Good evening and welcome
to the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.
My name is Hamsa Srikanth
and I'm one of the two Athenaeum Fellows this year.
As we speak, President Trump is delivering
the State of Union address in Washington DC.
Media outlets have been waiting
with bated breath for this event.
After Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo,
revealed that Trump will make a quote,
"Significant announcement on the status of ISIS."
Trump announced in December,
that the US would pull its troops from Syria,
and the administration has made repeated claims
that ISIS has been, quote, "Defeated."
In 2014, ISIS controlled an area of land
that was the size of Britain,
and it is true that the terrorist group
has since lost significant territory,
but the question on all of our minds still persists.
Is the threat of ISIS truly over?
Here to answer that question
is our speaker tonight, Mark Juergensmeyer.
Mark Juergensmeyer is a distinguished professor
of sociology and global studies,
and affiliate professor of religious studies
at UC Santa Barbara.
Our speaker is also a pioneer in the global studies field,
focusing on global religion, religious violence,
conflict resolution, and South Asian religion and politics.
He has published more than 300 articles and 20 books,
including the award winning book, Terror in the Mind of God,
and his co-edited book, Oxford Handbook of Global Studies.
Professor Juergensmeyer will give an illustrated analysis
of the rise of ISIS and discuss its current state,
and religious, and global influence.
His insights are all based on site visits to the region,
extensive interviews, and surveillance
of Jihadi online chat rooms.
Mark Juergensmeyer's Athenaeum presentation
is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship
in Religious Studies at CMC.
This is a 45 minute presentation
and there will be a Q & A at the end.
As always, I must remind you that audio-visual recording
is strictly prohibited.
Please use this opportunity to silence your devices,
stuff your face with bread, and adjust your seat
if you've not already done so.
And without further delay,
please join me in welcoming Professor Mark Juergensmeyer.
(group applauding)
Thank you for that generous introduction,
and I wanna say what a pleasure it is
to be back in Claremont Colleges.
It's just a thrill to be here,
not just because of the beauty of the campus,
but because of the intellectual excitement
of the students and the faculty.
It's a really rare atmosphere, academic atmosphere,
and it's such a pleasure for me to be with you
to talk about an interesting and somewhat troubling topic.
This is a project that I've been working on for many years,
and to follow the rise of ISIS has been a fascinating thing.
To follow its fall and its decline,
in some ways is even more interesting,
because the question is whether movements like this
ever really end and what happened to the people,
what happened to the issues, what happened to the problems,
what happens to the prospects of those
who were involved in the movement to begin with?
So that's our subject for tonight.
Last year, when I was in Iraq at the edge of Mosul,
talking with some people in the resettlement camps
that were hastily created along the border,
was talking with this guy,
who at one time, was a supporter of ISIS.
He was a Sunni Arab from Ramadi and he said,
at first it seemed like this was such a promise
for Sunni Arabs, but he said,
ISIS was a strange religion.
It was a strange religion he said, but it was our religion.
It was a Sunni religion.
And I thought, what a remarkable thing to say.
In some ways so apt, because if you look at the map of Iraq,
you immediately figure out the geo-politics of the region.
Iraq really is three different separate ethnic communities
and they're divided both by religion and by ethnicity.
Now, the difference between Shia and Sunni,
for those of you who don't know much about Islam,
it's kinda like the difference
between Protestants and Christians,
Protestants and Catholics in Christianity.
And you're saying, yeah, but Protestants and Christians are,
Protestants and Catholics are all Christians, right?
Yeah, but say that in Northern Ireland
and you can see that whether you're Protestant
or you're Catholic can make a huge difference.
It can determine whether you're gonna be alive one night
on your way home from work, if you're assaulted by a crowd,
and they say, who goes there?
Are you Protestant, are you Christian?
Because, along with that religious identity
comes a whole host of other issues,
some of them ethnic and some of them historic,
and the same is true among the Shia and the Sunni in Iraq.
They're both Arab and they're both different
from the Kurds in the north, who are,
they're Sunni's also, but they're ethnic like Kurd.
They speak a different language.
They look different.
So there's a really,
there's three different groups
and they look different directions.
The Shia look east towards Iran,
and you're saying of course, well they're all Shia.
Yeah, except of course in Iran, they're not Arabs.
They're Persians, they speak a different language.
They have a different culture.
And yet, I think it's fair to say that the Shia
in the southeastern portion of Iraq, look east.
It's fair to say that the Sunni Arabs
in the western part look west.
They look towards Syria, where all of the eastern part
of Syria is Sunni-Arab.
The majority of people in Syria are Sunni-Arab like them,
and are in Jordan, or in Saudi Arabia.
And the Kurds, of course, look north towards the other Kurds
in Turkey and Iran.
So, they're really three different areas.
How on earth did they ever get together?
Well, during the Ottoman Empire,
there were all these different regions.
And so there were,
each of these regions has its own distinct characteristic.
They didn't get lumped together into nation states
until the end of the Ottoman Empire,
which was the end of World War One,
and the British and the French decided,
well, they'll create nation states out this.
So, they lumped together a whole section,
and they made that Syria,
and they lumped together the other tribal regions
on the other side of the Jordan,
and they called that Transjordan or Jordan,
and then there was a section,
they wanted to save a place where Christians could be safe,
so they called it Lebanon,
and then there was kind of a big chunk left over
and they called it Iraq.
That's kinda how it came about.
So, all you have to do is look at this map
and you can see that the current tensions in Iraq
are kinda the leftover business of the attempt
to create nation states out of the Ottoman Empire
a hundred years ago.
And what held Iraq together all that time,
were secular dictatorships, both in Syria and in Iraq.
Secular, both cases, the Ba'ath party,
which is kind of a socialist party,
and that worked fine in a way,
as ruthless as those dictators were, until this happened.
This is the American invasion of Baghdad in 2003,
Shock and Awe, where the pretense was supposedly
the kind of secret weapons caches,
the weapons of mass destruction which Saddam Hussein had,
and they weren't able to find, and yet,
it gave the reason for invading Iraq,
and then presumably to liberate the country.
