Though US Secretary of State John Kerry is working hard in the Middle East to find Muslim countries to partner in the fight against ISIS, the ones he is courting may be counterproductive. The current regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for instance, are loathed by many Muslims, and not just by extremists. Cairo’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and the patronage state of the Saud family are not wildly popular. A coalition that includes them would likely be ammunition for the ISIS recruiting efforts among disaffected Muslim youth.

The Iran leadership is also regarded with suspicion by many Sunni Muslim activists, but for a different reason. ISIS recruits are Sunni and Iran is Shi’a. But therein lies the importance of Iran. As the largest and most important Shi’a country in the world it has enormous influence over other Shi’a politicians in the region. And it just so happens that two sets of them are located in the seats of power in Syria and Iraq.

To understand the importance of Iran in solving the ISIS problem, therefore, it is important to remind ourselves how ISIS came to power in the first place. Though they are extremists, and portrayed in the Western media as crazy bloodthirsty fanatics, that alone would not have allowed them to ascend to the heights of power that they have now attained.

ISIS has wooed moderate Sunni supporters to their side in both Syria and Iraq. According to an insightful article by Graeme Wood in The New Republic, the ISIS supporters consist of three types—psychopaths, believers, and pragmatists. The psychopaths and believers are largely recruited from outside the region. The cruel executioner in the videos of the beheadings of Westerners is likely a 23-year old former rapper from West London who was lured to the region as a soldier of fortune in a grand imagined war.

The pragmatists in the ISIS ranks are local Sunni Syrians and Iraqis who see the movement as their best hope for getting ahead. In both countries, the Sunnis have regarded themselves as oppressed by Shi’a political leaders—Nouri al Maliki in Iraq and Bashir Assad in Syria. In both cases the large Sunni population had lost hope that they would ever be treated as more than second class citizens in their own countries.

This is where ISIS entered the picture. In Syria, they rescued a failing Sunni insurgency against the Shi’a Alawite regime of Bashir Assad. In Iraq, they employed old army personnel and government administrators from the days of Saddam Hussein. In both cases they gave Sunnis hope and a role to play in public life.

But unlike the psychopaths and the believers, these pragmatic Sunnis could easily get tired of an ISIS regime run on beheadings, rigid social restrictions and strident ideology. They could turn away from the extremists if they were given a chance to become equals in the Syrian and Iraqi society.

This is exactly what happened in 2008 during the Awakening—a period in the US occupation of Iraq in which General David Petraeus called for a surge of troops in the city of Baghdad to maintain order, and a decrease of US military in the Sunni areas of Western Iraq where they had become an irritant and had driven young Sunni men into the hands of al Qaeda of Iraq—the predecessor of ISIS. With money and weapons from the US, the Sunni leadership not only turned away from al Qaeda but also turned on them with a vengeance, effectively keeping al Qaeda out of the spotlight—until 2014.

Once again Sunnis have been lured by al Qaeda style of jihadi activists, now under the banner of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham, or ISIL, since al Sham can be translated as Levant, the old name for greater Syria). More recently in a fit of megalomania it has called itself the Islamic State, as if there could be only one, but it does give a role to the local Sunni leaders. Once again a sense of alienation and disaffection has driven the Sunnis into the extremists hands.

Could these moderate Sunnis, the pragmatists in Graeme Wood’s words, be lured back as they were during the Awakening in 2008? That depends to a large measure on what happens in Damascus and Baghdad, whether the Shi’a governments there are open to shared governance.

This is where Iran comes in. As a kindred Shi’a government it is more than a neighborly spectator on the trials of Iraq and Syria. The leaders of both of these countries are known to bow to the wisdom of Tehran, from which they get considerable amount of counsel and military support. And Iran has a vested interest in keeping calm within the region, and more importantly, keeping a strident, hostile anti-Shi’a crowd like ISIS from its doorstep.

Iran has recently shown that it understands the importance of shared governance in order to appease the Sunnis and keep ISIS support from growing. When the US said that it would not support the al Maliki government in Baghdad without a more open (that is, Sunni inclusive) policy, this position was echoed by Iran, and by the Shi’a clergy in Iraq most closely allied with Iran, Ali al-Sistani. Shortly after the ISIS incursion and the fall of Mosul, Baghdad received an important visitor in the person of Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds force and the most powerful military strategist in the country.

