In the nearly six years since protestors in Syria first demonstrated against the four-decade rule of the Assad family, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and some twelve million people—more than half the country’s pre-war population—have been displaced. The country has descended into an ever-more-complex civil war: Jihadis promoting a Sunni theocracy have eclipsed many opposition forces fighting for a democratic and pluralistic Syria. Regional powers have backed various local forces to advance their geopolitical interests on Syrian battlefields. The United States has been at the fore of a coalition conducting air strikes on the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Turkey, a U.S. ally, has invaded in part to prevent Kurdish forces, who are backed by the United States in the fight against the Islamic State, from linking up their autonomous cantons. Russia too has carried out air strikes in Syria; though it claimed to be primarily targeting the Islamic State, analysts say it has more often targeted rebels, including those backed by the United States, who seemed to pose a more immediate threat to the Syrian regime.
After a long stalemate, foreign backers of the regime have turned the tide in Assad’s favor, capturing rebel-held enclaves of east Aleppo, which had once been a hub of the resistance. But Syria likely faces years of instability. Assad has never been willing to negotiate his way out of power, but his continued rule is unacceptable to millions of Syrians, particularly given the barbarity civilians have faced. Meanwhile, the foreign forces on which he relies will continue to wield power. In the north, Kurds will be unlikely to cede their hard-won autonomy, and the Islamic State is yet to be defeated.
Hafez al-Assad is welcomed in Moscow by Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1971. Bettmann/Corbis
Assads’ Rule Breeds Discontent
Hafez al-Assad seized power from a Ba’athist military junta in 1970, centralizing power in the presidency. Assad, who came from the Alawi minority, a heterodox Shia sect that had long been persecuted in Syria and was elevated to privileged positions under the post–World War I French mandate, promoted pan-Arab nationalism.
In February 1982, Hafez ordered the military to put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama with brute force. Syrian forces killed more than twenty-five thousand there. For the regime’s opponents, Hama would become a rallying cry in 2011. For the regime, it provided Hafez’s son and successor, Bashar, with a template for responding to dissent.
The Assads presided over a system that was not just autocratic but kleptocratic, doling out patronage to bind Syrians to the regime. As the 2011 uprising turned to civil war, many members of minority groups remained loyal to the regime, but so too did some Sunnis, fearing revenge if opposition forces were to take Damascus.
President Bashar al-Assad tours the industrial city of Hessya in 2007. (SANA/AP Photo)
Economic Reforms Upend Syrian Society
Bashar succeeded his father in 2000 pledging reforms. He promised to let markets take the place of the “Arab socialism” touted by the Ba’athist state, upending old patronage networks. He broke up and privatized state monopolies, but the benefits were concentrated among those well-connected with the regime, while the end of subsidies and price ceilings harmed rural peasants and urban laborers. Arecord-setting drought from 2006 to 2010 exacerbated socioeconomic problems. Mismanaged farmland was rendered fallow and farmers migrated to cities in ever-larger numbers, causing the unemployment rate to surge.
Syrians gather outside Deraa's main courthouse, which was set on fire by demonstrators demanding freedom and an end to corruption, in March 2011. Khaled al-Hariri/Reuters
Arab Uprisings Echo Across Repressed Region
The Arab Spring began in December 2010 with the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor decrying corruption. His desperate act inspired protests in Tunisia, and then across the Middle East and North Africa, which forced longtime strongmen in Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt to step down. Inspired by these previously unthinkable events, fifteen boys in the southwestern city of Deraa spray painted on a school wall: “The people want the fall of the regime.” They were arrested and tortured. Demonstrators who rallied behind them clashed with police, and protests spread. Many were calling for something more modest than regime change: the release of political prisoners, an end to the half-century-old state of emergency, greater freedoms, and an end to corruption. Unlike Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Assad responded to protestors immediately, offering just token reforms while directing security services toput down the protests with force.
