Israeli soldiers and police block Palestinians from one of the entrances to the old city in Jerusalem. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Nov 20 2014 (IPS)

The recent killing of an Arab youth by the police in the Israeli Arab village of Kufr Kanna, outside Nazareth, the ongoing bloody violence in Jerusalem, and the growing tensions between the Israeli security services and the Arab community in Israel could be a dangerous omen for Israeli domestic stability and for the region.

Should a third intifada or uprising erupt, it could easily spread to Arab towns and cities inside Israel.Recent events clearly demonstrate that the Arabs in Israel are no longer a quiescent, cultural minority but an “indigenous national” minority deserving full citizenship rights regarding resources, collective rights, and representation on formal state bodies.

Foreign media is asking whether Palestinians are on the verge of starting a new intifada in Jerusalem, the Occupied Territories, and perhaps in Israel. Ensuing instability would rattle the Israeli body politic, creating new calls from the right for the transfer of the Arab community from Israel.

As Israeli politics moves to the right and the state becomes more Jewish and less pluralistic and inclusive, the Palestinian community, which constitutes over one-fifth of the population, feels more marginalised and alienated.

In response to endemic budgetary, economic, political, and social discrimination, the Arab community is becoming assertive, more Palestinian, and more confrontational. Calls for equality, justice, and an end to systemic discrimination by “Israeli Arab” civil society activists are now more vocal and confrontational.

The Israeli military, police, and security services would find it difficult to contain a civil rights intifada across Israel because Arabs live all over the state, from Galilee in the north to the Negev in the south.

The majority of Arabs in Israel are Sunni Muslims, with a small Druze minority whose youth are conscripted into the Israeli army. The even smaller Christian minority is rapidly dwindling because of emigration.

The vast Muslim majority identifies closely with what is happening at the important religious site of al-Haram al-Sharif or Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Islamic State’s territorial expansion in Iraq and Syria and the rise of Salafi groups in Sinai and Gaza will surely impact the Arabs in Israel.

In addition to Arabic, Palestinians in Israel speak Hebrew, travel throughout the country, and know Israel intimately. A potential bloody confrontation with Israeli security forces could wreak havoc on the country.

Israeli Arab Spring?

Based on conversations with “Israeli Arab” activists over the years, a possible “intifada” would be grounded in peaceful protests and non-violent civil rights struggle. The Israeli government, like Arab regimes during the Arab Spring, would attempt to delegitimise an “Israeli Arab Spring” by accusing the organisers of supporting terrorism and Islamic radicalism.

One Palestinian activist told me, however, “The protests are not about religion or radicalism; they are about equality, justice, dignity, and civil rights.”

Analysis of the economic, educational, political, and social status of the 1.6 million Arabs in Israel shows not much improvement has occurred since the bloody events of October 2000 in which 13 Arabs were killed during demonstrations in support of the al-Aqsa intifada. In fact, in welfare, health, employment, infrastructure, public services, and housing the situation of Israeli Arabs has retarded in the past decade.

For years, the Arab minority has been called “Israeli Arabs” because they carry the Israeli citizenship or the “’48 Arabs,” which refers to those who stayed in Israel after it came into being in 1948.

Although they have lived with multiple identities—Palestinian, Arab, Islamic, and Israeli—in the past half dozen years, they now reject the “Israeli Arab” moniker and have begun to identify themselves as an indigenous Palestinian community living in Israel.

Arab lawyers have gone to Israeli courts to challenge land confiscation, denial of building permits, refusal to expand the corporate limits of Arab towns and villages, meager budgets given to city and village councils, and limited employment opportunities, especially in state institutions.

In the Negev, or the southern part of Israel, thousands of Arabs live in “unrecognized” towns and villages. These towns often do not appear on Israeli maps! Growing calls by right-wing Zionist and settler politicians and their increasingly virulent “Death to Arabs” messages against the Arab minority have become more shrill and threaten to spark more communal violence between Jews and Arabs across Israel.

