The recent government crackdown upon demonstrators in the
town of Hawija, and the ensuing violence has highlighted Iraq’s protest
movement. People began taking to the streets in Anbar province after Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government issued an arrest warrant for former
Finance Minister Rafi Issawi’s bodyguards for terrorism. Activism quickly
spread to northern Iraq. Rather than being a monolithic group with a central
leadership however, these protests have involved a variety of tribes, political
parties, and insurgent groups across many different cities and towns. They have
also been explicitly Sunni and sectarian compared to previous demonstrations in
Iraq from 2011 and 2012, which were national in character. To breakdown these
various movements and their agendas is Kirk H. Sowell, a Washington DC-based
political risk analyst who is the editor of the biweekly newsletter, Inside
Iraqi Politics.
Scene from one of the earliest demonstrations in Ramadi,
December 2012 (Reuters)
1. Iraq’s current protest movement has gone
through several phases. When they started in December 2012 in cities like
Fallujah and Ramadi what were their initial grievances?
The protestors basic demands haven’t changed much, and they
mostly revolve around treatment by the security services, including the freeing
of innocent detainees, the repeal of deBaathification, and the capital
punishment clause in the counterterrorism law, as well as for “balance” in the
security services, meaning sectarian balance, which is required by the
constitution. There was a formal list of 13 demands published on January 6,
2013 by the Coordination Committee in Ramadi, and that came to represent “the
demands” of the demonstrators. And of course there were also groups from the
beginning pushing a more radical agenda, of which we can discuss more. But in
both the Iraqi and pan-Arab media, when people speak of “protesters’ demands,”
this is what they mean.
Sheikh Saadi has become the spiritual leader of the Ramadi
protests (Antiwar.com)
2. It seems like several people have tried to
assert themselves into the leadership of the Anbar protests. These include
Sheikh Abdul Malik al-Saadi, Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, Sheikh Ali Hatem Sulaiman,
former Finance Minister Rafi Issawi, and Speaker of Parliament Osama Nujafi.
What has been the role of each one of these individuals?
When people refer to Anbar protests, and this is true in
pan-Arab commentary as well as in English, they usually mean those running the
protest site in Ramadi, which is the capital of Anbar, and all the figures you
just mentioned are associated with that. This group, the formal name of the
protest organization is the Anbar Coordination Committee, came to have the
media dominance it had because it was well-organized, ready to speak to the
media, and because it was backed by two pillars of legitimate authority in
Sunni Arab Iraq: the clerical establishment and the political parties. And with
time they came to link up with protest organizations in all the Sunni
provinces, and for this larger group they use the oblique name “the six
provinces,” which is appropriate since they claim to speak for “the people,”
and not just a faction.
For the clerical establishment, you mention Saadi, and he is
a kind of spiritual guide for the protests. He doesn’t have the dominance that
the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has among the Shia, but even among people who
ignore his injunctions, a problem Sistani has as well, few openly defy him. His
brief return to Ramadi from his home in exile in Jordan the week after the
protests started was a huge boost for what I’ll call the Ramadi camp. And
they’ve also gotten strong support from the dominant clerical figures, Rafia al-Rafai,
whom most Iraqi Sunnis recognize as mufti, and Ahmad Abdul Ghafour al-Samarraie,
the head of the Sunni Waqf (Endowment) Administration. But Saadi is the key
clerical figure.
The other pillar is the anti-Maliki political establishment,
and the parties tied to the protests have come under Speaker Osama al-Nujafi’s Mutahidun
electoral bloc, which contains most of the Sunni
parties that were part of the “Iraqiya” coalition, and which was created for
the provincial elections. In addition to Abu Risha and Issawi, whom you
mentioned, in Anbar Ahmed al-Alwani of the Islamic Party is also a key figure. Nujafi,
in his capacity as speaker of parliament, played a major role in making the
Ramadi demands “the demands” by calling a special session on January 6
specifically to discuss the 13 demands of the protestors, meaning those in
Ramadi who are his allies.
Indeed it would be hard to overstate how closely tied the
Ramadi camp is to the Mutahidun politicians. Numerous protest videos show Abu
Risha and Alwani hanging around on the podium during speeches, standing next to
protester spokesman Said al-Lafi. Until the warrant for his arrest, Issawi was
also frequently there, and in fact there is one video dated after Maliki first
tried to arrest him showing Issawi playing ping pong with activists behind the
speaking area; you can hear Lafi’s voice in the background. And Lafi himself is
reportedly a member of the Islamic Party, in which his father, Mahmoud al-Lafi,
is a senior figure.
