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Winning power, losing Iraq

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With their hard-won empowerment under threat, Iraqi Shia now realize that it takes more than being in office to keep Iraq intact, writes Salah Nasrawi in the third of a three-part series on Iraq’s key communities in post-Saddam Iraq.  
During some of the darker moments of their struggle to topple the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein, exiled Iraqi Shia political groups would urge their followers to keep up the struggle for their causes and consoling them that Allah’s reward is awaiting Shia for their suffering and patience.
“And We wanted to confer favor upon those who were oppressed in the land and make them leaders and make them inheritors,” the exiled Islamic-oriented leaders would keep saying, quoting from holy Quran. To many of their followers the verse had become iconic, prophesying God’s ultimate empowerment of Shia after centuries of what they perceive as exclusion and persecution by Sunni governments.
Shia-Sunni division in Islam dates back to 632 AD when the death of the Prophet Mohammed triggered a power struggle among his companions. Sunnis chose Abu Bakr, one of Mohammeds’ closest friends as his successor and argued that a prominent Muslim leader who would follow the Prophet’s traditions should be chosen by consensus. Shia, on the other hand, believed that Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law Ali Ben Abi Talib was God’s chosen and more qualified for the job.
That political debate and the power struggle it had initiated led to a sectarian split which Muslims have never been able to heal. For much of the last fourteen centuries the Shia-Sunni animosities topped the list of some times bloody conflicts that aroused ugly passions. While Sunnis remained the dominant political group, Shias who felt oppressed by successive caliphs and sultans had challenged the political primacy of the Sunnis resulting in various revolts and a deepening schism.
In modern Iraq, the division reflected a deep political struggle as majority Shia believed that they were robbed of power by the British colonial authority which energized the Sunni minority with the creation of modern Iraqin 1921 following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The power arrangements helped setting the conditions for today’s sectarianism as Shia felt being betrayed and under successive governments they complained of injustice by Sunnis whom they accused of grabbing power and assign them a marginal role. 
The idea of redressing perceived historic injustice and achieving their ambitions became ceneteral in Shia thinking as USefforts to invade Iraqwere put in high gear in 2002 to topple Saddam and the Bush administration sought support from Iraqi exiled political groups to provide a “national” cover for the conquest a year later.
With the collapse of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime, Shia political groups wasted no time in taking advantage of the power vacuum and to further their agenda in taking over the new government, exploiting the sect-based system which the Bush administration had set up. Iraqi Shia felt they had finally been rewarded for their persecution but they have yet to consolidate their newly gained political power with the huge resources now under their control. 
But Iraq turned out as not an easy place for the Shia revival which upset the sectarian balance in Iraq for years to come. Their newly acquired power has become an unwinnable quagmire as a resilient Sunni rebellion continued to steam ahead and culminated in humiliatingly defeating the Shia-government’s one-million man army by seizing huge swaths of land a decade later.
The offensive by militants who have swept across much of northern and western Iraq since last month has been fueled in part by grievances among the country’s Sunni Muslim minority with Shia Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki whom they accuse of mistreatment, discrimination, marginalization and exclusion.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s Sunni neighbors seethed about Shia’s rising influence and have done very thing they could to stall their emerging power. Sunni Arab countries, which prefer Iraq to be ruled by Sunnis, felt threatened by a notion of an emerging alliance of Shia political forces in the Middle East, backed by a resurgent Iran. Subsequently, Iraqwas turned into a battleground for the new sectarian regional hidden war.    
While Iraqi Shia faced massive challenges by domestic and regional enemies, many of their failures were the results of vast and terrible mistakes by their leaders. Shia elites’ main problem is that of failing to lead a successful transition in democracy and nation building following Saddam’s ouster. Instead of laying the ghosts of Iraq’s sectarian legacy to rest they let anew sectarian chapter to unfold.
From the outset Shia elites performance was so abysmal and underscored a huge gap between expectations and achievements. Iraq’s new confessional system required that its main ethnic and sectarian groups – Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims have to share power. Yet the ruling Shia groups restricted the boundaries of possibilities for privileged Shia and thus creating a failing sectarian oligarchy.  
Iraqi Shia governing class remained busy reasserting itself at the expense of crafting an inclusive sustainable democracy that can co-opt other communities. The new constitutional process which enshrined pluralism and federalism to ensure power is shared between communities was turned into a sect-based majority versus minority governing system which contributed to the disastrous ethno-sectarian conflicts and their violent ramifications.
As a result, ethnic Kurds took advantage of Shia political elite’s mismanagement and inefficiency to work to advance their independence agenda while Sunnis felt alienated, frustrated and threatened and sought refuge in a rebellion they hoped would reverse the Shia’s course. The takeover of parts of Iraq by Sunni extremists in June which fuelled the push for Kurdish independence in the country was is a clear manifestation of how Shia have fallen short of recognizing the nature and depth  of Iraq’s problems and subsequently how to solve them.
Shia leaders’ other big problems are their incompetence, mismanagement, corruption, and indulgence in self-interests. Their lust for power, sectarianism and lack of leadership skills are largely responsible for Iraq’s poor governance and the failure of the transitional period. There are enormous evidence that many of Iraq’s problems stem from its political leaders who are exploiting the ethno-sectarian divisions in their favour to grab more power. 
The Iraqi national state has been reduced to fiefdoms run by entrenched political groups. A decade-long failure in good governance and the long standing confessional conflicts have mutilated into an existential crisis. The extent of these autocratic practices has turned democracy into a farce. The result is that Iraq’s legislative and executive branches of government which have been designed to work on consensus have been dysfunctional and gridlocked in ethno-sectarian struggles.
One of the devastating effects emerging from the poor leadership and bad governance during the transition has been the rampant corruption. Thanks to the systematic draining of state resources authoritarianism, patronage and clientelism permeated all levels of government impeding economic development, democracy and the rule of law.
Corruption in the security forces resulted in negative consequences on the political instability. One of the main reasons for the stunning collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosullast month was corruption. Many high ranking officers have bought their posts with money paid to politicians, and corrupt practices such bribery and extortion of protection money are epidemic. All these and other forms of corruption led to incompetence and low moral in the ranks and files of the security forces which crumbled before a bunch of terrorists. 
It is against this background of how Iraq is becoming a failed state and plunging towards an over-all civil war that one should judge the Shia rule. Notwithstanding strategic challenges they have faced since they captured power, the Shia political elite have been primary responsible for much of the country’s misfortune. They did little to reconcile the contradictions between their grand ambitions and the commitments they made to build a united, democratic and pluralistic Iraq.
Sunnis have always derided Shia as being incompetent and good only for beating their chests, a reference to acts of mourning and lamentation for the martyrdom of their saint Imam Hussein at the hands of Umayyad Sunnis in the 7th century.  While that remains derogatory diatribe and a kind of sectarian prejudice, Shia cannot but be accompanied by feelings of lose as they watch Iraqfalling apart. 
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Iraqi Sunnis’ choice