Deepening fissures in Israeli society between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority will have long-term implications for a viable future for Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

The Arab community expects tangible engagement initiatives from the government to include allowing Arab towns and villages to expand their corporate limits in order to ease crowding; grant the community more building permits for new houses; let Arabs buy and rent homes in Jewish towns and ethnically mixed cities, especially in Galilee; increase per capita student budgetary allocations to improve services and educational programmes in Arab schools; improve the physical infrastructure of Arab towns and villages; and recognise the “unrecognised” Arab towns in the Negev.

Depending on government policy and regional developments, Israeli Arabs could be either a bridge between Israel and its Arab neighbours or a potential domestic threat to Israel as a Jewish, democratic, or multicultural state. So far, the signs are not encouraging.

The Islamic Movement, which constitutes the vast majority of the Arab community, is also becoming more cognizant of its identity and more active in forging links with other Islamic groups in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.

The growing sense of nationalism and Islamisation of the Arab community is directly related to Israel’s occupation policies in the West Bank, continued blockade of the Gaza Strip, and refusal to recognise the Palestinians’ right of self-determination. Long-term government-minority relations in Israel, whether accommodationist or confrontational, will also affect American standing and national interest in the region.

Although secular activists within the Arab community are wary of the Islamist agenda, they seem to collaborate closely with leaders of the Islamic Movement on the need to assert the political rights of Israeli Arabs as full citizens.

In 2006-07, Arab civil society institutions issued three important documents, known collectively as the “Future Vision,” expressing their vision for the future of the Palestinian community in Israel and its relations with the state.

The documents called for “self-reliance” and described the Arab minority as an “indigenous, Palestinian community with inalienable rights to the land on which it has lived for centuries.” The documents also assert the Arabs in Israel are the “original indigenous people of Palestine” and are “indivisible from the larger Palestinian, Arab, Islamic cultural heritage.”

Arab activists believe that recent Israeli policies toward the Palestinian minority and their representatives in the Knesset are undermining the integrationist effort, empowering the Islamist separatist argument, and deepening the feeling of alienation among the Arab minority.

Way forward

Recent events clearly demonstrate that the Arabs in Israel are no longer a quiescent, cultural minority but an “indigenous national” minority deserving full citizenship rights regarding resources, collective rights, and representation on formal state bodies.

Many of the conditions that gave rise to the bloody confrontation with the police on Temple Mount over a decade ago, including the demolition of housing, restrictions on Arab politicians and Knesset members, restrictive citizenship laws, and budgetary discriminatory laws remain in place.

A decade ago the International Crisis Group (ICG) anticipated the widespread negative consequences of discrimination against Israel’s Arab minority and its findings still stand. Perhaps most importantly, the organisation judged the probability of violence to remain high as long as “greater political polarization, frustration among Arab Israelis, deepening Arab alienation from the political system, and the deteriorating economic situation” are not addressed.

In order to avoid large-scale violence, the ICG recommended that the Israeli government invest in poor Arab areas, end all facets of economic, political, and social discrimination against the Arab community, increase Arab representation at all levels in the public sector, and implement racism awareness training in schools and in all branches of government, beginning with the police.

A poor, marginalised one-fifth of the Israeli population perceived as a demographic bomb and a threat to the Jewish identity of the state can only be defused by a serious engagement strategy—economically, educationally, culturally, and politically.

If violence and continued discrimination are part of Israel’s long-term strategy against its Arab minority to force Arab emigration, it is unlikely that the government would implement tangible initiatives to improve the condition of the Arab minority.

Accordingly, communal violence in Israel would increase, creating negative ramifications for regional peace and stability and for U.S. interests in the eastern Mediterranean.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Earlier in October, Azerbaijani news media reported the death of a professional Azerbaijani wrestler, Rashad Bakhshaliyev, who was killed in Syria while fighting for the Islamic State. The news, which came as a surprise to many in Azerbaijan, underscores an emerging security threat for Azerbaijan.

