Mosul Tragedy, Decoding ISIS

MUSINGS

As the tragic news comes in of 39 of our men killed in the Iraqi township of Mosul, allegedly by the ISIS, one sits back shaken. There are too many disasters and human tragedies taking place in the Middle East—barbaric killings, car explosions, bombs strapped on the alive forms of teenagers, homes targeted, buildings bombarded, entire settlements razed to the ground, dying children, deaths and destructions as never before.

One has been left wondering—who set up the ISIS? Who is behind it? Which are the Western powers backing it? Who funds it? Who organises mass-scale destructions with minutest precision? Who is behind these deadly tactics at unsettling the very basic survival of millions in landlocked States? Who is killing whom, to relay an ongoing state of terror?

In the midst of haunting stories of human disasters, it would be silly and naïve to believe that the ISIS exists on its own! Perhaps, it’s another of those extensions and dimensions to the Western powers’ combined strategy to wreck and destroy human life in the Middle East, after ruining entire settlements on the West Bank... Over the last three decades I have heard the successive Palestinian envoys to India—right from the Dr Khaled-Al-Sheikh to Osama Musa—detail America-backed Israeli intrusions into their territory, specifically mentioning that ‘without America’s support Israel is zero! Israel cannot survive without America.’

Getting back to the Middle East and the connected Arab countries, their leaders had realised that Western powers together with Israel’s strategies were all set to more than intrude, but, perhaps, that realisation came somewhat late. In fact, way back in 2001, during my meeting with Libya’s erstwhile ruler Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif-El-Islam, in New Delhi, he had told me during the course of an interview that he does realise the havoc taking place in that region because of the Israel-US tie-ups and he was keen to unite the Arab world to take on the ‘enemy’. But before he could work in that direction he and his entire clan was destroyed by the military might of the West. I also recall Saif’s reactions to the terror-tags pinned on him and on his father—“It all depends on your perception. Many liberation leaders were viewed as being terrorists but later they became heroes...when Nelson Mandela was in trouble we helped him out, when Mugabe was having problems we helped him too, so does that mean we helped terrorist outfits! Both these men fought liberation wars and they were later treated as heroes.’

And it’s no secret that way back in the early 1990s madrasas and other religious institutions had been set up by the CIA along the Afghan-Pakistan border! Religion was used and used to the fullest by the Americans in Afghanistan to create their base, otherwise the Afghan struggles had been based on nationalism and not religion. The aftermath of those camouflaging tactics are writ large, ongoing. Not a day passes by without news of bombardments in and around the Afghan terrain.

It’s about time to decode the ISIS. Independent researchers ought to rip off the ongoing camouflages to the entire existence to the ISIS. And for their research they should definitely use the explanations-cum-rationale-cum-backgrounders put forth by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s grandson, Asfandyar Wali Khan. He goes by the rather simplistic explanation to the growing turbulence: “If you have two badmashes in a village it’s okay, because they will be busy settling scores with each other. But there will be chaos and confusion if there is only one badmash left! That’s the trouble in today’s world. There is only one badmash left! We all know that badmash!”

And even a brief study of the works of Noam Chomsky would be enough to suggest the entire dimension of the expansionist plans of America and the havoc they are capable of unleashing. To quote him—“In the Reagan years alone the US-sponsored state terrorists in Central America left hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses, millions orphaned and four countries in ruins. In the same year Western-backed South African depredations killed 1.5 million people. I need not speak of West Asia or much else... All of this, however, is barred from the annals of terrorism by a simple devise, the term ‘terrorism’ like most terms of political discourse has two meanings—a literal one and a propagandistic one. Needless to add that the propagandistic version is preferred and pursued by the US—terrorism is terrorism that is directed against the US and its friends and allies.” Chomksy also draws parallels between the US and the Nazis—“The Nazis, for example, bitterly condemned terrorism and conducted what they called counter-terrorism against terrorist partisans. The US basically agreed and it organised and conducted similar counter-terrorism in the post-war years.”

As Yogi Government Completes One Year ...

In the last couple of days there seems less flaunting of the encounters and encounter-killings that the State had indulged in, in these recent months. Probably, the hounding and pounding of hundreds of innocents in the State of Uttar Pradesh was one of the major reasons for the BJP’s recent shameful defeat in Yogi’s home turf.

If only Yogi Adityanath had spared the human being, instead had an equal number of mosquitoes killed in encounters, in his State and particularly in his constituency, Gorakhpur, probably the masses would have reacted differently. Not to be overlooked the fact that the entire region is plagued with encephalitis and malaria. Yogi’s next round of encounter killings should be targeted against the four-legged mosquitoes of his State.

On This World Poetry Day - March 21

I’m filing this column of March 21, which happens to be the World Poetry Day, so leaving you with these lines of Sahir Ludhianvi—

“Here we go, stoking fire through song-laden lips/

The fear of the world can never staunch the flow of our words/

In all, we have just one view, our own/

Why should we see the world through someone else’s eyes?/

It is true we did not turn the world into a garden/

But at least we lessened some thorns from the paths we travelled.”