People demonstrate against the Assad regime in the besieged town of Al Qsair, near Homs, in January 2012. Alessio Romenzi/Corbis
From Protest Movement to Civil War
Anti-regime protests soon spread from Deraa to major cities like Damascus, Homs, and Hama. Events in Deraa offered a preview of what was to come elsewhere: The Syrian army fired on unarmed protestors and carried out mass arrests, both targeting dissidents and indiscriminately sweeping up men and boys,rights monitors reported. Torture and extrajudicial executions were frequently reported at detention centers. Then, in late April, the Syrian army brought in tanks, laying siege to Deraa. The civilian death toll mounted and residents were cut off from food, water, medicine, telephones, and electricity for eleven days. Amid international condemnation, the regime offered some concessions, but also repeated the Deraa method elsewhere where there were protests, at far greater length and cost, leading some regime opponents to take up arms. Local coordinating committees sprang up in villages and urban neighborhoods. Originally established to organize resistance to the regime, many of these committees would take on the role of public administration and service provision.
Members of the Free Syrian Army in January 2012. Alessio Romenzi/Corbis
A Disorganized Opposition Splinters
In July 2011, defectors from Assad’s army announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army, and soon after they began to receive shelter in Turkey. Yet the FSA, outgunned by the regime, struggled to bring its loose coalition under centralized command and control. FSA militias often didn’t coordinate their operations and sometimes had competing interests, reflecting their varied regional backers. With resources scarce, they preyed at times on the very populations they were charged with protecting. Its civilian counterpart was also established in summer 2011, in Istanbul. The Syrian National Coalition claimed to be the government-in-exile of Syria, and the United States, Turkey, and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, among others, soon recognized it as “the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” But the SNC and its successor, the National Coalition, were unable to deliver significant diplomatic or material support to the opposition, and many of the regime’s opponents within Syria accorded it little legitimacy. Rival coalitions began to proliferate, and FSA fighters drifted to Islamist brigades which, with funding and arms from Gulf donors, scored greater battlefield successes against the regime.
Islamic State militants pose for a photo posted online in the Yarmouk refugee camp, in the Damascus suburbs. Balkis Press/Sipa via AP Images
Al-Qaeda and Islamic State Emerge
The regime’s torture and killing was exploited by al-Qaeda militants eager to capitalize on Syria's chaos. In January 2012, a group called Jabhat al-Nusra announced itself as al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, and the following month al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri called for Sunnis from around the region to join a jihad against the regime. Jabhat al-Nusra gained Syrian and foreign recruits as it scored greater battlefield successes than rival opposition groups.
In April 2013, a group formed from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq that called itself the Islamic State of Iraq emerged and exceeded even Jabhat al-Nusra in its brutality. In several months, its forces established control over territory spanning western Syria and eastern Iraq. The ascendance of the Islamic State and other extremists groups fed an increasingly sectarian, zero-sum conflict, and civilians living in the fiefs—as with those of the FSA and pro-regime militias—suffered abuse.
The rise of extremist groups in Syria was, in part, the regime’s own doing, as Assad wanted to present to the world a stark choice between his secular rule and a jihadi alternative. In mid-2011, the regimereleased hundreds of Islamist militants from prisons to discredit the rebellion. They would form extremist groups like Ahrar al-Sham, which espoused a sectarian agenda.
A father holds his dead child in Aleppo, which has been contested for months, in October 2012. MAYSUN/epa/Corbis
Civilians as Targets
Both Assad’s forces and rebel groups have regularly targeted civilians in areas beyond their control. The deaths of some 1,400 civilians fromchemical weapons deployed by the Assad regime in the summer of 2013 mobilized world powers to dismantle the regime’s chemical arsenal. However, in the years since, the Syrian government has employed devastating conventional arms that have also caused massive civilian casualties.
The regime has made regular use of sieges and aerial bombardment. These collective-punishment tactics serve dual purposes, analysts say: They raise the costs of resistance to civilians so that they will pressure rebels to acquiesce, and they also prevent local committees from offering a viable alternative to the regime’s governance. In 2016 the UN humanitarian agency saidfive million peoplelived in areas that were besieged or otherwise beyond the reach of aid.
The toll has mounted despite a UN Security Council resolution in 2014 aimed at securing humanitarian aid routes. Humanitarian aid became politicized as Assad would grant UN convoys permission to distribute food and medicine in government-held areas while denying them access to rebel-held areas, and rights advocates charged the regime with targeting medical facilities and personnel.
At a Hezbollah rally in the Beirut suburbs, the militant group's supporters wave flags featuring the faces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Bilal Hussein/AP Photo
From Domestic Rebellion to Internationalized Civil War
The deepening of Syria’s civil war made both pro- and anti-regime forces dependent on external sponsors. As major powers deepened their involvement, Syria has become a battlefield on which the region’s geopolitical rivalries have been fought.
