What the Global War on Terror Really Accomplished

Twenty years after 9/11, America didn’t dismantle or destroy jihadist groups, but it fundamentally changed the way they think

Hassan HassanHassan Hassan is the editor in chief of Newlines

September 9, 202107:45 EST

A security personnel walks past a wall mural with images of US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad (L) and Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Kabul on July 31, 2020 / Wakil Kohsar / AFP via Getty Images

Iwas introduced to Maysara in 2015. I wanted to hear from him about his decadelong experience of being part of the Islamic State group, and how he spearheaded the fight against it in eastern and southern Syria the year before. Maysara bin Ali, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Maria al-Qahtani, was also interested in speaking to Syrians from the eastern region — of whom I am one — where he previously worked until the Islamic State captured it in the summer of 2014.

Maysara is a longtime jihadist who has operated in Iraq and Syria for the past two decades. In early 2001, he was moved by the killing a few months earlier of Palestinian fifth-grader Muhammad al-Durrah during the second intifada and joined a paramilitary unit established under Saddam Hussein for the “liberation of Jerusalem.” The volunteer army was made up of Iraqi civilians, and Maysara even signed up as a willing suicide bomber.

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, he joined the insurgency in 2003, operating mainly in Mosul and nearby Qayyarah, around his birth town of Herarah. He joined al Qaeda in Iraq and rose through its ranks when it rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006. Being from the prominent Iraqi tribe of Jubour and having received religious training under notable Iraqi clerics, he served in the organization as a cleric and a tribal engagement official.

I have been following Maysara since the early days of the Syrian conflict, initially because he commanded the militant group that dominated my hometown and other areas in eastern Syria for about three years, and later because he was at the forefront of historical events and conflicts that shook up jihadism from within. I was also researching how jihadists operate in tribal environments, and he fit the bill as both a jihadist ideologue and a social interlocutor.

A year before moving to Syria, he had been released from prison in Iraq for medical reasons. Out of prison, he resumed his jihadist activities and revived contacts, some of whom would become founders of other powerful jihadist factions within the Syrian rebellion. After a popular uprising broke out against the rule of Bashar al-Assad in 2011, he and a half-dozen jihadists operating in Iraq traveled to Syria and linked up with existing sleeper cells to establish Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Support Front, as a Syrian franchise of the Islamic State of Iraq.

Today, Maysara personifies a striking transformation within the world of jihadism. He fought the Americans in Iraq; he immersed himself in jihadist ideology and strategies and quickly ascended within a number of Iraq’s militant groups; he helped create a jihadist startup in Syria; and the two organizations he helped establish and lead became central to the dramatic changes that jihadist movements underwent in the past decade.

Yet, he has emerged as a leading voice in a nascent shift away from international terrorism toward localized militancy and governance. Many jihadists like Maysara have defied both the Islamic State and al Qaeda in favor of a new strategy that emphasizes the consolidation and retention of power regionally instead of waging a global jihad against the West. This is not because their ideology has softened: It is because they have learned that inviting overwhelming reprisals from modern militaries is the fastest way to forfeit their conquests, squander their influence and be forced to start all over again.

Twenty years after 9/11, America did not dismantle or destroy jihadist groups, but it fundamentally changed the way they think. Much of the shift in jihadist thinking has to do with the military campaigns launched by the U.S. as well as the popular uprisings that submerged jihadists in local conflicts and compelled them to focus on issues within their national borders.

Contrary to how some understand the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, the lesson extremists are taking from the Taliban’s success is not simply that jihad works but that diplomacy and engagement are a necessary part of the process, which includes reassuring the West about external threats emerging from their areas. What can be gained from parlays in Doha is more significant and lasting than any terror attack.

In the past month, analysts noted with interest how the Taliban assisted U.S. forces at the Kabul Airport during the evacuation of American citizens and their Afghan allies. The Taliban practically held the door while the U.S. troops departed the country. What appeared bizarre and paradoxical was in fact entirely predictable to anyone who has studied how jihadism, shaped by the past 20 years, has reevaluated its priorities.

The question now is if the U.S. has fully appreciated this transformation. For all the overblown rhetoric about ending “forever wars,” the Biden administration still hews to a core counterterrorism doctrine. The global war on terror continues by stealth, with “over the horizon” missions on specified targets. We are now entering an era of invisible wars, premised on the same view of who and what the enemy is that was adopted within days of the 9/11 attack. In this view, jihadism is both static and transnational, and what stops its adherents from flying planes into skyscrapers and setting off bombs in Western cities is the lack of capacity to do so.

What makes Maysara’s case special is that he is a veteran jihadist who operated under both the Islamic State and al Qaeda but whose heterodox views are now prevailing within the jihadist universe.

Nearly two years before the world came to know about the Islamic State, he proposed to his group in late 2012 a plan to arrest the Islamic State’s now-dead leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and one of his closest aides, Abu Ali al-Anbari, when the two were meeting with commanders and senior members of Jabhat al-Nusra. At the time the Iraqi group was trying to merge the two groups under one organization. Jabhat al-Nusra rejected the idea and the two organizations ultimately started fighting each other in eastern Syria and elsewhere. His plots against the leaders of the Islamic State were later corroborated by testimonies of senior Islamic State members jailed in Iraq, as well as in videos produced by the Islamic State on the group’s attempts to capture Deir ez-Zor and eastern Syria in 2013 and 2014. He told me he opposed the Islamic State even though Baghdadi offered him a higher position if he aligned with him.

It was not just a turf war. Maysara had the same ideological fights with the Islamic State and al Qaeda in Syria after 2011 as he did with the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006: they were over political and religious positions that undermine or distract from the real and urgent domestic cause. Sheikh Abdullah al-Miyahi, one of his religious mentors in Iraq, spoke about these ideological battles Maysara engaged in when the two were in an Iraqi prison in 2004, during Maysara’s first of two prison stints. The sheikh is currently jailed in Iraq for association with al Qaeda, and he attacked Maysara in a series of interviews on an Iraqi television channel. Despite his criticism of Maysara, he acknowledged that Maysara was particularly opposed to the “extremists” of al Qaeda in Iraq at the time, which is currently the Islamic State. Maysara differed with those over questions that came to define the Islamic State relative to other groups, such as takfir (the practice of labeling fellow Muslims as apostates) and collaboration with others after the declaration of an Islamic state.