The problem was, as soon as the country was liberated,
there weren't really good plans
for what they were gonna do afterwards,
and one of the first things that happened
after the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down
at Firdos Square in central Baghdad,
was a whole different thing entirely.
It was a kind of mass plundering of government buildings,
where people came in and looted, they took things.
They took the air-conditioners.
They took the desks.
They took the copper wiring out of the buildings,
and people all over Iraq observed this,
and they realized this place is falling apart.
The country is in chaos,
and the Americans have come to liberate us,
but they're not putting anything in its place,
and Iraqi's were used to being ruled by governments
that they didn't particularly like or trust,
but this was a whole different level of anarchy.
And then they thought, there must be something,
there must be something afoot,
and what was afoot, of course,
was their sense that the American presence was
out to do them in.
There was a whole series of insurrections,
where discontent turns to furor,
and furor turned to a sense of resistance,
and resistance turns to terrorism,
with one group after the other
aiming at the American occupation.
That's where I came to Baghdad
in the spring of 2004, with my colleague, Mary Calder,
from London School of Economics
on the left of your picture here,
and that's our translator on the right.
I'm dining with this guy,
who's the head of the Association of Muslim Clerics
of Al Anbar Province.
This is the leading Sunni Arab Muslim organization,
and asking him the simple question,
which is, what's going on,
why are Americans such a target of resistance?
We could understand how anyone wouldn't want to be occupied
by another country, but this is a whole
'nother level of resistance.
And what the Mullah told us was
that you know they had a theory.
It was kind of a conspiracy theory,
that the reason the Americans came, they decided,
it had nothing to do with oil.
It had nothing to with weapons of mass destruction.
They said, it was because the Americans were secretly
in league with Saddam Hussein, and then when that puppet
wasn't performing, they wanted to get rid of him
because they were afraid that the revolution was coming.
The Muslim revolution that would bring Sunni Arabs
into a whole new leadership, Muslims into power
against this secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
And he said, that's what the Americans
didn't want to happen.
They didn't want us to take over our own country.
So, behind this insurrection was the sense
that the Americans were there to keep them
from establishing a Muslim and Sunni state.
Now, it's a little unrealistic in the sense
that there are only 20% of the population
in Iraq are Sunnis, 60% are Shia,
and the other 20% are Kurds.
And yet they felt at least in that
region that they had a certain primacy,
they said, a certain kind of heritage.
After all, during Saddam Hussein's rule,
all of the leadership was in Sunni hands
and they assumed that that would kind of happen,
they realized it wouldn't.
George Bush talked about democracy in Iraq,
what that meant to them, democracy means,
that the majority rules and the majority are Shia,
it means winner take all,
it means the Sunnis are gonna be nothin'.
Democracy means that the Sunnis are gonna be
second-class citizens in their own country.
So when this guy came out of Jordan,
and he said, look you Sunnis you need to do something,
you need to march together,
you need to follow a new line,
we're going to create our own Muslim kingdom after all.
Follow me!
Zarqawi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
gangster in Amman Jordan, he had tattoos and yet,
he proclaimed that he was part of Al Qaeda,
Al Qaeda of Iraq.
And Osama bin Laden, even though he kind of winced
when he saw the tattoos and he didn't like
the idea, the anti-Shia rhetoric,
said, well, kinda nice to have more Al Qaeda right,
okay, okay, we'll put up with him.
So there was Al Quaeda in Iraq
and the insurrection spread like crazy.
And the target was a combination of Americans
and Shia forces whom they were afraid
were going to, under the rubric of democracy,
take over Iraq and run it purely for the benefit
of Shia and those Sunni Arabs would be dirt.
That's, as I say, when I came to Iraq,
we saw pictures like this on the television.
Look familiar, you know?
The prisoners, often foreigners,
in orange jumpsuits and behind them,
black-clad people with the black flags
and the decapitations,
and that was happening under Zarqawi, Al Qaeda in Iraq.
But it didn't last forever, one thing,
Al-Zarqawi was killed by American forces,
they had to show a picture of his head
in order to prove to people he really was killed.
So that's not really what killed off
Al Qaeda in Iraq, however.
What killed off Al Qaeda in Iraq was
quite a different thing, it was in a policy
by the American military under General David Petraeus,
that President Bush announced as
the surge, as a surge of forces
but that was really a misnomer 'cause the forces
were only surged in the city of Baghdad.
In the rest of Iraq, particularly in Al-Anbar Province,
it was just the opposite.
The plan was to withdraw the American troops
because they had become such a target
of the resistance in western Iraq,
and replace it with the Sunni tribal leaders
themselves and their own militia,
and the Americans would give them weapons to fight Zarqawi.
Because this new Al Qaeda in Iraq
they were as much of a threat
to the old Sunni leadership
in Iraq as they were to the Americans
and the Sunni leaders wanted to reclaim
their own authority, so they were happy
to take the weapons of their own volition,
and fight against Iraq and the Americans
were happy to see Iraqis fighting Iraqis.
And they could just focus their troops on Baghdad
where they became a kind of police force.
It was wildly successful,
it's called The Awakening,
where American troops moved out of Al-Anbar Province,
the tribal leaders took over.
They were given the weapons and the authority
and the money in order to fight their own campaign,
and they were pretty successful
in getting rid of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Until, this happened,
I know this is a long-winded story
but it's all connected and it all makes sense
so I want you to bear with me,
'cause it all is relevant to what is happening
to ISIS now, because in 2011 when
in a plan that was worked out by Bush
long before Obama became president,
and then Obama carried it out,
eventually the American troops would withdraw,
and then they did,
and then the Iraqis took over and they were fully in charge
under the leadership of this guy,
this is actually my own picture.
I interviewed al Maliki, oh,
years before he became the leader in Iraq
when he was, I actually was disappointed,
I wanted to interview the leader
of the Shia and the Sunni parties,
and I couldn't interview the leaders
so they kind of passed me off
on the second-rate Shia party, the Dawa Party,
and this second-rate, kind of office manager,
and that was al Maliki.
And fairly recently I went back over the tapes
listening to that interview,
in what was the dullest interviews I've ever had.