Furthermore, this group coordinates for the six provinces
who come under the Saadi-Ramadi umbrella, and they actually hold the meetings
in Alwani’s home. Alwani told an interviewer for al-Sumaria TV recently that
they decide on each Friday sermon’s theme, and the approach to the government
in these meetings, and you can confirm this by checking what they actually say
at the sites aligned with Ramadi. The clerics even publish a summary of the
Friday theme on their website, and imams truly follow that.
Of the names you mentioned, Ali Hatem Sulaiman is the one
that doesn’t fit. He’s not part of Mutahidun, but apparently has grown close to
Lafi just by spending a lot of time hanging around the protest site, and giving
outrageous speeches. A former Maliki ally, Ali Hatem has turned 180 degrees,
and has given several speeches or interviews advocating or threatening violence
against federal security personnel. The electoral commission recently struck
his party from the electoral rolls for incitement, and reasonably so.
In saying this I will note there are other organizing groups
in Ramadi, and of course Fallujah is now a completely different place in terms
of protests. But we can come to that. When media like al-Jazeera refer to the
“Anbar protestors,” they usually mean this group.
3. Unlike the other demonstrations that took
place in 2011 and 2012, this year’s have become distinctly Sunni in character.
What kind of symbols and rhetoric are they using that highlights their
sectarianism?
The first thing you notice in watching these protests is the
near-ubiquitous presence of old regime flags, the Baathist flag and the current
flag have the same colors, but the old flag had three stars for the basic
tenants of the Baath Party and “God is Greatest” purportedly written in
Saddam’s hand. The new flag has no stars and the lettering is written in a
different script. There are exceptions to this, but this is the rule. And in
Fallujah there has been an increasing presence of al-Qaeda flags, both the regular
one and the one used by the Islamic State of Iraq, which is al-Qaeda in Iraq’s
political umbrella.
Protesters in Fallujah flying Al Qaeda in Iraq and the old
Baathist era Iraq flag (Maktoob)
The second problem is the language, but here it differs from
site to site. The protests which are the biggest problem are not the Ramadi
camp and their “six provinces” group, but those in the more militant wing of
the movement, where you often hear speakers use phrases that imply the
imposition of Sunni rule, like “overthrow the regime,” or “void the
constitution,” or references to “jihad” and “mujahidin.” Many speeches also
employ terms offensive to Shia, like “Safavid” or “majus,” the former being a
Persian Empire that used to rule Iraq, and the latter being a pejorative term
for Shia Muslims.
There is a distinction between protests, which is often
overlooked, which I want to emphasize, the distinction between mosques and open
air protest sites. The language and tone used in mosques is much more measured
than that at protest sites. The reason for this is that the Sunni Waqf controls
the mosques and appoints the imams, and Samarraie, the waqf head, can remove
preachers if they get too far off the reservation. And indeed Samarraie has
expressly warned preachers about using divisive or sectarian language, but he
has no control over most of the non-mosque sites, where the group that controls
the site decides who gives the sermon.
You can even see this distinction in Ramadi, which is an
open air site, but where the Friday sermons, exceptionally, are strictly
controlled. The Friday sermons are pretty clean, strongly-worded for sure, but
free of anti-Shia rants, and references to “jihad”, and the like. But then in
night and weekday speeches at the same site, that discipline is lost, and I’ve watched
speeches by Lafi, the protestor spokesman, that are quite inflammatory and that
you would never hear on Friday afternoon. And I’m sure these guys think this is
unofficial, so it doesn’t matter, but these speeches are all on Youtube, and
some make the news on Shia TV channels. And I think that what Shia think is not
that these sermons don’t count, but that they represent what the “moderates”
really believe.
The protests’ third problem of presentation has to do with
how the demands themselves are framed, in that even the relatively more
moderate Ramadi camp frames them in a way, which is very Sunni-specific, and
often too sweeping. For example, no elected prime minister will agree to a
complete repeal of deBaathification. And when figures from the more moderate
camp talk in interviews about how they believe Sunnis are the demographic
majority, both Lafi and Nujafi have done this, then combine that with the
Baathist flags and demands for proportional representation in the security
services, it doesn’t come off well. And that’s the moderate camp. In the
militant camp people say things like “free all the prisoners” or else we
declare jihad, when everyone knows that many of those in Iraq’s prisons really
are terrorists.
