Britain’s collusion with radical
Islam : Interview with Mark Curtis
From Syria to Saudi Arabia, historian Mark
Curtis’s new book sets out how Britain colludes with radical Islam – and how
the British media is failing to inform us.
Image: Theresa May and Saudi Arabia’s Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, March 2018. PA Images/Victoria Jones, all rights
reserved.
A former Research Fellow at Chatham House and
the ex-Director of the World Development Movement, British historian Mark
Curtis has published several books on UK foreign policy, including 2003’s Web of
Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, endorsed by Noam Chomsky
and John Pilger. Ian Sinclair asked Curtis about the recently published new
edition of his 2010 book Secret
Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.
Ian Sinclair: With the so-called ‘war on terror’ the dominant
framework for understanding Western foreign policy since 9/11, the central
argument of your book – that Britain has been colluding with radical Islam
for decades – will be a shock to many people. Can you give some examples?
Mark Curtis: UK governments – Conservative and
Labour – have been colluding for decades with two sets of Islamist actors which
have strong connections with each other.
In the first group are the major state
sponsors of Islamist terrorism, the two most important of which are key British
allies with whom London has long-standing strategic partnerships – Saudi Arabia
and Pakistan. The second group includes extremist private movements and
organisations whom Britain has worked alongside and sometimes trained and
financed, in order to promote specific foreign policy objectives. The roots of
this lie in divide and rule policies under colonialism but collusion of this
type took off in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Britain, along with the US,
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, covertly supported the resistance to defeat the
Soviet occupation of the country. After the jihad in Afghanistan, Britain had
private dealings of one kind or another with militants in various
organisations, including Pakistan’s Harkat ul-Ansar, the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), all of which had strong
links to Bin Laden’s al-Qaida. Covert actions have been undertaken with these
and other forces in Central Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe.
For example, in the 1999 Kosovo war, Britain
secretly trained militants in the KLA who were working closely with al-Qaida
fighters. One KLA unit was led by the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, then Bin
Laden’s right-hand man. The British provided military training for the KLA at
secret camps in Kosovo and Albania where jihadist fighters also had their
military centre. The ‘dirty secret’ of the July 2005 London bombings is that
the bombers had links with violent Islamist groups such as the Harkat
ul-Mujahidin whose militants were previously covertly supported by Britain in
Afghanistan. These militant groups were long sponsored by the Pakistani
military and intelligence services, in turn long armed and trained by Britain.
If we go back further – to the 1953 MI6/CIA coup to overthrow Musaddiq in Iran
– this involved plotting with Shia Islamists, the predecessors of Ayatollah
Khomeini. Ayatollah Seyyed Kashani – who in 1945 founded the Fadayan-e-Islam
(Devotees of Islam), a militant fundamentalist organization – was funded by
Britain and the US to organise opposition and arrange public demonstrations
against Musaddiq.
More recently, in its military interventions
and covert operations in Syria and Libya since 2011, Britain and its supported
forces have been working alongside, and often in effective collaboration with,
a variety of extremist and jihadist groups, including al-Qaida’s affiliate in
Syria. Indeed, the vicious Islamic State group and ideology that has recently
emerged partly owes its origins and rise to the policies of Britain and its
allies in the region
Although Britain has forged special relationships
with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, it has not been in strategic alliance with
radical Islam as such. Beyond these two states, Britain’s policy has been to
collaborate with Islamist extremists as a matter of ad hoc opportunism, though
it should be said that this has been rather regular. Whitehall does not work
with these forces because it agrees with them but because they are useful at
specific moments: in this sense, the collaboration highlights British weakness
to find other on-the-ground foot soldiers to impose its policies. Islamist
groups appear to have collaborated with Britain for the same reasons of
expediency and because they share the same hatred of popular nationalism and
secularism as the British elite.
IS: Why has the
UK colluded with radical Islamic organisations and nations?
MC: I argue that the evidence shows that
radical Islamic forces have been seen as useful to Whitehall in five specific
ways: as a global counter-force to the ideologies of secular nationalism and
Soviet communism, in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; as ‘conservative
muscle’ within countries to undermine secular nationalists and bolster
pro-Western regimes; as ‘shock troops’ to destabilise or overthrow governments;
as proxy military forces to fight wars; and as ‘political tools’ to leverage
change from governments.
This collusion has also helped promote two big
geo-strategic foreign policy objectives. The first is influence and control
over key energy resources, always recognised in the British planning documents
as the number one priority in the Middle East. British operations to support or
side with Islamist forces have generally aimed at maintaining in power or
installing governments that will promote Western-friendly oil policies. The
second objective has been maintaining Britain’s place within a pro-Western
global financial order. The Saudis have invested billions of dollars in the US
and British economies and banking systems and Britain and the US have similarly
large investments and trade with Saudi Arabia; it is these that are being
protected by the strategic alliance with Riyadh.
IS: You include a chapter in the new edition of the book exploring
the UK and West’s role in Syria. Simon Tisdall recently noted in The
Observer that the West has been “hovering passively on the sidelines in Syria”.
This is a common view – including on the Left. For example, in September 2014
Richard Seymour asserted “The US has
not been heavily involved” in Syria, while in February 2017 Salvage magazine
published a piece by Dr Jamie
Allinson, who argued it was a myth that “the US has pursued a policy of regime
change” in Syria. What is your take on the West’s involvement in Syria?
