All posts by Salah Nasrawi

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Dangers of an Iraqi-Iranian border deal

A new border treaty with Iran has come as a test for Iraq’s leaders, writes Salah Nasrawi
Iraq and Iran have been holding talks behind closed doors on a new border agreement that the two countries hope will end a decades-long dispute amid fears that Tehran holds the upper hand because of Baghdad’s weakness and Iran’s strong influence in the war-battered country.
The talks are also being held at a time when events in the Middle East have benefited Iran and helped the largely Shia nation to bolster its regional position at the expense of its mostly Arab Sunni neighbours.
Officials have said secret bilateral negotiations have been going on for months in order to reach a deal on the demarcation of the 1,400km long joint border, including key oil fields and the strategic waterway of the Shatt Al-Arab.
The first news of the contacts came last month when Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Javad Zarif announced during a visit to Baghdad that “a significant deal” would be signed on the border with Iraq “within the coming two weeks”.
“The ground for the expansion of cooperation is well prepared despite existing threats and challenges,” Zarif was quoted as saying by the official Iranian Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).
Zarif said Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari would travel to Tehran to sign the deal. IRNA, however, reported during Zarif’s visit to Baghdad on 14 January that the two ministers “discussed implementing an agreement that has already been signed between Iran and Iraq on broadening cooperation on border issues.”
Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, meanwhile, announced last week that technical teams from both sides were “making progress” in the negotiations on the demarcation of the land and river borders.
In a statement, the ministry confirmed that Zebari would visit Tehran soon for further talks.
With the talks shrouded in secrecy, the full picture of the anticipated deal remains unclear, spurring growing concerns about the Iraqi negotiators’ ability to push an agenda that is in line with Iraq’s national interests on a range of issues.
Because of its Shia allies in the government, many Iraqis fear that Iran may be pushing for a resolution to the long-standing border dispute to make territorial gains and settle scores in the historic rivalry between the two nations which have fought wars and competed for regional supremacy. 
In November, Zebari acknowledged that he had tried to derail previous Iranian attempts to open discussions on the Algiers Treaty, the last boundary agreement concluded in 1975 that was later abrogated by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
In a lengthy interview with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper, Zebari said he had warned Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and his predecessor Ibrahim Al-Jaafari against making any commitment to Iran regarding the Algiers Agreement.
“This agreement was signed on the body of the Kurdish people and the body of the Iraqi [anti-Saddam] opposition at that time, and it divided the Shatt Al-Arab,” said Zebari, a former guerrilla in the anti-Baghdad Kurdish insurgency.
Zebari did not elaborate, but he was apparently referring to one of the major purposes of the Algiers Agreement, which was to stop Iran from supplying the Kurds with arms in their struggle against Saddam’s regime, eventually leading to the collapse of the Kurdish insurgency.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the idea of re-negotiating the border issue with Iran should now fuel fears among many Iraqis who feel their country is ill-prepared to deal with such a major diplomatic challenge while it is enmeshed in an ever-deepening ethno-sectarian struggle.  
The border conflict between Iraq and Iran is deeply rooted in history and regional geopolitics, and its last bloody manifestation was during the 1980-1988 War which left some one million people dead, wounded or disabled. Collateral damage to the economy of the two countries was also immense.
The dispute goes back to the 17th century, when in 1639 the former Ottoman Empire, in control of Iraq at the time, signed the first of a series of treaties with Persia to ease territorial disputes.
A protocol was signed in 1913 that established the land boundary, detailing the border between Iran and Iraq and defining the thalweg principle, or the deepest point in the river, as the border line in the Shatt Al-Arab.