Hundreds of Azerbaijanis are known to have joined Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria. Concern is starting to build that these battle-hardened jihadists could one day set their sights on challenging President Ilham Aliyev’s administration in Azerbaijan.Salafis have a solid foothold in Azerbaijan, and at least some of them are prone to radicalisation, as the steady stream of Azeris who have left their homeland to go fight in Syria and Iraq demonstrates.

Some prominent militants now fighting in Syria, most notably field commander Hattab al-Azeri, have already started verbally attacking the Aliyev government for its secularism and corruption.

Azerbaijan would seem to make an attractive target for IS jihadists. It is one of the few countries in the world with the Shia Muslim majority population, and the IS is virulently anti-Shia. On a geopolitical level, going after Azerbaijan would also seem attractive for the IS, given Baku’s links to Russia, the United States and Iran, three countries that are among the IS’ chief antagonists.

Azerbaijan itself would seem to present a vulnerable target. While it has a strong security apparatus, widespread corruption has weakened many state institutions in the eyes of the population.

In addition, Azerbaijan is home to a substantial, indigenous community of Salafis, followers of a particularly puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam. While not all Salafis are apt to become jihadists, jihadists have come from Salafi ranks. There is a danger that at least some non-violent Salafis may sympathize with the goals, if not tactics, of the jihadists and become radicalised.

Virtually unheard of in Azerbaijan until the early 1990s, Salafism has spread rapidly since. No credible data exist on the number of Salafis in Azerbaijan today, but their presence is relatively strong in the Sunni-majority northern parts of the country, the capital city of Baku and the town of Sumgait.

Several factors explain the rise of Salafism in Azerbaijan. First, the long legacy of official Soviet atheism warped the popular understanding of traditional Shia tenets, which for centuries had formed the moral and ethical bedrock of Azerbaijani society.

The Bolsheviks created a spiritual void and inadvertently paved the way for more extreme religious beliefs to fill it once the communist system collapsed in 1991. It is noteworthy that in their efforts to denigrate the Shias, Salafis have made prolific use of derogatory depictions of religious figures, almost entirely Shia, in early Soviet films.

Soviet atheists and post-Soviet Salafis may be strange bedfellows, but, working in tandem, they have succeeded in destroying the traditional religious underpinning of Azeri society.

Anti-Iranian policies carried out by various Azerbaijani governments since the 1990s have contributed to the spread of Salafism. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, isolating Iran was one of the explicit policy goals of successive American administrations.

Officials in Baku at the time believed an alliance with the United States was essential for achieving their own strategic goals, namely regaining control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. So Azerbaijan readily aligned its policies with a US-promoted regional framework that excluded Iran. This enabled Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, through the establishment of charities and banks, to foster the spread of Salafi beliefs in Azerbaijan.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Azerbaijani authorities saw no reason to take action to check the spread of Salafism. If anything, they saw its proliferation as a healthy counterbalance to Iran’s efforts to export its influence to Azerbaijan. While pro-Iranian Shia elements have been openly critical of the Aliyev administration, Salafis in Azerbaijan have tended to emphasise loyalty to the government and have shied away from political activism.

In recent years, authorities have awakened to the potential Salafi threat. But addressing it now is infinitely more challenging than it would have been a decade ago. Salafis have a solid foothold in Azerbaijan, and at least some of them are prone to radicalisation, as the steady stream of Azeris who have left their homeland to go fight in Syria and Iraq demonstrates.

It is clear that jihadists, especially those now engaged in Syria, do not recognise state borders and consider the entire Muslim world as fertile ground for the expansion of their self-proclaimed “caliphate.” Thus, no Muslim-majority state should feel secure enough to ignore this threat.

The Aliyev administration in recent years has ruthlessly persecuted independent journalists and civil society activists, and the pace and scope of its crackdown has intensified in 2014. Over the same period, Baku has occasionally clashed with the United States and European Union, in particular Germany, over what Azerbaijani officials contend are the West’s “double standards” on human rights.