Years later, now in northern Syria, Maysara would continue such debates but against al Qaeda and its ideologues in Syria in the same way he had done with the Islamic State of Iraq. A common denominator between the two situations, he would point out, was Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian jihadist ideologue linked to al Qaeda. Al-Maqdisi was party to the jihadist infighting in Syria, who eventually took a hard stance against the likes of Maysara who advocated for disengagement from al Qaeda and global jihad, accusing the group of “diluting” its jihadist character. Maysara blamed al-Maqdisi for the creation of the monster that would later become the Islamic State, pointing to his writings as a key source of radicalization among inmates.

Maysara is also not an isolated case: Such traditional views are coming back to the fore — and even dominating debates — because recent events like the defeat of the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria and the recent victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan appeared to have vindicated this line of thought.

The success of groups that turned to local militancy instead of global terrorism have underscored the defects of ideologies that focused on waging ruinous global battles.

The best way to understand and assess the next phase of Sunni militancies is to view them through local insurgencies that predated al Qaeda

The localization of jihadist causes is here to stay, and the best way to understand and assess the next phase of Sunni militancies is to view them through local insurgencies that predated al Qaeda and the Islamic State. In a sense, jihadists are not as much converting to a new form as they are reverting to old insurgencies and norms, before al Qaeda hijacked and internationalized them.

The ideology of transnational jihadism targeting the West, “the far enemy,” as epitomized first by al Qaeda and more recently by the Islamic State, has been an aberration in the long history of Islamist militancy that is rooted in local grievances and conflicts. Groups linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State can be traced to indigenous insurgencies or hotspots that preceded these organizations by decades, and these groups are now reconnecting with their old roots to further entrench themselves.

In Syria, for instance, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham can be regarded as a second iteration of the Islamist insurgency in central and northern Syria in the 1970s and 1980s, even if they were created by veterans of the jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iraq in the 2000s. This connection is both ideological and organic. These Syrian groups have been guided primarily by the Islamist and jihadist ideas of Abu Musab al-Suri, who emphasized decentralization, pragmatism and deep ties with local communities above organizational rigidity and vanguard ideas and laid the groundwork for a “third generation” of jihadism after Afghanistan and Iraq. These Syrian groups have also been shaped by memories and events in the country, even among returnees who had left in the 1980s and became involved in battlefields in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Iraq. Many younger members and leaders of these groups also share family links and grievances with those involved in the old insurgencies.

The same goes for the Islamic State of Iraq, with roots in old extremist movements north of Mosul and in Kurdistan, and a particular brand of sectarianism that existed in the country, and was even promoted by Saddam’s regime, in the 1980s and 1990s. Maysara, for example, explained that the anti-American atmospherics promoted by the former regime in the 1990s and early 2000s “primed” Iraqis to join the jihad after 2003, and he himself relates to an older and indigenous militancy, in the north, through jihadist mentors from Iraq, more than to materials or individuals from outside the country.

The Taliban, too, are said to look at earlier incarnations of their movement in the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad, and before that in the Afghan Pashtun Islamism, as inspiration to be less dogmatic than they were in the 1990s. As Afghan journalist Ahmed-Waleed Kakar put it in Newlines last week: “Those considered moderate during the Soviet jihad consisted of traditionalists and monarchists keen on accommodating local context and norms.” The Taliban were among those traditionalists, he added. The Taliban will probably not change in any significant way, but the idea of how they seek to justify flexibility by looking back is illustrative of the broader point about older roots for contemporary militant groups, parallels to which can be found in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Yemen.

These views existed before al Qaeda, and under al Qaeda as undercurrents, and their vindication means they can emerge as more grounded than the vanguard ideologies that dominated the scene in the better part of the past two decades, because they have an established basis in local realities across the region. The process of reverting to old roots started before the Arab uprisings in 2011, but the consolidation of such changes at the expense of transnational jihadism has taken time to play out.

Militants, thrust into sudden conflicts, needed time to acclimate and establish a footing in their given area. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, meanwhile, provided a ready and functional framework for militants. Many of the conflicts in the region caught locals off guard and pushed them to embrace ideologies already locked and loaded for such armed conflicts. Ahmad Abazeid, a jihadism expert from Syria, attributed the weakening of Syrian militant groups relative to veteran jihadist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State to the lack of a jihadist or militant ideology grounded in the Syrian context, especially since the country had not seen conflict for four decades. A Syrian jihadist or militant ideology had to be developed in the diaspora, namely in Afghanistan and Iraq. These veterans came back to Syria as part of foreign-led jihadist leagues. It took a while for some of these groups to free themselves from the shackles of the veterans and seek to localize their operation, even if their priorities were shaped by local events and ideologies all along.

When Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came to Iraq in 2002, to prepare for the fight against the U.S. invasion, he brought with him jihadist expertise and experience, gained through years spent in Afghanistan, that local groups lacked. The foreign jihadists had many such advantages, enabling them to ride the local waves and become leaders of men. Nevertheless, no jihadist ideology could succeed without a local support base that served as its core, and it is that core that eventually took over and “re-Iraqized” the group, in terms of ideology and direction.

The shift to local jihad was not consolidated earlier also because the jihadist splits took time to be crystalized. Take the differences between al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The two had strategic and tactical disagreements since the early days of the war in Iraq, as exemplified in the famous letter Ayman al-Zawahiri, then the deputy leader of al Qaeda, sent to al-Zarqawi in 2005 warning him about his vicious and sectarian tactics in Iraq. Later, after al-Zarqawi died, the Iraqi group ended its oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden and formed the Islamic State of Iraq, declaring its Iraqi leader as “the leader of the faithful” who reported to no one. Despite such disagreements, however, the two sides maintained a civil discourse, and the Iraqi branch continued to respect and refer to al Qaeda’s leaders as their elders. This dynamic changed drastically after 2013, when quiet disagreements turned to loud schisms that polarized the jihadist scene and hardened existing differences among various strands of jihadism and militancy. This caused the sharp fragmentation of jihad for the first time despite differences existing for decades before.

What may have appeared as the recovery of al Qaeda after the popular uprisings and the death of bin Laden in 2011 was arguably an illusion: The very groups that caused the demise of al Qaeda and made it obsolete were the ones that made it look like it was still powerful because jihadists pretended and outsiders assumed that various groups in the region still deferred to it. It would take several years for this dynamic to become apparent, as the dust settled and new realities emerged. Al Qaeda under al-Zawahiri could not keep its own branches, permanently losing the key ones in Iraq and Syria. Other al Qaeda branches, such as in Yemen and Africa, pledged publicly that they would not allow their terrain to be used for attacks against the West. Such pledges were dictated by local imperatives, even if they had the al Qaeda stamp of approval.

