by John McHugo
General Zia ul-Haq was killed in August 1988 by a bomb planted on his plane. The rise of sectarianism in Pakistan that took place during his rule has not been reversed to this day, despite the reversion of the country to democracy. Attacks continue on Shi‘is and Sufis and any other group deemed by Wahhabi-inspired movements to be engaging in idolatry. A militantly anti-Shi‘i organisation called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is blamed by the government for the attack in August 2016 on the police academy in Quetta in which at least sixty people were killed. In February 2017, nearly ninety people were killed in a bomb blast at a Sufi shrine in rural Sindh. Such attacks are sadly part of a pattern that now extends well beyond Pakistan.
IX
The period from the Islamic Revolution in Iran to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 saw the reaffirmation of Muslim identity in a way, and to an extent, that few would have predicted at the start of the 1970s. This reaffirmation of identity did not of itself imply sectarian conflict among Muslims, but there were forces working in that direction. These can be seen clearly in the ominous developments in Pakistan, where the growth of sectarianism was a consequence of Saudi Arabian and Iranian interference on the one hand, and manipulation by the Pakistani government on the other. In the final chapter of this book there will unfortunately be all too many similar examples.
Another harbinger of what was to come was the discrimination against Shi‘is in Saudi Arabia. The existence of the sectarian divide in that country turned out to be the perfect way to defuse calls for real reform, which might have led to a united front among Sunnis and Shi‘is. The pursuit of sectarianism would become almost a deliberate strategy, while the weakness of so many states and the reliance on quasi-tribal patronage as the basis of power would make unity across sectarian divides much harder to achieve. Few foresaw the Iranian Revolution in, say, 1977. In the same way, few in early 2001 would have predicted that two years later the USA would invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. And few of the policy makers in Washington and London who were engaged in the planning of that invasion seem to have foreseen that it would unwittingly open the gate to a sectarian Hell.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Wedges into Fault-Lines
I
When George W. Bush took the momentous decision to invade Iraq in 2003, his forces had little difficulty reaching Baghdad. But the Americans and their allies had convinced themselves that they would be greeted as liberators. They hardly acknowledged that they were occupying a country that they had defeated in war, however hated its government may have been, and that they had responsibilities to safeguard its people under the laws of war. The result was a rapid breakdown of law and order. This was compounded as the Americans and their allies set out to dismantle the corrupt and brutal old dispensation, but failed to put anything effective in its place. Like many of the Americans brought in to work under him, Paul Bremer, the man chosen by Washington to govern Iraq for the immediate future, had no background knowledge of the Middle East. Even more crucially, he had no understanding of Arab or Muslim society. The Americans had their own ideas about how to rebuild Iraq. It was these ideas that would now be implemented, as well as the dictates of policies that were often crafted to gain approval from ideologists back in America (e.g. on opening up Iraq to free markets and rolling back ‘big government’). There was a complete failure to establish any records of Iraqi civilian casualties. The Iraqi state, which had been under extreme stress before the invasion, quite simply collapsed. At the same time, what has been called the ‘shadow state’, the networks of patronage and clientelism that had sustained Saddam Hussein’s rule, shattered into smithereens. People fell back on their own communities and networks. They would look to these, first, for their security and wellbeing. Only secondarily would they give thought to Iraq itself.
The American intention had been to create an Iraqi democracy. Yet, once they set out to achieve this noble aim, they soon encountered unwelcome realities. As it has been put by Charles Tripp, professor of politics with reference to the Middle East at SOAS:1
Public ministries became partisan fiefdoms, farmed out to powerful factions, made more powerful by their ability to command militias that were used to terrorise political enemies and whole neighbourhoods or communities seen as hostile to their sponsors. The elected National Assembly, although the formal seat of authority, was not where power resided. This lay in the hands of men made powerful by the support they could muster in local ethnic and sectarian communities, by the weapons at their disposal, by the share of the national resources which they had managed to appropriate or by the patronage of the United States. In short, a range of mutually suspicious leaders were being encouraged to emerge as the new oligarchy of Iraq.2
In these circumstances sectarian identities were bound to come to the fore.
Muqtada al-Sadr, a firebrand Shi‘i militia leader who was the son of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, was able to benefit from the prestige of his deceased father’s name. This included the goodwill attached to the network his father had set up to help the Shi‘i poor, and over which the son now presided. Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr had been a highly respected figure. After apparently following a policy of quietism (that is, religious withdrawal from politics), he had become a public critic of the Saddam Hussein regime. He had followers among Sunnis as well as Shi‘is. Not only did he conduct joint prayer meetings, but he also encouraged Shi‘is to pray behind Sunni imams. He was reported to have had ambitions to become the leader of all Iraqi Muslims, although he never wavered in his strong Shi‘i positions on such matters as the history of the early caliphate. Despite this, his attempt to appeal across the sectarian divide had made him potentially a very dangerous figure for the regime of Saddam Hussein.3 He was executed in 1999.