In 1937, the two countries signed a treaty under which Iran clearly recognised modern Iraq’s claim of sovereignty to almost the entire Shatt Al-Arab with the exception of areas around certain key Iranian port cities.
The then shah of Iran, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, abrogated this treaty in 1969, triggering a standoff followed by a severe deterioration in bilateral relations.
Iraq has always maintained that the Shatt Al-Arab, which represents its only true outlet to the Arabian Gulf, is a vital artery for its communications. Iran, on the other hand, has argued that the thalweg principle should be applied to the entire length of the Shatt Al-Arab.
In 1975, the then shah and Saddam signed the Algiers Agreement under which Iraq finally conceded to Iran’s long-standing demand that the thalweg principle be used to delimit the border in the Shatt Al-Arab.
However, following the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and the opening of a new chapter of antagonism between the two countries, Saddam declared the 1975 Treaty abrogated.
He claimed that the Islamic regime’s frequent violations of the accord had necessitated the abrogation, setting off a bloody war lasting eight years.
The border zone is also known for its extensive oil fields, and many of these are in disputed areas. Since the ouster of Saddam in the US-led invasion in 2003, Iranian soldiers have temporarily occupied the oil wells several times. In December 2009, Iranian troops seized an oil field in a desert area south of Baghdad and raised the Iranian flag.
They withdrew a few days later.
Reports in the Iraqi media have repeatedly claimed that Iran is stealing large amounts of oil from Iraqi fields and making profits of billions of dollars a year.
Some of the oil is believed to be drilled from horizontal wells on the disputed border.
Iraq’s territorial borders with its neighbours have long been the source of bitter disagreements. Last year, Iraq and Kuwait completed the demarcation of their border under a UN Security Council resolution more than 20 years after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Since the modern state of Iraq came into being in 1923, successive Iraqi governments have not accepted the British-drawn borders that established Kuwait as a separate sheikhdom after the First World War.
Many Iraqis have remained opposed to the demarcation agreement, saying that the new border has robbed them of property, territory and oil fields. Many of the country’s MPs have also blamed the government for signing the deal from a point of weakness and called for the re-negotiation of the border deal.
The construction of a new giant Kuwaiti port on Boubyan Island on the Khor Abdullah Waterway, which is the only strategic access to the sea for Iraq, has also raised concerns about Iraqi access to the sea.
For now, as officials in both Iraq and Iran remain tight-lipped about the details of their negotiations, there are a lot of questions about the timing of the process and its intentions as Iraq sinks deeper into political and sectarian conflicts that threaten its very existence as a state.
The lack of transparency and the absence of parliamentary discussion and public debate about the negotiations only increases suspicions and will not create the climate needed to find a national consensus on any possible deal.
Fundamentally, the long-standing territorial dispute with Iran is a major diplomatic challenge for Iraq that the country’s Shia-led government may not be well suited to handle.
Since the US-led invasion in 2003, Iran’s influence has steadily grown in Iraq, and many Iraqis now fear that their country has become a de facto client state of Iran.
Moreover, the country is mired in sectarian violence and an acute political crisis. The Iraqi government is dysfunctional and it cannot task itself with negotiating such a huge undertaking and commitment.
On the other hand, efforts to settle the dispute are unlikely to be effective unless they are based on the broad perspective of the entire Middle East and Gulf region. Iran is in a much stronger position due largely to its recent nuclear deal with the West, and it could now work out an agreement that would give it more leverage in the region.
All this should remind the Iraqi leadership of the country’s national interests and of the complexities associated with the border problems when its negotiators sit down with their Iranian counterparts to strike a deal.
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Iraq’s poetry of defiance

