Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: “The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer.”

The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger’s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington’s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region. In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.

Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America’s Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America’s “forever wars.”

President Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future — possibly forever — “to protect the people and interests of the United States.” The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.   

“Reducing Terrorism” Leads to a 50,000% Increase in… Yes!… Terrorism

Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as “Base Americaine,” that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America’s military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone.

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Washington has been focused on Niger and its neighbors since the opening days of the Global War on Terror, pouring military aid into the nations of West Africa through dozens of “security cooperation” efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program designed to “counter and prevent violent extremism” in the region. Training and assistance to local militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America more than $1 billion.

Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM’s General Langley went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America’s longtime West African partners. “During the past three years, national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger,” he said. “These juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to serve.”

Langley did not mention, however, that at least 15 officers who benefited from American security cooperation have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the Global War on Terror. They include the very nations he named: Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); and Niger (2023). In fact, at least five leaders of a July coup in Niger received U.S. assistance, according to an American official. When they overthrew that country’s democratically elected president, they, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors.

Langley went on to lament that, while coup leaders invariably promise to defeat terrorist threats, they fail to do so and then “turn to partners who lack restrictions in dealing with coup governments… particularly Russia.” But he also failed to lay out America’s direct responsibility for the security freefall in the Sahel, despite more than a decade of expensive efforts to remedy the situation.

“We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, even as Libya began to slip into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed forces over the government’s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas, and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and mentorship by Marines in Virginia.

Having overthrown Mali’s democratic government, Sanogo proved hapless in battling local militants who had also benefitted from the arms flowing out of Libya. With Mali in chaos, those Tuareg fighters declared their own independent state, only to be pushed aside by heavily armed Islamist militants who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint French, American, and African mission prevented Mali’s complete collapse but pushed the Islamists to the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger, spreading terror and chaos to those countries.

Since then, the nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles armed with Kalashnikov rifles regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax) and terrorize and kill civilians. Relentless attacks by such armed groups have not only destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, prompting coups and political instability, but have spread south to countries along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence has, for example, spiked in Togo (633%) and Benin (718%), according to Pentagon statistics.

American officials have often turned a blind eye to the carnage. Asked about the devolving situation in Niger, for instance, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel recently insisted that security partnerships in West Africa “are mutually beneficial and are intended to achieve what we believe to be shared goals of detecting, deterring, and reducing terrorist violence.”  His pronouncement is either an outright lie or a total fantasy.

After 20 years, it’s clear that America’s Sahelian partnerships aren’t “reducing terrorist violence” at all. Even the Pentagon tacitly admits this. Despite U.S. troop strength in Niger growing by more than 900% in the last decade and American commandos training local counterparts, while fighting and even dying there; despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Burkina Faso in the form of training as well as equipment like armored personnel carriers, body armor, communications gear, machine guns, night-vision equipment, and rifles; and despite U.S. security assistance pouring into Mali and its military officers receiving training from the United States, terrorist violence in the Sahel has in no way been reduced. In 2002 and 2003, according to State Department statistics, terrorists caused 23 casualties in all of Africa. Last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, attacks by Islamist militants in the Sahel alone resulted in 11,643 deaths – an increase of more than 50,000%.

Pack Up Your War

In January 2021, President Biden entered the White House promising to end his country’s forever wars.  He quickly claimed to have kept his pledge. “I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,” Biden announced months later. “We’ve turned the page.” 

Late last year, however, in one of his periodic “war powers” missives to Congress, detailing publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations around the world, Biden said just the opposite. In fact, he left open the possibility that America’s forever wars might, indeed, go on forever. “It is not possible,” he wrote, “to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.”

Niger’s U.S.-trained junta has made it clear that it wants America’s forever war there to end. That would assumedly mean the closing of Air Base 201 and the withdrawal of about 1,000 American military personnel and contractors. So far, however, Washington shows no signs of acceding to their wishes. “We are aware of the March 16th statement… announcing an end to the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh. “We are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification… I don’t have a timeframe of any withdrawal of forces.”

“The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan last year. Now that the junta has told AFRICOM to leave, the command has little to say. Email return receipts show that TomDispatch’s questions about developments in Niger sent to AFRICOM’s press office were read by a raft of personnel including Cahalan, Zack Frank, Joshua Frey, Yvonne Levardi, Rebekah Clark Mattes, Christopher Meade, Takisha Miller, Alvin Phillips, Robert Dixon, Lennea Montandon, and Courtney Dock, AFRICOM’s deputy director of public affairs, but none of them answered any of the questions posed. Cahalan instead referred TomDispatch to the State Department. The State Department, in turn, directed TomDispatch to the transcript of a press conference dealing primarily with U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Philippines.

“USAFRICOM needs to stay in West Africa… to limit the spread of terrorism across the region and beyond,” General Langley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.  But Niger’s junta insists that AFRICOM needs to go and U.S. failures to “limit the spread of terrorism” in Niger and beyond are a key reason why.  “This security cooperation did not live up to the expectations of Nigeriens — all the massacres committed by the jihadists were carried out while the Americans were here,” said a Nigerien security analyst who has worked with U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

America’s forever wars, including the battle for the Sahel, have ground on through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden with failure the defining storyline and catastrophic results the norm. From the Islamic State routing the U.S.-trained Iraqi army in 2014 to the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan in 2021, from the forever stalemate in Somalia to the 2011 destabilization of Libya that plunged the Sahel into chaos and now threatens the littoral states along the Gulf of Guinea, the Global War on Terror has been responsible for the deaths, wounding, or displacement of tens of millions of people.

Carnage, stalemate, and failure seem to have had remarkably little effect on Washington’s desire to continue funding and fighting such wars, but facts on the ground like the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan have sometimes forced Washington’s hand. Niger’s junta is pursuing another such path, attempting to end an American forever war in one small corner of the world — doing what President Biden pledged but failed to do. Still, the question remains: Will the Biden administration reverse a course that the U.S. has been on since the early 2000s?  Will it agree to set a date for withdrawal? Will Washington finally pack up its disastrous war and go home?

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Tomdispatch.com

The Party of God Brigades were founded by Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis. The organization is not related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon, though the two have a collegial relationship. Al-Muhandis was assassinated by President Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 along with the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani. Ever since, the Brigades have sought to force out of Iraq the remaining 2500 US troops there and to force out of Syria the remaining 900 US troops stationed in that country. US troops were put into those two countries by the Obama administration during the fight against the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) terrorist organization, 2014-2018. In those years, the US was often de facto allied with Shiite militias such as the PGB and with their sponsor, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. In 2018, Trump destroyed the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 and placed a “maximum pressure” economic siege on the Iranian economy. That and his assassination of Soleimani and al-Muhandis set Iran and its allies, the Shiite militias of the Middle East, on an increasingly belligerent footing.

The Party of God Brigades and other Iraqi Shiite militias have launched around 150 attacks on bases housing US troops since the Gaza conflict broke out on October 7.

Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] printed the communique it received from the God’s Party Brigades:

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

“Leave is given to those who fight because they were wronged — surely God is able to help them .” [Qur’an 22:39].

Continuing our path of resisting the American occupation forces in Iraq and the region, and in response to the massacres of the Zionist entity against our people in Gaza, at dawn today, Sunday 1/28/2024, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq attacked four enemy bases with unmanned aerial vehicles — three of them in Syria and they are Al-Shaddadi, al-Rukban and al-Tanf bases, and the fourth inside our occupied Palestinian lands, and it is the US Marines’ Zafulun Facility. The Islamic Resistance affirms that it will continue to destroy enemy compounds.

“Victory is only from God. God is Almighty, All-Wise.” [Qur’an 8:10].

