AFRICA – Conflictos Modernos

The Ideological and Military Threat that Comes from the South.

The Conception, Consolidation, and Expansion of Islam.

622 to the first half of the 8th century. The Umayyad Caliphate.

During this period, the revolution consisted of the methodical and systematic use of armed force by believers to combat infidels (or idolaters). And, in the same political and religious context, to extend the lands of Dar al-Islam throughout the world. Dar al-Islam refers to the lands where Islam governs and where Sharia law is applied as a general social rule of life.

No other major religion has followed and used armed violence in the same way and with the same continuity as Islam. To impose its creeds and morals throughout the world.

***MOSES RAISES HIS ARMS, HELD UP, TO WIN THE BATTLE AGAINST AMALEK***

This is not to say that other religions have not employed violence in their defense or in the active persecution of their infidels or those who differ from them throughout their history. There are the Crusades and the Religious Wars in Europe; the war of Joshua to conquer the land of Canaan, which Jehovah gave to the Jews, and the Maccabean War for the independence of Judea.

***THE SPANISH TERCIOS IN FRANCE DURING THE WARS OF RELIGION***

But this has never been part of its essence and nature, as an “instrument of redemption” for humankind, as another “pillar” of the basic duties of its believers. “War has been prescribed for you, and you have rejected it. So, Allah will seek out a more obedient people and reject you.” This has been confirmed in Islam throughout the centuries, albeit intermittently, by the ulema or ideologues, the muftis or jurists, and the imams or direct preachers of the people.

The initial trajectory.

In the time of Muhammad, barely into the 7th century, power in Arabia was divided among the tribes that inhabited it. But the Hijra, the migration of Muhammad and some 50 followers (gained through his preaching and that of a few disciples, since 610) from Mecca to Medina (the Prophet‘s City), ushered in a new era of transformation in the world and expansion of the Arab Islamic Theocracy.

Power throughout the Near and Middle East was divided between the Sasanian Persian Empire and the Byzantine Empire.

A few years later, the Arabs had seized control of the Sasanian Empire (644). They had also reduced Byzantine territory in Asia, which had previously extended from Egypt and Greater Syria to the Red Sea and northern Mesopotamia. Only Anatolia remained under Byzantine control in Asia.

Meanwhile, the Arabs were gaining control of North Africa: in 641 they occupied Egypt and quickly spread to Tripoli (Libya) and Ifriqiya, as well as the Atlantic coasts of the Maghreb (in 697). Finally, in 711 they invaded the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania, which they conquered in just a few years.

They were «aided» by Arrian Christians, who denied the divinity of Christ and thus readily accepted the one God of Islam, particularly regarding the establishment and consolidation of bureaucracy. Interestingly, the so-called Christian Reconquista of Spain lasted seven centuries of fierce, not continuous, struggle.

But in 732, they invaded the Frankish Kingdom. There, they were defeated at the Battle of Poitiers, near Tours, in October 732. And they were repelled forever, beyond the Pyrenees.

The Berber and Rif Society.

Berberia is a rather historical term, encompassing a broad region of North Africa, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the eastern border of Egypt. This region has been inhabited by Berbers since ancient times and was influenced by Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, and Turks. Today, this term or designation does not refer to a single political or geographical identity.

The Rif is a mountainous region in northern Morocco, extending along the western Mediterranean coast. There is no official figure for the area of the entire «Rif cultural region,» as it covers several provinces in northern Morocco, from Tangier in the west to Melilla/Nador in the east, and from the Mediterranean Sea to approximately the Ouerrha River in the south. The Rif people predominantly belong to the Amazigh (Berber) ethnic group. There is no specific population census for the Rif ethnic cultural region.

Its population consists of local Berber tribes, who have maintained their culture and traditions throughout the centuries and fought to preserve them. The Rif region boasts great natural beauty, with mountains, valleys, and rugged coastlines. Its most important city is Al Hoceima, the capital of the province of the same name.

