September 11, the Twin Towers, the return of the Taliban
by Marco Invernizzi
Twenty years ago, on September 11th, an event happened that in these days has been remembered by all media: the Islamist terrorism hit the “Great Satan”, the USA, from within, causing the death of three thousand people and the astonishment of the whole world.
Not all Islamic fundamentalists are terrorists, but there is no doubt that the terrorism of Al-Qaeda and also that of Isis, which gave birth to the Islamic State, proclaimed in Iraq in June 2014, by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, profusely benefited from that “cultural revolution.” as Gilles Keppel calls it, that since 1979 changed the history of all Muslims, both Shiites, with the Khomeinist revolution of the same 1979, and Sunnis, with the Saudi (and American) financing of the sacrosanct anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan (Jihad ascesa e declino. Storia del fondamentalismo islamico, Carocci 2016).
In these days, twenty years after the end of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, a new Taliban government takes office in the same country: the prime minister, Mohammad Hasan Akhund, is on the UN list of terrorists; the interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is the head of the Haqqani Network, a group committed to guerrilla warfare and mass extermination; Haqqani is the link between Pakistan, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and on his head hangs a 10 million dollar bounty from the FBI; the Minister of Defense is Mohammad Yaqoob, son of Mullah Omar, who was the first leader of the jihadist group and founder of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (News list di Mario Sechi, 9 settembre 2021).
All anti-Taliban resistance seems defeated, even that of those fighters we accompanied around Italy between 1979 and 1989 to make people aware of their difference from the fundamentalists, who were already exsistent before calling themselves “Taliban”, i.e. students educated to Islamism in Pakistani schools during their exile from Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion. The militiamen we supported were those who fought in the Northern Alliance, who had among their commanders Ahmad Shah Massud (1953-2001) and did not want to impose shari’a, but who today seem to have disappeared, fled abroad or been arrested, except for the son of so called Lion of Panshir, who still seems to be perched in the gorges of his native valley (Michael Barry, Massud. Il leone del Panshir. Dall’islamismo alla libertà, Ponte alle Grazie, 2003).
It is too early for an adequate evaluation of what has happened in these twenty years, even if we all try to provide some kind of explanation. Certainly, the West has come out very badly. But which West? The one that in Texas shouts to the world that abortion is a crime, or the one that shouts to Texas legislators that it is a right?
Today, in the West, there are two “Wests”, and the first one seems so minority that it causes clamor whenever it manages to make an important mark on history, as in Texas. But it is the only hope: a small West being born within a powerful and aging West, that is dying.
Friday, September 10, 2021
Friday, September 10, 2021
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