Post-2003 Iraq has been known for its deep divisions. In his
book Iraq after America: Strongmen, Sectarians,
Resistance Col. Joel Rayburn
tried to describe the different groups that have been struggling for power in
the country through both participating in the government and violently trying
to overthrow it. Rayburn worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer before going
on to becoming a senior military fellow at the National Defense University’s
Institute for National Strategic Studies and the Hoover Institution Working
Group on Islamism and the International Order. He can be followed on Twitter @joel_rayburn. Below is an interview with
Rayburn where he explains what he termed authoritarianism, sectarianism,
maximalism, and resistance in Iraq.
1. In your book you
spent several chapters discussing the different Shiite parties that took power
after 2003. The first was the Dawa. How did it change from when it was formed
in the 1950s to when it took power via Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in 2006?
After starting out as a secret society of young but
well-connected Najafi clerics in 1959, Da’wa through the 1960s grew into a
party with a large grassroots following.
It was easily the dominant Shia Islamist group at that time, big enough
to be called a movement rather than just a party. But from the early 1970s onward, the
Ba’athist regime cracked down severely on the party and made mere membership in
it a capital offense. The crackdown
intensified in 1979-1980 during the Iranian revolution and the beginning of the
Iran-Iraq war, and this pressure drove Da’wa’s leadership either underground or
out of the country altogether. Once
Da’wa was in exile, its members were pursued by Saddam’s intelligence services
intensely enough that Da’wa began to grow paranoid about Ba’athist infiltration
and targeting and grew to be distrustful of outsiders. At the same time, Da’wa was largely cut off
from the grassroots popular following it had generated inside Iraq, and the
party began to look like other exiled, elite parties around the region. As they waited outside the country for their
chance to return, Da’wa gradually came to resemble the insular, secretive
Ba’ath Party that they had sought to overthrow.
2. The second group
you dealt with was the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which you called
Shiite supremacists. Can you explain the meaning of that name and how ISCI was
an example?
By “Shi’a supremacists” I meant to describe those Shi’a
groups that emerged during the Iran-Iraq war, mostly in exile in Iran, with a
goal of returning to Iraq and establishing a Shi’a ascendancy to replace the
longstanding Sunni ascendancy. These
groups were largely established by the Iranian regime and fought against the
Iraqi regime during the Iran-Iraq war.
Fighting on the enemy side in the war alienated them from much of the
Iraqi population, which meant that when they returned in 2003 they had an
interest in polarizing the country along sectarian lines in order to gain a
popular following. Since 2003, these
groups have used their new power inside Iraq to try to gain revenge against
what they viewed as Sunni oppression of the Shi’a community, and they
specifically sought by 2005 to push Sunnis out of the Baghdad region. Even more than the Supreme Council, I would
describe the Badr Corps as a Shi’a supremacist organization. I would put Ahmad Chalabi in that category as
well.
3. The third group
was the Sadrists. That was based upon Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr’s
movement from the 1980s-90s. What was the ayatollah’s original vision, and how
did his son Moqtada al-Sadr and the breakaway group Asaib Ahl Al-Haq end up
compromising some of his ideas in their fight against the Americans?
In many ways, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr inherited the Da’wa
Party’s grassroots following once Da’wa was forced to leave the country. During the 1980s, Mohammed Sadiq built a very
large popular following in Baghdad and the south, so much so that he eclipsed
the Hakim family’s following among the Iraqi Shi’a. With him at the helm, this original Sadr
movement was more Iraqi nationalist and pan-Arab than the other Shi’a Islamist
parties, and he was allowed some measure of freedom to operate by Saddam, who
saw Mohammed Sadiq as a useful Iraqi counterweight to the religious leaders at
the top of the Iranian regime. Later
Saddam and Mohammed Sadiq turned against each other, of course, but throughout
the Iran-Iraq war and the 1990s the Sadr movement can be viewed as a
countercurrent to Iran’s Islamic revolution rather than in alignment with
it. When Moqtada Sadr and Asa’ib Ahl
al-Haq (AAH) turned to the Iranian regime for support against the U.S.-led
coalition and allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC), it was certainly a reversal of Mohammed Sadiq’s effort to
keep his distance from the Iranian regime.
And AAH’s declared loyalty to Iran’s Supreme Leader is very much against
Mohammed Sadiq’s effort to assert Najaf and Karbala’s primacy over Qom in the
world of Shi’ism. I have a feel Mohammed
Sadiq al-Sadr would be very disappointed in this choice that AAH has made,
considering that its top leaders, such as Qais al-Khazali, were his students in
Najaf in the 1990s.
4. Conventional
wisdom was that the Iraqi insurgency was made up of former Baathists and
Islamists, which also included foreign fighters. These were considered two
distinct groups. You argued that there was actually a lot of overlap between
those two, in part due to Saddam’s Faith Campaign in the 1990s. Can you explain
how Saddam’s policy led to an increase in religiosity within Iraq and how that
played out when the insurgency was formed after the U.S. invasion?
After his disastrous defeat in Kuwait and the scare he
experienced in the massive intifada of 1991, Saddam needed a new basis for the
legitimacy of his regime, and he chose to seek it in religion. This was the genesis of his “Faith Campaign”
of the 1990s, during which he actually Islamicized his regime and the
previously secular Ba’ath Party. He
built mosques for Iraqi clerics who were willing to support him and encouraged
Ba’athist businessmen to do the same. He
and other major Ba’athists began to pay for pilgrimages and so on. And he also sent Ba’ath Party members, such
as secret police and intelligence officers, into the mosques to study Islam—but
he steered them toward Salafism, which he viewed as a less threatening strand
of Islamism than that of his old enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood. This created a strange fusion of Ba’athism
and Salafism inside Iraq. After Saddam
fell, the remnants of the regime that went into armed resistance to the
coalition and the new political process fell back quite easily on the Ba’athist-Islamist
networks that had developed before 2003, with the result that the Sunni
insurgency was an Islamist one from the very beginning. This can be seen in the Islamic branding,
imagery, and rhetoric of every single Sunni insurgent group since 2003. There was no secular Sunni resistance at all,
a strange outcome for a Ba’athist regime that once had been the least Islamist
in the Arab world.
