A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is

by John McHugo

  In our opinion, [the Shi‘is] are the key to change, because attacking their religious, political and military aspects will reveal their rage against the Sunnis. They will bare their fangs and show the secret rage simmering in their hearts. If we manage to drag them into a religious war, we will be able to awaken the slumbering Sunnis, who will sense the imminent danger and the cruel death that these Sabaeans [a Gnostic sect in Mesopotamia that is mentioned in the Qur’an] have in store for them.9

  Such attitudes led to disquiet and opposition from other Sunni militants. Some regarded him as little more than a desperado. He was eventually rebuked in June 2005 by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s eventual successor. Al-Zawahiri’s criticism may, however, have been more concerned with tactics – the risk that al-Zarqawi’s campaign would alienate other Muslims – than principles.10 Al-Zarqawi met his end on 7 June 2006 from a bomb dropped by an American F-16C fighter plane while he was attending a meeting of jihadi leaders in a safehouse. But by then, a sectarian civil war was well under way. That month, the World Health Organisation and the Iraqi Ministry of Health estimated that 151,000 people had been killed since the invasion.11

  On 22 February 2006, a massive act of deliberate sacrilege had taken place. The golden-domed shrine of the Tenth and Eleventh Twelver Imams in Samarra was blown up. Not only did it house the tombs of the imams Ali al-Hadi and al-Hasan al-Askari, but it was the spot where the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, had begun his occultation. It was a pilgrimage destination for Twelvers in their millions, and was also a place venerated by Sunnis – who, while not accepting the Twelver claims concerning the imams, respected the holiness of the two devout descendants of the Prophet who were buried there. It was also located in a predominantly Sunni town. Within hours, some 1,300 Sunnis (or people assumed to be Sunnis) had been slaughtered by the Mahdi Army. Up to this point, some Iraqis had seen Muqtada al-Sadr as primarily a nationalist leader with whom Sunnis could cooperate against the Americans. Any such nebulous dream of a united Sunni-Shi‘i front against the occupiers was now well and truly over.12

  This barbarous act and its cruel aftermath finally ended any dream of a secular Iraq for the foreseeable future. It ensured that the new dispensation that had arisen after the invasion, and which saw power being channelled through the sectarian and ethnic communities, would now continue. A ‘unity government’ was formed under Nouri al-Maliki, a member of the al-Da‘wa Party, but there would be no national unity; instead, there would be yet more rule through patronage networks. The difference was that the Shi‘is now had control, and they believed that their hour had come. Nouri al-Maliki’s government instituted a new sectarianism that favoured Shi‘is and reflected this new reality of power. Although the minister of defence was a Sunni, the Ministry of the Interior remained with SCIRI, and an ally from his own party, al-Da‘wa, controlled the ministry of national security. But real power did not reside in Iraq’s new parliament. It remained with the various Shi‘i militias and the Kurdish militia known as the Peshmerga. Death squads often operated with apparent impunity, not just assassinating political opponents but carrying out sectarian killings that often had no motive except revenge and intimidation.

  In 2007–08, a military ‘surge’ saw an additional 35,000 American troops come to Iraq to reinforce the 130,000-or-so foreign troops in the US-led coalition. This was combined with serious attempts to prise Sunni Arabs away from the insurgency – and to drive a wedge into the split that had developed between most Sunni Arabs and the ultra hard-line ‘Islamic State in Iraq’, which was the rebranded ‘al-Qa‘ida in Iraq’ of Abu Musa al-Zarqawi. These initiatives met with considerable success, not least because the vicious anti-Shi‘ism of al-Zarqawi’s followers did not resonate with many Sunnis, who saw how destructive it was. Nor did they support the extremely restrictive version of the Sharia that the jihadis enforced. One grievance that went deep was the attempt by Islamic State in Iraq to take over local business activities in Anbar Province, including lucrative smuggling across the Syrian border.

  The result was what became known as the Sahwa, or ‘Awakening’ movement. Tribes in the Sunni north west of Iraq began cooperating with the government and the Americans, and were provided with arms to turn against the jihadis, as well as promises that they would eventually be incorporated into the Iraqi security services. Local councils were also set up. Over 80,000 men, many of them former insurgents, joined groups that were part of the Sahwa. By the summer of 2007, the insurgency had faded (although it had not ended) and major insurgent strongholds, such as Ramadi and Fallujah, were in the possession of the Sahwa militias.

