Freedom, Geopolitics, Conspiracies, Health, and more
By: Graham Gambier
Date: 16 August 2014
The Iraq Crisis in Detail
The ongoing vicious fighting in Iraq is often characterized as a battle between the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and the Iraqi government. Many people think of this as simply being a proxy war between Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority and Shia majority.But it's more complicated than that. There are Sunnis on both sides of the conflict, and some who are neutral. There are multiple insurgent groups that aren't ISIS. And the Kurds— non-Arab Sunni Muslims who have a semi-autonomous state in northeast Iraq — have a totally unique role in the ongoing fighting, and may actually be benefiting from it.
One of the major drivers of the rise of ISIS has been Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's policy towards the Sunni Muslim minority.
Maliki, a Shia Muslim, has built a Shia sectarian state and refused to take steps to accommodate Sunnis. Police have killed peaceful Sunni protesters and used anti-terrorism laws to mass-arrest Sunni civilians. Maliki has made political alliances with violent Shia militias, infuriating Sunnis. ISIS cannily exploited that brutality to recruit fighters.
Composition of Iraq
Almost exactly a century ago Britain and France drew up the 1916 Sykes-Picot borders that turned Ottoman Mesopotomia into modern day Iraq
Iraq is composed of five main constituencies:
- The ruling Shia south-east
- The Shia-Sunni south (largely uninhabited)
- The Sunni north-west
- The Sunni-Kurd (mid?) north, and
- The Kurdish north-east
Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party suppressed the Shia and the Kurds and, under his reign, the Sunnis ruled Iraq.
The US invasion of Iraq led to the 2006-2007 Sunni-Shia civil war.
The Shia faction won the civil war, with heavy-handed US backing, who installed the Shia as the ruling faction, currently under Nouri al-Maliki.
Oil reserves in Iraq are considered the world’s fifth-largest proven oil reserves, with 140 billion barrels.
The Shia south-east has the majority of the oil reserves and, although under-invested, a developed infrastructure to exploit it, thus the vast majority of the income.
There are substantial oilfields in the Kurdish region but the regime always appropriated much of the revenue. Also, some of the infrastructure has been damaged by recent events.
The Kurds and the Sunnis are dependent on Baghdad for their budgets. This is what held Iraq together all these years — it would have fallen apart years ago had it not been for this financial dependence.
Background to the current crisis
Sunni Expectations
Saddam spread a false belief that Sunnis were the real majority in Iraq. Many Sunni still believe that they are the demographic majority in Iraq (even though they're not), either by themselves or by including the Kurds in their calculation, and that they should still be the ruling ruling faction.
Some Sunni remain Ba'athist and are deeply resentful of the loss of status and power of their party.
The Sunnis want a proper level of representation in government.
Shia Treatment of the Sunnis
During the civil war the "Peace Brigades", the Mahdi Army’s euphemism for its bands of fighters - the same men who killed hundreds of British and American troops during the occupation - now acted as death squads who acted against the Sunnis.
Mr Zamili, a former deputy health minister, was accused of running such death squads from the department of health's hospitals, using ambulances to kidnap and murder hundreds of Sunnis.
The torture and slaughter of Sunnis by Shia death squads continues. Night after night death squads rampage through Iraq's main cities. In Baghdad, up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets. Often they've been tortured with electric drills.
These Shia death squads want to turn Iraq into a Shia state aligned to Iran.
The Maliki government unwisely relys on Shia militias, particularly Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), translated as League of the Righteous, a splinter group of the radical Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. Then there's the Badr Organization, which is part of Maliki's coalition and controls the Transportation Ministry. It was founded as the military wing of the Iran-backed Shia group called the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
Under Maliki, people found themselves subject to illegal arrest. Prisoners were treated badly and there's no transparency in terms of prosecution. Sunnis are disproportionately the ones who are prisoners.
Last year, there were a series of operations to counter the second Sunni insurgency. The administration arrested 800 people in a month and nobody knows what happened to these people, how many were innocent, how many were guilty, or if they were prosecuted. Oftentimes Iraqis sit in prisons for years without a trial. Sometimes they're tortured; sometimes people, especially Sunnis, have to pay ransoms to get their family members out of prisons even if they didn't do anything wrong.
