While all the world’s leaders are wondering about rebuilding Iraq and Syria after the fall of Daesh, there remain many other questions which are far more complex, even though they are not usually raised in public.

At the end of all ideological wars, like the religious wars of the 16th century in Europe or the Second World War in the 20th century, the question is raised about the future of the defeated soldiers. Many of them have committed atrocious crimes, and it does not seem possible to re-integrate them into the society of the victors.

Since the successive falls of Mosul, Rakka, Deir ez-Zor and Boukamal, the Caliphate no longer has its own territory. The end of the Islamic State followed the abandon by the United States of the « Sunnistan » project intended to cut the Silk Road in Iraq and Syria (according to the Robin Wright plan [1]. This was censored by the intervention of President Trump in May 2017). Finally, the jihadists were defeated by the Iraqi and Syrian armies.

For three years, the global anti-Daesh Coalition alternated ineffective bombing raids with the delivery of weapons to the jihadists, as the Iraqi Parliament revealed at length. It only played a decisive role during the battle for Mosul, when it attempted to exterminate the surviving jihadists by completely destroying the city.

In 2015, the Caliphate numbered 240,000 combatants:

40,000 jihadists, members of Daesh as such.

80,000 members of the Order of Naqshbandis, ex-soldiers of the Iraqi army fired by Paul Bremer.

120,000 men from the Sunni tribes of Western Iraq, descendants of the Yemenite combatants.

There is no way of evaluating how many of these were killed in combat, or how many new jihadists were brought in during the war. Whatever the various declarations, we do not know how many they are today, and we can only refer to older numbers for an approximate estimation.

If the 200,000 Iraqis who joined Daesh are now integrated in the Iraqi Sunni population, what can be done about the 40,000 hardened criminals who are the foreign jihadists?

Fighting the Caliphate

For comparison, at the end of the Second World War, while the Wermacht (that is to say the German army) was demobilised without any trouble, what could be done with the SS (the troops of the Nazi movement which was recognised as a criminal organisation by the Nuremberg trials)? They numbered close to 900 000, and there was obviously no question of killing them, or even holding them for trial. Many of them went home to be forgotten. The officers were recuperated en masse by the United States to fight the USSR, either by sabotaging the Soviet economy, or by setting up anti-communist régimes all over the « free world » (sic). Some of them refused the peace and continued the war for two more years – these were the « lone wolves », an expression that is being currently re-used.

The recycling of the SS was organised by the CIA’s first director, Allen Dulles, and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. No-one was aware of this until the US Congress discovered the size and the consequences of this operation. The Church and Nedzi-Pike Commissions, as well as the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, unequivocably established the facts as from 1975. President Jimmy Carter decided to end the programme, while Admiral Stansfield Turner purged the CIA.

International public opinion has retained that for almost thirty years, the United States was a crypto-dictatorship under which hundreds of thousands of citizens were forbidden professional activity, and millions of others were spied on. However, it has completely forgotten that countries as different as Saudi Arabia, Bolivia, South Korea, Guatemala, Iran, the Philippines and Taïwan were governed by cruel dictatorships which relied upon the SS recycled by the CIA [2]. Programmes of mental manipulation, experiments with drugs and torture schools are sometimes mentioned separately, although they make up a coherent ensemble prolonging « Nazi science » (sic).

We therefore need to think about a solution for the jihadist problem in order to avoid reproducing this type of error, and imposing upon our children the consequences of the crimes of Daesh.

Certainly, the current situation is different from that of the Second World War. On one hand, it is easier since the jihadists are far less numerous than were the SS. On the other, it is more complex, because Adolf Hitler was beaten, while the commanders of the jihadists were not.

1. We can forget about those who fled alone. They are a problem for the police, little more.

2. Others, in groups, are attempting to appropriate new territories of which they will be the bosses, either close to the ex-Caliphate or in their own countries. But they no longer seem to be participating in a global strategy.

About 200 of them have withdrawn to the province of Idleb, controlled by Al-Qaïda. There they are fighting various insurgent groups.

Some of them moved to Africa. They are present in the Sinaï, where they are fighting against the Egypto-Israëli military alliance [3]; in Libya, where they are holding Tripolitania; and in Nigeria, where they confront the Chado-Nigerian alliance.

3. Most of Daesh’s jihadists have split into two groups. The United States (via the Kurdish anarchists) and Turkey treat them as professional combatants and offer them a future as mercenaries.

a) The first group was recuperated by Brett McGurk and General Joseph Votel to form half of a Frontier Protection Force stationed in Syria. But since this project was censored by General Jim Mattis, the Force has not been constituted. These men are camped in Kasham, at the exit from the US military base [4].

Last week, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), in other words the Syrian Kurdish anarchist party, offered them an amnesty and began to incorporate them into its militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). They were denounced before the Security Council by Russian ambassador Vassily Nebenzia. Since the YPG is officially armed and supervised by the US military, these jihadists are now de facto under the command of the Pentagon, even though they are registered as a Frontier Protection Force.

b) The second group was recycled by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan under the flag of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Presented in 2011 by the Atlantist Press as having been created by deserters from the Syrian Arab Army, the FSA was in fact constituted by Libyan combatants from Al-Qaïda under the supervision of the French military [5]. Dispersed twice, it was again reconstituted, and is fighting alongside the Turkish army in Afrin.