These policies merely weaken Baku’s ability to address its most serious security threat – the metamorphosis of Salafism into militant Islam. Stability in Azerbaijan would be much better served if Baku focused on taking action that would diminish the potential for international and homegrown jihadism.

Editor’s note:  Eldar Mamedov is a political adviser to the Socialists & Democrats Group in the European Parliament. He writes in his personal capacity. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

In the city of Metlaoui in the Governorate of Gafsa, a mining region in the parched south of Tunisia, the streets are dust, filled with ruts, the skin of the men in the cracked lanes leathery brown from the heavy weather.

In Ibn Khaldoun, a neighbourhood on Metlaoui’s fringes, the area seems less of a city and more a chaotic village of one-storey homes of brick and concrete trying to hold fast to sudden rises in the earth.

Behind the flimsy steel gate of one home at the end of an alley in Ibn Khaldoun, locals take me into the courtyard of a home of hollow windowsills and empty doorframes. Used clothes spill out the doorway into the courtyard.“We are in a crisis of trust, between the Islamists on one side and liberals on the other."

Five young Salafists, guilty of nothing more than sporting long beards and praying five times a day, neighbours say, were arrested in a raid by security forces in late October.

“An officer from the security forces said [the Salafists] had weapons. But they didn’t. So the officer said ‘But they will build them!’”

A neighbour points to the earthen floor of the house. “But look; the Salafists were praying in the dust! No one is funding them or supporting them. They’re no threat – they don’t have anything.” Around him, other neighbours of the arrested Salafists loudly condemned the ruling Ennahdha party, who they saw as responsible for the arrests.

Tunisian authorities launched military operations into the Tunisian interior in response to attacks by armed militants in October which rocked a major tourism hub, nearly destroyed the tomb of a former president, and reportedly left six National Guard soldiers dead. Yet, it’s possible that the embattled ruling Ennahdha Party may be using the military operations as a card to appease powerful political adversaries.

According to Fabio Merone, an analyst living in Tunis who specialises in the politics of Salafi groups like those blamed for October’s attacks, the once-outlawed Ennahdha Party “has been refused power so long that they’re desperate to integrate into the elite.” He went on to say that, “Ennhdha is being asked by police forces and the wealthy to take a clear stand with the state against extremists.”

In doing so, he claims, they’re attacking the conservative base that brought them to power in 2011.

After the rise of a small extremist insurgency on Tunisia’s western border and the assassination of two prominent leftist opposition leaders earlier this year, accusations from leftist and liberal political groups against Ennahdha of being tolerant of terrorist groups rose to a crescendo.

Following the last assignation in July, 60 members of the National Constituent Assembly – charged with drafting a constitution and already far behind deadline – walked out, freezing the transitional process completely. This brought the ire of still more Tunisians to bear on the Islamist party, currently at the head of the transitional government.

In its attempts to appease well-off liberals who prefer the old regime of president Zine El Abdine Ben Ali and who feel “suffocated by the Islamists,” Ennahdha is turning its back on its once-thriving Salafist base.

The Salafists, at first wildly successful in channeling the frustration of Tunisia’s poor after the fall of former dictator Ben Ali, are now being publicly rejected by Ennahdha. After Ennahdha cancelled the national conference of ultra-conservative group Ansar Al Charia in May, and in August officially labeled it a ‘terrorist group’, average Tunisian Salafists are facing the heat, like those arrested in Metlaoui.

“Tunisian families are looking at Ennahdha like they once looked at the RCD [Constitutional Democratic Rally, which ruled Tunisia until 2011], because of the arbitrary arrests,” says Selim Kharrat, executive director of Al Bawsala, an NGO which encourages political participation in Tunisia.

Kharrat raised the possibility that arbitrary arrests of Salafists and raids are the work of security forces outside Ennahdha’s control. He notes that sections of the security forces are influenced by supporters of the old regime, who feel threatened by the rise of the Salafists and may be pursuing the crackdown.