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As their rebellion continues to capture the headlines, the question remains what Iraqi Sunnis are up to.In the second of a three-part series , Salah Nasrawi explores how Iraq’s key communities’ have forged their positions and perspectives in post-Saddam Iraq.   
 
“Most of the Sunni leaders were living in another world. They were in a weird state of denial. The Sunnis continued to behave as though they were Iraq.” Nothing better sums up the dilemma of the Iraqi Sunnis following the United States-led invasion of Iraq and ouster of former president Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime in 2003 than these few words of Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United Nations envoy to Syria, who played a key advisory role in forming Iraq’s first government after the invasion.
For most of the last decade Iraq’s Sunni minority has stubbornly refused to come to terms with the post-Saddam reality that has enabled the country’s Shia majority to come to power and transcend the past in order to build a future for all Iraqis.Most Sunnis boycotted the referendum on the post-Saddam constitution on the grounds that it was a recipe for the end of Iraq as a unitary state as it allowed confessional groups, or provinces, to set themselves up as autonomous regions under a federal system.
The Sunni mood of rejection, fuelled by policies of exclusion and discrimination exercised by the newly empowered Shia-led government, has become a policy choice that was first displayed in dismay and opposition and later became actions of violent resistance to culminate in a persistent rebellion.

 

By maximising their goals and resorting to violence, the Sunnis alienated moderate secularist Shias who could have partnered with them in a political alliance to challenge the Shia religious groups that took advantage of Sunni extremism to hold onto power.

 

Since the seizure of Mosul and several other predominately Sunni cities last month, plunging Iraq into a new cycle of sectarian war, the question that has bewildered analysts has been the nature of the Sunni strategy to further their cause amid Shia mobilisation to stall the Sunni advance and retake the captured towns.

 

It is well understood that the policies of marginalisation of the Sunni community by Shia Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, which have isolated the Sunnis politically, are a main factor behind the revolt. But doubts remain whether resorting to all-out sectarian war spearheaded by the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will allow Iraqi Sunnis to regain their previously dominant role in Iraq’s politics.

 

Instead, it is feared that the Sunni offensive will only deepen the sectarian schism, further entrench the Shias, and send Iraq down the path of fully-fledged civil war.

 

The Sunnis face tough questions about their military and political strategy. Baghdad, a city of six million people the majority of them Shias, is unlikely to fall to the Sunni rebels. After absorbing the shock of the defeat, the government forces have also launched a counter-offensive to take back the cities lost to the insurgents.The deployment of newly bought Russian-made Sukhoi (Su-24) bombers and US manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft will drastically shift the military balance in favour of the government troops.

 

The Iraqi army may not succeed in putting down the Sunni rebellion, but the conflict could trigger a protracted and costly civil war similar to that taking place in neighbouring Syria.The Sunni threats to expand to Baghdad and the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala have already inflamed Shia fears and led to mass mobilisation in Baghdad and Shia cities.Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the Shia religious leader, has urged all Shias “who are capable of carrying arms to join the government” in the fight against the rebels. With sectarian mobilisation on the rise, hostilities are expected to simmer to a boil and spread across Iraq.

