ARABS DRAFT PLAN OF ATTACK WITH US
Donald Trump has urged the Saudi-led alliance of 41 Muslim-majority states to improve cooperation on their ability to defeat the threat of extremism. They can do so by ending conflicts and developing communities, Foreign Correspondent Taimur Khan writes
Experts at Riyadh forum discuss ways to build military to counter extremist threats,
RIYADH // In his two- day visit to Saudi Arabia, US president Donald Trump and his top aides stressed that GCC states must do more to build their capabilities to confront Iran and defeat extremist groups that have thrived from the region’s turmoil.
This is why the Saudi-led coalition of 41 Muslim-majority states has taken on greater urgency.
The coalition “stands for something essential and it fulfils a function that we could never fulfil”, said former US defence secretary Ash Carter at a conference in Riyadh this week.
“It has a stature and capability, particularly in the economic, political and ideological spheres that outsiders couldn’t possibly have.”
How exactly the coalition will create a framework to build up counter- terrorism and other security capabilities and align members’ common long-term goals in its fight against terror remains to be seen.
But the meeting – hosted by the alliance and the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies during Mr Trump’s visit – sought to bring the complex challenges into greater focus.
Former security officials, analysts and academics agreed that greater intelligence sharing between the coalition members is imperative to mitigating the effects of the return to their home countries of the estimated 30,000 foreign fighters who joined ISIL in Iraq and Syria.
Saudi Arabia is a key intelligence partner for western countries, and has more than a decade of experience in building expertise to deradicalise extremists and identify and destroy their networks.
How to build such capabilities would be crucial to share with coalition members.
“The issue of returning foreign fighters is very important,” said prince Abdullah bin Khaled, a research fellow at the international centre for the study of radicalisation and political violence at King’s College London.
Not all those who return are the same. Some might be disillusioned and could help to counter ISIL narratives, he said. “Some might be disengaged from violence but not deradicalised. They will be passive when they come back to their countries but they will engage in recruitment.”
Building and sharing intelligence capacity – even if coupled with coordinated military efforts – will not be sufficient in the ongoing turmoil plaguing the Middle East, said conference delegates.
“Many people think that there must be some intelligence silver bullet out there that can solve these problems and these groups,” said Richard Barrett, former director of global counter-terrorism operations at MI6.
“Yes, it can shine a very bright light but it’s also on a very small part of the picture.”
The greatest challenge will be the political dimensions of fighting extremism, in particular how to bring about political solutions that will end the region’s wars, which is the top driver of recruitment for groups such as ISIL, experts say.
It was the Sunni frustration with Baghdad and a civil war raging in Syria – where Sunni civilians bore the brunt of the violence – that helped ISIL to spread rapidly across Iraq in 2014.
For the Saudi-led coalition, it is a reminder that ISIL will try again to regenerate this way, and underscores the need for coalition members to coordinate on the complicated politics of post- conflict recovery and reconstruction.
One delegate from Algeria cited an example from his region. Even though the UAE, Tunisia and Algeria share an interest in fighting ISIL, divisions over the conflict in Libya has stopped them from sharing intelligence.
Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya “provide a supply of rallying cries and causes to recruit” and provided havens for militants fleeing one country for another, said Prince Abdullah.
The longer the conflicts drag on, the more capable and resilient the extremist groups would become, said Will McCants, who studies extremist movements and is director of the project on US relations with the Islamic world at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
ISIL, Al Qaeda and other militant groups now had “tremendous experience fighting wars and also in governing because there are so many unstable places in the Middle East and North Africa where they can do this over and over again”, he said.
“The challenge for the coalition that Saudi Arabia is leading is that these organisations can frustrate attempts to stabilise civil wars because they are not locals, and so are not invested the way local insurgents might be in ending the conflict,” said Mr McCants.
The relationships between fighters who disperse and the financial networks that funded them continue long after a conflict ends, he said.
“Counter-terrorism data has to be heavily localised,” said Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Pembroke College. “What radicalises someone in X place is very different from what radicalises someone in Y.”
In Yemen, Al Qaeda’s local affiliate has drawn support from Yemenis who do not necessarily agree with their ideology but rely on it for the services it provides in the absence of a strong state. The problem with Yemen is not radicalisation, “it’s passive toleration”, said Dr Kendall. “We have to address community development and particularly education. It has to be much more bottom-up and much less top-down if we’re going to get anywhere.”
The meeting sought to bring the complex challenges into greater focus