The resistance of the Rif Berbers to the Arab conquest was a long and complex process, spanning several centuries, and ultimately, barely noticeable. The Arab conquest brought significant changes to the Assabiyah of the inhabiting tribes. This refers to the consciousness and unity of the social group, which in this case are local tribes—that is, “original, primitive, primary social groups.” They base their unity and sense of belonging on it, defining who they are and what they recognize themselves to be.

In turn, it possessed sufficient spiritual strength in the nascent groups to help them feel they were enough strong and able of the first movements of expansion and settlement throughout the vast region. It was their primary and centripetal social force.

The Berbers of the Maghreb were “Old Christians” before the Islamic invasion. There were already 47 bishoprics functioning there in the 5th century after Christ.

The Berbers, with their light skin, are distinct from the Arabs or dark-skinned people (Moors) and constitute a characteristic majority in regions such as Kabylia, the Rif, and the Aurès (in Algeria). In Morocco, 44% of the population are Berbers of the Amazigh, Gomara, and Zenata ethnicities.

Their social structure divides them into relatively impermeable classes, based on their origins and occupations. The chiefs or amenokales are “first among equals,” elected by the noble classes and warriors in their sovereign assemblies, which make or ratify all important decisions for their community. These “chiefs” are like “privileged negotiators” with the various governments and authorities. They enjoy personal, rather than institutional, authority. And their agreements can be ignored by adult men if they are not ratified by those sovereign assemblies.

The natural and political conditions of their habitat have always been harsh.

Thus, the Rif people have developed a resilience, a human resistance, a social vaccine, to survive and endure in their ancestral lands. Therefore, their religion is not the only virtue of their ethnicity. Essential, enduring virtues or values also stem from the mutual interplay of rights and duties among the members of the social group. From this arise personal identity, defined and compared to their peers, and the mutual protection of individuals and their basic societies.

In modern times, with unmanned aerial vehicles, artillery and air bombs, and all-terrain tracked vehicles equipped with automatic weapons, the isolation of the Rif people has been largely overcome. The Rif people are participating in Moroccan politics and society through political parties and social movements, generally religious in orientation. They have been working to promote their rights and interests within the Moroccan government and society.

The social-political and religious mechanism of Jihad.

Three were the reasons that stimulated the tribes to starting the way of the conquest of large and distant lands and peoples, out of the Arabic peninsula. The first one was the religious reason. As in any religious primitive community, the Umma was the center of the mandates and Allah’s benedictions. They being collectively and keenly lived the fulfillment of a monotheistic and simple doctrine. This religion was demanding an active and coercive, constant and expansive proselytism, directed to the unfaithful persons and the hostile frontier peoples. “O believers, pursue the idolaters (or infidels) until all worship on Earth is given to Allah.”

(To be continued)

JIHADISM THREATENS THE SOUTHERN FLANK OF EUROPE

Introduction.

In an area of the Sahara and the Sahel that is continuous, diffuse, extensive and of plastic geopolitical contours, comprising eastern Mauritania, northern Mali and Central African Republic, western Niger and the mountainous areas of southern Algeria, extends the natural habitat of West African jihadists. The vast transition zone of the Sahel occupies the African territories between the Sahara and the humid tropical regions, located south of it. The Sahel is plagued by persistent droughts, which are its main geographical determinant and which progressively extend the desert to the south and drive its sedentary inhabitants away to the neighbouring Central African countries. The Sahel is no more that Central Africa’s wet and green terrains, which are in process of being overwhelmed and deserted by the uncontained advance of the Sahara and which continues eastward across Chad and South Sudan to the shores of the Red Sea of Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Bereberia and the Land of the Tuaregs.