The overwhelmingly Shi‘i working-class district in Baghdad once known as Madinat al-Thawra (‘City of the Revolution’) had been rebranded as Madinat Saddam (‘Saddam City’) in an act of sycophancy towards the dictator. But after the American invasion it soon became known as Madinat Sadr (‘Sadr City’). Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, which called itself the Mahdi Army, used violence against anyone who opposed Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City and large parts of the Shi‘i south. During the period immediately after the start of the American occupation, he initiated contact with Sunni insurgents. This might conceivably have led to cooperation between Sunni and Shi‘i militant groups against the occupiers, but it did not.
Muqtada al-Sadr also faced opposition from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior source of emulation in Iraq for Shi‘is. It will be recalled that Sistani had rejected Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih (government of the mujtahid). He believed that religious leaders should hold back from day-to-day politics. This put him at odds not only with Muqtada al-Sadr, but also with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and many in the al-Da‘wa Party. These two Shi‘i organisations had returned in force to Iraq as soon as Saddam Hussein fell. They had grown and been strengthened during their period in Iranian exile and also had their own fighting men. There was potential not only for strife between Sunnis and Shi‘is, but also within the Shi‘i community itself.
Acts of resistance to the occupiers increased. As early as July 2003, the Americans were forced to admit that they were facing ‘a classical guerrilla-type campaign’.4 The following month bombs killed the newly arrived UN representative Sérgio Vieira de Mello in Baghdad and Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of SCIRI who had just returned to Najaf from Iran. Attacks on those working for the new authorities or queuing up at recruitment centres became commonplace – especially in Shi‘i areas, where they were designed to intimidate Shi‘is who might volunteer for the police or government jobs. The resistance gradually became a full-blown insurgency, but it had no central leadership. It intended to make life for the occupiers so uncomfortable that they would leave. It included Ba‘athists who had lost out as a result of the dismantling of Saddam Hussein’s patronage networks, as well as assorted nationalist and Islamist element
s. Some of them wanted a return to the way things had been before the invasion, while others were motivated by instinctive revolt at the thought of America running their country.
The Shi‘i militias did not take part in this insurgency and generally stood on the sidelines, but using violence for their own purposes. They deeply resented the Americans and the disorder they had brought, but they were certainly not about to join forces with those who wished to see Saddam Hussein’s henchmen returned to power. In these circumstances, unity between Sunnis and Shi‘is against a foreign occupier became very difficult. Saddam Hussein’s manner of rule had ensured that this would be the case. For their part, much of the hostility among Sunni Muslims towards the new emerging dispensation targeted the Shi‘i community. They saw it as collaborating with the Americans to displace the Sunnis from their dominant position in Iraq.
At the same time, the breakdown in law and order following the invasion led to theft, robbery, kidnapping, drug smuggling and general criminality on a massive scale. One of the last acts of Saddam Hussein’s government had been to open the prisons and release the criminals from jail. This was followed at the time of the invasion by the disappearance of the police from view – often because they feared for their lives if they were seen in uniform. People were left with no support and protection, save what they could get from their extended family and those they could trust on a personal level. This was yet another stage in the Iraqi state’s retreat from the services it had once provided. That withdrawal had begun with the sanctions imposed during the Kuwait crisis, when Saddam Hussein could no longer provide the bulk of the population with their needs. Instead, he had cunningly encouraged the re-emergence of the tribal system, which previously had been in decay.
Despite the best efforts of Ayatollah Sistani and many other religious leaders (both Shi‘i and Sunni), the cycle of violence spiralled out of control. The situation made it possible for the type of Islamism that viewed Shi‘is as idolaters, worthy of death, to become increasingly prominent among Sunnis. Simultaneously on the Shi‘i side, SCIRI and its military wing, the Badr Brigade, were able to enmesh themselves at the heart of the government. Militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army carried out attacks against Sunnis. According to a report by the International Crisis Group (a Brussels-based organisation researching ways to avert and resolve conflict): ‘what they lacked in popularity they made up in resources, military organisation and patronage’.5 After elections in January 2005, some of the Badr Brigade operatives moved into the Ministry of the Interior. The borderline between them and the Ministry’s troops became blurred at a time when death squads were targeting Sunnis in Baghdad.
Increasingly, Sunnis and Shi‘is living in neighbourhoods dominated by the other sect left to live among members of their own in a different district. Bombs targeted mosques and markets in Shi‘i areas, and were paralleled by equally horrifying attacks on Sunnis. In this way, Baghdad gradually ceased to be a mixed city and become a predominantly Shi‘i one, with some Sunni enclaves.
In the wider Muslim world, the occupation of Iraq by the Americans and their allies was widely perceived (with considerable justification) as a move intended to lead to American and Israeli hegemony in the Arab Middle East. This inevitably sparked calls for a jihad to expel the invaders. Sunni fighters from other countries began to make the journey there. Iraq’s borders were now largely unguarded. Syria was nervous at neoconservative sabre-rattling in Washington that called for Syria to be invaded as soon as Iraq had been sorted out. The result was that Syria quietly let many Sunni fighters across its border. Many linked up with Iraqi Sunni Islamists and others fighting the American occupation. As time passed, large numbers of Sunni Ba‘athists and other nationalists would join the jihadi Islamists and adopt their ideologies.