It said absolutely nothing of interest,
it was, oh yes Shia and Sunni have always worked together,
we will live together in harmony,
oh yes it will be peace, and then thank you,
yes that's very interesting.
But this guy, in part because he was so dull and so drab,
the Americans and others supported him
because they thought, oh he's the good kind of,
you know he has no interest in power,
he'll be a good kind of placeholder
until we find somebody really good
to lead the Iraq government.
They underestimated al Maliki.
'Cause he picked up a cue from Saddam Hussein
which is, you rule by bribery and by intimidation,
and by having a good network of support,
and immediately started giving away plum jobs
and office positions and military positions
to people who knew nothing about the military,
to his buddies and Shi'ite friends.
And the Shi'ites prospered under al Maliki,
and the Sunnis, tsk, you guessed it.
Once again they were second-class citizens.
Once again, they were waiting for a savior
to come out of the desert,
and to give new leadership.
That's where this guy steps in.
He was, in fact, with Zarqawi,
he was part of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
And what al-Baghdadi was doing initially
was simply reviving Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Pictures on the left were pictures
that the Americans took when he was
briefly held under detention,
back in the old Al Qaeda in Iraq days.
But then when he tried to revive the movement,
by this time it was too late,
and he let this beard grow out
and he stood in front of the main mosque in Mosul
and proclaimed himself the Great Caliph
of the new Islamic State.
The Caliph?
I'm the King of the World, I'm the King,
look at me, al-Baghdadi.
Extraordinary megalomania, but,
who would follow such a person?
Well, the answer is interesting.
Because there was a following and he did have
extraordinary military success.
ISIS which he renamed it after
he got in a fight with Osama bin Laden
and Osama bin Laden says, look,
you guys gotta be nice with Al-Nusra,
this other kinda Al Qaeda group that are around,
why don't you guys get together
and al-Baghdadi said, nuts to that (chuckles),
we don't need you Osama bin Laden,
we don't need Al Qaeda, we're changing our name,
we're going to be the Islamic State.
It proclaimed itself the Islamic State,
and was wildly successful, I mean,
just within a matter of months in 1915
they suddenly were in charge of most of eastern Syria
and western Iraq, now I know that when you look on a map,
it looks like there's just a spiderweb
of ISIS extension but that spiderweb is where people live.
Most of, you know when I would fly over
from Amman, Jordan into Baghdad,
I remember looking out of these little planes down at
just miles and miles of nothin',
you know there's just desert.
Except for these little oases of streams
and roads, that's of course, what ISIS held.
So when you see this kind of spiderweb of ISIS control,
it really means that they control much more than that.
And they control it with an interesting combination
of things, one was ideological,
and a kind of vision of a certain kind of bizarre
millenary and apocalyptic strand of Islam,
which is part of Islamic tradition
but not a very popular one,
or a particularly prominent one and yet,
you know within part of Saudi Arabian heritage,
and it was something that was picked up by al-Baghdadi
and expanded, they were part of this
end of the world, you know, final days,
it was kind of like the end times you know prophecies
within evangelical Christianity,
and we can try to plant that onto Islam.
This kind of vision that they were at the end of days
and they were creating a whole new world,
the ISIS Apocalypse.
That had attraction to many,
but for others it was simply they got a job.
You know there were all of these members
of Saddam Hussein's army,
he had the largest army in the region,
and when the Americans came in part of the deal was
that they wouldn't hire any of the old Baghdad Army
for the new army, they wouldn't hire any of
the Ba'ath Party administrators for the new administration,
so you had these literally 10s of 100s of thousands
of people, competent people, military,
and administrators out of work,
most of them Sunni.
So ISIS gave them jobs.
Mosul ran very efficiently under ISIS
in part because the old Ba'ath Party administrators
finally had their jobs again,
and they could run the city and ran it pretty efficiently.
So for many it was just the lure of territorial control.
And you'll see the crowds of, these are ISIS supporters,
but they're just ordinary Sunni Arabs,
who were looking for work, looking for a role,
looking for dignity, looking for a role in public life
which they didn't have.
There were some extreme of course,
there was a lot of anti-Christian talk,
a lot of anti-Shia, this is Shia Kafir, the enemy,
you know, in front of a Shia mosque.
But it was predominantly this sense
of Sunni Arab empowerment,
that propelled ISIS both in Syria as well as in Iraq
because, of course, as life would have it,
the same kind of uprising was happening in Syria
with the Assad regime where in Syria
the Sunni Arabs are actually the majority in the country
and yet, the Assad regime being
a kind of Shia, Alawites,
and Christian supporters,
the Sunni also felt like second-class citizens.
So you had this huge region,
of eastern Syria and western Iraq,
join together for a time under ISIS control.
And this map shows one of the largest
extents of their control in 2015.
By 2017 and by the beginning of 2018,
the geographical control of ISIS had shrunk to very little.
You can see how the kind of spiderweb network
has disappeared, a lot of the region in the north
was liberated by Kurds,
both Kurds from Iraq and Syrian Kurds,
that became a very effective fighting force
with the US protection because both
Turkey and Syria and to some extent Iraq
governments were all suspicious of the Kurds
because they were afraid the Kurds
would try to create their own separate government,
their own separate region.
And right after the end of the ISIS defeat in Mosul in fact,
Kurdistan and northern Iraq did try to proclaim itself
as separate and the Baghdad government went berserk.
But despite that and largely with American support
the Kurds were able to mount this effective
resistance against ISIS control,
so by the end of the 17th beginning of the 18th,
it was pretty much over.
I was there right in the beginning of '18
when they were still fighting in Mosul,
but as we came closer to the city
you could see the areas that ISIS had retreated from,
these are my pictures of the bridges
that had been blown up by ISIS retreating
so you would have to ford around the bridges,
this is a village right outside of Mosul.
When I saw this picture I stopped the jeep,
I asked the driver to stop so I could get out
and take closer pictures and he said,
no, no, don't put one foot outside of this car.
And I said, why not, he said, you could blow up,
this place is full of land mines.
So if you wanted to come back to the village,
first of all, what do you do about the land mines
and then if you look at every building
is destroyed in this village.
There's no electricity, there's no water,
there's no means of rebuilding in the village.