Iraqis are resorting to poetry and songs to vent their frustrations with those in power, writesSalah Nasrawi

One video shows folk poets mocking vote-buying candidates. In another a poet is cheered by a huge crowd as he scorns corrupt politicians, and in a third a popular singer laments Iraq’s decay in the post-US invasion era.
Eleven years after the US-led invasion that ousted former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s regime and promised a democratic and free nation, Iraqis are still struggling with a decade of a failed state.
Iraqi folk poets and singers are increasingly taking the lead in voicing their resistance to their incompetent leaders amid mounting popular frustrations over failures to restore security, rampant corruption and poor basic services.
The rising voices of protests in poetry and sung-verse also come ahead of parliamentary elections in April, which many Iraqis perceive as being crucial in deciding their country’s future as the Sunni insurrection and Kurdish pro-independence sentiments intensify. 
The protests reflect a growing anger among Iraqis over their leaders who are seen as useless politicians exploiting ethno-sectarian divisions in their favour to grab more power.  
On Saturday, the country’s election commission disqualified dozens of candidates in the April elections for having criminal records including, theft, drug trafficking, bribery and prostitution.
What is phenomenal about this emerging vocal expression of defiance to the Shia-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki is that the performers are mostly Shia and their criticism revolves around their politicians’ betrayal of Shia ideals.
Of the many reasons behind the frustration and anger is a new retirement law which was passed last week and allowed MPs to secure lavish benefits for themselves.
Many Iraqis believe the law is unconstitutional because it discriminates against the majority of Iraqis by exempting the privileged political elite from the government’s pension scale.
Only 166 MPs in the 325-member parliament endorsed the controversial legislation.
Videos circulating on Iraqi online media and social networks show clips of laughing audiences reacting to poets who mock sleazy lawmakers and politicians.
Their harshly-worded criticisms reflect growing anger over the nation’s presently wide wealth gap, created mostly by greed of the country’s political establishment. 
In one of the videos recorded in the southern city of Nassiriya two poets are seen engaged in a public poetry debate about the coming elections, which many Iraqis fear will bring the same corrupt politicians back to parliament.
The scene: a pavement in mid-town where the poet mimics a candidate who appeals to pedestrians:
For God’s sake, vote for me.
If you vote, you will receive a blanket,
A heater,
I will make you live like sultans,
I will send you up, up, up…
Vote for me!
The other poet in the debate, who emerges from the unconvinced audience, strikes back:
We don’t trust you any more,
Our votes will never be yours.
We abhor you.
If you ever come back we will burn you in acid,
You, cheater, liar,
You’ve eaten the flesh and left us the bones.
That’s not the worst of it, however. In a second video distributed widely over the social networks the “betrayal” of the Shias’ most revered imam Ali is how poet Hazim Jabir describes the excess of the country’s Shia politicians, and the designation is more than a rhetorical flourish: 
Are you not ashamed?
In the name of faith,
You’ve abandoned the faith.
You, rulers who pray,
You murder people and go to perform prayers in their blood,
To whom do you belong?
Your seats are more important than your people,
Haven’t you had enough? 
Tomorrow, doomsday, when you meet Ali,
What are you going to tell him?
He starved to feed the hungry,
And now we starve, and you are never satisfied.
Many of the poems have been turned into songs and performances that cut through the hegemony of patriarchal political discourse and are inserted into the fabric of daily life.
In one favourite song, singer Hassan Al-Rassam lambasts the politicians who are removed from the very people they have promised to serve: 
You are just worthless thieves,
Idiot who trusts a thief,
You’ve got the best of everything,
Leaving us with nothing.
If anyone raises a question,
A bullet hits him in the forehead.
Why has the world turned upside down?
By displaying the power of such verses and music to resist the country’s political class which is enriching itself at the expense of the rest of the people, Iraqi poets and singers are adding a powerful voice to a discontented public in a way that written expression cannot do.  
Throughout the present period of deep distress and national calamity, Iraqis have had the opportunity to express their limited freedom of expression through the independent media and online social networks.
But increasing pressure on the independent media and threats to writers has lent the opportunity to poets and singers to resort to older traditions of connecting with people and embracing social and political issues.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Iraq on Monday a bomb struck a newspaper office in Baghdad after its editor had received threats from Shia groups for publishing a cartoon of Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which was seen as offensive.
Last week, Iraq’s judiciary issued a warrant for the arrest of a columnist critical of the government who had allegedly libeled Al-Maliki.
The warrant against Sarmad Al-Taie, who writes a column for the Al-Mada newspaper, was issued under an article of the criminal code that prohibits defaming or insulting government employees.
Another warrant was issued for Munir Haddad, a retired judge who sentenced Saddam to death in 2006 and is now a private lawyer. The warrants are the first against writers or intellectuals since the US-led invasion in 2003.
Last week the Iraqi Ministry of Culture banned a play two days after its debut at the National Theatre in Baghdad. The play “Women Parliament” is critical of MPs who waste their time and public money in doing business, travelling and bickering.  
Critics have also accused the government of using public money to silence criticism and buy the local media.
Local news outlets reported last week that the government-controlled election commission had started funding a television network known to be critical of the government, twisting its reporting to a pro-government stance.
The allegations surfaced after the channel stopped its critical reporting and began putting a favourable spin on its coverage of government news.
The government has also ordered the reopening of the offices of the channel in Baghdad, closed last year after it was accused of spreading misinformation and exaggeration.
However, the government can hardly do anything to muzzle the often spontaneous and fleeting oral forms of expression dealing with Iraq’s dilemmas.
Fearing a backlash and a boycott of the April polling, Shia clerics have warned their congregations against re-electing the same politicians who have “betrayed” them.
On Friday, prayer imams in the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala denounced the lucrative retirement benefits for politicians and urged Iraqis not to vote for those MPs who had endorsed the law.
In a country that is terribly polarised and dangerously unstable, a large-scale boycott could erode the legitimacy of the already fragile political process and result in far more deadlock and even bloodshed.
Meanwhile, true to their traditions which, some say, go back to ancient Sumeria, Iraqi folk poets and vocal artists are expected to remain within the mainstream of political critique and mobilisation.
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Iraq’s unwinnable war

