Britain’s collusion with radical Islam: Interview with Mark Curtis
Ian Sinclair
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.
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.
Interview date: 20th March 2018
This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. Source: Open Democracy.
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