With weeks, al Maliki was gone. In September, 2014, the new Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, took office and pledged to take a more open stance to the Sunni minority. The BBC has dubbed his regime “a new era in Iraq.” But it will take some massive changes, including redrawing the pro-Shi’a constitution, to make Iraq as inviting to the Sunnis as it did during the Awakening period. A great deal of mistrust will have to be overcome on both sides.

Syria faces perhaps an even more difficult challenge in finding a solution that will be agreeable to the Sunni minority as well as to the Alawite and Christian minorities that support the Assad regime. Assad is adamant, and he has already turned down the best opportunity for reconciliation a couple of years ago with a UN proposal for a shared governance peace settlement.

So neither Baghdad or Damascus want to change. But Tehran could make all the difference. The Iranian government is probably the only credible influence on both the Syrian and Iraqi regimes that could persuade them that radical change is essential to stave off the threat of ISIS and the specter of a permanent Islamic State carved out of the hind quarters of both of those countries.

The US can bomb all it wants to. But the only thing that will really make a difference is the erosion of Sunni support for ISIS. This will probably not happen until there is a change in attitude in both Syrian and Iraqi capitals. And in both cases, Iran holds the key.

The hideous images of orange-clad Westerners kneeling beside black-draped executioners that have been broadcast from ISIS-controlled Iraq recently are eerie reminders of similar scenes just ten years ago. At that time the terrorists were agents of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of ISIS.

Why did they use such extreme measures then, and why do they now, and what is the difference between the two? The answers to these questions tell us much about how terrorism works, and how it plays a role in the present Sunni politics of Iraq.

As I argued in my book, Terror in the Mind of God, most acts of terror are instances of performance violence. They are dramatic events meant to shock, and to lure the viewer into the perpetrators’ worldviews. These are performances intended for very specific audiences, including the worldwide audience on television and the Internet.

Take 9/11, for example. Anyone seeing this on television –and that includes most of the developed world—would see an image of war. For the moments that they were stunned by such an image they would be drawn into the worldview of jihadi activists, a view of the world engaged in a great cosmic war. To the extent that they convinced us of the validity of this worldview, they were successful.

Most people in the Muslim world rejected the premises behind that image, and refused to accept the notion of cosmic war. They thought the attack was simply an extreme act of a small group of misfits, or possibly a conspiracy conjured up by the CIA or Israeli secret agents.
Alas, among those who took the image seriously as a valid assertion that great forces were combatting on a global scale were many in the Western media and many political leaders, including the inner circle of the George W. Bush presidency. Hence the “global war on terror” theme that dominated US foreign policy for the rest of the Bush presidency and that lingers on today.

Involving the US in active military engagement was useful for the jihadi ideology since it fulfilled its proposition that the US was the major force that was combatting Muslim politics. The ensuing US invasion and occupation of two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, were further signs that the al Qaeda prophecy of cosmic war was being fulfilled.

In 2004, after the invasion of Iraq, the al Qaeda strategy in Iraq itself also turned to extreme violence. In this case it was the beheadings of seemingly innocent American travelers and journalists.

These mesmerizing acts of terror had two effects. They pulled the US even deeper into military engagement with Sunni Iraqis, thereby alienating the general population of Sunni Iraqis even more than they had been. And these acts also had a chilling effect within the Sunni community —it showed that these forces meant business and were willing to take a life-and-death stance. As a result, it attracted many young Sunnis into the al Qaeda fold, especially after the US attacks and demolition of the city of Fallujah later that year.

For several years it seemed that al Qaeda in Iraq would be a permanent fixture of Sunni politics in the country. Then a remarkable thing happened. Sunni leadership became weary of the extremism, the killings, and the rigidity of al Qaeda, and were lured by a savvy project engineered by US General David Petraeus to remove US troops from the Sunni regions of Iraq and support the Sunni leadership in their efforts to rid themselves of the al Qaeda extremists. This was the so-called Awakening of 2008. Since then, al Qaeda in Iraq has stayed in the shadows.

In 2014, all that changed. After a bitter fight with al Qaeda leadership in Syria and in its central leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, one man came out on top: the Iraqi extremist leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. The Syrian and Iraqi extremist Sunni forces were united under the banner of his Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (the Levant, greater Syria) — ISIS or ISIL. In a blitzkrieg across the region it seized vast reaches of Sunni territory in Iraq the size of Pennsylvania, including the second largest city in the country, Mosul.