 

A key mistake committed by the Sunnis is their alliance with ISIS in their drive to fight the Shia-led government. Although the partnership with the murderous organisation, responsible for killing thousands of civilians, mostly Shias, dates back to the beginning of the Sunni insurgency, the new alliance will put the Sunnis at the mercy of the terrorist group.The declaration of an Islamic caliphate in Iraq by ISIS this week with temporal and spiritual sovereignty will further complicate the sectarian conflict.

 

One problem is that the Sunnis will be held responsible for the gruesome atrocities which the group is perpetrating in territories under its control, including the summary executions and extra-judicial killings of Shia civilians, police and soldiers, which will deepen sectarian animosity and create a backlash against the Sunnis across Iraq.

 

Since ISIS spearheaded, the offensive dark sectarianism has swept many parts of Iraq, and there are already reports of Shia reprisals against Sunnis in Baghdad and elsewhere. In recent days there have been reports of Iraqi police killing Sunni insurgent prisoners in their custody and the sectarian killing of Sunnis in Baghdad.

 

A second problem is that the Iraqi Sunnis have different goals from those of ISIS, which now wants all Sunnis to pledge allegiance to its “caliph” Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Few among Iraq’s Sunnis are expected to make such a vow, and many have fought ISIS before and are unlikely to endorse either the group’s fanatical strategy or its hard-line tactics.

 

While some Sunnis will continue to aspire to take back control of the government in Baghdad, most only want an end to their alienation and mistreatment by having an equal share in the power and resources either of a federal or of a unitary Iraq.

 

Sooner or later, the onslaught on the cities and threats to seize more will prove to be an expensive war of choice boding ill for Iraq’s Sunnis. By taking their anti- government protest movement to a full-scale war, Iraq’s Sunnis are risking not only peace and stability but also the country’s unity.

 

The Iraqi Kurds have already exploited the turmoil and seized land populated by Sunni Arabs, planning to annex it to the autonomous Kurdistan Region. There is a real danger that the insurgents will end up positioning the Sunnis in a resource-poor canton in the so-called Sunni Triangle in western Iraq and resulting in the de facto partitioning of Iraq.

 

Seen from this perspective, Iraq’s worsening sectarian conflict and the involvement of the ISIS jihadists will have far-reaching implications not only for its people and its neighbours but also for the Islamic world at large.It may ignite the long-anticipated war within Islam, pitting Shias against Sunnis, on the one hand, and moderate Muslims against radicals, on the other.

 

The Shia-Sunni split dates back to the 7th century when Prophet Mohamed died and a debate emerged about who should succeed him as leader of the emerging Muslim community.The Shias felt Mohamed’s successor should be his cousin and son-in-law Ali Ben Abi Talib, while the Sunnis chose one of his faithful disciples and argued that a prominent Muslim leader who would follow the Prophet’s traditions should be chosen by consensus.That political debate and struggle for power has led to a sectarian rift which since then Muslims have never been able to heal.

 

In Iraq, the Sunnis held power since the British occupation following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Historians point to the role played by the British authorities in empowering the Sunni elite as a new political class at the expense of the majority Shia population.

 

 By helping the minority Sunnis to dominate the Shias and ethnic Kurds, the British helped set the conditions for today’s sectarianism. While the Sunnis continued to pride themselves on being the guardians of Iraq’s unity, Shia disenchantment with Sunni domination and Kurdish secessionism grew.

 

Many would now argue that the United States aggravated the situation when it invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime, helping empower the majority Shias through the sectarian-based political process it launched. The same US-engineered system allowed the Kurds to have a federal region, which they gradually and relentlessly turned into a semi-independent entity.

 

Shia political forces worked through their monopoly of power and control of the security forces to consolidate power and did little to initiate a process of reconciliation and inclusion. As a result, the Sunnis felt that they were without effective political representation and subsequently the biggest losers in post-Saddam Iraq.

 

Yet, Iraq’s problems are not simply the results of the failure and follies of US policy and the rise of the Shias and the Kurds’ secessionist ambitions. They are also the inevitable consequences of the Sunnis’ maximalist strategy, militancy and lack of a sense of direction and leadership. The Sunnis have always needed a political compass and roadmap that would define peaceful and democratic alternatives and allow them to voice their grievances and push for full partnership in a multi-sect political process.

 

There are many secularist and nationalist Shias who are opposed to the exclusion of the Sunnis from government and reject Al-Maliki’s sectarianism, authoritarianism and heavy-handed style of government. The Sunnis have common ground with these Shias, who want to build a shared future with their Sunni counterparts. Unfortunately, the Sunnis have failed to reach out to these moderate Shias and make statements about their readiness to work jointly to achieve national goals.

 

The Sunnis need to work for justice in a participatory political system that includes all sects and ethnicities, but in order to do so they have to come to terms with the Shias and the Kurds. As Brahimi rightly noticed, they need to acknowledge reality and stop defining themselves as the only true Iraqis, dismissing the Shias as traitors and “Iranian stooges.”

