Category Archives: North Africa

Caliphate, Iraq, North Africa, Sectarian, Syria, U.S. Foreign Policy

The War for MENA: Militias, Bombers, Cargo Cultists, and International Brigades……..

March 19, 2015 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“Unthinkable just a decade ago, the main government forces leading the battle are Shiite fighters—the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs) that are under the control of militia leaders. These forces’ main partners are Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah. U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey has called the situation “the most overt conduct of Iranian support” since the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) began…………… The White House seems to view growing Iranian involvement in the war as a reality that cannot be wished away, which is probably true, but also as a step forward in U.S.-Iranian relations, which is arguably naive. Events on the ground in eastern Iraq suggest a different way of looking at the issue. If anything, the battle for Tikrit has shown that there is a whole side of the war from which the international community has been deliberately excluded. Iran and its Iraqi proxies have been carving out a zone of influence in eastern Iraq…………”

His title asks: “What to Do With Iraq’s Shia Popular Mobilization Units?”
Everyone, people of every faith and every sect are involved in this war: Wahhabi, Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, Jewish, possibly even Buddhist and Zoroastrian and Cargo Cultist. There are the Sunni and Wahhabi and Shi’a warplanes, which bomb targets in Syria and Iraq. There are also Christian, Jewish, and no doubt a few atheist bombers as well among them. I am not sure what the Caliph’s true faith is.

Those warplanes from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and possibly others? They are not flown by Shi’as: these are excluded from flying warplanes or doing sensitive military and security jobs. Not to mention that everybody on the other side, on the dark side, is Wahhabi, from the ISIS terrorists to their financiers to their female slaves and concubines.

This is not a sectarian war for the Levant anymore. It is now a sectarian world war that has gone beyond the Levant. It is a Middle East and North Africa war. A MENA War that goes beyond what the West usually calls a Sunni-Shi’a war: it is Wahhabi terrorists against everyone else, be they Sunnis or Shi’as. It now stretches from Iraq and Syria through Egypt and Libya, all the way deeper into North Africa. With the possibility of other outlying fronts in remote areas of Asia and Africa. It has attracted the misguided faithful from all over the world. So, both sides, nay all sides, in ‘this war’, have their powerful “International Brigades“.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
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Africa, Arab Revolutions, Libya, North Africa, Sudan

Now I Have Seen It All: Sudan Saving Libya………..

November 14, 2014 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“Sudan said Thursday it is organizing a December 4 meeting of Libya’s neighbors, as the North African country continues to be plagued by lawlessness and violence. The foreign ministers of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Niger and Tunisia have been invited to the meeting in Khartoum, the foreign ministry said. Arab League secretary general Nabil al-Arabi and the organisation’s envoy to Libya, Nasser al-Qidwa, were also invited………….”

Now I have seen it all, und warum nicht? Everything is topsy turvy in the region now. If absolute tribal princes and potentates can claim to bring freedom and democracy to Syria, why can’t Sudan bring stability to Libya? Anything is possible these days.
Go for it, Omar. You must be serious: you have no more sense of humor than your ancient namesake did.

I have some concern about the list of invitees. I don’t mean to show any disrespect, but Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Niger, Tunisia and the Arab League don’t cut it. Not alone. Didn’t Qatar and the UAE join Bernard-Henri Levy and Senator McCain in bombing Libya and overthrowing Qaddafi? Why not invite them too?

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Arab Revolutions, Egypt, Islam and Elections, Libya, MENA, North Africa, UAE

UAE Pivoting: Brothers Karamazov to the Shores of Tripoli……..

August 26, 2014 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“From the Halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli
We fight our country’s battles
In the air, on land, and sea………” USMC Hymn

“Egypt and the United Arab Emirates were responsible for carrying out two series of air strikes in the past week on armed Islamist factions in Tripoli, Libya, US officials said on Monday. The officials said the two Arab countries used aircraft based in Egypt. Earlier the New York Times reported that the two US allies acted without consulting Washington………..”

If you have a choice between believing Egyptian (and UAE) officials and American officials, whom would you believe? I’d take my chances with U.S. officials, since they are subject to public and media scrutiny (er, ahem, not that they would lie even if they could get away with it). Besides, Egyptian officials are notorious serial liars, possibly the lying-est in the history of the Middle East.

