5MONDAY, MAY 29, 2017DAILY EXPRESS | PERISCOPE

By James M. Dorsey

By Katrin Bennhold, Stephen Castle and Declan Walsh

By Carlotta Gall

Saudi Arabia used US President Donald J. Trump’s visit to the kingdom to drive its anti-Shia and anti-Iran agenda. For the Saudi royals, it was a dream come true.

Trump’s visit barely two weeks after Saudi Arabia had managed to block his administration’s proposal to impose United Nations sanctions on the Saudi branch of the Islamic State (IS).

In light of Trump’s speech and main message while visiting the kingdom, it is truly bewildering to see that Trump and Muslim leaders turned a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s recent intervention.

While a majority of world leaders, including many leaders of Muslim nations, condemn Iranian policies, they view the Islamic State as the world’s foremost terrorist threat.

If that position needed any further proof, it arrived post-haste. Supporters of IS celebrated Monday’s attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, in which at least 22 people were killed and 59 others wounded. Claiming responsibility for the attack, IS described the concert as a Crusader gathering.

The Saudi obsession with Iran trumps everything

Saudi Arabia blocked the sanctions to ensure that the world’s focus would remain on Iran, which it sees as the world’s leading state sponsor of political violence.

The US-proposed sanctioning of the Gulf branch of the Islamic State at the United Nations risked drawing attention to the fact that the Saudis see militant Islamists as useful tools in its proxy wars with Iran in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

In Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s intervention has given IS rival Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) a new lease on life. Prior to the war, AQAP had been driven to near irrelevance by the rise of IS and security crackdowns.

In a report in February, the International Crisis Group (ICG) concluded that AQAP was “stronger than it has ever been… In prosecuting the war, the Saudi-led coalition has relegated confronting AQAP and IS to a second-tier priority… Saudi-led coalition statements that fighting the group is a top priority and announcements of military victories against AQAP in the south are belied by events,” the ICG said.

In a statement issued by the Riyadh summit attended by representatives of 55 countries, the leaders vowed “to combat terrorism in all its forms, address its intellectual roots, dry up its sources of funding and to take all necessary measures to prevent and combat terrorist crimes.”

It “welcomed the establishment of a global centre for countering extremist thought to take base in Riyadh, and praised the centre’s strategic objectives of combating intellectual, media and digital extremism and promoting coexistence and tolerance among peoples.”

The statement made no reference to Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism that propagates a supremacist worldview, encourages prejudice against Muslim and non-Muslim minorities and that according to many policymakers and analysts, enables an environment that potentially breeds militancy.

In a nod to Saudi Arabia’s four-decade long proxy war with Iran that increasingly appears to enjoy Trump’s endorsement, the statement paid lip service to confronting “sectarian agendas.”

However, that passage was linked to countering “interference in other countries affairs.” That is a reference to Iranian support for groups like Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah militia, the Houthis in Yemen, Iraqi Shiite militias fighting IS alongside the Iraqi military and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The statement avoided calling on Sunni Muslim ultra-conservative political and religious leaders to refrain from contributing to sectarian strife. Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the eve of the summit ruled out dialogue with Iran on the grounds of its religious beliefs.

Prince Mohammed, turning its power struggle into an existentialist sectarian battle, charged that Iran was planning for the return of the Imam Mahdi (the redeemer) by seeking to control the Muslim world.

Shi’ites believe that the Mahdi was a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed who went into hiding 1,000 years ago. They trust that he will return to establish global Islamic rule before the end of the world.

To confront extremism, Muslim political leaders and religious groups will not only have to stand up to political manipulation of their faith, but also to prejudices and conspiracy theories based on ingrained bias.

This also includes implicit as well as explicit supremacism that have long been common currency across the Muslim world. It is a jihad that is a lot more difficult than Muslim political leaders paying lip service and playing politics.

Baseline honesty is a prerequisite, if there is to be any hope for an effective countering of extremism and political violence.

-James M. Dorsey, scholar and award-winning journalist is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture, and one of the pioneers of the exploration of the political, social and economic aspects of Middle Eastern and North African soccer. This article was originally featured on theglobalist.com

The Muslim world’s struggle

MANCHESTER, England — Salman Abe-di was wearing a red vest, his suicide bomb hidden in a small backpack, when he phoned his younger brother in Libya and asked him to put his mother on the line. It was about 10:20 p.m. on Monday (22), and the call was short.

