To the Victors, but Will it Spoil?

by Eric Martin

Nir Rosen has a fascinating piece on recent events in Iraq in the Boston Review.  This portion is about as concise and accurate a recounting of the evolution of the conflict as I've come across: 

Since the occupation began, Muqtada has been the most controversial public figure in Iraq. A populist anti-American leader, he came from a lineage of revolutionary Shia clerics who opposed the Saddam’s regime and who gave voice to Iraq’s poor Shia majority. Capitalizing on his slain father’s network of mosques and the family name, Muqtada and his followers, called Sadrists, seized control of Shia areas in Iraq when Baghdad fell, especially the slums of Basra and the capital. He rallied marginalized Shias against the occupation, its puppet government, and eventually against Sunni extremists as well. His movement provided social services, and his militia, Jeish al Mahdi—the Mahdi Army or JAM—fought the Americans and defended Shias from extremist Sunni terrorism.

But the Mahdi Army and its rivals eventually propagated sectarian violence, fighting in the civil war and expelling or killing innocent Sunnis. After the February 2006 bombing of the Samarra shrine, a Shia holy site, the two-year-old civil war intensified. With attacks against Sunnis escalating, the largely Shia Iraqi police often looked the other way. The bloodshed was indiscriminate.

By 2007 Muqtada was no longer in control of the militias, many of which had become mere criminal gangs. In August of that year, fearing that the Surge would mean an all-out American assault on Shia communities controlled by his militias, he called for a ceasefire. But he did not tell his men to disarm, and fighting continued, especially resistance attacks against the Americans by recalcitrant former Mahdi Army fighters, who viewed Muqtada’s ceasefire as a betrayal.

Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s government tacitly supported Shia militias throughout the civil war, but in March 2008 Maliki surprised everyone by launching “Charge of the Knights,” a 15,000-man Iraqi Army operation intended to crush Shia militias—especially Muqtada’s followers—who had Basra in their grip. The assault floundered until American backup rescued the beleaguered Iraqi security forces and drove the militias out. Maliki managed to chalk it up as a victory, and his decision to crush Shia militias in Basra, Baghdad, and elsewhere won him the support of many Sunnis.

Jassim Ahmad, deputy head of the Sunni Islamic party in Basra, confirmed the offensive’s impact. He told me that their previous headquarters had been destroyed following the 2006 Samarra bombing with the complicity of local police. Many Sunni sheikhs had been murdered as well. But some Sunnis had returned after Charge of the Knights, with about 400 of them in the local police and army by the end of 2008, according to his figures.

In downtown Basra the campaign’s success was plain. The local economy was thriving, and women could once again walk on the streets without wearing the veil if they chose to. As Ahmad put it, “now the Sunni sect doesn’t have problems in Basra.”

After the operation, local officials held a conference to discuss rebuilding. Despite the conference’s distinctly Shia tone, speakers expressed relief that the militias and “criminals” were gone. They praised Iraqi forces for providing security. There was no mention of the British or the Americans. It felt like a post-occupation Iraq, and the mood of the meeting inspired hope that when the Americans inevitably reduced their numbers, the country would not again fall into civil war.

In a nearby slum, four Mahdi Army men complained that the army stole from homes, but they vowed to support Maliki, despite his crackdown. “We obey Muqtada, and whatever he says, we do, and he said, ‘don’t fight the government,’” they told me. “We are not against the government or the people, just against the occupation. We are giving the government an opportunity.”

It was clear that something significant had changed in Iraq. While resentment lingered and murders continued, the sectarian violence had subsided, and there was a willingness to think about a future in which different Iraqi communities would live together in peace.

Still, talk about a “post-sectarian future” is premature. The situation is complex and fluid, and people in the communities most ravaged by the civil war understandably tell each other a range of conflicting stories about the roots of the change. One explanation that few are prepared to discuss openly is that Iraq’s civil war ended because Shias won: violence against Sunnis ceased after Sunnis were brutally cleansed from Basra and large swaths of Baghdad, and Shias gained firm control of government ministries and local police. Sunnis knew they were defeated and Shias no longer worried that Ba’athist oppression would resume. With no external enemy, Shia militias began to fight each other and turned into criminal gangs terrorizing their own communities. The defeat of the Sunnis and divisions among Shias created space for new possibilities, and the government and American forces occupied that space.