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq
Sunday 16 Rajab 1445

God knows what Zafulun is, but apparently it is their term for the place that Tower 22 stands. It is interesting that the group views the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as part of occupied Palestine. Palestine and the Transjordan were conquered by the British army during World War I and Britain subsequently ruled the West Bank and the rest of Palestine as a League of Nations Mandate, while giving charge of the Transjordan to the family of the Sharif Hussain, the Naqib or leading noble of Mecca, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad and his clan, the Banu Hashem. Hussain and his sons had supported the British against the Ottomans during WW I because the British lied to them and promised them an independent Arab state after the war. In any case, this Shiite militia appears to view the Hashemite Dynasty (King Abdullah II is a descendant of Sharif Hussain) as illegitimate.

In return, the highly capable and effective Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, or GID, is even as we speak making plans to help track down and kill the PGB cadres behind this attack on Jordanian soil. Jordan will also have some harsh words for Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani, who came to power with the support of the Shiite militias and is thought to be close to them.

Aljazeera English Video: “Three US service members killed in drone attack on US post in Jordan near Syria”

The Ma`refa site says that al-Muhandis was born in 1954 or 1955 in Basra, originally named Jamal Jaafar Muhammad Ali Al Ibrahim. He married an Iranian woman. In 1973 he was in Baghdad, where he entered the Technological University in the Engineering School, being graduated with an engineering degree in 1977. While working as an engineer he did further degrees in political science. He also took off some time to study at a Shiite seminary in Basra that was part of the establishment of Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, the clerical leader of Iraq’s Shiites in the 1960s.

Right from the time he was in high school in the early 1970s, he joined the Da`wa Party. Some say that Da`wa, or “the Call,” was founded in 1958 to compete with the Communists and Baathists, who were appealing to Shiite youths. Baathism is a mixture of socialism and Arab nationalism with a strong secularist cast, and it instituted an authoritarian Stalinist-style one-party state in Iraq from 1968. The Da`wa party, in contrast, theorized a Shiite state as a believers’ paradise in opposition to the Communists’ workers paradise. Its leaders made room for consultative government.

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran began radicalizing Iraqi Shiites. Saddam Hussein came to power in an internal Baath Party putsch in 1979. In 1980 he outlawed the Da`wa Party, executed its clerical leader Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and made belonging to it a capital crime. For the past twenty years the post-Baath government has been finding mass graves in the Shiite south of Iraq, where the Baath secret police shot down suspected Da`wa members.

Al-Muhandis, his nom de guerre, which means “the engineer,” was forced to flee to Kuwait. There, he was part of a Da`wa cell that turned radical and committed acts of terrorism against the US and French embassies, given the hostility of those countries to the Islamic Republic. He then appears to have gone to Iran, where he left the Da`wa Party for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an even more radical organization founded by Iraqi expatriates in Tehran in 1982 at the suggestion of Khomeini. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the son of Muhsin al-Hakim, became the head of it in 1984. Thousands of Iraqi Shiites defected to Iran during the 1980s, and SCIRI organized them. Those who remained loyal to the Da`wa Party, who mostly rejected Khomeini’s vision of a clerically ruled Muslim state, tended to make their way to London instead. The Supreme Council developed a paramilitary branch, the Badr Corps, which was trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and which carried out operations against Baath installations in Iraq. Al-Muhandis Joined the Badr Corps and rose to become one of its commanders.

The independent Shiite site al-Khanadeq in Lebanon says that the Party of God Brigades was founded by al-Muhandis in 2003 when the US, as I wrote about, invaded Iraq, with the aim of forcing the occupiers back out. He appears to have broken with the Badr Corps at that point and formed his own militia, primarily out of armed groups based in the Shiite holy city of Karbala (the Ali Akbar Brigades, the Karbala Brigades and the Abu al-Fadl Abbas Brigades). By 2007, they had begun jointly calling themselves the Party of God Brigades. They mounted some attacks on US bases. I also wrote about the role of the Shiite militias in that era

The organization became prominent in 2014 when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on Iraqi young men to rise up to defend the country from ISIL, which had taken Mosul, at a time when the Iraqi Army built by the Bush administration had collapsed. The Party of God Brigades and other Shiite militias armed themselves and went to fight, with training and support from the iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Gen. Soleimani, against ISIL in Amerli and later in Tikrit and Fallujah. They helped ensure that ISIL was defeated. The militias developed political parties which got a fair-sized bloc of seats in parliament. In 2018 parliament recognized the Shiite militias or “Popular Mobilization Forces” as a formal part of the Iraqi military — a sort of national guard.

After 2018, when ISIL was rolled up, the US kept several thousand troops in Iraq for mop-up operations and to continue to train the new Iraqi army.

Israel is accused of committing covert ops against Iraqi Shiite militias inside Iraq, blowing up a weapons depot in 2019.

In Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad initially faced a rebellion by civil society groups in 2011, but attacked the demonstrators militarily and turned the struggle into a civil war. It took on sectarian tones, since most rebels were Sunnis, while the elite of the government were Alawi Shiites. Lebanon’s Hezbollah came in on the side of Damascus, as did the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Party of God Brigades came up from Iraq along with some other Shiite militias. With help from the Russian air force, the Shiite militias defeated the Sunni rebels and drove their remnant into the far north Idlib province.

In the east of Syria, the US enlisted the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia as ground troops to defeat ISIL in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces, with US air support. The US put in a small number of its own troops, embedded with the YPG. After ISIL was defeated, the US maintained a small military presence in Syria’s southeast. Again, they aimed to mop up ISIL and prevent it from reconstituting itself, and to lend continued support to the YPG in these largely Arab provinces. It is alleged that they also attempt to block Iranian activities, including shipments of weapons to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, on behalf of Israel. Further, they may be helping the Kurds siphon off oil from fields in the southeast, denying the petroleum wealth to Damascus. If this latter charge is true, it is a war crime.

On January 3, 2020, Trump blew away al-Muhandis and Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani had just come on a civilian airliner with a diplomatic passport to negotiate better relations with Saudi Arabia via the good offices of then Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi.

The Party of God Brigades went to war with the US troops in the country, subjecting the Iraqi bases that housed them to rocket and drone strikes. The Iraqi parliament demanded that Abdul Mahdi find a way to kick US troops out of Iraq (he never did).

Since October 7, the Party of God Brigades’ secretary-general, Ahmad al-Hamidawi, has branded the US an equal partner in the Israeli war on Gaza and it and other Shiite militias have launched dozens of attacks on US bases. None had resulted in a fatality until Sunday.

In a historical irony, one of the reasons some Neocons around George W Bush wanted to invade Iraq was to stop it from being a danger to Israel. Over two decades later, the PGB hit a school in Eilat with a drone, and the US, having destroyed the secular Baath Party, is at war with political Shiism in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Maybe the problem is US policy in the region, and maybe no number of wars and conquests are going to reshape the Middle East in ways really favorable to that policy?

The other bombing hit a mosque in Hangu in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province. The mosque was known to be frequented by members of the local police. The suicide bombers had tried to hit the police station first and been repulsed, so they turned to a soft target. There have been 300 attacks in this province this year.

The insurgent movement in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP), denied involvement. The TTP is closely allied with the Taliban who now again rule Afghanistan, and there are frictions between the Taliban and the current Pakistani government.

That the attack in Mastung targeted worshipers commemorating the birthday of the Prophet suggests that the perpetrators were members of ISIL, the so-called “Islamic State” group. When ISIL was ruling northern Iraq and eastern Syria, they banned celebrating Muhammad’s birthday as a sinful “innovation.” Their views on the matter are in accord with the fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Islam in Saudi Arabia, where jurists such as Abdel Aziz Bin Baz (d. 1999) also forbade honoring the Prophet’s birthday. Small ISIL cells have carried out terrorist attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and have occasionally hit targets in Pakistan itself. In Baluchistan, the so-called Islamic State- Pakistan Province is active, whereas in Khyber Pushtunkhwa the rival Islamic State – Khurasan carries out attacks. The latter was likely the perpetrator at Hangu.

Pakistan’s own security has declined because of infighting among the country’s political elite since Prime Minister Imran Khan was unseated in a vote of no confidence on April 10, 2022, in which 20 former supporters in the parliament defected. Khan has castigated the parliamentary maneuver as an illegitimate plot, and is now in jail on corruption charges that his followers say are trumped up.