Iranian intervention could help ISIS in its quest to build support among Iraq's Sunnis. The perception that the Iraqi government is far too close to Iran is already a significant grievance among Sunnis. That's part pure sectarianism and part nationalism. Many Iraqis don't like the idea of a foreign power manipulating their government, particularly Iran because memories of the Iran-Iraq war haven't faded. Iranian participation in actual combat risks legitimizing ISIS' propaganda line that this isn't a conflict between the central Iraqi government and insurgent rebels, but rather a war between Sunnis and Shias.
Composition of the Sunnis
There's three major groups:
- The group who support the insurgency.
- The group who are in the political process, but opposed to Maliki, and
- The group who are in the political process and aligned with Maliki.
The group aligned with Maliki are a very small percentage, probably no more than those who support ISIS.
A clear majority of Sunnis, at the grassroots level, believe in the political process, but, there's also a lot of people on the borderline who are willing to vote but are also willing to support the insurgency.
The Supporters of the Insurgency
ISIS, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is the most radical element. Their fighters are well trained and battle-hardened, having spent years fighting in Iraq and Syria. In its self-proclaimed status as a caliphate, ISIS claims religious authority over all Muslims across the world and aspires to bring much of the Muslim-inhabited regions of the world under its direct political control, beginning with territory in the Levant region, which includes Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, and an area in southern Turkey that includes HatayThen you've got more nationalist-focused groups like the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandia (JRTN), which means "The Army of the Men of the Naqshbandia Way.", headed by Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, who was the former deputy of Saddam Hussein. Many of its members are former members of Saddam's Ba'ath party. They are an important group. Their goal is to restore a centralized Sunni dictatorship, but more secular than the jihadist caliphate the ISIS would put in place.
These two groups seem more interested in fighting Maliki's Shia government than each other, but there are signs of friction. In mid-July, residents of Muqdadiya found 12 bodies, corpses of fighters killed in a clash between ISIS and JRTN.
Those Opposed to Maliki
Of those who are opposed to Maliki, Nujayfi's Mutahidun is the largest group having won 27 seats in the last election. That's down from 45 in the previous, but nonetheless, Mutahidun and the factions that make it up clearly represent the plurality of Sunnis in the political process.You've also got Iyad Allawi's cross-sectarian, but mostly Sunni, Nationalist Coalition. They won 21 seats; of which 15 or 16 were Sunni. Allawi himself is Shia, but his key allies were Sunni.
Then you've got Salih Al-Mutlak's Arab Coalition, which has 11 seats. There, they're closer to Maliki — they don't support Maliki per se, but they're willing to work with him.
Those Who Support Maliki
You've got people like like Saadoun al-Dulaimi, the acting Defense Minister, whose people are basically paid for.Then you've got some groups who have been forced to flip based on legal threats, based on crimes genuine or fabricated. Maliki will just sit on the criminal files until they become useful. That's what happened with prominent Sunni politician Jamal Al-Karbuli.
These bribed and threatened politicians only represent an extremely limited portion of Sunni Iraq.
The prospects for ISIS and the other Sunni insurgent groups to carve out a semi-autonomous state
The insurgents can only win if they get the Shia to give up. If the insurgents keep fighting over two or three years, and the Shia just give up they can win.The mainstream Sunnis are divided and extremely weak. The Iraqi Army units that just dissolved when the fighting started were heavily Sunni, and there was clearly some collaboration going on between them and the insurgents.
But if you have a Shia unit, highly motivated, they have huge advantages in hardware and numbers. They're going to sweep all before them. That doesn't mean they'll exterminate the insurgency, but they'll guarantee the insurgency can't control a region.
ISIS cannot challenge the Iraqi government for control over the country. On a basic level, it's simple math. A rough count of ISIS' fighting strength suggests it has a bit more than 7,000 combat troops, and it can occasionally grab reinforcements from other extremist militias. The Iraqi army has 250,000 troops, plus armed police. The Iraqi military also has tanks, airplanes, and helicopters. ISIS can't make a serious play for the control of Baghdad, let alone the south of Iraq, without a serious risk of getting crushed.