MC: These are extraordinary comments revealing
how poorly the mainstream media serves the public. I’ve tried to document in
the updated version of Secret Affairs a chronology of Britain’s covert
operations in Syria to overthrow the Assad regime. These began with the
deployment of MI6 and other British covert forces in 2011, within a few months
after demonstrations in Syria began challenging the regime, to which the Syrian
regime responded with brute force and terrible violence. British covert action,
mainly undertaken in alliance with the US and Saudi Arabia, has involved
working alongside radical and jihadist groups, in effect supporting and
empowering them. These extremist groups, which cultivated Muslim volunteers
from numerous countries to fight Assad, have been strengthened by an influx of
a massive quantity of arms and military training from the coalition of forces
of which Britain has been a key part. At the same time, Britain and its allies’
policy has prolonged the war, exacerbating devastating human suffering.
UK support for Syrian rebel groups long
focused on the Free Syrian Army (FSA), described by British officials as
‘moderates’. Yet for the first three years of the war, the FSA was in effect an
ally of, and collaborator with, Islamic State and al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria,
al-Nusra. London and Washington continued to provide training and help send
arms into Syria despite the certainty that some would end up in the hands of
jihadists. Some of the militants who joined the Syrian insurgency with British
covert support were Libyans who are believed to have been trained by British,
French or US forces in Libya to overthrow Qadafi in 2011. Some went on to join
Islamic State and also al-Nusra, which soon became one of the most powerful
opposition groups to Assad.
Britain appears to have played a key role in
encouraging the creation of the Islamic Front coalition in Syria in November
2013, which included groups which regularly worked with al-Nusra; these
included Liwa al-Tawhid – a group armed by Qatar and which coordinated attacks
with al-Nusra – and Ahrar al-Sham – a hardline Islamist group that rejected the
FSA. Both groups contained foreign jihadists, including individuals from
Britain. Ahrar al-Sham’s co-founder, Abu Khalid al-Suri, was linked to the 2004
Madrid bombing through a series of money transfers and personal contacts; a
Spanish court document named him as Bin Laden’s ‘courier’ in Europe. The same
network was connected to the 2005 London terror attack.
The UK role in Syria has not been minor but
has been an integral part of the massive US/Arab arms and training operations,
and British officials have been present in the control rooms for these
operations in Jordan and Turkey. Britain also consistently took the lead in
calling for further arms deliveries to the rebel forces. British covert action
was in the early years of the war overwhelmingly focused on overthrowing Assad:
evidence suggests that only in May 2015 did UK covert training focus on
countering Islamic State in Syria.
IS: What role has the mainstream media played with regards to
Britain working with radical Islam?
MC: It has largely buried it. In the period
immediately after the 7/7 bombings in 2005, and more recently in the context of
the wars in Libya and Syria, there were sporadic reports in the mainstream
media which revealed links between the British security services and Islamist
militants living in Britain. Some of these individuals have been reported as
working as British agents or informers while being involved in terrorism
overseas and some have been reported as being protected by the British security
services while being wanted by foreign governments. This is an important but
only a small part of the much bigger picture of collusion which mainly concerns
Britain’s foreign policy: this is rarely noticed in the mainstream.
IS: The British public and the anti-war movement are not mentioned
in your book, though they seem a potentially important influence on the
nefarious and dangerous British foreign policies you highlight?
MC: Yes, it’s largely down to us, the British
public, to prevent terrible policies being undertaken in our name. We should
generally regard the British elite as it regards the public – as a threat to
its interests. The biggest immediate single problem we face, in my view, is
mainstream media reporting. While large sections of the public are deluged with
misreporting, disinformation or simply the absence of coverage of key policies,
there may never be a critical mass of people prepared to take action in their
own interests to bring about a wholly different foreign policy.
The mainstream media and propaganda system has
been tremendously successful in the UK – the public can surely have very little
knowledge of the actual nature of British foreign policy (past or present) and
many people, apparently, seriously believe that the country generally (although
it may make some mistakes) stands for peace, democracy and human rights all
over the world. When you look at what they read (and don’t read) in the ‘news’
papers, it’s no surprise. The latest smears against Corbyn are further evidence
of this, which I believe amounts to a ‘system’, since it is so widespread and
rooted in the same interests of defending elite power and privilege.
The other, very much linked, problem, relates
to the lack of real democracy in the UK and the narrow elitist decision-making
in foreign policy. Governments retain enormous power to conduct covert
operations (and policies generally) outside of public or parliamentary
scrutiny. Parliamentary committees, meant to scrutinise the state, rarely do so
properly and almost invariably fail to even question government on its most controversial
policies. Parliamentary answers are often misleading and designed to keep the
public in the dark. Past historical records of government decision-making are
regularly withheld from the public, if not destroyed to cover up crimes.
British ‘democracy’, which exists in some forms, otherwise resembles more an
authoritarian state.
There are fundamental issues here about how
policy gets made and in whose name. It’s not an issue of whether Labour or
Conservative is in power since both obviously defend and propagate the elitist
system. Jeremy Corbyn himself represents a real break with this but the most
likely outcome, tragically, is that the Labour extremists (called ‘moderates’
in the mainstream) and the rest of the conservative/liberal system which believes
in militarism, neo-liberalism and the defence of privilege, will prevail if and
when Corbyn becomes Prime Minister.
The signs are already there in the Labour
manifesto for the last election, which would have continued the present
extremism in most aspects of UK foreign policy, even if it promised some change
and still represented a major challenge to the establishment. Again, it will
obviously be up to us to change policies, democratize the media and transform
British governance more broadly.
