[Dean's World] Dave Schuler: AQ Runs Afoul of Iraqi Marriage Customs: When Soft Power Turns Hard

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Schuler:
AQ Runs Afoul of Iraqi Marriage Customs:  When Soft Power Turns Hard
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1188413958.shtml


   There is an absolutely fascinating post over at [1]SWJ Blog from David
   Kilcullen on the origins of the tribal revolt in Iraq.

     Some tribal leaders told me that the split started over women. This
     is not as odd as it sounds. One of AQâs standard techniques, which
     I have seen them apply in places as diverse as Somalia, Pakistan,
     Afghanistan and Indonesia, is to marry leaders and key operatives
     to women from prominent tribal families. The strategy works by
     creating a bond with the community, exploiting kinship-based
     alliances, and so âembeddingâ the AQ network into the society. Over
     time, this makes AQ part of the social landscape, allows them to
     manipulate local people and makes it harder for outsiders to pry
     the network apart from the population. (Last year, while working in
     the tribal agencies along Pakistanâs North-West Frontier, a Khyber
     Rifles officer told me âwe Punjabis are the foreigners here: al
     Qaâida have been here 25 years and have married into the Pashtun
     hill-tribes to the point where itâs hard to tell the terrorists
     from everyone else.â) Well, indeed.

   As I understand it Arabizing local populations through intermarriage
   is a practice that goes back thousands of years. Apparently, Al Qaeda
   has adopted the strategy themselves as a method of creating bonds with
   local populations. Unfortunately for AQ, the approach runs afoul of
   Iraqi tribal customs since they are, reportedly, endogamous with
   respect to tribe.

     Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not
     done. AQ, with their hyper-reductionist version of âIslamâ stripped
     of cultural content, discounted the tribesâ view as ignorant,
     stupid and sinful.

     This led to violence, as these things do: AQI killed a sheikh over
     his refusal to give daughters of his tribe to them in marriage,
     which created a revenge obligation (thaâr) on his people, who
     attacked AQI. The terrorists retaliated with immense brutality,
     killing the children of a prominent sheikh in a particularly
     gruesome manner, witnesses told us. This was the last straw, they
     said, and the tribes rose up. Neighboring clans joined the fight,
     which escalated as AQI (who had generally worn out their welcome
     through high-handedness) tried to crush the revolt through more
     atrocities. Soon the uprising took off, spreading along kinship
     lines through Anbar and into neighboring provinces.

   I guess it's not just Americans who are unsensitive to local customs.

   The post goes on to describe conflicts between tribal organizations
   and AQ over business operations (legal and illegal), AQ's links with
   Iran, the form that the tribal revolt might take in Baghdad, and
   future prospects.

   Highly recommended.

References

   1. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/08/anatomy-of-a-tribal-revolt/