Orlando Massacre: ISIS Inspired or Homophobic Attack?

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We don’t know all the facts – what connection that Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen may have had with ISIS or any other extremist Islamic movement – but what we do know is contradictory. His vicious assault on a Saturday night crowd in a gay bar either had nothing to do with Islam, or everything to do with it.

His father, Mir Seddique, told NBC news that his son’s actions “had nothing to do with religion.” His father did, however, suggest another motive: homophobia. The father said that Omar saw two men kissing when they were in Miami, and the son went into a rage.

Omar’s former wife confirmed that he had a short temper and was prone to violence. She told the Washington Post that he used to beat her, and was “mentally unstable.”

On the other hand, the Amaq Agency, the news outlet of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, in mentioning the incident stated that the shooting “was carried out by an Islamic State fighter.” Omar himself called 911 shortly after entering the bar in Orlando saying that he had pledged allegiance to the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Federal law enforcement officials added that in that brief call he also referenced the Tsarnaev brothers who exploded bombs during the 2013 Boston Marathon.

It is not clear why Omar referred to the Tsarnaev brothers although with our limited knowledge of the incident his attack and theirs seem eerily similar. Both were assaults on public spaces, soft targets, conducted without any notice. In both cases the perpetrators had personal reasons for undertaking the attacks—homophobia in the case of Omar and in the case of the older Tsarnaev brother, a resentment over governmental policies that deprived him of his goal to become a Golden Gloves champ.

And in both cases they turned to an extreme Islamic rhetoric to justify their acts. In the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, it was an ideological support for the separatist movement in Russian-controlled Chechnya. In the case of Omar Mateen, he claimed to be carrying out a terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS. But was he?

ISIS is getting desperate. It would like to claim that it has the ability to conduct terrorist acts around the world. Yet in the area that it actually controls—eastern Syria and western Iraq—it is losing ground.

The movement known variously as the Islamic State, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or “the Levant”—wider Syria), or Daesh has been seriously degraded. Air strikes have killed many of their leaders, disrupted their supply routes, and destroyed their weapons caches.

Within the last year they have lost some of their major territorial conquests, including Palmyra in Syria, and Ramadi and Sinjar in Iraq. Currently the ISIS-controlled city of Fallujah is under attack and seems destined to fall; their major outpost in Libya, Sirte, has been retaken by government forces, Syrian troops are moving towards their headquarters in Raqqa, and their largest trophy in Iraq, the city of Mosul, is slated for liberation.

Moreover, volunteers are not streaming to the region in the numbers that previously had supported the movement. Although their online presence continues to be active on Twitter and on secret sites on the dark web, volunteers seem hesitant to join a losing operation.

In this context ISIS needs the illusion of power. This is no doubt that this is what the Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks were meant to achieve.

ISIS has also encouraged individuals to conduct their own acts of jihad against disbelievers. Such acts would give the appearance of a global terrorist operation, even though the central ISIS command did little to plan or conduct them. Is this what happened in Orlando?

Thus far, there is no evidence that Omar Mateen has had any connection with ISIS leadership. The ISIS news agency that boasted that he was an “ISIS fighter” did not, however, state that his was an ISIS operation. The agency did not imply that it had been planned and orchestrated by the central command in Syria.

Moreover, a gay bar in Orlando, Florida seems like a strange venue for an ISIS operation. Multiple targets in the heart of Paris and Brussels fit more closely to the modus operandi of the ISIS organization, showing the weakness of the government security apparatus. An attack on a gay bar would not have the same symbolic effect. Though ISIS has persecuted gays in the territory they control, there has not been any other case in which the movement has targeted gay culture in the West.

But gay culture was clearly an obsession of Omar Mateen, according to his father. Like the Tsarnaev brothers’ attack on the Boston Marathon, this sad tragedy appears to be one conducted by a lone wolf with a private motive who has cloaked his actions with the glamor of a global terrorist ideology.

Perhaps if Mateen had been a Christian he would have justified his homophobic rampage with right-wing Christian rhetoric. Or if he had been a Marxist, he might have justified his rage in Soviet-era homophobic language. But since he was a Muslim and linked himself with ISIS, we are left with the uncertainty about whether and to what degree this can be described as an Islamic extremist act.