Then the beheadings began. In some ways the purposes were the same as they were in 2004. The beheadings of Western journalists and aid workers were clearly meant to inflame the anger of America and the West, and to draw them into a war that would be seen (the jihadis hoped) as evidence of Western militancy against Islam in general. To some extent, that strategy is working.

But there were also large numbers of beheadings of recalcitrant local Sunnis—far more than the Westerners, in fact—that were carried out in hideously public ways, their severed heads displayed on fence posts for all to see. Clearly the point of these actions were meant to intimidate the local population, and to deter any movement towards counterrevolution similar to the Awakening project that had successfully turned the modern Sunni leadership against al Qaeda in Iraq ten years ago.

And there was one more effect of these public acts of horror. In an era of the Internet where Twitter, YouTube and countless other social networks are available to instantly project the power of terrorist acts, these events were meant for a global audience. Specifically they were meant for a global audience of disaffected young Muslim men around the world.

The videos of these beheadings were recruiting devices. As shocking as it might seem to most of us, they had an odd appeal to young men who felt alienated from society and eager to join a force that was bigger than themselves, one that was tough, determined, and took no prisoners. ISIS was for them, and in recent months they have joined in the thousands, streaming from Europe, Britain, US, Australia, Russia, China, even India.

This is new. The old al Qaeda in Iraq did not show much interest in involving foreigners, who would not be well trained for military service, after all, and often would have language barriers that would make them less than ideal soldiers. Moreover they would be coming to battle eager to fight and to kill; they would be loose cannons in a carefully controlled army.

That is probably al Baghdadi’s point. The bulwark of the ISIS military force in Iraq comes from Saddam Hussein’s old army, who were denied roles in the new army in Iraq. Now they have a place, and they are old, seasoned, disciplined soldiers. They likely are not disposed to extremism in any form, and probably are suspicious of the ISIS leadership and its rigid, violent methods. They are also probably the most likely to turn against ISIS some time in the future, should an Awakening kind of solution be offered from the government in Baghdad.

In other words, the old Iraq army stalwarts in ISIS need to be held in check. The intimidating public beheadings are certainly a deterrent. An even greater deterrent is the large number of passionate foreign fighters who would be more than eager to turn against any old army superior who was deemed to be soft or less than loyal to the ISIS regime.

So extreme terror can be a useful device. Whether it will be sufficient in time remains to be seen, especially since there are efforts in Baghdad to be more open and conciliatory to Sunni interests—in other words, to launch a new Awakening that would turn Sunni leadership against their ISIS rulers. That is probably the only thing that will turn the situation around. When that happens the counterrevolutionary Sunnis will have to fight against not only Iraqi extremists but impassioned foreigners willing to die with a vengeance. By luring the foreigners with terrorist images, the ISIS leaders have created a whole new complication to any easy solution in the region.