Few today doubt that al Qaeda is moribund. The group functions largely through the so-called Hattin Committee (which U.S. officials mistakenly refer to as the Hattin Shura) that includes al-Zawahiri’s aides deputized in his chronic absence to deal with conflict resolution and mediation among jihadists particularly in places like Syria, and even these aides tend to be viewed suspiciously by many jihadists because they were based in Iran. Yet ground-level changes in jihadism and militancy, more than the dysfunctionality of its organization and absence of its leadership, can better explain why al Qaeda has little chance to reverse its fortunes. It is not a question of whether al Qaeda can field a more charismatic or functional leader than al-Zawahiri; instead, the idea itself no longer has the same utility it once had within the extremist circles. Unlike in the past, the jihadist leadership is contested, the movement itself is fragmented, and the vanguard ideas that once attracted a following under the symbolic leadership of bin Laden no longer resonate.

This does not mean the end of al Qaeda, however. Should the pendulum swing and the jihadist experiment in local governance fail, one can imagine the argument for attacking the “far enemy” gaining renewed support among some. This scenario could also happen if drones and bombs continue to drop on civilians in rural areas across the region in the name of counterterrorism. And no organization or movement is monolithic: It is entirely plausible that some individuals inspired by jihadists will continue to seek to carry out attacks against the West. But as a broader remit, it is unlikely that jihadists today will be as ambitious and daring as al Qaeda was in 2001. And this will likely prove to be the rule for the foreseeable future, for several reasons.

First, al Qaeda commands little respect among jihadists today. Al-Zawahiri has a narrow fan base among jihadists, and mostly because he was a companion and a successor to bin Laden. Al Qaeda had the advantage of being an early adopter of transnational Sunni jihadism, which provided them with the symbolism, through bin Laden and others who had just emerged victorious from the fight against the godless Soviets, to lead the Sunni jihadist movement for a while. This leadership role ended after 2011, with the death of bin Laden, the eruption of Arab uprisings and the subsequent jihadist infighting.

Second, jihadists teach their recruits about the need to focus locally not as part of their external propaganda but internally to their own audience. They dismiss the old “jihad of the elite,” of the vanguards and globalists, and advocate for the “jihad of the people,” which caters to local needs. The old way of bin Laden belonged to a different era, they say.

Third, they also take inspiration from their Shiite counterparts, who went through a similar global-to-local evolution. They did not target the West or seek a global caliphate, but they succeeded in controlling several Arab countries with the help of Iran. Within the region’s Islamist landscape, Shiite groups pioneered transnational terrorism and suicide bombing, especially in the 1980s after the Iran-Iraq war. Even though Sunnis were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, they would adopt suicide bombing and transnational terrorism only a decade later, through Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which learned directly from Hezbollah, and with al Qaeda, respectively.

Most important, though, is that the changes within jihadism are happening not just because the localized approach has benefits but also because the alternative carries immense costs. Jihadists have learned two lessons from the past 20 years which have had a moderating and sobering effect. One is that local fights are the priority and more can be achieved by focusing on the local environment, an opportunity that had not necessarily been available in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Arab uprisings were an opportunity that presented itself one decade into the U.S.-led war on terror, and involvement in these uprisings taught jihadists to moderate their views, limit their ambitions and ground their views in country-specific contexts. They now have to fight as insurgents operating and embedding within communities, rather than as vanguards preaching from ivory towers. The other lesson is to not mess with the U.S. if you can help it; in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, jihadists fought the U.S. as an occupier not as the “far enemy” as such. The Taliban limited their fight to Afghanistan, while al Qaeda and the Islamic State took the fight to the West. The first succeeded and the other two failed.

This jihadist transformation is playing out at a time when the U.S. is similarly shifting its priorities away from counterterrorism and maximalist positions in foreign policy, to focus on domestic threats or on great power competition, which in turn reflect widespread attitudes in many circles within the U.S. This two-way change — in American priorities and in the jihadist outlook — will likely further reinforce the dynamics that deemphasize confrontation, not in the sense that the two sides will like each other but in that both have changed their priorities and have less time for each other.

As it did with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. will likely learn to live with the reality of jihadists controlling certain areas. Washington seems less willing to initiate campaigns against jihadists as a policy reflex, as the U.S. did in many places over the past 20 years to deny jihadists the ability to congregate and operate in certain areas, such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Mali, Somalia and Libya. In many of these cases, the U.S. had no particular strategy beyond preventing radical forces from controlling areas merely because they were jihadists, and they left no room for engagement or compromise.

That approach slightly changed with the Taliban, when the U.S. did the unthinkable by engaging, negotiating and striking a deal with their foe of 20 years. This engagement endured under three administrations, with direct negotiations ultimately starting under a Republican administration and enforced under a Democratic one. Even more unthinkable were the scenes of the Taliban and U.S. fighters standing mere inches from each other outside the Kabul airport, coordinating their efforts through mediators.

But it is simplistic to view the persistence of jihadism as a defeat for the U.S.

Behavioral changes within jihadism are in part a product of the U.S.-led campaigns against global jihadism. The Americans may not have defeated or eliminated jihadism, but they helped transform it from being a vanguard movement committed to international terrorism into local actors responsive to both local and international imperatives who came to view as counterproductive the fight as previously defined by bin Laden and al Qaeda.

And that is the unheralded accomplishment of the war on terror, which, besides all the destruction and misery it caused, transformed jihadism. The U.S. achieved its core objective, notwithstanding the rhetoric about nation building, human rights and women’s emancipation, by tempering jihadism to be a threat only to local populations, not to Westerners. In this sense, the global war on terror was in fact won, just not on the high-minded terms in which it was fought.

The Shared Struggles of Bedouins and Native Americans

Whether in the Middle East or North Dakota, tribal societies struggle to navigate long-held traditions with occupation and displacement

September 3, 2021

The area between the ancient cities of Jerusalem and Jericho is at once unremarkable yet beautiful — a space made up of modest yet wide sloping valleys that transition in color slowly and unevenly from green to the many shades of brown and tan that make up the desert landscape. Heading east toward Jericho, one gets the impression that this is where the fertile valleys and merchant cities of the Levant finally meet the vast expanse of the great deserts of the Arabian Peninsula.