Bellah on Global Religion

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Posted on the website of the International Sociological Association, February 23, 2016

Religion has always been global, in the sense that religious communities and traditions have always maintained permeable boundaries. They have become part of the global transportation of peoples, producing diaspora communities that assimilate elements of the cultures with which people interact. They are also an element of the transnational diffusion of cultural practices and ideas, and for this reason Max Weber characterized certain traditions such as Buddhism, Islam and Christianity as universal religions of salvation.

But religious expressions can also be responses to new situations, to the globalized, multicultural environments in which people express their spirituality and moral integrity in novel shared ways. It is this kind of global religion that may be the harbinger of the future, the religiosity of a global community.

In an interesting essay written shortly before his death in 2013, American sociologist Robert Bellah ruminated over the possibilities of a global civil religion for a Luce Foundation-supported project on Religion in Global Civil Society that I directed. His ideas were presented at one of our seminars at Santa Barbara and are summarized in a chapter of the book based on that project, God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society, co-written by Dinah Griego, John Soboslai, and myself, and published by the University of California Press in 2015.

Bellah’s Santa Barbara paper begins where his famous essay, “Civil Religion in America,” ends, with the possibility of what Bellah calls “a world civil religion.” Bellah, quoting his own words in “Civil Religion in America,” says that the time has come to consider global society as containing the elements of “a viable and coherent world order.”

Moreover, the cultural dimension of such a world order requires “a major new set of symbolic forms.” This sounds like he is anticipating a global religion, though in the earlier essay he did not go into any detail about what these “symbolic forms” might be, and how they would relate to traditional religion. His 2012 reflections in Santa Barbara began to elaborate on these two cryptic statements.

How could a global civil religion be constructed? As we interpret Bellah’s essay, he argued that there are at least three possibilities. One would be a kind of synthesis of some of the moral and spiritual elements of all the religious traditions of humankind such as Christianity, Islam, and the like, or if not a synthesis at least a repository of their shared values. The second would be as an extension of the civil religions of America, Russia, and other national societies. The third would be an expression of an emerging new global culture.

While Bellah focuses on the third—the embryonic cultural aspects of a new global society—he does talk about the possibility of traditional religion and nationalist civil religions participating in this emerging culture. All of this sounds optimistic, but Bellah was not by nature an optimist. For one thing, he saw the difficulties in getting parochially-minded people to look beyond their local and national interests to the profound economic, environmental, and social problems that confront humanity on this planet, and which might unite them morally into a global civil society. For another, he saw the possibility that the notion of common global identity and purpose could be formed around functional and utilitarian economic interests rather than moral and social concerns.

Bellah argued that the emergence of a global religion would be consistent with the history of religion, which has largely been a single story. His magesterial 2011 book, Religion in Human Evolution, charts the development of religiosity across the centuries as a single evolving planetary phenomenon, albeit one that is expressed in particular cultural identities such as Hinduism, Judaism, and Chinese. But the singularity of the world’s religious culture is not the same thing as global civil religion, Bellah argues, since this new kind of global religion is the expression of the new phenomenon of global civil society, the idea of a shared sense of citizenship. This is a recent notion, and the possibilities of a global religion in this sense, as an expression of global civil society, is just now emerging.

Bellah concludes his paper by saying that he is convinced that “religious motivation is a necessary factor” in transforming the growing global moral consensus into effective forms of civil society. He engages with Habermas in envisioning the possibility of world law and global governance that will be created in response to an “actually existing global civil society.” This will be the bases of the shared experiences that constitute on a global scale the civil religion of national societies, one that uniquely expresses the character of the emerging global community but that also has “a spiritual dimension drawing from all the great religions of the world.”

Juergensmeyer videos

Juergensmeyer’s Boycott of BYU for Religious Discrimination 2015

Intro to the book, God in the Tumult of the Global Square 2015
http://www.ucpress.edu/ebook.php?isbn=9780520959323

Interview on religious violence, Uppsala Sweden, Oct 2015

Comments on the Hizmet Movement Dec 2015
http://en.cihan.com.tr/en/hizmet-movement-needed-to-be-seen-more-of-in-society-says-juergensmeyer-vCHMTk2MDc1My8v.htm?site_preference=mobile

“Old Wars, New Methods,” Interview on Straits Times Television, Singapore 2014

Fox News the day after 9/11- Juergensmeyer interviewed by Neil Caputo Sept 12, 2001. My interview begins at 10:50

What is Global Studies? Panel moderated by Mark Juergensmeyer 2012

Why ISIS Attacked Paris

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When I heard that the French government had identified ISIS as the group behind the horrible multiple attacks on Paris that have left over 120 dead and hundreds wounded, I wondered why. Why would this attack be useful to ISIS? After all, it is an organization that is primarily focused on Syria and Iraq. And they have been having enough trouble just maintaining the area that they control.