I’d say 98% of the Muslims in the world approve of commemorating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, which is usually given as the twelfth day of the third month of the Islamic calendar, Rabi’ al-Awwal in 570 CE, nearly six centuries after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

I wrote a book about the Prophet Muhammad, in which I discuss the likely circumstances of his birth, but more importantly his teachings on peace and reconciliation.

Purchase

It is a great shame that some do things in his name at which he clearly would horrified.

Admittedly, historians do not think large public celebrations of this day began until about the 1100s CE, some 500 years after the Prophet. Since that time, poetry and hymns have been composed for the occasion, and people have developed customs like giving children toy horses or staging parades in the streets and putting up illuminated chandeliers and lanterns over city streets. That is why some scholars consider it an innovation. But most of those see it as a good innovation. The fundamentalist Wahhabi and Salafi tendencies, in contrast, tend to see all later innovations not present at the beginnings of Islam as illegitimate.

In Pakistan, most people celebrate the entire Muslim month of Rabi` al-Awwal as the birth month of the Prophet. Marching bands, rides on caparisoned camels, and other activities of public “fun” are popular.

It is widely celebrated among American Muslims.

The major Sunni religious authority, the al-Azhar seminary in Cairo, Egypt, has repeatedly upheld the legitimacy of such celebrations. The considered legal ruling or fatwa says, “It is not permissible according to Islamic law to challenge the legitimacy of celebrating the anniversary of the Prophet’s birthday due to the forbidden things that may occur during it. Rather, we denounce the evils that may surround it, and we warn those who commit it – with wisdom and leniency – that these evils contradict the basic purpose for which these honorable occasions were held.”

Sufis, Muslim mystics, have sometimes engaged in ecstatic rituals on this anniversary of which the more sober clerics disapprove. You could compare this difference to one between, say, mainstream Presbyterian clerics and Pentecostalists.

Still, there is a broad consensus in both Sunni and Shiite Islam that commemorating the birth of the Prophet is a good thing, a moment of joy and celebration.

The ISIL terrorist group, which has wrought a vast swathe of destruction through Muslim societies and has also committed terrorism in Europe and the US, has a policy of acting harshly, “like wild beasts” (tawahhush). By attempting to outlaw perfectly innocent and uplifting religious practices like the birth of the Prophet, they set themselves up as superior to other Muslims and can use such prohibitions as a means of asserting power over others. Hence the bombing of the procession outside a mosque in Mastung. The good news is that the Muslims themselves have waged a concerted and brave campaign to root out this wicked heresy that has created so many orphans.

(The Conversation) – The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, or “MBS,” is bringing a new vision of a “moderate, balanced” Saudi Islam by minimizing the role of Saudi religious institutions once seen as critical to the monarchy.

For decades, Saudi kings provided support to religious scholars and institutions that advocated an austere form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. The kingdom enforced strict codes of morality, placing restrictions on the rights of women and religious minorities, among others.

Under MBS, women have been allowed to drive; co-educational classrooms, movie theaters and all-night concerts in the desert – in which men and women dance together – are a new normal.

Scholars Yasmine Farouk and Nathan J. Brown call the diminishing role of Wahhabi religious scholars within Saudi domestic and international policy nothing short of a “revolution” in Saudi affairs.

MBS acknowledges that these reforms risk infuriating certain constituents or could even provoke retaliation. As a scholar who studies interpretations of Islamic law to justify or contest militancy, I’ve followed these reforms closely.

In the past, Saudis who challenged the authority of Wahhabis have provoked unrest. When King Fahd, who ruled between 1982-2005, rejected the advice of his Wahhabi scholars and allowed the U.S. military to station weapons and female service members on Saudi soil, several of them supported a violent insurrection against him.

MBS seems unconcerned with such challenges. In an interview broadcast widely throughout the kingdom, MBS chastised Wahhabi scholars, accusing some of falsifying Islamic doctrines. He then detained a major Wahhabi scholar from whom he once sought counsel, charging him with crimes against the monarchy. MBS defended these actions, claiming, “We are returning to what we were before. A country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions, traditions and people around the globe.”

Negotiating Wahhabism

This proclaimed return of “moderate Islam” echoes the reforms of MBS’s grandfather, King Abdulaziz, founder of the modern Saudi kingdom. This vision rejects policies toward Wahhabi Islam favored by his uncles, King Faisal and King Khalid.

Between 1925 and 1932, Abdulaziz suppressed Wahhabi scholars and militants who had demanded that he uphold their version of “pure Islam” and not open the kingdom to trade and development. He did the opposite and asserted the supremacy of the monarchy.

The booming Saudi oil economy developed by Abdulaziz required his son, King Faisal, who ruled from 1964 to 1975, to reconsider the monarchy’s relationship with Wahhabism. Unlike Abdulaziz, Faisal believed Wahhabis would help him save the kingdom.

Saudis who felt left behind in the emerging Saudi oil economy had found an inspirational symbol of liberation in Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who helped overthrow the Egyptian monarchy in 1952 and implemented plans to redistribute Egyptian wealth.

Faisal encouraged Wahhabi scholars to work with politically driven Islamists to reject the revolutionary politics of Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and craft a new vision of Islam for Saudi youth.

Faisal permitted Wahhabi scholars to reform Saudi educational institutions with their conservative Islamic curriculum. Abroad, Faisal’s scholars presented Wahhabism as an authentic Islamic alternative to the Cold War ideologies of the U.S. and USSR. Wealthy Saudis, these Wahhabi scholars argued, had a religious duty to promote Wahhabism across the globe.

Resisting Wahhabism

Faisal’s reforms met with success. King Khalid, who followed Faisal, continued to favor Wahhabi scholars, particularly while responding to two major challenges in 1979.

A group of Saudi students, who believed Faisal’s and Khalid’s reforms to be illegitimate, seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s most sacred site, for two weeks in 1979. An attack on the Grand Mosque was viewed as an attack on the monarchy itself, which claims the mantle of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.”

The seizure came to a violent end with combined action by French and Saudi military forces. Afterward, Khalid agreed to elevate religious officials who affirmed the Islamic credentials of the monarchy.

Also in 1979, other Saudi youth traveled to join the resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. One such Saudi who answered the call that year was Osama bin Laden, who would establish al-Qaida in 1988.

Bin Laden’s and al-Qaida’s grievances against the monarchy emerged following King Fahd’s acceptance of an increased deployment of U.S. soldiers to Saudi soil following Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Bin Ladin proclaimed the presence of American infidels in Saudi Arabia to be a defilement of Islamic holy lands, an “affront” to Islamic sensibilities, and demanded the destruction of the monarchy. Al-Qaida launched anti-Saudi insurgent campaigns lasting through 2010.

Not all conservative Islamist leaders called for violence. As historian Madawi Al-Rasheed notes, many Saudi scholars framed themselves as reformers who sought to correct Fahd’s departures from “authentic” Islam and restore Faisal’s vision.

When MBS speaks of a “moderate Islam” he is not just condemning the violence of al-Qaida. He’s abandoning the monarchy’s accommodations of the Wahhabi establishment. He blames some Wahhabi scholars for the violence that the monarchy faced in 1979 and again in the the 1990s and 2000s.

He has worked quickly to erase those accommodations and, like his grandfather, affirm the supremacy of the monarchy.

A ‘moderate Wahhabism’ for Saudi society?

Many of these revolutionary changes occurred amid the 2016 unveiling of “Saudi Vision 2030,” a plan for complete Saudi political, economic, educational and cultural transformation. MBS believes that this will meet the demands of Saudis under the age of 30 – who number more than 60% of the kingdom’s population.

The religious curriculum shaped by King Faisal is gone, replaced with a “Saudi first” education, which removes Ibn abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, from textbooks and emphasizes Saudi patriotism over a Wahhabi Islamic religious identity. Saudi Arabia has announced it will no longer fund mosques and Wahhabi educational institutions in other countries.

