After the 9/11 terror attacks which changed the world forever, New Zealand, under Helen Clark’s leadership, refused to join the US-Britain invasion of Iraq. The goal was to topple the long-time dictator Saddam Hussein, who was allegedly developing weapons of mass destruction, but the action was also billed as forming part of the broader so-called “War on Terror”.
The decision to stay out of an ill-planned invasion which would ultimately lead to Iraq’s descent into a bloody and years-long civil and sectarian war likely kept New Zealand’s reputation on the global stage largely intact, even if American and British noses were out of joint.
The bloodshed between various Shia and Sunni groups would also splinter al-Qaeda and later result in the formation by Iraqi jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis or Isil).
Police officers keep watch outside the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch a year after the terrorist attack. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Meanwhile, there was a spike in terrorist attacks around the world, with the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, attacks in Mumbai and Norway in 2011, the Boston Marathon bombings and a Kenyan shopping mall attack in 2013, suicide bombers in Ankara and Beirut in 2015, as well as co-ordinated assaults in Paris, and not to mention the March 15, 2019, attacks on two Christchurch mosques. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in most corners of the world.
Isis took Islamic extremism and violence beyond even what its forerunners managed and soon took advantage of the civil war that broke out in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria during the reputed Arab Spring.
Protests in 2011 that demanded democratic reforms and the release of political prisoners, quickly took on a revolutionary bent and demanded the fall of al-Assad’s regime, sparking a brutally-violent crackdown from his government.
The uprising soon became a civil war, featuring many factions, including Isis, and ended up displacing millions of people and with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands. Al-Assad used chemical weapons as well as traditional bombs against his own people while presiding over a security network feared for its torture and brutality.
In 2015, then-Prime Minister Sir John Key announced New Zealand would send a non-combat military mission to Iraq as part of the US-led coalition fight against Isis.
Over four years Kiwi troops helped upskill the Iraqi Security Forces to try to bring some semblance of peace back to the country.
And while Isis was largely defeated in the region – without ever fully going away – al-Assad, who inherited his rule in 2000 after taking over from his father Hafez al-Assad who had been in power since 1971, had continued to oversee a tyrannical regime.
Now, there is hope among Syrians that their country will return to becoming a moderate and secular country, brushing off more than 50 years of oppression.
New Zealand must reach out to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that led the overthrow, or whatever leadership emerges in the country’s new dawn, and offer help in emerging from post-al-Assad darkness.
Although we played a small role in subduing Isis, and trying to make the world a safer place, it was the right thing to do at the time – just as it was right that Clark boldly went against the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003.
It is also the right thing to try to help Syria – a once great nation – to again become a proud, prosperous and principled player in the Middle East. And for us to play another small part in trying to pave a path to peace in what is still such a rocky region.