Today we no longer think of these geographic markers of space but instead of the zone between Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In order to cross the Jordan Valley, we have to travel through the science-fiction-sounding “Area C,” a highly militarized section of the occupied West Bank where Israeli settlements exist directly alongside various small gatherings of Palestinian Bedouins — their makeshift dwellings dotting the empty landscape along the modern highways built exclusively for Israeli settlers.

Since 2014, as part of our multimedia research project, The Native and the Refugee, we have produced a dozen films on the ongoing settler colonialism in North America and the Middle East. The Native and the Refugee juxtaposes the Palestinian movement with indigenous struggles in the United States by focusing specifically on the native reservation and Palestinian refugee camp as spaces of exception. What are the worldviews, histories and ways of life of these communities, who persevere in their demands for dignity and self-determination?

From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota to the Jericho Governorate in the West Bank — from Washington to Jerusalem — the political questions of our time revolve around indigeneity, refugeehood and sovereignty. The continued processes of state formation in the U.S. and Israel both mirror and reinforce each other, and this is nowhere better seen than in the reservations and refugee camps left in their wake.

The struggles that take place within and around many American Indian reservations represent an attempt to articulate both an alternative mode of governance and relationship to the land. When the people of Standing Rock protested the passage of the Dakota Access Pipeline under the part of the Missouri River that abuts their reservation, the struggle that emerged resonated within a longer horizon of sovereignty beyond the reservation itself.

Few, if any, communities have been as fundamentally affected by the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the nation-states of the modern Middle East as the nomadic Bedouins. This includes not just Bedouins who reside in what is today Israel, but even more so the Bedouins of the occupied territories, especially the West Bank. In every area around the Arabian Peninsula there are liminal spaces between geographic regions wherein lines were drawn to divide countries — the desert region that separates the Levant from Mesopotamia contains the border between Iraq and Syria; the Sinai Peninsula contains a border separating Egypt from the Levant; and then there are the currently contested sites in the valleys between Jerusalem and the border town of Jericho.

It is into and within these liminal spaces that the Bedouin exists, challenging our geographies and the political edifices of the state. Just as the displacement of Arabs from Israel — and their subsequent refugee status while living just hours from their original village— reveals something fundamentally illusory or artificial about these modern nation-states, so too, it is with the Bedouin whose way of life is in fundamental contradiction to the borders of the modern Middle East and the nations they demarcate.

As we write, there are currently around 6 million people in Lebanon. Approximately 1 million are Syrian refugees, 450,000 are Palestinian refugees, 100,000 are Kurds, and at least another 100,000 are Bedouins. More Lebanese people live in Brazil than in Lebanon. The prejudices and political contradictions of the modern nation-state exist wherever such a form is found: ethnic and religious minorities contending for status and survival alongside refugees, indigenous populations and elites of all stripes.

It was during the Nakba of 1948 that Israel occupied the Negev Desert and forced the displacement of the native Bedouin population into many of the surrounding countries. People who had once migrated only with the demands of nature were now forcibly moved again and again by the occupying Israeli authorities, from 1948 through 1967, up until the present day. The Bedouins of Palestine transitioned painfully from the free migrations of nomadism to the forced migrations of refugeehood. Today, 85% of the Bedouins in the occupied West Bank are refugees from what is now Israel, though most have refused to move into refugee camps in order to try to maintain their traditional lifestyle.

The Bedouins, through their various displacements, have continually faced harsh decisions as both a people and as individual tribes. Given the choice between a partially compromised nomadism that allows for subsistence living and an abandoned way of life that will likely lead to precarity and poverty, the Bedouins have largely chosen the former, grasping at whatever strands of their traditional way of life remain possible. But even here they find themselves under threat. Israel’s current plan is to round up all of the Bedouin tribes from all of their gatherings in the occupied West Bank, allot each family a mere 0.1 acres of land and cram the majority of them into what would effectively be a giant Bedouin reservation, in an area called al-Nuweima on the outskirts of Jericho.

The Bedouins harbor no illusions about what this forced relocation would mean. As one Bedouin leader told us, “We will not be able to raise sheep or practice our traditional lifestyle and will be forced into becoming day laborers. For us, this is out of the question.” The Israeli plan to place all West Bank Bedouins in a giant reservation on the borders of Jericho is part and parcel of the forced evictions in East Jerusalem. The majority of these Bedouin gatherings are located in the stretch of land between Jerusalem and Jericho, precisely the area that the Israelis would like to turn into the greater suburbs of a united Jewish Jerusalem, free of Palestinians.

In 2014, Israel first announced this proposal to relocate and resettle 12,500 Bedouins living in Area C, and it was that same year that we started work on The Native and the Refugee, researching and listening to the experiences of Palestinian refugees and American Indians. We traveled from Beirut’s Burj Barajneh to New York’s Akwesasne, Amman’s Wihdat to Arizona’s Navajo Nation, Bethlehem’s Dheisheh to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge, documenting their movements for self-determination.

The al-Nuweima plan recalls an important chapter in the history of the American Indian reservation. In the Dawes Act of 1887, the U.S. government forced a system of private property onto what was previously communal land tenure, dividing native territory into parcels to be owned by each family and putting the remainder out onto the open market. Allotting land to each individual family not only resulted in the loss of overall native territory but also worked to eradicate their tribal system of governance and social structure, imposing an external form of life based on a static familial privatization of the land.

Then as now, it was done for the benefit of the settlers, either to occupy and privatize formerly held native land, to extract its natural resources or to build infrastructure for the profit of the urban dwellers. By uprooting a traditional economy and trading in communal autonomy for a division of spoils, it reduced a proud and self-sufficient people to dependence on the setter-colonial economy, which caused their displacement in the first place.

The Bedouins of the Jordan Valley are well aware that the al-Nuweima plan would yield similar results, undoubtedly collapsing their tribal structure, forcing them into an impoverished urban environment and leaving them with no other option than to work as individual day laborers for the Israeli settlers. Because of the purposeful eradication of the Palestinian economy in recent decades, the end of the Bedouin’s subsistence economy would mean their forcible integration into Israel’s colonial one.