Fighting in Anbar province is putting ever-greater strain on Iraq’s political and sectarian tensions, writes Salah 


As Iraqi security forces backed by their Sunni tribesmen allies battled anti-government rebels in Ramadi and Fallujah in Anbar province this week, violence continued to soar in Baghdad and many other cities across Iraq.
The surge in violence has raised concerns about the continuing deterioration in the security situation in the country less than three months before a crucial parliamentary election. 
Violence has escalated since early January, when Sunni extremist insurgents seized large parts of the two cities after government forces had dismantled a Sunni Muslim protest camp in Ramadi.
While the security forces retook control of some parts of Ramadi with the help of allied local tribesmen, Fallujah has remained largely under rebel control.
This week government forces intensified shelling of the rebel hideouts in Fallujah in what appeared to be the preparation for a ground offensive to regain control of the city.
But an all-out assault to reassert control over Fallujah has been put on hold, probably out of fear of large-scale civilian casualties and to convince the Sunni tribes to oust the militants themselves.
However, fierce fighting has left dozens of the insurgents dead, according to the government, while locals have reported heavy casualties among residents because of the army’s shelling and air-strikes.
More than 140,000 people have been made homeless since the new conflict erupted, according to Iraq’s ministry of displacement and migration.
Meanwhile, terrorist acts and other violence continued in many other parts of Iraq. Car bombings hit crowds, marketplaces, restaurants and government buildings mostly in Shia-majority towns and neighbourhoods.
In a daring attack on Thursday, assailants stormed government offices in Baghdad, killing at least 20 people and briefly taking a number of civil servants hostage.
The attack was mounted by eight armed men. The security forces reportedly killed four of the attackers in clashes that left many parts of the huge government building that hosts the transport ministry and human rights ministry devastated.
Fearing more attacks on other government offices, police blocked roads around Baghdad and areas leading into the capital’s fortified Green Zone, which is home to the government headquarters, foreign embassies and other key institutions.
Baghdad’s heavily guarded international airport was struck by three Katyusha rockets on Friday. The missiles hit the runway, a parked plane and the airport’s border area.
There were no reports of casualties, but the attack raised concerns about the security of the airport, Baghdad’s gateway to the world and a facility that handles dozens of flights every day and hosts several international airlines.
The raid indicates that the insurgents can now penetrate the fortified security zone around the facility and the multiple checkpoints on its highways and strike at Iraq’s main transportation network.
On Monday, Katyusha rockets also rattled Baghdad’s Green Zone. Columns of smoke were later seen bellowing over an army garrison inside the enclave. 
At the same time, many parts of Iraq have been engulfed in sectarian and political violence, a sign that the situation has been exacerbated by the recent fighting in Anbar province.
In other Sunni-populated provinces, such as Diyalah, Nineveh and Salah al-Din, anti-government rebels have stepped up their attacks against the military, police forces and pro-government tribes.
They are now clashing with the army and police posts nearly every day in some of Baghdad’s outskirts, including Abu Ghraib and Tarmiyah. 
Retaliatory attacks, including on Sunni mosques, and killings by Shia extremists in some mixed districts and neighbourhoods have also been growing in recent weeks. Such attacks have raised concerns that Shia militias who had earlier been showing restraint might now have abandoned it.
Some 1,013 Iraqis were killed, including 795 civilians, in the violence in January, according to government figures, while 2,024 were wounded, making it one of the bloodiest months in the country in two years.
Experts of all stripes agree that the ongoing standoff between the Iraqi forces and the militants in Anbar may take a long time to resolve. Many of them believe that even if the army can retake Fallujah, the Sunni anti-government resistance will not end until the roots of the Sunni rebellion are removed.
Iraq’s latest crisis started in December 2012, when tens of thousands of Sunnis began protesting against what they saw as the marginalisation of their sect.
The protesters initially wanted the Shia-led government of prime minister Nuri Al-Maliki to put an end to the perceived targeting of the Sunnis by the security forces, but these later turned into demands for the equal sharing of power and wealth.
By late December, Al-Maliki was claiming that a protest camp in Ramadi had been turned into the headquarters of the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Iraqi army and police forces later moved to dismantle the protest camp after efforts to find a political solution to the crisis had broken down.
Clashes then broke out in Anbar, with Sunni anger at the government’s crushing of the year-long protest movement inflaming Iraq’s already deeply rooted sectarian tensions.
Since the fighting broke out in Anbar, fears of an all-out sectarian war have increased.
As the violence spirals, there seems to be no military solution to Iraq’s situation and the prospect of peace and stability seems bleak.
Al-Maliki has been labeling the Sunni anti-government rebels as Al-Qaeda terrorists in an attempt to discredit the insurgency and justify his government’s crackdown.
While extremists may be taking the lead in the fight in Fallujah, Sunni hard-line tribesmen and other armed groups, especially officers from the decommissioned army of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, have been actively involved in the rebellion.
Al-Qaeda has disavowed the ISIS. In a purported statement published on one of the jihadist Websites on Saturday, the General Command of the terrorist group insisted that it had no link with the ISIS, a move which will give credit to claims that rebels in Fallujah are not Al-Qaeda members.    
Al-Maliki’s strategy seems to be to rely on building allies with rival Sunni tribes and provide them with arms and funds to fight the insurrection. This is a carbon copy of the disastrous “surge” that was forged by the US army during the nine-year US occupation of the country that ended in total failure.
What Al-Maliki should understand is that he is now facing an entrenched resurrection by the country’s wider Sunni minority, who complain of being neglected and excluded by his government while he has been refusing to make any compromise.
The consensus opinion is that if the fighting in Anbar drags on it will cast a grim shadow on the next parliamentary elections that are slated for 30 April. Virtually every commentator believes that even if these elections are held peacefully, they will reproduce Iraq’s sectarian troubles, tensions and frustrations.
As a whole, the battle in Anbar and the larger Sunni resistance it is causing is drawing a deeper dividing line in Iraq’s politics, as well as in its geographical and social dimensions.    
Kicking out the fighters from Fallujah could be a breakthrough in the fight against the insurgency and finding allies among the Sunnis to join the war against the rebels may divide the Sunni camp, but in the end what Iraq needs is a sustainable solution to its problems.
Iraq is crumbling not just because violence is playing havoc in the country, but also because there has been no breakthrough in the sectarian deadlock that has paralysed its government for so long.
Unless there is a working system that guarantees inclusion within a just state that will deal with all Iraqis as equal citizens, there will be no peace or stability in the country.
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Will Iraq remain united in 2020?