“We are in a crisis of trust, between the Islamists on one side and liberals on the other,” Kharrat says plainly. Yet whether it’s the work of secular groups tied to the old regime or Ennahdha politicians trying to please them, the brunt of the war on terror being faced by Tunisians in the impoverished interior is the same.

In a farming village not far from Metlaoui, villagers mill silently around a home in the middle of freshly ploughed fields. My guide tells me that only days after the start of the military operations in October, eight locals were arrested from the house after a reported standoff with the National Guard.

The whole household was rounded up and jailed on suspicion that two of the young men in the home were plotting terrorist acts. However, evidence was reportedly thin, and the six others were simply family of the young men.

Though released soon after their imprisonment, my guide relays to me, the innocent family members are outraged with the security services and the government they see as complicit in the raid. Despite this, they are silent with me – eyes lowered and hands stuffed in their pockets. My guide tells me the family members of the suspected terrorists were given orders from the government not speak to journalists after their arrest.

Seif Eddine Belabed, a media supervisor for Ennahdha in one of its neighbourhood offices in Tunis, seemed unfazed by the story of Tunisians being swept up in raids with little or no evidence. “Maybe I arrest 100 people, and five or six are innocent,” he responds, in an office in downtown Tunis. “A mistake, but at the same time you’ve caught over 90 bad guys. This is what happens in a raid.”

Like the Ennahdha leadership since it began cracking down on the outwardly pious in Tunisia earlier this year, Belabed disowned the Salafists – violent or no. “There’s this idea that Salafis are a branch of Ennahdha. This is wrong.” Waving his hand, he said, “In their methods and ideology, they are something else completely.”

Hundreds of young Egyptian Christian girls have mysteriously disappeared. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

When a young Christian girl goes missing in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, her family will call on a certain Muslim sheikh in the nearby town of El-Ameriya.

The local Salafi leader, whose ultra-conservative views condone the marriage of girls as young as nine, has a history of abducting Coptic Christian girls and forcing them to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men, claim rights activists.

And so the sheikh and his associates are the natural starting point for any investigation into missing underage Christian girls. And, according to activists, that is usually where they find them.

“Whenever a young girl disappears in the area the trail leads to this sheikh,” says Mamdouh Nakhla, chairman of the Al Kalema Organisation for Human Rights.

In a recent case, a 13-year-old Coptic Christian girl from a village near Alexandria was allegedly kidnapped and held for over a week as her abductors tried to force her to renounce her religion.

According to her testimony, she was drugged unconscious while in a taxi on her way home from school. She woke up in a secluded house with two Salafi sheikhs and an elderly woman. Her abductors forced her to wear niqab, a full veil covering the body and face, and beat her when she refused to convert to Islam.

Girgis claims she was released nine days later when the sheikhs became nervous after her family organised large demonstrations for her return. The Salafis turned her over to police, who feared the girl’s testimony would spark sectarian clashes, and so tried to convince her to claim she had wilfully gone to a sheikh seeking to convert to Islam.

“The only thing unusual (about this case) was that the girl was returned,” says Nakhla. “In one case I investigated a kidnapped girl was allowed to call her parents, but in all others the girl was never heard from again.”

Christian rights watchdogs say abductions and forced conversions of young Egyptian Coptic girls have been going on for decades right under the noses of local authorities. But the frequency of the kidnappings has increased alarmingly since the uprising in 2011 that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak and brought an Islamist-led government to power.

More than 500 Christian girls have been abducted in the last two years, according to the Association of Victims of Abduction and Forced Disappearance (AVAFD), which documents the disappearances. A growing number of cases involve girls between the ages of 13 and 17.

AVAFD head Abram Louis claims the abducted girls are taken to ‘safe’ houses, where they are manipulated or blackmailed into converting to Islam and forced to marry Muslim men, often to serve as second wives.

“If we inform the police where the kidnapped girl is being kept, they inform the Salafis, who then move her away to another home and then we lose all trace of her,” Louis said in a recent interview.

“Egypt has laws in place to protect girls under 18, but Salafis do not accept them,” says Amal Abdel Hadi, head of the New Woman Foundation. “To them, a girl is only a minor until she has her first period.”