Saudi religious police, once tasked with upholding public morality, saw their powers curtailed. They no longer have powers of investigation or arrest. They cannot punish behaviors deemed morally inappropriate.

Critics remain unimpressed, noting that demoting religious officials does not diminish the violence of the Saudi state. Religious police continue their online surveillance of social media. In 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, was killed following his calls for a continued voice for Islamist reformers in Saudi Arabia. Al-Rasheed argues that the images of a new Saudi society conceal suppression of Saudi reformers. Some observers note that a growing Saudi “surveillance state,” with capacities to peek into the private lives of Saudis, underwrites these reforms.

As Peter Mandaville, a scholar of international affairs, observes, the “moderate Islam” offered by MBS is complicated. On the one hand, it characterizes a new tolerant Saudi Arabian Islam. Yet, inside the kingdom, Mandaville argues that the “moderate Islam” of MBS demands that Saudi youth – as good Muslims – will submit to the authority of the monarchy over the kingdom’s affairs.

Some observers believe this might not be enough. Mohammad Fadel, a professor of Islamic legal history, argues that the current configuration of the Saudi monarchy is incompatible with “the kind of independent thought the crown prince is calling for in matters of religion.” Saudi society will flourish, he adds, “when Prince Mohammed recognizes the right of Muslims to rule themselves politically.”

With these reforms to Wahhabism, MBS hopes to secure the loyalty of a generation of young Saudis. As Saudi history would indicate, however, such a bargain requires constant renegotiation and renewal.

Nathan French, Associate Professor of Religion, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – July 3, 2023, marked the tenth anniversary of the military coup that removed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi from power, paving the way for the establishment of an autocratic regime led by the retired military officer Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. The overthrow of Morsi sent the Muslim Brotherhood, the sociopolitical organization that supported him, into what many consider its most severe crisis since it was founded in 1928 by the Egyptian teacher and imam Hassan al-Banna. Morsi had been elected president in June 2012 in the freest Egyptian elections up to date. The first experience of political power for the Brotherhood would last only a bit longer than a year, with the July 2013 coup forcing the members of the Brotherhood into hiding, exile, or, as in Morsi’s case, imprisonment. Morsi died in prison in June 2019 due to maltreatment.

In their collective work “The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22,” Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat present a historical overview of the Brotherhood before examining its trajectory during the last decade. Ayyash is a fellow at Century International, the US think tank that published the book. Meanwhile, ElAfifi is a PhD candidate at Syracuse University and Ezzat is an independent writer and researcher.

“Broken Bonds” greatly relies upon multiple interviews with former and current members of the Brotherhood.  Overall, the authors see the Brotherhood as finding itself at the lowest point of its almost centennial history, and yet, as a resilient organization that will most likely bounce back thanks to the adaptability it has always shown in the face of crisis.

The Brotherhood’s relationship with the Egyptian state has historically been a complex one. Repressed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s, it managed to establish a solid presence in universities and syndicates in the 1970s when President Anwar Sadat initiated a limited political opening. Under Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood enjoyed a tacit non-aggression pact during the 1980s while it spread its conservative values among Egyptian society.

This tacit understanding collapsed in the early 1990s when Mubarak’s regime restricted the Brotherhood’s influence among university students and syndicated workers. In the context of Egypt’s neoliberal turn, the Brotherhood came to play a larger role in providing services and basic commodities to the most disfavored sectors of society. The Brotherhood expanded its membership in the 2000s, but its political role was limited to participating in protests allowed by the Mubarak regime, such as demonstrations against Israeli violence in Palestine or the US invasion of Iraq.

For an organization that had traditionally been repressed or, at best, tolerated, by the Egyptian state, its assumption of state power in June 2012 — although with the shadow of the army always looming over — was a profound change. The authors describe the Brotherhood’s decision to run for the Egyptian presidency as driven by two competing objectives. On the one hand, it sought to avoid prosecution at the hands of a new regime by controlling state power itself while showing an image of moderation. On the other hand, the Brotherhood wanted to prevent more radical Islamist groups and figures, such as Salafi preacher and presidential candidate Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, from gaining support among Brotherhood sympathizers. This, however, necessitated stressing the Brotherhood’s conservatism.

The Brotherhood’s simultaneous pursuit of these incompatible goals “led to contradictory policies and mixed messages to the public.”[1] Morsi’s foreign policy was also confusing, with the president’s frequent changes of course transforming “the Brotherhood’s tactics for seeking allies into a series of trials and errors.”[2] If the short period in power had been an agitated time for the Brotherhood, the July 2013 coup sent the organization into disarray, with the leaders that had avoided capture scattered in Egypt and exile, mainly in Qatar, Sudan, Turkey, and Malaysia.

Only three members of the Brotherhood’s Guiding Bureau remained in Egypt without having been imprisoned or gone into hiding — a small fraction considering the Guiding Bureau had twenty members at that point. These three members, who had all joined the Bureau after 2011 and were thus newcomers to the higher echelons of the Brotherhood, decided to create the High Administrative Committee (HAC) in 2014 to lead the Brotherhood from within Egypt. Mohamed Kamal emerged as the main figure of the HAC, which sought to include younger members of the Brotherhood in the new leadership structure.

Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat, The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22. Click here

The HAC also adopted an increasingly confrontational stance toward the Egyptian government, accelerated after a slim majority of the HAC approved plans to carry out limited violent attacks against the new Egyptian regime. The interviews with rank-and-file Brotherhood members conducted by the authors allow us to better understand the changes taking place after the Brotherhood lost power. An interviewee rhetorically asks: “What were we supposed to do, just let people, especially women, get beaten or arrested off the streets?”.[3]

The HAC’s escalation resulted in new crackdowns against the Brotherhood. Moreover, Kamal and his partners would soon find out that “changing a movement as vast as the Brotherhood is not an easy task.”[4] The historical leadership of the Brotherhood in Egyptian prisons and exile saw with concern their decreasing power over the Brotherhood’s actions, which was being directed by leaders with limited experience that had attracted numerous youth revolutionaries.

Mahmoud Ezzat, the Brotherhood’s acting general guide after the imprisonment of the general guide Mohammed Badie in August 2013, had gone into hiding and little was known about him. In May 2015, however, Ezzat issued a statement ordering the dissolution of the HAC and the creation of a new HAC that would be subordinated to the Brotherhood’s leadership in exile. The HAC contested Ezzat’s decision, but the acting general guide and the historical leadership in exile commanded most of the Brotherhood’s financial resources. They proceeded to cut funding to those regional offices in Egypt that supported the HAC and progressively imposed themselves. Kamal, who had co-founded the first HAC and become its leader, was killed by the Egyptian security forces in October 2016.

The Kamal-Ezzat split was followed by another period of internal tensions after the arrest of Ezzat in August 2020. This new conflict would show that “the historical leadership was far from united”, pitting two of its main figures against each other.[5] Mahmoud Hussein, a member of the Guidance Bureau who happened to be out of Egypt at the time of the July 2013 coup, had gained a dominating position over the communications between the Brotherhood in Egypt and the leadership in exile. The new acting general guide after Ezzat’s detention, Ibrahim Munir, accused Hussein of blocking messages sent from prison by the general guide Mohammed Badie to the leadership in exile.

Munir removed Hussein from his positions of responsibility in 2020, but the internal victory of the acting general guide was not consolidated until 2022. As the authors note, in contrast to the clash between Kemal and Ezzat, “the Hussein-versus-Munir split was not based on conflicting ideas and worldviews. Rather, it appeared to be about the power of controlling the organization.”[6]

Despite the death of Ibrahim Munir in November 2022, the Brotherhood seemed to have returned to relative stability quickly thereafter. The internal conflicts had left profound scars on the organization, though. The authors document the case of numerous members of the Brotherhood that decided to abandon the group. Some of them mentioned that the Brotherhood was no longer loyal to the ideals of its founder Hassan al-Banna, while others expressed their disenchantment over the Kamal-Ezzat split.

