Radicals 'unexpectedly won in Iraq'

Abu Dhabi: The US and Al Qaida failed to achieve their goals in Iraq, while their common enemy - Shia radicals - emerged triumphant, an academician told a Ramadan majlis on Wednesday night.

"The US military forces did not manage to transform the military success of the invasion of Iraq into a political victory, while Al Qaida did not succeed in transforming Iraq under occupation into Afghanis-tan of the 1980s," Gilles Kepel, professor and chair, Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at the Institute d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, told the audience at the majlis of General Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces.

Speaking on the eve of the seventh anniversary of 9/11, Kepel said the group that managed to control the situation in Iraq ultimately was neither Al Qaida nor the US.

"But it happened to be their common enemy - the Shia radicals.

"That was to be a great surprise because no one had expected that the tussle between Al Qaida and US forces would lead to the strengthening of the Iranian position in the region," Kepel said in the lecture tilted Global Al Qaida and terrorism: Who is the Winner and Who is the Loser.

Kepel described what has unfolded in the last seven years as "the display of two ground narratives - one that was carried on by Al Qaida and tried to engineer some sort of jihad as they called it through martyrdom operations to further what they saw as their political objective or mobilising the masses of the Muslim world.

"This wrong perspective was displayed thanks to a number of very visible operations - bombings, martyrdom and hostage taking and the intensive use of images for propaganda, TV clips, stories on the Internet and so forth."

The American perspective, Kepel said, emanated from the US President, the neo-conservatives in his administration, and was strictly opposite that of Al Qaida, but was also mimicking it in some ways.

Idea

"It was organised around the idea of war on terror where you had one principle first and opposed to it was multifarious evil.

"And this evil was centralised in the figures of Al Qaida, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri and others. But it was also perceived as a means to transform and to reshuffle the Middle East in depth," Kepel said.