The Berber country is formed by the hinterland of the countries of the central and western African Mediterranean, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripolitania (western Libya). These white-skinned individuals, to distinguish them clearly from the Arabs or brown (Moors) constitute a characteristic majority in regions such as the Kabila, the Rif and the Aures. Although since the end of the seventh century they embraced Islam, the Berbers have always maintained a strenuous and discontinuous resistance against the invasion of the Arabs from the East, for the maintenance of their idiosyncrasy and regional power in their lands. Berbers were old Christians before Islamic rule. For example, in the Maghreb there were 47 bishoprics functioning in the 5th century AD.

At the south of Bereberia, being part of their ethnic groups and extending with the desert towards the interior of Africa, live the Tuareg or al-Tawarik. This is the plural of «tarqui«, «tarka«, which are a defined racial group within the Sanhadja of Western Sahara. The name could come from the Arabic verb «taraka«, which means to abandon, for example, religion, to become «renegades«. And it would refer to the difficult Islamization of this Berber group. Other researchers derive the name from the Arabic tharik, camino. To designate them as «road robbers«, by the total control they got during centuries over the great trans-Saharan routes and their usual looting of the black populations of the Sahel. Its organized and independent origin arises with Queen Tin Hinan, who would move from the western desert to the Hoggar Mountains. And from there they subsequently spread to the southern regions of the Sahara and the northern Sahel. There are very rich burials of women, who come from this time more or less idealized. This matriarchal origin is supported by its Christian tradition and establishes a sonship and maternal heritage in the Tuareg clans. And it gives Tarqui women freedom, esteem and prerogatives, which are unknown in the Muslim world. Forming a nation without a state of their own, the Tuareg are divided into eight tribal federations. These are geographically grouped into the northern Tuareg, the Tassili N-Ajjer, Hoggar and Adrar and the southern, the Awelimid and Kel Wi of the Air.

Their social structure divides them into classes that are not very permeable, by virtue of their origins and the trades they do. The Tuareg of the upper classes have the privilege of wearing a veil colored with indigo, which gives the whole ethnic group its popularized name, the «blue men«. The chiefs or amenokales are here «primus inter pares«, elected by the noble classes and warriors in their sovereign assemblies, who make or ratify all decisions important to the clan. These local chiefs are privileged negotiators with the various Governments or authorities, who enjoy personal rather than institutional authority, and whose agreements can be ignored by adult males, if they are not revalidated by those assemblies. Today, the Tuareg are spread over a vast territory, without borders or well-defined lands, seeking a sedentarization that is the basis of a minimum social and economic development from the pure nomadism. This actual geographic space coincides with the «subversive habitat«, which is superimposed on it, where the various active jihadist groups in north-west Africa desert settle.

Tuaregs aprende todo sobre la historia, ubicación significado y mas — ***TUAREG OR DESERT*** ***BERBERS***

Since immemorial time, the Tuareg have been engaged in nomadic herding of camels, sheep and goats. Although its main wealth, power and status came from the «control» of the caravan routes that crossed its vast territory. This control was exercised with an eclectic combination of “customs”, robberies and as drivers and auxiliaries of caravans. This domination of the trade and supply routes, undisturbed by the European colonizers, gave them an important influence on the markets of origin and destination of those. They also ravaged the Black populations affordable from their territories, stealing their goods and capturing slaves for service and sale. The rather abrupt appearance of the new independent African states after the Second World War, definitively broke this economic power and the influence on the isolated populations in these routes. By restricting their free movement, while losing the exclusivity of the transports by its land with the progressive motorization in those.

Their transhumance and ability to adapt to periods of drought were also strangled. Droughts in the 1970s and 1980s forced families and small clans to settle alongside nearby urban centres in Algeria, Libya and Nigeria. Currently, the total population of the Tuareg ethnic group living in their natural and historical habitat and their geographical surroundings ranges from 1.2 million to 1.5 million people. And in these territories of so many countries, the population density is repetitively 1.5 people per square kilometre.