Other stories emphasize the resurgence of a latent pan-Iraqi nationalism, the consolidation of Iraqi national security forces, the exhaustion of sectarian violence, the shift in views about the militias—from heroes to enemies of the people—and the massive pay-off of mostly Sunni militiamen.

Indeed it was a combination of all these things, the early 2007 “Surge” in U.S. forces playing a smaller role than American claims often suggest. The Surge benefitted from other changes. Troop increases and a determined counterinsurgency policy came at a time when they could finally be tolerated in anti-occupation neighborhoods because the main struggle had shifted from liberating Iraq from the Americans to inter-Iraqi fighting. Had the Surge occurred a year earlier, it would have met far greater resistance.

Rosen himself provides evidence that the Maliki government's past support for sectarian cleansing was a little more than "tacit."  From his conversations with an Iraqi Army captain Mushtaq:

According to Mushtaq, at the time, much of the government supported the Mahdi Army, so the fighters had access to good information...

“We captured a lot of Mahdi Army guys back then,” Mushtaq told me, “but we got orders from the prime minister’s office and Baghdad operations center to release them.”

When the Mahdi Army was at its peak, Mushtaq explained, it had the support of two individuals in the Prime Minister’s office: Major General Adnan al Maksusi, an intelligence officer, and Dr. Basima al Jadhri, an advisor to Maliki on the Ministries of Interior and Defense, and later on Reconciliation. “They used to fire all officers who were against the Mahdi Army or who arrested [members of] the Mahdi Army.”

Eventually, that support waned and then reversed into active opposition - although moreso with respect to the outaw splinter JAM cells, if not as intensely for Muqtada al-Sadr and the core Sadrists themselves. 

Rosen's concluding paragraphs adeptly describe the current situation in Iraq: a picture of guarded optimism matched with grim reality, painted on a canvass of imense tragedy. 

Despite the relative calm, it was clear during my trips to Iraq in 2008 and 2009 that the post-civil war order was one of enshrined sectarianism. At the Ministry of Interior, I saw televisions in the lobby and waiting room tuned to Shia religious channels. Shia religious music blared from the radios of police vehicles. Shia religious banners hung on the Ministry of Interior and other ministries while Shia religious flags waved in the wind above the nearby Ministry of Oil and other government buildings. On the walls of the Baghdad Council there was a large mural of Shia pilgrims marching to Karbala. A confident expression of Shia identity, much as I saw at the airport in Basra, was now the most common manifestation of sectarianism. The state now belonged to the Shias.

Since 2003 millions of Iraqis have lost their homes. Hundreds of thousands have died. Tens of thousands have been imprisoned by the Americans. Iraq’s demographic distribution has been irrevocably changed. Sectarianism rules, if less explicitly violently than it once did. The new government is among the most corrupt in the world. It is beginning to resemble its Baa’thist predecessor in its authoritarianism and brutality. But it faces no immediate threats, and its strength gives it some form of legitimacy, even among Sunnis. An ugly peace may indeed hold in Washash and the rest of Iraq.

Let's hope that peace holds, and that, in time, the hard edges soften.

Comments

[Ugh]

We Won! U!S!A! U!S!A!

[Point]

This was a good catch; kudos.

[bobbyp]

Fundamentalism at home, fundamentalism abroad. My, aren't we special! And at a cost of only a $trillion or so.

Change is indeed cheap.

[Bob In Pacifica]

I remember a few years ago how news about the Mahdi Army came out daily. What I find most interesting is how I (we/everyone) could pretty much blank out the war in Iraq. Not only don't we hear anything in the major media, but shows like Rachel Maddow et al have some investment in protecting the Obama Administration and so the close examination of on-the-ground day-to-day coverage in Iraq has pretty much dried up.