mindstalk | (Reply)

It's an interesting term which I have never really used. One problem I can see with it is that it encompasses parties that are violently opposed to one another (e.g. the ruling Shia mullahs in Iran and the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan). On the other hand, "Islamist" or "Islamicist" are pretty broad terms that include people who are inspired by Islam in the same way that many politicians in America are inspired by their religion but do not seek a theocracy or any other form of fascism (e.g. some of the political parties in Turkey).

I do use the term "bad guys" a lot, because the motives of most players in Iraq, at least in Al-anbar where I was, are difficult to define. Most of the adversaries we faced (by which I mean people who were dangerous to US forces or to their own communities) were either tribally motivated or were simply thugs who draped themselves in the green of Islam. The Iraqis themselves tended to refer to these people broadly as "bad guys" - the term they used was "irhaabi," which our interpreters applied whenever we said "insurgent" but which the Iraqis use to mean "trouble-maker" in general. I had an interesting conversation with some local leaders in the town of Gharmah north of Fallujah in which they asked me what I thought of George Washington, to which I replied that he was an irhaabi (there are, by the way, some interesting similarities between our insurgency against the British and the Iraqi insurgency against us). We often talked about bad guys being Wahabbis (or for the cognoscenti, Salafists), but it was hard to tell if the local "emir" who runs a Sharia court and execute wrongdoers (we rescued one old man a couple hours before he was scheduled to be beheaded) was a religious zealot or just a local gangster.

In short, very few of the insurgents in Iraq seem to fit the "Islamofascist" label. There was a hard-core Salafist cadre present who may have provided some doctrinal guidance, but for the most part the "bad guys" seemed to be hoodlums or loose bands with a tribal axe to grind.