Thanks to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s plans for new provincial divisions the country’s continuing unity is under threat, writes Salah Nasrawi
There was no referendum, no opinion polls, and no cross-party or public debate, as there usually is when genuine democracies inform people about their choices so that they can make decisions and accept responsibilities.
The announcement by Iraq’s Shia-led government last week of plans to create several new provinces, some of them from contested parts of the country, has taken most Iraqis by surprise and renewed fears of Iraq’s “soft partitioning”.
It also comes amid reports that preparations are underway with international backing to declare Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan Region independent within the next five years.
Iraq’s latest conflict began on 21 January when the government announced plans to turn Tuz Khurmatu and Talafar, two towns which fall inside Iraq’s so-called “disputed territories” which are claimed by almost all Iraq’s mosaic of different ethnicities, into new provinces.
Two days later the government said it also planned to turn three more districts into governorates, including Fallujah, a district in Anbar, Iraq’s largest province and a stronghold of Sunni resistance against the Shia-dominated government.
Shia Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki described the decision, taken by a majority of his ministers, as being “irreversible” because he said it was “constitutional and lawful.” Iraq is currently divided into 18 muhafazat, or governorates. Three of these constitute the northern Kurdistan Region and the rest are under the central government’s control.
In explaining why it wanted to establish the new governorates, the government said the districts were large enough in area and population to be upgraded to the status of provinces. It said the new arrangements would help to boost economic development in the provinces and provide better services and social care to their populations.
Yet, the government’s plans for a new provincial map of Iraq have opened up many challenges on both the local and national levels. Many Iraqis question their policy objectives, legitimacy and timing.
Under the plans, which need to be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, Tuz Khurmatu, a district dominated by Shia Muslims of Turkmen ethnicity and annexed to the Sunni Arab-dominated Salah Al-Din province, is to be a separate province.
Another town whose inhabitants are also mostly Shia Muslims of Turkmen ethnicity, Talafar, now controlled by Nineveh, a Sunni Arab-dominated province, is also to be declared a separate governorate.
Since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003 that toppled the Sunni-controlled regime of former president Saddam Hussein both Tuz Khurmatu and Talafar have been subjected to frequent bombings by the Al-Qaeda terrorist group, and the plan reawakens hopes that they will now assume their own security and governance.
It came as no surprise that the Turkmens, who are Iraq’s third-largest ethnicity, hailed their upgrading as an opportunity for greater political influence alongside the country’s Kurds and Arabs.
Leaders of the Turkmen community, which has been complaining of marginalisation in recent years, urged the national parliament to quickly endorse the government plans.
Iraq’s Christian minority, which has also been complaining of exclusion and discrimination, hailed the decision to turn the largely Christian populated Nineveh areas into a province as a blessing.
Some Iraqi Christians have called for a separate Christian “federal entity” in these areas of northern Iraq in the hope that they could thereby gain greater autonomy, security and political status.
But the Kurds, who had hoped that the three would-be provinces would become part of their autonomous region, have voiced strong reservations to the move, which has been vetoed by Kurdish cabinet ministers.
Though the Kurdistan Regional Government has refrained from commenting on the plans thus far, Kurdish MPs slammed them as unconstitutional and politically motivated.  
Meanwhile, Sunni Arabs in Nineveh railed against the plans, which will take both Talafar and the Plain of Nineveh from the largely Sunni Arab populated province.