It is not only the Brotherhood that is undergoing a long crisis but Egypt itself. Al-Sisi’s period in power has been dominated by sham elections and continuous repression on the political front, and vanity projects and unmanageable amounts of debt on the economic front. Al-Sisi has continuously presented the Brotherhood as “an omnipresent nemesis to justify the state’s continued repression of Egyptian society,” writes Abdullah Al-Arian, an associate professor at Georgetown University.[7] Nevertheless, the Brotherhood will continue to be popular in Egypt, argue the authors of Broken Bonds, because the reasons behind the organization’s popularity “are intrinsic in the state’s failures in dealing with society’s problems.”[8]

If we are to highlight a shortcoming of the book, this would probably be its limited attention to how the international dynamics of Middle Eastern politics affected the Brotherhood’s fate. Whereas Qatar and Turkey accommodated members of the Brotherhood after the 2013 coup, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates backed al-Sisi’s anti-democratic repression of the Islamist group. As Matteo Colombo from the Clingendael Institute details, a key factor in the Brotherhood’s current crisis is the “increasingly repressive regional political environment supported by the power of the Saudi and Emirate states.”[9]

Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat’s Broken Bonds is an impressive piece of research and analysis. There are two main reasons for this. First, the authors succeed in making intelligible the labyrinthic internal politics of the Brotherhood to those who might only have a general understanding of Egyptian politics and history. Second, thanks to their access to senior leaders and rank-and-file members of the Brotherhood, the authors show a deep understanding of the organization that is both top-down and bottom-up. Broken Bonds constitutes a work that cannot be ignored to comprehend the convulsed trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood in the last decade.

[1] Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22 (Washington, DC: The Century Foundation, 2023), p. 80.

[2] Ibid., p. 83.

[3] Ibid., p. 127.

[4] Ibid., p. 104.

[5] Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat, Broken Bonds, p. 109.

[6] Ibid., p. 112.

[7] Abdullah Al-Arian, “The Lasting Significance of Egypt’s Rabaa Massacre,” Middle East Report Online, August 23, 2022, https://merip.org/2022/08/the-lasting-significance-of-egypts-rabaa-massacre/.

[8] Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat, Broken Bonds, p. 157.

[9] Matteo Colombo, “Lost in Transition: The Muslim Brotherhood in 2022,” CRU Policy Brief (The Hague: Clingendael Institute, July 2022), p. 8. Retrieved from https://www.clingendael.org/publication/lost-transition-muslim-brotherhood-2022.

Hate acts targeting minorities are not actually free speech, of course.*

The great exponent of mystical Islam, Sayyed Hossein Nasr, argued that if we want to understand the position of the Qur’an in Muslim societies, we should think of it as the way Christians venerate Christ. It is the very “Word of God,” which of course is what Christians call Jesus (John 1:1).

Nasr wrote, “What corresponds to Christ as the word of God in Christianity is not the Prophet Muhammad but the Koran in Islam.”

So burning the Qur’an is sort of like throwing a big wooden crucifix with the corpus of Christ on a bonfire.

Iraqis in several cities, led by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, held demonstrations for the past two days against the desecration of scripture. On Thursday they had tried to storm the Swedish embassy in Baghdad.

Ironically, the man who burned the Qur’an in Sweden is himself Iraqi, and he had served alongside the Shiite militias in a Chaldean Christian Popular Mobilization Force, fighting ISIL, which targeted Iraqi Christians. A lot of Iraqi Christians are angry about how Muslim fundamentalists in Iraq treated them after the American invasion. Since they are Christian they seem to have been unfairly tagged as somehow related to the American occupiers, but this allegation was untrue. Many Kurds and Shiite Muslims were close to the Americans, though.

It is interesting to me that there are indications in the Qur’an itself of how believers should respond to ridicule and harassment. In the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself, the Qur’an says, pagans in the city of Mecca subjected the early believers to a great deal of humiliation.

I wrote about these peace verses in my edited book,

Peace Movements in Islam, edited by Juan Cole. London: IB Tauris, 2021. Click here. .

Enwrapped 73:10-12 speak of how the believers were to respond to hostile comments: “Be patient with what they say and take your leave of them graciously. Leave to me the affluent who impugn your integrity, giving them a short reprieve, for we possess shackles and a searing abyss . . .”

The notion of leaving vengeance to God can be compared to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 12:19, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

The Prophet was so far away from harboring any ill-will toward his opponents that in Ornaments 43:33-35, Muhammad appears to speak in his own voice with these sentiments: “If it would not have caused all people to observe a single communal path (an yakun ummatan wahida) we would have bestowed roofs of silver and staircases for their houses on those who reject the All-Merciful, and would have furnished their homes with fine doors and couches on which to recline, and gilded ornaments. But all that is merely for the enjoyment of the life of this world, whereas the hereafter is for the God-fearing.”

The Criterion 25:63 says, “The servants of the All-Merciful are those who walk humbly upon the earth — and when the unruly address them, they reply, “Peace!”

The word for “unruly” here literally means “ignorant,” but it was used in that era to refer to people who lacked self-control. They clearly were low-lifes, taunting the believers, who kept their dignity and replied by praying for peace and security for their tormentors.

The Table 5:45 in the Medina period paraphrases Deuteronomy 19:21. Arberry translates it this way: “And therein We prescribed for them: ‘A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation’; but whosoever forgoes it as a freewill offering (tasaddaqa bi), that shall be for him an expiation (kaffara). Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down – they are the evildoers.”

So, as in the Gospels it is urged that the faithful go beyond the principle of an eye for an eye to exercise forgivenes, so in the Qur’an believers are urged to forgo demanding this satisfaction for a wrong against them, and it is implied that exercising restraint in this regard will bring the blessings of divine forgiveness on the believer.

Distinguished 41:33-35 observes, “Whose discourse is more beautiful than one who calls others to God and performs good works and proclaims, ‘I am a monotheist? The good deed and the evil deed are not equal. Repel the latter with what is best and behold, it will be as though the one, with whom you have a mutual enmity, is a devoted patron. Yet to none is this granted save the patient (alladhina sabaru), and to none is it granted save the supremely fortunate.” This remarkable verse goes beyond counseling gracious withdrawal from and forgiveness of foes to urging doing good toward them and returning their evil deeds with good ones, which over time has the prospect of winning them over and making them patrons rather than enemies.

So that’s it. That’s how the Qur’an advises dealing with unruly and hostile harassers. Return good for evil. Win them over. Wish peace on them. If the harassment becomes too much, withdraw graciously.

It might be objected that there are verses in the Qur’an authorizing violence. There are, but they are clearly about permission for self-defense when being violently attacked by marauding enemy warriors. They aren’t talking about how you would behave in peacetime and in civil society. Christian thinkers also made a distinction between war-time ethics and peace-time ones.

The Christian monk Athanasios of Alexandria (d. 373) wrote, “For even in the case of the other actions in life we will find that there are differences based upon the circumstances in which they are done. For example, it is not permitted to commit murder, but in wars it is both lawful and praiseworthy to destroy one’s enemies, so much so that those who displayed valor in war are deemed worthy of the highest honors, and monuments to them are erected to proclaim their achievements. And so, the same action is not permitted in certain circumstance and at certain times, but is allowed and excused in different circumstances and at the right time.”

I also discussed the historical context for these verses in my biography of the Prophet Muhammad:

Juan Cole, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires (NY: Bold Type Books, 2018). Click here.

—–

*An earlier version of this posting linked to an article alleging that Sweden had banned the burning of the Hebrew Bible. Apparently the person threatening to do so actually withdrew the threat before the police could decide on the issue.

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ANKARA, TURKIYE- JUNE 3: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan first received his mandate from MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli, as the temporary chairman of the Parliament, and then took the oath at the General Assembly on June 3, 2023 in Ankara, Türkiye. Re-elected President once again in the 28 May election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s duty, which he will continue until 2028, has officially started. The first ceremony was held in the Turkish Grand National Assembly.(Photo by Ugur Yildirim/ dia images via Getty Images).

