Mideast: Terror and Humanitarian Aid
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The United Nations has not established an agreed-upon definition of terrorism. The United States of America defines terrorism as “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals.” This definition is functional domestically, but it becomes difficult to define “criminality” internationally. These definitions are difficult to create and agree upon. However, how terrorists are defined and by whom is extremely important.
The designations made by the world’s most powerful militaries and economies have the strongest impact. These nations, such as the US, Russia, Germany, China, etc., have the power to destroy economies and deploy massive armies unilaterally. If the United States designates a group as a terrorist organization, US policy will bankrupt it and isolate it from the US-allied nations of the world. Russia and China have similar reach but opposing views and different networks of geopolitical relationships.
The UN has statutes prohibiting member states from supporting terrorist organizations in any way, including financially. The US and other powerful nations have similar policies against their own nationals supporting terror organizations. These laws are important for preventing the growth of fringe groups that enact violence against civilians all over the world. However, the laws’ effectiveness is partly reliant on how the groups are designated as terrorist or not, a process that is entirely arbitrary and frequently politically motivated.
In the Middle East, this is a particularly pertinent predicament because there are many civilian populations whose governance structure is a US-designated terror organization. For example, Hamas, a designated terrorist group, governs the civilian population of Gaza. The Taliban governs the civilian population of Afghanistan. The Iranian government is considered a terror state. HTS, which just conquered Assad’s Syria out from under him, is considered a terror organization by the US. These designations create political and bureaucratic barriers for the countries’ civilian populations to engage with the rest of the world.
In Afghanistan, the years following the Taliban’s takeover in the early 2020s pushed the country deeper into a humanitarian disaster. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) revealed the trend of the big donor countries severing aid due to poor relationships with the Taliban and as a punishment for the Taliban’s restrictions against the rights of women. The UK, the US, and Germany all decreased their funding by over fifty percent in the years following the takeover.
US Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan
Unfortunately, when a group like the Taliban succeeds in taking over a whole country, continuing to treat them as a terrorist group collectively punishes the entire civilian population they rule over. However, groups like the Taliban are responsible for their radicalism’s consequences. A spokesperson for the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief and Development (ACBAR) said to VOA News, “I think it's fair to say that there are consequences for the [Taliban] government's decisions and actions.”
Before the deadly October 7 attack and subsequent regional war, the US had removed the Houthis from its list of designated terror organizations. The US had conceded that the Houthis controlled a significant portion of Yemen, and to avoid worsening an already massive humanitarian crisis, the Houthis had to assume the traditional role of a government in the eyes of the foreign community. Of course, once war broke out and Yemen sided with Hamas against Israel, they landed back on the list of designated terror organizations so that the US could legally carry out military action against them.
Farea al-Muslimi, a fellow on Middle Eastern policy at Chatham House, notes that frequently US terror designations are created with domestic politics in mind despite the much more drastic impacts internationally. He analyzes Trump’s designation of the Houthis as terrorists in 2021, Biden’s undoing, and subsequent reenactment of the designation as all being convenient timing with regard to their domestic campaigns. The designations were not maximized as negotiating pieces or as effective international strategies. Furthermore, the initial designation was revoked specifically because of the negative humanitarian consequences of such a designation.
During the Gaza war, Israel has consistently asked its allies in America and Europe to withhold funding from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the predominant aid agency for Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere. Israel claimed that UNRWA had been infiltrated by Hamas militants and that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 attack. After an investigation by the UN, they found a handful of UNRWA employees who had taken part in the invasion and violence in Israel. The US withheld tens of thousands of dollars, out of millions they did give, from UNRWA, as did Germany and the UK. Most countries made the decision to keep funding UNRWA soon after because they provide almost one hundred percent of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza, and to undermine them would cause societal collapse for people under siege.
HTS in Syria has been trying to shake its terrorist designation since it was announced in 2018. HTS enforced the independence of the Idlib province of Syria for many years. The Syrian Salvation Government had many members of HTS’ leadership in their top ranks although the relationship between SSG and HTS is debated. The US only just announced that they would not pursue the $10 million bounty they placed on Muhammad al-Jolani. This comes as HTS beat back the Assad government and is attempting to create a new government to unite Syria.
The bounty’s removal may be the first of many steps in a US-led process to normalize relations with Syria’s new government rather than ostracizing them simply because HTS is an Islamist group. The way these groups are listed and unlisted based on urgent domestic political needs or geopolitical alliances rather than evenhanded justice and law raises questions about the practice’s legitimacy.
Anyone looking for clean answers and black-and-white rules should look elsewhere than international relations. Foreign policy is a web of relationships in which people, for the most part, are trying to do the best for themselves and their people, as well as for the civilians of the world. This process involves sacrifice, tricky decisions, and paradoxical choices. It seems hypocritical to accuse someone of terrorism one day, a death sentence in the US, and to repeal the designation the next. Perhaps, in some cases, peace, health, and safety are more important than justice.
