Who Can Best Defeat Salafi Terror in Iraq?

Not the Americans, that's for sure. They have already clearly
demonstrated in the last year that they are completely incapable of
getting a grip on Salafi and native Iraqi resistance. This is hardly
suprising given that most of their troops on the ground speak not a
word of Arabic and know nothing of the culture of any the diverse
ethnic populations of Iraq. Perhaps most importantly, they understand
nothing of Islam and the historical and contemporary tensions between
Sunni and Shia, not to mention the ultra-sectarian Salafi sect that
are the backbone of Al-Quaeda's "International Brigade" fighting in
Iraq.

And yet last month's Salafi outrage against the first free Shia
celebration of their biggest annual festival in Karbala in over 10
years has clearly shown that, free from US and UK occupation, we can
expect Shia neutrality to the current Salafi guerrilla activities in
Iraq to be swiftly transformed into a no-nonsense settling of accounts
with their murderously sectarian "Ultra-Sunni" neighbours.

With US & UK withdrawal Iraq's Shia majority will no longer be
constrained by the need to maintain a pan-Iraqi and pan-Islamic
consensus in the face of the alien Western invaders. Freed from this
un-natural and false unity forced on them by the presence of the
common foe, the Shia will waste little time in ridding Iraqi society
of its blood-thirsty Salafi irritants. Whether the methods they use to
do this will be more or less extreme than the current US blunderings
is a somewhat academic question. One thing is for sure though, it will
be a million times more effective than the clueless flounderings of
the ignorant yankee cowboys.

Where the US have failed, the sovereign Iraqi people, autonomously
organised in a grand coalition of Shias, Kurds, and moderate Sunnis,
unified by the common goal of finally getting a bit of peace and quiet
and a chance to rebuild their country, schools, hospitals,
universities and everyday lives free from dictators, western
imperialists and blood-crazed jihadi prophets of armageddon, will
liquidate any remaining forces of death and destruction still
lingering in their territory with a ruthless efficiency that will
forever silence western racists still intent on preaching the lie that
Arabs are too "culturally immature" to be sovereign in their own
countries.

Still the Americans continue to insist that they must at all costs
continue their occupation of Iraq as only they can "stem the advance
of global [Islamic] terrorism". Such lies. It was the americans
themselves who selected the ultra-orthodox Sunni Salafi sect as the
ideal base (and don't forget "Al Qaeda" means "Base") for an Islamic
anti-communist force in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation
precisely on the grounds that the Salafis had a deep hatred of Shias
and so could be trusted not to side with the Iranian regime of the
Ayatollahs that had so angered the Americans by confiscating their oil
interests in Iran. In Saudi Arabia, the sole state in the Arb world
where the Salafi sect, also known as the Wahabis after the name of the
sect's founder, are the established religion, the dread mutawa
(religious gestapo) commonly murder minority Shia citizens out of pure
sectarianism. Short of Iran itself, no Arab land is more capable and
willing to rid itself of a Salafi infection than the majority Shia and
generally relatively secularised Iraq.

Only the US occupation itself is allowing the Salafi guerrillas the
freedom to enter and operate in Iraq. Even despite outrages like the
sectarian massacre at Karbala last month, the Iraqi Shias know that if
they allow themselves to be distracted into a fight with fellow Arabs
and muslims at a time when they must concentrate on evicting the Texan
oil thieves from their land, they will not succeed in winning their
freedom.

International soildarity with our Iraqi brothers and sisters demands
that we continue to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal
of USUK occupying forces from Iraq, secure in the knowledge that once
the cowboys are finally gone, the Iraqi people, both Shia and
non-Shia, will waste no time in seeing that all Al Qaeda activity in
Iraq is terminated with extreme predjudice.

The Madrid bombings are the first of this kind we have seen in Western
Europe since Bologna and similar "Strategy of Tension" outrages in
Italy's dirty war of the late 60s and 70s. The fact that some people
even gave a moment's credit to the self-serving smear that this action
could have been an ETA action means that some in our movement have
forgotten that only the extreme right use the tactic of no warning
bombs against mass crowds of working class civilians.

Yet this basic knowledge should help us understand the true nature of
the Al Qaeda and associated international militant Salafi Jihadi
network.

During the 1980s the Americans set about finding/forming an
international force that was extreme right wing when it came to
fighting the social democratic government of Afghanistan (which, lest
we forget, was actually freely elected by the people of Afghanistan
before Soviet intervention) with its ideas of land reform and
education for women - the two causes the mujaheedeen openly stated
that pushed them to rebel against the elected government.

Further it had to be a force that could also be trusted to be at
daggers drawn with the Iranian (Shia) Islamic Republic and yet could
act as an international political force that could lure the poor and
dispossessed of the muslim world away from the grasp of Nasserite,
Baathist or left-wing anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist (NB, despite
the rhetoric, Al Qaeda have never really attacked Israel in any way or
ever showed any indication of genuinely giving a tuppeny damn for the
plight of the Palestinians, other than exploiting them for propaganda
purposes) political forces.

Finally they were also intent on cementing their alliance with the
degenerate and corrupt House of Saud, the US's most important Middle
Eastern ally and oil supplier. Indeed, with the right choice, the huge
piles of Saudi petrodollars could even be mobilised to fund this
force.

In the end all the above made the choice of the Salafi sect not only
natural but virtually inevitable. I have written elsewhere on the
history of the Salafis/Wahabis and their relationship to the House of
Saud and the history of Western imperialist maneuvering for securing
oil supplies in the regions. Suffice it to say that this past made
them the ideal basis for an entirely novel type political force - an
extreme right "anti-imperialist" force. Though this concept may puzzle
the unimaginative who have lazily assumed that anti-imperialism must
forever be the privileged and exclusive possession of the left, the
massacre in Madrid must clearly show to even the slowest amongst us,
that despite now being at war with Western Imperialism, the Salafi
Jihadi network is unmistakeably of an extreme right character. But
that this force has come into existence not organically from the
struggle of the oppressed people's of the Arab and Muslim world, but
artificially, top-down at the decree of the ruling classes of the
region and, above all, America itself.

The fact is that the forces that have struck at Spain in the last days
are in their origins a Frankenstein bearing the label "Made in the
USA".