Initially when I met Nouri al-Maliki I was disappointed. It was in Baghdad in 2004 some months after Saddam Hussein was toppled by invading US troops, and I was part of a small team of scholars led by Mary Kaldor from the London School of Economics who were trying to understand how broken societies could heal in times of conflict. My goal was to talk with Sunni and Shi’a political leaders. I had an interesting interview with Sunni leaders from al Anbar province who were engaged in the resistance against the US occupation, but the main figures in the dominate Shi’a party were too busy. So instead they referred me to the Dawa party, the second largest Shi’a political group. The top official in this party was also unavailable, so I had to settle with a lesser character, essentially the office manager of the Baghdad headquarters of the party. That was Nouri al Maliki.
When I arrived at the makeshift Dawa party headquarters in what had been the old ticket office of an abandoned airfield, al Maliki was waiting to meet with me—no staff, no receptionist, just al Maliki. He was wearing a brown suit with a white shirt and no tie, and he absent-mindedly fingered his wooden prayer beads as he waited for my questions. He was a less than imposing figure.
Going back over the transcripts, I find there was nothing remarkable about the interview. He was careful and cautious in his comments. If there was a dominant theme it was one of inclusiveness—an ironic sentiment, considering how narrowly sectarian he became when he ascended to a position in power. But in 2004, when he was a nobody talking with an American professor, al Maliki was all about pluralism. He thought the new government of Iraq should reach out to all quarters of society, and he regarded his own party as exemplary in this regard. Yes, it was largely Shi’a, as was most of Iraq. But the party included Sunnis and Christians, al Maliki claimed. Otherwise, the interview was quite formulaic.
This bland demeanor largely explains how he made it—how al Maliki was plucked from relative obscurity to the position of Prime Minister, a post that he held for eight years with an increasingly iron hand. Initially he was favored precisely because he was perceived as being not threatening. In a stand-off among contending political interests, the ideal leader seemed to be a second-rate functionary from a second-rate party with a personality that seemed to suggest a lack of political ambition.
This observation turned out to be dead wrong. Once he got into power al Maliki seemed to enjoy it. Rather than embrace all factions of the country, he focused on his base, the Shi’a professional class. Like Saddam Hussein before him, al Maliki showered political favors on his loyal followers, and claimed he was protecting their interests. “Their” in this case, referred to his Shi’a comrades. The Sunnis were left out in the cold. They feared they would be forever second class citizens in the new Iraq.
This was the fear that propelled Sunni leadership into supporting the insurgency against the US occupation. When I was in Iraq in 2004, the leaders told me that the US intended to support the Shi’a in the south and the Kurds in the north to the exclusion of the Sunnis in the west. The de-Baathification process supported by the Americans was an indication of this, since most of the functionaries in Saddam Hussein’s Baath party came from his own Sunni community. For this reason many young Sunnis joined forces with the extremists, the al Qaeda of Iraq led at that time by Abu Musab al Zarqawi. They were tacitly supported by their elders, who saw no other option for asserting Sunni interests in the country.
Perhaps the lowest moment came in 2004 when a protest in Fallujah against the killing of the Palestinian Hamas leader, Sheik Yassin, led to a confrontation with American troops posted nearby the city. When a convoy of American mercenary soldiers associated with the Blackwater security agency drove through town, a gang of young Sunni men attacked it, setting the cars on fire and brutally killing the occupants. The picture that stunned the world was as scene of charred American bodies hanging from the girders of a bridge over the Euphrates River.
In response, Pentagon officials ordered US troops to march on Fallujah, and in two successive skirmishes during that year the city was virtually destroyed. Many of the citizens left. The traditional social structure of the city was severed, and whatever control the elders had over the fiery youth of the city was weakened. Many of the young men fanned out over Iraq, joining forces with Zarqarwi’s al Qaeda extremists, clashing with both the American occupying troops and the Shi’a paramilitary groups, such as the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Then a remarkable thing happened. The Americans stopped battling with the Sunni leadership in al Anbar province and provided them money and arms to fight against the al Qaeda extremists. They promised the Sunnis a greater role in Iraq’s future and freedom from extremists who were annoying the elders with their aggressive, Islamist posturing. This was the Awakening movement in 2007 that was part of the so-called “surge” engineered by General David Petraeus. It did involve a surge of US troups, but they were mostly deployed to the city of Baghdad where they helped to police the neighborhoods and contain the sectarian fighting. Out in the western hinterlands of al Anbar province it was an anti-surge, a decrease in US presence and a support for local leadership.
It was a brilliant strategy and worked well as long as the Americans were in the country. When the US troops left in 2011, it was up to the Iraq government to insure that the Sunni interests were supported and its leadership was respected. This task fell on the Prime Minister, Nouri al Maliki, who proved himself to be woefully short of both tasks. Maliki was busy shoring up his own power by catering to his Shi’a base and, like Saddam Hussein before him, handing out government appointments as rewards for personal loyalty.
So in a tragic way, the situation in 2014 has reverted to that of 2004 in a post-Fallujah state of hostility between the Sunni population in the West and the Baghdad government exclusively concerned with the interests of the Shi’a in the South. Once again the Sunnis, left out of the new Iraq, have joined forces with the extremists who promise to free them from the control of Baghdad. In 2014 the extremists are the jihadi forces associated with ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. It is a movement that has taken over the Syrian resistance movement, much to the chagrin of those Syrian rebels who are simply anti-Assad and not ideologically extreme. In fact, the ISIS forces are so extreme in their anti-Shi’a ideology and their savage methods—including public beheadings—that the old al Qaeda leadership has denounced them. Yet with the complicity of the Sunni community in western Iraq they have seized vast stretches of the country, including the city of Mosul, second largest in the country.
Iraq seems to be on the verge of splitting up. The Kurds in the north are anxiously protecting their turf, and have expressed an eagerness to be autonomous. ISIS has proclaimed itself the Islamic State, and wants to create a new country out of western Iraq and eastern Syria. This would leave The Shi’a with the city of Basra and the rest of Iraq, presumably also with the capital city of Baghdad. The only thing that might keep Iraq from falling apart would be a reversal of Maliki’s pro-Shi’a style of leadership and encouragement for a new Awakening movement that would give Sunni leaders a role in the government. This might undercut their support for ISIS, and even—as during the earlier period of the Surge—encourage them them to turn against their extremist comrades. But the only thing that has kept this kind of political pluralism from happening is al Maliki.
This explains why he has become such a reviled figure in Iraqi politics. US President Barack Obama made it clear that American support for Iraq was contingent on a change of leadership that would make the government more open. Even Iran, the Shi’a protector, has indicated that it is time for Maliki to leave. The major Shi’a cleric in Iraq, al Sistani, has withdrawn his support. Al-Maliki’s own Dawa party was divided in its support for him.
This is where Haider al-Abadi has entered the picture as the new Prime Minister designate. The Iraq President, Fuad Masum, a Kurd, snubbed al Maliki and asked another member of his Dawa party, al-Abadi, to form a government instead. After several days of threatening legal action and possible force to keep in power, al Maliki acceded to the inevitable and al-Abadi is slated to be Prime Minister at the beginning of September.
Now that al Maliki is on his way out, does Iraq have a chance of surviving? The answer to this question depends in part on Abadi, whether he is willing to be sufficiently open to Sunni representation to make them interested in participating in a united Iraq. If so, they will turn away from ISIS as easily as they turned against Zarqawi’s al Qaeda forces seven years ago. As terrifying as they are, the hard core ISIS fighters number only in the thousands and without local Sunni support their tenuous political hold will fall like a house of cards. With al Maliki out, therefore, Iraq may have a future after all.

