The Islamic State, Shia religious clerics and the mobilisation of Shia militias in Iraq and Syria

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the Islamic State’s (IS) attacks on Shia communities and their holy sites across Iraq and Syria and explores the responses of key Shia religious and political leaders. It demonstrates how these Shia elites utilised sophisticated mobilisation frames to admonish their followers to take up arms against the IS. To do so, these Shia elites drew on Shia religious symbols and historical events that emphasise Shia suffering at the hands of Sunni forces and highlighted the urgent need to protect Shia communities and their holy sites. The article also demonstrates how these mobilisation frames were malleable in the hands of different Shia elites and were instrumentalized to advance both national (defend the country) and transnational goals (defend Shia Islam). The article concludes by noting that this study of the complex motives underpinning Shia mobilisation has implications beyond the case of contemporary Iraq and Syria.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic State
• Shia clerics
• Shia militias
• Iraq
• Syria

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, Ibn Taymiyya considered the practice of attending the shrines of fallen martyrs an act of shirk (Beránek & Ťupek, 2018, pp. 44–45).

2 It is not surprising that these Shia clerics invoked the concept of jihad to justify and legitimize the fight against the IS. This has been a recurring theme in Islamic history and utilised by various Islamist movements to advance different political agendas (Cook, 2005; Bonner, 2006).

3 It is important to acknowledge that many of the Iraq-based Shia militias that formed the PMUs, including Badr, have close ties to the Iranian state. However, as has been demonstrated in the case of Hezbollah, such militias can maintain strong transnational links while also adhering to a platform underpinned by a national agenda. Hence, Iraqi militias vary in both their loyalty to Iran and in the extent to which they wish to defend Iraq and its sovereignty.

4 There are reports that Iran facilitates the deployment of Shia Afghan fighters to Syria (Constable, 2018). In exchange for fighting against radical Sunni forces, the IS in particular, Iran is reported to have granted residency to the Afghan Shia fighters and their families and paid them a monthly stipend.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ali Akbar

Dr. Ali Akbar is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Melbourne where he received his PhD in Islamic Studies. He also works as a part-time research fellow at the University of Deakin. He is an expert in the fields of Islamic studies with a focus on contemporary Islamic thought and Middle Eastern politics as well as Iranian politics. He is the author of Contemporary Perspectives on Revelation and Qur’anic Hermeneutics (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Contemporary Approaches to the Qur’an and Its Interpretation in Iran (co-authored with Abdullah Saeed, Routledge, 2020). He has also published extensively in journals including Iranian Studies, Culture and Religion, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, British Journal of Middle East Studies, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Mediterranean Politics, Third Word Quarterly and Political Theology.

Benjamin Isakhan

Benjamin Isakhan is Professor of International Politics and Founding Director of Polis, a research network for Politics and International Relations in the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University, Australia. He is also an Adjunct Senior Research Associate, Department of Politics and International Relations, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg.