Al-Qai'da's warriors rush in where Americans fear to tread

FALLUJAH'S fate symbolises an Islamist surge that imperils the whole world.

Jihadist fighters move through Fallujah in a commandeered police truck.

IN the 20 years since Samuel Huntington published his seminal essay The Clash of Civilisations? things have seldom looked more ominous.

All the optimism that followed the successful US Navy SEALs operation that killed Osama bin Laden in his Pakistani lair almost three years ago has largely dissipated, while President Barack Obama's confident assertion in the landmark address he delivered in Washington last May that the "global war on terror is over" now looks wildly unrealistic, if not plain fraudulent.

Instead, as an anxious world watches, the US is being confronted by what amounts to one of its greatest humiliations since 9/11, with al-Qa'ida-linked jihadist militants claiming control of Fallujah, a major city in Iraq's western Anbar province that is redolent with significance and symbolism for America's entire war effort in the country and, indeed, its global battle against terrorism.

America's invasion to get rid of Saddam Hussein cost the country thousands of young soldiers' lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. A third of those lives were lost in fighting around Fallujah. The city was the setting for the biggest battle fought by US forces since Vietnam. It was eventually recaptured from the terrorists and stabilised following a US troop surge against the Iraqi insurgents. Yet this week - barely three years after Obama ordered a total pullout of US troops from Iraq - the city was back in the hands of those same al-Qa'ida-linked Sunni jihadists.

Nothing more tellingly underscores the extent of the growing challenge now being posed by Islamist militants across vast swaths of the Middle East, Africa and beyond, with potentially dire consequences worldwide.

Long-held fears about the extent to which the upheavals of the Arab Spring, and specifically the uprising against the despotic Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus, would create the conditions that would fuel the jihadist onslaught across the region are being realised as the Syrian civil war spills into countries such as Iraq and Lebanon, providing new opportunities for al-Qa'ida's proxies. And, having made the crucial mistake of failing, early in the conflict, to arm the then moderate rebel movement that was seeking to overthrow the Assad dictatorship, Washington is watching for the most part helplessly, with few viable options at its disposal, as the most abominably cut-throat of the jihadists make the running.

Syria's civil war, now clearly beyond Washington's influence and that of other Western nations, has been described as the crucible of the proxy war being waged in the region between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. It is hard to argue with that analysis. While the West has tiptoed away, unwilling to get involved on the side of a Syrian rebel movement that is now dominated by al-Qa'ida-linked jihadists, Riyadh's oil-rich Sunni rulers are pouring in weapons. Iran's Shia ayatollahs, notorious supporters of terrorism, are doing the same through their Lebanon-based Hezbollah surrogate, while former KGB spy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, showing no signs of the skittishness displayed by Obama, is providing massive arms shipments to the Assad forces.

In both Syria and Iraq, the battlelines that have been drawn are between Sunni and Shia: in Syria, between Assad's heterodox Alawite Shia sect, linked to Iran and Hezbollah, and the various Sunni al-Qa'ida jihadist groups, and in Iraq between the ardently nationalistic and sectarian Shia government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Sunni al-Qa'ida insurgent groups that have thrived in an environment in which Sunnis have been discriminated against since Saddam's removal.

Full-scale civil war rages in Syria, with a civilian death toll now estimated by the UN to be well beyond 136,000. The al-Qa'ida success in Fallujah and Anbar province suggests Iraq, too, faces an imminent civil war, with the UN estimating that almost 9000 people have died in violence there in the past year alone.

But they are not by any means the only countries confronting the jihadist threat. The tumultuous uprisings that accompanied the Arab Spring have left in place mostly weak and fragile administrations in countries across the region with scant control over vast swaths of their territory that have become fertile ground for militant activity and training bases.

Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, for example, has become a lawless hotbed of al-Qa'ida activity since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in 2011, something that has potentially major consequences for the security of Israel, with reports that the militants are equipped with surface-to-air missiles capable of bringing down aircraft. These weapons were apparently obtained amid the mayhem in Libya following the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime.

Southern Libya itself - another almost entirely lawless region - has also become a haven for the jihadists, and concern about it is growing because of its relative proximity to potential al-Qa'ida targets in Europe and the migration of African asylum-seekers to European countries.

From the troubled West African nations of Mali and Nigeria, through Libya and on to Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east, the perspective is one of al-Qa'ida and its proxies and affiliates on the march in a way that contradicts all the optimistic narrative of significantly weakened jihadist militancy expressed by Obama last year. It comes as a stark reminder of just what the al-Qa'ida success in Fallujah means for a world that was led to believe it had terrorism against the ropes.

Significantly, the rising tide of militancy is seeing unprecedented cross-pollination between the various jihadist groups, with the al-Qa'ida affiliate in Yemen, al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula, regarded as its most organised and potent proxy, now said to be working closely with allied jihadist groups in Sinai as well as Lebanon, where Sunni militants have been attacking Shia Hezbollah groups.

In Africa, too, there is close collusion between the murderous Boko Haram militants in oil-rich Nigeria, a key Western ally on the continent, and the jihadists of the al-Shabaab terrorist movement in Somalia responsible for the spectacular attack last year on a shopping mall in Nairobi, capital of neighbouring Kenya.

The accepted wisdom amid the triumphalism that followed bin Laden's killing in 2011 was that his death would be a devastating blow to al-Qa'ida and the jihadist cause. Three other top al-Qa'ida leaders - Sheik Said al Masri, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman and Abu Yahya al-Libi - have been killed since then, but the "crippling blow" expected by US officials has not eventuated.