This spatial colonization is at the heart of Israeli ethnic cleansing efforts against the Bedouin people. In Area C, the very infrastructure of the Israeli settlements is often deadly for the Bedouins. We saw a highway, exclusively serving settlers, erected near the gathering of Khan al-Ahmar, forcing the children of this community to walk across it on the way to school, heedlessly causing numerous deaths and countless injuries. This occurs alongside other forms of stark infrastructural inequality, where the newest illegal Israeli settlements are furnished with electricity and running water while Bedouin gatherings, there for decades, are systematically denied both. Meanwhile, if the sheep of the Bedouins stray onto territory designated for Israeli military or settler use, the animals are confiscated and impounded, either to be returned in exchange for a heavy fine or not at all.

We observed what the Bedouins themselves call “psychological warfare,” waged by settlers and the military in an effort to break their collective spirit and force them off the land. This includes forced demolitions of Bedouin gatherings, the spraying of sewage water onto their structures and land, and the specific targeting of women as a form of gendered violence used to humiliate the members of the gathering. Such was the case, for example, with the daughter of the chief of Khan al-Ahmar, who told of us of being brutally beaten by the Israeli military.

All of the above tactics find resonance in the history of the U.S., where the same methods of forced displacement of an indigenous population were used by both the government and settlers. We heard stories shockingly similar to those of the Bedouins when we visited Diné (Navajo) families currently living on the Black Mesa in the Southwest of the U.S. Much like the Bedouin, the Diné find themselves in a position of estrangement from both the U.S. government and from the Hopi reservation’s tribal government, which now controls much of their traditional territory. Black Mesa has historically been inhabited by both Hopi and Diné people.

But in order to conclude an agreement concerning mineral extraction, the U.S. government passed the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974, dividing 1.8 million acres of formerly shared land, leading to the forced relocation of more than 10,000 Diné people. Those families that “illegally” remain maintain their traditional economy and continue to live autonomously from the machinery of U.S. financial governance and because of this they face constant threats, harassment and violence from both the Hopi police and U.S. federal officers.

The Bedouins of the occupied territories find themselves in a singularly difficult position as they are denied recognition as a displaced Indigenous or minority group, both by Israel as well as by the Palestinian National Authority. This is to say that they are not recognized politically as Bedouins, as a distinct group within Palestinian society, making it difficult for them to demand the rights that should be afforded to them as both refugees as well as an indigenous people.

Much like native peoples in the U.S. have had to successfully balance their specific tribal identities within a larger pan-native identity so, too, the Bedouins must negotiate between their identity as individual tribes, their larger identity as Bedouins and finally their national identity as Palestinians. As with indigenous movements around the world, the foundation of this identity remains the Bedouin’s day-by-day articulation of their own worldview as a people, rooted in their particular symbiotic relationship to the land, their own systems of tribal governance and their own inherently communal way of life. Its lessons and examples then become not only a form of political resistance but also an ethical model in helping humanity confront the depths of the problems we face — from the downsides and dangers of nationalism on the one hand to unrestrained industrial development on the other.

Indeed, as with American Indians’ continued resilience and survival, the Bedouin communities’ very existence poses a particular and direct challenge to the occupation. It is not just that they inhabit the land that Israel wants in order to expand its settlements, but it is also because their way of life, society, means of subsistence, and relationship to the land and each other are in conflict with the developmentalist, corporatist model that Israel would like to export to the region, and forcibly sublimate the Bedouins into. However, as the chief of a Bedouin gathering near Jericho told us, “We will not leave, we will not leave no matter the cost.”

All stills are from the The Native and the Refugee / Vanessa Teran and Mitra Azar

Malek RasamnyMalek Rasamny is a researcher and filmmaker

Vanessa TeranVanessa Teran is a multimedia artist

Matt PetersonMatt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine

Taliban find dozens of ballistic missiles in Panjshir Valley

By Dylan Malyasov
Sep 15, 2021



Taliban members found dozens of short-range ballistic missiles and warheads stored in Panjshir Valley.

Taliban militants had taken the last holdout – Panjshir Valley in the east of Afghanistan – and released a video showing the depot of Soviet-made 9K72 Elbrus (NATO reporting name Scud B) tactical ballistic missiles and 9K52 Luna-M (NATO reporting name FROG-7) short-range artillery rockets.

A dozen missiles and artillery rockets along with warheads in separate containers were found in Panjshir Valley after the regime overcame the resistance of the remaining government forces.

Based on this video, the missile weapon have been stored in the open air for a long time and are in a deplorable state.

According to open sources, several hundred missile systems were gifted to the Afghan government in the 1980s from the friendly Soviet communist regime as military aid.

9K72 Elbrus is a tactical ballistic missile with a range of 300 km with a circular error probable (CEP) between 450-900 meters. It was designed to engage important enemy targets such as airfields, command posts, large concentrations of troops and vehicles, air defense batteries, supply depots and so on.

9K52 Luna-M is a Soviet short-range artillery rocket system that fires unguided and spin-stabilized 9M21 rockets. It was originally developed in the 1960s to provide divisional artillery support using tactical nuclear weapons but gradually modified for conventional use.

About this Author
Dylan Malyasov
U.S. defense journalist and commentator. Aviation photographer. Dylan leads Defence Blog's coverage of global military news, focusing on engineering and technology across the U.S. defense industry.

NEWSARMYVIDEO

The Drone Unit that Helped the Taliban Win the War

The work of a drone unit, reported in detail here for the first time, shows how the Taliban were able to win the war against the U.S.-backed forces in Afghanistan

Fazelminallah QazizaiFazelminallah Qazizai is an Afghan journalist and co-author with Chris Sands of “Night Letters: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Afghan Islamists who Changed the World”

September 15, 2021

Two civilian contractors prepare a US Army 14′ Shadow surveillance drone before it’s launched at Forward Operating Base Shank May 8, 2013 in Logar Province, Afghanistan / Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

As the U.S. began its final drawdown of troops from Afghanistan in the spring, the Taliban’s drone unit moved into position for its most important mission yet. A team of 12 engineers-turned-assassins, it was tasked with firing what would turn out to be one of the decisive shots in the closing stages of the war.