In fact, ISIS has not been doing well these days. On the day before the attacks the strategic town of Sinjar has been retaken by Kurdish and Yazidi forces, cutting off the ISIS supply line between their main town in Syria, Rakka, and Mosul, their largest conquest in Iraq. The amount of territory controlled by ISIS has shrunk considerably in recent months.

They are also not as attractive to young Muslims activists as they used to be. Two of their most famous recruits, notorious around the world for beheading ISIS captives, have themselves been killed by target strikes. The number of young people volunteering to join the ISIS forces have dwindled and scores, perhaps hundreds, have been trying to return home, weary of being used as cannon fodder. ISIS, it appears, is on a downward slide.

But perhaps this is precisely what explains the Paris attacks. ISIS is desperate. It needs a victory, a vivid show of force to bolster the morale of its supporters, attract new volunteers, and with luck, intimidate its foes.

The attacks in Paris may have been calculated to achieve all of these goals. Moreover, if its actions could goad the French and other Western powers into further military action against them, this would fit perfectly into the image of the Western Crusaders waging war against the forces of Islam. No matter that the Islamic forces of ISIS are terrorists and despised by most Muslims around the world, to their supporters and potential volunteers, they are able to project an image of Muslim resiliency if Western forces do in fact become more militarily engaged in Syria and Iraq.

Most acts of terrorism are performances of power by groups that often have very little power. As with all performances, the critical question is who is the intended audience? In the case of the Paris attacks it appears to be ISIS’ own demoralized supporters and the French public who could easily be whipped up into enthusiasm for a military attack on ISIS, which is what ISIS wants.

This is why the response to ISIS is such a critical matter. A knee-jerk Islamophobic response that accuses Islam of violence will help ISIS by alienating Muslims and reinforcing the notion that the Islamic world is under siege and needs to be defended. Similarly, policies that will restrict Syrian refugees—themselves victims of ISIS—will only enhance the anti-Muslim image of the West. And military action might make matters worse, much worse.

President Francois Hollande has already proclaimed that ISIS is at war with France. If he were to say that France should also be at war with ISIS, and propose French troops engaging with ISIS on the ground in Syria and Iraq, this would fulfill one of ISIS’ goals. It knows that with the current support of Arab Sunni Muslims in Eastern Syria and Western Iraq a ground war is one that would favor their side.

If the Sunni Arabs in those parts of Syria and Iraq were to turn against ISIS, however, their game would be over. Their support would fall like a house of cards.

The Sunni Arabs in Iraq were once before lured away from the extremism of al Qaeda in Iraq (the precursor of ISIS) when they were empowered by the American-supported Iraqi government. If the government today in Iraq –and in Syria—were to politically embrace the Sunni Arabs in their countries ISIS would began to crumble from within.

This is what US Secretary of State John Kerry meant when he said, soon after the Paris attacks, said that it was a wakeup call for even more vigorous attempts at a diplomatic solution. It is time to defeat ISIS, but not by the military actions that will only enlarge their support. It is time to defeat them by undercutting their support with political changes in Syria and Iraq.

Holy Disruption

God in the Tumult

“A new book by UC Santa Barbara scholars explores the impact of globalization on religions around the world.” Article by Jim Logan published in the UCSB Current, November 3, 2015.

When we think of globalization, it’s usually in terms of commerce. Over the past several years, however, UC Santa Barbara’s Mark Juergensmeyer has come to see both its spiritual side and its impact on religions around the world.

In a new book, “God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society” (University of California Press, 2015), Juergensmeyer and UCSB co-authors Dinah Griego and John Soboslai explore, for the first time, how globalization has impinged on the world’s great faiths.

“We were trying to take the temperature of religions in public life around the world,” said Juergensmeyer, a professor of sociology and of global studies at UCSB and the founding director and fellow of the campus’s Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. To survey the global role of religion, Juergensmeyer launched a project that involved “some of the best minds in places like China, Russia, India, Egypt and Argentina,” he said. “No one else had done something like this.”