So yeah ISIS is gone but what are the people gonna do,
and the answer is, they go out here,
these huge camps have been created
almost overnight by the United Nations
High Commission for Refugees, and I have to say,
they've done an extraordinarily good job.
They've gotten this whole refugee camp thing down,
absolutely perfectly.
When you go into the camp you'll see
that the roads have been bulldozed and created
with gravel strips and as you can see on either side here,
there are about 14 tents and these are tents
that are tall enough that you can actually walk inside.
On either side and in the middle
there's a big kitchen area,
and then on either end there are
toilets, facilities for both men and for women.
And then they have big areas, playgrounds for kids,
schools for kids, medical facilities.
It's extraordinarily well done.
But it's still a refugee camp,
I mean, it's a well-done refugee camp,
but still it's a refugee camp.
So we're talking with these guys who were telling me
what it was like to live under ISIS rule in Mosul,
and they, saying at first they were Sunni Arab,
so at first they supported ISIS,
they said it gave it, we had jobs,
first time, he said, in years we've had jobs.
So they did fairly well except
they said over time, ISIS began turning on them,
on the Sunni Arabs in Mosul,
they became more and more paranoid,
more and more suspicious.
This guy on the left had worked for a while
as a civilian with the Iraq government police
and when ISIS found out about it,
he said he found himself in a field one night,
and then he didn't know why he was put there,
until other people in the field
they suddenly start falling over,
and he realized they were being shot.
So he just fell down and played dead for a while
until the shooting stopped and then he was able
to sneak back up and he got his family,
and they got out of town as quickly as they could.
This guy on the right,
went to jail for two months for smoking cigarettes.
So he also left when he had an opportunity to leave.
And now here they are, now, here they are.
Now what?
That brings the question of what is the future?
I mean the ideal future of course,
is to deal with the problem
that created ISIS in the first place.
Define some role for Sunni Arabs
within both Syrian and Iraqi public life.
That means, both Damascus and Baghdad
finding a way both politically,
changing the constitution in some ways in the case of Iraq,
and being more open, giving more benefits
to the people of all regions,
to finding a way to get them more
in control of their own lives.
That's the ideal plan,
where Arab Sunnis abandon ISIS,
but Baghdad and Damascus embrace the Sunnis,
I call this plan A, integration.
Well that's not happening.
What about plan B?
Plan B would be, if you create a whole new
Sunnistan, because as I said,
eastern Syria and western Iraq,
primarily Sunni Arabs, back in the Ottoman Empire days,
you know those were kind of contiguous regions,
why don't you put 'em together now and create a new nation?
Call it, I just made it up,
Sunnistan or something like that,
you know and it would be a place
where Sunnis can run their own country,
but of course, in my fantasy,
in my fantasy both Iraq, Baghdad and Damascus
would be happy to get rid of the Sunnis right?
So this way, Baghdad could keep the richest part of Iraq,
and you know the Shia majority
and you know Bashar al-Assad,
to keep the Christians, the Alamites on the coast,
the richest part of Syria and they'll let
the Sunnis have their own pl--,
that's not gonna happen either.
So much, there's no indication,
you'd need Saudi, Turkish, Iran involvement.
No indication they're moving in that direction.
Which leads us to plan C,
which is really no plan at all.
Plan C is that you kinda defeat ISIS militarily,
but nothing happens.
Go to Ramadi and Fallujah the two towns
been liberated from ISIS now for a couple years,
nothing has happened.
They have not rebuilt the cities,
their cities are still a mess.
The people are still out of work.
The Sunnis still feel like second-class citizens,
all the conditions that gave rise
to the ISIS in the first place continue,
the only difference is that without
ISIS control, the tribal leaders have now
taken a more traditional role in providing
the kind of leadership in the vacuum of power,
in the vacuum of leadership,
in the absence of integration of Sunnis
in the public life in both Syria and Iraq
that they had before.
Which can be thought of as a step in the right direction,
but will that last forever?
For one thing, ISIS hasn't really gone.
There are at least 30000 by US military count
guerrilla fighters still.
I get a kind of update of ISIS in Iraq daily,
and every day there are incidents,
every day there are killings, there are guerrilla attacks,
and sometimes, you know, a half dozen.
They don't make the New York Times
because there's all little attacks.
But they're still there.
There are pockets of land right along
the Syrian-Iraq border that are still under ISIS control.
So, ISIS still there, it hasn't left.
You could say well it's getting smaller.
Yeah, maybe,
maybe, if no new people have joined them.
But the US is movin' out (laughs),
and as it moves out the Kurdish network
that has been controlling ISIS
and controlling the expansion of ISIS,
is now seriously degraded and is under threat itself.
By Syria, Turkey, by the Iraq government.
So it's not just, oh, we've done our job,
mission accomplished, our soldiers have done their job
and they can now leave, you're leaving
a situation now where the Kurds
no longer have the support which is
really terrible for them, extremely irresponsible,
after they've done the heavy lifting
of the fighting against ISIS to be abandoned,
but also it means that you now have the opportunity
for ISIS to continue to expand.
And then there are these people.
Now these people are all this extraordinary Jihadi network
that ISIS fostered, largely online,
through internet connections, through Twitter accounts.
It brought young people all over the world
into the region to be fighters for a time,
I mean, truth be told, they were just cannon fodder.
Poor people would be recruited,
and they think oh we're going to glorious war,
we're gonna fight for the Great Caliph.
And I remember, at the beginning wondering
why al-Baghdadi would want these people
'cause foreigners make terrible soldiers,
they don't know the language, they haven't been trained,
what the devil he's gonna do with them.
Then I realized, oh I know what he's gonna do with them.
He'll put suicide belts on them,
throw them out in the front line
and let 'em blow themselves up,
and that'll take care of that.
You don't have to worry about integrating
them into the army and you've got an extremely
effective military force.
If you have people willing to blow themselves up
they can do all kinds of stuff.
You can take a very small military force,
which is what ISIS has always had
compared with the Syrian or Iraqi military,
and just scare the crap out of the huge military enterprise
because you have people who are willing
to just stand up in front of you and blow themselves up.