 

The ultimate solution to Iraq’s problems is a political one, and the Sunnis cannot pursue their goals through violence and territorial gains. The Sunnis refused the idea of power-sharing among Iraq’s ethnicities following Saddam’s downfall, claiming that the new political system would herald the break-up of the country.Now by seizing cities, they have drawn the lines of a little “Sunnistan.” Worse still, they have put it under the rule of a terrorist group that has declared it to be a Taliban-style mediaeval caliphate.
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Kurds write Iraq’s last chapter
As the Shia-Sunni standoff escalates in Iraq, the country’s Kurds are celebrating their divorce from Iraq, writes Salah Nasrawi

When former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein sent his troops to invade neighbouring Kuwait on 2 August 1990, many Iraqis feared that their eccentric leader had plunged into a new adventure that would put their country in danger. However, for the country’s autonomy seeking Kurds, the onslaught was a heaven-sent gift as it opened a window of opportunity for their long-awaited independence from Iraq.

The first reaction from Jalal Talabani, an exiled Kurdish leader at the time who returned to Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003, was that the Iraqi dictator was riding the back of the tiger, meaning that he had got himself into trouble that would be difficult to get out of without lasting damage to the country.
Hoshyar Zebari, then an exiled Kurdish spokesman and later Iraq’s post-Saddam foreign minister, recalled in an interview that the invasion of Kuwait was the moment when the Iraqi Kurds felt that the time for their liberation had finally come.
From that time on, Iraqi Kurdish leaders, who had always said they would “partner with the devil” for the sake of Kurdistan as they waged a relentless guerrilla war against successive Iraqi governments, learned a new lesson: how to achieve their historic ambitions by taking advantage of the Iraqi leaders’ gruesome strategic blunders and the regional and international reactions these have provoked.
Only six months later and after Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War, much of the Kurdish leaders’ opportunistic enthusiasm bore fruit when the Kurds succeeded in setting up their first autonomous government after US and British forces had created a “safe haven” in northern Iraq to protect them against Saddam.
Without Saddam’s folly in playing hard ball with world powers and threatening their interests, the Iraqi Kurds could never have enjoyed such good fortune. 
In 2003, the Kurds again had a rendezvous with luck when the US-led invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam made them realise that their dream of seceding from Iraq was now inching forward.
The post-Saddam Iraqi constitution recognised the Kurdish northern enclave as the federal Kurdistan Region that enjoyed full autonomy. Soon afterwards, ths Kurds moved to turn the autonomous region into a semi-independent entity with its own flag, president, prime minister and parliament. They also created their own army, security forces, and intelligence services, and operated their own airports and border points.
Since the US-led invasion, the Kurdish leaders have done everything they can to fulfill their ambitions. Kurdistan president Masoud Barzani has warned that the Kurds will seek independence if the new relationship with Baghdad does not stand the test of time.  Behind the scenes, he has been working hard to make the date of Kurdish independence grow nearer.
In February this year, the Kurdish media quoted an advisor to Barzani as saying that the Kurdish leader was preparing to declare Kurdistan an independent state “in the near future.”
The Kurds have had to wait 11 years for Saddam’s successors as the rulers of Iraq to make terrible miscalculations that they can exploit to push their independence scheme further.
The country’s Shia and Sunni leaders have made enormous mistakes in their struggle for power and wealth, and earlier this month as Sunni rebels overran government security forces and took control of several cities, the Iraqi Kurds finally acted on their plans and seized the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and a large chunk of territory bordering their enclave, vowing that they would never give it back to Iraq.  
It has long been assumed that the failure of the Shia and Sunnis to resolve their disputes 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.
But the swift Kurdish use of the standoff and the move to expand their control over huge swaths of land has raised eyebrows, making it seem that the Kurds have been ahead of the curve and may have gone too far in exploiting Iraq’s chaos.
According to the Kurdish narrative, Iraqi soldiers abandoned their posts in Kirkuk and other areas after the Sunni group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants advanced, allowing Kurdish Peshmergas quickly to fill the security vacuum. The Kurds claimed that Kirkuk and its nearby oilfields needed protection from ISIL, which had just captured several predominantly Sunni cities and was sweeping toward Baghdad.
The international media, however, has reported that the Peshmergas tricked the Iraqi army troops in these areas, claiming to offer them help only to overrun their camps and expel them towards Baghdad. The Peshmergas later seized Iraqi army bases and confiscated their weapons and equipment in scenes reminiscent of Kurdish pillaging of Iraqi army camps and other government installations following the fall of Saddam in 2003.
Moreover, some Iraqis have accused the Kurds of being behind the recent fall of cities into the hands of Sunni rebels allied with ISIL. The country’s Shia media and politicians have been pointing the finger at the Kurdish leaders for what they claim has been their complicity in a regional conspiracy to topple the Shia-led government and divide Iraq.
They point to the anti-government Sunni leaders of armed groups who were given sanctuary in Kurdistan where they have been directing their political and propaganda campaign against the Baghdad government.
Whatever the truth may be, by exploiting Iraq’s turmoil the Kurds have created further facts on the ground in order to establish their long-desired independent state. One of Kurdistan’s major steps toward independence was beginning to sell its oil unilaterally last month. As a result, Kurdistan is currently exporting 125,000 barrels of oil a day, a figure that is expected to more than triple to 400,000 barrels by year’s end. This lucrative sale, which would make Kurdistan financially independent from Iraq, was widely seen as a last straw in relations between Iraq’s Arab majority and the minority Kurds.
