Under Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arabs exercised power through Iraq’s security apparatus and the support they garnered from neighbouring Sunni Arab states who perceived Iraq as the Arab bulwark against Persian designs on the region. Yet Sunni Arabs comprised barely a fifth of the Shia majority state. Amid the rising sectarian rivalry, Shia populations around the world anticipated regime change as liberation from the Sunni yoke.
Sunni power brokers were less enthused, fearing Saddam Hussein’s fall might trigger a domino effect. Ever since Napoleon Bonaparte first conquered the Nile Delta in 1799, Western colonial powers had chipped at more than a millennium of Sunni Muslim rule, divvying-up the Near East between non-Arab or non-Sunni satraps. In the carve-up that followed the First World War, Christians had won power in Lebanon and Jews in Palestine; a generation later Alawites had won power in Syria. Fearing further erosion, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned that US policy would create a Shia arc extending horizontally from Iran west through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean, and vertically incorporating the world’s largest oilfields from the Shia-majority Azerbaijan in the north via Iraq to the eastern Arabian coast.
At the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002, Gulf leaders publicly embraced Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Eddin Ibrahim. Visiting American officials preparing their war plans faced constant clamouring that the region’s crisis was in Palestine, where Israel was suppressing the second intifada, not Baghdad. Financial anxieties fuelled their fears. Jordan’s monarch feared for his oil supply which Iraq supplied for free, and UN agencies – which had served as the conduit for $60 billion of Iraqi oil expenditures – faced the loss of their largest ever cash cow.
Saddam Hussein was neither an Iraqi Nasser nor an Arab Bismarck, and still less a new Saladin as some Arabs vainly hoped (Mussolini was a more likely antecedent). But his supply of medicines for Palestine’s wounded, his cry of ‘Jihad to liberate Palestine!’, his largesse to targeted social sectors (he built a housing estate for Jordanian journalists), and his image as a Sunni standard bearer all struck a popular chord. Thus, rather than celebrate the toppling of the region’s most brutal dictator, Arab demonstrators took to the streets to protest against it. Egyptian and Jordanian police opened fire to quell near daily protests. In Damascus and Riyadh, thousands flouted interior ministry bans to rally outside US consulates.
Inside Iraq, the mood was decidedly ambivalent. Washington was widely perceived as serving its own needs, not Iraq’s. Amid the countdown to war, the UN Security Council dispatched dozens of UN monitors to rake Iraq for elusive weapons of mass destruction, but none for human rights abuses. Sanctions too were widely blamed for eroding the coping mechanisms of Iraq’s people, while strengthening the regime by giving it control over the population’s bellies. That said, after a decade of foreign sanctions and internal brutalization, many looked for any way out. Shias, in particular, welcomed US intervention. Washington’s rhetoric of rescuing Iraq from tyranny dovetailed surprisingly with Shia millennial theology, which promised redemption from oppression. Democracy was all the more attractive if it could deliver majority (Shia) rule.
The speed of America’s conquest of Iraq was aptly likened to the six days in June 1967 it took Israel to conquer Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Sinai. Galloping 700 kilometres from the Kuwaiti border, US forces captured Baghdad in ten days, and the country in less than three weeks. Government forces largely fled. With remarkably few casualties, the invasion toppled the most militarized regime in the Arab world.
The pace of conquest, however, was illusory. As America’s forces raced north, they bypassed most of Iraq’s cities. The regime collapsed, but a plethora of well-armed local chieftains and religious leaders filled the vacuum. In Baghdad, mobs pillaged the assets of central government, stymieing the possibility of an immediate resumption of central control. The machinery of state – public records offices, prisons and courtrooms – was reduced to ash, and symbols of power, including the world’s greatest Assyrian collection at the Iraq Museum, stripped. In the north, Kurdish peshmerga forces expanded their Kurdish autonomous zone southwards, into the territories of a purported ancestral Kurdistan, including the oil-rich town of Kirkuk. US generals, who weeks earlier had scorned Saddam Hussein’s seventy-two gold-plated palaces, Louis XIV furniture and private swimming pools gave free rein to their troops to delight in them, oblivious to the unfolding looting and warlordism raging outside the gates.