Instead, as Katherine Zimmerman, senior analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, says: "The network remains far from crippled and there is little evidence indicating that the network on the whole is in the decline. Al-Qa'ida's affiliates actually strengthened their positions in 2011 despite the death of bin Laden."

Efraim Karsh, a professor of Middle East studies, has predicted that the phenomenon of global jihad will grow, especially in Iraq, now the US is out of the picture. And Frederic Wehrey, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describing the situation in Libya and Sinai, says: "You have a set of festering grievances, tribal grievances, and you have al-Qa'ida able to exploit those. At the bottom of all this, and especially in the Sinai region ... you have decades of repression. So you have enough grievances to foster mass anger."

Michael Knights, a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has been quoted as testifying before congress that al-Qa'ida in Syria has ambitions to dominate the terrorist scene in Syria, expand into Lebanon and the Mediterranean, and then into Israel and Turkey. He reportedly said it had succeeded in convincing its followers that Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are multiple fronts in one war to create an Islamic state.

Al-Qa'da leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, is believed to be the mastermind behind tactics that have seen it exploit the opportunities thrown up by the collapse of authoritarian governments in the Arab Spring uprisings, especially the civil war in Syria, which he long maintained would give al-Qa'ida a golden opportunity to advance its cause.

It is clear too that the sectarian violence resulting from the Shia-Sunni divide in Iraq is providing fertile ground for the al-Qa'ida-linked insurgent groups. It is returning them to the potency they had in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's overthrow.

On its own, the jihadist resurgence across huge swaths of the Middle East and Africa is alarming enough, with governments being challenged by Islamic militancy on an unprecedented scale.

Its significance goes far beyond just those areas, however, and with an estimated 7000 foreigners - including some from Australia - known to be fighting with extremist forces in Syria and elsewhere, there seems little doubt that there will be a serious security knock-on effect when they return home.

European leaders, in particular, are alarmed by the number of jihadists from their countries who have joined up with militant groups fighting in Syria. They fear what they might get up to when they return. And in Russia, Putin, as he struggles to secure the Sochi Winter Olympics, is feeling the effects of long years of involvement in jihadist movements around the world by Chechen and other militants.

And all the signs are that things are set to get worse, with grim assessments from top US intelligence agencies about the prospects for a resurgence by the obscurantist, al-Qa'ida-linked Taliban in Afghanistan after the last of the US-led coalition forces leave at the end of this year.

What is known as the National Intelligence Estimate, a collation of the analysis of 16 top US government intelligence agencies, in a report just disclosed, paints an irredeemably bleak picture about the prospects of holding out against a Taliban takeover unless the recalcitrant government led by President Hamid Karzai agrees to a deal that will allow a small US-led coalition force, including Australian Diggers, to remain in the country after the end of the year.

It forecasts a rapid resumption of Taliban control over the territory that has been held by coalition forces, something that will inevitably turn it back into the fertile base it was previously for al-Qa'ida and bin Laden.

Similarly, across the border in Pakistan, despite a new government being elected last year pledged to fight terrorism, nothing has happened and Taliban and al-Qa'ida militants, including, it is believed, al-Zawahiri, enjoy a largely free rein, challenged only by US drone strikes.

The scenario is one of unremitting gloom, with the Obama administration, which should be providing the sort of firm leadership and support that will counter the jihadist advance, showing few signs - as in its total mishandling of Syria - of any capacity or willingness to do so.

The Syrian uprising was a test of Washington's ability to lead on an issue that goes to the heart of the battle against jihadist terrorism; by failing in 2012 to provide the weapons the then moderate rebels needed to bring down the Assad regime and establish a democracy, they have played into the hands of the jihadists and enabled them to achieve the pre-eminence they now have, putting them in a position in which they are increasingly challenging governments and are even capable of capturing major cities redolent with symbolism, such as Fallujah.

Is this the "clash of civilisations" that Huntington forecast in the aftermath of the Cold War, the epic battle between different cultures that he apprehended? Were he alive today, Huntington would doubtless have insightful views on it all. What they might be can only be guessed at. He died in 2008. But what is not in doubt is that, far from being against the ropes, as Obama suggested, jihadist terrorism has a powerful new wind in its sails that the civilised world will underestimate at its peril. Years ago in the mid-1970s, for my sins, as a then relatively young foreign correspondent I covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, spending long months in the icy Hindu Kush living cheek by jowl with the Islamic mujaheddin, the predecessors to the Taliban, as they launched their attacks on Soviet positions and convoys.

Bin Laden was among the mujaheddin at the time. It was an epic battle in which the Soviets, despite their vastly superior weaponry, were defeated and put to flight. The Islamists then used to boast that while the Kremlin's army had all the guns and smart watches, "we have the time".

And time won out: they lost none of their religious zeal and determination. Eventually, the Soviets gave up and fled, their tails between their legs.

I'm reminded of that now in assessing the jihadist resurgence we are witnessing. Bin Laden's killing clearly wasn't the death knell to global terrorism that it was hoped it would be. The militants are coming in bigger numbers than ever.

What's needed is a concerted response, with Washington providing the lead in dealing with an ever more challenging crisis.

Unfortunately, as Syria has shown with such tragic consequences, there is no sign of that happening.