What they found, through a series of workshops in multiple countries, is that globalization has had a profoundly disruptive impact on religion ¾ and may even be contributing to a new, cooperative faith centered on addressing many of the world’s pressing problems. It’s a movement that dismisses the status quo in favor of collective activism.

Globalization, Juergensmeyer explained, has touched every aspect of our lives, including religion. “The disruptive part of globalization involves taking away the center. There is a massive antiauthoritarianism, a massive kind of democratic movement; the Arab Spring is one manifestation of it. But so is contemporary politics where traditional political leaders are being rejected for outsiders, or perceived outsiders, whether it’s Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, somebody who’s not part of the traditional establishment.”

The seeds of the book were planted in 2008, when the Henry Luce Foundation funded a workshop on “Religion in Global Civil Society.” An international group of scholars met at UCSB to discuss religion in a changing world. That led to a five-year project hosted by the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at UCSB. Workshops at UCSB and in Delhi, Cairo, Shanghai, Buenos Aires and Moscow attracted scholars, religious leaders and public figures, who shared their observations on the ways religion is being shaped by globalization.

“God in the Tumult of the Global Square” is a distillation of those workshops, which became known as the Luce Project on the Role of Religion in Global Society. Griego is the Luce Project coordinator at UCSB and Soboslai, who worked with Juergensmeyer on the text of the book, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB.

From the project, Juergensmeyer explained, it became apparent that globalization has lent fluidity to religions and potentially even threatens the secular nation state by blurring borders and national identities in an age of instant communication and open borders. “The nation-state itself is a fragile artifice,” he said. “It’s challenged in the global era where everything is made everywhere and everybody can live everywhere. Just look at the problem of refugees in Europe right now. It’s a huge issue in international immigration and it’s huge issue in American politics. That’s a part of the fluid mobility of the global era, and one of the consequences of that is that is the challenge of thinking about who we are as a nation, as a community, and how we identify ourselves.”

As globalization leaks into every corner of our lives, religions will continue to react and adapt, Juergensmeyer observed. Some will embrace tolerance in the face of change while others will choose resistance. “I hope people would see that these expressions of religion in public life are a part of globalization. They’re responses to changes in global society. Particularly — and this was a discovery we made — the kind of antiauthoritarianism, the decentralization, the anti-institutionalization of all society also affects religion. And so both the expressions of religious defensiveness and religious openness and tolerance are appropriate responses, although opposite, but understandable responses to globalization.”

– See more at: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/016112/holy-disruption#sthash.uDTTBu6y.dpuf

Why I Boycotted BYU

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This essay was originally posted on Religion Dispatches, October 10, 2015.

 
Sometimes you find yourself in the spotlight when you least expect it. This happened to me this week when I decided that out of conscience I could not attend a conference dedicated in part to religious freedom on a campus that denied it to its own Mormon students.

Shortly before I was planning to go the conference this weekend I received an email from a group of present and former Mormon students who called themselves “Free BYU.” Because of a policy at Brigham Young University, which is supported by the Church of Latter Day Saints, Mormon students who lose their faith, convert to another religion, or leave the church are automatically expelled from the University. They also lose their housing, scholarship, and campus jobs. This seemed so counter to the spirit of academic freedom—and to the very issues of religious liberty that the conference was promoting—that in conscience I felt that I had to take a stand.

I had looked forward to the conference. The issue was important, the international roster of scholars participating was impressive, and my old friend and colleague, David Little, was to receive an award for his work on issues of religious tolerance around the world. He certainly deserved it. My schedule was tight but I could go for at least a day.

But then I received the Free BYU email and I knew I could not attend. All my adult life I have been a part of academic communities that have prized freedom of inquiry, intellectual openness and the life of the mind. I have been so grateful that in our society we have this one institution—the university—that preserves a domain for intellectual exchange and the marketplace of ideas. This is especially so in our current media climate that is so dominated by opinion masquerading as fact. More than ever, we need the intellectual freedom of the university.

But doesn’t a religious institution have the right to set its own rules, I was asked in one email that I received in response to my decision. I received dozens of emails from present and former Mormon students at BYU supporting my position, some of them telling heartbreaking stories about how their careers were ruined by being expelled for their beliefs just months before graduation. But I also received one or two emails defending the university’s position on expelling Mormon students who lose their faith.

