english text 178 ephemeral hope of finding a solution for their feeling of misfortune. And that disaster introduced a new danger. The return to the drift towards despotism, the chaotic interventionism of the regional and international actors in the conflicts (Syria, Iraq, Yemen), the interpretation of the conflict in terms of Sunni/Shiite sectarianism, the forgetting of the occupation of Palestine, and a new extension of the terror affecting humanity in the Middle East. However, far from providing a political, social and humanitarian response to those key problems, only the military fight against ISIS has been pursued, despite the fact that it is from those other problems that the new enemy draws nourishment. And in that amalgam of actors and interests, the battle against ISIS is ignoring the necessary attention that would be required to attack the political causes that feed it. The totalitarian powers in the region have regained their strategic value, without reckoning the consequences of the social frustration that they generate and the impulse towards radicalisation that they provoke. Moreover, ISIS takes advantage of the lamentable political and institutional sectarianism to which the realities of Iraq and Syria have led, and it fills the vacuum of dispossessed Sunni populations that have no alternative political project to integrate them and give them visibility. The coalition that is acting against ISIS does not offer any political perspective to the populations that attach themselves to it, nor does it tackle the grave breaches of social injustice and lack of representation in the political system that they suffer. Everything revolves around geostrategic considerations of power and security. The Americans dismantled the Iraqi state and re-established it in accordance with the old but very vivid orientalist and colonialist visions of Arab societies. Their approach to the country was based on a primary conception of Iraqis compartmentalised collectively into communities, and they erected a new system of institutional engineering based on sectarianisation of the country. And once again they imposed a self-fulfilling Western prophecy on the Arab Middle East: a sectarian confrontation, resulting from establishing federalism in a country in which the Sunnis – identified with Saddam Hussein in accordance with the culturalist paradigm of “they’re all the same” – were marginalised from the political system and the oil resources, which were shared between Kurds (governing Kurdistan almost independently) and Shiites (controlling the central government). All of which brought with it a profound feeling of Sunni dispossession. First the Americans and then the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, used every means to combat a Sunni reaction that inevitably became increasingly radical. The collective crushing of the city of Fallujah in November 2004 became a symbol of Sunni “martyrology”. The revolt of the Sunnis radicalised by the sectarian system dominated by Kurds and Shiites in Iraq spilled over into the Syrian conflict and was one of the factors that contributed to its spread. The Syrian regime, seeking to delegitimise the opposition that had been fighting against it since the revolution started in 2011, encouraged the radical outgrowths within its variegated composition. Both Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq and Bashar al-Assad in Syria placed every means at their disposal in order to radicalise their opponents with a view to aiding their fight against terrorism. The rise of ISIS took place slowly over many years. Most of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq initially adopted a passive attitude to ISIS, but later they sought its protection from the exactions of the Iraqi security forces in view of the government’s manifest lack of will to integrate them into the existing political system. The Islamic State organisation had existed in Iraq since 2006 as a group within the Islamic ideological orbit defended and financed by Saudi Arabia to offset the rise of the Shiites and the Iranian influence paradoxically introduced by their traditional American allies in their clumsy, arrogant invasion of Iraq. It was the staging by ISIS in the middle of 2014, with great mastery of the media, of a whole catalogue of provocations (Western hostages and live coverage of beheadings, enslavement of women and children, mass killings, attacks on religious minorities, etc.) that generated Western intervention. The ISIS actions and the attacks perpetrated in Paris in November 2015 were aimed at seeking the direct intervention of the Western armies so that the ISIS forces could present themselves as fighting against colonialism and as the new crusaders. It is a very profitable strategy of social adhesion, in view of the unpopularity of those interventions and of the failures that have accumulated in the contemporary history of the Middle East because they never include a satisfactory political plan for the populations of that region. Moreover, the “Iranian threat” has reached such a level of paranoia (partly fed by the USA since 1979) that the Saudi axis in the Gulf is incapable of conceptualising the region without incorporating it into all its strategic and geopolitical views. As a result, the sectarian paradigm has been manipulated and overstimulated by interpreting the conflicts and their intervention in them in terms of the antagonism between Shiites and Sunnis. The obsessive interpretation that sees the Arab Shiite populations as a fifth column for Iran certainly adopts a distorted focus, given that the conflicts have very autochthonous roots and those populations have reacted because of the marginalisation and contempt to which they are subjected by the regimes that govern them (as in the revolution in Bahrein, crushed by Saudi tanks) and not because of a “natural” identification with Iran. The Iraqi Shiites did not act as a fifth column for Iran in the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s. Similarly, the Arab Shiites do not look to the Iranian religious authorities but to their own Lebanese or Iraqi Arab authorities, who speak out against the Khomeini model of wilayat al-faqih in Iran. It is usually the absolute lack of political will to integrate them in the representation of the state that sets off the violent conflict or confrontation
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