“How are you doing, Mom? Please forgive me for anything I did wrong,” he said, and hung up.

A short time later, he walked through the glass doors of the Manchester Arena, the city’s biggest concert venue, lingered for a few minutes by the stalls selling merchan-dise related to Ariana Grande, the American singer who was performing there that night, and blew himself up, killing 22 people and wounding 116.

Since the attack, police have taken 11 peo-ple into custody, and on Saturday (27) Britain lowered its threat level from “critical” to “se-vere.” Officials are confident that they have captured the entire network. But the inves-tigation continues into the network’s hierar-chy, the precise logistics involved in planning the bombing, and what motivated Abedi.

The brief phone call to his mother — “for-give me for anything I did wrong” — encapsu-lated a deeply complicated family tale of con-flict and rebellion, a complex interweaving of personal histories and the tortured recent history of Libya.

It is the story of a strict father’s flight from the repression of Moammar Gadhafi, Lib-ya’s leader at the time, and a personal jihad against that dictatorship, which in turn shook up his children’s world.

The seismic tremors from Libya’s revolu-tion in 2011 reverberated across geographi-cal and generational borders, in Manches-ter’s sizable Libyan population — the largest outside Libya — and in the Abedi family as well. Almost certainly, the events that helped set Salman Abedi on his hauntingly familiar path, from quiet boy in a strict Islamic house-hold to troubled young man to, eventually, suicide bomber, began there.

As Gadhafi tottered in 2011, Abedi’s father, Ramadan, returned to Libya to finish the fight he had started two decades earlier, and took his British-born teenage sons with him. The elder Abedi, a onetime Gadhafi enforcer, fled Libya in 1991 after supporting Islamists seeking to overthrow the brutal leader. Now, as Western warplanes pummeled Tripoli, the capital, that dream was finally coming true.

His sons — Ismail, Salman and Hashem

— accompanied Abedi to Tunisia, where he worked on logistics for the rebels in western Libya. The sons knew very little about Libya, having grown up in the Whalley Range, a working-class area of Manchester. But their father, a proud Islamist, wanted them to fol-low in his footsteps at this euphoric moment.

Salman, a lanky 16-year-old at the time, joined his father as the Tripoli Revolutionary Brigade descended on the Libyan capital that summer. A year later, Ramadan snapped a photograph of 15-year-old Hashem holding a machine gun.

“Hashem the lion … training,” read the caption on the father’s Facebook page.

They were not the only ones to make the journey from Britain. Akram Ramadan, who fought alongside Ramadan Abedi, recalled there being a strong contingent known as “the Manchester fighters.”

“We were all fighting,” Akram Ramadan said in Manchester. “Drug dealers from here were fighting — everybody went.”

After gaining a taste of battle, Salman was sent back to Manchester, while his father de-cided to stay.

There is no way to prove that this experi-ence in Libya put Salman on the path that led him to the doors of the Manchester Arena. But the experience of armed struggle in one generation can beget violence in the next, ter-rorism experts say, even with an entirely dif-ferent ideological underpinning.

“The older generation normalizes mili-tancy,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a specialist in researching terrorism at the Royal United Services Institute. “Which direction it goes depends on the time. And the kids rebel against their parents.”

And rebel Salman certainly did. According to accounts by family friends and neighbours, his strict Muslim upbringing was upended by the events of 2011.

He had been a quiet boy who was teased, and sometimes bullied, at school, a former classmate recalled. A fan of Manchester United, he developed a passion and aptitude for soccer. “He was polite, just a normal teen-ager,” said one neighbour, who remembers him as a boy.

‘They Can Get Lost’But that changed with the fall of Gadhafi.

While his father stayed in Libya, he lived with his mother and siblings in Manchester, where he began to drink alcohol and smoke mari-juana. Some said he fell in with local gangs. He became known for a temper and a readi-

ness to fight.Akram Ramadan said the absence of a fa-

ther figure was often a problem for Libyan families, particularly the Abedi sons, whose father imposed strict discipline.

“There was a lot of it here, putting pressure on their kids to become very, very, over the top, good Muslim kids,” Ramadan said.

“When the revolution kicked off and all these dads went to Libya to fight, the kids found freedom,” Ramadan said, adding that Salman’s mother, Samia, was unable to con-trol him.

Salah Rashid, 69, the mother’s accountant, concurred. “I’ve seen many residents leave for Libya,” he said. “If they don’t embrace their children and teenagers, they can get lost.”

