Paul KeenanAn entirely new front in the war against so-called Islamic State (ISIS) was opened up at the end of August, and once again, the bulk of the western media missed it.
More eager for the immediacy of daily bombings in Syria and battlefield gains by Turkish tanks and allies in pushing ISIS ever further back to its final strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul, news outlets once again overlooked the ‘softer’ war being waged from within the Muslim world itself towards dealing a death blow to a cult which has stigmatised Muslims worldwide.
That new front in this softer war occurred in the Chechen capital, Grozny, between August 25-27 (with details only now emerging from local sources).
Reforms
Between those dates, some 200 Muslim religious leaders and scholars from Russia, Syria, Turkey, India, Britain, Lebanon, Egypt, South Africa and Jordan gathered to debate and finalise a package of reforms that aims to pull Muslims from the lure of ISIS ideology and back to a more peaceful Islam so damaged by the radical group.
Prominent among the delegates was Sheikh Ahmed Mohammed Tayyab, head of al Azhar University in Cairo (the epicentre of religious instruction for Sunni Muslims everywhere) who has time and again denounced ISIS.
On that basis, what indeed was there to report but another round of condemnations which have done nothing to halt ISIS in its tracks?
But it was not those figures actually in attendance at the conference who made it noteworthy, but those who did not attend – those who were deliberately excluded as obstacles to a peace so strongly desired.
Central to coverage of the conference in the Middle East was the fact that neither Saudi Arabia nor Qatar were offered an invitation by the Grozny organisers.
This snub was clarified as speakers took to the lecterns for their presentations. What transpired was nothing short of a collective accusation against those two nations for their backing for militant Islam, coupled with a denunciation of the strain of Islam (Salafism/Wahhabism) dominating both Saudi Arabia and Qatar, making extremist tendencies the more likely in the eyes of non-Salafist Sunni Muslims.
In a joint statement from delegates at the conclusion of the event, it was asserted that the exclusion of Salafism from the hoped-for reform plan was necessary towards “a radical change in order to re-establish the true meaning of Sunnism, knowing that this concept has undergone a dangerous deformation in the wake of efforts by extremists to void its sense in order to take it over and reduce it to their perception” of it.
This is indeed ground-breaking, and indeed, ground-shaking. What geopolitical realities and polite diplomacy have stopped Western leaders from stating of Saudi Arabia’s known support for radical Islam has in a moment become a clarion call to a reform movement within Islam itself.
For the record, agreed reforms (yet to be set in train) by the close of the conference include the creation of a television news network to specifically counter the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera; the establishment of a centre in Chechnya to investigate radical groups and counter extremist thought, and the provision of scholarships for those interested in studying sharia law to compete with Saudi funding in this area.
Even more contentiously, delegates mooted the possibility of excluding Saudi seats of learning from the Sunni world in greater favour of sites such as al Azhar and like-minded universities.
Unsurprisingly, religious authorities in Saudi Arabia have reacted with fury to the conference and its proposals, dramatically proclaiming that they represent the first phase in “burning us at the stake”. An ironic turn of phrase indeed given the proclivities of the radicals.
Iraqi desert offers proof of Islamic State genocide
The wanton slaughter conducted by so-called Islamic State since its emergence in 2014 is well known.
The murderous horde has even ‘helpfully’ worked to catalogue its own crimes in videos, via its online magazine and even in DVDs sent to the families of its victims.
But now, as territory held by the group recedes and is slowly liberated, the real scale of that slaughter is beginning to emerge from the sands of northern Iraq.
From an investigation conducted by the Associated Press (AP) in following the armies of liberation, and through the use of satellite imagery, numerous mass graves containing the victims of the extremists have been identified, and in some cases, excavated in search of evidence with which to damn the guilty at future trials. (The exhumation of one grave holding the remains of 1,700 Iraqi soldiers slaughtered as ISIS overran Tikrit in 2015 saw the executions of 36 militants on August 21.)
So far, some 72 mass burial sites have been located, but AP warns that this is just the beginning. In addition to located sites, researchers believe that Sinjar mountain – where beleaguered Christians and Yazidis waited in the vain hope for a quick international response to the advance of IS – is literally dotted with graves containing anywhere between three bodies and many thousands of dead. Early estimates soar to 15,000 victims.
Evidence
Together with the physical evidence, AP has also begun to catalogue the testimonies of those who managed to escape the onslaught, offering eyewitness accounts of the murderous minutes before the bulldozers consigned the dead (though not in all cases) to the earth.
Such testimonies also offer a glimpse into the initial fate suffered by Christian and Yazidi women who could not outrun the advance.
Snatched from the murder squads, women and girls were transported ‘behind the lines’ by militants.
The subsequent discovery, in newly liberated Manbij in Syrian territory, of a torture prison for women attests to the unspeakable circumstances many found themselves in.
Undaunted, even now as it is beaten back to its final redoubts in Raqqa and Mosul, ISIS continues to perpetrate outrages in a testament to the fanatic bloodlust dressed up as religious fervour underpinning the group.
The sooner it is consigned to its own grave in the desert the better.