(AhlulBayt News Agency) - Following the 9/11 attacks and Taliban's decline to accept to get Al-Qaeda terrorist group out of Afghanistan after a warning by George W. Bush, then-president of the US, Washington launched its retaliatory offensive in Afghanistan in October 2001. Almost a month later, the government of Taliban was toppled and was pushed out of the major Afghanistan cities. An international conference ensued in Bonn, Germany, and Hamid Karzai was picked as acting head of post-Taliban Afghanistan, and then he was elected as president of the country in the election.
But this was not the ending point of the military operations and presence of the invading forces in the South Asian country. The shadows of war kept affecting Afghanistan up to now, some 15 years after the invasion.
The Afghanistan war in addition to influencing the Afghan domestic political and social issues has forced large numbers of the Afghan people out of the country, majorly to the European countries, as refugees. The United Nations Higher Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) before spark of the Syrian and Iraqi crises deemed Afghanistan as the world’s largest refugee producing country. The influx of the Afghan refugees migrating to the European states in recent years and after eruption of the devastating Syrian crisis kept increasingly going on, and the Afghans are now the second-largest migrating population in Europe.
On the other side, the start of Iraq war under the cover of the Iraqi WMDs in 2003 unleashed a new wave of migration of the Iraqi Muslims to Europe. This challenge has kept going until now due to prevalent insecurity and also rise of ISIS terrorist group in the country.
But beside impacts of Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the waves of migration of Muslims who present a potential for tendency towards radicalism we must consider the effects of migration on the psychological and motivational aspects of other Muslims including the native Muslims of Europe and the second and third generations of the migrants in the European countries. Actually invading a Muslim country and leaving behind large numbers of victims and destructions and circulation of the news about them certainly cause an increase in aversion to the non-Muslims— majorly Europeans and Americans— and development of a spirit for collective protection of the Muslims. In other words, according to the views of the social movements, putting strains on a social group will result in collective consistency and developing radicalized demands. So, the native Muslims or the migrants who preserved their Islamic identity against the threats coming from the Western liberal democratic discourse due to psychological pressures from Iraq and Afghanistan wars develop their own ethnic, religious, sectarian, and nationalist identity rather than developing cultural consistency with the European liberal democracies. Meanwhile, the radical atmosphere has managed to respond to their demands. This atmosphere has roots in the problems of the migrant Muslims and the negative and discriminatory views towards them. The bad economic and social conditions like poverty, unemployment, delinquency, and other troubles and discriminations in some European countries majorly affect the Muslim communities. In such conditions, on the one hand Islamophobic sentiments appear among the Western public opinion and on the other hand terrorist attacks of the 9/11, which were carried out by Al-Qaeda terrorist group but the Western governments tried to attribute them to all of the Muslims to pave the way for further pressures on them, have made the situation difficult for the Muslims in the Western countries.
These hard conditions especially push the young Muslims into frustration and expose them to social damages. Naturally, these unwanted conditions boost a tendency for violence among them, something that in turn fuels Islamophobia in the Western societies. Blasphemy against Prophet Muhammad in the name of freedom of speech but in fact in opposition to respect to religions and freedom of belief, ban on hijab for Muslim women, rise of anti-migration social campaigns, plenty of problems in the way of migration to Europe, disrespecting the migrants as second and third degree citizens, Islamophobia and Muslimphobia, putting ban on the Muslim media, Western man’s identity reaching dead end because of focusing on materialism, rise of questions about welfare in the Western communities due to increase in poverty and deepened economic gaps, security pressures and persistent spying on the Muslims just against the principles of freedom of the citizens, and judicial discrimination against the Muslims, all these cases cause Muslims, either native or migrant Muslims, to face considerable pressures by the leading Western discourses. This challenge not only questions the credibility of the hegemonic discourses of the West but also it frustrates any attempts by the Muslims to get along with the European discourse.
In response to such a situation, what in recent years succeeded to present itself as an alternative discourse was the radical organizations under the name of the Islamic State or Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. The extremist discourse with its Islamic State motivation has managed to attract many people from the Western discursive atmosphere to its own. It at the same time added many other attractions to its atmosphere.
Therefore, radicalism in Iraq and Syria under the title of Islamic State of Iraq and Levant— or Syria ( ISIS/ISIL) or the affiliates of Al-Qaeda have been successful in adding attractions to its discursive structure that appeals to the native and migrant Muslims of Europe. This discourse is on a collision course with the Western liberal democratic discourse that has failed to assimilate Muslims into its body.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars and their going on up to now and their consequences in terms of migration of the Muslims to Europe and effects on the native Muslims have contributed to development of radical discourse in the region. The refugees who left their war-torn countries to Europe after facing injustice, inequality of rights, being considered as second and even third degree citizens, disrespect, and humiliation that all are signs of failure of pro-justice discourse in Europe have discovered their fantasy in the radical ideology.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the Western mistakes in launching useless assaults at Iraq and Afghanistan on the one hand and discriminatory treatment of the migrants from these two countries on the other hand have created appropriate potentials for escape of the native and migrant Muslims from the Western societies to change the current conditions. The Western mistakes have many examples in history and have always caused suffering for the Muslim nations.
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