The target was a regional-level official in the north of the country named Piram Qul. Like so many of Afghanistan’s now deposed ruling elite, Piram Qul was a beguiling mixture of the charismatic and corrupt, a veteran of the mujahedeen’s struggle against the Soviets in the 1980s who had come to regard his youthful principles as an impediment to power. He was an ethnic Uzbek warlord who was part of many anti-Taliban Afghan factions, including Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Jamiati-i-Islami. In the years since the U.S.-led invasion, he had served as a member of Parliament and presided over local militias accused of a range of human rights abuses, including kidnapping and murder. What mattered to the Taliban, though, was the stranglehold he had on Takhar, a province on Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan — an area traditionally hard for them to influence. Piram Qul was one of the last dominoes that needed to fall if the insurgents were to sweep across the north and trigger a decisive advance on Kabul. Their plan to assassinate him was motivated by necessity, not vengeance.

On the morning of May 2, Piram Qul was meeting villagers in the district of Rustaq in Takhar, accompanied by his usual retinue of bodyguards. Far above, a Taliban drone filmed him using a camera connected to the internet via a satellite signal. The hit squad’s leader was stationed at an undisclosed location nearby, where he controlled the drone and monitored the camera’s video feed using a laptop computer. He knew the drone was unlikely to be spotted. Its body and wings were painted custom blue to blend into the sky, so were the mortar rounds attached to its homemade weapons rack. The drone had cost the Taliban tens of thousands of dollars to buy, and it was quieter than cheaper and easily available commercial models. Nevertheless, the lead assassin needed to hold his nerve and remember everything he had practiced. This was not the first attack his team had carried out, nor would it be the last. But for tactical and psychological reasons it was essential he got it right. Kill Piram Qul, and the Taliban would be a step closer to sweeping through the north in a matter of weeks. Miss, and Piram Qul might encourage local security forces to regroup, stalling the Taliban’s advance and leaving the drone team embarrassed and exposed.

Around 11 a.m., the unit leader uttered a prayer and keyed the launch code into his computer. Seconds later the mission was over. Piram Qul was dead before he even realized he was under attack. The war could now be won.

Soon afterward, before any of Afghanistan’s cities had fallen to the Taliban, a member of the drone unit spoke to me on condition of anonymity about the assassination. The first of two members who agreed to be interviewed for this article also hinted at the extraordinary events that were about to unfold across the country. “We are one of the main forces that has demoralized the enemy and is causing them to flee,” he said.

While images of the Taliban alongside vast stockpiles of abandoned U.S. and Afghan military equipment have featured heavily in Western media coverage of recent weeks, they do not tell the story of America’s defeat. Classic insurgent tactics and unconventional weapons won this war. The work of the drone unit, reported in detail here for the first time, shows how the Taliban were able to neutralize the technological and military superiority of the U.S. In the past few days, the drone unit has again been busy, carrying out reconnaissance in the province of Panjshir that allowed Taliban ground forces to rout remnants of the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance hiding there.

The two drone unit members interviewed for this article spoke to me in several meetings that took place in secret in Kabul. All the interviews were held before and during the nationwide offensive that led to the Taliban entering the capital on Aug. 15 and declaring victory. Both members asked for their identities to be concealed due to the nature of the work. At one meeting, the two members were among a number of insurgents who attended a dinner in the neighborhood of Khoshal Khan, where they were joined by their squad leader, or emir, for a traditional Afghan meal of rosh — a dish of boiled and dried lamb, mixed with herbs and spices, and served with potatoes. The leader opted not to be interviewed, and his colleagues declined to reveal his name.

That drones should end up becoming one of the insurgents’ most potent weapons is a fitting twist to a war that confounded U.S. expectations from the start.

That drones should end up becoming one of the insurgents’ most potent weapons is a fitting twist to a war that confounded U.S. expectations from the start. Though drones have been used for surveillance purposes far longer, armed drones did not become operational until the late 1990s. In the last two decades the technology has become synonymous with the so-called global war on terror. The CIA used drones prior to 9/11 to track the movements of Osama bin Laden under the old Taliban regime. Then, during the 2001 invasion and its aftermath, it carried out its first drone strikes inside Afghanistan. Later, it began to use drones across the border in Pakistan, targeting insurgent hideouts in areas otherwise beyond the reach of U.S. forces. At least 51 CIA drone strikes occurred in Pakistan under the Bush administration, according to the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. This number increased significantly once Barack Obama entered the White House. From early 2009 to early 2017, the bureau estimates that more than 370 drone strikes occurred in the border areas of Pakistan. The strikes decapitated the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban and killed many militants, though they also killed hundreds of civilians.

Many states watching these developments saw the potential of drones and started developing their own. But soon enough, drone technology had also started finding its way into the hands of insurgents and militias across the Middle East. In 2006 Hezbollah used armed drones against Israel, albeit with limited efficacy. Other nonstate groups tried their luck as unrest spread across the region in the wake of the Arab Spring, with Yemeni Houthi fighters using drones to attack oil refineries in Saudi Arabia in 2019. But it was the use of drones by the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria that captured the Taliban’s imagination. Footage of the attacks was featured in the Islamic State’s slick propaganda and found its way to Afghanistan, where it was eventually seen by the future emir of the Taliban’s drone unit.

The architect of Piram Qul’s assassination was at something of a personal and professional crossroads when he began to study the Islamic State films in detail around two years ago. He had made his reputation within the Taliban as an instructor at a training camp for suicide bombers, only to find that the nature of the war was now changing. U.S. military operations were winding down, and the Taliban leadership knew that continuing to launch suicide attacks against Afghan forces risked angering the population. A more precise method of killing was needed, particularly in the north of the country where the insurgents had less support. To the man who would become the unit’s emir, drones seemed like the perfect answer. After talking through the idea with senior intelligence operatives, he started to assemble his team.

The emir is tall, with an athletic build, long hair and flecks of gray in his beard. While he spent some of his youth studying in madrassas, he reportedly excelled as a student in Kabul University’s faculty of engineering during the U.S. occupation. He carries an Italian 9mm pistol and a knife with a handle made from goat horn — a piece of artisanship distinctive to the Afghan province of Parwan. But he is also rarely seen without his laptop and two smartphones — a Huawei and a Samsung Galaxy S20. The squad leader’s team of 11 men is made in his image. Like him, several of them are from Wardak, southwest of Kabul. They are well educated, and a number of them worked for Western NGOs before joining the drone team.

“We don’t work for money, we work for our theology and ideology,” said the second unit member.

Its job was to harass and assassinate Afghan government officials in the north.