Governor Atheel Al-Nujaifi of Nineveh said he would ask the provincial council to declare Nineveh a federal region if the parliament moved ahead and approved the plans.
Sunnis in Anbar also rejected the idea of carving Fallujah out of the already Sunni majority province.
Meanwhile, rival Shia groups have also been lukewarm about the plans, partly because they see them as designed to serve the election campaign of Al-Maliki who is seeking a third term in office in the 30 April polls.
Leader of the Shia Sadrist parliamentary bloc Bahaa Al-Aaraji said the decision would “open the door to the splitting of Iraq.”
A closer look at the plans, however, indicates that the Al-Maliki government’s decision may not be haphazard, as some outside observers had previously suggested. Its intention is to redraw the borders of Iraq’s provinces in case the partitioning of the country becomes inevitable.
Its main goal is apparently to create pockets inhabited by ethnicities other than Kurds that would encircle the Kurdish enclave in the north of the country and bloc its expansion into the disputed territories. 
With calls for Sunni Arab autonomy within a federal Iraqi state gaining strength, the plans also aim at limiting their assertion of territorial control. 
In recent weeks, Sunni leaders have been increasingly vocal about demanding their autonomy.
Last week, Sunni Speaker of the Parliament Osama Al-Nujaifi traveled to Washington to discuss Sunni grievances with US President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden. 
Prominent Sunni MP Saleem Al-Juburi said Al-Nujaifi had discussed with Obama and Biden the possibility of declaring the Sunni-populated provinces as federal regions within Iraq.
“This is the [only] solution if other solutions fail,” he told Iraqi Al-Summeria television.
In 2006, Biden, who was a leading US senator at the time, proposed the so-called “soft partition” plan to divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions held together by a central government.
But the plan was seen by many Iraqis as paving the way for breaking up the Iraqi state into three separate entities for Kurds, Shias and Sunnis.  
A Kurdish news outlet close to the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party reported this week that the autonomous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq would declare its independence within five years.
Rudaw quoted energy advisor to the Kurdistan Regional Government Ali Balu as saying that Kurdistan “is going to be rid of its status as a region within Iraq.”
“A plan is underway for Kurdistan to be an independent state in the near future,” he said. According to Balu, Kurdistan’s independence would be driven by the region’s geostrategic position and its rich energy reserves.
He said that Kurdistan president Masoud Barzani’s participation in the World Economic Forum at Davos last week had been to pave the way for international recognition of Kurdistan as an independent state.
Barzani has repeatedly warned that the Kurds will seek independence if the region’s disputes with Baghdad over oil, the region’s budget and its territory remain unresolved.
More broadly, the widely expected moment of Iraq’s split may now be finally approaching. It has long been assumed that the failure of Al-Maliki’s coalition government would push Iraq into “soft partitioning” as the only means of avoiding a fully-fledged civil war and the growing threat of a regional flare-up.
Given the increased violence and political uncertainty in Iraq today, the new plans, which would initiate substantive changes in Iraq’s ethno-political map in addition to Kurdistan’s alleged preparations for early independence, raise the question of whether Iraq will remain united in 2020.
In a country where fundamental issues remain unresolved, including the future shape of its provincial boundaries and power-sharing, things are likely to continue teetering on the brink.
With communal divisions sharpening and violence going unabated, the Iraqis’ faith in a unitary state is fading and many of them may now be surrendering to what they see as inevitable.
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Washington should keep away from Iraq