Of course a church or a temple can limit membership and set its own standards of belief—within its own walls. But we bristle when those standards are imposed outside. I noted that BYU accepts non-Mormon students on campus and does not dissuade them from converting to the Mormon faith. But if a Mormon student rebels, he or she is axed. This is not just unfair, it seems to me, but contrary to the spirit of what a university is.

A university that calls itself a university is a public institution. It is not a Sunday school. Regardless of who sponsors it, the university is a public trust. It provides necessary skills to accredit individuals for jobs in the public arena, and just as important, it provides that social space that I referred to above—the arena for the free expression of ideas—that is important for an educated society and for an individual’s own intellectual growth.

But what about honor codes that many universities impose? These are usually attempts to regulate behavior—not thought. They attempt to prohibit, for example, alcohol and pot in student dorms. Prohibitions against thinking, against ideas that are counter to administrators’ beliefs, however, should have no place in a university.

Although I am not an expert in issues of religious freedom in American higher education, I do not know of many attempts to prohibit the free expression of thought. It would be as if one university expelled a student for accepting the scientific account of evolution, and another expelled a student for voting Democrat. Perhaps such cases exist, but I would be opposed to them as well.

And if a religious organization sponsors a university shouldn’t it be allowed to set the rules? Well, yes and no. When it comes to freedom of thought, I’d say no. If some rich donors come to our campus (as indeed they have) and want to create a position to promote their own ideas, we might thank them for their money but politely explain to them that the university is dedicated to the life of the mind and the free expression of views and they can’t control what our faculty and students think. Neither should the church or any other entity that wants to sponsor a university.

I’m one of those rare academics who is a practicing Christian. I love the church, but I also love the academic community and its standards of honest inquiry into the truth. I believe that the two, church and campus, should be free from each other’s meddling—for the sake of both.

Freedom of Religion at BYU

mormonsWith regrets to the organizers, I’ve cancelled my talk at a conference at Brigham Young University today in protest against the University’s policy of expelling any Mormon students who leave the faith. Here is the letter I sent explaining my position:

To: International Center for Law and Religion Studies, Brigham Young University

I regret that I will be unable to participate in the Law and Religion Symposium that is being held this week at BYU. It was an honor to be invited to speak at this event, and as you know I made every effort to make room in my schedule to be there on Tuesday. My decision not to participate is an act of conscience based on BYU’s policy of expelling any Mormon student who leaves the faith or converts to another religion.

Alas I was unaware of this policy until this weekend when it was brought to my attention. I have decided that it would be hypocritical of me to participate in a conference in which the issue of religious liberty is paramount when the institution sponsoring it fundamentally violates this principle in its policies towards Mormon students. As I understand it, non-Mormons are allowed to enroll in BYU, and they are welcome to convert to the Mormon faith if they wish, but if  Mormon students change their religious affiliation they lose their scholarship, their campus housing and jobs, and are expelled from school even if they are months away from graduation.

In making this decision I mean no disrespect to you, the Center with which you are affiliated, or the other participants in this week’s conference. I know that many faculty members at BYU are opposed to this policy and are quietly working to change it. I applaud them, and hope that my decision will be taken as a sign of support for those within BYU who are seeking change. I appreciation your dilemma and admire your persistence.

Again, thanks for the honor of the invitation. I hope that I will be invited back to BYU and will be able to accept some time in the future when this policy restricting religious freedom is lifted.

Sincerely,

Mark Juergensmeyer

 

Letter to the University of Illinois

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The following is my letter to the University of Illinois requesting that my acceptance to give a presentation in its prestigious MillerComm lecture series be deferred until there is a resolution of the freedom-of-speech issue involving Prof Steven Salaita; his appointment was cancelled by the Chancellor after being pressured by donors unhappy with his political comments posted on Twitter.

August 10, 2015

Professor Tamer Basar, Director
Center for Advanced Study
University of Illinois

Dear Prof Basar:

I want to thank you and the Center for Advanced Study for the honor of inviting me to give a talk in the Center’s prestigious MillerComm lecture series in Fall, 2015, based on my work on the global rise of religious nationalism. The honor is enhanced by the fact that I am a U of I alum, and this will constitute something of a homecoming for me.

My acceptance, however, is contingent on a positive resolution to the freedom-of-speech issue involving Prof Steven Salaita. In making this decision I am guided by the advice of Mohandas Gandhi that “the first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.” The denial of the basic right of freedom of speech is humiliating not only for those who are victims of it but also for the institutions that allow it to happen.