As mounting casualties and desertions weakened Assad’s army, the regime came to rely increasingly on Iran and Russia. Iran, a longtime ally interested in protecting a vital land route to its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, has invested billions in propping up the regime. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps advises Assad’s army and has sustained thousands of casualties. Its volunteer Basij paramilitary force and the foreign Shia militias it has rallied have sustained even more casualties.
Russia, traditionally averse to regime change, has provided Assad with critical diplomatic support. Moscow has cited what it calls an illegal intervention in Libya and the ensuing chaos there as justification for vetoing measures in the UN Security Council that would have punished the regime. Russia then entered the conflict directly in September 2015 with the deployment of its air force. Though Moscow claimed its air strikes would primarily target the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, analysts said it more often targeted other rebel groups, some backed by the United States and many intermingled with al-Qaeda’s affiliate near the front lines with the regime. This helped Assad strengthen his control of population centers along the country’s western spine. Opposition forces, too, depend on foreign support. A rapprochement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar enabled the formation in March 2015 of the Army of Conquest, which was designed to overcome the lack of coordination among rebel groups in the north and comprises an array of opposition and extremist groups. The United States, too, has provided covert training and arms to opposition forces. But official foreign support for opposition forces has been unsteady and uncoordinated.
A YPG base in northern Syria bears signs of rocket fire from a Turkish attack. Soran Qurbani/Demotix/Corbis
The Kurdish Bid for Autonomy
Kurds have fought to consolidate a de facto autonomous territory in northern Syria, which has made them alternately friends and foes of Arab opposition groups. The Islamic State’s siege of Kobani in the fall of 2014 was a turning point; the battle to oust the militant group highlighted the effectiveness of the Kurds’ People’s Protection Units (YPG) against the Islamic State. U.S. forces aided in ousting Islamic State fighters from Kobani and continue to provide arms and air support to the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces. But the YPG’s priority has turned to consolidating autonomous Kurdish cantons in the country’s north, a region the Kurds refer to as Western Kurdistan. YPG fighters, interested in protecting fellow Kurds, have been accused of ethnic cleansing in mixed Arab-Kurd areas. The YPG is tied to the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Washington has designated a terrorist organization. In August 2016, Turkey deployed its military along the Syrian border to both roll back Islamic State forces and, in tandem with Syrian Arab and Turkmen fighters, block Kurds from linking up their two cantons in a contiguous territory. The United States considers Turkey, a NATO ally, a vital partner in the war against the Islamic State, and it faces the dilemma of trying not to alienate either partner.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hold a news conference in Vienna in October 2015 amid frustrated efforts to find a political solution to Syria's civil war. Brendan Smialowski/Pool/Reuters
The Diplomatic Thicket
UN-backed attempts to mediate a conflict-ending political transition in Syria have been stymied by differences among veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council and other powers. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey aligned with the United States against the Assad regime, while Iran joined Russia in backing it. Russia and China have cast multiple vetoes on Syria-related Security Council resolutions, and the threat of veto has deterred or watered down humanitarian and human rights measures, reinforcing a view of the body as toothless. A June 2012 multilateral document known as the Geneva Communique has become the basis for negotiations. It calls for “a Syrian-led political process,” beginning with the establishment of a transitional governing body “formed on the basis of mutual consent.” But multiple rounds of peace talks to implement these principles have yielded little. A core issue is Assad himself: He has no interest in negotiating his own political demise and retains Russia's and Iran's backing, while the possibility of Assad staying on in a transition is anathema to the opposition.
With dim prospects for a negotiated settlement, the United States has instead focused on counterterrorism activities while calling for de-escalation. Some analysts say a number of rebels have come to question U.S. commitments and even joined extremist groups due to factors such as the apparent U.S. resignation to Assad remaining in power, its halting support for vetted armed groups, and air strikes in Idlib and Aleppo provinces that at times have been indistinguishable from those by Syrian and Russian forces.