Tombuctú - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre — ***TIMBUKTU***

The Tuareg always opposed the formation of central states, which would project their action within their territory. They did so by force against the black empires of Mali and Songhay, which also elevated Timbuktu to the status of Magreb’s cultural capital in the Late Middle Ages. Timbuktu was founded by the Tuareg at the beginning of the 12th century, who always considered it their property and, over the centuries, reconquered it several times, the last in the period 1863-1893. The Tuareg are Muslims from the periphery of Islam, where orthodox or radical doctrines do not arrive with full power and interest. The natural and political conditions of his land have always been hard. They have developed a human resilience to survive and endure in their perennial lands. So, not only is their sui generis religion a virtue of their ethnicity. The mutual play of rights and duties, which derive from the relations between individuals and family groups, clans and tribes, are also virtues for them. Whence they derive the personal identity, referred to and compared with their peers, and the mutual protection of individuals and their primitive societies.

Estado Islâmico reivindica autoria de atentado no Mali | VEJA — ***MALIAN MILITARY: VERY GOOD IN FORMATION OR PARADE. WORSE PATROLING OR IN COMBAT***

So, it is not surprising that in the moments of maximum weakness of the Malian state, the Tuareg took over northern Mali and made Timbuktu their political capital. Coexisting by mutual advantage and reluctantly with the seat of internationalist jihadist groups in cities like Gao, Kital and the capital itself, in the interior of its Azawad Republic. The Republic of Mali became a yielding state. The Army tried to impose itself on the Tuaregs and the Islamist green shoots in the north. But, it lacked motivation, body spirit, training and equipment and professional will. Generals led from Bamako the spasmodic attacks against the most obvious and permanent rebel settlements. And the officers and non-commissioned officers, among whom the capabilities were similar, tried to encourage and propel their men. So that, overcoming the natural tactical laziness of fighting, the small units fulfilled their missions. For this reason, the coup d’état of 22 March 2012 was staged by the Malian captains, who, in a gesture of survival Bonapartism, were fed up with the misuse to which they were subjected.

(TO BE CONTINUED).

THE HATE, THE WAR AND THE EVIL.

THE HATE.

The Hate is always an untidy passion. What might arise initially in the soul as competition and emulation, ultimately displays as distaste, repugnance or rivalry. It is a primary reptilian feeling of survival, compound or mixed with the dread and the rage towards other one, which is perceived as foreign, different and menacing. So, the hate expresses always as negative and destruction, still potential.

The hate breaks personal and social bridges and makes clashing spaces. The hate poisons the relations of different types and takes them to personal and social, antagonistic and irreconcilable situations. And this destructive and self-destructive drive forms a «sinister and mortal curl» in the emotional vital pace of the men. Once created the habit and the accepted and repeated guideline of conduct (by our automatic brain, though we do not notice). We have formed a riverbed for the flow of the hate and his extension. That so turns out to be easier to repeat and to keep live.

The mental Gordian knot of the hate, only can be cut by the collective overcoming. And this is carried out personally, exercising a broad mindness generosity and the personal effort of overcoming and oblivion the circumstances that shaped «that situation«. Looking for the only possible and human solution to the clash as such, to the fear perceived and more or less deformed, to the rage that stultifies and exceeds the spirit.

THE WAR.

The War arises in the armed collective clash. In the violent dialectics of two social rivals groups. That employ the weapons for the attainment of certain aims, which are exclusive for both.

The regional and frontier tribes have been developing a social way, therefore, personified and assumed in his wide culture, of canalizing the hates and differences towards the minor possible hurt. Three are the claiming mechanisms that arise to mediate, smooth or alleviate the affronts and disputes. The first is the «blood price«. It consists in the fact that a related group or a family selection, assumes and faces the «offense» realized by a member of this group. The offense is paid, for example, by the delivery of camels or cereals measures. Then there is the revenge, when a crime is committed or a member of a clan is insulted seriously. This generates a spiral, developed in successive cycles, of violence and misbehaviors. Actions that the honor of the group forces to do. Sometimes, a «mediators council«, accepted by the parts, can arbitrate with success to cut the chain.