But the United Arab Emirates flexing military muscle in the MENA region (with help from their little man in Egypt)? The private fiefdom of the Bin Zayed Al Nahayan brothers? As someone who is rude and crude (which I am not) would exclaim: the UnitedFuckingEmirates? The funny country that is 87% composed of imported temporary foreigner laborers and reportedly relies on a Blackwater-advised foreign mercenary force of Colombians and White South Africans and Australians and others to keep order? That is a shocker.

The Al Nahayan brothers are pivoting from the Persian Gulf toward North Africa now. They helped mess up Bahrain by joining the Al Saud invasion to crush the popular uprising and prevent the liberation of Bahrain in 2011. They joined up with French pop-philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and John McCain and NATO bombers to help liberate Libya in the same year. They helped muddy the waters in Syria in 2011 and convert a popular uprising into a Wahhabi-financed and armed Jihadi terrorist campaign. There are some reports of a sisterly role for the brothers in the rise of ISIS and its Caliphate in Iraq and Syria and back to Iraq.
What Mr. Vladimir Putin should worry about now is if the brothers decide to pivot to the Ukraine and maybe seek to liberate the Crimea. Mr. Obama may have to worry about the brothers Al Nahayan pivoting toward the far east, thus complicating his own efforts at pivoting toward the arms of his Chinese business partners and Kim-Jong Un.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Libya, Middle East Women, North Africa, United Nations International Organizations

Grand Mufti of Libya Orders Women to Relax and Enjoy Violence against women………

March 12, 2013 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“The Grand Mufti of Libya, Sheikh Sadeq Al-Ghariani has issued a fatwa against a UN report on violence against woman, calling on Muslim women around the world to protest against it. The 32-page report from the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) calls for greater action by governments to protect women and girls from violence as well as spread awareness of women’s rights and do more to challenge discrimination. The statement from the Grand Mufti read that it “strongly condemns the provisions of the charter….………….”

Liberated Libya is doing some things that Colonel Qaddafi would not have condoned. He would not have stood for this type of misogyny. The colonel did, reportedly, have his own form of misogyny and abuse of women. But like many Arab despots he did have pretensions of being progressive on some issues. I shall not bore you by mentioning a possible liberated Syria and what it might be like if…………..

Cheers
mhg

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GCC, Jordan, North Africa

Morocco and Jordan and GCC Constitutional Monarchy……

July 27, 2012 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Neck of the woods

Remember the Saudi plan of last year to have Morocco and Jordan join the Gulf GCC? So what happened to that Saudi plan? Are they working hard in Riyadh on modalities for Jordanian and Moroccan membership? Does the complete silence on this issue relate to the fact that Morocco is now more of a constitutional monarchy that it was last year? Is it related to the fact that the Star Trek king of Jordan is being pressured to allow freer elections? But that is exactly what the Bahraini opposition is demanding: to have a constitutional regime like Morocco. Yet the whole GCC establishment and the Wahhabi-tribal-liberals rose against the Bahraini people and their demand. That is what some of the Gulf tribal-Islamist opposition claim to be seeking, but selectively: they strongly oppose a constitutional monarchy for Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. They must think the al-Saud princes and al-Khalifa kleptocrats are fonts of wisdom that can’t be replicated through any election.
As for Qatar and the UAE and Oman, they claim that they already have the most unelected unrepresentative democracy that money can buy (actually can’t buy in the case of Oman). The al-Saud princes are slightly different: they have the least democratic and least representative and least free system that oil money has a hard time buying.
Cheers
mhg
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Algeria, Arab Revolutions, France, North Africa

France after Nazism: the Massacre at Sétif………

July 26, 2012 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Neck of the woods
“On the European side, vague anxiety was succeeded by real fear. Despite all the changes, the idea of treating Algerians as equals was intolerable, to be avoided at all costs……… In Sétif the trouble started when police tried to seize the PPA flag, now the Algerian flag, and banners calling for the release of Messali Hadj and Algerian independence. It spread to the surrounding countryside, where tribes rose up. In Guelma the events were triggered by arrests and the actions of the militia, which provoked tribes to take revenge on local settlers. The European civilians and the police responded with mass executions and reprisals against entire communities. To remove all traces of their crimes and prevent investigations, they opened mass graves and burned the bodies in the lime kilns at Heliopolis. The army’s actions caused a military historian, Jean-Charles Jauffret, to say that its conduct “resembled a European wartime operation rather than a traditional colonial war” (4). In the Bougie region about 15,000 women and children were forced to kneel before a military parade. The final toll is speculative, as the French government closed the commission of inquiry directed by General Tubert and the killers were never tried………….”