Elliot Rodgers was at war. The troubled narcissistic young man who went on a rampage this weekend in Isla Vista, killing six and then himself, was armed with a small arsenal of automatic weapons.
In a 137 page autobiography that he titled “My Twisted World,” Rodger explained that he was “at war,” but he claimed that he was not the one who created it. Rather, he was responding as a soldier in combat, defending his honor. “Women’s rejection of me is a declaration of war,” he said, adding ominously that “if it’s war they want, then war they shall have.”
Rodger was referring to the fact that although he was obsessed with sexuality, he was still a virgin at age 22. He could not accept the idea that he was to blame for what he regarded as a social failing. He thought of himself as a “magnificent gentleman,” and “a god.” What is interesting, though, is that he thought of his rejection and his planned revenge not as a personal problem but as warfare.
“I am the true victim,” he cried out in the closing paragraph of his autobiography, most likely written hours before committing his savage attacks, his “day of retribution.”
“I didn’t start this war,” he said. “But I will finish it by striking back.”
Rodger had a lifetime of thinking about and acting out roles of combat. His favorite computer game was World of Warcraft, to which he achieved level 60, and to which he was committed for some 14 hours a day when he was in junior high school. The films he admired, including Alpha Dog and Hunger Games–which his father had helped to create as an assistant director–were also seeped in images of battle.
These images do not produce violence, necessarily. But it is striking that virtually all acts of terrorism in the contemporary world employ images of cosmic war that come from their cultural traditions. Follow this link to know about sexy cam chat. For Sikhs it has been the epic wars of Sikh princes against the Moghul Emperors; for Muslims it has been the struggles of jihad described in the Qur’an. For Jews and Christians the divine battles of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) are thought to come to life in contemporary struggles that are seen as skirmishes in a cosmic war.
Though Elliot Rodger was a lone wolf, in the sense that he acted alone, he can also be considered a terrorist informed by American culture. He is an American terrorist who employed the militant cultural images of contemporary American youth culture to inform his own imagined battles. Like other terrorists who have created performances of violence in order to create a momentary sense of social power, Rodger was a soldier in his own desperate and secret cosmic war.