The split within the ranks of the jihadists between pro-US and pro-Turks reflects the disintegration of the Turko-US alliance.

• Brett McGurk was part of the team of John Negroponte and Donald Rumsfeld, who imagined and organised the Islamic Emirate in Iraq (future Daesh) in order to transform the unanimity of the anti-US Resistance into a Sunni-Chiite civil war.

• At the beginning of his political career, when he was one of the leaders of the Millî Görüş, an Iraqi-German-Turkish Islamist organisation created by Ezzat Ibrahim al-Duri (Grand Master of the Iraqi Order of the Naqshbandis) and Necmettin Erbakan (Turkey), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan supervised the supply of arms to the Chechen jihadists fighting Russia. Very much later, when he was Prime Minister, he helped the jihadists in their struggle against the Syrian Arab Republic, and gave his unreserved support to Daesh [6].

In any case, the distribution of the jihadists seems to be a function of opportunity and ethnic origins. For example, Abdullah Sufuni, the ex-Emir of Aleppo, took the side of the US in revenge for the losses incurred during the Turkish invasion of Iraq. The Caucasian jihadists, on the other hand, took sides with Turkey because they have entertained close relations with Ankara for thirty years.

4. Although the Pentagon has abandoned the idea of creating a State to cut the communications route linking the Mediterranean to Iran and China, it has not abandoned Admiral Arthur Cebrowski’s strategy aimed at the destruction of the societies and States of the « non-globalised world » [7]. Some of Daesh’s combatants have thus been recuperated in order to pursue this plan, acting as auxiliary Special Forces.

In this context, the jihadists have been moved by the US armies to the Indian sub-continent, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, to Bangladesh and Myanmar (but not Sri Lanka), as was revealed by Zamir Kabulov, Vladimir Putin’s special envoy to Afghanistan.

The Iranian chief of staff, General Mohammad Baqeri, confirmed that the US Air Force had transferred some of the members of Daesh from Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan. Iranian President Sheikh Hassan Rohani, made telephone contact with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to confirm this information. Then, speaking to the Press, he revealed that he had proposed the aid of Iran to Afghanistan in their fight against the pro-US jihadists of Daesh.

According to Pakistani Senator Rehman Malik, India may be organising a collaboration between the jihadists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the militia of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu party. The goal is to penetrate the Muslim insurgents from Cashmere in order to exterminate them. The RSS, responsible for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, has a long tradition of extreme violence. Rehman Malik is not a simple Senator, he was nominated as head of counter-espionage by Benazir Bhutto, and then became Pakistan’s Minister for the Interior. He has recently launched a procedure for the UNO to bring this affair before the International Criminal Court, and for Narendra Modi to be brought to trial.

The UNO High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, declared last week that the crisis concerning the Rohingyas in Myanmar [8] could lead to a regional conflict. If this were to be the case, the conflict would begin first of all in Bangladesh and Malaysia, where many refugees live.

A few hundred other jihadists returned to Latin America. Mainly from Trinidad and Tobago, they attempted to organise a huge terrorist attack during the carnival of 13 and 14 February, but were arrested five days earlier. The mission of this commando was to revive the Islamist tradition of the Caribean island, on the model of the failed coup d’Etat of July 1990. Then they planned to profit from the disorder created by the Venezuelian extreme-right wing in order to plunge the country into a war comparable to the conflict in Syria.

Fighting the ideology of the Caliphate

If, at the end of the Second World War, the Western powers failed with the reinsertion of the ex-SS, they succeeded in eradicating their ideology almost everywhere - Nazism. This ideology was only kept alive by the SS recycled into the stay-behind networks tasked with sabotaging the Soviet economy, in the Baltic countries and in Ukraine, where it is resurfacing today.

At their creation, the United Nations were above all an international coordination for denazification and the fight against war propaganda. All the member States forbade Nazi symbols and publications. The Nazi party, the NSDAP, was dissolved and war propaganda was censored. Yet no-one, with the exception of the Russian Federation and its allies, seem to be ready to combat the ideology of political Islam nor its party - the Muslim Brotherhood.

As an example, France has at its disposal an institution tasked with representing the Muslims in the country. It has managed to elect two representatives of the Brotherhood and has taken the institution’s presidency from an Algerian administrator and handed it to a member of the Turkish Millî Görüş. Simultaneously, it organised a world Press campaign against Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, currently under investigation in a criminal affair. The idea is to personalise the debate, in order to eliminate this troublesome symbol, but without confronting the Brotherhood’s ideology.

The Society of the Muslim Brothers had already been dissolved at the end of the Second World War, as a result of the political assassinations it had perpetrated in Egypt, and the intelligence it had supplied to Nazi Germany. But nothing was done about their ideology. Worse, the British MI6 took advantage of the incarceration of its principal leaders to reorganise the Brotherhood in its own image. The situation has not changed. After the disastrous episode of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt once again banned the Brotherhood, but President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, intent on pacifying his country, allowed his wife to wear the hijab (the veil has no connection with Islam, and only appeared with the Caliphs of Baghdad).

The Iraqis and the Syrians have just overthrown the Daesh Caliphate, but the battle is long way from being over. Some of the jihadists continue their mission, while their ideology remains unchanged. Once again, it is very difficult for the Western powers to let go of an instrument which is so useful for their strategy.