However, Salafi leaders have categorically denied any role in abducting Christian girls or forceful proselytising. They claim that so far as they know, the girls converted to Islam of their own free will, in some cases after falling in love with a Muslim man.

Ishaak Ibrahim, a religious rights researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), says inter-faith love affairs and conversions are dangerously provocative issues in Egypt. Rumours of such have led to outbreaks of sectarian violence.

He says many of the alleged abductions involve young Christian girls who appear to have converted to Islam to escape bad relations with their families, or after having engaged in pre-marital relations (taboo in conservative Egyptian culture) with Muslim men.

“The girls appear to have chosen to change their religion,” Ibrahim told IPS. “But because the family is ashamed, and because the police don’t investigate to find their daughter, the family chooses the easiest solution, which is to say the girl was kidnapped by Muslim extremists.”

Such cases only present a problem when the girl is a minor, he says, as Egypt’s Child Law criminalises the marriage of any girl under 18, even if by her own free will.

But Nakhla, who is representing the families of 20 missing Coptic girls, says there are clear signs that young girls have been coerced into converting and marrying.

Referring to one recent case, he asks if it makes sense that a 15-year-old Christian girl would suddenly choose to convert to Islam and serve as a second wife, without any legal rights, to a firebrand Salafi sheikh over 40 years her senior. The girl has never spoken or written to her parents since her disappearance – unusual behaviour in a country where family ties run deep.

“In Egypt it is a crime to marry a minor, and you can’t legally change your religion until you’re 18… yet the government refuses to investigate these cases and arrest those responsible,” complains Nakhla.

While Ibrahim argues that all Egyptians should have the right to change their religion at any time, he says authorities also have a responsibility to ensure that women – particularly minors – are protected from coercion and exploitation.

“The family should be allowed to meet their daughter and get her to explain what she wants in the presence of the public prosecutor,” he says.

Salafi leaders have rejected any state intervention, and have warned against attempts by parents and human rights organisations to return the girls to their families.

Tunisian families have begun to dread knocks on their doors, or late-night phone calls, fearing that the messenger will bear the news that their son has been smuggled out of the country to join the “jihad” in Syria.

Semi Ghesmi, a Salafist student and elected head of the National Students Union in Tunisia, supports what he calls the “jihad” in Syria. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

Families here told IPS that they have no way of contacting their sons once they leave — whether by choice or coercion they will never know — for the warring nation nearly 3,000 miles away. At most, family members receive an inaudible telephone call from Libya, where the soon-to-be militants are trained, the muffled voice on the other end of the line saying a quiet and final goodbye.

After that point, no news is good news. If they are contacted again, it will only be an anonymous caller announcing the death of a son, brother or husband, adding that the family should be proud of their martyred loved one.

The next day, the family might find a CD, slipped under the door, containing filmed footage of the burial.

There are no reliable data on exactly when young Tunisian men began rushing to join the Free Syrian Army, currently engaged in a battle to depose Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, but experts and civil society activists are agreed on one thing: the number is increasing.

On Mar. 29, local sources reported that between 6,000 and 10,000 men have left the country, while the Algerian press say the number could be closer to 12,000.

Families tell IPS the self-proclaimed jihadists leave in secret, often under cover of darkness, and change their names en route so that Facebook and internet searches yield no results. They believe mosques and charity organisations serve as fronts for this “recruitment” process.

Widely considered the cradle of the Arab Spring, Tunisia has gained a reputation as a progressive country, bolstered by the strong democratic current that toppled former dictator Zine Abadine Ben Ali in January 2011. The election of the moderate Islamist party Ennahda in October 2011 further raised hopes that the country would stay on track towards a more inclusive future.

But beneath the moderate veneer, a strong ultra-conservative undercurrent remained, steered by Salafist-controlled mosques – like Fath, Ennassr, Ettadhamen, and the great mosque of Ben Arous located on the outskirts of Tunis – that are now serving as headquarters for the smuggling of fighters.