So add all those factors together, and it becomes easy to
see why Shia support for the Sunni protests has gone from qualified and limited
in January to almost nothing now. All the Shia parties that backed concessions
to the Sunnis lost seats in last month’s provincial elections, while the pro-Iranian
parties gained.
4. What kind of concessions were the
organizers able to get out of Baghdad, and were they happy with any of them?
The irony is that the organizers really haven’t gotten any
concessions out of Baghdad, although they can take indirect credit for the
concessions. Maliki’s initial response was to dismiss the protests as
irrelevant, and threaten to suppress them with force, but the Shia religious
authorities in Najaf rebuked him, and insisted that he meet protestor demands
that were “consistent with the law and the constitution,” that’s the phrase
that is used.
So Maliki appointed a ministerial committee to look into
prison abuses, and the last I’ve seen they’ve released slightly over 3,000
prisoners. Virtually all of them are people who either have been held for years
without trial or have finished their terms, and were being held illegally. So
they should have been released anyway.
More substantively, in March Maliki reached a potentially
wide-reaching deal with Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni Arab
from Anbar, which had three elements. One was a reform to deBaathification, so
that former Baathists who held the bottom seven of the party’s ten ranks from
firqa or division on down could get jobs in non-security sectors. A second was
for the repeal of two laws related to seizures of property of former Baathists,
which had hit the Sunni economic elite especially hard. And a third was for the
repeal of the infamous “secret informer” law, which allows courts to rely on
information from unnamed sources.
The protest movement reacted by sabotaging the process. In
March, the Ramadi camp began talking about the possibility of forming a
negotiating committee to be headed by Saadi’s son Ahmad. They had previously
just made demands and expected them to be met, but they gave Maliki no credit,
and continued to attack him. Furthermore, the militant wing only increased its
efforts to push the movement toward militancy, and they succeeded, as even
before the lethal raid in Hawija on April 23, Ramadi had already turned more
hostile. And because of the parliament boycotts, none of these legal reforms
have been put into place.
It is important to underline, though, why this is, and it
relates to a core element of the protest movement’s make-up. Mutlaq leads the
Arab Iraqiya bloc, which is the main competitor to Nujafi’s Mutahidun. Passing
these reforms would have been a major coup for Mutlaq, and so the Ramadi camp
has a conflict of interest.
5. Ramadi and Fallujah eventually went in
different directions. How have the two cities addressed talks with the
government, and dealt with the insurgency?
Because Ramadi’s dominant protest organization is centrally
controlled, the Fallujah protest camp has gradually come to resemble nothing so
much as an island of fanatical Ramadi rejects, al-Qaeda, the Baathist Free Iraq
Intifada, and the Sunni Popular Movement in Iraq, which appears to be a front
for Islamist insurgent groups like the Islamic Army. In fact, the two biggest
changes in Fallujah since January are the proliferation of al-Qaeda flags,
which weren’t there initially, and a dramatic decline in the number of
protestors present; presumably the two are related. And calls for a declaration
of jihad are an everyday occurrence in Fallujah.
Ramadi, as we’ve discussed, has evolved, but kept to a line
that in principle accepts the political process, and isn’t looking to overthrow
the constitutional order. They’ve experienced a decline in attendance, but only
a moderate one. And they have become more militant since late March when Saadi
tried and failed to forge a unified front for negotiations, causing Ramadi to
harden its stance. This was shown most dramatically on April 12 when there were
young men marching in military formation, and the preacher giving the Friday
sermon put on a burial shroud, to say he was ready for martyrdom, then later
changed in to camouflage clothes, as if ready for war.
6. Demonstrations in Mosul and Hawija were led
by a group called the Free Iraq Intifada. What have been their demands, and how
are they connected to militants?
The Free Iraq Intifada (FII) is the political arm of a
Baathist organization led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, the former deputy to Saddam
Hussein. The organization, the Army of the Men of the Naqshibandi, known by its
Arabic initials, JRTN for Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al- Naqshibandi, has grafted an
Islamist covering over its Baathist, pan-Arab nationalist core, and has been
militarily active from the height of the insurgency 2004-2007 up through the
present time. Initially, FII maintained the pretense that it was an independent
organization, although telltale signs of JRTN-FII ties were there all along. Then
on April 24, the day after the Hawija raid, they announced their “merger.” But
I’ve gone back and done a thorough study of the evidence, and I’ve concluded
that FII was never an independent organization, just a front. And the FII’s
leader is Abu Abd al-Naemi, who is from Salahaddin, I presume Tikrit, since the
JRTN’s core leadership is from there.