Türkiye finds itself in a deep economic crisis, which most analysts agree has been worsened by Erdoğan’s unorthodox economic policies and his spending spree before the election. The months before the electoral contest were also marked by the earthquake that shook south-eastern Türkiye and northern Syria, leaving over 50,000 people dead on the Turkish side of the border alone. In the aftermath of the natural disaster, multiple reports showed that the low construction standards condoned by local authorities and the Turkish government resulted in avoidable deaths.

Erdoğan and his center-right AKP have worked over the years to create an institutional and media environment that facilitates their repeated electoral successes. According to an observation mission of the Turkish elections conducted by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), “biased media coverage and the lack of a level playing field gave an unjustified advantage to the incumbent.” However, the strategic mistakes of the opposition also need to be considered to understand why they failed to unseat Erdoğan at his moment of maximum weakness. It has been noted that Kılıçdaroğlu’s promises to assign vice presidential positions to the different party leaders of the opposition coalition sent a confusing message to the Turkish population regarding who would be in charge if the opposition won. The contrast with Erdoğan’s personalist platform was certainly stark. Even so, if skillfully communicated along the lines of “unity in diversity”, the collective leadership of the opposition platform could have proven a strength rather than a weakness.

In contrast, it was known long before the election campaign started that Kılıçdaroğlu was not the best presidential candidate for the opposition. Different polls from early 2022 to early 2023 showed that CHP politicians Ekrem Imamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş, the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara respectively, were far more popular than Kılıçdaroğlu. In December 2022, a judicial ruling banned Imamoğlu from politics (he has been able to stay in office while appealing the decision) for referring to members of the Turkish supreme election council as “fools.” Imamoğlu’s accusations came after the members of the council forced a repetition of the 2019 local elections in Istanbul, which Imamoğlu won by a wider margin than the initial elections that were declared void. Imamoğlu’s legal problems clearly affected his chances of running for president, but Yavaş did not have any obvious impediment.

If Erdoğan was the personification of victory, in discursive terms the triumph went for anti-immigration positions. In fact, the reason Erdoğan failed to win the election in the first round, as he had done in 2014 and 2018, was the strong showing of the ultra-nationalist Sinan Oğan, who received 5.2% of the votes. Oğan’s campaign largely revolved  around promises to send back Syrian refugees living in Türkiye – according to the Turkish government, 3.7 million Syrian refugees out of a total of 5.5 million foreigners live in the country. Oğan found fertile ground in a country that has seen the emergence of deadly assaults on refugees and immigrant neighborhoods during the last years. When recently polled on the subject of Syrian refugees, more than 88.5% of Turks demonstrated that they want them to return to their country.

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Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu attends a swearing-in ceremony at the Turkish parliament in Ankara, June 2, 2023. (Photo by Adem ALTAN / AFP) (Photo by ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Images)

The runoff contest had almost become a formality after the first-round results: 49.5% of the vote went for Erdoğan and 44.9% for Kılıçdaroğlu, which put the AKP leader half a point away from victory. The impressively high turnout, at 87.4%, meant that the opposition’s options to mobilize citizens who had not participated in the first round were very limited. To complicate matters further, after the first round the opposition lost a few key days involved in recriminations, the restructuring of the election campaign team, and carving up a new strategy for the runoff. The despair within the opposition camp was closely related to the high expectations generated by the majority of pre-election polls, which suggested Kılıçdaroğlu would emerge on top after the first round.

Once the soul-searching came to an end, the next step was the pursuit of Oğan’s votes to have a slight chance in the runoff. There were rumors that the opposition offered Oğan to head a new migration ministry or even the vice presidency if he were to support Kılıçdaroğlu in the second round. At the end, he sided with Erdoğan although the Turkish President did not appear to make any concession to him. Oğan probably saw Erdoğan was going to win regardless of his decision and preferred to back the strongest force. The opposition had to content itself with the support of Umit Ozdag, the leader of the far-right Victory Party, which had been the main party in the alliance that backed Oğan’s candidacy in the first round.

Although both the government and the opposition coalition promised to send refugees back to Syria, the anti-refugee discourse has been “much more prominent” in the opposition camp, explains Chatham House Associate Fellow Galip Dalay. During the two weeks between the first round and the runoff election, Kılıçdaroğlu stepped up his anti-refugee messages. Six days before the second round, in a rally in the province of Hatay, which borders Syria, Kılıçdaroğlu exhorted his audience to “make up your mind before refugees take over the country.” Hatay would go on to become the only province in Türkiye where there was a shift of winner: Kılıçdaroğlu won the first round, Erdoğan the second.

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ISTANBUL, TURKEY – MAY 29: Members of the public are seen near the Hagia Sophia the day after Erdogan was re-elected to presidency on May 29, 2023 in Istanbul, Turkey. On Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won another 5-year term after he was forced into a runoff election with the opposition politician Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan prevailed despite criticism of his management of the country’s economy and the government’s response to the devastating earthquakes earlier this year. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images).

The roadmap to gain Oğan’s vote was not a complete failure, but the opposition needed around 90% of Oğan’s votes to win the election if turnout had remained constant – a possibility that became even more distant as turnout fell by 3.1% in the second round. This meant Erdoğan needed a lesser number of votes to overcome the 50% mark in the runoff election. In fact, the 27.13 million votes Erdoğan received in the first round (as compared to 27.83 million votes in the second) would have been enough to win the second round with over 51% of the valid votes.

Three different provinces illustrate the limited success of the opposition in winning over Oğan voters. In both Kayseri and Bilecik, Oğan received more than 8% of the vote, far above the national average of 5.2%. In the second round, the share of the vote for Kılıçdaroğlu increased at the same rate as Erdoğan’s in Kayseri while Kılıçdaroğlu’s gains in Bilecik were only slightly bigger – 1.6% more than Erdoğan. Something similar happened in Bursa, a far more important province in electoral terms as it is Türkiye’s fourth in number of population. In this western region, Oğan received 7.4% of the vote in the first round. In the second round, Kılıçdaroğlu’s share of the vote increased by 4.5% and Erdoğan’s by 3%.

The opposition did a better job in Istanbul and Ankara, the two largest metropolitan areas, where its margin of victory doubled, but the differences remained too small to compensate for Erdoğan’s overwhelming wins in Central Anatolia and the Black Sea region. Furthermore, Ozdag’s Victory Party support for the opposition proved to have negative consequences in the Kurdish-majority areas of Türkiye. This is something several analysts had expected given the Victory party’s strong anti-Kurdish views. In Diyarbakır, Van, and Mardin, the most populated Kurdish provinces won by Kılıçdaroğlu in the first round, the opposition’s candidate lost between 0.3 and 1% of the vote in the runoff election. The number of votes for Erdoğan in these provinces hardly increased, but the fall in the turnout rate was higher than the national average of 3.1% – 6% in Diyarbakır and Van, 4% in Mardin – suggesting the opposition failed to re-mobilize some of the voters who had previously voted for Kılıçdaroğlu.

Part of the problem for Kılıçdaroğlu was that most of the support he received in the Kurdish areas in the first round consisted of tactical voting. The first round of the presidential election was held together with the parliamentary elections, which the opposition lost to the AKP and its ultra-nationalist ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The pro-Kurdish and left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) called for HDP supporters to back Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential election, forgoing putting up their own presidential candidate as they had done in the past. In the parliamentary elections, however, the HDP put forward its candidates under the umbrella of the Green Left Party (YSP), which gained close to 9% of the vote and was the strongest political force in 13 south-eastern provinces. It is reasonable to assume that a significant number of Kurdish voters who had split their vote for Kılıçdaroğlu and the YSP in the first round decided to stay at home for the second round, especially considering Kılıçdaroğlu’s reach-out to the anti-Kurdish Victory Party.