The United States does not have a solution to the Iraqi crisis and it should stay out of the country, writes Salah Nasrawi
The recent flare-up in Iraq’s western Anbar province has drawn US media attention to Iraq and sparked a controversy on whether the United States should re-engage in the war-battered country two years after its last troops left.

Some American politicians and media pundits are even suggesting that the Obama administration should actively intervene, probably by considering sending troops back to Iraq to help the Shia-dominated government in combating Al-Qaeda-linked fighters.

Although there are plenty of reasons to make the United States pay for its follies and crimes in Iraq, most obviously during its protracted occupation of the country, Washington is poorly qualified to help stabilise Iraq and engage in state-building in the devastated country.

While the present escalation is increasingly turning deadly and threatens to shatter the ethno-sectarian divided country, it is out of the question that most Iraqis would want to see US troops back in their beleaguered nation.

However, Iraq does not seem to be a pressing issue for the Obama administration, and the partisan rhetoric about Iraq seems to be mostly a blame-trading game between the Democrats and the Republicans over the administration’s approach towards the country before the mid-term elections.

It will be interesting to see how US President Barack Obama, who is facing charges by his opponents of being reluctant to take hard foreign-policy decisions that disturb his base, will tackle post-Anbar Iraq.

If Obama contemplates interfering in Iraq, he should deal with four contradictory positions. While most Americans, and in particular in his Democratic base, remain opposed to intervention, his Republican critics want him to be more actively involved in Iraq.

Meanwhile, in Iraq itself Shia Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki is seeking US political support, weapons and training of the security forces, while the country’s Sunni community wants Obama to halt support to Al-Maliki and increase pressure on him to abandon his sectarian policies.

Thus far, the Obama administration has been reluctant, or too confused, to put on display any concrete policy towards Iraq apart from the usual meaningless statements.

As the present crisis began unfolding, the administration voiced support for Al-Maliki’s government and accelerated deliveries of military equipment to Iraq to help it fight militants in the Anbar province.