In Libya in the days immediately after the bombing, the father was arrested by a militia, the Special Deterrence Forces, which said it had also detained Salman’s younger brother, Hashem, now 20. It was a spokesman for the militia who provided the details about Salman’s phone call to his family before the bombing.

His father divided his time between Manchester, where he led prayers at a local mosque, and Tripoli, where he worked as an administrator in the Interior Ministry. As other Arab countries plunged into conflict, he cheered on like-minded Islamists like the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front in Syria.

In Manchester, the Abedi family were well known at Didsbury Mosque, a long-standing establishment popular with Manchester’s large Libyan population and the diaspora from other Arab countries. Ramadan Abedi, who had studied the Quran in Saudi Arabia, often did the call to prayer.

Salman Abedi and other family members visited their father in Libya regularly. By 2015, the Islamic State had established a base in the city of Sirte, and had hidden pockets of support in cities like Tripoli, where the Abedi family is from.

It was there, according to officials from Libya and the United States that Salman es-tablished a connection with Abdul Baset Gh-wela, a radical preacher whose son had died fighting in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Back in Manchester, he is believed to have had links with other young residents of the city who joined the Islamic State in recent years, security officials said. One of them is Raphael Hostey, a prolific recruiter for ISIS who is believed to have been killed in a drone strike in Syria in May last year, age 24.

Despite denials from Hostey’s brother, Ju-nade, officials believe that Abedi and Hostey knew each other before Hostey left for Syria in 2013. “He was his hero,” one law enforce-ment official said of Abedi’s admiration for Hostey.

The killing of Hostey was the start of a fate-ful two weeks that may have further steeled Abedi’s desire for revenge.

A week later, another acquaintance, Abdal-raouf Abdallah, 24, was jailed for nine years after being convicted of funding terrorism and preparing acts of terrorism. The very next day, Abdul Wahab Hafidah — a friend of Salman and close friend of his younger brother — was run over and then stabbed to death in Manchester, in what police called a gang-related episode.

The killing was a “wake-up call” for Libyan parents about their children’s involvement with gangs, said Ahmed Sewehli, a psychia-trist. “It was a big deal in the Libyan commu-nity.”

‘He Was Always Alone’Around this time, Salman is believed to

have started planning Monday’s attack. He opened a bank account, which would go un-used until he used it to buy supplies for his suicide bomb from two hardware stores nearly a year later. The money on the account came from student loans, officials confirmed Saturday — loans that he continued to receive even after dropping out of Salford University, where he had enrolled in 2015 to study busi-ness management.

He had made little mark at the university. One fellow student said he had come to just a handful of lectures before disappearing.

“I saw him in the prayer room sometimes,” said Abdul Omar, 22, a second-year-student who presides over the university’s Islamic So-ciety. “I remember seeing him waiting a bit earlier for the prayer. He was always alone.”

When Akram Ramadan, the family friend, last met Abedi less than three months ago, he initially failed to recognize the young man, who was leaning on a car outside his brother’s home, waiting to pick him up for prayers in a long, beige-coloured, Islamic shirt.

But Abedi recognized his father’s friend and greeted him with the Arabic term for “uncle.”

“I hope you are not doing any naughty tricks or pranks anymore,” said Akram Ram-adan, referring to Abedi’s past reputation.

“No, no, no,” Abedi had answered. “I quit doing pranks.”

‘Forgive Me’

Messages and floral tributes left for the victims of the attack on Manchester Arena lie around the statue in St Ann’s Square in central Manchester, May 24 - REUTERS/Jon Super

Tangled path to a bombing

To counter militancy

EL KAMOUR, Tunisia — It may look like just a clutch of tents pitched outside an oil pumping station on the edge of the Sahara. But to the people of this southern region, this is Tunisia’s second revolution.

Tired of waiting for the government to re-lieve their poverty and create jobs, thousands of young people have been camping here and demonstrating in the main town, Tataouine, for weeks. This past week, the protesters shut the main oil pipeline at El Kamour and clashed with units of the national guard who tried to burn down the camp Monday. A po-lice station and a national guard post were burned in turn. One protester was killed, and at least two others were gravely wounded.

Six years after the revolution that brought down Tunisia’s dictator of 23 years, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the protests reflect mount-ing frustration at the broken promises of the country’s new democratic leaders to bring tangible improvement to poorer regions like this one.

