Mr Benn's Speech on Bombing Syria - how right is he?

Questioning Hilary Benn's speech on 2 December 2105

The purpose of debate is to make the obscure clear, and to come to a good decision based on what is known. Listening and questioning are important parts, as important as speaking itself. Hilary Benn seems to have made his mark with a brilliant piece of oratory, which earned him a standing ovation. It is therefore worth looking at what he said and asking, ‘Is this true?’

What should we do with others to confront this threat to our citizens, our nation, other nations and the people who suffer under the cruel yoke of Daesh? The carnage in Paris brought home to us the clear and present danger that we face from Daesh. It could just as easily have been London, Glasgow, Leeds, or Birmingham and it could still be. 

There is an assumption that ISIS (I am writing in English so use the English acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham and because no one seems to pronounce the Arabic acronym well) organised the Paris attacks from its headquarters in Raqqa. This needs to be questioned. There have been a number of jihadist atrocities for decades now, perpetrated by different jihadists who hold similar views to ISIS, and while some may have been trained in a variety of Al Qa’eda and other bases, they have tended to be local. After all the Paris killers were mainly Belgian and French, as far as we know now. Deciding to bomb Syria because Paris was attacked by French and Belgian terrorists is the same mistake as was made following the 2001 attacks in New York where most of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, and the others from UAE, Egypt and Lebanon. Then both Afghanistan and Iraq were attacked. Until there is proof that the instructions came from Raqqa, this is no reason to launch these attacks. You do not need a central organisation to be a suicide bomber or a man with a gun.

It needs to be accepted that this sort of Islamic terrorism is a long term problem. It is mainly spawned from the radical Islamism exported vigorously from Saudi Arabia and often supported by Deobandi preachers in British mosques. Bombing some dusty town on the Euphrates will not change people’s minds, unless to encourage vengeance.  

The first part of his argument is simply missing a point. If we want to stop these terrible attacks, we need to deal with the disturbed young men who find it all attractive.

Later on he speaks of ISIS planning more terror attacks. If he looks at where ISIS fighters come from, other than the cannon-fodder, the foolish British men who end up getting killed, the most effective terrorists have been fighting these jihads for decades. I met some in Pakistan in 1987 when they were fighting the Soviets (supported by us, of course); they moved to where there was jihad and payment. Chechens have moved: different former-Soviet republics, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now, of course, Syria. They are survivors, and will move to Mali or wherever looks promising. They won’t be ISIS. They will still be the murdering jihadi thugs they are.

No one in the debate doubts the deadly serious threat that we face from Daesh and what it does, although we sometimes find it hard to live with the reality. In June, four gay men were thrown off the fifth storey of a building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. In August, the 82-year-old guardian of the antiquities of Palmyra, Professor Khaled al-Asaad, was beheaded, and his headless body was hung from a traffic light. In recent weeks, mass graves in Sinjar have been discovered, one said to contain the bodies of older Yazidi women murdered by Daesh because they were judged too old to be sold for sex. Daesh has killed 30 British tourists in Tunisia; 224 Russian holidaymakers on a plane; 178 people in suicide bombings in Beirut, Ankara and Suruç; 130 people in Paris, including those young people in the Bataclan, whom Daesh, in trying to justify its bloody slaughter, called apostates engaged in prostitution and vice. If it had happened here they could have been our children.

One of ISIS’ attractions to the disturbed men it uses to perpetrate is grim deeds is its grim deeds, and their video footage. This is not some mystical Sufi movement seeking union with the Divine. It is a fanatical and apocalyptic organisation which seeks to wreak vengeance on those it hates in the most violent way. But it understands the West as so many of its people come from the West or have studied here. Mr Benn, having been part of the New Labour movement ought to recognise spin when it is in front of his eyes. Everything that liberals in the west like: pluralism, the arts, nice holidays, night clubs, ISIS see as an opportunity to gain attention. Asking people to smoke in private is not going to get headlines; telling gays to be gay behind closed doors is not going to either; but his examples are exactly what get the headlines. This appeals to the macho, just as bombs do. The Syrian government tries to do something different. They target gays, but to blackmail them and use them as spies. I imagine MI6 does the same. The Syrian government has tortured and killed thousands more men and women than ISIS not just since 2011, but throughout Baathist rule. Like ISIS it oppresses scholars, sells antiquities and has enabled jihadists and its own agents to murder, assassinate, torture, rape and humiliate hundreds and thousands of its own citizens. Far more than the thugs of ISIS who have killed less than 1% of victims in the Syrian crisis, compared to the government’s 96%. So Mr Benn simply ignores the Syrian government and its detestable enormities.

It needs to be said clearly that under both Hafez al Assad and Bashar al Assad there have been at times policies to use Islamist jihadist fighters to destabilise Syria’s neighbours. Many of the jihadists who caused chaos after the 2003 invasion of Iraq were organised and encouraged by the Syrian government. When it changed its mind, it imprisoned them; but in 2011 when people started demonstrating against the Syrian government they were once again freed in order to cause the chaos the government wanted so that it could say that extreme radical Islam is the alternative to Bashar’s ‘just and gentle rule.’

On the subject of ground troops to defeat Daesh, there has been much debate about the figure of 70,000, and the Government must explain that better. But we know that most of those troops are engaged in fighting President Assad. I will tell Members what else we know: whatever the number—70,000, 40,000, 80,000—the current size of the opposition forces means that the longer we leave it to take action, the longer Daesh will have to decrease that number. So to suggest that airstrikes should not take place until the Syrian civil war has come to an end is to miss the urgency of the terrorist threat that Daesh poses to us and others, and to misunderstand the nature and objectives of the extension to airstrikes that is proposed.

Mr Benn should be careful. ‘Whatever the number’ really is a foolish thing to say. This isn’t bargaining in the late Aleppo suq: 150,000 committed would be brilliant, 50 would be useless. The forces about whom he is speaking as allies to exterminate this disease on the ground are not really interested. Certainly ISIS is a problem for those rebels, but nothing like the problem which is the Syrian Army, the Iraqi and Russian forces and Hezbollah who are ranged against them in all their might. Even if the ‘moderate rebels’ were interested in Benn’s war, of the supposed 70, 000 there are 25,000 or so in the Hauran, the south of the country far from ISIS territory and with their own struggle. The rebels in the Ghouta, the oasis of Damascus are not going to leave their main prize, any more than will Bashar and his kleptocratic cronies.

He quotes the KRG Representative in London

“Last June, Daesh captured one third of Iraq overnight and a few months later attacked the Kurdistan Region. Swift airstrikes by Britain, America and France and the actions of our own Peshmerga saved us... We now have a border of 650 miles with Daesh. We have pushed them back and recently captured Sinjar ...Again Western airstrikes were vital. But the old border between Iraq and Syria does not exist. Daesh fighters come and go across this fictional boundary.”

If he had bothered to look at the footage of the war in the north-east, Rojava as the Kurds call it, he would have noticed that the main effort was by ground forces. They fought against ISIS at Kobane (or ‘Ayn al ‘Arab as I knew it) and directed the USAF to precision attacks on ISIS targets. The Kurdish infantry went in, the aeroplanes followed. There are no ground troops in the Mid-Euphrates. The Kurds are not interested in taking over non-Kurdish territory, nor are local Arab tribes keen.

As for the Syria-Iraq border, that was a free zone for jihadists for years under the Syrian government’s attempts to destabilise Iraq. Which of course, it did.

There is much more in Mr Benn’s speech which I am sure is questionable. I am sure there is a question of legitimacy. I think his final paean for ‘our’ anti-fascist glory is wrong, but these are not my area.

It was a Satanic speech, full of half-truths and deception, and this comfortable man should feel ashamed.

Bombing Syria?

The attacks on Paris have raised the profile of ISIS in western thinking, and the gut response by France has been to increase its bombing of areas of Syria under the control of the violent jihadi semi-state. Two months ago the Syrian crisis was being seen through the lens of the hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking to escape from the continuing violence in Syria. It is really important to work out a strategy to deal with both the humanitarian crisis in Syria, and the jihadi threat across the region and elsewhere.