Erdoğan and his AKP had probably never been weaker than they were in the run-up to these recent parliamentary and presidential elections. Consequently, the opposition has strong reasons to believe it has missed an incomparable opportunity. Under the new presidential system, Erdoğan will not be allowed to run for president again in 2028 due to a two-term limit. Even so, the difficulties for the opposition arising from “the lack of a level playing field” in Turkish elections will likely only have increased by 2028. Considering the results of the second round of the presidential election, the CHP is in a good position to maintain the mayorships of Istanbul and Ankara in the 2024 local elections. But even if these good prospects for the opposition materialize, these wins will have a sour taste with four more years to go until the next presidential and parliamentary elections.

The unequal playing field gave the incumbent an unjustified advantage

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

( Globalvoices.org) -Showing up at a polling station, as one of the two presidential candidates, in a country-wide election with a pocket full of cash may not occur to leaders of democratic countries, but in Turkey, that is what the newly re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did on May 28. The incumbent president was seen handing out TRY 200 banknotes (USD 10) to his supporters amid cheering and blessings.
In Turkey, campaigning on an election day is prohibited, but given the unequal playing field in the run-up to both elections on May 14 and May 28, it is unlikely that President Erdoğan will face any repercussions. The same applies to countless violations documented by the Turkey-based Human Rights Association (İHD). According to their report, there was violence and vote rigging observed across Turkey on May 28. In Hatay, observers documented mass voting, while in other provinces, representatives of the main opposition CHP faced violence. According to the association, there were also instances in provinces where men voted on behalf of women or pre-stamped ballots were brought from outside. The association said:

In the light of the initial data Human Rights Association (İHD) has received and those reported in the press, it has been determined that violations including mass and open voting, obstruction of observers and party representatives, and physical violence took place in the presidential election runoff. İHD calls on all public authorities, especially the Supreme Electoral Board, to fulfill their duties in accordance with human rights standards in order to ensure fair elections.

On June 1, the Supreme Electoral Board announced the official results of the second round of presidential elections. According to the results, President Erdoğan received 52.18 percent of the votes while his opponent, Kılıçdaroğlu received 47.82 percent.

Predictions for the next five years

Already, a day after the election on May 29, the country witnessed a price hike on gas and alcoholic beverages as well as reports of medical professionals looking to leave the country. According to the Turkish Medical Association (TBB), an independent medical and health professional association, data from March 2022, some 4,000 doctors have left the country in the last ten years. The new data shared by the association showed the number of medical professionals wanting to leave in the first five months of 2023 reached 1,025. But it won’t be just the doctors leaving. According to a survey by Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung conducted among Turkish youth to evaluate their social and political opinions, “a significant proportion, 63 percent of young people, expressed a desire to live in another country if given the opportunity,” citing worsening living conditions and declining freedom in Turkey as main reasons for this decision.

Already, there are signs that Turks, from all walks of life — especially those with little children — intend to seek opportunities abroad. Among those wanting to leave are those fearing persecution by the new leadership.

Supporters of the ruling party celebrate the victory on May 28. Image by Aziz Karimov. Used with permission.

There is also the economy and the slumping of the national currency, the Turkish Lira, against the dollar. According to Morgan Stanley analysts, lest President Erdoğan reverses his policy of low-interest rates, the lira could face a 29 percent slump by the end of 2023. On June 3, Erdoğan is set to announce the new cabinet. Among them, is former Minister of Finance, Mehmet Simsek, who is expected to take over all of Turkey’s economic policies, according to reporting by Bloomberg. Pundits say Simsek’s inclusion within the new cabinet is a move that could help prop up Turkey’s struggling economy:

The economy is not the only area where Turkey is likely to see further problems, according to Daron Acemoğlu, a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In a detailed thread on Twitter, Acemoğlu noted judicial independence “was very bad and probably cannot get much worse.” There is also the media environment. According to Acemoğlu while he does not anticipate “a complete ban on all dissident voices,” the conditions may worsen if the state anticipates introducing further “controls on social media.” Acemoğlu also anticipates further erosion of “autonomy and impartiality of bureaucracy and security services,” as well as challenges imposed against civil society and freedoms more broadly.

Some of the restrictions on media were quick to follow. On May 30, The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) also known as the chief censor in Turkey, launched an investigation against six opposition television channels over their coverage of the elections.

After securing another victory, President Erdoğan delivered a divisive election speech. Speaking to his supporters who gathered at the presidential palace in Ankara, he called the jailed leader of the Kurdish HDP party a terrorist and promised to keep Demirtaş behind bars. During the speech, his supporters began calling for Demirtaş’s execution. In December 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey must immediately release the Kurdish politician. The politician was placed behind bars in November 2016, and if convicted, could face 142 years in prison. The charges leveled against him are being a leader of a terrorist organization, an accusation Demirtaş has denied.

There is also the case of Can Atalay, the newly elected member of parliament, representing the Workers Party, who remains behind bars, despite Atalay’s lawyers’ attempts to free him. All newly elected parliament members are expected to attend the swearing-in ceremony on June 2.

Journalists Union of Turkey (TGS) President Gökhan Durmuş was closely watching the President’s victory speech and released a statement expressing his concern about the divisive nature of the next government and the implications on press freedom in the country.

However, in an atmosphere where the society is divided exactly in two, it will only be possible to continue to be in power by continuing the oppressive policies. And President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has already signaled to the whole society in his balcony speech that this will be their choice.

The future of the opposition alliance

While at first, it was unclear what will happen to the opposition alliance, also known as the Table of Six, the past few days indicate divisions within the group. Uğur Poyraz, the Secretary General of the IYI Party and one of the members of the Table of Six said on June 1, “The name of this alliance is the electoral alliance; when the election is over, the alliance will also disappear. As of May 28, the electoral alliance ended.” But not all members of the alliance share the same sentiments. In a video address shared via Twitter, the leader of Gelecek Party Ahmet Davutoğlu encouraged supporters of the alliance “not to fall into despair or possible provocations,” adding, that those who supported the ruling government and its alliance did so not because they accepted the status quo but due to an environment of fear.

Other members of the alliance, such as the leader of the Felicity party Temel Karamollaoğlu took it to Twitter, where he criticized the ruling government for the polarization, asking whether it was all worth it. “Was it really worth it, declaring half of our nation ‘terrorists, enemies of religion, traitors,’ in return for this result you have achieved? Was it worth all the lies, slander, and insults,” wrote Karamollaoğlu.

The latter was also reflected in a joint statement issued by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA), and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) observers:

The second round of Türkiye’s presidential election was characterized by increasingly inflammatory and discriminatory language during the campaign period. Media bias and ongoing restrictions to freedom of expression created an unlevel playing field, and contributed to an unjustified advantage of the incumbent.

The blame game

Many blamed the opposition alliance and its leader for failing to secure victory in these elections but according to Gönül Tol, the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program and a senior fellow with the Black Sea Program it is not as simple as that and that fear factor played a significant role. In a Twitter thread, Tol alluded to a handful of complexities that determined the outcomes of these elections. From elections being unfree and unfair, to both pro-democracy and President Erdoğan’s alliance having “existential anxieties,” with both sides seeing the elections “as a war of survival.”  Tol explained:

In such polarized contexts, people do not change their voting behavior easily based on policy preferences, incumbent’s performance or opposition’s promises. Going for the other guy rather than sticking with the devil you know is too big of a risk to take, especially in the face of such dramatic uncertainty. That is why Erdoğan continues to polarize the country.

As for the fear factor, Tol noted that President Erdoğan’s victory speech, was “the most aggressive” to date, “because that is how autocrats cling to power against unfavorable odds. They stoke fear and frame elections as a war for survival. That is how they prevent defections. That is how they can still muster majorities even when they fail to deliver.”

Writing for T24, academic and journalist Haluk Şahin explained that the outcomes of these elections were “determined not by economics and sociology, but by social psychology. In other words, a choice driven by subconscious and subconscious fears, identities, denials, jealousies, desires for worship, and ambitions to dominate.”