A true revolution is made by the people, not by jihadis coming from other countries.
The imams of these mosques often hail from the Gulf and are skilled at convincing young men – who run the gamut from poor, uneducated Tunisians, to wealthy professionals — that they must “help their Syrian brothers” in the “jihad” against Assad.

Charity organisations like Karama wa Horrya, Arrahma, Horrya wa Insaf, which provide basic humanitarian assistance to the poor, also play a role in this network that gathers able-bodied Tunisians, transports them to Libya and then, after a brief stop in Turkey, sends them onwards to the frontlines of the Syrian war such as the north-western border with Lebanon, and the city of Aleppo.

Young fighters’ first point of contact in Syria is with the Jabhat al Nusra (meaning the ‘Support Front for the People of Syria’), considered the most aggressively militant arm of the FSA.

Beyond these vague details, very little is known about the actual recruitment process. The only credible information comes from wounded jihadis who are sent back to Tunisia if their injuries have resulted in handicaps that render them unfit for battle. Most die in the fighting and those that return are often too afraid to speak of their experiences.

Tunisian youth, who played a crucial role in the 2011 revolution here, have conflicting views about the Syrian uprising, and their countrymen’s participation in it.

For some, like Semi Ghesmi, elected representative of the technological department of the National Student Union, Syrians are engaged in an outright jihad in the strictly religious sense of the term, meaning a battle between “good” Muslims and “kafirs”, or infidels. In this war, the FSA has the moral highground and must be supported.

Others like Nassira, a student at the Manouba University in Tunis, say the Syrian conflict “is not a revolution like the Tunisian one”. In her opinion, a true revolution is “made by the people, not by jihadists coming from other Muslim countries”. She favours the Tunisian model, which was dictated not by a small circle of extremists but by the majority of the people.

During the recent World Social Forum, held in Tunis from Mar. 26-30, the division between supporters and opponents of the Syrian rebels came to light when local participants burned FSA flags in the streets.

Jihadis – or racketeers?

Most families who spoke to IPS were too afraid to give their names, fearing reprisals. They suspect powerful and wealthy interests have a hand in the smuggling of fighters, since some families have received as much as 4,000 dollars in “payment” for each jihadi recruit.

Those who spoke to IPS under condition of anonymity believe the recruiters themselves also receive a fee. Many denounced the government for allowing this “business” in human lives to thrive.

A local journalist who has been investigating the process, but did not want to be identified by name, told IPS the government almost certainly makes money off this racket as well.

Experts believe Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi’s statement, issued through the Ministry of Religion, that “we don’t suggest young people leave… but we have no right to prevent them” is tantamount to an admission that the government has no plans to put a stop to the practice, or apprehend those involved.

Observers find further proof of the government’s complicity in an agreement, signed in the Libyan capital Tripoli on Dec. 11, 2011 by Ennahda’s Ghannouchi; Burhan Ghalioun, former chief of the Syrian National Council (SNC); and Mustafa Abdel Jalil, former chairman of the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), outlining plans to send weapons, along with Tunisian and Libyan jihadis, to Syria. The contents of the agreement were leaked to the public last year.

Not content with recruiting only men, clerics have begun to urge women and girls – some as young as 14 years – to take up “jihad through marriage” by travelling to Syria to satisfy the sexual needs of anti-Assad forces.

The phenomenon picked up speed after a Saudi religious scholar named Mohamed al-Arifi issued a fatwa in December 2012 allowing the “temporary marriage”, sometimes lasting just a few hours, of young girls to Syrian insurgents. Though he has subsequently revoked the edict, following a public outcry, the practice continues.

Here again, numbers are impossible to pin down – but IPS has heard of several cases in the last three months of Tunisian teenage girls who have gone missing, which has sparked fears of a new form of religiously sanctioned sexual trafficking.