  In November 2008 the Sahwa were put under Iraqi government control. This is the point at which matters began to deteriorate. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki tried to split the movement so as to neutralise it. Only a few Sahwa fighters were incorporated into the security services, while attempts were made to disarm many others by withdrawing their weapons permits and subsidies. The Shi‘i (and Kurdish) political groupings that dominated Maliki’s government did not want to have to compete with a movement that would revitalise tribal Sunni influence. Moreover, some of those most outspoken in their opposition to the Sahwa were the predominantly urban Sunni bloc in parliament, the Iraq Accord Front. This feared that whatever the Sahwa gained would be at their expense. There was also another old Iraqi dynamic at work: Baghdad versus the countryside. Many of the leaders of the Sahwa and their followers bitterly resented central government control. Once the government had shown that it was not on their side, it became inevitable that many of them would begin to drift back to supporting the insurgency of Islamic State in Iraq.13 This was also in response to the increase in corruption, pervasive throughout the institutions of the Iraqi state. There was no real will to tackle it, since the political parties in parliament making up the government were dependent on it.

  At the end of 2010 a series of demonstrations calling for freedom and dignity swept through many of the autocracies of the Middle East and North Africa, beginning an event that became known as the Arab Spring. In early 2011, a few breezes from this wind of hoped-for change blew into Iraq. Youth activists designated 25 February as a national day of rage against the corruption in Iraq’s democratic politics. There were calls for demonstrations across the country, demanding that the government be cleaned up. Although demonstrations did take place in sixteen cities, the security services had taken pre-emptive action beforehand by intimidating and beating up potential ringleaders. According to the International Crisis Group, on the day of protests up to twenty demonstrators were killed by the security services, and many more were wounded.14

  But as far as many Sunnis in the north-west of the country were concerned, matters were getting close to the point of no return. In March the Arab Spring also reached Syria, where the government resisted calls to reform, and then demands for its resignation. Syria descended into a prolonged civil war, which also became a proxy conflict. By 2012, the Syrian government’s hold on the east of the country was slipping, and in April 2013 it lost the important city of Raqqa in the Euphrates valley. This was the month in which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had become the leader of Islamic State in Iraq in 2010, changed the movement’s name to ‘The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham [i.e. Greater Syria]’15 – also known as ISIS or Daesh (its Arabic acronym), which is the name we will use. Raqqa became its de facto capital. It could now use much of eastern Syria to give itself strategic depth. In 2013 there was an escalation in Daesh attacks in Iraq, including many attacks aimed at releasing captives held in jail. Many of these, such as the raid on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, were successful.

  In the summer of 2014, in a blaze of well-coordinated attacks, Daesh finally burst onto the international news channels and shocked the world. In the space of three months, it swept across much of northern and western Iraq and took Mosul, Iraq’s second- or third-largest city. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, dressed in Abbasid black, proclaimed himself caliph and claimed jurisdiction over all Muslims worldwi
de. The world seemed bemused as the Iraqi army turned and fled. Yet, as has been pointed out by the journalist Patrick Cockburn, who has first-hand knowledge of Iraq and Syria at this time, what had happened should scarcely have come as a surprise. However daunting al-Baghdadi and Daesh appeared, the Sunni Arabs of north-west Iraq were ‘even more frightened’ of the Iraqi army and the Shi‘i and Kurdish militias which often fought alongside it.16 They saw the Shi‘i soldiers virtually as a foreign occupying force.

  Sometimes the officers commanding army units would abandon their troops and flee by helicopter. Much of the army was not fit for combat. It had become a vehicle for the dispensing of patronage. Corruption, as ever, played its part. People would pay a bribe to join the army, seeing it as an investment because of the salary they would receive.17 Another example was the decision taken by the Americans that supplies of food to the army should be outsourced. Perhaps in the context of public procurement in a Western state this might have saved money and increased efficiency, but in Iraq after 2003 it could only ever have become an opportunity for kickbacks.18 Most professional soldiers in the officer corps had been sent home by the Americans because they were Ba‘athist and Sunni, and were not taken on again when the army was later rebuilt. When Tikrit fell to Daesh, defeated soldiers were divided into Sunnis and Shi‘is. Many of the Shi‘is were machine-gunned, and a video of the atrocity was posted on YouTube. Unsurprisingly, the populations of some towns and areas taken by Daesh were likely to fear the return of the forces of the Shi‘i-dominated government in Baghdad as much as they feared Daesh itself.