When the drone team was established sometime around 2019, its remit was clear. While other sections of the Taliban were free to use basic civilian drones for surveillance, and the Haqqani network was allowed to carry out the occasional uncoordinated drone attack in the south and east of the country using equipment it acquired independently, the hit squad was the only drone unit with official operational approval from the Taliban’s leadership. Its job was to harass and assassinate Afghan government officials in the north. In doing so, it was to report solely to senior members of the Taliban’s intelligence apparatus. No one else in the insurgency was to be given detailed information about the unit’s operations, including shadow governors and high-level military commanders. The unit would be headquartered in the northern province of Kunduz.

Although other sections within the Taliban were able to rely on Pakistan or Iran to assist with weapons supplies when necessary, the drone unit members made no mention in my interviews of receiving help from either state. Instead, they claim to have turned to a private Afghan front company that imported agricultural chemicals and farming equipment from China. The unit asked the company to find a drone that was quiet and light but strong enough to withstand adverse weather conditions and fly at relatively high altitudes. When the company identified the right drone, it cost the Taliban approximately $60,000. They purchased it in China and smuggled the parts into Afghanistan via Pakistan.

Next, the unit’s engineers set to work modifying the drone. The chemical tanks and hoses for carrying and spraying fertilizer and pesticides were removed and replaced with a makeshift plastic missile rack capable of holding four mortar rounds that could be fired via a computer-activated spring mechanism. The Talibs changed the fuses on their usual mortars for more powerful versions containing RDX, a type of explosive popularized by U.S., British and German forces during World War II. While the drone came colored black, unit members repainted it blue to camouflage it against the sky. They also painted the RDX mortars blue. The drone was set up to be controlled in flight using a combination of laptop computers and smartphones that were connected to the internet via a portable satellite terminal.

After several trial-run attacks on checkpoints of the Afghan security forces, the Taliban’s first major operation with the new drone came in the northern city of Kunduz on Nov. 1, 2020. At least four bodyguards of the provincial governor were killed in the strike, which occurred while the guards were playing volleyball in the governor’s compound. The second drone unit member interviewed for this article said another potential operation in Kunduz, this time against U.S. troops, was called off after U.S. service members spotted the drone and relayed a complaint to the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, noting that it would violate the terms of the nationwide withdrawal agreement the Trump administration struck with the Taliban in February 2020. Taliban leaders ordered a halt to the operation — a rare example of them interfering in the drone team’s work. That same month, the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security told Parliament in Kabul that he wanted to stop the import of commercially available camera drones. It was too late.

Unit members continued to scout for potential targets even as images of crude insurgent drones used by other Taliban fighters began to spread across social media. The pictures belied the professionalism of their work. They traveled across the country in a silver Toyota Corolla Fielder station wagon driven by a trusted colleague hired from outside the team or used motorbikes to move quickly and easily through villages and backroads. The unit also bought and weaponized a second drone. Meanwhile, two more official Taliban drone units modeled on their efforts were established for the south and east of the country.

As the Taliban edged closer to victory, the northern team stepped up its operations. When Piram Qul’s name was added to the unit’s hit list, it was only a matter of time before he was killed. His assassination on May 2 this year went exactly as planned. Local media reported that the drone strike had been triggered by a call to Piram Qul’s mobile phone, ensuring its aim was precise. Not everyone in the drone unit was happy with the result, however. In the days that followed, the team learned that Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, had been due to visit Takhar in early May, only for his trip to be canceled over security concerns in the wake of Piram Qul’s death. Some members rued the fact they had missed a chance to assassinate the president.

“The drone’s targeting system is very exact,” said the second unit member. “If your hat has four stars on it and the operator targets a specific one of those stars, he can hit it.”

The unit did not dwell on its missed opportunity. With Piram Qul dead, members turned their attention to an even more powerful political figure in northern Afghanistan, Atta Muhammad Noor, better known as Ustad Atta. Another ethnic Tajik veteran of the mujahedeen’s fight against the Soviets, Ustad Atta had spent much of the U.S. occupation as governor of Balkh province and the de facto ruler of the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. To his supporters, he was an ardent opponent of the Taliban whose sharp suits and opulent lifestyle were evidence of his progressive politics. But the man Afghans call Ustad Atta was notorious locally for inflaming ethnic tensions and cracking down on anyone who challenged his authority. He had used his power to amass an enormous personal fortune, cultivating lucrative patronage networks linked to Afghanistan’s cross-border trade with central Asia. Although he was no longer governor, his continuing influence meant the Taliban could not hope to control the north if he remained a key figure on the political scene.

On July 1, Ustad Atta was hosting a meeting with other warlords and politicians at his house in Mazar-e-Sharif when a Taliban drone fired one of its mortars into the yard outside. Ustad Atta escaped unhurt, but a number of people were injured and several vehicles damaged. In an interview soon afterward, the drone squad members predicted that Ustad Atta would no longer try to resist the advance of the Taliban’s ground forces, with one of them mocking him as an aspiring Bollywood movie star who was only interested in fame and fortune. Atta was clearly spooked. Six weeks later, on Aug. 14, the Taliban took control of Mazar-e-Sharif. On Aug. 15, Kabul fell. Ustad Atta and Ghani were nowhere to be seen.

The British journalist and author Chris Sands contributed to this story from London.

 

Decriminalisation will lead to suicide prevention. It's high time Pakistan repealed Section 325, a British Raj remnant

The first step towards destigmatising suicide is to make it a human rights issue, not a criminal offence.

Rabeea SaleemPublished 04 Sep, 2021 04:22pm

As World Suicide Prevention Day approaches on September 10, it is high time for Pakistan to repeal Section 325 of the Pakistan Penal Code, a legacy of the British Raj.

According to WHO estimates, there are around 130,000 to 270,000 cases of attempted suicide in Pakistan each year. Suicide is a criminal offence under the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) 325 which states “Whoever attempts to commit suicide and does any act towards the commission of such offence, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, (or with fine, or with both)”. Ironically, Pakistan continues to follow this law which is a legacy of the British Raj, even though Britain itself decriminalised suicide way back in 1961.

Factors behind suicide

Between 2016 to 2020, 767 suicides were recorded in Sindh, as per a five-year research conducted by the Sindh Mental Health Authority (SMHA). The highest number of cases occurred in Tharparkar (79). An alarming 60 per cent of the victims were teenagers. In June 2021, the SMHA carried out what it called a “psychiatric autopsy” of the Thar region to determine the “reasons behind suicides”, according to a statement by the authority’s chairman, Dr Karim Khawaja. The findings suggest that the majority of cases involved lower income groups and people suffering from untreated mental illness and poverty.