And a lot of them were people like this,
all of whom by the way, look at 'em,
foreigners from all over Europe,
North Africa, they're all dead,
they never last more than a couple months.
Now some of them are still alive
and there is this broader network
that was fostered through the glossy online magazines
like Dabiq and particularly,
not just through the magazine articles
that glorified the martyrs and they glorified
the great cause, the attractiveness,
but I have a couple of my students
who speak Arabic and are from middle eastern backgrounds
who are online interacting on these Jihadi networks,
and they've come up with some of the things
you're going to see.
There is on Twitter and on Telegram
which is a Twitter kind of forum
and also on Tor which is kind of the dark web,
there are all these social networks
where there's Jihadi conversation
an extraordinary kind of communication
in this network of people.
They kind of, they thrill each other,
they kind of feed on each other's enthusiasm
for this imaginary war, this great battle
in which they're involved.
I told some people earlier when we were talking about how,
my students were in contact with this kid
in Toronto Canada who's 16 years old.
And the kid said, you know, he was in on a Jihadi network
with all these people online,
he said my parents are trying to take away my computer,
they found out, and he says but it's not gonna work.
He says 'cause I have other ways of getting online,
he says, besides, I've got to, he says,
this is the only community I've ever known.
These are the only friends that I have.
He said I feel more real when I'm online,
with the Jihadi network,
which he called (speaks foreign language), the family.
I'm more online when I'm with this family
than with my own family, or with people I know in school.
What an extraordinary thing to say,
I mean you could see how people individually
who are marginalized for whatever reason,
personal, or social, or because they're
in an expatriate community of less-than-friendly neighbors,
they would feel life, feel an identity,
feel a connection online.
And these people continue, they're still online,
my students are still in contact with them,
the chatter has not stopped.
It's gone away from, they're not focusing
on Iraq and Syria so much anymore,
now they're talking about the Philippines,
they're talking about Africa and they're talking about
the United States, they're talking about France,
you know, or this is last year,
where an ISIS supporter took a truck
and drove down the wrong way of a bike path in Manhattan.
When the truck stopped and he tumbled out,
he left a note behind saying,
ISIS is alive.
Well maybe ISIS, isn't fully alive
but it's certainly alive in this kind of far flung.
Imagine a cyber-community where reality
is only as real as your perception of it.
And then there are people who lived
in these cities that have been liberated.
This is Mosul after the end of the bombing.
This is Mosul.
You can't go back to that.
There's no money for rebuilding it.
These cities are not gonna be rebuilt,
certainly not very quickly.
Where are all the people,
all people are with these guys
that I talked with this last year,
and I'm going back to Iraq in about three weeks,
and I'm going to Mosul, I'm going to try to follow-up
on some of the contacts I've made there.
So I asked these guys, what're you gonna do next?
And they said, well of course we wanna go back,
but there's nothing to go back to.
And I said what's gonna happen?
He said, well, some people are gonna turn to ISIS again.
He said right here in the refugee camp,
I've talked to people, they're thinking about it.
He says, you know we're so angry, we're just so angry.
We're angry at the Iraq government,
we're angry at the Americans.
Yeah, they liberated us but look what they did,
they liberated but they took away our cities,
took away our homes, took away our families, our friends.
What's gonna happen?
I don't know, is ISIS over?
Is ISIS over?
I don't know.
That's the question for all of us.
Thank you for your attention, I appreciate it,
we can have a little discussion.
(audience clapping)
Thank you.
We now have time for questions.
We have a few guidelines for you.
Please raise your hand if you have a question,
one of us will bring the mic to you.
Please stand up when you ask your question,
and Priya you will have to go to students.
Hi thank you for coming to speak with us
today about this topic so,
in your plan B, in creating a sort of Sunnistan,
how would this plan sort of succeed,
and why is it not feasible?
Well, first of all, let me say, am I live?
First of all I think I'm the only one,
you know who's a proponent of this plan B.
Because even though I said, maybe Baghdad or Damascus
would be happy to get rid of Sunni regions,
they haven't been racing to this as a live opportunity.
And as I said it would also take realistically
the coalition of support, from Turkey, and Iran,
and Russia, major players in the region,
in order for such a thing to be viable.
And then of course, it would take a massive amount
of international aid, which is where the United States
presumably would come in.
If the United States was really interested
in trying to develop some sort of stable and lasting peace
within the region.
But since it would be a Sunni government
and a Sunni region that has,
at least not so far been very hospitable
and friendly to Americans (chuckles),
I can't easily see any American government,
forget about the present one,
but any American government quickly jumping in
at this opportunity.
So I think there's still lots of reasons
why it wouldn't work and as I say,
I think I'm probably the only proponent of it,
it just seems like a cool idea but it's not gonna work.
I, oh yes, yes. No you got it, you got it.
You sure? Yeah go for it.
Alright.
Yeah thank you for the talk.
Why don't you turn sideways so everybody can see ya?
Thank you for the talk, it's been excellent.
So if you were able to get into the room
with Trump right now, what would you recommend for him?
Read your intelligence reports (laughs).
(audience laughing)
Oh gee.
Clearly any American president
should be cognizant of the impact
of American decisions and although I'm certainly
sympathetic with the idea
that we want to bring our US troops back from
the region and also back from Afghanistan,
the trick is to do it in such a way
that it's not gonna create more chaos as a result.
And right now, Iraq and Syria are
poised between three very ambitious international actors,
Iran, Russia, and Turkey.
All three of which are very eager to maintain their,
and extend their stakes within the region.
And the Kurds unfortunately are the biggest
obstacle to their success, which is tragic,
because as I said, first of all,
because the Kurds are wonderful people,
they've been dealt such a bad, you know,
card in history by not ever having had
the opportunity to have their own country
or their own region.
But also because they were the ones who were
the major force in defeating ISIS,
but right now when I go to Iraq in a couple weeks,
I'll be going to Erbil, I'll be going to Kurdistan,
so I'm sure I'll get an earful of their concerns about this.
so I think I'd tell him what people have been telling him,
and I think what he has been hearing because,
this Twitter announcement, we're gonna move out of Syria
immediately has now been modified a little bit with,
oh well, after a while, and oh well,
we're gonna immediately come back in if ISIS regains
its footing, which by the way, it certainly will.