Two months after the invasion, Washington attempted to assert control by appointing Paul Bremer, a former US counter-terrorism department chief, to head its Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) charged with running Iraq. Within days of his arrival, he quashed planned local elections and ruled as sovereign, issuing fiats that began, ‘I hereby promulgate’, and were designed to serve as the architecture of a model state. By the time of his hurried departure thirteen months later, he had issued 100 orders, 17 memoranda, 12 public notices and 12 regulations, whose cumulative affect was to gut Iraq of its security forces, bureaucracy, nomenklatura and nationalized industries.
But for all his grandiose ambitions, Bremer never really projected his authority much beyond the walled Green Zone that US forces carved out of central Baghdad. Corruption was rife. His skeletal staff – often composed of novices and non-Arabic speakers – administered billions transferred in pallets of cash. US corporations grabbed the largest contracts, and after taking huge service charges handed them on to subcontractors who took their slice and did the same. What little trickled into Iraq was used to hire migrant labourers, as in Arab Gulf states. Iraqi employees and products were considered too high-risk. By the end of his tenure, Bremer had spent all Iraq’s oil revenues as well as the Iraqi assets which the UN had frozen and licensed for his disposal. Of the promised reconstruction, there was no sign.
His political architecture was similarly threadbare. In deference to local demands for representation, he appointed a 25-member Governing Council of Iraqis, divvying out posts on the basis of sectarian demographic weight. Though hailed as Iraq’s most representative body because it awarded Shiites a majority, most of its members were long-term exiles. All but one of its nine rotating presidents lived abroad, five of them in London. Bremer’s plans were similarly foreign. His blueprint for revamping Iraq was based on the Allied reconstruction of post-war Germany. In place of de-Nazification he imposed de-Baathification, disbanding the forces of law and order to the last traffic warden. But while he perfected his plans in his palace, other forces unleashed by the US invasion reshaped Iraq on the ground.
Iraq’s Shia Conversion
Saddam’s overthrow precipitated a wave of Shia triumphalism. By the time US tanks rolled into Saddam City, the capital’s slum district which was home to two million Shiites, young clerics surfacing from years in hiding were already in control and fanning out through the city. By the end of April 2003, clerics controlled two-thirds of Baghdad’s clinics and a third of its hospitals. Saddam City was renamed Sadr City, after the two leading Shia clerics who had opposed Saddam. Across southern Iraq vigilantes led by clerics imposed their version of Islamic law, lashing alcohol merchants and destroying gypsy encampments.
After decades of suppression and closure, the husseiniya, or Shia prayer hall, resurfaced as the hub of communal decision-making. Exuberant Shia crowds whitewashed Saddam’s ubiquitous aphorisms and stencils from billboards and classroom walls, and replaced them with images of ayatollahs. They unearthed mass graves, where according to Human Rights Watch Saddam had buried 300,000 Shias. Shia seminaries, closed as part of Baath party policy as comprehensive as Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, also resurfaced. For the first time in centuries, Shia flags flew over Iraq’s institutions. In short, America’s toppling of the Baath spawned a Shia renaissance.
The religiosity appeared to take the American newcomers by surprise. Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence, had predicted Iraqi Shiites would be better friends for the US than the Saudis because they were ‘secu
lar’. But within months the US-appointed Governing Council had signed a Basic Law, or quasi-constitution, stipulating that Iraq’s laws should conform to the Islamic canon.
That said, despite appearances, the clergy’s ascendancy in Iraq bore significant differences to that in neighbouring Iran. Unlike Ayatollah Khomeini and his theory of the velayat al-faqih, or sovereignty of a single religious jurisprudent, Iraq’s leading clerics did not aspire to create a theocracy, still less to run one, but rather to advise the ruling authorities. The leading religious party, Dawa, espoused the notion of velayat al-umma, or popular sovereignty, in which the people served as God’s vice-regents and held legislative and executive power. ‘Islamic theory rejects aristocratic regimes and proposes a form of government which contains all the positive aspects of the democratic system,’ wrote their leading ideologue Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr in the 1970s before Saddam tortured him to death.