Finally, there is the more or less limited war. This establishes a military collective action between faced clans or tribes and has an intermittent and extensive character. The lack of resources is a source of serious clashes between consolidated groups. And his rooting can manage to be like the vendettas. The origins or causes are the nomadism, the pastures, the droughts, the hunger, the drinking troughs, the demographic exclusive pressure and the lack of capital or the underdevelopment. But, also they can be the distribution of political and social roles in countries in precarious social and economic situation. Or of the economic performances that generate the exploitation and sale of his principal producing sources, which generally are monocultures or monoproductions of the mining industry. But, in his tribal origin, the armed conflict is always a limited war in the useless hurt: The children, the women, the animals, the fruit-bearing trees, even the crops that cannot remove, are respected. The premise is more or less not to urge or justify in the opposite one a thirst of and insane total revenge.

The tribes formed the constant flow of native emigrants, who populated and made grow from 1970, all the underdeveloped populations. Sometimes they were joined, from the 80s, by a foreign, more or less specialized emigration. That was devoting itself to the services, the development of the civil infrastructures and the extraction industries. One of the things that the modern civilization brought, which is nothing more that to live and to develop in the cities, it is the disappearance of the «procedure of containment and respect» of the fighting in and between the tribes. His interests were already those of the great city, his values (different from what the autochthonous virtues mean) were those of a disorganized society in ways of acceptance and integration.

It has been said that this «emigration from the lands«, broke the internal cohesion, the influence and the power of the tribes in many countries. It is not totally true. It has not happened in Iraq, which was much more modern and developed. And of it gives faith the devilish and complex guerrilla war generated after the Allied occupation at first of 2003 and against the successive sectarian governments of the shia majority. Not in the Lebanon, where the shiítas of the south of the country form the base of Hezbola‘s ethnic and logistic support.

The tribes were working or can work socially and politically as a «nation in embryo» in situations of isolation, structural poverty, central precarious authority. But they will tend to weaken when the benefits of the ethnic and tribal, regional and local structures were or are overcome by the provided by the dominating sheik or emir or the despot or democratic central state. And these had or have the popular constraint means, the respect and the ancendancy, to keep the tribes sufficiently close and united. And follwoing with a general common politics, favorable to the majority of the citizens, and not forgetting the rights of the minorities.

IN THE TRIBAL ZONE OF PAKISTAN, AT THE BORDER WITH AFGHANISTAN.

Where the preference clans does not take place. That is the cancer that has corroded the tribal state unions, for example, in Somalia. Where, in addition, it has been absent the enough exemplary and supported figure, so to manage to impose a national common politics and the social peace. For example, in Iraq, where the government of Saddam Hussein and his aptitudes to keep joined the three etnias of the country. With all his disadvantages of corruption, arbitrariness and clientèle, were making the country to work very reasonably. And it was so much as military, winning the war to the Islamic Republic of Iran, as economically.

Other one of the vices that the «civilized» members of the tribes have acquired is the excessive greed. And with her, her corollary and the easy way to satisfy her, the rampant corruption. The social equality in the tribes, his «ideological rough republicanism», was guaranteeing the use and reasonable enjoyment of the resources by all the members.

The American and European troops are prepared to fight against a military regular enemy provided with a masses army. Or even more modern, of the IIIrd generation, with more elaborated technological means and better trained men to support the lonelinesses and tensions of the awaited current battlefields. Definitively, his «environment», his space of action, is the direct and opened clash in presence of a great profusion of probable enemy targets. His instrument is the attrition, the destruction of the aims that the enemy presents and could be detected and acquired in all the depth of his march or attack deployment. The last two enemy steps, nowadays increasingly remote or deep, are reached by the aviation of tactical support of long range or with the ballistic or autonomous rocketry of middle range.

Which is here the role of the man? To detect and confirm the enemy targets, to try to fix them if it is a question of a patrol or small combat unit and to call his «ordnance» in order that it devastates them. Only his elite units, always scanty and, therefore, exceptional and precious, are formed to only employ his organic means in the infantry close fight.