5. You termed the
ruling Kurdish parties maximalists. What were their goals after 2003, were they
successful, and what were the consequences of their actions in northern Iraq?
By “Kurdish maximalists” I meant those Kurdish leaders and
factions that wanted not just to restore the Kurdish position in Iraq and
incorporate Kurdish-majority areas into Kurdistan, but also to expand Kurdish
rule to wherever Kurds were living, even if they were minorities. Take for example the expansion of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party presence into western Ninewa, to towns such as Sinjar where
Kurds are decidedly not a majority but where Kurdish maximalists believe it
important to establish Kurdish rule so as to create an expanded Kurdistan that
is contiguous with Syrian Kurdistan. The
Kurdish maximalists took advantage of the power vacuum that ensued after April
2003 to expand into territories that had long belonged to Sunni Arabs. Zumar, the Mosul Dam, and the entire eastern
half of Mosul city are good examples.
The peshmerga occupied these areas and also oil-rich territories whose
final disposition is still in dispute, such as Bashiqa in eastern Ninewa province. I would say that the Kurdish maximalists were
quite successful in seizing these territories, but they were far less
successful in quelling Sunni Arab violent resistance against their newly
expanded footprint. What has followed
that land grab of 2003 has been a dozen years of Arab-Kurd warfare all along
the “Green Line” dividing Arab Iraq from Kurdish Iraq, with tens of thousands
killed and as far as I can see, no end in sight.
6. What role did
Syria play in exacerbating Iraq’s political and security problems?
A very insidious one.
The Assad regime welcomed their archenemies, the Iraqi Ba’ath, into
exile in Syria and at once helped them and other Sunni insurgent groups to
conduct terrorist and insurgent attacks inside Iraq. It seems clear now that the Syrian regime
viewed the prospect of a successful U.S.-allied Iraqi democracy as a great
danger to Alawite rule in Syria, and they pulled out all the stops to try to
ensure that the American project did not succeed. From 2003 onward they allowed Zarqawi and his
successors in Al Qaeda in Iraq to use Syria as their strategic depth and the
main staging base for AQI fighters and suicide bombers. Bashar al Assad’s regime had direct oversight
of many of the insurgent groups operating inside Iraq and, as one former Syrian
official once told me, only intervened to stop insurgent activities when an
insurgent group failed to report its plans and attacks back to its Syrian
regime interlocutors.
7. You argued that by
2013 Iraq was already back into a state of civil war? What were some signs that
the country had fallen into that situation?
I had always recognized the political fissures that could
lead to civil war, but I first really took note of the physical signs of what
was happening when Al Qaeda in Iraq conducted a Mumbai-style attack on the
provincial government buildings in Tikrit in March 2011. A team of AQI gunmen and bombers was able to
kill more than 50 officials and civilians and wound about 100 more, and they
killed the Salahaddin provincial police chief and four provincial council
members. When I saw that news, I
realized that AQI had rebounded from the raids that eviscerated its senior
leaders, including Abu Ayyub al Masri, about ten months before. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this
also represented that the organization was making a comeback under the man we
know as Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. From that
attack in Tikrit it was a little over a year and a half until the raid against
the senior Sunni politician Rafe al Issawi led to large-scale Sunni protests
that eventually boiled over into violence between the protesters and Prime
Minister Nuri Maliki’s troops, especially in Anbar. During the very violent last week of April
2013, of course, hundreds of people were killed when large gunfights broke out
between government troops and insurgents—including those from the Naqshbandi
Army--in Hawijah, the Turkmen towns south of Kirkuk, and Mosul, along with
large bombings in Baghdad. When those
clashes took place I realized the civil war had already restarted.
8. What do you see in
the future for Iraq’s ruling parties and the country’s government?
I hate to say that as it stands right now I don’t see a very
rosy future for them. When the Iraqi
army and national police units in the northern provinces collapsed in the face
of the ISIS offensive last summer, the Shi’a political parties in Baghdad made
the fateful choice not to embark on an emergency rebuilding of the Iraqi army,
but to create a parallel security structure under the major Shi’a militant
groups, including the Badr Corps, Kata’ib Hizballah, and Asa’ib Ahl al Haq,
with all three of these (and several other major counterparts) answering to the
operational control of the IRGC and Qassem Soleimani. This meant the Iraqi government no longer
owned the strongest arms in the country, and it also means the formal Iraqi
government structure in Baghdad will for the foreseeable future, in my opinion,
have great difficulty restraining the Shi’a militant groups. I don’t know how this will play out, but the
signs so far are not encouraging.
1 comment:
I was truly impressed by how much was so cogently laid out in such a brief but insightful interview.
The echoes of "How do you keep them down on the farm...?" once Al Baghdadi could take an axe to the thin veneer of civil governance in Tikrit, then later to Hawija, Anbar, Baiji, Mosul, anon. The same with the Shia militias under Iranian and other controls.
Clearly, Baghdad does not represent the levels of power and meaning that it used to, so What are the Kurds and Southern Iraqis to make of it all?
Steve
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