Al-Baghdadi’s death won’t end Middle East’s woes

The killing of the founder and leader of the Islamic State (IS) by US commandos operating in Syria should certainly further weaken the most vile and deadly Islamist movement to emerge in the Middle East in the modern era.

The world is certainly a better place with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dead and a measure of justice meted out on behalf of all the women IS raped, all the journalists IS beheaded and the tens of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis it abused. Good for President Donald Trump for ordering it, for the intelligence agents who set it up, for the allies who aided in it and for the Special Forces who executed it.

But this story is far from over, and it could have many unexpected implications. Let’s start at home.

Mr Trump was effusive in his praise for the US intelligence agencies who found and tracked al-Baghdadi to the lair in Syria where he blew himself up to avoid being captured. In his news conference, Mr Trump went on and on about just how good the men and women in our intelligence agencies are.

Well, Mr President, those are the same intelligence agencies who told you that Russia intervened in our last election in an effort to tip the vote to you and against Hillary Clinton (and is still intervening). When our intel agencies exposed that reality, you impugned their integrity and quality.

So thank you for clearing up this confusion. We now know that the same intelligence services who have been heroic in protecting us from those who want to attack our constitutional democracy from abroad are the same heroes who have stepped up to protect our constitutional democracy from within. Unlike you, they took seriously their oath to do both.

As for the future of the Middle East, let’s not forget that IS was the Sunni Muslim jihadi organisation that emerged after President Barack Obama’s administration eliminated the previous holder of the worst-person-inthe-world title, Osama bin Laden. Al-Baghdadi’s death — a very good thing in and of itself — is not the end of our troubles in and from the Middle East.

Mr Trump’s effort to play down the significance of Mr Obama’s killing of bin Laden — while playing up his killing of al-Baghdadi as the key to creating the peace to end all peace — only shows how ignorant he is about the region.

IS emerged in 2014 as the product of three loose factions or movements, as I pointed out in a column back in 2015.

One faction comprised the foreign volunteers. Some were hardened jihadis, but many were losers, misfits, adventure seekers and young men who had never held power, a job or a girl’s hand, and they joined IS to get all three. IS offered a paycheque, power and sexual release to men and women coming from closed societies or cultures where none of that was available.

IS’s second faction — its brains and military backbone — was composed of former Sunni Baathist army officers and local Iraqi Sunnis and tribes, who gave IS passive support. Iraqi Sunnis constitute about one-third of Iraq’s population. They had ruled Iraq for generations, and many Sunnis in the Iraqi military were enraged and humiliated by how the US invasion of Iraq had overturned that order and put the Iraqi Shia majority in charge.

The third IS faction was composed of the true religious ideologues, led by al-Baghdadi. They have their own apocalyptic version of Islam. But it would not have resonated so far and wide were it not for the first two factors listed above.

And that leads us back to Mr Trump and his foreign policy. Mr Trump has never met a dictator he did not like. He is blind to the fact that the next al-Baghdadi is being incubated today in some prison in Egypt, where President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt, whom Mr Trump once actually called “my favourite dictator’,’ is not only rounding up violent jihadis but liberal nonviolent journalists, activists and politicians. Their only crime is that they want to have a say in their country’s future and help to create an environment where they can realise their full potential — so they will not have to look for dignity, power, a job or a girl’s hand from extremist groups like IS.

When Mr Trump praises al-Baghdadi as his favourite victim and Mr Sissi as his favourite dictator, all he is doing is walking in place. We’re actually getting nowhere.

And that brings me back to Syria. Syrian Sunnis supported IS for the same reason Iraqi Sunnis did. Iran, the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia, the Shia-Alawite Syrian regime of Bashar Assad and Russia have all collaborated to create a pro-Iranian Shia minority government in Damascus, Syria. Of course they gave Mr Trump a free pass to kill al-Baghdadi! His death just makes it that much easier for them to rule Syria without sharing power with the Sunnis. As long as that’s the case, there will be no stability there.

Finally, Mr Trump kept going on and on in his news conference about how he, in his infinite wisdom, was keeping US troops in Syria to protect the oil fields there so maybe US oil companies could exploit them. He even boasted that while he was against the Iraq War, we should have taken over all of Iraq’s oil fields to pay for it.

This is disgusting talk, and again, a prescription for trouble in the future. If America has any role in the Middle East today, it is not to protect the oil wells but to protect and enhance what I call the “islands of decency”.

These are places like Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan, Jordan, the UAE, Oman, Lebanon and the frail democracies in Tunisia and Baghdad. None of these are developed democracies; Oman, Jordan and the UAE are monarchies. But perfect is not on the menu in the Middle East right now. And these countries do promote more moderate versions of Islam and religious tolerance, they do empower their women, and they do encourage education.

These are the necessary but not sufficient antidotes to IS. They are worth preserving and enhancing in hopes that they can develop one day into something better for all their peoples. Just look at the democracy protests in Lebanon. You can see where the young people want to go.

Only Mr Trump would boast of defeating IS and thinking that all that needs to be done now is to protect the Middle East’s oil wells and America’s favourite dictators — and not its wells of decency.

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If America has any role in the Middle East today, it is not to protect the oil wells.