In requesting this deferral of my invitation, I mean no disrespect to you, the Center, or to the faculty of the University, many of whom have publicly voiced their opposition to the administration’s actions. I empathize with your dilemma. Moreover, I am encouraged by recent court decisions and the resignation of the Chancellor, which makes me hopeful that the situation may soon be resolved.

I look forward to a speedy resolution of this issue in favor of academic freedom. I hope that I will still be able to give my presentation at the U of I, if not on the date scheduled then soon after, assuming that you are willing to reschedule the event.

Thanks again for the honor of this invitation, and I hope that I will soon be able to join you on the Champaign-Urbana campus.

Sincerely,

Mark Juergensmeyer
Professor of Sociology and Global Studies
Fellow and Founding Director,
Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies

Images of Refugees from ISIS

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It’s potato day at a refugee camp near Erbil, Kurdistan, for Muslim Arabs from Mosul, Iraq.

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A Sunni Arab refugee from a town near Mosul; at a refugee camp outside Erbil, Kurdistan

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A former advisor for the post-Saddam Iraq Army from Tikrit, Iraq; at a refugee camp near Erbil, Kurdistan.

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A Muslim from the town of Kawraban near Mosul with his son; in a refugee camp near Erbil, Kurdistan

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A Syrian Christian pharmacist showing off his cooking, meat dumplings, at a refugee caravan camp in a churchyard in Ankawa, near Erbil, Kurdistan.

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A Syrian Muslim from Qamishlo village near the town of Hassaka, with his wife and child and a friend; in Qustapa refugee camp outside Erbil, Kurdistan

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The mother of the man in the previous photo, whose husband had been killed; in a refugee camp outside Erbil, Kurdistan

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A refugee camp for members of the ancient Yazidi religion from the Iraqi town of Sinjar; the camp was near Diyarbakir, Southeastern Turkey

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Talking with Yazidi elders from Sinjar, in a park converted into a refugee camp outside Diyarbakir, Turkey

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Talking with Yazidi women from Sinjar at the Yazidi refugee camp outside Diyarbakir, Turkey.

[All pictures are by Mark Juergensmeyer in Kurdistan, Iraq, and Turkey on July 25-29, 2015]

For a brief report on these interviews see the essay, “Talking with Refugees from ISIS” on this website.

 

Talking with Refugees from ISIS

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“They believe in some strange religion, not Islam,” a Muslim refugee from the Iraq city of Ramadi told me when I talked with him recently in a refugee camp near the Kurdistan capital of Erbil in Northern Iraq. ISIS territory was some 40 miles away, but he spoke as if the extremists could return at any moment.

“They reject our religion and say we are not sufficiently Muslim, but they kill the men and rape the women. What kind of Islam is that?”

Though his religious affiliation was Sunni Muslim and his ethnic identity was Arab–the kind of people that ISIS regards as its preferred community–he had been a policeman in Ramadi and knew that he would be targeted. His neighbors were frightened as well, having heard stories about the harsh rule of the ISIS commanders and the loss of freedom under their control. As soon as he heard fighting at the edge of town he and other families quickly climbed into their cars at two o’clock in the morning and escaped. Most of the rest of the city joined them, he said. Now they are waiting in the camp, hoping for ISIS to leave the town so they can return.

It was a story repeated by dozens of refugees that I met in camps and makeshift shelters in Kurdistan and southeastern Turkey. They seemed puzzled about who ISIS was and what it wanted.

Most of the refugees used the term “Daesh” for ISIS, based on an acronym for the Arabic name for the movement, al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham (“the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [wider Syria]”–ISIL or ISIS). By coincidence, the term daesh also means something like the Arabic word for “bullies,” and for that reason ISIS leaders are annoyed by its usage. Probably also for that reason the term persists among those victimized by it.

“The Daesh leaders are foreigners,” a Kurdish man from a village near the Iraqi city of Mosul told me, saying he didn’t know where they came from, since he didn’t recognize their form of Arabic. The local members of the movement, he said, were poor people forced into it, though some seemed to be true believers.

An automobile dealer from a town west of Mosul recognized one of the ISIS fighters who captured him as a neighbor man to whom he had sold a car. The car dealer was from the Kurdish ethnic community; the man who bought his car was an Arab.