  III

  After the 2003 invasion, the fault-line in Iraqi society between Sunnis and Shi‘is was always going to be exploited by those seeking to destabilise the country. Iraq was reconstituted as a democracy – but in a form that encouraged politics to be conducted by parties and organisations that appealed to distinct sects and ethnic groups. The way to win votes was to attract support from your own community, and to try to bring them a greater share of the cake that constituted the Iraqi state. By definition, this meant that there would be less of that cake available for the competing groups. This helped to push many Sunnis and Shi‘is towards a quasi-tribal allegiance with members of their own sect, excluding those who did not belong to it. This was not so very different from the way in which the Iraqi state had always been run; the difference was that now, for the first time, politicians from the Shi‘i majority controlled the government and would be the dispensers of patronage. The sad consequence was that the extreme version of Wahhabi disdain and hatred for Shi‘is propagated by Abu Musa al-Zarqawi could be grafted all too easily onto the sense of dispossession felt by many Sunnis after the American invasion.

  The tsunami of sectarian strife that was unleashed in Iraq is with us still. It was made much worse by the underlying struggle for hegemony between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which had been an important part of the regional background before the invasion. A feature of the period after 2003 was the steady increase of nervousness about Shi‘ism among conservative, Sunni-led regimes. The catchphrase ‘the Shi‘i Crescent’ was coined by a Jordanian intelligence officer in late 2004 and popularised by King Abdullah II of Jordan in an interview with the Washington Post. The crescent was allegedly composed of Iran, Iraq, Syria (implying that it was ruled by the Alawi minority from which the president and many of his henchmen came) and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The accusation was that a sectarian brand of politics was now radiating out from Tehran across the region.19 The phrase (and the idea behind it) caught on, not just in the Arab world but also in the Western media.

  The last two chapters have shown that Tehran was actually promoting Iran’s revolutionary brand of Islamism, rather than sectarian strife. It should also be emphasised that the Alawis of Syria follow a very different creed from that of Iran’s Twelver Shi‘ism, and that Iran’s alliance with secular Syria was in any case pragmatic, not religious. Be all that as it may, the Shi‘i Crescent was a deeply threatening concept that could only ratchet up feelings of insecurity among Sunnis as they watched the disaster unfold in Iraq. Fear of the spread of Shi‘i power linked to Iran was also observable among Sunni rulers at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Hezbollah overreached itself in an incident on the Israeli border when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. In retaliation, Israel bombed Lebanon, deliberately devastating its infrastructure and, over the course of the conflict, killing many civilians. Hezbollah responded with untargeted rocket attacks on Israel, which also killed civilians.

  The credibility of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and other major Sunni Arab leaders was strained when they failed to push for an immediate ceasefire. When Israel sent in ground troops, it seemed to many people in Arab countries that King Abdullah and other Sunni rulers, such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Abdullah II of Jordan, were quietly hoping that Israel would draw the teeth of this Iranian-backed, revolutionary, Shi‘i movement. As the fighting continued, the deafening silence of these rulers became increasingly embarrassing for their (overwhelmingly Sunni) subjects. They were eventually forced to change their tune and call for a ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria taunted them as ‘half-men’.20 That would not have gone down well in Riyadh, Cairo or Amman. The incident showed that feelings of Arab solidarity still existed among ordinary people, and transcended the Sunni-Shi‘i divide.