The Pieds noirs, the European colonists, not only wanted to keep the myth that Algeria was French and that Algerians were “French. They also did not want the Muslim Algerians to have equal political rights. Messali Hadj later formed a movement against the FLN and was demonized by Arab nationalists (he died in exile in France). Ferhat Abbas went on to become first president of the Interim Algerian Government in exile after the FLN started its revolt in 1954. He was replaced later. After independence in 1962 Ahmed Ben Bella came out of a French prison to became president. He was overthrown in 1965 by a coup plotted by Boumedienne and Bouteflika (the current president) and others.
Later on, Ben Bella, after he was released from his ‘Algerian” prison, visited Hadj’s grave.
Cheers
mhg
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Algeria, France, North Africa

Cinquante ans plus tard: how France Dodged an Algerian Bullet …………

March 29, 2012 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“If they lacked reasonable arguments, the French Parliament has just provided them with another argument by passing the law penalising any remark undermining the Harkis , the Algerian auxiliaries of the French army during the occupation. Moreover, in December, the French Right-wing had attempted to deposit the ashes of General Bigeard, former torturer during the Battle of Algiers at the Musée des Invalides in Paris. For their part, the Algerians have refused an entry visa to the pieds noirs , the former French colonial settlers in Algeria, who wanted to make a pilgrimage to their birthplace. These are small spikes to remind each other that one can be moderate but not amnesiac. Whether we like it or not, the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of Algeria will not fail to crystallize all resentments and unspoken terms of the common history of the two countries that still continue to modulate memory
according to politic issues…………”

Until 1962 many Frenchmen insisted that Algeria was part of France, that Algerians were French. They also thought that some Algerians, the non-Muslim whites, were more French than others, with more ‘French’ rights than other Algerians. Just imagine how things would be now, if the Algerian revolution had failed. If France had won, it would have been a classic pyrrhic victory. Imagine how things would be now:

France would have a population of about 100 million, of which about 40 million would be Muslims of Algerian (and other African descent). Forty percent of all French would be Muslim, with the percentage growing. Just think of the possibilities. From a certain French point of view, they truly dodged a Muslim bullet, and they have Charles de Gaulle to thank for that. This is of course based on certain undeniable assumptions on how the French feel about Muslims in their country.
These French right-wingers who still admire the hardline colonialists of old Algeria would feel differently about them now had Algeria remained French. Wouldn’t you say?
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Politics, Economics, North Africa, Salafi, Tunisia

Fundamentalists of North Africa on the Rise………….

March 28, 2012 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“Yesterday, the Islamist party Ennahda declared on national evening television that it would keep intact Article 1 of the 1959 Tunisian Constitution. Article 1 of Tunisia’s first constitution explicitly states that Tunisia is a free, sovereign, and independent state, whose “religion is Islam, language is Arabic, and regime is republic.”………. This decision came in a very delicate political context, as an ongoing debate over the place of religion in post-revolutionary Tunisian society and government continues to evolve. The past two weeks alone have seen several demonstrations, some calling for the implementation of Shariaa, law based on the Koran and other Muslim holy writings, in the constitution, and others calling for a civil state……………”

The more ‘moderate’ Tunisian Islamists of Ennahda have decided to keep their promise and not try and transform the country into a theocracy. Not yet. Media reports indicate that a few thousand, no doubt mostly Salafis, have demonstrated for a full application of the Shari’a. That would have transformed Tunisia into a Saudi-style Salafi regime. In that case, Tunisia would be transformed into the Democratic People’s Salafi Republic of Tunisia, just as the Arabian Peninsula is now the Democratic People’s Salafi Kingdom of Arabia. That would have been a disaster for the country, given the strong secular streak among many of its people, and given the heavy economic reliance on tourism, and given the proximity to Europe.

Even some of the Gulf GCC countries that apply strict Islamic rules at home would not want that to happen in Tunisia, for two reasons: (1) They have invested heavily in the Tunisian tourist industry (hotels, resorts, etc), and (2) Where else would the potentates go for their long peaceful (and I might add ‘fun-filled’) holidays? You never read about any Saudi princes and other Gulf potentate vacationing in Afghanistan, do you? Not even during the rule of the Taliban. Come to think of it, you never read of any of these potentates ever vacationing in Saudi Arabia either. Maybe it has to do with the ambiance, or maybe it is that “whatever happens in Tunisia and Morocco stays in Tunisia and Morocco’. Most of it, from what I hear.
Cheers
mhg

