Much worse

Much worse
by Gabriele Zamparini

Asked by the BBC whether the situation in Iraq could now be classified as a civil war, the outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan replied: "A few years ago, when we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war. This is much worse.”

A few days ago, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees released an update on the Iraq situation. It starts: “Iraq is haemorrhaging”. Then it gives the picture of an apocalypse.

Aljazeerah.info’s editor has just published a summary translation of three articles appeared on the London-based Arabic newspaper, Al-Quds Al-Arabi:

The first article is about a study conducted by the Iraqi Southern Research Center for Strategic Planning. It mentions that about 400 Iraqis are killed daily in Baghdad alone. The killing is sectarian aiming at cleansing East Baghdad from Sunnis and West Baghdad from Shi'is.

Perpetrators commit their crimes using car bombs, mortars, motorbikes, bicycles, and guns. They kill in day times with protection from security forces.

In another article, there are stories about Shi'i families forced to quit their homes in Sunni areas, and Sunni families forced to quit their homes in Shi'i areas by militiamen. Despite their plight, they are better off than the ones who are killed daily to complete this ethnic cleansing campaign.

About fifty families are forced daily to leave their homes from one area to another. About fifty more families are forced to leave Baghdad as a result of this campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In addition, extended families and neighbors exert pressure on men to divorce their wives from another sect. Thus, many Sunni women have been divorced by their Shi'i husbands, who usually take the children in their custody. Many Shi'i women are also being divorced by their Sunni husbands, who keep children in their custody, too.

The article tells some of these stories, with names of people and their locations.

A third article is about the opportunist Iraqi exiles, who were used by the Bush-Blair administrations to convince the public in the US-UK to accept the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

After completing their role, they and their families are now back in the wealthy London neighborhoods. The article mentions names and locations of residence of these Iraqis who helped destroy their country. These include Iyad Allawi, Ibrahim Al-Ja'afari, Ahmed Chalabi, Adnan Pajahji, Laith Kubba, and Ali Bin Al-Hussain.

Sectarian violence tears Baghdad into two parts, is the title of a report from the Integrated Regional Information Networks, which is part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The reports reads:

For decades, Iraq's six million-strong capital was a city where people mixed freely and did not care whether their neighbour was a Sunni or a Shi’ite Muslim.

But now, the years-old peaceful coexistence between members of different religions and sects in Baghdad is threatened with a battle underway between the two major Muslim sects to have their own territory in this war-torn city.

"A new Baghdad is now emerging, a Sunni west and a Shi’ite east with the broad Tigris River in the middle as a sectarian boundary," said Dr Jamal al-Uraibi, a Baghdad-based analyst who lectures in political science at the University of Baghdad.

"This will have adverse effects on Iraqi society for the coming generations as each sect has legitimate claims to territory on both sides of the river which they won't emotionally abandon," al-Uraibi added.

What independent journalists and analysts are saying?

Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily:

Shia death squads composed of members of the Mehdi Army and the Badr Army, the armed wing of the Iran-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq are responsible for much of the recent bloodshed in the country. Sunni insurgents too have been hitting back. It is widely believed that Shia militia groups are backed by senior Shia leaders in the government and parliament.

Nir Rosen interviewed by Amy Goodman:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's talk about Muqtada al-Sadr. You've been in Iraq a long time. And now the newspapers of the weekend saying Muqtada al-Sadr replaces Osama Bin Laden as the world’s great enemy. Tell us who he is, and your experience of him over the years.

NIR ROSEN: Well, he arose from seemingly nowhere, although he comes from a very important clerical family. It's believed that his father, Muhammad Sadeq Sadr was killed by Baathists in 1999.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s who Sadr city is named for?

NIR ROSEN: Yes. And, Muqtada very quickly became the voice of the disenfranchised, poor, Shia majority, especially young men. Virtually every single young Shia male in Iraq supports Muqtada Sadr today. And certainly his men dominate the police, they dominate the army. When you hear about people dressed as police officers, or dressed as security forces, kidnapping somebody, you’re just hearing about supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr's, who are members of the police, kidnapping somebody. He’s been very anti-American from the beginning, very nationalistic, unlike perhaps, Abdul Aziz Hakim, of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who was perceived as coming on the back of American tanks, and being sort of sponsored by Iranians. Muqtada can claim he's always been there and suffered with the Iraqi people. He can disparage Ayatollah al-Sistani for being the quietest, for being Iranian-born. He has a national’s credentials. And for quite a while, he was actually fighting alongside Sunni resistance members.

In 2004, you had Muqtada’s people supporting the Sunni resistance in Fallujah, you had Sunni resistance helping Muqtada’s people in Najaf, in Sadr City, and there was a brief moment where you thought that there could be Sunni/Shia unity against the Americans at least. And if there was anything good that the American’s had done it was to unite the Sunni’s and Shia’s against them. But that all fell apart by 2005, or by the end of 2004. And since then, Muqtada al-Sadr, his militia, have taken the lead is sectarian attacks.

(…)

AMY GOODMAN: And the discussion of possible direct negotiations of Iran and Syria and the possibility that that’s what the Iraq Study Group is going to recommend?

NIR ROSEN: I think it’s clear that they will, and that I think it’s great that the US talks to Iran and Syria, its long over do. However, there is this belief that Iran and Syria have and have had this huge role in the violence in Iraq. And I just don't think that's true. If anything, Iran and Syria have always been concerned about the instability in Iraq. They are the neighbors of Iraq and if anybody can be threatened by the instability, it's them.