Yet the protesters are themselves a sign of change in the country, as are the challenges confronting the government. The demonstra-tors are representative of a new generation that has come of age in relative freedom, only to face the prospect of long-term unemploy-ment. A large number are university gradu-ates, organized and articulate. All out of work, they have forged a united movement out of protesters from a swath of towns and villages across the area.

There was no particular spark that started the protests, the first of which began in Ksa-rOuledDebbeb, a small town just outside Tataouine, on March 14. The protesters’ core demand is simply more jobs.

“We were fed up,” Ali Ghaffari, 24, an Eng-lish student, said. “We were young people in our 20s. We made a list of 260 people who are jobless.” Other protests soon followed in surrounding towns. In April, protesters be-gan camping in front of the governor’s office, and a month ago they set up the camp in the desert.

The government recently handed out new oil concessions in the region, a step that only served as a reminder of how little the region benefits from the resource. The oil companies hire people generally from outside, and little is invested back.

The protesters’ demands have steadily solidified: a quota of jobs for local people at the oil companies drilling in the region, the creation of jobs in an environmental agency and an investment fund for job creation pro-grams. The government has denounced the leaders of the unrest as having links to ter-rorists or being the tools of mafia bosses. But it has steadily raised its response to their de-mands.

The protesters are holding out for more, and an uneasy truce has descended after thousands turned out to bury the man who was killed — Muhammad Anouar Sakrafi, who was 23 and unemployed.

In the desert camp, about 125 miles south of Tataouine, 200 protesters were keeping watch Thursday, and the pipeline remained shut.

Resting up in the shade of their tents from the harsh Saharan sun, they said they would remain until the government accepted 17 de-mands they had put forward.

“Everyone came for our rights and for jobs,” one of the protesters, Walid Abdelmol-

lah, 27, said. “We are here to the end. No go-ing back!” he added, using a phrase that has become the signature chant.

In Tataouine, the protesters control life on the streets. They are camped outside the governor’s office and at main intersections, in scenes reminiscent of the popular uprising of 2010 and 2011. The governor resigned Tues-day and left town, and the police and army were absent from view. A handful of police officers in civilian clothes emerged from the charred shell of the main police station to talk to reporters. The situation was still uneasy, they said, and they were not wearing uni-forms, in order to keep a low profile.

“This is the second revolution,” said Ahmed Wafi, a retired civil servant whose daughter, SabrineWafi, is a leading women’s activist in the town. “And this one is more serious.”

The protesters have organized themselves almost entirely on Facebook and have been sharing and live-streaming events on their social media accounts. They have largely by-passed the mainstream Tunisian media and remain distrustful of journalists.

“There is a problem of confidence in the mainstream media, so everyone goes on so-cial media,” said Youssef Zorgui, who has been running a Facebook page in his home-town, BirLahmar, and covered the protests in the camp. “We can share everything on Facebook, whereas the media have cen-sors or show only one or two minutes of the events.”

The protesters have pointedly chosen not to elect leaders of the movement. “It is a democratic movement. We decide altogeth-er,” as one said. He asked that only his first name, Naim, be used.

The movement has rejected any involve-ment of political parties — in the camp, the protesters are not allowed to discuss politics — and they have kept civil society groups and much of the Tunisian news media, whom they accuse of bias, at arm’s length, banning them from the desert camp.

The government has made efforts to re-spond to their demands — if unevenly. The Prime Minister, Youssef Chahed, travelled to the region to talk to the protesters in April and has sent his employment minister for negotiations.

It is not clear who ordered the national guard to intervene forcibly Monday. The governor had insisted publicly that there would be no use of force only minutes be-fore the national guard moved on the camp. Aides suggested that his resignation was due, in part, to his having been undermined.

In addition to jobs and investment, the protesters are demanding an apology for the police violence; they accuse the national guard of deliberately running down protest-ers in the camp.

Witnesses said Sakrafi had been knocked down from behind by a racing police vehicle. He suffered multiple fractures to his legs, head and torso and died on the spot, his cousin Mustafa Sakrafi said. Protesters said they had handed videos of the episode to the military investigator the next day.

It remains unclear who set fire to the po-lice station and the National Guard post in Tataouine. Many protesters claim it was outsiders set on looting. The movement has vowed to start a volunteer action to clean up and repair the buildings.

- New York Times News Service

Young and unemployed, Tunisians agitate for a ‘Second Revolution’