Volunteers help a Syrian refugee on the southeastern Greek island of Lesbos. Manu Brabo/AP Photo
Refugee Crisis Brings EU to a Breaking Point
More than half of Syria’s pre-war population of twenty-two million has been displaced by the violence, with more than six million displaced internally and another six million fleeing abroad. Neighboring countries have borne the heaviest burden: Lebanon, a country of only 4.5 million people, is hosting more than one million Syrians, and Jordan, with more than half a million, has begun blocking would-be refugees from crossing the border. Turkey is host to nearly three million Syrians, straining government resources. With limited work and educational opportunities, and little hope that they will soon be able to return safely home, more than one million refugees havejourneyed to Europe, contributing to what the UN has called the largest migrant and refugee crisis since World War II. Disputes over how to settle refugees across the EU have thrown the bloc into disarray, threatening to bring an end to the Schengen system of open borders on the continent and contributing to the rise of anti-immigrant, far-right parties. The EU struck an agreement with Turkey to block their northward migration, but it is jeopardized after an attempted coup attempt. As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purged his political opponents and sought to curry nationalists’ support for consolidating executive power in the presidency, the EU suspended accession talks, leading Erdogan to threaten to once again “open the gates.”
Residents flee the al-Salihin nieghborhood in east Aleppo after regime troops retook the area in December 2016. (George Ourfalian/AFP/Getty Images)
East Aleppo Falls to Pro-Regime Forces
The regime captured the last rebel-held enclave of east Aleppo in December 2016 after a prolonged siege and bombardment. The city, Syria’s economic powerhouse, had been contested since 2012, and its capture marked a stark reversal of fortune for the opposition; in 2013, rebels had nearly encircled the regime-controlled western part of the city. But the campaign also demonstrates how dependent Assad has become on his foreign backers, both the Russian air force and Shiite militias, as his own forces have weakened.
Scores of civilians were massacred in the battle’s last days in what a UN spokesman called “a complete meltdown of humanity.” With their defeat in Aleppo, rebels were isolated to northern Idlib province, parts of the south, and small enclaves around Damascus and Homs. But even with control of major population centers, Assad will have trouble re-establishing authority over a country that has been fragmented by warlords and overrun by foreign forces, and is likely to face a persistent insurgency, analysts say.
Islamic State's Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Photo by Al-Furqān Media, official media arm of Islamic State terrorist group.
July 1, 2016
It has been two years since the self-styled Islamic State (IS) announced the establishment of a “Caliphate”. How will this construct evolve and what form would it take? After 23 months of war the determination of the Islamic State (IS) Caliphate is being put to the test, with a significant decline of its revenues and a total combat casualties estimated to exceed 26,000 fighters since 2014. The United States reported in January 2016 that the group would have lost respectively around 20% and 40% of the populated territories it used to control in Syria and Iraq. IS has the potential to fight back, especially as its strongholds in the Syrian provinces of Aleppo and Deir ez Zour have not been reconquered yet. However, should the erosion of the Caliphate continue over the coming months, it would be more and more difficult for IS to defend the entity it created against the assaults of its enemies and ensure governance at the same time. Retrospectively, the first two years of the Caliphate might thus be seen as a period of transition leading to the reconstitution of the “state”. It is an open question how the latter could evolve and which forces might benefit from that process.
Loss of Popular Support?
IS, also known as ISIS, based the legitimacy and the credibility of the Caliphate on the Sunni-Shia divide and the power vacuum plaguing large parts of Iraq and Syria. The IS organisation is used to present itself as the defender of Sunnis against the Shia-led regimes of Baghdad and Damascus. It remains dependent on the active or passive support of Sunnis living in areas under its influence and control. These local populations stand at a crossroads. The Caliphate provided them with basic services, the administration of “justice” and an embryonic welfare state, but it also brought disillusionment among its “subjects” and exposed the latter to the risks associated with a state at constant war. According to political scientist Myriam Benraad, “[IS] pledged to hand power back to the Sunnis and secure their prosperity … not only did it not keep its promise but it took civilian populations hostage”. Territorial losses are likely to lead IS to intensify its “indirect strategy” that aims at forcing enemies of the group to reconsider their military involvement in Iraq and Syria by targeting their civilian populations. The domestic cost of this approach may nonetheless be high. Sunnis living in the Caliphate are primarily interested in ensuring their security, improving their conditions of life and increasing their political influence. Terrorist activities led or claimed by IS will not meet these expectations and could widen the gap between locals and the “state”. IS might enforce stricter policies of coercion and repression to reassert societal control, which would further expose the dictatorial nature of its rule and make the Caliphate lose more of its appeal.
