamists. In Egypt, the first open elections in decades brought to power representatives of the moderate wing of the Muslim Brotherhood; a year later, military leaders overthrew this elected government. In Libya, Yemen, and especially Syria, persistent civil wars undermined the search for stability. The hold of the Islamic State was likewise difficult to shake. In Iraq, air strikes by a U.S.-NATO coalition and assaults by Iraqi ground troops only slowly repulsed the extremists.

In the period leading up to 2016, Western policymakers grappled in vain for clear and effective ways to help defeat the Islamic State and bring order to the region. Their efforts were especially freighted, since the turmoil in the Muslim world was at the center of many of Europe’s problems. These included the immigration emergency of 2015–2016, the persistent extremist Islamist terrorist attacks, the destabilization of Europe’s energy supplies, and the disastrous human rights crisis faced by millions of Middle East residents.