The Kurds have lived for centuries in the generally mountainous areas of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Syria. They believe themselves to be the descendants of ancient tribes belonging to the Iranian branch of the large family of Indo-European races. The Kurds trace themselves back to the Medes who founded a kingdom that captured Nineveh, the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire, in 612 BCE, before being conquered in turn in 550 BCE by Cyrus the Great who established the Iranian dynasty of the Achaemenids.
But while the Kurds remain an ethnicity with a distinct culture and language, the term Kurdistan, which literally means the land of the Kurds, remains controversial. Historians agree that human settlements in the area go back to the era of the Akkadians who ruled Mesopotamia, or ancient Iraq. The area remained strongly unitary in nature during the rule of the ancient Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Islamic kingdoms and throughout the period of the Ottoman Empire, which also kept the country in one piece.
In recent history, the Iraqi Kurds have fought successive Iraqi governments since the birth of modern Iraq in 1920 and after they lost an opportunity to have an independent state following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. Under Saddam, though the Kurds enjoyed minimum cultural rights they suffered oppression and military crackdowns, including chemical weapons attacks.
Since their seizure of vast areas following the recent crisis, Kurdish leaders have repeatedly vowed that their control over the new territory is irreversible. While no one would doubt that Kurdistan is now on an irrevocable track towards independence, the question remains of how much this will affect Iraq and the rest of the region.
It is doubtful that the Iraqi Shia and Sunnis will accept the new border with Kurdistan if it is defined unilaterally by the Kurds. Both Arab communities have resisted attempts by the Kurds to annex Kirkuk and other cities, which they consider to be Iraqi regardless of their populations’ ethnicities. Supreme Shia leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani has even decreed that the future of Kirkuk and the territories should not be “subject to negotiation.”
A further question is whether Kurdistan can be a truly sovereign state, or by splitting from Iraq the Kurds are only changing an old subordination to domination or influence by another powerful nation. Neighbouring Iran, which has a large independence-seeking Kurdish minority of its own, is expected to be wary of the Iraqi Kurds’ ambitions and will try to torpedo efforts to set up a feasible Kurdish state which it will see as a potential ally for Turkey and the United States.
Turkey is already embroiled in Iraq’s disputes and is also believed to be entertaining geostrategic ambitions in Iraq. Turkey had stakes in Iraq, and during the British occupation in the 1920s Ankara laid claims to the city of Mosul as a former Ottoman vellyat, or province, seeing it as including all the present-day Kurdish region. 
Ever since the US-led invasion, Ankara has been a key regional actor in Iraq, apparently trying to counterbalance Shia Iran’s enormous power in its southern neighbour. Relations between Ankara and Baghdad have been strained since Iraqi Shia prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government tried to arrest Sunni vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi in 2012, forcing him to flee to Turkey.
Ankara helped convince Iraqi Sunni leaders including al-Hashimi to join al-Maliki’s government that ended nine months of political deadlock after inconclusive national elections in March 2010. Ties further deteriorated as a result of Iraqi Kurdistan starting to export its oil through Turkish Mediterranean ports in May this year, with Turkey being the key collaborator in facilitating Kurdish oil sales.
Many Iraqis believe that Turkey had a role in the seizure of Mosul by Sunni rebels. There are also signs that Ankara supports moves by Kurdistan to seize Iraqi towns even though some of them are densely populated by Turkomen, an ethnic minority group of Turkish origin that for centuries has braved Arab and Kurdish attempts at domination.
Last week Kurdish news outlet Rudaw quoted Huseyin Celik, a spokesman for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), as saying that the Iraqi Kurds “have the right to decide the future of their land.” 
Attention has also focused on Ankara’s foreign policy in Iraq after reports circulated by pro-AKP Turkish media reported in 2012 that Iraq could be partitioned into two “sections”, with Sunni Arabs and Kurds being put in one and Shia Arabs in another.
The reports suggested that the Sunni Arab-Kurdish section could be under Turkish influence, while the Shia section could be placed under the influence of Iran. The revelations coincided with remarks made by Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who called for a dialogue with Iran “to avert sectarian conflicts” in the region.
At first glance, the Kurds’ achievement in taking the territory disputed with the Arabs by exploiting the chaos in Iraq could be a cause for national celebration, but the prospects for a viable, defendable and unitary Kurdish state remain uncertain.
In addition to challenges by powerful neighbours, the Kurds face huge domestic problems. They are sharply split on political, tribal, and linguistic lines, and they will be faced with daunting decisions concerning their future in a tumultuous region.
These decisions should be guided by a risk-benefit analysis of statehood. In a new Middle East, where nations are shaped by internal upheavals and regional and international politics, the risk-to-benefit ratio of Kurdish statehood in Iraq can only grow.
This story was first published in Ahram Weekly.  
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Iraq dismembered
The fall of the Sunni triangle to rebels in Iraq has raised fears of the remapping of the country, writes Salah Nasrawi


“This is a regional problem, and it is going to be a long-term problem,” said US President Barack Obama in his concluding remarks to a policy statement made last week on the crisis in Iraq. He vowed that the United States would not be “dragged back” into military action in Iraq. 