Sectarianism plays a role here. The Iraqi army is mixed Sunni and Shia, and the Iraqi Army is cleaving along sectarian lines. E.g. The willingness of Sunni soldiers to fight to retake Mosul appears limited. This makes some sense out of the Mosul rout: some Sunni Muslims don't really want to fight other Sunnis in the name of a government that oppresses them.
On the other hand, the chaos in Syria allowed ISIS to hold this territory pretty securely. This is a big deal in terms of weaponry and money. The war gave them a lot of access to heavy weaponry.
It's also hugely important as a safe zone. When fighting Syrian troops, ISIS can safely retreat to Iraq; when fighting Iraqis it can go to Syria. Statistical evidence says these safe rear areas help insurgents win. One of the best predictors of insurgent success that we have to date is the presence of a rear area.
Unlike some other Islamist groups fighting in Syria, ISIS doesn't depend on foreign aid to survive. In Syria, they've built up something like a mini-state: collecting the equivalent of taxes in the areas it controls, selling electricity to the Syrian government that it's currently fighting, and exporting oil to fund its militant activities.
ISIS' near-term goal to hold Iraqi oil and power facilities is credible. ISIS sees oil as an important part of its future development.
The west is proposing to arm the Kurds. The Peshmerga are formidable fighters and, if they can hold Kirkuk and its oil fields and oil pipeline to Turkey, they might thwart ISIS's oil plans in Iraq.
Iran's Ayatollah Sistani has declared a fatwa against ISIS and has vowed to fight them and such a fight would have Iraqi government support and possibly US support.
In June, Iran sent about 500 Revolutionary Guards to help Iraq fight ISIS. These aren't just any old Iranian troops. They're Quds Force, the Guards' elite special operations group. The Quds Force is one of the most effective military forces in the Middle East. One former CIA officer called Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani "the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today."
The US, UK and France have embarked on a mission of 'humanitarian aid', to relieve the Yazidis and Christians in Mount Sinjar in the Southern Kurdish region by bombing the insurgents and dropping aid to the beleaguered. This aid mission is open-ended and may well suffer 'mission-creep'. Although western governments have insisted 'no boots on the ground' any number of 'black swan' events may change that.
In June, Obama sent up to 575 American troops to Iraq. The first 275 troops are equipped for combat, but were tasked solely with providing security to personnel evacuating the Baghdad embassy. The next 300, though, are different. These troops are deployed to "joint operation centers" on the ground to coordinate US and Iraqi intelligence on the conflict.
The US has moved cruise missile destroyers into the Persian Gulf and has not ruled out airstrikes.
In terms of an endgame, experts see ISIS failing to establish an effective rebel government and the Kurds coming out as big winners, provided the recent fighting in Kurdistan ends favorably for them.
What Should the West Do?
In my opinion: Absolutely nothing, this is not our fight.The current limited western intervention is supposed to be on humanitarian grounds to prevent genocide of the Yazidis and the Christians, but what about the Christians in Syria, or the Palestinians in Gaza? Why aren’t we intervening in those cases?
The UK and France created Iraq (and Syria) out of disparate warring tribes in their despicable and underhand division of the Ottoman Empire in the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. Iraq is not a natural country and should be allowed to dissolve into its constituent parts. Let the Sunnis have their own state, we should support self-determination for them and for the Kurds and Shia too.
The US created this current mess. First they supported, armed and trained their 'friend' Saddam Hussein when he was their foe Iran's enemy, then they turned against him when he attacked Kuwait
Before the first Gulf War the US gave Saddam to understand that it would not interfere in its quarrel with Kuwait. US Ambassador April Glaspie conveyed the message to Saddam that the US 'had no opinion' on Iraq's future intentions with regard to Kuwait because Kuwait, along with the UAE, was artificially depressing the oil price and certain American interests didn't like that.
The US blatantly, and with foreknowledge, fabricated the reasons for the second Iraq war because Saddam was planning the ultimate blasphemy of not selling his oil in US dollars.
The US didn't just vanquish Saddam Hussein and his military forces in the second Iraq war but destroyed most of the civilian infrastructure of Iraq.
The US support for the Shias in the Iraqi civil war, and the subsequent suppression of the Sunnis, is what led us to this point.
No one in Iraq, indeed no one in the entire middle-east, trusts the US.
The west has 'helped' enough. It is time we learned to leave well alone.
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