Some of the newly arrived foreign fighters became followers of the Jordanian jihadi Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who horrified the world with his apparently psychopathic behaviour. He seems to have been one of the first to take pleasure in decapitating prisoners with a knife and depicting the grisly scene on a video. He is best known in the West for beheading the kidnapped British civil engineer Ken Bigley and other Western hostages. It is probably he, more than any other single individual, who lit the spark that ignited what can only be described as a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shi‘is in Iraq.
II
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was born in the Jordanian town of Zarqa in 1966. Zarqa had become home to destitute Palestinian refugees, many of them expelled in 1948–49 by the armies of the new state of Israel. They came to constitute perhaps 80 per cent of the town’s population. It was a town where bitterness against Israel, the West and the Jordanian monarchy (which was perceived as collaborating with Israel) was widespread. It soon became a stronghold of support for radical Palestinian nationalist organisations. As militant Islam grew, much of this support transferred itself to political Islamism. Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s Palestinian spiritual mentor, had made his home in Zarqa for a period. The town would send a significant number of jihadi ‘foreign fighters’ to Afghanistan and subsequent jihadi conflicts, including Iraq after 2003.
Like a number of other jihadis, al-Zarqawi rediscovered Islam after a life of crime that allegedly included sexual assault. He did not have a secondary education. He travelled to Afghanistan where he saw action. On his return to Jordan he was imprisoned for possessing firearms and false documents. It appears that he was tortured while in prison. He said that he ‘loved jihad’ but did not have ‘the patience to learn, teach or preach.’6 After a further period in Afghanistan in which he ran a training camp, he seems to have been active in the border regions between Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan, and also to have organised terrorist attacks in Jordan and possibly in Europe. These may have included the Madrid train bombings of 2004. The 2003 invasion of Iraq gave him new opportunities for jihad.
What distinguishes al-Zarqawi and his group is his extreme anti-Shi‘i line. His group became the franchise known as ‘al-Qa‘ida in Iraq’ and he pledged allegiance to Bin Laden in October 2004 after eight months of contacts with the al-Qa’ida leader. Some of his group’s attacks were aimed at queues at government recruitment centres in Shi‘i areas such as Hilla, but they were also responsible for the killing of religious scholars like Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim, who was murdered in a mosque in Najaf along with eighty-three other worshippers on 29 August 2003. Other targets were Ashura commemorations in 2004 and 2005. In a letter in which he swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, Abu Anas al-Shami, one of the leading religious scholars in al-Zarqawi’s group, explained the anti-Shi‘i strategy:
The only solution is for us to strike the heretics [i.e. the Shi‘is], whether they are men of religion, soldiers or others, until they submit to the Sunnis. You might object that it is too soon, and unfair to throw the nation into a battle for which it is unprepared; that this will cause losses and spill blood; but this is precisely what we want.7
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself wrote another letter to Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri to give them a report of the situation in Iraq as he saw it.8 In this he asserts that America had entered Iraq in order to create a Greater Israel. America had done a deal with the Shi‘is, ‘the dregs of humanity’, so that they will stand by ‘the Crusaders’ against the Mujahideen (the jihadis fighting in Iraq). Extreme language is used to describe the Shi‘is: they are ‘a lurking snake, a crafty and malicious scorpion, a spying enemy and a mortal venom’. They ‘wear the garb of a friend’, but ‘the true face of their creed is war against the people of sunna and the community’. In this view, Shi‘is have betrayed Islam throughout history: the Safavids stabbed the Ottomans in the back, and prevented them taking Vienna and spreading Islam in Western Europe. The Shi‘is are also accused of helping the Mongols and the Franks (i.e. the Crusaders) to attack Islam. A direct charge of unbelief and treachery, as well as a list of ways in which the Shi‘is reject the beliefs of Sunnis, is included in the letter:
His
tory’s message, confirmed by the current situation, demonstrates most clearly that Shiism is a religion that has nothing in common with Islam except in the way that Jews have something in common with Christians as people of the book. From patent polytheism, tomb worship, and circumambulating shrines to calling the companions of the Prophet infidels and insulting the mothers of the believers [i.e. the Prophet’s wives] and the best of the Muslim nation, they arrive at distorting the Quran as a logical means of defaming those who know it, in addition to claiming that the imams are infallible, that believing in them is a tenet of faith, that revelation came down to them, and other forms of unbelief and heresy that fill their favourite books and reference works – which they continue to churn out incessantly.
The dreamers who think that a Shiite can forget this historical legacy and the old hatred of the nawasib [a pejorative term used by Shi‘is for Sunnis, meaning ‘swindlers’], as they say, are deluded... These are a people who gathered in their unbelief and marked their heresy with political cunning and a feverish effort to seize on the crisis of governance and overturn the balance of power in the state: with the assistance of their allies, the Americans, they are trying to redraw this state and determine its size by means of their political banners and organisations.
The letter concludes with an outline of the strategy he proposes to implement in Iraq. The key to this is igniting religious war between Shi‘is and Sunnis: