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Only one thing unites Iraq: hatred of the US
The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their
cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies
By Patrick Cockburn
12/12/07 ""The
Independent"" -- -- As British forces come to the
end of their role in Iraq, what sort of country do they leave
behind? Has the United States turned the tide in Baghdad? Does
the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilising after
more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a temporary
pause in the fighting?
American commentators are generally making the same mistake that
they have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated
five years ago. They look at Iraq in over-simple terms and
exaggerate the extent to which the US is making the political
weather and is in control of events there.
The US is the most powerful single force in Iraq but by no means
the only one. The shape of Iraqi politics has changed over the
past year, though for reasons that have little to do with "the
surge" – the 30,000 US troop reinforcements – and much to do
with the battle for supremacy between the Sunni and Shia Muslim
communities.
The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa'ida partly because
it tried to monopolise power but primarily because it brought
their community close to catastrophe. The Sunni war against US
occupation had gone surprisingly well for them since it began in
2003. It was a second war, the one against the Shia majority led
by al-Qa'ida, which the Sunni were losing, with disastrous
results for themselves. "The Sunni people now think they cannot
fight two wars – against the occupation and the government – at
the same time," a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. "We
must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the
moment."
This is why much of the non-al-Qa'ida Sunni insurgency has
effectively changed sides. An important reason why al-Qa'ida has
lost ground so swiftly is a split within its own ranks. The US
military – the State Department has been very much marginalised
in decision-making in Baghdad – does not want to emphasise that
many of the Sunni fighters now on the US payroll, who are
misleadingly called "concerned citizens", until recently
belonged to al Qa'ida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi
civilians and American soldiers on their hands.
The Sunni Arabs, five million out of an Iraqi population of 27
million and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's government, were
the core of the resistance to the US occupation. But they have
also been fighting a sectarian war to prevent the 16 million
Shia and the five million Kurds holding power.
At first, the Shia were very patient in the face of atrocities.
Vehicles, packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers,
were regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shia market
places or religious processions, killing and maiming hundreds of
people. The bombers came from al-Qa'ida but the attacks were
never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni political leaders or
other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very
short-sighted since the Iraqi Shia outnumber the Sunni three to
one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the
revered Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February, 2006.
The bombing led to a savage Shia onslaught on the Sunni, which
became known in Iraq as "the battle for Baghdad". This struggle
was won by the Shia. They were always the majority in the
capital but, by the end of 2006, they controlled 75 per cent of
the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back into a few
enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad.
In the wake of this defeat, there was less and less point in the
Sunni trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was
itself being evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The
Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on
their community by the Shia would provoke Arab Sunni states like
Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support but this
never materialised.
It was al-Qa'ida's slaughter of Shia civilians, whom it sees as
heretics worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni
community. Al-Qa'ida also grossly overplayed its hand at the end
of last year by setting up the Islamic State of Iraq, which
tried to fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the
Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed
because they worked for the government and Sunni families in
Baghdad were ordered to send one of their members to join al
Qai'da. Bizarrely, even Osama bin Laden, who never had much
influence over al Qa'ida in Iraq, was reduced to advising his
acolytes against extremism.
Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa'ida gave
the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qa'ida
Sunni militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and
paid for by the US. But the creation of this force is a new
stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the conflict.
Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where
Sunni and Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left.
Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the
elimination of al Qai'ida as a preliminary to an attack on the
Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which
triumphed last year.
The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and
weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as
the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it
does not control this new force.
If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the
other was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia
nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to
purge it of elements he does not control, and wishes to avoid a
military confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community
if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would
certainly fight if the Shia community came under attack or the
Americans pressured it too hard.
American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust
that Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But
equally destabilising is the presence of a large US army in Iraq
and the uncertainty about what role the US will play in future.
However much Iraqis may fight among themselves, a central
political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the US-led
occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since
the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out
by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 per
cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable.
Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The
Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in
Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has
become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last
for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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