{"id":102247,"date":"2017-11-20T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=102247"},"modified":"2017-11-19T16:20:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-19T16:20:26","slug":"why-do-civilians-become-combatants-in-wars-against-the-u-s-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/11\/why-do-civilians-become-combatants-in-wars-against-the-u-s-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do Civilians Become Combatants In Wars against the U.S.A.?"},"content":{"rendered":"

19 Nov 2017 – <\/em>Sixteen years into our seemingly endless state of war since September 11th, a significant body of research is finally emerging to clarify who exactly U.S. forces are fighting in their ever-expanding war zones, and what drives civilians to join armed groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Islamic State.<\/p>\n

We have been told that U.S. forces are \u201cfighting them there\u201d so that we don\u2019t have to \u201cfight them here.\u201d\u00a0But researchers are learning that, like the Iraqis who rose up to resist the illegal U.S. invasion and occupation of their country, most of the people joining armed groups across the Middle East and Africa are only fighting\u00a0at all\u00a0because U.S. and allied forces\u00a0are \u201cfighting them there,\u201d in their\u00a0countries, cities, villages and homes.<\/p>\n

In 2015, the Center for Civilians in Conflict published the results of interviews with 250 people who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya in a report titled,\u00a0The People\u2019s Perspective: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict<\/a>.\u00a0One of its main findings was that, \u201cThe most common motivation for involvement, described by interviewees in all four case studies, was the protection of self or family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also in 2015, Lydia Wilson, a researcher from Oxford University, was allowed to interview a number of captured Islamic State fighters<\/a> in Kirkuk, Iraq.\u00a0 It was hard for Wilson to find captured Islamic State fighters to interview, because Kurdish and U.S.-backed Iraqi government forces\u00a0summarily execute Islamic State fighters that they capture.\u00a0But the police in Kirkuk were holding prisoners and trying them in court, so Wilson got permission from the police chief to talk to some of them.<\/p>\n

The first prisoner Lydia Wilson interviewed was captured, tried and sentenced to death for exploding at least four car-bombs and a scooter-bomb in Kirkuk.\u00a0But his interview was not exceptional \u2013 his account of his motivations was repeated by every other prisoner.\u00a0He said that his first loyalty was to his wife and two children, and that he joined Islamic State to support his family.\u00a0He told Wilson, \u201cWe need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war\u2026 all I want is to be with my family, my children.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the interview, Wilson asked the prisoner if he had any questions.\u00a0By then he knew that General Stone, one of Wilson\u2019s colleagues, was ex-U.S. military, and, instead of asking a question, he just exploded in anger at him, \u201cThe Americans came.\u00a0They took away Saddam but they also took away our security.\u00a0I didn\u2019t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn\u2019t have war.\u00a0When you came here, the civil war started.\u201d<\/p>\n

General Stone was not surprised.\u00a0\u00a0This was the same outraged speech he had heard from nearly every prisoner since he began interviewing prisoners<\/a> as the commandant of U.S. military prisons in Iraq in 2007.<\/p>\n

Lydia Wilson summarized what she learned about the prisoners in Kirkuk in an article for\u00a0The Nation<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cThey are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death by execution or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government.\u00a0They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family and tribe.\u00a0This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity, but cultural, tribal and land-based, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

The recent killing of four U.S. soldiers in Niger surprised many\u00a0Americans, but the U.S. has 6,000 troops in 53 countries in Africa<\/a>, so we should not be surprised by flag-draped coffins coming home from seemingly random countries there.\u00a0But before our leaders reduce the entire continent to a new U.S. \u201cbattlefield,\u201d we should take note of a new report published by the U.N. Development Program\u00a0(UNDP), titled\u00a0Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This report is based on 500 interviews with militants from across Africa.\u00a0As its title suggests, the interviewers questioned the militants specifically about the \u201ctipping point\u201d that decided each of them to actually join an armed group such as Boko Haram, Al-Shabab or Al Qaeda. By far the largest number (71 percent) said that some kind of \u201cgovernment action,\u201d such as \u201dkilling of a family member or friend\u201d or \u201carrest of a family member or friend,\u201d was the final straw that pushed them over the red line from civilian life to guerrilla war and\/or terrorism.\u00a0By contrast, religious ideology was generally not the decisive factor\u00a0in their decision.<\/p>\n

The report concluded, \u201cState security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather than the reverse.\u201d In a section on \u201cPolicy Implications,\u201d the report added, \u201cThe\u00a0Journey to Extremism<\/em>\u00a0research provides startling new evidence of just how directly counter-productive security-driven responses can be when conducted insensitively.\u201d<\/p>\n

All these studies agree that, by design or default, U.S. policy is confusing cause and effect to justify military operations that turn civilians into combatants, fueling an ever-escalating, ever-spreading cycle of increasingly global\u00a0violence and chaos.<\/p>\n

The prescription for peace is to stop \u201ccounter-productive security-driven responses\u201d that fuel this cycle of violence, and to start turning combatants back into civilians, as Colombia is doing as a result of the peace agreement that is ending 53 years of civil war.\u00a0 With all the problems facing America and the world in the 21st century, we cannot afford to wait so long to choose the path of peace and start reengaging peacefully and constructively with all our neighbors.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Nicolas J S Davies, syndicated by<\/em> PeaceVoice<\/em><\/a>, is the author of<\/em>\u00a0Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Center for Civilians in Conflict published the results of interviews with 250 people who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya. One of its main findings was that, \u201cThe most common motivation for involvement, described by interviewees in all four case studies, was the protection of self or family.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":102249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}