(END)

The Arab Spring brought a host of new actors to the political stage. In Jordan, it pushed the Salafists to the fore, where some of the group’s more radical elements are now calling for holy war in neighbouring Syria. The Jordanian regime is growing increasingly concerned about the possible spillover effects of violence in Syria, especially since Jordanian Jihadist-Salafist Sheikh Abou Mohamad Tahawi recently released a fatwa calling for jihad in Syria.

“I called for any man able to go for jihad in Syria; it is the responsibility of any good Muslim to stop the bloodshed perpetrated by the Nusayri regime,” the Sheikh told IPS, referring to the ruling regime in Syria, which is Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

“The Alawite and Shiite coalition is currently the biggest threat to Sunnis, even more than the Israelis,” Tahawi stressed. Jordanian Jihadist-Salafists seem to have responded to Sheikh Tahawi’s call. According to journalist Tamer Smadi, a specialist on radical movements in the Hashemite Kingdom, a group of over 30 Jihadists tried to enter Syria a few weeks ago. All but seven, including Abu Anas Sahabi, an explosives specialist, were caught by Jordanian intelligence services.

Jihadists’ increasing radicalism has widened the gulf between extreme and moderate Salafists. The reformist wing has even met with the U.S. embassy, an unusual move for Salafists who do not recognise national politics.

“The Arab Spring resulted in the division of the Salafi community here in Jordan,” said Smadi.

Salafism – a movement that calls for a purer and more radical interpretation of Islam, following the precepts of the ‘Salaf al-Saleh’, or ‘the righteous predecessors’ – has been present in Jordan since the 1960s, when it was brought into the country by returning university students from Egypt and Syria.

Sheikh Mohamad Nasreldine Albani, an Albanian-Syrian religious leader, also played an influential role in the movement in the 1980s by heading a Salafi faction called Tabligh wal Daawa (Muslim Calling) in the city of Zarqa.

Salafism is based on three pillars: belief in one god, the ‘daawa’ or the missionary task, and ‘jihad’.

According to Sheikh Omar Bakri, a radical cleric who was expelled from Britain in 2005 for his alleged links with al-Qaeda, “Most Salafists, however, only apply the first two principles of true Islam without fulfilling the third, the jihad.”

The hawkish wing of the movement came into the public sphere in 2005, when Jihadist-Salafists under the leadership of Abu Mussaab al-Zarqawi organised a series of suicide bombings in several hotels around the capital, Amman, killing 60 and wounding dozens. Al-Zarqawi was later linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The resulting crackdown on the Salafist community forced the Jihadists among them to move largely underground until, when the pan-Arab pro-democracy movements kicked off in late 2010, they started participating in and organising protests in Jordan.

Jihadist-Salafists, a loosely structured faction who only number around 1,500 in Jordan, have recently begun to stage several demonstrations, the largest of which was held on Apr. 15 this year in the city of Zarqa and drew around 350 protesters.

The protest resulted in a violent clash with the police, leaving dozens of wounded policemen and numerous civilian causalities. In response, the Jordanian regime unleashed a harsh crackdown on the community, raiding several Jihadists’ homes in Zarqa and nearby towns and charging 146 with terrorist activities.

In Jordan, the vast majority of Salafists are traditionalists who focus on Islamic ‘fiqh’, or religious knowledge. But for over a year now, new players have emerged, namely reformists who subscribe to a more moderate approach to Salafism. In early April 2011, the ruling regime and several Salafist leaders held a meeting to negotiate demands.

Such reform is unprecedented within a religious faction that, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, does not believe in political organisation. Traditional Salafists also generally reject the notion of nationalism and refuse to partake in political life, as they believe in the rule of a global Islamic Ummah.

“Reformers are coming to understand that the community has a greater role to play, whether politically, economically or socially,” said Ibrahim Hamad, himself a Salafist reformist. The Salafist reformists have also begun coordinating aid to Syrian refugees who have fled the ongoing violence in their country to Jordan.

“They (reformists) are growing in areas where Syrian refugees are present. Up until now they have distributed about five million dollars in aid, 60 percent of which is provided through countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Kuwait,” Smadi explained.

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