News and Media

Ever since ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014, political and military leaders in Iraq and the United States have regarded the liberation of Iraq’s second-largest city as a sine qua non for rolling back the caliphate. The campaign against ISIS has made progress on many fronts, but predictions that the army of terror would soon be dislodged from Mosul appear premature at best.

The primary reason why the assault on Mosul has been repeatedly postponed rests with Iraq’s feeble and fractured central government. Recently, demonstrators loyal to radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr raucously occupied the parliament in Baghdad. As lawmakers fled the scene, the demonstrators – chanting “you are all thieves” – called for the dissolution of the government. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered the arrest of the protesters and declared a state of emergency, but the latest crisis reveals the intensifying power struggle within the political system. In the recent past, such instability has nurtured the jihadist threat.

Under Abadi’s predecessor, political dysfunction in Baghdad set the conditions for the rise of ISIS. Iraq’s central government had welcomed Iranian assistance because of its fear of abandonment by America, and this hardened the Shiite character of the regime. Nouri al-Maliki’s tenure was marked by relentless marginalization of the Sunni minority. First, the Sons of Iraq – the force that with the U.S. had vanquished ISIS’s forerunner, al-Qaeda in Iraq – were disbanded and harassed. The Iraqi army was gradually transformed into a de facto Shia militia. Sunni opposition politicians - including the deputy prime minister - were arrested, and elections were manipulated.

The Shia-dominated government’s chronic misrule now represents the greatest threat to Iraq, according to Emma Sky, a former advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority. Sky observes that the destructive politics of the “green zone” – the walled-off enclave on the Tigris river where Iraq’s political class divvy up state largesse, generally for themselves and their clients – has put in jeopardy Iraq’s entire post-Saddam order. It has alienated crucial constituencies, not least the Sunni and Kurdish minorities whose support is crucial to the liberation of Mosul.

While stationed en masse in Iraq, the U.S. army was dubbed “the defense militia for those [Iraqis] without a militia.” Today, Sky writes, “the sad reality is that Iraq has become ungovernable, more a state of militias than a state of institutions.”

Whatever its costs, the robust U.S. presence in Iraq – political as much as military – ensured a degree of Iraqi social and political cohesion that prevented the consolidation of power in Baghdad under one sect at the expense of others. It is precisely this tyranny of the majority that arose in the wake of America’s withdrawal, and that ISIS has exploited to its advantage among the aggrieved and alienated Sunni minority ever since. Unfortunately for ISIS’s enemies, this state of affairs shows no signs of abating.

The 14th installment of ISIS’s English-language magazine, Dabiq, devoted comparatively little space to celebrating recent bombings in Brussels, dedicating less than two pages to eulogizing suicide bombers Najim Laachraoui, Khalid el-Bakraoui, and Ismail el-Bakraoui.

I emailed her and also sent a message on Facebook. No answer. Then I remembered my sister-in-law uses WhatsApp on her phone. She was in Lahore Sunday for a family wedding. The children were with her. I had no idea if they were staying near Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park. Lahore is a big, beautiful city, full of history, monuments, street food, and fun, Pakistan’s cultural center.

As my in-laws readied themselves for another day and night of wedding festivities on Easter Sunday, the city was reminded that it was also home to discontent and anger.

A splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban targeted a popular park where Easter celebrations were underway. The bomb blast killed more than 73 men, women and children and injured 320. As the chaos unfolded, rioting was spreading in another part of the city as mourners for Mumtaz Qadri, the recently hanged murderer and former bodyguard of liberal lawmaker Salmaan Taseer, marked the 40^th day of his death with nationwide riots and rallies calling for Sharia law in Pakistan. Qadri killed Taseer in 2011 after the lawmaker pushed to reform Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which are often used in disputes to attack neighbors for personal gain. The targets are often Christian Pakistanis.

My sister-in-law thankfully responded to my messages on Whatsapp after what felt like an eternity, “We are fine. The city is in lockdown.” Relieved, I simply replied, “Ok, be safe. Bye,” and returned to the emerging headlines and comments growing on my Facebook feed. There were people asking for blood donations at the hospitals in Lahore. Some messages indicated families were looking for a loved one, and Facebook asked its billion plus members to check in – asking us all if we were safe. 

This was not the first time Christians have been targeted by Islamists in Pakistan. The same group that took responsibility for the attack, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, targeted two Christian churches in March 2015, killing 14 and wounding 70. This Easter’s attack was a possible response to the previous day’s announcement on Voice of Jihad, a website of the Afghan Taliban, announcing “Only Islamic rituals can be celebrated in an Islamic country.”

Lahore’s diverse cultural history can be attributed to the men and women who have traversed its roads for centuries. Rulers have included the Hindus, Sikhs, and Turks. Ptolemy mentions Lahore in his studies of geography in the 2nd century. Descriptions by a Chinese traveler confirm the city’s existence again in the 7th century. Today, it is the capital of Pakistan’s largest province – Punjab.

The Christians in Pakistan, especially Lahore, are part of the diversity and indigenous history of the country. Islamism, and its offspring – groups like Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, are the foreigners; born of Cold War politics to ward off the Russians in Afghanistan and fight India in Kashmir. Such groups have been tolerated for far too long.

As law enforcement began raids and making arrests following the Easter carnage, the real question that needs to be asked is will the government address the madrassas and training camps in southern Punjab, which continue to remain active with the Pakistani government’s knowledge. A 2008 U.S. State Department cable from its Lahore consulate office to Washington, D.C. noted that the number of extremist recruits in Punjab appeared to be increasing in certain areas since 2005. Locals stated this was the result of social services work being increasingly provided by extremist networks who were then “minimizing the importance of traditionally moderate Sufi religious leaders in these communities.” The State Department cable highlights that the locals in affected Punjabi communities want the government to come in to stop the spread of extremist activity, replace the social services attracting the poor with government help instead. It is unclear if any improvements have been made since that 2008 cable.

It is unlikely. But, while we wait for the government to act, others are. There are numerous grass-roots organizations in the country that focus on a range of gaps in society from illiteracy, health education to specifically addressing issues of tolerance and democracy. The Insan Foundation Trust, for example, trains media staff to identify prejudicial content against minorities and women in programming to remove it. More importantly, the training includes learning how to create content to replace that bias to build greater understanding between communities in Pakistan through the entertainment and news aired daily throughout the country.

Chasing jihadists after every attack is not a strategy. It only ensures another Ankara, Belgium, or Lahore. A real strategy requires shutting down extremist channels for recruitment. This includes shuttering their ability to feed a child in a madrassa in return for spewing hate; targeting the foreign governments that sponsor the extremist networks in Pakistan; and asking the educated Islamist sympathizers among Pakistan’s government and military to understand that aligning with extremists in the  fight for Kashmir is not worth losing Pakistan.