With that in mind, the FII’s demands and rhetoric are easier
to understand. In most regards their demands overlap with those of the Ramadi
camp, but are framed more radically. They use phrases like “free all the
prisoners” and “abolish the constitution.” They call the government “Safavid,”
so often you’d think Iraq had a prime minister named “al-Safavi.” And most
importantly, they reject negotiation as a matter of principle, and want to
overthrow the regime, not just bring down the Maliki government.
The JRTN was behind one of the most infamous incidents in
the protest movement’s now five-month history. On March 26, they stormed the
Ramadi protest site, and tried to turn the movement toward war through
intimidation, right in the middle of the day’s speeches. Lafi rebuffed them,
and they decamped to Fallujah.
7. What have the protest groups in Salahaddin’s
Tikrit and Samarra, and Diyala’s Baquba been like?
Tikrit is a relative hotbed, and up until late March a
single protest site there was shared between the JRTN, the pro-insurgency
Muslim Scholars Association (MSA), and the Islamic Party (IP), which as noted
above is one of the components of Nujayfi’s Mutahidun. Then in late March, the
same week the JRTN and the Islamic Party had a confrontation in Ramadi, they
split in Tikrit, so the IP and the MSA moved to another site. There have also
been a series of security operations in Tikrit prior to the Hawija clashes, and
again these are related to the fact that the protest site is a JRTN stronghold.
Samarra has created much less stir. To be candid I’ve not
followed Samarra as close as some of the other centers, but the main protest
site there, Al-Haq Square, is controlled by the clerical establishment and the
imam, Shaykh Muhammad Taha Hamdun, is the nationwide spokesman for the Ramadi
camp’s “six provinces” group. There is no group that dominates Samarra, though,
and others are present.
In Baquba, and Diyala more broadly, the story is similar.
The main mosque in Baquba is controlled by the clerical establishment, and so is
part of Saadi’s Ramadi camp. The imam, Sheikh Ahmad Said, comes off to me as
very “old school,” and didn’t call for the armed option until Saadi did, and
then only as a “Defense Army,” following a statement Saadi issued after Hawija.
But the JRTN has an active presence in Diyala as well. Their main center in the
province appears to be at Jalula, in the Arab portion naturally. They are very
anti-Kurdish, being Baathist, and so have bases there, and nearby in the area
of Salahaddin to the northeast in Sulaiman Bek, Tuz Kharmato.
If you wanted to draw a national color-coded map of the
Sunni protest movement it would be quite messy, but essentially the Ramadi-Six
Provinces group aligned with Saadi and the Mutahidun have dominant, but not
exclusive positions in the main religious areas of Anbar, Salahaddin, Diyala,
and all three major protest areas Baghdad, al-Adhamiya, al-Ghazaliya and al-Amiriya.
The JRTN are the strongest group in Mosul, Tikrit, Hawija, Kirkuk, and with
notable strength all along the Arab-Kurd ethnic borderline. Measuring real
public support is difficult. The JRTN has an unfair advantage over truly
peaceful groups since it is armed and ruthless, and it ruled Iraq for 35 years,
after all. I presume that the Ramadi camp’s control in Baghdad is aided greatly
by the government’s clampdown on their chief rivals, all of whom are fronts for
armed insurgent groups.
Other pro-insurgency groups like the Islamic Army and the
MSA I’d place between Saadi and the JRTN ideologically, and they have a wide presence
but don’t appear to be dominant anywhere. There are also activist groups like
the Iraqi Revolution Media Support Committee and the Iraqi Spring Coordination
Committee, which are widely active and influential, but don’t appear to even
aspire to dominate all of Sunni Iraq.
8. After the Hawija incident many tribes,
clerics, and organizers began talking about armed struggle. What specific
cities and groups have taken this turn towards militancy, and which ones are
calling for moderation?
I’d put them into three categories. The first category
includes those opposed to any armed option. And this group includes many tribal
leaders everywhere, including Hawija and Anbar. I thought it was notable after
the Hawija incident that the Jibur tribe reiterated its support for the Iraqi
Army, and especially its relationship with the 12th Division, which
recruits in the area. Some mosque imams have also categorically rejected any
option of armed action against the state. No protest groups of any significance
have.
