The
Myth Of Sectarianism
By
Dahr Jamail
05 January,
2008
International Socialist Review
If
the U.S. leaves Iraq, the violent sectarianism between the Sunni and
Shia will worsen. This is what Republicans and Democrats alike will
have us believe. This key piece of rhetoric is used to justify the continuance
of the occupation of Iraq.
This propaganda,
like others of its ilk, gains ground, substance, and reality due largely
to the ignorance of those ingesting it. The snow job by the corporate
media on the issue of sectarianism in Iraq has ensured that the public
buys into the line that the Sunni and Shia will dice one another up
into little pieces if the occupation ends.
It may be
worthwhile to consider that prior to the Anglo-American invasion and
occupation of Iraq there had never been open warfare between the two
groups and certainly not a civil war. In terms of organization and convention,
Iraqis are a tribal society and some of the largest tribes in the country
comprise Sunni and Shia. Intermarriages between the two sects are not
uncommon either.
Soon after
arriving in Iraq in November 2003, I learned that it was considered
rude and socially graceless to enquire after an individual’s sect.
If in ignorance or under compulsion I did pose the question the most
common answer I would receive was, “I am Muslim, and I am Iraqi.”
On occasion there were more telling responses like the one I received
from an older woman, “My mother is a Shia and my father a Sunni,
so can you tell which half of me is which?” The accompanying smile
said it all.
Large mixed
neighborhoods were the norm in Baghdad. Sunni and Shia prayed in one
another’s mosques. Secular Iraqis could form lifelong associations
with others without overt concern about their chosen sect. How did such
a well-integrated society erupt into vicious fighting, violent sectarianism,
and segregated neighborhoods? How is one to explain the millions in
Iraq displaced from their homes simply because they were the wrong sect
in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Back in December
2003 Sheikh Adnan, a Friday speaker at his mosque, had recounted a recent
experience to me. During the first weeks of the occupation, a U.S. military
commander had showed up in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province located
roughly twenty-five miles northeast of Baghdad with a mixed Sunni-Shia
population. He had asked to meet with all the tribal and religious leaders.
On the appointed day the assembled leaders were perplexed when the commander
instructed them to divide themselves, “Shia on one side of the
room, Sunni on the other.”
It would
not be amiss, perhaps, to read in this account an implanting of a deliberate
policy of “divide and rule” by the Anglo-American invaders
from the early days of the occupation.
There have
been no statistical surveys in recent years to determine the sectarian
composition of Iraq. However, when the Coalition Provisional Authority,
led by Paul Bremer, formed the first puppet Iraqi government, a precedent
was set. The twenty-five seats in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC),
were assigned strictly along sectarian lines based on the assumption
that 60 percent of the population is Shia, 20 percent Sunni, and 20
percent Kurds, who are mostly Sunni. For good measure, a couple of Turkoman
and a Christian were thrown in.
It is evident
that this puppet troupe deployed at the onset of “democracy”
in Iraq was mandated to establish to the population that it was in the
larger interest to begin thinking, at least politically, along sectarian
and ethnic lines. Inevitably, political power struggles ensued and were
cemented and exacerbated with the January 30, 2005, elections.
Mild surface
scratching reveals a darker, largely unreported aspect of the divisive
U.S. plan. A UN report released in September 2005 held Iraqi interior
ministry forces responsible for an organized campaign of detention,
torture, and killing of fellow Iraqis. These special police commando
units were recruited from the Shia Badr Organization and Mehdi Army
militias.
In Baghdad
during November and December 2004, I heard widespread accounts of death
squads assassinating Sunni resistance leaders and their key sympathizers.
It was after the failure of Operation Phantom Fury, as the U.S. siege
of Fallujah that November was named, that the Iraqi resistance spread
across Iraq like wildfire. Death squads were set up to quell this fire
by eliminating the leadership of this growing resistance.
The firefighting
team had at its helm the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, ably
assisted by retired Colonel James Steele, adviser to Iraqi security
forces. In 1984–86 Steele had been commander of the U.S. military
advisory group in El Salvador. Between 1981 and 1985 Negroponte was
U.S. ambassador to neighboring Honduras. In 1994 the Honduras Commission
on Human Rights charged him with extensive human rights violations,
reporting the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers.
A CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras
has placed on record documents admitting that the operations Negroponte
oversaw in Honduras were carried out by “special intelligence
units,” better known as “death squads,” of CIA-trained
Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured, and killed thousands
of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas. Negroponte was
ambassador to Iraq for close to a year from June 2004.
The only
public mention of any of this I have seen was in Newsweek magazine on
January 8, 2005. It quotes Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. secretary of defense
at the time, who discussed the use of the “Salvador Option”
in Iraq. It compared the strategy being planned for Iraq to the one
used in Central America during the Reagan administration:
"Then,
faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government
funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly
included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel
leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and
many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite
the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages
scandal."