When the town was surrounded by ISIS, the militants forcibly divided the population into its Kurdish and Arab groups. One of the Arabs suggested that representatives from both groups wave a white flag and go to the ISIS leaders to negotiate their way out of the situation. That’s when the car dealer recognized his former customer among the ISIS fighters. The customer-turned-ISIS-fighter looked down and tried to avert the gaze from his former neighbor.

The negotiations soon broke down and the Arabs were told that they would not be harmed as long as they did nothing to impede ISIS’ authority and if some of the men would volunteer to fight on their side. The Kurds were not given any assurances, and fearing the worst most of them slipped away that night in the darkness to safety. They heard that those who stayed were divided into men and women’s groups. The men were killed and the women were taken into slavery.

I talked with another fellow, a Syrian Christian pharmacist, who had in fact stayed in his village in Syria after it had been taken over by ISIS forces. When he became a refugee he was able to stay in a slightly more comfortable Arab Christian camp than the one for Arab Muslims; it was set up in what had formerly been a playground next to a Catholic church in the Erbil suburb of Ankawa. The camp consisted of one-room campers instead of tents, supplied by the Christian charity, the Good Samaritans.

The pharmacist told us that the Syrian Army had assured them that they would be safe as ISIS approached. But then they suddenly disappeared, and ISIS had taken the town. At first, the ISIS militants told them they would not be harmed as long as they gave them all their money and their cell phones. In other villages, they heard, an agreement to convert to Islam and a payment of $7 per month would allow them to survive. But initially they were not given those options. Moreover, his wife was taunted for wearing a Western-style dress, as many Christian women do, so she could not venture outside. They also kept their daughters hidden, fearing they would be captured by ISIS and sold into sex slavery.

They waited until the middle of the night and then they and their neighbors made a break for freedom. They piled into the back of trucks and with the lights out drove madly through checkpoints and down the road towards Iraq and Kurdistan. The pharmacist showed me a video he had made with his cell phone, which did indeed look like a cattle surge of vehicles illumined by a few eerie lights. Now the news from his town is “very bad”—there is no water or electricity or food in stores. Christians are forced to make payments to be allowed to survive and have to pretend to be Muslims and go to the mosque, and ISIS militants roam around the streets and do whatever they want.

When I asked several of the refugees whether ISIS was motivated by religion or by power, they said “power,” but that they used religion as an excuse for their authority. One Kurdish man from the Syrian town of Dierzor said that he had evidence that the ISIS fighters weren’t really religious.

The Kurd told a story that he had heard about a Christian Syrian who was arrested by ISIS soldier at check point. The ISIS soldier asked the Christian to state his religion. “Muslim,” the Christian said, trying to save himself. The ISIS fighter then asked the Christian to prove it by reciting the Qur’an. The Christian mumbled some verses from the Bible, the only scripture he knew. “Good enough,” said the ISIS militant, unaware that the verses were not Qur’anic, and let him through unharmed.

When I asked the Kurd what kind of people supported ISIS in his Syrian home town of Dierzor, he said only a few did; they were mostly poor people who received money if they joined the movement as fighters. ISIS, he said, pays their soldiers 1000 dollars a month, whereas the Syrian opposition groups pay only $500. And ISIS does pay in US dollars, interestingly, perhaps from money it receives from illicit oil sales.

The Kurd said that all of his Kurdish neighbors in Dierzor were gone. They were told by ISIS they could stay but then killing began. Now they have either escaped and are refugees, or have been killed.

My hosts in Erbil found this fellow, the Syrian Kurd, encamped in a vacant lot, where they took me to meet him. Though most of the two million refugees in Kurdistan—a fourth of the population of the region—were in orderly refugee camps living in tent cities or in clusters of pre-fab modular rooms, some, like the Syrian Kurd, had taken refuge in empty lots or unfinished buildings in the city of Erbil. Since the rise of ISIS has brought Erbil’s economic boom to a halt and stalled its construction frenzy, there are plenty of abandoned buildings to serve as shelters.

In the case of the Syrian Kurd, he and his family along with three other families had created a tent city on an unused site at a street crossing. They poured concrete slabs and illegally tapped into an adjacent power line for electricity. They dug into the ground and connected to the city’s water supply to have drinking water and dug a pit for a latrine. With television and a refrigerator, they managed to create a viable living space.

The residents of Erbil were remarkably tolerant—sympathetic, really—to the situation of such impromptu refugee camps, and the refugees in vacant lots received hand-outs and help from the neighbors. The government of Kurdistan, however, is trying to encourage all refugees to live in camps, and are rapidly building more to house them. But new refugees continue to pour in.

Many of the approved camps consisted of rows of modular houses, or tent roofs over one-room buildings with cinderblock walls. Many had water, electricity and toilets in each unit, with solar-powered satellite dishes for TV. In other cases, each family had only a tent and shared rows of common toilets with hundreds of other families. The canvas roofs bore the insignia of the United Nations, though private relief organizations, including many from Kurdistan itself, were donors as well. Though most refugees came when ISIS overran the region two years ago, some were war-weary Syrians who had been nomads for years. A few were new arrivals.

One of the newest refugees I talked with was the young Sunni Arab man and his family who had just arrived from the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, that fell to ISIS forces in May, 2015. He said that he and 90% of the population left on one side of the town as ISIS entered the other. There had been heavy fighting, he said, and his own nine-month daughter had been killed in the fighting. And then the Iraqi Army just gave up and left. The townspeople panicked. They drove their cars into the desert, and then towards Baghdad, but were turned away at the edge of the city because they were Sunni and Baghdad was controlled by Shi’a militia. For that reason they came back to the desert, and a few, such his family and himself, were able to fly to Erbil to stay in safer refugee camps.

The Ramadi man had heard reports that ISIS had set up a check point at the entrance to the town next to an open pit that served as a mass grave. When people tried to enter the city, the ISIS guards checked their computers to see if their names were on lists that would allow them to pass through, and if not they shot them on the spot and tossed their bodies into the open grave.

In Southeastern Turkey there are additional refugee camps for Kurds, including those Kurds who worship the ancient Yazidi religion. I went to the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir to visit a Yazidi camp where some 3500 were living in tents in what had been a municipal park.

I had to get special permission as a writer from government authorities to enter any refugee camp in Kurdistan or Turkey, though in this case I also had to gain the approval of local leaders who ran the camp. One of them joined in the conversations and urged the Yazidi refugees to tell me what had happened to them. Their stories were particularly harrowing.

A middle-aged Yazidi woman from the town of Sinjar told me her story about how they waited too long to make their escape. She said that initially the Kurdish troops, the peshmurga, assured them that they would be safe, and not to worry. When they heard that a nearby city, Tel Afar, had fallen to ISIS, they still stayed. The peshmurga troops, however, were overrun, and ISIS took control.

She knew that the Yazidi people would be targeted by ISIS since they were not Muslim. She had heard that they were killing Christians for not being Muslim, and Sunni Muslim Kurds for not being Arabs, so she knew that her people would be doubly damned since their religion was Yazidi and their ethnic community was Kurdish. The woman said that she and other Yazidis rushed through the main street and many of the men were killed, including her husband and his brothers, but she and her children kept going to safety. They fled to the Sinjar mountains along with thousands of other Yazidi refugees. After ten days the Kurdish militant movement, the PKK, opened a corridor of safety for them to escape.

She has heard reports that teenage girls were taken by ISIS to warehouses where they were auctioned off to old men who bought them as sex slaves. Some were bought for no more than a thousand Iraqi dinars, which amounts to less than a US dollar.

I asked her and several of the other refugees in her camp and in Erbil whether they thought that ISIS would stay in power long. Yes, they sadly affirmed, since “they were evil,” as one of them put it. They  they knew how to intimidate people through killing. At the same time they knew there was little future for them as refugees in Kurdistan or Turkey. They had no option but to hope that they could return to their villages and towns. “All we have left is hope,” one of the men said.

 [My thanks to those who helped with arrangements and translation while I was in Kurdistan, Iraq, and Southeast Turkey, including Ibrahim Barlas of the Pacifica Institute; Ibrahim Anli of the Journalists and Writers Foundation in Istanbul; Ardalan Jalal of Erbil’s Dialogue Middle East; and Hasan Yilmaz of the Diyarbakir Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople’s Association.]

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The woman in the center is from the Yazidi religious community in Sinjar Iraq whose husband was killed by ISIS. The interview was in a refugee camp in Diyarbakir, Southeastern Turkey on July 28, 2015.

 

Mark Juergensmeyer