We are still in shock– the attacks this weekend were literally in front of my house in Isla Vista. But now that the candlelight vigil is over and the yellow tape taken from sidewalks, the question turns to why? Who was Elliot Rodger and why did he engage in this private act of terrorism?
In reading Elliot Rodger’s writings a portrait emerges of a disturbed narcissistic young man of privilege who was consumed with envy and blamed everyone else for his social failings. He saw his life like a movie (Alpha Dog was one of his favorites) and computer games, which he played incessantly (especially World of Warcraft), and gained the illusion of power in his arsenal of weapons including three semi-automatic pistols and 400 rounds of ammunition.
When he was in junior high school he played computer games 14 hours in a day, determined to reach level 60. It was the only skill in which he had a measure of success. In everything else from sports to classes to social conquests he was hounded by a sense of failure even though he was convinced he was “destined for greatness.” In high school and then college, sex was his obsession, though clearly his failing, since at the time of his death he had not even kissed a girl. He blamed the beautiful women who ignored him, and the socially adept young men to whom they were attracted, for his own failings. His 137 page autobiography details how he would like to take revenge on the “Day of Retribution” which was to begin with stabbing and killing his roommates, then shooting up a whole sorority, driving down the coast to kill his stepmother and younger brother, before heading back to IV to plow his car into as many attractive young bystanders as he could. Fortunately he was only partly successful in this savage fantasy.
Who is at fault for creating this cold young monster? Clearly the violence of American society permeated his life and informed his sinister project. He was living in a movie or a computer game. The easy accessibility of guns gave him the illusion of power.
His was an act of terrorism since it was a public performance of violence meant to spread fear and give him a sense of control. I would be tempted to call him a Christian terrorist even though he was not remotely religious since he would have been called a Muslim terrorist if his name was Abdul rather than Elliot. But it would be more accurate to call him an American terrorist. Like most “lone wolf” terrorists in recent incidents around the country and the world, he is a private actor; but he is also a part of a larger cultural momentum that valorizes extreme acts and convinces ordinary persons that they are failures if they do not live up to the lives of the culture’s successful and sexually powerful personae. It is a cultural failing and an American terrorism for which we can all take some blame.

When I asked the official in charge of religious affairs in the Ukrainian government why it and so many of its neighboring states turned to religion in their rejection of Soviet control, he explained that “it is due to a failure of ideology.” Marxist and other secular ideologies have “failed,” he explained, for they are not able to “touch the heart” the way ethnic and religious identities do.
Whether or not Marxist ideology “failed,” it is clear that it became unhappily tied to what was perceived as Russian imperialism. The liberalization of Soviet policies in the 1980s opened the floodgates for a lively expression of ethnic loyalties in Eastern Europe that only intensified after the end of the Soviet Union on New Year’s Day in 1992. In such diverse locations as Lithuania, Armenia, East Germany, Poland, and Ukraine, religious movements were at the forefront of opposition to Soviet control and the emergence of new nationalisms. In a sense, these were old nationalisms; they traced their identities at least to the nineteenth century and in most cases much earlier. In their post-socialist form, however, these national identities were new: their combination of democratic popularism and cultural nationalism was a distinctive feature of the modern age.
In many of these countries, Catholic Christianity was a rallying point for nationalists eager to separate themselves from the Russian cultural domination symbolized by the Russian Orthodox Church. This was the case in Ukraine, where the Catholic Church in the western part of the country continues to be at the forefront of nationalist causes. The religious culture of Ukraine is more complicated than simply a Catholic-Orthodox split, however, since there is a form of Ukrainian orthodoxy that is distinctively Ukrainian and stridently anti-Russian. The statement declaring Ukraine’s independence on August 24, 1991, claimed “a thousand-year-old tradition of building statehood,” which originated in the tenth century, when Vladimir the Great created a separate Ukrainian Church.
This link between Ukrainian nationalism and religion persisted in the post-Soviet period, especially in Western Ukraine. The eastern part of the country contained a large percentage of ethnic Russians, most of whom were Russian Orthodox. The residents of Western Ukraine have been Catholics—members of the Uniate Church, a Ukrainian branch of Catholicism—or members of a distinctly Ukrainian form of Orthodoxy that defies the authority of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. The conflict in Ukraine, therefore, is not just an ethic and political split, but a contest of competing visions of religious nationalism.

You can see the complete essay here