Why do terrorists target Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria?

It is not religion, even though I do not consider religion to be innocent. With verses, books, and leaders preaching what seems to be hatred, religion better functions as a good tool to justify killing rather than the agent of killing itself.

It is rather politics and money. In Syria, it is more of politics than money. The rebels in Syria have long been described as “rebels” despite the fact that even their God would call them terrorists. Few people in the West know that non-Syrian terrorists keep flocking inside Syria on sectarian grounds. And fewer know that the sectarian justification was invented by the US and its Gulf allies. And rare are those who know that this justification is false.

What the US and its Gulf allies have in common is enmity with the Assad regime because of its alliance with their bigger enemy Iran. Syria, being a mosaic of religions, races, sects, and ethnicities, is easy to target by reviving ethnic and religious tensions. When some people took to the streets in Syria to call for justice and democracy, Gulf Sunni clerics, urged by the US, preached that Assad was killing Sunnis because Shiite Iran told him to do so. Based on this lie, they also preached Sunni sacred war against Shiite Assad.

For Western politicians, Israel, and their allied Gulf nations, weakening Assad means weakening the Iran, Syria, Hizbollah axis who have been countering all Western and Gulf imperialist dreams in the region. The bearded Sunni fanatics needed to be armed, trained, and financed. The result was ISIL.

McCain, when he met them in Libya, he called them “my heroes.” But even a serpent, when it kills your enemy, you would call it your hero. And even a fool would agree that Khaddafi was not a friend of the “free” Western World. Since his youth, Khaddafi was throwing all the bad adjectives on Western leaders. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, he worked hard to build an Arab alliance that would counter Western interests.

In the 1960s he was joined in his childish dreams by leaders like AbdelNasser in Egypt and Boumedien in Algeria. That was in North Africa, but in the Middle East, none was there to listen to him. And as the course of history moved on, the Western leaders did everything to prevent anti-Imperialism leaders to take power and with the turn of the century, neighbouring Tunisia had the Wetsren puppet Ben Ali, Algeria had an impartial government led by Bouteflika, and Egypt had pro-Western Mubarak. Khaddafi was left alone.

Earlier than that, Khaddafi nationalised Libya’s oil. Until the Civil War, every Libyan citizen had the right to have their share from the oil revenues, something that angered the Western leaders, their Imperialist institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and etc.

As his allies were falling one by one – Saddam was removed by a US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Boumiedien was allegedly poisoned and replaced by pro-Western Benjdid in 1978, and Syria’s Assad regime had already been weakened by years of war with Israel-, Khaddafi turned to Africa and started all pointless things in the impoverished continent to buy the loyalty of his fellow Africans. But even that was considered as dangerous by the Western leaders who saw Khaddafi identify with Chavez and Morales and join him in his dreams of an independent Southern world.

With the so called “Arab Spring,” and with the early timid mobilisation in Eastern Libya, long marginalised by Tripoli, the opportunity was ripe for the Westerners to finance and support the insurgency that had more Islamists than seculars in it. What mattered for these democratic leaders was seeing Khaddafi removed.

Once Khaddafi is removed, the West left the Libyan people struggling against all sorts of fundamentalists on their own.

The Libyan Islamists lost elections in 2014 but they refused to cede power. Aided by armed militias, the Islamist government took over Tripoli and Western Libya. The democratically elected government took Eastern Libya. The democratic West did little to calm the tension or embarrass the illegal Islamist government. It goes without saying that keeping Libya at war with itself guarantees that a strongman like Khaddafi would never come to existence, and thus, oil will keep flowing to Western cities.

In Iraq it is both money and politics. It is both Syria and Libya. The Bush administration, after removing the Sunni president Saddam Hussein in 2003, knew for sure that it needed the help of Iraq’s Shiite majority to keep Saddam’s Sunni legacy from re-emerging. In that, the US needed help from Shiite Iran. The Iranians were so generous in providing help that they took over Iraq. By 2011, the West knew that Iran went too much and was taking over the Middle East, putting their interests at stake. The game needed to be played again, the other way round. As Sunni fanatism incarnated in ISIS was exported from Syria to Iraq in the summer of 2014, McCain was enthusiastic to hide his support to the move. He turned all the blame on the Maliki regime for marginalizing the Sunni people. Anyway, that was true, but logically, ISIL is not the right tool to punish him for being too sectarian.

Further, the intimate connection between oil and violence cannot be hidden in the 21^st century. If violence continues in Iraq, cheap prices are guaranteed in the West. If oil is in the hands of ISIS, the terrorist group will sell it with cheap prices to arm itself. If it is in the hands of the government, it will do the same to guarantee armament and recognition as legitimate government amid the war.

In Egypt, terrorism guarantees Israeli interests as it keeps Al-Sissi government away from the Islamist government of Ghaza. Besides, terrorism has been weakening the Egyptian army, the most powerful in the MENA region. This diminishes the Egyptian threat that Israel fears.

In Tunisia, it is neither money nor politics. It is more than that. Tunisia is attacked as a dangerous image that challenges all Western stereotypes about the Arab World.

Tunisia challenges the image of the Arab countries as patches of lands divided by sectarian, tribal, and racial affiliations. It is almost the only Arab nation without these dividing affiliations. Late president Bourguiba tried his best to kill tribal feelings among his people. By 1987 when he was removed in a peaceful coup, he was able to cleanse all tribal feelings among his people.

Tunisia also challenges the image of the submissive Arab-Muslim veiled woman whose only mission on this planet is to breed and have sex with her husband. Under Bourguiba, women were emancipated as early as the 1960s. Now, female students make up a majority in Tunisian schools and universities. Female doctors and teachers outnumber their male counterparts. And in the government, there are 8 women ministers.

Tunisia challenges the stereotype that Arabs and Muslims are unfit for democracy. Tunisia is almost the only democracy in the MENA region, challenging Netanyahu’s recurrent statement that Israel is the only democracy in the region.

Tunisia also challenges the stereotype that Muslims and Arabs are single-minded people who are culturally isolated from the rest of the world. With high literacy rates and a multilingual population, Tunisia is one of the most progressive nations in the region. Openness is also manifested in Tunisian tourism. So the Bardo Attack few days ago is also an attack on this image that fundamentalists and their Gulf sponsors hate about Tunisia.

Images and stereotypes are promoted by the media and later used by Imperialists to justify intrusion. By challenging sterotypes, Tunisia challenges these justifications.