Particularly if the Kurds are kind of demobilized.
Hi thank you so much for your talk.
So you had touched on the power of social media,
especially for ISIS, so,
I kinda wanted to throw it back to
when the fighters first were on the way to siege Mosul,
and the big hashtag was AllEyesOnISIS,
and that actually hit within 24 hours
the number one trending item on Twitter
for the Arab-speaking world.
So I was just kinda wondering,
how do we change that narrative,
how do we like stem the influence of ISIS on social media
since that's so huge to their aims,
and then also how does that curb the flow of recruits
and not just what ought to be done, but who ought to do it?
Yeah that's an interesting question,
I think the last question's probably the most interesting,
because America's ability
to manipulate public attitudes
through kind of public relations and media influence,
it's extremely marginal and often counterproductive.
The American military helped to create
the problem in the first place,
in the way that I've just described,
and I think it does have a role in trying to come up
with long-range solutions, but,
that long-range solution I think
has to have some sort of equitable role for Sunni
leadership within both Syria and Iraq.
And that means, first of all, working with Iranians,
to some extent Russians, but particularly Iran,
and both Damascus and Baghdad,
they probably have the single largest influence.
Which I think was what the Obama administration
was aiming for in part with this rapprochement
over the nuclear arrangement,
because even at the time there was talk about
how this was really only part of a larger strategy
to work with Iran in the rebuilding, and restructuring,
of Iraq and Syria, and I think that,
clearly is an appropriate route to go.
The current administration by backing off
from Iran, showing no interest whatsoever
in working with Iran, I think it makes it really
very difficult for Americans to have
any kind of leverage in the region, any.
All they can do is have pamphlets
or you know these counter-terrorism videos
that they expect people to see online.
Which between you and me are worthless,
it's not working.
Yeah what I just said not everybody would agree with,
but that's my opinion.
Hi, thank you for your talk.
I'm curious about.
I hear voices but I don't, oh there you are (chuckles).
I thought they were in my head for a second.
I was really interested in your slide
about your interviews with the Sunni Muslim men
in the refugee camps, and I'm curious,
were you able to get interviews with any women
that might have lived through that same experience,
and if so what was their take?
Yes.
I talked with quite a few women, actually.
The women, in general, share the opinion of the men,
the women were, if I can generalize,
more concerned about keeping their families together.
Probably the most moving, I did have slides
but I didn't show that, were women that I met
who were Yazidi, who had been in Sinjar.
Yazidi is a religious community,
it's an ancient religious community,
kind of sun-worshiping, and for that reason
they're regarded by some Muslims as devil-worshipers.
And so ISIS was able to claim
that the Yazidis were devil-worshipers,
therefore they could be taken into slavery,
even worse, the women could be taken into sex slavery.
And so I talked with a couple of mothers who had
told me just, deeply moving stories
of how they rescued their daughters,
how they protected their daughters
from being sold into sex slavery.
Sold, I mean, they'd be taken to warehouses and raffled off.
She said, for just a few dollars to some dirty old man,
I'm quoting what the mothers would tell me.
And how they were able to hide out their daughters,
who were right there, I could see 'em,
they made it, they were out.
And how she was, you know, hoping now for a better future.
Now the problem is they can't go back to Sinjar either.
It's been destroyed like the other towns
that have been rescued that you have to destroy them
in order to rescue them.
So when I talked with them,
they were in a camp in Diyarbakir in Turkey,
which is the largest Yazidi camp,
that's the reason why I went there I just
was really interested in
the fate of the Yazidi population.
Some of the Yazidi women by the way have been so articulate,
women who had been taken into sex slavery
and they've come out.
I was at Sulaymaniyah, a city in Iraq,
a little over a year ago where I gave a talk
to Muslim clergy, the Association of Muslim Clergy,
to talk about intolerance and extremism in Islam.
And before I talked they had a Yazidi woman talk,
who looked over at the sea of 400 Muslim clergy,
and just blasted them for, where were you, she said,
when Islam was treated like dirt
and they took me and they used me for sex slavery,
where were you?
And they said, we never supported ISIS.
Yes, but you didn't fight, you know.
It was just a very, very dramatic woman,
where she was able to fire them up,
and show them that even, kind of, allowing,
not speaking up, even allowing their silence to go on,
was an act of outrage and allowed her
to be treated the way that she shouldn't.
And yet there she was speaking, she was just,
man she had all my admiration.
Because in the whole ISIS situation,
the women have suffered some of the worst, it's terrible.
But bravely.
Thank you so much for your talk.
I'm wondering if you think that radicalization
can be uprooted through economic development programs.
I'm sorry I didn't hear the question.
Do you think that radicalization
can be uprooted through economic development?
That is a factor.
You know, we talked about this at Gaston's class,
about what does religion have to do with it?
And as I think you probably picked up from my talk,
there's a religious component.
I mean the whole idea of apocalyptic Islam
and the kind of the end of the world,
it animates a certain crowd within the movement,
but a certain crowd.
Because, for most of the followers,
it was economic opportunity,
the opportunity to get a job and to be somebody.
And so economic development,
particularly insofar as it engages
the Sunni workforce that's been deprived
largely because of the US government policy
that restricted Ba'ath administrators
and former military from being
part of the new administration, the new military,
of the post-Saddam regime.
Yes I think it would make a huge difference.
These things are complicated, it's never,
oh it's all about economics!
No it isn't.
It's all about religion!
No it isn't, it's about economics,
and religion and pride, and ostracism,
and the sense of exploitation and,
you know these are complicated pictures,
and they have different dimensions to them.
Thank you so much for you talk today.
My question kind of revolves around how
today most of what you're talking about
was ISIS and Syria, specifically,
or Islamic State in Syria, and Iraq.
So what do you think the future
of the Islamic State is in other places,
such as the Philippines, Libya, and currently even Nigeria,
where they recently took over an elite base
of the Nigerian military.
Yeah, there are these other outfits called ISIS,
they're largely local groups like Boko Haram
that has kind of taken the name ISIS
as a funny kind of way of legitimizing it.