Foremost amongst Iraq’s Shia clerics was Grand Ayatollah Sistani. He made an unlikely Iraqi liberator. Born 800 miles away in the Iranian shrine city of Marshad in 1930, he first visited Iraq aged thirty and was something of a recluse. And yet for over a year his fatwas, written in a pinched hand, flummoxed and ultimately unseated Bremer, carrying far more weight than the latter’s edicts heavy with legalese. Though cloistered in his Najaf office, he was the dynamo that drove Iraq’s transition to democracy. He gave elections a religious stamp of approval, declared voting an Islamic duty, and as spiritual leader of Iraq’s largest community, kept Iraq’s 15 million Shias from open revolt against US forces on the understanding that the US would stage free and fair elections and hand power to their victors.
To this end he galvanized demonstrations in numbers rarely seen in the Middle East except at funerals. Launched in January 2004 from the Basra mosque where Shia rebels had launched their 1991 revolt, the protestors marched north, gathering numbers as they moved up the Tigris. By the time they reached Baghdad, Bremer had begun to backtrack on his ambition to govern Iraq. In March 2004, he handed back the first ministry to Iraqi rule, and as he ended a visit to the health ministry officials unfurled a large black banner from its rooftop, proclaiming ‘Hussein’s Revolution’. Bremer furtively left Baghdad in June 2004, handing over to an unelected Interim Iraqi Government and a US ambassador. Despite mounting violence, Sistani continued to champion Iraq’s first parliamentary elections, set for January 2005, turning his office into an election machine. He authorized a single Shia list, dispensed millions of dollars in campaign funds, and used the 2,500 mosques which followed his fatwas to broadcast voting instructions to the faithful. Defying the threat of massacres by Sunni rebels seeking to enforce a boycott and thwart a Shia victory, Shias turned out to vote in their millions.
Sistani did face challenges to his reformist creed. Muqtada Sadr was the young scion of Iraq’s most prominent clerical family, with a reputation for siding with the Shia poor and dispossessed. Impatient with Sistani’s constitutional approach, Sadr called for a popular revolution against both the US occupation and the mercantile elites allied with Sistani. After failing to spark a popular uprising in November 2003 with a creed steeped in millenarianism, he opted for military means. He assembled a 60,000-strong armed force, drawn largely from the lower, and predominantly Shia, ranks of Saddam’s disbanded infantry. He named it the Mahdi’s Army after the twelfth Imam of the Shiites, who according to Shia tradition would return as the Messiah, and made rapid gains. In March 2004 his forces swept through seven southern provinces, and overran police stations and a Coalition base from Basra to Kirkuk, procuring much-needed arms in the process. They also wrested control of Iraq’s lucrative Shia shrine-cities, Karbala and Najaf, from Sistani’s clerics. Though rapidly pushed back elsewhere in Iraq, they only abandoned Najaf after US-led forces, with Sistani’s tacit assent, stormed the shrine in August 2004.
Amid growing intra-Shia rancour, forces professing loyalty to Sistani repeatedly clashed with Sadr’s as they vied for control of Shia towns. Only loosely controlled by the clerics, the military wings repeatedly resorted to gangsterism. After heavy fighting for control of Basra in spring 2008, US–Iraqi forces attacked Sadr’s heartland in Baghdad, Sadr City. Sadr disbanded his forces and fled to Iran to study religious jurisprudence in Qom, determined to renew his claim to political and religious Shia leadership at a later date.
The Sunni Counter-attack
As Saddam’s Sunni hierarchy tumbled under the combined assault of Bremer’s decrees and Shia supremacists, angry protests erupted led by the newly unemployed. For the most part, they closely mirrored Iraq’s sectarian divide. Heavy-handed US responses, particularly in Fallujah, where US forces opened fire on demonstrators to lethal effect, fuelled the anger. Without a Sistani figure to harness dissent, Sunni opposition in central and northern Iraq fragmented into loosely coordinated cells of former soldiers, under the command of Saddam’s generals, particularly those of the Republican Guard. Their targets were the newly ascendant Shia leadership, US forces, and the foreign mercenaries and Iraqis they employed.
An influx of jihadi groups, who trickled in from Afghanistan before the invasion and flooded from across the region and beyond soon afterwards, fuelled animosities. Hosted in Sunni areas, they made common cause – or in the words of US commanders ‘a marriage of convenience’ – with ex-Baathist cells. From their rear bases along the upper Euphrates and Tigris valleys, especially in the western province of Anbar, they conducted a wave of suicide bombings in Iraq’s major cities. Initially focusing on foreign targets – the Jordanian Embassy and the Baghdad headquarters of the UN and Red Cross were amongst the first targets – they increasingly targeted Shia civilians.