Hammer and Anvil
Such a scenario would have positive implications over the long term if a viable alternative to the Caliphate had emerged from the war. This has not been the case so far. Arab Sunni populations are caught between IS on the one hand and different actors they still consider to be hostile to their interests on the other. In Iraq, feelings of mistrust shared by a majority of Sunnis towards the Iraqi central government as well as their fear of indiscriminate attacks from the Iraqi army and retaliation from Shia militias make a shift of power from IS to Shia forces doomed to failure. The challenge is even greater in Syria, where a potential but unlikely reimplantation of the Assad regime in governorates it used to control before the civil war would face considerable opposition from Syria’s Sunni majority. In both countries, growing resentment between Arabs and Kurds might sow the seeds of new ethnic clashes. The campaign against IS is over focused on the objective of military defeat, with little attention paid to post-conflict peacebuilding efforts. This is a shortsighted policy. To be sustainable, territorial gains that are made by anti-IS forces need to be followed by reconstruction, governance and inclusive political processes. This agenda is severely jeopardised by sectarian cleavages and, in the immediate future, displacements of population who fled fighting. Political scientist Gilles Dorronsoro noted that “the cities of Tikrit, Ramadi and other Sunni bastions passed under the control of IS are falling one after the other, but they are almost depopulated. Return of inhabitants is very limited”.
From Caliphate to Emirate?
Three factors suggest that al-Qaeda (AQ) and its Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) would be likely to take advantage of a new balance of power. First, the conflict between IS and AQ/JN has been a major bone of contention within the Jihadist community since the two organisations split in 2013. Setbacks suffered by IS would be an ideal opportunity for JN and its parent organisation to attempt to restore the leadership of AQ. Second, any failure of the Caliphate as a “Sunni project” could entice JN to portray itself as a more authentic and effective defender of Sunni populations. The group aims at establishing an Islamic “Emirate” that would rely on a harsh interpretation of Sharia law. To this end, JN developed a dense network of rebel alliances and a genuine base of local support in the North-western Syrian governorate of Idlib where it established a low-key but influential presence. These assets could be used to gain further traction and expand JN’s outreach, provided that the group would be able to overcome internal disagreements as well as feelings of suspicion and animosity expressed among militant factions and parts of the population that are opposed to its objectives. Third, a protracted loss of momentum of the Caliphate might be used by AQ and JN as a decisive argument in support of the long-term methodology favoured by their respective leaderships. JN took great care in gradually entrenching itself in the opposition and the social fabric of Syrian communities, as opposed to IS who adopted a strategy for immediate action. The latter approach may well be much frailer than initially thought.
*Romain Quivooij is an Associate Research Fellow with the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Late last year, Fathullah Jamil decided he’d had enough — of days that began before dawn, calling believers to prayer at the mosque; evenings spent negotiating a taxi through the sweltering streets; and nights spent in an airless one-room home. The children had moved to West Asia, and had been calling their parents to join them. Jamil sold the taxi, and caught a flight to Thiruvananthapuram to pick up his ailing Indian-born wife, Shah Bano.
Had intelligence officials in Kerala not intervened, the elderly couple would by now have been spending their retirement in the Islamic State — home to their three half-Indian, Thiruvananthapuram-educated sons, along with their wives and children. The Maldives advertises its stunning island resorts as an earthly paradise, but intelligence services are increasingly concerned at the number of its citizens who are seeking the afterlife { read 56 hoors in Jaahnaat } marketed by Islamists. Indian and Western services estimate up to 200 Maldives citizens, out of a tiny population of 359,000, may now be in Iraq and Syria — the highest by far, in population-adjusted terms, of any country in the world.
The Maldives government says it can confirm 57 people have made the journey, while the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda affiliated rival, al-Nusra, have released at least seven obituaries for Maldivians killed in combat. Death Threats, Attacks Inside the Maldives, too, secular writers and activists are facing a growing tide of death threats —- sometimes backed up by lethal attacks.
Former jihadist-turned-secular writer Ahmed Rilwan, who disappeared last year, is thought to have been murdered by Islamist-linked street gangs. Hilath Rasheed, another writer and democratic rights activsts, lives in exile in Sri Lanka after his throat was slashed in a near-fatal attack. “There’s a growing culture of violence against dissidents from the religious right-wing and the perpetrators are enjoying complete impunity,” said writer Yameen Rasheed.
