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Features Iraq: The looming threat of civil war
September 15th, 2005 -- Is Iraq in a de facto state of civil war? According to the stand-ard academic definition, a civil war is an internal conflict that results in at least 1,000 combat-related fatalities, 5% of which are sustained by government and rebel forces. Those benchmarks have long since been passed in Iraq. But while the technical definition of a civil war may have been met, the potential for much greater violence in the near future has made some hesitant to utilize that term just yet. “I think there are signs of a creeping movement towards a Lebanon-style civil war, not the kind with fixed military positions, but the kind with rising levels of assassination and militia and warlord action,” said Larry Diamond, a former high-ranking official with the US’ Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in a recent television interview. Others are less equivocal. “What’s happening in Iraq is a multidimensional conflict... But the civil war is the central part of it — the violent contest for power inside the country,” Pavel Baev, of the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, told the Christian Science Monitor. The growing sectarian political divisions and the precipitous rise in inter-communal killings which now complement the violence between the insurgents and US and Iraqi government forces certainly threaten to unleash an all-out conflict that would dwarf Iraq’s current blood-soaked chaos. Two years ago, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa predicted that the invasion of Iraq would “open the gates of hell” in the region. Musa’s prophecy was nothing if not prescient, and in late August he warned that Iraq’s draft constitution, were it to enshrine federalism (as it did), would be a “recipe for chaos”. US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad had a slightly different take, calling the constitution “right for Iraq at the present time”. With the constitution passed over the objections of the constitutional commission’s 15 Sunni Arab members, and many other nationalist Iraqis, the fault-lines have deepened. Demands by the dominant Shi’ite political party, SCIRI, that a Shi’ite region eventually be formed in the south constitute the sum of all Sunni Arab fears — the threat of exclusion from Iraq’s oil wealth (which is buried in the north and south) and the possibility that perceived Western plots to divide Iraq will succeed. “We will stand, with all our wisdom and strength, against anyone who wants to divide Iraq and fulfil this grand plot against the country,” said prominent Sunni leader Adnan Dulaymi with regard to the constitution. A serious drive is now under way to get Sunni Arabs registered for the 15 October referendum on the constitution. If they defeat it by mustering a two-thirds majority in three provinces, the government will be dissolved and new transitional bodies elected. In that event, either a more equitable political process may emerge from the ashes, or a violent free-for-all could ensue in which each community attempts to secure its interests by force. Communities at war As the political differences become more entrenched, inter-communal violence is now gaining seemingly unstoppable momentum. Iraqi nationalism appears to be dissolving as fearful Iraqis seek safety in confessional bonds. Patrick Cockburn wrote vividly in the London Review of Books of Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad living in terror of Shi’ite death squads that operate with apparent government sanction, and of Shi’ite neighbourhoods traumatized by the unending wave of suicide bombs. In one recent attack 16 Shi’ites were killed by a car bomb outside a restaurant popular with government security forces in Basra, normally a city safe from insurgent attacks. While the targets in Basra were military, hundreds of civilians have also been targeted. On 17 August, for example, 43 Shi’ite civilians were killed by bombs at a bus stop in Baghdad and then at the hospital where the wounded were taken. On the other side, 36 bodies, apparently Sunni Arabs, were found in a dry riverbed in the Shi’ite-majority Wasit province on 25 August. The secretary-general of the Iraqi Islamic Party (a Sunni political party involved in the political process) blamed Shi’ite-led security forces. The tragic stampede at the Kadhamiya festival on 31 August, which left nearly 1,000 Shi’ite worshippers dead and was sparked by rumours of suicide bombers in the procession, has done little to ease sectarian tensions. Even during a commemorative march by hundreds of Shi’ites on 2 September, firefights erupted between Shi’ite and Sunni gunmen. More worrying are the consistent reports of small-scale ethnic cleansing by all communities. There have been reports of Sunnis using assassination and intimidation to drive Shi’ites from Ramadi in western Iraq and from certain districts of Baghdad, allegedly in retaliation for similar Shi’ite actions against Sunnis in the south, and