The brutality of US counter-insurgency methods and the siege and subsequent storming of Anbar’s main towns, Fallujah and Ramadi, only accentuated sympathies for the jihadis, further cementing the alliance with the local population. In contrast to Arab nationalism, jihadi ideology thrived on repression. ‘Jihadi violence is like a virus,’ noted an exiled ideologue. ‘The more you bomb it, the more it spreads.’
Despite, or perhaps because of, Saddam’s capture in December 2003, the revolt flourished. Jihadi cells were ever more in the commanding seat. The following month rebels dispatched their first platoon-sized Special Forces – operating under such names as ‘Jihadi Earthquake Brigades’, challenging US forces’ hold on provincial capitals. In October 2006, an umbrella group of jihadi organizations in Mesopotamia declared an independent Islamic state covering Arab Sunni provinces across Iraq. US forces had some success co-opting Iraqi Sunnis by reviving military units Bremer had disbanded, but jihadi groups retained remarkable staying power. Six years on, they continued to jolt central government with a series of huge bombings against government offices.
Iraq’s Civil War and Shia Victory
Iraq does not split neatly into Sunni and Shia parts. Iraqi tribes straddle the sectarian divide and most count tribesmen from both. In the north, a substantial minority of Iraq’s Kurds are Shia; in the south a quarter of Basra is Sunni, and Baghdad is a communal patchwork. Or was.
Bremer’s handover of formal control to Iraqis launched the communal race for control of Iraq. Shias fought with the demographic muscle of the ballot box, Sunnis with arms. At their peak, an average of six suicide bombings a day struck Baghdad, sometimes targeting Shias in their market places, other times their shrines. Guided by Sistani, Shias displayed remarkable restraint. But Shias were increasingly traumatized: rumours of a suicide bomber loose amongst pilgrims on a bridge linking Baghdad’s two principal shrines precipitated a stampede in which nearly 1,000 people died – the single worst toll in post-invasion Iraq. As the bloodshed swelled, people on both sides looked to armed groups to safeguard their economic, legal and physical well-being.
The jihadis’ destruction of Samarra’s gold-topped Imam al-Asqari Shia shrine in February 2007 marked the tipping point. In its wake, Shia militants attacked over a hundred Sunni mosques and killed a dozen Sunni imams. Death squads armed
with electric drills toured heterogeneous but predominantly Shia suburbs and satellite towns of Baghdad, torturing Sunnis to death. The predominantly Shia security forces – drafted by the Iraqi government under US supervision and commanded by a Shia interior minister and his appointees – exacerbated the terror. Sunni fighters, who had fared well against US troops, were increasingly on the defensive. Three-quarters of the 3,000 cadavers arriving in Baghdad morgues every month in 2007 were Sunni.
The revenge killings triggered a Sunni flight, emptying whole neighbourhoods of their non-Shia populations. As they fled, US forces erected concrete blast-walls and checkpoints, splitting the capital into cantons of separate sects and quarantined confessions. Baghdad’s hotchpotch grew increasingly monochrome, with the east bank of the Tigris – Rusafa – almost entirely rid of its Sunnis. Similar scenes repeated themselves in other hitherto mixed parts of Iraq. By 2007 over two million mainly Sunni Iraqis had fled north or abroad: an average of 100,000 people per month. Many were middle class. In their absence sectarian warlords and tribal sheiks held ever greater sway.
When the civil war’s dust settled in 2008 the result was a striking change in Baghdad’s demography. A Colombia University survey revealed that of the capital’s five million people, only a few hundred thousand were Sunni. Countrywide, the proportion of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs fell from 20 to 12 per cent of the population. Washington claimed credit for the decline of the Sunni insurgency, attributing it to its increased troop ‘surge’, beginning in summer 2007. More accurately, the Shia counter-attack had shattered Sunni resistance. Many Sunni fighters jumped at the US offer to register for a Sons of Iraq programme, which allowed them to keep their guns and earn cash nominally fighting al-Qaeda, and salvage a little honour from the jaws of defeat. Having previously fought ballots with bullets, Sunni Arabs begrudgingly ended their boycott and insurgency, and accepted political integration into the post-Saddam Iraq. By 2009, the death-toll had dropped from a few thousand to a few dozen per month.
A History of the Middle East Page 50