Although I am mostly concerned with Syria, it is important to remember that the crisis affects a number of other countries. Iraq is where ISIS was created, a direct result of gross incompetence by the USA led destruction of the country in 2003, and ISIS is mainly Iraqi led and holds a significant area of Iraqi soil. Turkey has been a major conduit of both personnel and general trade into the ISIS area, and in general part of the Turkish state is not particularly opposed to ISIS, allowing over the years significant support, and there are many ISIS sleeper cells now in Turkey. Also the Turkish anti-Kurdish campaign over the last six months has distracted it from dealing with ISIS and also attempted (and failed) to distract the generally effective pan-Kurdish offensive against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. Lebanon’s Shia fighters of the Hezbollah party have been significant in supporting the Syrian government with Iranian backing, and of course recently Russia has been heavily involved in bombing areas of Syria, often civilian areas with no rebel presence, but also mainly non-ISIS rebels (some of whom are of the Al-Qaeda linked Nusra Front), while Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf countries have been supporting non-ISIS rebels, and individuals there have been supporting ISIS. As well as these, NATO countries, such as USA< France and UK have been involved in covert, supportive and air operations against ISIS and to some extent the Syrian government.

 The post-Paris narrative has been one concerned with dealing with ISIS. Although this group has called for local attacks in the West, it is not clear how much its leadership in the Middle East knew about the plans or had any direct involvement. It encourages both lone-wolf attacks and gives training to suicide-bombers and terrorists in the sort of attacks which happened in Beirut, Paris and Bamako. Clearly ISIS is a problem, and probably the source of these attacks. But the reason ISIS exists is the failure of firstly the Iraqi government to govern well, and then of the Syrian. Sleeper cells in Mosul preached against the corruption and incompetence of the Iraqi government, and when they helped the ISIS takeover ran the public services much better. Later the level of oppression and submission required by the ISIS leadership in Mosul began to rankle, but it was clear that to begin with life under ISIS was better than under the chaotic government. To rid the world of ISIS means ensuring good governance.

ISIS in Syria exists because of the Syrian government, headed by Bashar al-Asad. It is a sectarian, kleptocratic regime which has managed to divide the Syrian people into sects with its actions and propaganda. Nearly all the refugees fleeing Syria say they are fleeing the government and its torture, rape and bombing. Very few flee ISIS in comparison. ISIS does not control the heavily populated west and north. By ending not only the rule of Bashar al-Asad, but the whole system under which he has headed the destruction of the country, the main reason for ISIS’ existence in Syria would disappear.

If western governments wish to rid themselves of the fear of ISIS, then the Syrian government needs to change.

Syria’s infrastructure has been badly destroyed by the different parties since the popular uprising was turned into a violent conflict by the government. Not only have ancient sites, like the Omayyad Mosque and Suq in Aleppo, or the ruins of Palmyra, been badly damaged, but hospitals, schools, factories and power generating facilities. The Russian bombing (mainly non-ISIS rebels) has added considerably to this, and has had widespread human cost too. The USA led of ISIS areas bombing seems to have been relatively limited, probably in an attempt to avoid the deaths of innocent civilians. Since France increased its bombing following the Paris attacks, it has been noticed that the number of civilian casualties have risen. This is significant and worrying.

ISIS has large numbers of people in its towns and villages. Its own fighters in general are not Syrian, with its leadership mainly being Iraqi, and huge numbers of fighters from many countries and backgrounds. Careful targeting in the USA led strikes has been an attempt to kill ISIS leaders and not the local population who have no say in the government of their areas. There are real difficulties in who to target. Many rural and urban Syrians in the ISIS area are very poor. ISIS has gained some support with high levels of pay with wide benefits for its members. It also encourages significant trade in a variety of products, from stolen antiquities to oil, and this trade is run by local Syrians who are taxed on their income. If there is an increase of attacks on traffic of oil, for instance, it will be through the targeting of poor local Syrians. They are scraping a living, feeding their families in a traumatically difficult situation. To bomb them would make a slight dent in the income of ISIS (95% of ISIS revenue is through local taxation), but at huge cost to poor Syrian families, pushing them towards being supporters of ISIS. If there must be bombing it needs to be carefully targeted, and this is becoming harder as ISIS leaders and fighters seem to have moved from Raqqa or to have moved to civilian areas in a typical human-shield mode.