The second category would be those who follow Saadi’s line
of forming a “Defense Army,” but not calling for jihad or going on the
offensive. It includes many if not most clerics, the “six provinces” naturally,
and some groups outside the Ramadi camp, including the Islamic Army. The latter
group has vocally broken with the Baathist JRTN, with which it has been
otherwise allied, over this issue.
The third category includes those who want to declare jihad,
destroy the state, and replace it with an entirely new regime. This just
includes JRTN and al-Qaeda.
Acting Defense Minister Dulaimi at a memorial for five
soldiers killed near Ramadi (AFP)
9. Also in the wake of Huwija, 5 soldiers were
killed in a checkpoint near Ramadi. How did the government respond, and how
were the protesters involved?
As in the Hawija raid, the facts here are quite unclear, but
the incident has set the province on edge. On April 27, five soldiers were killed
early in the day at the Pride and Dignity protest site in Ramadi – this is the
emblematic protest site, which has been the center of events. At least three of
the soldiers were Anbar natives, and the attack caused outrage throughout the
province, and the tribes which had been providing support to the protest site
announced they were withdrawing until the killers were found and justice was done.
And Saadi issued a statement clarifying that he’d not called for jihad, just a
defense army, and prohibited attacks on Iraqi soldiers or police of any
sectarian origin.
The complication is that the government concluded that the
Ramadi protest organization leadership was itself implicated in the killings,
and the three key individuals for whom they have issued arrest warrants are
Lafi, the Ramadi spokesman, Muhammad Khamis Abu Risha, who is Ahmed Abu Risha’s
nephew, and Qusay al-Janabi, a popular preacher who is the one I referred to
previously as putting on a shroud during his Friday sermon. Now this has gotten
dangerous, and last Tuesday the army tried to execute the arrest warrants at
Alwani’s house, as mentioned above, remember they coordinate the Ramadi camp
protest strategy at the personal residence of the Islamic Party leader.
Alwani’s guards fired shots in the air, and to avoid bloodshed, the soldiers
retreated.
That same day, federal security also arrested Jisawi Ramah,
a military commander in the Islamic Army insurgent group in Fallujah. And
afterward I listened to an interview by a leader in the Popular Sunni Movement,
which is an insurgent political front group, in which he refers to the five
soldiers killed as “intelligence agents.” The way he phrased it implied
approval of the killings.
This is a problem, because the government and its criminal
justice system lacks credibility, although it is worth nothing that Anbar army
units are not really a foreign force. General Mardhi al-Mahalawi, who is the
Anbar Operations Commander, is a respected Anbari who played an important role
during the civil war period, and when Maliki appointed him to this position in
February, Mahlawi was welcomed. And like army divisions elsewhere, the army in
Anbar recruits locally, so despite Shia domination at the national level, local
army personnel are not without credibility.
Armed protesters at the Ramadi Camp raise the question of
whether the demonstrations will remain peaceful or turn towards violence (AFP)
10. In your opinion, what do you think is the
future of the protest movement? Will they remain largely peaceful or do you
think Hawija has turned many of the groups towards violence?
The short answer is that pessimistic scenarios outweigh the
optimistic ones, although both outcomes are possible. So I’ll make a couple of
points about the protest movement going forward, and then give you the most
likely implications.
Ahmed Abu Risha, speaking for Ramadi protestors, has just a
few days ago announced that they have agreed to have Saadi negotiate on their
behalf with the government. In the same statement he said that all arrest
warrants for protest leaders since December had to be voided. Given that Abu Risha’s
nephew is among them, one would think it was a conflict of interest to have him
make the announcement. More important is to understand how the protests’
failures have resulted from structural flaws, and not merely bad tactical
decision-making, that also impact what they are likely to do going forward.
Begin with understanding the protest movement not as a
general mass of ordinary Sunni Iraqis who have spontaneously chosen to take to
the streets, as it is often portrayed, but as an outgrowth of a core division
within the organized part of the Sunni community going back to 2003. One the
one hand, there are those like the clerical establishment, the Islamic Party
and tribal leaders like Abu Risha who have chosen to work within the political
process. This group is almost perfectly represented in what I have called the
“Ramadi camp” that follows Saadi and Nujafi’s Mutahidun. And just within the
past two weeks we’ve seen this group waver back and forth between qualified use
of the political process, and qualified support for armed action. On the other
hand, there was the armed insurgency, which lost the civil war during the
2004-2007 period, and has reincarnated itself under various front names in the
radical wing of the protest movement.