of Kurds driving Arabs out of Kirkuk. The ever tense relationship between Kurds and Arabs is also nearing its moment of truth. The constitution tackles the volatile question of Kirkuk, which is caught in a lethal tug-of-war between Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans. It reportedly mandates that by December 2007 hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs who were moved to the city by the regime of Saddam Hussein must be relocated and a decision taken on whether the city should join the Kurdish autonomous region. But it is not only the Sunni Arab community which feels threatened by the prospect of Kurdish domination. “We are encouraging our people to claim their rights peacefully,” a Turkoman leader told the New York Times. “But if talks with the Kurds break down, that will be the beginning of civil war.” Like Lebanon, only bigger Iraq’s descent into zero-sum sectarianism has increased fears in the Arab world that it will become another Lebanon. The denominational map in Iraq is not as complex, but the grievances of Iraq’s three major communities are becoming ever more intractable. And Iraq’s population of 25 million, ten times larger than Lebanon’s, clearly has a stellar per capita rate of martial acumen to go with an apparently endless reservoir of arms. Unrestrained conflict in Iraq would therefore be likely to make that in Lebanon seem quaint. The Lebanese civil war had its roots deep in Lebanese domestic politics and history. But to some degree the country eventually became a battle-ground for competing regional interests. There is vastly more at stake in Iraq, the most gifted Arab country in terms of natural resources and strategic geography. It shares long borders with Turkey, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, all of whom it has had at least contentious relations with in the recent past. In a full-fledged civil war, the temptation for Iraq’s neighbours to forcefully assert their interests might prove irresistible. Given all this grist, how might the dark mill of civil war begin turning in Iraq? It might simply develop out of a continuing, steady rise in the vicious cycle of revenge killings. Alternatively, the collapse of the political process — say, on 15 October — could lead to an all-out land grab: the Kurds attempting to seize Kirkuk, for example, or Arab Sunnis and Shi’ite fighting for control of the mixed Sunni-Shi’ite towns south of Baghdad. Rivalries between Shi’ite groups were recently on display in the battles across five cities in southern Iraq between the Badr Brigades, affiliated with SCIRI, and Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Nineteen people were killed. Sadr, who espouses strong Iraqi and Islamic nationalism has made it clear that he opposes federalism. His stance has won him support among sections of the Sunni public and leadership. And then there are the neighbours. As Juan Cole of the University of Michigan recently wrote: “If Iraq fell into civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites, the Saudis and Jordanians would certainly take the side of the Sunnis, while Iran would support the Shi’ites.” Which means, in a sense, that an Iraqi civil war would see the eight-year Iran-Iraq war replayed on Iraqi territory. To complicate matters, any Kurdish success would draw in Turkey. Beyond Iraq, a civil war could destabilize the Gulf, and thereby the world economy. Sunni-Shi’ite tensions could be kindled in states like Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Washington’s quandary The US would thereby face an unenviable quandary. If civil war breaks out, it will be blamed either because of the provocation of its enduring presence or the vacuum left by its precipitous withdrawal. There is a strong body of opinion that maintains that it is the presence of occupation forces that stokes the violence. Their presence may have set Iraq on fire, but the conflagration would be unlikely to be extinguished by their absence. To an extent, the Bush Administration has only itself to blame. Iraq was hardly a model of communal harmony under Saddam Hussein. But US support for sectarian political parties and the creation of a political system centred around confessional quotas has significantly elevated identity politics. This approach has migrated into a constitution which apportions government posts on a confessional basis, Lebanon-style. If the Administration intended to divide Iraq’s communities in order to make them more malleable, its success could come at a very high price. The joke in Iraq before the invasion was that Iraqis actually wanted the gates of hell to be opened so they could get out. But even Iraqis’ stubborn gallows humour is fading as the prospects for a better future after Saddam diminish. Yet there are slivers of light amid the darkness. After the Kadhimiya tragedy the Iraqi media hailed Uthman Abd al-Hafez, a young Sunni who died saving Shi’ite pilgrims drowning in the Tigris, as a hero and icon of sectarian harmony. |
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