In Iraq and in Syria the islamist bases are always in the cities and populations most favorable to the activity of his different bands. And they are surrounded or perviosed by military national and foreign forces. Already at the beginnig of the war, the North American intelligence intercepted a memorandum of 17 pages written by Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, former chief of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and directed to Osama ben Laden. In it he was expressing to him his worry for his survival: «In Iraq there are not mountains where we could shelter, nor forests in whose thickness we could hide. There are spies eyes everywhere. Our backs are exposed and our movements are realized in view of all». And this geographical military space is similar in Syria.

THE EVIL.

The Evil is conceptually the lack and the denial of the good, which is the only virtue or effort (as stable and permanent value) that is positive. And the primary negative force that generates the hate in a wide sense, not necessarily violent, is the one that gives force, life and permanency to the evil of the man.

Sometimes in the History and in the history of the human groups, raises a special and adherent evil, with own reality, that it is difficult to fight and avoid. There existed always the great ethnic, political, social and religious persecutions: the Jews were so by the Nazi Germany; the Christians, yazidis and other minor groups, in the Southwest of Asia; the educated, leader classes and with urban works suffered it in the Red Khmers’ Cambodia, which overcame in the scanty time suffered and in the affected percent of the population, the Bolshevik persecutions against the not proletarian or enemy classes. But, the force, the continuity and the determination that displayed in them, which were generated and channelled by the rage, the habit of unhealthy conduct and the guideline accepted by so many people, overcame the possibilities and the insane imagination of the human mortal collectivities.

The Evil as concept, as immaterial entity, needs from instrument, a vector, a vehicle, to display in our physical world. And this material vehicle is provided by the untid and uncontrolled passions of the men, already dominated and dragged by the hate and his corollaries passions. In which and by means of them, the Evil displays enslaver, overflowing and superhuman.

The imposition of the communism in Russia from 1917, caused million dead men, destroyed countless families and persons and eliminated the perspectives and vital paths of many millions more, throughout almost 25 years of widespread and inhuman terror. The enemies of class were liquidated, a wide and confused name where were fitting all the nuisances for the governing class; the Red Army was purged in 1937; many peasants were slowly killed of hunger from 1930, with the implantation of the five-year industrialization plans, which were removing the agricultural resources for it and giving priority to the heavy industry, which would turn the USSR into a great modern Power.

HISTORIC STUDY OF RESULTS Y VICTIMS.

And all this became systematic and coldly. As it corresponds to visionaries, illuminated by a considered scientific social doctrine and, therefore, infallibly. That they were detecting the absolute and all-embracing power and were themselves abrogated the right and the sovereignty for it. The three powers of the State were centering in them to be exercised, in a satrapy, a tyranny endowed with the modern means at his disposition. Supposedly they were doing it in name of the people and for the people, but they never did it with the real people. Mao calculated that around 90 generations would be need, suffering the «proletariat dictatorship» in the «socialist countries«, in order that could arise, were appearing the green outbreaks of, the «new communist man«.

GULAGS IN THE USSR.

All these putrid, inhuman, insane ideas come from the sewage, pits and black wells of the human intelligence and soul. And they are the valid, sure and permanent instrument for the periodic manifestation of the Evil within the humanity. This Evil, unattainable for the reason and the human capacities, is the temporal manifestation of the Misterium Iniquitatis.

The Evil acts stimulating in a fulfilled, relarge, excessive way our untied passions. On having examined the affected facts, only we can wonder: how was it possible that this happened?, how did it come near to so much?. Except in personal exceptional cases, the Evil acts in the human collective and insane actions. So that, his presence remains diffuse, vague, veiled. There will never be «security» of his action. Because the supra rationals phenomena neither are implied not even are overlapped openly with the material human phenomena. This way, they can conjecture or suppose his presence and his operation, but without confirming them «in stricto sensu».