ISIS continues to trade through Turkey.  This is not the time to discuss the Turk/Kurd issue, but the Turkish government has been working hard to prevent further Kurdish expansion in Syria. At present there are significant Kurdish populations south of the Turkish border in an area just north of Aleppo, and then in a much larger area along most of the east of the border in the Qamishly and Hassake area, known as Rojava in Kurdish, or the Jezireh in Arabic. At present the Kurds have been successful in expelling ISIS from much of the Kurdish territories in Syria and Iraq. They have used local Christian and Arab allies in this, but are at the limit of their own area and it is not reasonable for them to move further, even though linking their east and west territories would suit other parties. It needs to be stressed too that alliances are pragmatic. Christians tend to be pro-regime, and there are occasional tensions between Arabs and Kurds fuelled by propaganda. The ISIS area on the Turkish border has been a consistently busy area of trade, with support from many Turks on either religious or financial grounds. For ISIS to be defeated this is probably the most important key. Turkey is ambivalent both as a nation and as a government. Erdoğan’s policy of quiet support for Sunni extremists is foolish, as his attempt to be the leader of the Sunni world (as it seems) is absolutely in conflict with ISIS’ apocalyptic vision of its own Caliphate. If ISIS is left to grow it will activate its many sleeper cells among the very conservative Sunni Turks along the border and become a challenge to Turkey’s existence. But Erdoğan’s obsession with humiliating the Kurdish population of the east is encouraging growing discontent with Turkish governance at a time Erdoğan needs national unity to deal with the threat on the southern border.

Syria is suffering. It has been bombed, shot and shelled into a ruin. What is needed is to stop the flow of arms and to gather all the interested parties to end the fighting. It may be that some carefully targetted bombing is necessary, but increasing bombing of ISIS territory with the associated civilian suffering will result in further refugees fleeing Syria and an increase in support for ISIS. Neither of these will resolve the problems faced in Europe, let alone the suffering of the Syrian people.

A Christian's meditation on Syria's suffering

I was asked to give a talk on Syria at St Olave's Church York. I wrote two, and this is the one I didn't use. We can say different things about Syria and how I as a Christian respond. The Gospel for the day is the story of Bartimaeus, to whom Jesus gives sight.

 St Mark wrote his gospel in a period of catastrophic warfare during a Judean uprising against the Roman thugs who were robbing the country of its wealth, an empire led by soldiers who were happy to use torture, and who would use local clients like the Herod family to ensure that the rich and powerful were kept rich and powerful. Jesus was offering an alternative regime, which would challenge the narrative of torture and military force with a new vision of service and humility. Blind Bartimaeus could see that, when the sighted powerful couldn’t.

The uprising in Syria against a brutal, torturing kleptoctracy began in outrage at children being imprisoned and beaten. Remember how St Mark talks about Jesus’ treatment of the children? ‘Let them come to me.’

The response to a massive popular rejection of the system was violence. Syria is being crucified by a bunch of Mafiosi because that is what they know. The reaction to peaceful demonstrations by the Syrian government was the same result as the Romans and their Judean clients, the Jerusalem clerical elite. Be brutal.

My first visit to Hasakeh in the Kurdish north-east, was to meet the young and dynamic Bishop, Matta. He had studied with Anglicans in New York and was busy building a monastery. He drove around in a very nice Mercedes, and was most hospitable. When I was leaving he gave me a little lapel badge. What would a Syrian Bishop give? It was the head of the president. For Bishop Matta had been coerced by the government. You Christians, whose families fled Turkey in 1922 after the genocide, you will be protected by us, but you must be totally subservient. Nice car, political protection, VIP lounge at the airport, meetings with important politicians, and the protection of your Christian Syriac minority in the sea of Islam and Kurds. So every big feast would see the governor visiting the church and the Bishop, and the Christian minority feeling connected and safe. Unlike the Kurdish majority who could easily find themselves tortured, and thousands of whom were stateless and impoverished. You don’t want to be like them do you?

