ISIS echoes from the past

This article first appeared on The Media Line.

The infamy of the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attacks that killed at least 129 people in Paris this week, stems from the brutality of its executions and the medieval mentality with which it runs its ‘caliphate.’ Using the power of the internet and the camera, the Sunni ultra-extremist group has shocked the world and appears to have convinced Western audiences of its unique power to menace. Yet the Islamic State is hardly alone in its strategy of killing on a colossal scale. Two particular groups stand out in recent history with bloody parallels to the Islamic State.

In Algeria, following the cancelation of election results in 1991 by the army, the country slowly slid into a civil war which raged until 2002 and cost the lives of as many as 150,000 people. Among the many Islamist factions fighting the government, one stood apart for its brutality and hardline stance towards anybody who opposed its ideology. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) became synonymous with attacks against civilians as it led a strategy of terrorizing the population into submission and compliance. Organized massacres against villages were a significant part of this campaign with attacks on the communities of Bentalha and Rais being some of the most bloody, each killing hundreds of people.

This was a strategy that worked in the early years of the civil war, Dalia Ghanem-Yazbeck, a research analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told The Media Line. Between 1992 and 1995 the GIA received support from the local population who, “even gave their own children to do jihad against the ‘impious state,’” Ghanem-Yazbeck said. The similarities between the GIA, who attempted to run their own caliphate in territory they controlled, and ISIS are apparent, the academic suggested. “ISIS even talks about the GIA in one of its issues of Dabiq… I think that ISIS is learning from the mistakes of the GIA and trying to avoid them,” Ghanem-Yazbeck said, referring to ISIS’s online monthly magazine.

A second organization with close parallels to the Islamic State, despite its communist ideology, was Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. Taking power in the small Southeast Asian country in 1975, the party of Pol Pot is believed to have caused the deaths of as many as 2 million of its own citizens during its short four-year reign. As much as a quarter of the population could have been killed through starvation, exhaustion, torture and execution, byproducts of the dictator’s attempts to bring about a utopian agricultural society.

“Under Pol Pot they established ‘Year Zero’ where everybody would be equal, would be a peasant and grow rice,” Myers Cooper, director of the charity Cambodian Communities out of Crises, told The Media Line. The population was forced to move into the countryside and work using primitive tools in agricultural communes. A number of famines followed as urban Cambodians struggled to learn to farm without using technologies invented prior to ‘Year Zero,’ i.e. 1975.

To add to the death toll, all “enemies, actual and perceived,” were executed, Cooper said. This included professionals, foreigners, ‘subversives,’ and anybody else who did not match the Khmer Rouge’s ideal of a perfect communist peasant. In some cases the extremes of the cadres were so arbitrary as to be bizarre. “People who wore glasses were (assumed to be) intelligentsia and therefore executed – all in the name of equality and the elimination of privilege,” Cooper explained.

Parallels to the rise of the Islamic State out of the insurgency in Iraq against the United States military can be seen in the ascension of the Khmer Rouge from the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In an effort to destroy Viet Cong supply routes, the US dropped a huge amount of ordinance onto Cambodia. “The Khmer Rouge played on the bombing, they gained much popular support from ordinary people whose lives had been ruined by collateral damage,” Cooper suggested.

From these parallels it is possible that lessons might be learned for policy leaders looking to tackle ISIS, or that warnings for the future may present themselves, the analysts hinted.

A policy of “decay and infiltration” brought about the collapse of the GIA in Algeria, Ghanem-Yazbeck suggests. The military allowed the GIA to control territory it had seized and waited until the population in these zones became disgusted by the Islamist’s brutality and formed a ‘counter-resistance,’ Ghanem-Yazbeck said. At the same time the security service infiltrated the GIA with spies reducing the organization effectiveness.

The temporary defeat of Al-Qa’ida in Iraq following the ‘Sunni Awakening’ bears similarities to the events in Algeria. The Sunni extremist group was pushed out of many areas of the country by local people, supported by US forces, who had become disgusted with their brutality.

“What killed the GIA is the GIA,” Ghanem-Yazbeck argued, pointing to the extremists’ decision to ‘excommunicate’ the entirety of Algerian Muslim society for not being ‘sufficiently pious’ to join their revolution. This may offer hope to those fighting the Islamic State. As Ghanem-Yazbeck said, “I do believe that only IS will kill IS.”

At the same time there are warnings. Such was the corruption of the Cambodian regime prior to the Khmer Rouge that US-supplied weapons were sold to the Khmer Rouge, rather than being used against them, Cooper said. “Perhaps there is a parallel in that if we give aid to the government in the countries affected (by ISIS) there is the risk that they will not use it effectively,” Cooper suggested.

Simultaneously the charity director noted a second cautionary point. The Khmer Rouge were removed from government by the invasion of their communist neighbor Vietnam in 1979. With the logic of the Cold War, Vietnam was the West’s enemy and therefore the Khmer Rouge, who escaped into the jungles of Cambodia to fight a guerilla war, became allies. Rumors persist that Western governments supported the Khmer Rouge campaign after 1979, despite the genocide they had committed, Cooper explained.

In the efforts to remove the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, Cooper warns, “(It is) possible that we might end up supporting ISIS.”