But there's no central control
from within ISIS in Syria,
and the reason I know this,
the project I'm working on right now
is how terrorist movements come to an end.
And I'm looking at three cases in particular.
One is ISIS, and as I said I'll be going
back to Kurdistan in a couple of weeks, three weeks.
A second is the Khalistan movement,
which I know is not a Jihadi movement,
but it's the one in Punjab that I began with,
because I used to live in the Punjab
and I got all involved in trying to figure out,
the Bhindranwale and the whole Khalistan movement,
and I've been talking with people there
about how the movement came to an end,
and whether it really is ended.
Because as you may know, I don't know how
closely you're connected with the Punjab.
I read your book, I read the part.
Okay, okay but as you know
there is a kind of resurgent movement in Canada
but also in Chandigarh and Jalandhar and places like that.
And the third case that I'm looking at
is the Mindanao movement,
the movement for Muslim Mindanao in southern Philippines.
And I've been going there also talking with people,
including this last year there was
a faction of the militant Muslim movement
had joined with ISIS who took over
the town of Marawi in Mindanao.
And the Philippines government came in
and they thought they would just easily
extricate it from the city but it didn't work out that well
'cause they had infiltrated the whole city.
So they ended up, the Philippine government
using American military, they bombed the hell out of it.
They just totally destroyed the city, just like,
it looks like Mosul or Al-Raqqah,
these just absolutely destroyed cities.
So I went there to try to figure out what's going on,
and for one of the things I figured out
is the number of foreign ISIS people were very small.
There were just a few, there were some people from Jordan,
there were some people from Libya,
but very few and also they didn't integrate well
with the fighters because they didn't know the language,
I mean, you know, it's understandable.
Foreign fighters are really not very useful,
unless you just use them for suicide attacks
and you know throw a suicide belt on 'em,
throw 'em out there.
But so ISIS was really a kind of name
to give a radical street cred to a group
that was just an extremist branch
of the Moral Independence Movement itself.
But, as in Mosul and Raqqah,
after the Philippine government did its dirty work
of destroying the city,
now you got a whole host of new young people
who wanna become radicalized.
'Cause they're really pissed off at what
the Philippine government has done.
And you can understand the feeling, you know.
Maybe they didn't have any particular political sentiment,
but suddenly in comes the government
and it destroys your city and kills your friends,
you're gonna be pretty unhappy.
So now the movement has a new leash on life
in part because of the extreme action
of the government in trying to get rid of it.
Is it ISIS, I don't think so,
the same way Boko Haram is not ISIS in Nigeria.
Or the movement in the Maghreb,
Al Qaeda Maghreb is not really ISIS,
but it has taken on the name to kind of
give it a sense of affiliation.
The same with Al-Shabaab in Somalia for example.
Hello. Hi.
Okay, so when ISIS was building its
outreach strategy, let's call it,
to what degree did it rely on past ideologies
of terrorist movements like abd-al-Salam Faraj
or Sayyid Kotb or Timothy McVeigh,
and to what degree did it build its own
kind of scholarly body to create
kind of an ideology for the movement
when it was expanding internationally
and in Iraq and Syria?
Are you talking about the kind of apocalyptic
millenarian ideology, or you're talking about
the organizational strategy?
No the apocalyptic millenarian ideology
and the justifications for their attacks abroad,
as in France and Belgium and whatnot.
They're actually two separate questions.
I mean the apocalyptic imagery,
this has been around for a while,
this is, I mean, in most religious traditions
you'll find some strange little group,
you know like Christians with the signs saying,
the end of the world is near, you know, it's about to come,
or actually it's gotten larger.
I don't know whether you follow the end times novels,
the Left Behind novels.
Maybe if you have some evangelical friends
in your family they've heard about it.
These are the largest-selling books
in recent history in the United States.
They've topped the New York Times list for
years in some cases.
And you'd never heard of them.
Because most people are not in touch with this kind of
evangelical apocalyptic subculture
that's very lively in the United States.
Most people didn't even realize that they existed until
they voted in huge numbers for the current administration
and they're kind of one of the backbones
of his popular support.
But one of the tenets of this idea
is that the rapture is coming,
the end of the world is coming soon,
and with the end of the world there's gonna be
great warfare, great fighting.
Israel is going to be very important
because that's where the, you know, the Antichrist
is gonna wage war.
That's one of the reasons why they wanna defend Israel,
why Israel is very important,
you gotta move the American embassy into Jerusalem.
Wait a second all this stuff is beginning to make sense
that we see politically.
But so in Christianity,
there is this whole trajectory there as,
there's a millenarian strain,
in Hinduism there's a millenarian strain, and in Buddhism,
and there is a millenarian strain
in both Shia and in Sunni Islam,
and so this has been around for a while,
he's resuscitated it and made it,
what's different is he's made it
into a kind of political strategy.
And actually created the Islamic State, the Caliphate,
hasn't waited until the end of times,
until the Mahdi returns or whatever.
It's here man, you can come and join it,
you can actually be in the Caliphate.
whoa, you can, it's there?
Yeah sure, come on over.
That's what's really different
and that's what gives it a kind of international appeal
where you know they can say this is not just a wild idea,
this is actually happening, you can come and see it at work.
Hi thank you for coming to speak today.
Part of David Petraeus's sentiment was nation-building
is like eating soup with a knife,
I was wondering if you think we're doing
an effective job at nation-building,
or what we could be doing better,
or what your thoughts
are on the process. No we're doing a lousy job,
probably, just stop trying to nation-build,
if that's the way we're doing it.
I mean there are obviously it seems to me things
that any powerful government
like the United States could do,
but it's going to have to do it in concert
with other powerful governments,
particularly ones that have influence in the region,
this is why Iran is so critical to both,
Syria and Baghdad because it has the ear of
Shia leaders in both countries.
I think it was when there were these kind of rapprochement
between the United States and Iran,
there was an interesting moment during the rise of ISIS,
when this al-Maliki guy
that I showed a picture of was tossed out of office,
and a new guy came in it was kind of
clear that Iran was playing a role in the background.