While much has been reported about the sudden collapse of the Iraqi forces and the stunning fall of key cities and communities across Iraq to Sunni rebels, fewer headlines have been written to put the dynamics of the geopolitical earthquake unleashed by the new developments in the perspective of Iraq’s overall catastrophe and its larger implications for the Middle East and the Arab Gulf region. 

Iraq is being torn apart, and by calling it a “regional problem” Obama is trying to distance himself, his administration and the United States from the ravages of the civil war that is underway and the tragic partitioning of Iraq, which is fast becoming a reality. 

To understand how all this came about, it is necessary to go back to the US-led invasion of the country in 2003 and the toppling of the Sunni-dominated regime of former President Saddam Hussein. 

Obama and his predecessor, George W Bush, bear special responsibility for the disaster befalling Iraq by invading the country, destroying the state apparatus and social fabric, and exiting it nine years later without securing it or leaving an effective and credible government in place. 

The list of the US mistakes in Iraq during the occupation is long and shameful, the most despicable of which was giving free reign to sectarianism by effectively creating a governing system based on confessional politics that did not help Iraq to hold together as a unitary state. 

When Obama decided to pull out US troops from Iraq, he left security in the hands of an incompetent Iraqi military that was unprepared to deal with domestic and foreign threats. 

The blame for this fiasco also lies with Iraqi leaders who are lacking a collective vision to unite the Iraqi people. They are ineffective, power-greedy and driven by sectarian politics. The new political class installed by the Americans has resorted to violence to either maximise their gains or to stop the other side from doing so. 

Shia Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, in particular, takes special blame for behaving like a dictator, excluding other groups from power, and using the army, police forces and militias to terrorise his political rivals. His insistence on having a third term in office despite strong opposition by his opponents, including Shias, has further polarised Iraq’s already fragile political system. 

The humiliating collapse of Iraq’s security forces and the fall of a string of cities into the hands of Sunni radicals spearheaded by fighters of the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has marked a stark failure for Al-Maliki’s government forces, largely due to his leadership style based on sectarianism, nepotism and corruption. 

Nearly 100,000 government soldiers in four army divisions could not withstand a few hundred badly trained and ill-equipped rebels. Other units lost control of vast territories, including the oil-rich province of Kirkuk to Kurdish forces, who annexed them to the now de facto Kurdistan state in northern Iraq. 

One reason for the humiliating defeat is the army itself. Despite spending billions of dollars on Iraq’s security apparatus, the army and the security forces have displayed weakness and incompetence. The army’s rank and file is inefficient and badly trained. Soldiers lack morale, equipment, weapons and intelligence. Their commanders, mostly political appointees or people who have bought their posts sometimes with hundreds of thousands of dollars, are corrupt and fraudulent. 

Another major factor behind the crisis that has climaxed in the new round of the civil war has been the high expectations of Iraq’s three major communities, Shia, Sunnis and Kurds, who have failed to take the right path and make the necessary compromises to resolve post-invasion problems and challenges. 

The conflict has revealed what many Iraqis have been hiding for years behind the empty slogan of “a democratic and federal Iraq,” while maintaining a maximalist, uncompromising and secessionist agenda. 

Shia leaders have failed to reach out to Sunnis or to integrate them into a new decentralised political system that would create a true participatory democracy. This has eventually led to the alienation of the Sunni community and its loss to radicals. 

The list of Shia mistakes paints a bleak picture of how they have failed to build a functioning state, making Iraq into an even more miserable place. 

Many Sunni leaders have been wrong too, especially for boycotting or not participating fully in the post-Saddam political process and resorting to attempts to overthrow the new Shia-led regime. 

The Sunni areas’ submission to radicals and alliance with ISIL, which is hell-bent on killing Shias and aims to create an Islamic state, has fanned communal discord. The seizure of major cities, triggering a fully-fledged civil war, may turn to be their biggest strategic blunder. 

Gruesome pictures of bloodthirsty ISIL terrorists butchering hundreds of Shia soldiers during the current stand-off will do more harm to the Sunnis than standing up against Al-Maliki’s policies of exclusion and discrimination.

As recent events began to unfold, the Kurds showed political opportunism and exploited the tumult to seize control of vast areas of Iraq, including the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk and other towns, some of them only 100 kilometres away from Baghdad. 

Agencies have reported how Kurdish forces, known as Peshmerga, have deceived Iraqi army troops in these areas, claiming to offer help only to overrun their camps and expel them to Baghdad. 