On May 9, 2021, three people killed themselves in Chitral within a period of 24 hours. Two girls, who were cousins, ended their lives by jumping in the Chitral River. Meanwhile, in a separate incident, a man took his life by stabbing himself with a knife repeatedly in the Sno Ghar village. The notoriously high rates of suicide in Chitral have been linked to poverty, lack of job opportunities and forced marriages. These findings also raise the ethical dilemma that if someone attempts suicide due to socioeconomic reasons, should the state be held responsible?

While suicide is generally attributed to mental health issues, in lower income countries like Pakistan, suicide rates also reflect broader economic and sociocultural realities. Public health interventions to reduce suicide should incorporate these components in addition to mental illness as a potential target for intervention.

Victims, not criminals

In May 2021, the Punjab Police tweeted a warning that anyone who survived suicide would be liable to one year imprisonment. This tone-deaf post was met with massive backlash on social media over the insensitivity in dealing with what essentially is a public health issue.

Suicide remains illegal in at least 25 countries worldwide and attempted suicide is punishable under religious law in a further 10. The World Health Organisation's Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan (2021-2030) has decriminalising suicide as an important target, seeking to end criminalisation, reduce stigma and ensure that there are sufficient services available for those that need them.

Criminalisation of suicide also deters sufferers from seeking adequate help.

“Suicide is an indicator of mental distress, not criminal behaviour. In many cases, the act signifies the extremity of depression. The role of the state should be to help treat such people, not punish them,” said former Senator Dr Karim Ahmed Khawaja.

In 2017, Senator Khawaja moved an amendment bill seeking to replace the colonial penal law by decriminalising attempted suicide. But despite its unanimous adoption by the Senate and the Council of Islamic Ideology, the bill was not passed by the National Assembly, and eventually lapsed at the end of the last government’s tenure.

In recent years, suicide legislation has been successfully repealed or superseded by new legislation in the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and India. In most cases, this has taken a combination of of civil society pressure, government and legislative changes, and in some cases support from the countries' religious leadership.

I spoke to Dr Murad Moosa Khan, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Aga Khan University, and former President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP).

“An important reason to destigmatise suicide is that people are already hesitant to seek help when it comes to mental health; criminalising suicide adds another layer of stigma, that they have done something wrong,” Moosa said.

According to the existing law, every suicide case should be received by the city’s government hospitals that are officially designated as 'medico-legal centers' (MLCs). “In Karachi, there are at least three designated MLCs — the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), Civil Hospital Karachi (CHK) and Abbasi Shaheed Hospital (ASH)," he explained. However, people are reluctant to go there for fear of legal repercussions.

He reported that since it is very rare for people to be prosecuted under this law, the practical risk is minimal, but the greater risk is of exploitation by medico-legal authorities and officers who may blackmail victims and their families in order to extort money from them.

Currently, people who attempt suicide end up either in a public sector, private sector or a charitable health facility. “If the attempt is a serious one, for instance use of a firearm or ingestion of a toxic poison, those cases are sent to an MLC hospital, as other hospitals do not want to get involved in police investigations in case of death of the individual.”

Cases that are less severe are not reported and treated at non-MLC hospitals. They are usually written off as food poisoning, another medical condition or accidental poisoning.

Dr Moosa further stated that almost all private and charitable hospitals are carrying out this practice in Pakistan. “Due to these practices, we do not know the true extent of attempted suicides in the country.”

What steps can be taken to repeal the law?

“To advocate for decriminalisation, many sectors have to come together, including mental health and public health professionals, human rights organisations, legal professionals, educational institutions and the civil society. International organisations such as the WHO, United for Global Mental Health (UGMH) and IASP have been actively involved in raising awareness about the need for suicide decriminalisation," Dr Murad shared.

Dr Uroosa Talib, Consultant Psychiatrist and Chief Medical Officer at Karwan-i-Hayat, one of Pakistan's largest psychiatric rehabilitation centres, said that a lot of people do not report suicide cases and since most of such cases need medical attention first so they are taken to tertiary-care setups.

“People hide facts about suicide to avoid legal implications. Additionally, patients and families go through the traumatising experience of dealing with our police. So they opt to stay quiet or conceal facts. Ironically, this way they deprive the person who attempted suicide of proper care. They are not given a chance at be seen by a psychiatrist to rule out any underlying mental health condition,” says Dr Talib.

Decriminalise suicide to destigmatise seeking mental health services

Decriminalising suicide is the first step towards eradicating the stigma associated with seeking mental health services. The second would be to develop the mental health services sector to cater to the needs of the population. This would entail psychoeducational training of personnel — police, medico-legal officers, emergency room doctors and staff, lawyers and religious leaders.

Detractors of this campaign are of the opinion that decriminalising suicide will result in a spike in suicide rates. Empirical evidence suggests otherwise. The WHO 2014 report reveals that suicide rates tend to decline following decriminalisation.

In fact, decriminalisation can actually lead to suicide prevention. This is because once the act is no longer considered criminal behaviour, there are less obstacles in reporting cases of attempted suicides. As a result, the data moves towards accuracy and correction and can thus facilitate in helping those who may be at risk.

When decriminalised, suicide will be considered a public health issue rather than a criminal act. The reduced stigma will also encourage psychologically vulnerable people to seek help and vulnerable at-risk individuals will be better able to obtain the care they need.

To help those who are campaigning for the decriminalisation of suicide in their countries, the UGMH, working with the Thomson Reuters Foundation and IASP, is working on a report that looks at suicide laws in various countries to produce accurate information on what legislative changes are needed. The report also looks at trends across countries, examples of where laws have successfully changed, and the role the international community can play in helping encourage reform. Local organisations such as the Pakistan Mental Health Coalition, Karwan-i-Hayat, House of Pebbles and PILL are also engaged in organising events to advocate for suicide prevention.

It is important to remember that decriminalisation does not imply legalising suicide. The aim is not to encourage suicide but to discourage prosecution of those who have attempted it. They may or may not have a psychiatric illness but they are certainly undergoing severe distress. The threat of prosecution only exacerbates their suffering. Decriminalisation will be a major stepping stone in the prevention of suicide and providing access to mental health services to those who are in need.