U.S.-backed
sectarian death squads have become the foremost generator of death in
Iraq, even surpassing the U.S. military machine, infamous for its capacity
for industrial-scale slaughter. It is no secret in Baghdad that the
U.S. military would regularly cordon off pro-resistance areas like the
al-Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad and allow “Iraqi police”
and “Iraqi army” personnel, masked in black balaclavas,
through their checkpoints to carry out abductions and assassinations
in the neighborhood.
Consequently,
almost all of Baghdad and much of Iraq is now segregated. The flipside
is that violence in the capital city has subsided somewhat of late now
that the endgame of forming the death squads, that of fragmenting the
population, has been mostly accomplished.
Baghdad resident,
retired General Waleed al-Ubaidy told my Iraqi colleague recently, “I
would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has decreased
and that everything is fine, but the truth is far more bitter. All that
has happened is a dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq.”
Baghdad today is a divided city.
Ahmad Ali,
chief engineer from one of Baghdad’s municipalities told my colleague,
Ali al-Fadhily, “Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many
towns and neighborhoods. There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni
Baghdad to start with. Each is divided into little town-like pieces
of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes.” Al-Adhamiyah,
on the Russafa side of Tigris River, is now entirely Sunni, the other
areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is purely Sunni except
for Shula, Hurriya, and small strips of Aamil which are dominated by
Shia militias.
Not being
privy to the U.S. machinations, Iraqis in Baghdad blame the Iraqi police
and Iraqi army for the sectarian assassinations and wonder why the U.S.
military does little or nothing to stop them. “The Americans ask
[Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki to stop the sectarian assassinations
knowing full well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian cleansing,”
says Mahmood Farhan of the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni
group.
A more recent
manifestation of the divisive U.S. policy has been the “purchase”
of members of the largely Sunni resistance in Baghdad and in al-Anbar
province that constitutes one-third of the geographic area of Iraq.
Payments made by the U.S. military to collaborating tribal sheikhs already
amount to $17 million. The money passes directly into the hands of fighters
who in many cases were engaged in launching attacks against the occupiers
less than two weeks ago. Tribal fighters are being paid $300 per month
to patrol their areas, particularly against foreign mercenaries. Today
the military refers to these men as “concerned local citizens,”
“awakening force,” or simply “volunteers.”
Arguably,
violence in the area has temporarily declined. “Those Americans
thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the
people of Iraq into sects and tribes,” announced a thirty-two-year-old
man from Ramadi, who spoke with al-Fadhily on terms of anonymity, “They
know they are sinking deeper into the shifting sand, but the collaborators
are fooling the Americans right now, and will in the end use this strategy
against them.” By the end of November 2007, the U.S. military
had enlisted 77,000 of these fighters, and hopes to add another 10,000.
Eighty-two percent of the fighters are Sunni.
Politically,
the U.S. administration maintains its support of the Shia-dominated
government in Baghdad. The fallout has been blatantly clear. On the
first of December, Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the Accordance Front, which
is the Sunni political bloc in the Iraqi Parliament, was placed under
house arrest by Iraqi and U.S. security forces in the Adil neighborhood,
west of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces also detained his son Makki and
forty-five of his guards. They were accused of manufacturing car bombs
and killing Sunni militia members in the neighborhood who have been
working with the U.S. military. Members of the Accordance Front, which
holds 44 of the 275 seats in the Iraqi Parliament, promptly walked out.
Maliki has, several times in the last several weeks, hurled public accusations
and criticisms at al-Dulaimi, sending political and sectarian shock
waves, further crippling the crumbling political process.
It is important
to mention that Maliki, a U.S. puppet par excellence, acts only as told.
After the January 2005 elections, the government that came into power
had chosen Ibrahim al-Jaafari as its prime minister. When Jaafari refused
to toe the U.S./UK line, Condoleezza Rice and her UK counterpart Jack
Straw flew to Baghdad, and before their short trip ended Jaafari was
out and Maliki was in as prime minister.
In the context
of these facts let us now return to the big question: Will Iraq descend
further into a sectarian nightmare if the occupation ends?
An indicator
of how things will likely resolve themselves upon the departure of foreign
troops may be drawn from the southern city of Basra. In early September,
500 British troops left one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in the
heart of the city and ceased to conduct regular foot patrols. According
to the British military, the overall level of violence in the city has
decreased 90 percent since then.
This may
or may not be a guarantee of a drop in sectarianism upon the departure
of the invading armies, but it does prove that when the primary cause
of the violence, sectarian strife, instability, and chaos is removed
from the equation of Iraq, things are bound to improve rapidly.
Are we still
going to believe that the occupation is holding Iraq together?
Dahr
Jamail, who spent eight months in Iraq as an independent journalist,
is author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist
in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). The New York Times’
Stephen Kinzer describes his writing as “international journalism
at its best.” Dahr is currently on a national speaking tour sponsored
by Haymarket and his articles can be found at http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/.
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