They later plundered their bases and made off with everything from weapons to air-conditioning units, armoured vehicles and mattresses, in scenes reminiscent of Peshmerga forces and Kurdish parties pillaging Iraqi army camps and other government installations following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. 

With Kurdish oil already being sold independently from Baghdad, the seizure of Kirkuk and other parts of Iraq by Kurdish leaders may be part of a calculation that Kurdish independence will come out of the collapse of Iraq.

But as a result of their strategic weakness, being landlocked and squeezed between two giant neighbours of Iran and Turkey, the Iraqi Kurds may end up paying a higher price for their secessionist adventure. 

This writer has warned for years that Iraq has been moving steadily towards disintegration. The way the United States ran the invasion and occupation was indicative of its intention to drive Iraqis into a corner where partition was their only option. That hour has now come, and the long-feared nightmare of the dismemberment of Iraq has now materialised. 

Meanwhile, as the Iraqis are now plunged into a bloody and probably prolonged civil war, their country is falling apart and new national borders are being drawn in the Middle East. 

Videos posted on the Internet this week showed ISIL fighters removing frontier posts with neighbouring Syria and tearing up passports after their invasion of Mosul. The new Middle East border lines are being redrawn by terrorist groups, which are bent on carving out an Islamic caliphate or state across the region and maybe beyond. 

Worse still, as the new Sunni uprising in Iraq has shown, there is an alliance being carved out between Sunni radicals and Baathist pan-Arabists, which if it stands the test of time will serve as a force of example for the rest of the Arab countries and put into action the merging of Arab nationalism with religious extremism. 

This is how the break-up of Iraq will wake the genie from the bottle and unleash a geostrategic volcano that will remap the region and redefine its nation states. 

It is for this reason that Obama was wrong when he characterised the Iraq crisis as merely a “regional problem,” because what will rise from the ashes of the volcano will erupt across the whole Middle East and probably beyond. 