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Anti-Semitism, Arab Counterrevoltion, North Africa, Salafi, Tunisia

Salafi Party Time: Tunisia’s Minority Communities not Imperiled, Yet………

March 28, 2012 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

“The President of the Tunisian Jewish Community Roger Bismuth has expressed deep concern over the security of Tunisia’s Jewish Community, and has called on the government to take immediate action against those who incite hatred against others. During Sunday’s Salafist demonstration on Avenue Habib Bourguiba, one Salafist preacher shouted “young people rise up, let’s wage a war against the Jews,” to a cheering crowd chanting “God is great.” Bismuth announced that he will be taking legal action against the Salafist preacher. “We can’t have this violent speech in our country… it is not the first time this has happened… it is totally unacceptable and I am going to take him to court,” said Bismuth. While Bismuth told Tunisia Live he has been unable to meet today with Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali, he paid a visit to the President of the Constituent Assembly Mustapha Ben Jaafar, who strongly condemned the Salafist preacher……….”

These f—cking Salafists, all they talk about is destroying the ‘other’, killing the ‘other’. They are mostly probably fifth column agents of despotic absolute monarchs, yet they are superb at taking advantage of situations. Just as they did after the Arab uprisings.
Their aim wherever they are in the Middle East is to create a totally homogeneous Salafi society where everyone looks alike, talks alike, thinks alike, prays together, and grows their dyed beards to the same shaggy length (using the same brand of Islamic black dye or Henna). Possibly even marry the same regulation four wives (appetizers until the end of time, what the Christian Evangelicals await as the Rapture and the Salafis see as ‘party time’). A society where everyone is as ignorant and stupid as everyone else. They will continue to agitate in Tunisia, as they are doing all over, especially on the Persian Gulf, until they either get their way or are sent to the Ile du Diable in the desert where they belong. Over there, they can worship absolute kings and polygamous robber princes to their hearts’ content. Without bothering decent folks.

Of course once the Salafis are in control, everybody else will be in danger, not just minorities. Many Muslims and Arabs will be in danger as well.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Politics, Arab Revolutions, Egypt, Libya, North Africa, Syria

From Libya to Syria: Tribes and Sects with One Flag…………

March 7, 2012 Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

BFF

“Tribal leaders and militia commanders in oil-rich eastern Libya have declared their intention to seek semi-autonomy, raising fears that the country might disintegrate following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC), the interim central government based in the capital Tripoli, has repeatedly voiced its opposition to the creation of a partly autonomous eastern region, warning it could eventually lead to the break-up of the North African nation. Thousands of representatives of major tribal leaders, militia commanders and politicians made the declaration on Tuesday in a ceremony held in the eastern city of Benghazi. They vowed to end decades of marginalisation under Gaddafi and named a council to run the affairs of the newly created region, extending from the central coastal city of Sirte to the Egyptian border in the east. Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston, reporting from the capital Tripoli, said the announcement was only the beginning of a process………...”

That is what happens when the façade of ‘nationhood’ that Qaddafi violently maintained collapses. Yet oil, petroleum, is the one item most likely to keep Libya from breaking apart now.
Most Arab states are basically a balance of tribal, ethnic, and sectarian interests. Egypt is famously the one exception. Egypt is not a tribal society and it has historically accepted a multi-ethnic culture (contrary to common belief, Egyptian people have roots from all around the Mediterranean and the rest of the Middle East). The Christian Copts were never an “issue” until the Mubarak regime started to dismantle the secular state that was initiated in the days of Mohammed Ali (Pasha not Clay). Egyptian Jews were not an “issue” until after the first Palestine War of 1948 (what Arabs call the Nakba, catastrophe, and Jews call Israel’s War of Independence). In Egypt, Shi’as are a tiny minority that the Mubarak regime magnified and built up into an illusory threat, no doubt under Saudi Wahhabi pressure. Now, with the political system of Egypt Islamized, with the Salafis effectively sharing parliamentary power with the Muslim Brotherhood, all bets are off.

In Syria also sectarian, tribal, and ethnic divisions are coming out into the open. Except Syria has more of these divisions, deeper divisions, longer suppressed than either Libya or Egypt. And Syria has been under the Ba’athist rule since 1963, under effective Ba’athist ideological political influence since the late 1940s. A very long period of the denial of divisions, of sweeping things under the rug. And Syria is surrounded by states that perceive their own national interests in Syria, and they are beginning to interfere and intervene.
Cheers
mhg

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Arabia Deserta: MENA Focus