 Islamic groups in Kuwait have gone on the defensive as liberals step up calls for a clampdown on extremists in the wake of deadly gun battles between security forces and Islamists.
| If they weren't so closely identified with the extremists they wouldn't have anything to worry about, would they? |
Mainstream Sunni groups moved swiftly to distance themselves from the violence that has rocked the normally peaceful emirate after the first gunfights broke out on Jan. 10, killing two police officers.
Leading Islamic figures, groups, organizations and charities have since issued statements condemning the militants and declaring their total backing to the government's iron-fist policy to stamp terror. They also held public rallies and lectures focused on the need for national unity in order to confront extremism which they said was alien to Kuwait and its people. "We meet today to prove on the ground that we all stand united against all terrorists and those who believe in violence," Islamist MP Nasser Al-Sane told a public rally late Tuesday.
| "Our kinda violence is entirely different from those guys!" |
"The group that carried out those incidents has no roots in Kuwait. They are alien to the Kuwaiti people," Khaled Sultan Al-Issa, head of the Islamic Salaf Alliance, said during the rally.
| "It's only coincidence that most of 'em wuz Kuwaitis and some of 'em wuz holy men!" |
Security forces over the past month fought four bloody gun battles in three weeks with gunmen linked to Al-Qaeda network, killing eight of them and capturing 14 others.
| It's the 14 who were captured that the Islamists have to worry about. Some of them may talk... |
Islamic groups, which form the largest single bloc in the 50-seat parliament with 13 MPs, have been directly accused by liberals of breeding extremism and creating an environment conducive to the spread of terrorism. Liberal groups, reduced to a small minority in parliament after the 2003 elections, have also accused government of turning a blind eye and failing to curb extremism. In a statement yesterday, the three main liberal groups — the Democratic Forum, National Democratic Movement and National Democratic Alliance — said government leniency was to blame for the rise of extremism in Kuwait. Former Oil Minister Ali Al-Baghli, a liberal, wrote in Al-Qabas yesterday that "it is not enough to cut the tail of the snake because it will grow another."
| Could he be referring to the holy men? Or perhaps even to certain princes resident in a neighboring country? |
"What is needed is to cut off the snake's head, namely the masters of terror and all those who propagate for terror in mosques and the media," he said. Islamists however charge that liberals are trying to capitalize on the bloodshed. "(Liberal) writers are instigating and pouring fuel on the fire rather than cooling things down," Islamist MP Daifallah Buramia said.
| Cooling things down is what you've done up until now, isn't it? |
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