Protagonists, Middle East (1st part)

The countries of the Middle East are countries without rains, with many deserts, arid soils, scorching suns and miraculous rivers, clear nights, crescent moonlight both in the sky and on the flags, territories with oil and gas, Countries of many religious beliefs sometimes fundamentalist and sectarian, often contradictory, conflict and war societies. Peoples who do not seem to know the concept of peace or remember it in their memories.

The protagonists are political and religious. It is generally difficult to tell them apart. Many political protagonists identify with a religion and many religious leaders act politically

From this point of view there are four great currents that are both religious and political. Sunni Islamism in its various versions, radical and moderate, Shiite Islamism, Christianity and Judaism.

Here we try to decipher its historical, conceptual and strategic frameworks.

Sunni Islamism, which we will be developing in the first part of this cycle, has two main versions,

the moderate version, represented by countries such as the Republic of Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and the radical version made up of the regimes that follow the so-called “wahabi” version of Islam, extremely rigorous and restrictive initiated and promoted by Saudi Arabia and various derivative movements such as ISIS in Syria and Iraq and AlQaeda and to some degree the Taliban movement in Afghanistan.

Wahhabism is an allegedly puritanical and radical religious current of Islam in matters of faith and religious practices. Created by the religious Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) in the 18th century. Its rise is due to its early relationship with the House of Saud and to the mutual support it provided. Followers of Wahhabism see their role as defenders of Islam, as well as the need to restore the purity of an Islam apparently contaminated by innovations , superstitions, deviations, heresies and idolatry. It originated in Saudi Arabia, which is still today the center of the sect, and uses its large funds to finance its expansion in the Muslim world and in other countries.

ISIS is a fundamentalist jihadist and Wahhabi Islamist group that proposes the return of the ancient Islamic caliphates through the formation of a proto-state in Syria and Iraq and other countries. They came to control a territory that stretched from Rafqa in Syria to Mosul in Iraq. It is currently reduced to small areas in these countries.

Al Qaeda is a fundamentalist jihadist Islamist organization that developed in various Muslim countries using terrorist attacks and practices and aims to create a network of Islamist resistance. It has become known worldwide for being responsible for the attacks of 9/11/2001 and other terrorist attacks, but also for having many branches in various Islamic countries such as Jabhat al-Nusra (known as Frente al-Nusra) today. called Tahrir Al Sham, and other branches and subgroups

Other radical and jihadist organizations include Hay'at Tahrir Al Sham ("Organization for the Liberation of the Levant"), and also the Nusra Front, is an active organization of allied jihadist-Salafist ideology and al-Qaeda branch in Syria and also in certain parts of Iraq and Lebanon. Salafists make a literal and orthodox reading of the founding texts of Islam, the Koran and the Sunna and consider their interpretation to be the only legitimate interpretation. This group has participated in the Syrian civil war especially in Idlib and north of Aleppo.

The Taliban for their part are a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political-military faction in Afghanistan, currently waging war within the same country. The word comes from the Arabic word ṭālib, that is, student, in the most general sense of the expression. The plural form ṭālibān [طالبان], "students", is translated from Arabic into Pashtun in a more specific sense as "religious student", "novice" or "seminarian"

whose idea of ​​society is based on strict interpretations of what the life of a Muslim should be, without allowing other interpretations that allow some kind of "debauchery", as is usual in democratic societies, and under which his country governed from 1996 until he was overthrown in the country in 2001.

It has regrouped since 2002 and revived as a strong insurgent movement that rules mainly in areas of Pastunistan and fights in guerrilla warfare against the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAFR), but in which the USA has the main role.

The predominantly secular predominantly Sunni Muslim regimes are mainly Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia and the Kurdish independence political movements.

Turkey is a democratic, secular, unitary and constitutional republic whose political system was established in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of the Mov. Nacl Turco, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, with the Occupation of Constantinople, as a consequence of the 1st World War and the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey's main religion is Islam. 99% of the Turkish population is Muslim, of which more than 80% belong to the Sunni branch of Islam.

For their part, the Kurds are a town of 20 million that lives in a mountainous region of Western Asia, encompassing part of the territories of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. Its main organizations are the PKK "Kurdistan Workers' Party", facing the Turkish government and the PDK Kurdistan Democratic Party which is one of the main Kurdish political parties in the Iraqi Kurdistan region. Promote democratic values. Individual rights and freedom of expression. For its part, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (UPK) is an Iraqi political party in the north of the country where almost all Iraqi Kurds live. Those provinces are Suleimaniya, Erbil, Dahuk and to a lesser extent Diyala, Al Ta’mim and Ninawa. In Syria is the PYD Syrian Democratic Union Party is a political party founded in 2003 by Kurdish nationalists in northern Syria. Her armed arm in the Syrian War are the Popular Protection Units and the Female Protection Units. It is a lay and egalitarian non-religious movement.

The Shiite current, which believes in it, believes in the transcendence of the 12 Imams and in particular of the last Imam al-Mahdi that will reappear at some point.

But we will develop this in a second article in this series where we will also deal with Shiite Islamism and its various tendencies, Maronite Christianity in Lebanon and Syria and Judaism in Israel and the multi-confessional Palestinian complement of the Arabs of the western bank of the Jordan, Gaza and the Arab-Israeli population as political-religious protagonists of the evolution and conflicts of Middle Eastern societies.