In regard to the Ramadi camp, their basic conception of the
situation in the country is a major problem, in that they have from the
beginning completely misread the true balance of power. Flowing from the
erroneous belief that they are the demographic majority, Sunni Arabs are
actually about 25 percent of the population, and Shia are about 55 percent, they
have acted as if they could just make demands, and have them met. In fact,
their movement has never been a political threat to Maliki, who once he got
over his initial negative impulses, began making concessions because he
correctly knew he could do so from a position of political, military, and
demographic strength.
Furthermore, the intertwining of the moderate wing of the
protest movement with politicians who have personal electoral interests has
distorted the entire process. However much blame Maliki bears for creating the grievances
that gave rise to the protests, Saadi and the clerics should have embraced his
turn toward compromise in March. And whatever negative might be said of Maliki
as a national leader, he is a moderate on issues related to deBaathification
and inclusion of Sunnis. One of the lessons of the last month’s elections,
which protest leaders appear to have completely missed, is that if Maliki is
removed next year he will most likely be replaced by a more hardline Shia
Islamist.
To right the ship, Saadi and the clerics need to moderate
their expectations, and force a change in course. Or perhaps the recent surge
in violence will convince Nujafi and the politicians to realize a change in
strategy is in their interests. It is worth noting that the protests are not as
large as they used to be, and in the recent election Sunni voters mostly opted
toward the center. This kind of turn to realism by Sunnis saved Iraq in 2007,
so a positive outcome is possible.
Then in regard to the other wing of the movement, there is
an important clarification to make regarding the protests being “peaceful.”
Although the radical groups don’t bring weapons to the protests, from the very
beginning their goal has been to push the country back to war, and this is
especially true of JRTN, which was behind the Hawija events. Other parts of the
militant wing, such as the Islamic Army, have more modest goals, and appear to
just want to use force or the threat thereof to redraw the balance of power,
and create Sunni regions. But these groups have never been just a small number
of “troublemakers,” as they are sometimes called. The insurgent front groups
have actually controlled an outright majority of the protest sites, albeit not
a majority of the protestors, since Ramadi camp protests are larger on average.
Looking further in the future, the danger of partition is
more real now than it has been in any time since 2006. And this is where the
difference between mainstream supporters of Sunni regions like Nujafi, the
Islamic Army, and the JRTN tends to collapse. The JRTN is wrong in thinking it
can take Baghdad, but Nujafi and the Islamic Army are wrong in thinking that
Maliki, or anyone who replaces him, is just going to hand over budget money to
an autonomous Sunni region with its own independent security force, like the
Kurds have now. This is on the minds of Shia leaders, as Maliki himself and his
surrogates have publicly warned that outright partition was a possibility. Adnan
al-Siraj, a Maliki ally, explicitly stated this in a March 14 edition of
al-Jazeera’s Behind the News, saying Shia could go their own way and Sunni
Arabs would suffer the most.
This is the scenario I think Siraj had in mind. The Shia
government, with its base in the south, would take Baghdad, which is close to
75-80 percent Shia now, plus most of Diyala and parts of southern Salahaddin.
Sunnis have for years accused the Maliki government of consciously encouraging
Shia migration to the Shia shrine area in Samarra. I can’t prove this, but what
I believe is that back in 2006 the Shia leadership held a meeting, and made a
contingency plan in case the state fell apart, and there is no way they were
going to allow a Shia shrine to fall into the hands of a Sunni state. So they
began to encourage Shia migration to that area. Also related to this is the
fact that the Shia government did nothing to stop the sectarian cleansing of
Baghdad by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in the 2006-2007 period. Only in 2008,
when the Shia had won the Battle of Baghdad decisively, did Maliki move against
the Sadrist militia.
Both Sunni leaders and international actors need to take
Siraj’s comments very seriously. A partition would be a total catastrophe, not
only for Iraq’s Sunnis, but for the region, as Sunni Iraq would then merge with
the fiery cauldron that is Syria. Maliki needs to press ahead with legal
reforms and concessions to the Sunnis, and put off his showdown with the
Baathists to later. There will need to be a security solution to the JRTN, as
they are truly irredeemable, but Hawija was the wrong place and wrong time to
force a showdown. And then as long as Maliki does this, Sunni leaders need to
support those moves. That is, I think, the only path that keeps Iraq from
falling apart.