It was also looking to provide additional shipments of Hellfire missiles, as well as ten ScanEagle drones and 48 Raven drones.

Secretary of State John Kerry made it clear that help to Iraq did not include US “boots on the ground,” explicitly noting that “this is their [the Iraqis’] fight.”

Some Democrats in the US Congress are proposing to repeal the authorisation, known as an AUMF, which was used by former president George W. Bush to wage the war to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The bill would cut off any US attempt to intervene in Iraq militarily.

On the other hand, critics of the White House have blamed the security deterioration on Obama for failing to agree on a deal with Al-Maliki’s government to leave a residual US force behind after withdrawing all American troops from the country at the end of 2011.

They argue that when the last US combat troops departed from Iraq in December 2011, they left behind a defeated Al-Qaeda and an Iraq where Sunni and Shia Muslims were sharing power in what they described as a democracy.

One of Obama’s vehement critics, Senator John McCain, has even proposed that the president should send David Petraeus, a retired four-star general who ran the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, back to Iraq in order to help deal with the growing unrest in the country.

McCain also suggested that Washington provide weapons such as Apache helicopters and logistical support to help quell the spiraling violence in Iraq.

But McCain said he opposed sending combat troops back to Iraq.

For his part, Al-Maliki has asked the United States for new arms to beat back the resurgence of Al-Qaeda-linked militants in Anbar and training of Iraq’s counter-terrorism forces by US forces.

He categorically brushed aside the idea of inviting American forces back into Iraq.

As for the Iraqi Sunnis, the crisis in Anbar has strengthened their focus on what they perceive as the Shia-dominated government’s marginalisation of their community, which they also blame on US policies in Iraq.

During a trip to Washington last week, Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh Al-Mutlaq warned the US government that supplying the Iraqi government with weapons was not the solution to defeat Al-Qaeda.

“Obama said he would withdraw from Iraq, but in a responsible way, and I don’t believe his withdrawal was responsible. He left so many problems that he should have solved before he left,” he told the US news outlet the Daily Beast.

Chief among those problems, Al-Mutlaq said, was the failure of the Al-Maliki government to share power with Sunni politicians. He repeatedly told audiences and journalists that the United States, which he accused of “destroying” Iraq, should do more to rebuild it.

These are conflicting positions, and there are questions about how Obama will attempt to reconcile them in order to take a viable policy approach to Iraq without choosing one side over another.

Certainly, Iraq is on a threshold, and its collapse as a state would constitute a national security challenge to the United States.

But no one wants US troops back in Iraq. The idea of sending back Petraeus or reviving the so-called “surge” strategy seems misplaced.

The surge remains America’s most misleading myth in Iraq, and its catastrophic results proved that it was nothing but another strategic blunder in the disastrous war the United States waged on the country in 2003.

Atrocities by US soldiers during the nearly 10-year occupation fueled the anti-American resistance in the country and represented a moral, political and military setback for the United States, as well a catastrophic human disaster.

The publication of gruesome photographs that appeared to show US Marines burning the dead bodies of Iraqis last week revived memories of the shocking war crimes perpetrated by American army personnel.  

Some of the photos published on the website TMZ.com showed Marines pouring liquid from a petrol can on two decaying bodies. Two other photos showed the bodies on fire, and two more showed the charred remains.

The Obama administration’s thinking on Iraq will not clarify until some of the other major uncertainties in the Middle East are resolved. These include the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Iran’s nuclear deal, and the crisis in Syria, all of which remain key preoccupations for Washington in the Middle East.

A breakthrough in all these three conflicts is not clear, and conceivably events including continued violence in Iraq may become a catalyst for renewed regional tensions that are increasingly taking on a sectarian dimension.

For most Iraqis, debating whether Obama should wield a longer or a smaller stick to deal with the conflict in their violence-torn country is irrelevant.

Given the fact that the Obama administration does not have a clear-cut strategy on Iraq, it is difficult to imagine that it could help to save the Iraqis from their tragic misfortunes.  

On the contrary, any US intervention will rekindle memories of the invasion and the destruction and humiliation it inflicted and will most certainly make matters worse and add more fuel to the fire in Iraq.