Soleimani who was one of the leading generals,
the leader of the Quds Force in Iran,
was in Baghdad at the time.
So, there's kind of some suggestion
that there was some secret deals with the United States,
military or CIA or something.
I don't know, I don't have access
to that kind of information.
But my hunch is that there were
some deals like that being made,
and that's actually I think very positive.
Because it shows that an attempt
to try to use Iranian influence to get
the government to being more open to the needs
of involving the Sunnis which I think
is absolutely essential for any kind of long-term success
of peace in the region.
But it can't be accomplished by,
certainly not by the United States by itself.
The United States can play a role,
but it has to be with a whole coalition of forces,
influences on those two governments.
Hi, does the UN have a plan
for their refugee camps,
and what role do you see the UN playing in the near future?
I'm sorry again I didn't--
Does the UN have
a plan for their refugee camps,
and what role do you see the UN playing in the future?
Well the UN doesn't have,
the UN is just there to help.
And those refugee camps will stay
as long as there are refugees,
as long as people need a place to stay.
And as I say, they've done a wonderful job,
but I've also been to refugee camps in Jordan,
which have been around a lot longer, like five years.
I've been in like the largest refugee camp in Jordan.
And when I was there I was going to go inside
and do some interviews and as soon as I got to
the edge of the camp I realized,
there's no way I can go inside.
The place was a madhouse.
Immediately swarmed with kids,
there were people swarming all over the taxi,
they wanted money.
You had to go in with an armed guard.
And I was thinking what's the difference
between this refugee camp and the one
you saw pictures of?
It's time, really.
And the camp I showed pictures of,
they'd only been up for a couple of months,
and people had just gotten to those camps,
and when they just get there,
they are just so happy to be alive.
They're happy to be alive, their kids are adjusting.
After five years, you're no longer living
in a refugee camp, you're living in a ghetto.
And you've got kids who've been raised,
they may have been eight years old
and now they're getting to be teenagers,
that are beginning to you know see the world differently,
and they're organizing into gangs,
it's not a healthy environment, is what I'm saying.
And you could easily see how, not just gang warfare,
but new forms of ISIS-type organizations
could easily develop in such unfortunate situations.
And I don't see any other option,
because those cities are not being rebuilt,
the money isn't there.
Even Ramadi and Fallujah,
these two central towns in Al-Anbar Province
that were supposedly liberated a couple of years ago,
they're still almost uninhabitable.
So if that's the future then you have
a huge section of the Sunni population
who not only feel like they were second-class citizens,
but now feeling like they are,
you know put in prison camps and incarcerated
for simply their ethnicity.
And that's just a terrible prospect for the future.
Hi.
So on the one hand you stressed about them
losing their homes, as you just said,
their cities are not being built
so they have no place to go to,
and at the same time you were talking about
them looking for an ideology and therefore,
the prospect of radicalization again.
And you know you must pardon my ignorance,
but I was really wondering,
what about alternative kinds of ideologies
that must or might exist in the region,
are there any liberal people among the Sunnis,
are their liberal Shias, do the Sunnis and Shias
talk to each other, are there common voices,
is there some kind of platforms
that are being created apart from the Islamic ones,
apart from the ones that you described?
Yes, I mean there are, back in the old Saddam era
there were secular political parties,
there were Marxist parties there were Labor parties.
But after the fall of Saddam,
political organizing quickly coalesced
around ethnic and religious grounds,
'cause that was the easiest way to organize.
It was the easiest way of making connections,
getting in support, so the major political parties
now are all you know around religious lines.
But this is not necessarily a bad thing,
getting back to are there more moderating forces.
Like the clergy I interviewed,
that I showed a picture of was the head of
the Association of Muslim Clergy of Al-Anbar Province.
They're great people, they're very responsible people,
they're the ones who turned against the Al Qaeda,
they don't see this kind of extremism in their interests,
quite the opposite.
I mean ISIS killed these people.
ISIS is not built on the normal
Muslim clergy of the region, just the opposite.
They were cruelly subjected.
ISIS is not a clergy-based movement.
And people don't wrap their heads around it,
well it's a Muslim movement,
it's like, well the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood doesn't have
any clergy in it either,
I mean these are movements of Muslim ideology,
but they're not based on the clerical network.
Like Fallujah is called the City of Mosques,
I mean they had the traditional clergy
have very important role to play
in the social structure of the city.
And given if the city was allowed to
and could be restored,
then these people would have a very important
moderating effect to play.
They would play the kind of traditional
moderate Muslim leadership
that they've been playing all of their lives.
And they should be allowed to be restored to that position,
but as long as there's this kind of social chaos
and there is no city and people are living in tents
in these big refugee camps,
then you've broken apart, you've disrupted
the whole social structure.
You've broken apart the traditional role
that moderate clergy play,
and this opens up possibilities
for whole new extremist movements to come into play,
that's what disturbs me.
Hi thank you for your talk.
So you spoke a little bit about the US's decision
to pull out of Syria and I was wondering
how exactly you think that will affect
the Kurdish population,
and US-Kurdish relations in the future?
It'll be horrible.
You know it would be just devastating.
And I'm not sure that's going to happen because,
and this is just a crazy presidency
where you know pronouncements come out in Tweet,
and then what actually happens sometimes is a little,
is a lot different.
And I think that, or at least I hope that,
there will be greater protection to the Kurds
and that this will not allow for like a mass slaughter,
or a kind of marginalization of the Kurds,
and the worst would be mass slaughter
where they'd actually be killed, which is possible.
Particularly the Turks,
who regard them as terrorists,
and the Syrian government has been
kind of not really favorably disposed to it,
but now it turns out the Kurds are kind of
looking towards the Syrian government as opposed to Turkey
as maybe they can work out some sort of alliance with them.
So it's a very precarious moment
for the Kurds and as I said,
I'll learn more about that in a couple of weeks
when I'm there and I'm sure I'll get my earful
of you know their woes and what their concerns are,
but they're in big trouble right now.
Have we talked ourselves out?
If there are no more questions,
please join me in thanking Professor Mark Juergensmeyer,
thank you. Aw thank you very much.
(audience clapping)
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