Others like political scientist Umut Özkırımlı explained that in order to “to topple an authoritarian regime at the ballot box” two things are needed, “sizeable electoral majorities” and “populist and ethnonationalist strategies” referring to an essay by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s The New Competitive Authoritarianism. In the essay, the authors argue:

Tilting the playing field in countries such as Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and Venezuela requires greater skill, more sophisticated strategies, and far more extensive popular mobilization … Prospective autocrats must first command sizeable electoral majorities, and then deploy plebiscitarian or hypermajoritarian strategies to change the constitutional and electoral rules of the game so as to weaken opponents. This is often achieved via polarizing populist or ethnonationalist strategies.

With local elections months away (Turkey is to hold mayoral elections in March 2024) academic Orçun Selçuk said the opposition should stick to “playing the long game”:

Calls for solidarity

On the night of election, as Erdoğan supporters, roamed the streets of Turkey, celebrating into the early hours of the morning, the other half of the country, did not hesitate in shaking off the outcome and calling to keep on fighting.

 

Acclaimed musician, Fazil Say, tweeted on May 29, “No demoralizing, friends, let’s embrace life. Keep up the goodness. Life goes on, music goes on, the world goes on, endless continuation to create and produce beauty.”

 

Well-known entrepreneur Selçuk Gerger, posted on his Instagram, that despite all the struggle, things did not change. “As of today, I will continue to live as I was living in Istanbul in the previous months and years, without regrets or stepping aside. I will not give up even for a moment. We won’t hide. The majority of people born and who grew up in this country are on our side. And yes, today we are really just starting our fight. Let’s not get hide!”

Via Globalvoices.org

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

( Globalvoices.org ) – The results from the May 14 general elections in Turkey were a surprise for some, a disappointment for others, and for those who rallied behind President Erdoğan and his coalition, a victory. These elections also showed how the main opposition coalition underestimated the societal split and the priorities that mattered — nationalism, big infrastructure projects, identity, religion, and security, to name a few. The financial crisis, graft, deterioration of rights and freedoms, as well as mishandling of the devastating February 6 earthquake did not matter in the end — especially as eight of eleven provinces affected by twin earthquakes backed President Erdoğan in the presidential votes.

The results were also a testament to the ruling state benefiting from the full control of the media landscape  — “for comparison, Erdoğan got 32 hours of air time on state TV compared with 32 minutes for Kilicdaroglu,” wrote journalist Amberin Zaman — making it much harder for the opposition to reach those who remained undecided or voters who were skeptical of their promises in the run-up to the election. This was also reflected in a statement by the International Election Observation Mission, according to which, “Public broadcasters clearly favored ruling parties and candidates.”

But the outcomes of the May 14 vote reflect more than just an uneven playing field. In fact, many observers got it wrong, as well as the pollsters, the opposition coalition itself, and the opposition’s presidential candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who, on the night of the election, tweeted:

We are leading.

On May 14, the numbers shared by the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) party indicated that Kılıçdaroğlu was clearly leading in the polls. But the enthusiasm of Ekrem İmamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş — the municipal mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, respectively — who appeared on television screens in the first hours of the polls assuring voters that the opposition coalition and Kılıçdaroğlu were leading in the polls, disappeared as hours went on.

It turned out there were discrepancies. For that, Onursal Adıgüzel, the party’s vice president who was also responsible for ballot box data entry, was let go. It turned out the algorithmic system used to count votes was faulty — it was missing input from 20,000 polling stations where the CHP did not have observers, according to the findings of journalist Nevşin Mengü.

The disappointment among opposition supporters was short-lived especially as reports of voter fraud began to galvanize the momentum needed to ensure a second round of presidential voting.

Starting on May 16, a hashtag on Turkish Twitter space was trending, #OylarYenidenSayilsin as reports of massive fraud in processing election results started trickling in. In some cases, the votes for the opposition party CHP and its ally Iyi Parti were dismissed by the Supreme Election Council (YSK) while in others, it was clear that votes for the opposition coalition were transferred to the parties within the ruling alliance.

At the time of writing this story, YSK is yet to announce the official results of the election.

Via Pixabay

In a series of tweets, academic Timur Kuran attempted to explain what was happening:

Kuran also urged the High Election Council or the Supreme Election Council (YSK) to “investigate who voted and how results from local polling stations compared with those in its own database.”

The discrepancies and CHP’s weaknesses in vote count led volunteers to offer their support in the second round:

I am ready to assist the team of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the Presidential Candidate of the National Alliance, for statistical simulation, data analysis and campaign communication in the second round. (Here are) my diplomas. Everything is going to be beautiful.

Grandfather ask us for help; what do you need? Observer, IT person, social media person, advertiser, graphic designer, influencer? We’ll be crowding at your door.

Eğer “Abi, değmez bu insanlara. Ben hayatıma bakarım. Olmadı yurtdışına çıkarım” diyen varsa etrafınızda, onlara söyleyin. Öyle bir hayat olmayacak. Saklanacak bir “sahil kasabanız” bile kalmayacak. Yurtdışına çıkarım meselesi de öyle kolay bir şey değil. Her gün içiniz yanar.…

— Ece Temelkuran (@ETemelkuran) May 16, 2023

If you have those around you thinking ‘man, its not worth it. I will move on. Or better yet move abroad,’ tell them this. There wont be a life like that. You may not even find a small sea shore cottage to hide at. As for moving abroad — its not as easy as you may think. You will burn on the inside every day.

According to YSK data, out of 64,190,651 registered voters, 53,993,714 voted in total. Among them were 4,904,672 first-time voters. With over 3.5 million registered overseas voters, 1,416,000 voted at the end. The turnout was the highest from all previous elections, with official numbers indicating a 88.92 percent voter turnout. In previous general elections held in 2018, this number was 86.24 percent. Historically Turkey has a high voter turnout. Many analysts say this is largely because elections are the only remaining democratic institution where people can influence the country.

What’s next

Since neither of the leading presidential candidates was able to secure over 50 percent of the vote, the country is headed to a run-off scheduled for May 28, which will also be the first time Turkey will have a run-off presidential vote under the country’s new electoral system. Many observers and pundits view the chance of the second round as a positive development for President Erdoğan.

Meanwhile, while the ruling government coalition secured 323 parliament seats out of 600, it still lacks the majority it needs to, say, introduce constitutional changes, which require 360 votes. There are fears that some of the newly elected members of the parliament represented among the opposition coalition may switch sides, especially as many of them are former members of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) or the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). It remains to be seen whether this will actually happen in the weeks and months to come. 

As for election propaganda in the next round, there are notable differences in the tone of the political messaging. In a video shared by Kılıçdaroğlu on May 17, the 74-year-old presidential candidate looked tired but still determined to win the second round. As explained by academic Timur Kuran:

Kılıçdaroğlu and his opposition alliance must also take into account what may have prevented more support in the previous round. According to columnist Atakli, it was not that the voters who supported the ruling government coalition agreed with theft. “Societies pushed into poverty and ignorance believe they cannot prevent theft,” wrote Atakli. Moreover, Kılıçdaroğlu accused some powerful people of graft — people who employ tens of thousands of people who think they might soon find themselves unemployed if Kılıçdaroğlu won and went after these business owners. Others, like journalist Ismail Saymaz say people believed the AKP propaganda that the opposition was in cohorts with apparent terrorist groups like the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK). In this case, according to Saymaz, Kılıçdaroğlu and his team must break this cycle in less than ten days.

But addressing people’s needs is not the only item on the to-do list. According to journalist Murat Aksoy, the opposition must have observers at each polling station to ensure the safety of the ballot box. It will also have to convince its voters to go back to the ballot boxes as well as some 8.5 million voters who did not vote in this election at all.

Scores of Turks, took to social media platforms, reminding peers to show up on May 28 and help shift the tides if not for their own future then at least for a 20-year-old Kübra Ergin, who committed suicide two days after election. In a note Ergin left behind, the young woman said, “I’m tired. They stole my youth. As a woman, I have never felt free. Because of the people of this country, I could not live my childhood, and I could not live my youth.”

Via Globalvoices.org

 

Written byArzu Geybullayeva