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Massive flare-up in Iraq

Iraq’s Sunnis are moving towards a new phase in the anti-government insurgency, writes Salah Nasrawi
As efforts to form a new Iraqi government stumble, Sunni rebels in the country have expanded their campaign in several Sunni-dominated provinces in what seems to be an integrated guerrilla offensive to topple Baghdad’s Shia-led government.
Sunni armed groups battled government troops in Iraq’s Sunni triangle this week and launched a series of deadly bombings across Iraq. The rebels temporarily seized control over parts of the two key Sunni-populated cities of Samarra and Mosul. While they were dislodged from Samarra by the army and security forces using helicopter gunships and heavy artillery, fighting continued in many parts of Mosul throughout the week.
Insurgents also struck Baghdad this week with a series of daily bombings, including areas of busy commercial districts and some government offices and flouting the tight security around Baghdad’s Green Zone which hosts main government offices and diplomatic missions.
The escalation came as the standoff in the restive Anbar province between the Iraqi security forces and insurgents entered its sixth month and the authorities failed to follow through with their announced “anti-terrorist” operation to expel the rebels from the town of Fallujah.
The flare-up is a massive setback to Shia Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Iraqi Armed Forces Nuri Al-Maliki, who is also embroiled in a government crisis after April’s elections that gave him a large number of seats in the country’s parliament but not enough to form a government.
The success of the Sunni rebels in wreaking havoc on the government’s security system on such a large scale is a psychological victory that could mean more problems for Al-Maliki who is facing criticisms because of the security forces’ continuing inefficiency in handling the insurgents. Many Iraqis have called for a national salvation authority to replace his government following the new upsurge.
On Tuesday, insurgents seized most of the northern city of Mosul, including the governor’s offices, police headquarters and other key government buildings. The city fell to the rebels after five days of fighting with the security forces who reportedly abandoned their posts en mass leaving rebels to overrun key installations in the sprawling city.
Dozens of civilians were also killed or injured, and thousands fled to safer parts of the city or to neighbouring districts. Clashes, bomb explosions and airstrikes continued for days as Iraqi security forces tried to expel the insurgents from the city. Thousands of prisoners, many of them convicted terrorists who were sentenced to death were freed from Mosul’s prison.
Before their assault on Mosul, insurgents controlled temporarily controlled Samarra, a Sunni-dominated city 95 kilometres from Baghdad before they were expelled by security forces and Shia tribes. The gunmen, travelling in dozens of vehicles and carrying heavy weapons, seized police stations, the municipality offices and university building.
The rebels were close to control a major dam on the Tigris and could have cut water supplies to Baghdad and southern Shia provinces or divert the stream to flood swaths of land in central and southern Iraq.
Also, the rebels came within a striking distance of one of the key Shia shrines in Samarra whose bombing by Al-Qaeda in 2006 triggered the worst bout of sectarian violence in which thousands died.
On Friday, the security forces thwarted an attempt by militants to seize the headquarters of the counter-terrorism police in the centre of Baquba, the capital of the Diyalah province. Several people were killed in the clashes.
A day before, insurgents launched an offensive on Samarra, a Sunni-dominated city 95 kilometres from Baghdad, attacking police checkpoints before they took control of several neighbourhoods. The gunmen, travelling in dozens of vehicles and carrying heavy weapons, seized police stations, municipal offices and university buildings.
The rebels were close to controlling a major dam on the Tigris River and could have cut off water supplies to Baghdad and the southern Shia provinces or diverted the River to flood swaths of land in central and southern Iraq.
The rebels also came within striking distance of one of the key Shia shrines in Samarra whose bombing by Al-Qaeda in 2006 triggered the worst bout of sectarian violence in the city in which thousands died.
On Saturday, rebels stormed Anbar University, briefly taking dozens of students hostage before withdrawing from the campus after heavy gunfights with the army.
Bombings also hit Kurdish party offices in Jalawla and Tuz this week, killing or injuring hundreds and damaging houses and cars in the attacks. Both Jalawla and Tuz are in disputed areas and the bombings carry a significant message to Kurds wanting to annex the cities to their autonomous region in the north of the country.
Elsewhere, rebels blew up several strategic bridges, apparently trying to block reinforcements sent by Baghdad in an attempt to repel the attackers. A curfew has been imposed on most of these cities to give army and police the chance to tackle the rebel’s seizure of various neighbourhoods.
The brazen attacks came as violence continues to surge in Iraq, with the rebels taking advantage of a lingering political crisis in the country. Nearly 1,000 people were killed in bombings across Iraq in May, while hundreds of others were killed in the fighting in Fallujah, making it the bloodiest month in the country so far this year.
The crisis in the Anbar province, triggered by last year’s government crackdown on Sunni anti-government protesters, has increased the polarisation in the country and given violent Sunni extremists the leverage to expand the rebellion.
The government has blamed the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group for the latest offensive. While ISIS has admitted responsibility for the coordinated series of bombings, the new fronts in the insurgency seem to be the work of several radical Sunni groups working together to demoralise the security forces and destroy the government’s authority.
A closer look at the operations indicates that their military aim on the tactical level is to wear out the government forces and force them to scale back their offensive on Fallujah and other flash-points.
The political objective of the June offensive, however, seems to be more complicated. It aims to foment rebellion among the Sunni population at large and prevent the Sunni politicians who won seats in the newly elected parliament from cutting deals with the government at the expense of the community’s interests and goals.   
It is not clear whether the insurgents will be able to achieve their objectives, but the latest rash of violence will certainly drive Iraq deeper into the sectarian abyss and further complicate the country’s national crisis.
One of the most feared consequences of the flare-up is that Al-Maliki may be able to use the standoff to whip up the Shias against the Sunnis in order to garner more support among his community in his drive to win another term in office.
Rival Shia political blocs, Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani and key Sunni political leaders have reiterated their strong opposition to his bid for a third term in office.
In a speech last week, Al-Maliki said rebels in Samarra were planning to attack the Shia holy shrine in order to provoke sectarian sedition. He thanked Shia tribes from nearby towns for coming to the support of the security forces in the counter-offensive in Samarra. Earlier, he had called the campaign to take back Fallujah from the Sunni rebels a “jihad,” or holy war.
Though Baghdad forces managed to hold off the large-scale Sunni assault, news coverage of the atrocities carried out by the security forces and the arbitrary shelling of residential areas during the counter-offensive have shocked the larger Sunni public, eroding  support for their political and tribal leaders who have showed willingness to cooperate with Al-Maliki.
Before the latest escalation, Al-Maliki was reportedly receiving support from many newly elected Sunni members of parliament whom he hoped would join a broad political coalition he has been building to form a new government.
The Iraqi media have reported that Al-Maliki has paid up to $US1 million to each aspiring member and made other gifts to secure their backing.
In another political blunder, Al-Maliki has called for a “national dialogue” meeting to be held next week in a bid to find a peaceful solution to the Anbar crisis. He has promised to spend US$1 billion on reconstruction and compensation efforts in Anbar and promised an amnesty to “those who have committed violations.”
The offer was immediately rejected by tribal and political leaders in Anbar and Fallujah, who insisted that the government army should be withdrawn from the province and the local police force be restructured. 
Al-Maliki’s attempts to buy the loyalty of the Sunnis or to divide the community seem to have little chance of ending his troubles. As the unprecedented assaults in major urban centres have shown, he will not be able to achieve a lasting victory without a negotiated end to the deep-rooted causes behind the insurgency.
Al-Maliki’s bid was largely seen as a manoeuvre to buy loyalty among Sunnis and to try to divide the community.
In a desperate bid to mobilise support Al-Maliki on Tuesday called on the outgoing parliament to impose emergency measures nationwide and urged tribes to join the armed forces to fight what called “terrorists.”
He also called for Arab and international help to fight “terrorism.”
What the unprecedented assaults on major urban centres have shown is that Al-Maliki can achieve no easy and lasting victory over the arduous Sunni insurgency. It remains to be seen if Al-Maliki is finally ready to step down and let a national salvation government takes over as many Iraqis have demanded or he will stay to watch the rest of Iraq burning.