Male’s powerful street gangs — in turn, linked to heroin cartels and protection rackets — are providing soldiers for the new Islamist army.Photographs obtained by The Indian Express show Rasheed’s alleged attacker, former gang member Ismail Rahim, travelling to Syria as part of a group organised by leading Islamist ideologue Adam Shameem. Like dozens of other former gang members, Rahim embraced neo-fundamentalist Islam in prison, seeing jihad as atonement for his past sins.
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Pakistan Link Evidence also exists that Maldives’ jihadist networks are tied in with groups in Pakistan. Azlif Rauf, named as a suspect in the writer Rilwan’s disappearance, fled to Pakistan last year, where he is thought to be hiding out with contacts in the Tehreek-e-Taliban.
Through the city, as well as in some of the smaller islands, graffiti calling on young people to join the jihad in Syria is widespread — as are online Twitter handles and websites promoting the cause. “This is the fastest-growing but least-understood security threat to the whole region. It’s just a matter of time before these people bring the killing home,” said former Maldives police intelligence chief Mohamed ‘MC’ Hameed.
For tourism-dependent Maldives, the prospect of attacks on Western tourists staying at isolated resorts scattered across the country’s more than 2,600 islands is a growing concern.
India’s Worry
Indian intelligence sources say they are also concerned at the prospect that Maldives could become a staging post for attacks against India.
In 2008, Maldives national Ali Assham — alleged to have been involved with the Lashkar-e-Taiba network attacked the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore — was deported from Sri Lanka to Maldives. Despite Indian demands, he was never prosecuted, and now lives in Male. Assham did not respond to repeated phone calls seeking comment.
Part of the problem, Hameed said, is the state’s lack of capacity to successfully investigate and prosecute jihadists. Ali Jaleel, who in 2008 became the first Maldives citizen to conduct a suicide bombing, was briefly jailed two years earlier — only to emerge within weeks.
Former President Mohamed Nasheed, similarly, pardoned the alleged perpetrators of a 2009 bombing in Male — some of whom are now believed to be fighting in Syria.
Textbook Jihad
The state’s own textbooks, human rights activists in Maldives say, also contribute to the problem. The class IX Islamic studies textbook tells students “performing jihad against people that obstruct the religion” is an obligation. It promises that “Islam ruling over the world is very near”. Promising a caliphate, the textbook says “this is something that the Jews and Christians do not want. It is why they collaborate against Islam even now”.
From Fathullah Jameel’s telling of his children’s story, it is unclear precisely what led his children to the Islamic State. Educated as a cleric at the neo-fundamentalist Jamia Salafia in Pakistan’s Faisalabad — home also to the Lashkar’s Assham — Jameel chose a secular education for his children after they finished primary school in Male. The children moved to India with their mother, living and studying near Thiruvananthapuram. “I know it is impossible to make a living from a mosque Imam’s wages in Male, and I wanted my children to have a better life,” said Jameel.
That’s not quite how it worked out, though: only the middle son, Aatifu Jameel, found a white-collar job, at immigration security. The oldest, Samihu Jameel, worked with a fishing crew. The youngest, Aataru Jameel, remained unemployed — part of the 25 per cent of Maldivians who do not have a job, even though the country employs over 100,000 migrant workers.
Syria Calling
In 2013, Samihu Jameel left for Syria —- among the first Maldivians to head there. Police officials familiar with the case say he was drawn to the jihad online, and then made contact with an Islamist charity that made arrangements. “Frankly, I don’t know. He said he was going to study in Cairo with a religious charity. Then, he disappeared,” said Jameel.
Last summer, Samihu’s wife, Nooha, along with the two brothers and their wives, Najuma and Izawa, also travelled to the Islamic State. They aren’t the only ones: couple Mohammad Zakman Adam Ismail and Marim Sanah are reported to have migrated to the Islamic State late last year.
In another recent case, Maldives government sources said, a young family who travelled to Syria lost their child to pneumonia in February.
Jameel speculates their decision may have, at least in part, been pragmatic. “It’s hard for young people in Male. After they married, the three boys had to take turns sharing the bedroom.”