But not all Christians flourished and some, especially the better educated felt frustrated. If they made life difficult for Bishop Matta, they might find themselves taken away and roughed up by the Security police. But if I took a party from my parish, the same security would ensure that we were safe and sound and have a great visit.

The Christians often felt isolated or aware that they could be in some horrendous place like Saudi Arabia where owning a Bible is illegal. They might not like the government, but the government frequently warned them that if there was opposition it would be a radical violent Islamic state. Not like the local Kurds whose Islam was moderate and who encouraged their women to be equal. But the government said: After us Al Qaida, and they believed it. So when the first demonstrations took place, the government opened the prisons and liberated many. But the ones they liberated were the violent Jihadists who flocked to Iraq to join the Islamic State, a brutal regime like Saudi Arabia, but one which did permit Bibles.

What can we as Christians say? I look at the Patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox and his closeness to the regime, and think, ‘If I were based in Damascus what would I do? My little community is scared enough and at least the regime claims to protect us.’ He can close his eyes to torture, as we have done too, because he is between the devil and the deep blue sea.

My friend, Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim spoke clearly at the beginning of the rebellion about the need for people to talk. He was kidnapped and is still missing, and I assume he is now one of the martyrs. So we need to read the gospel, especially St Mark, carefully. It does not offer easy solutions in a time of trial. It has God feeling abandoned in his torture.

I was watching some footage of a hospital, taken from the government by Kurdish and Christians rebels. It contained the torture cells, with blood, still red on the white tiles; the blood of a tortured man. In the Eucharist we receive the cup of life, we receive the blood of a tortured man. Christ our God knows what it is like to be the victim, he knows what it is to be betrayed to the powerful. When we think of Syrians who have had enough of this barbarous rule, they share something with God. Our Gospel is not wishful thinking, it is about having a God who is where we are when things really at their worst.

Russia in Syria

What is Russia doing in Syria?

Like the Syrian Civil War, Russia's latest intervention has many causes. One of them is internal Russian politics, something about which I am ignorant, but I suppose that Preident Putin thinks that he will be politically strengthened by his country's significant intervention in Syria.

Russia, like the USSR before it, has been a consistent supporter of the Baathist government in Syria for many decades. Syria has benefitted by receiving both military support and a shield in international diplomacy when Russia would veto any significant attack on it at the UN. It has meant for Russia that it has an ally in the middle of a frequently anti-Russian Arab world, It has allowed Russia to have a small naval base on the Mediterranean, although this has not been a much used asset over the decades.

With the eruption of the Syrian revolution in 2011, the two states which backed the government were Russia and Iran. Russia supplied the weapons, and Iran was significant in sending in military personnel, with reports of Iranian, Afghan and Pakistanis fighting as Syrian forces. Alongside them were Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, heavilly supported by Iran. In many ways Iran was taking much of the load of the actual fight.

Spiegel's Christoph Reuter recently wrote an important article about why Russia has intervened so dramatically.( http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/syria-leader-assad-seeks-russian-protection-from-ally-iran-a-1056263.html ) The essence is that Iran was treating Syria as an Iranian colony or even a province, as it has been doing with central Iraq. The difference between Iraq and Syria is that Syria's population is not significantly mainstream Shia. There is a significant Ismaili presence, and of course many of the ruling elite are Alawite, but there are far from being Iranian style Shia. Alawites have no mosques and their cult is scarcely Muslim, with their women avoiding headwear and a normal (and often religious) consumption of alcohol.

From Iran's point of view we need to remember the theological battle going on in the region between Shia Iran and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.