  Nevertheless, it was all too easy for Sunnis across the Muslim world to see their co-sectarians as oppressed by regimes dominated by Shi‘is, and for this to transform itself into sectarian anger while Saudi Arabian sheikhs denounced Twelvers and Alawis as infidels whose blood was lawful. Next door to Iraq lay Syria. Syria was a majority Sunni country where Islamist politics were outlawed (it was a criminal offence to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood). It was also a surviving bastion of secular, Arab nationalism. In the Syrian context, it was easy for Sunni Islamists to blend their struggle against secularism with anti-Alawi sectarianism. There was reprinting and recirculation of ancient opinions by scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328) that anathematised Alawis as a fifth column working to help Mongols and Crusaders destroy Islam; more recent ones by Haj Amin al-Husseini and Musa al-Sadr, stating that Alawis were indeed Muslims, were disregarded. Ibn Taymiyyah’s more general attacks on Shi‘is were also resurrected. They had once been influential on Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and more recently on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Now they would reach a much wider audience. The concept of the Shi‘i Crescent also raised the spectre of insurrections among other Shi‘i populations in Arab countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan. This was especially so with regard to the Shi‘i minority in Saudi Arabia and the Shi‘i majority in tiny Bahrain.

  Even in countries like Egypt, where there were very few Shi‘is, strong anti-Shi‘i polemic appeared and was a sign of the ‘othering’ of Shi‘is. In 2006 President Mubarak accused all Shi‘is everywhere of being loyal to Iran in a way that negated their allegiance to their native country. Sheikh Tantawi, the rector of Cairo’s al-Azhar Mosque at the time, called for reverence for the Prophet’s Companions to be considered an essential pillar of the Muslim faith, which implied that Shi‘is were not true Muslims. The numbers of Egyptian Shi‘is is unknown, but conversions to Shi‘ism did occur. It has been suggested that some Egyptian Sufi brotherhoods may have provided a door into Shi‘ism, an allegation that was treated sufficiently seriously for it to require a vehement denial by the supreme sheikh of the Sufi brotherhoods in 2007.21 This reflected a fear of Shi‘ism as a denial of the country’s perceived Sunni Muslim identity. In 2013, when Egypt was under the rule of the democratically elected Muhammad Morsi, four converts to Shi‘ism were burned to death by an angry mob while the police stood by and claimed that they did not have the numbers to intervene.

  IV

  Before we conclude, we will look briefly at how Sunni-Shi‘i relations have played out in three other countries since 2003: Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. As we saw in Chapter Twelve, there was a certain simila
rity between the way many Alawis were privileged in Syria through patronage, and the role played by certain Sunni groups in Iraq before 2003. Just as ordinary Shi‘is were likely to feel excluded from politics in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, so could ordinary Sunnis in Syria under the Assads. Yet in neither case was support for the regime conditioned by sect. As with the many Shi‘is who were co-opted under Saddam Hussein’s regime – and under earlier Iraqi governments – so, too, in Syria there were large numbers of Sunnis who supported the Assads.

  In Syria, the extensive protests that rippled across the country in March 2011 calling for reform led to an aborted revolution, which gradually evolved into an insurgency. This was to a considerable extent taken over by jihadi groups, which often proved to be generally the best-organised and most effective fighters on the opposition side. In Syria, as in Iraq, Daesh were able to use a poisonous sectarian narrative against the religious sect most closely identified with the country’s government. Other militant organisations did the same.

  A book that charts the descent of Syria’s revolution into a proxy conflict dominated by Sunni militants is Samar Yazbek’s The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. Yazbek is an Alawi supporter of the opposition who now lives in exile in Paris. Before Syria exploded, she was a writer and a presenter on Syrian television. In 2012 and 2013 she made three crossings into northern Syria from the Turkish border, visiting areas where government authority had collapsed. These are inhabited overwhelmingly by Sunni Muslims. Her story is heartrending. Several things stand out.

  The first is the military inability of the Assad regime, without massive external help, to regain the large areas that had escaped its control – even at what seems in retrospect a relatively early stage in the Syrian conflict. Yazbek went to districts south of Aleppo close to the motorway linking Syria’s great northern city with Damascus. Sections of this strategic artery were now in rebel territory. This forced the regime to re-route all transport with Aleppo along minor roads through the desert to the east. If the regime had had sufficient troops to retake the motorway we can be certain that it would have done so. Its loss was a major blow to its prestige and created significant logistical problems for the Syrian army. Yazbek was an eyewitness to the alternative strategy it employed. It bombed towns and villages indiscriminately, using the crude and infamous barrel bombs rolled out of the open doors of helicopters, as well as ordnance dropped from military aircraft. This was nothing less than terrorism from the skies. It was directed towards forcing the inhabitants of these areas to flee, or at least at cowering them into submission.