Saudi's aggressive planting of Wahhabi preachers throughout the Sunni world, including the take-over of mosques from Kenya to London, is well known. Its radically extreme form of Islam is alien to that found anywhere outside of central Arabia, but it is aggressive and well-funded. Its brand of Islam is to be seen as a basis for much of the violence racking the Muslim world. Certainly, if you had walked down the streets of Aleppo or Damascus a decade ago there was real contempt among serious Muslims for this extreme version which was seen as barbaric and inauthentic. But Wahhabism has been preached widely in mosques, on the streets and on the internet and has gained support.

Iran has been doing similar things on a smaller scale, but its preachers have been trying hard to turn the ordinary Shia, Alawites and other non-Sunni Muslims in Syria and Lebanon into Iranian style Shia, and also to convert Sunni Muslims in the same direction. There are reports of Iran bringing in Shia migrants from other countries into Syria to change the demography.

In terms of the war, the government of Syria is clearly losing. Most of its young men try to avoid the army, or are not trusted to fight. Bashar has been under pressure from the Iranians, and so he turned to Russia who have no serious theological interest in Syria, but plenty of reasons to value it as a client. (Some Russians see this partly as a war to protect the Orthodox Christians, but this has not been said by the Patriarch himself, and the Russian Church is not in Putin's pocket, despite the western view to the contrary) By making Russia the main fighter in Syria, Iran has been reminded that Damascus is not one of its provinces, and that it has other friends, and the public and aggressive Russian intervention is a clear statement of this.

European commentators have forgotten that religion is really important in most of the world. The basis of Russia's intervention in Syria is the struggle between the conservative Iranian Shia preachers and the radical Wahhabi Saudi Arabian preachers. Assad's relatives value their relaxed pragmatic Alawite religion and most Syrian Muslims, whether Sufi or not have an understanding of Islam, with its art and high culture and urban sophistication which is centuries away from the radical extremity which Saudi wealth promotes.

Genocide 1915-2015

It is clear from everything that I read about the Great War that there was a deliberate and organised killing of huge numbers of Christians by the Ottoman authorities from 1915 onwards. But once we are past that things get hazy and the victims of spin.

Most people know of this as the Armenian Genocide. But significant numbers of other Christians, chiefly Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic and related groups, were also massacred brutally, and it didn't finish in 1915. The Syrian Orthodox call it the Sayfo, a Syriac word meaning the sword.

It is worth thinking about the causes of the appalling massacres, deportations, rapes and plunder that went on.

Enver Pasha had been appalled by the Christian Bulgarian massacres of Muslims in the First Balkan war. They were brutal and Enver vowed revenge against Christians. His revulsion and violent reaction is a significant contribution to the massacres.

Russia was putting political pressure on the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to rebel against the government. The Russians generally thought of the Armenians as heretics, being non-Chalcedonian in their creed. But always keen to cause chaos in the Ottoman Empire, the Russians encouraged the Armenian separatists, and the reaction of the regime in the Empire was the gross move to destroy the Armenian presence in the Empire. It was done with the sort of brutality which has been seen in Rwanda, the Balkans and Syria over the last decades, a carefully planned mass murder.

Ironically one of the commemorations on 24 April look place in the Republic of Armenia, well within the Russian Empire in 1915 and far from the killings and deportations, a country whose own human rights practices since independence from the Soviet state have been far from exemplary.

The Ottomans intended to drive the Armenians from Anatolia down the Euphrates to Deir ez Zor, where a few weeks ago Da'esh, or ISIS, destroyed the church commemorating the genocide. Genocide can be cultural.

The Syrian government has been keen to emphasise the 1915 genocide, partly to embarrass the Turkish government, but also to distract people from the catastrophic situation it has created within its own borders. The Turkish leadership has been unwise: it has moved slowly towards a recognition of the facts of the killings, and it would not have been difficult to have said: That was the decaying Ottoman Empire, we are the young Turkish Republic: what happened under the Sultan is not of our doing. But foolishly they have not taken this line.

The greatest sorrow is that in huge areas of the old Ottoman Empire there is chaos, as in Libya and Yemen, as well as genocide in Syria and Iraq. It is so much easier to condemn for evil in the past to work to bring and end to the terrible human suffering today.