In Syria right now you have about 3 or 4 thousand Iraqi refugees crossing the border everyday, that’s going to destabilize Syria. You already have nearly a million Iraqi refugees in Syria today. Iran certainly wants a strong Shia Iraq as a close ally and a friend, much more than they want Saddam Hussein in charge. But, Iran isn't sponsoring the violence, neither is Syria. And so the belief that foreign countries can make things better I think is naïve, because the violence in Iraq has its own internal logic. It's civil war. All the arms are there, the hatred is there. And, it's not being fought by two large sides. It’s being fought in neighborhoods between different mosques, between different blocks, between different gangs. Power isn't in the green zone, power isn’t in Iran, in Syria, in Jordan. It’s not in the White House. It's very localized. Just different neighborhood clashes--

AMY GOODMAN: And what would happen if the US just withdrew troops?

NIR ROSEN: The same thing happening now, the civil war would continue. At some point Shias will make a move, a large move against the Sunnis in Baghdad. You’ll find a day when there are no Sunnis left in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia and Jordan are of course panicking about this, and they are hoping that the US will in some way arm or support Sunni militias. It’s hard for me to imagine that Sunni nations in the region will stand by and watch Sunnis pushed out of Baghdad. And Baghdad becoming really a Shia city. Because there is this Sunni terror of the Shia threat. So you'll see greater support from Saudi Arabia, from Jordan, perhaps from Yemin, from Egypt, for Sunni militias. Funding, things like that. And the civil war will spread and become a regional one. And I think Jordan will cease to exist as it does now. Eventually, because you'll have the Anbar Province of Iraq joining somehow--you already have one million Iraqi’s in Jordan at least. You walk down the streets of Jordan, you hear Iraqi Arabic as much as any other kind.

Loretta Napoleoni:

As it did during the bloody war in the Balkans, in Iraq the West is constantly entering into alliances, including with terrorist organizations, as if a clear divide existed between the good and the evil, and the West knew which was which. In Iraq, as in the Balkans, this "divide" shifts daily. In 1998, in Kosovo, following the attacks by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) against Serbian police and civilians, the U.S. accused the KLA of being a terrorist organization. The British followed suit. Then, in March 1999, foreign policy in the U.S. and the UK underwent a radical shift and both governments condemned the Serbs. Suddenly, members of the KLA were no longer terrorists but freedom fighters, and the KLA was summarily removed from the U.S. State Department's terror list. American politicians even praised the organization. The new status was then reversed when, a few months later, the KLA supported an Islamist insurgency against the government of Macedonia – a U.S. ally – and it was once again listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department. One wonders how many times since George Bush declared 'Mission Accomplished" in Iraq should the Mahdi Army have been entered and erased from this list.

The Balkanization of Iraq goes well beyond homegrown ethnic cleansing and civil war. It springs from the willingness of countries such as America and the United Kingdom to police the Middle East. It is proof that Western intervention can destabilize entire regions now that the world is no longer trapped in the Cold War Manichean straitjacket. (…) Today, Iran and Syria's involvement in the Iraqi civil war will continue to drag the country further into sectarian warfare and may even give al-Qaeda the longed-for opportunity to carve out their own state. This is the terrifying legacy of this unjust and illegal war, a legacy that should not be hidden by political propaganda. Nevertheless, the sooner the West pulls out of Iraq, the better the chances Iraqis will find their own way out of the present morass. The danger, of course, is that peace in Iraq will come only when nothing is left standing but the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia.

Mike Whitney:

There are no good options. If Bush ignores al-Sadr, then the ethnic-cleansing of Sunnis in Baghdad will continue and the number of civilian casualties will steeply rise. As author Nir Rosen stated in our opening quote, "You’ll find a day when there are no Sunnis left in Baghdad". Rosen’s prediction is becoming more likely by the day.

The Ba’athist leaders, who left the country with enormous wealth (and now live in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) will not sit idly-by while their fellow Sunnis are butchered in Baghdad. They will continue to fund the armed resistance and do whatever they can to destabilize the new Iraqi government. Additionally, they will support guerilla activities which target American facilities in the region to repay the people who created this holocaust. Already, Sunni cleric, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, the head of the Muslim Scholars Association, is traveling through the Middle East enlisting support from other Sunni leaders. He will probably establish a funding-stream for providing material support for the resistance. This illustrates how the war is gradually expanding beyond the confines of Iraq.

In an article which appeared on Monday in the Washington Post, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US, Turki al-Faisal said, "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave uninvited’. If it does, one of the first consequences will be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis."

It is likely that Sunnis in the other Middle East capitals share al-Faisal’s sentiments and will be equally willing to contribute generously to their "brothers-in-arms" in Iraq.

The invasion has opened Pandora’s Box and disrupted the regional balance of power. Now there’s no telling how far the war will spread. The ferocity of the sectarian fighting suggests that a much larger conflagration is on the way. Foreign leaders are already preparing for the worst. Bush’s misguided fantasies of "Victory" in Iraq have lit a powderkeg and it's probably just a matter of time before the entire Middle East is consumed by war.

Robert Dreyfuss:

It is, however, too late to stop the bleeding in Iraq. Six hundred thousand dead Iraqis later, the United States will depart from Iraq leaving behind a nation whose citizens will be struggling to rebuild their society for decades. The U.S. invasion of Iraq is a war crime of the first magnitude, an illegal war that destroyed a nation that had never attacked the United States, that did not have any weapons of mass destruction, that did not have any ties to al-Qaida, that had no connection to the September 11 attacks, and which—at the start of the war—was a small, impoverished country with a decimated army. The civil war in Iraq may indeed get worse, and it may last for years. Each and every one of those deaths will be on George W. Bush’s conscience—if, in fact, the Bible-thumping hypocrite has any conscience left.

This is the democracy the United States and their vassals brought to Iraq. The political process – that Trojan horse welcomed in many quarters of the Imperial left – was set 1) to divide the Iraqis between collaborators and anti-occupation and 2) (and even worse!) on ethnic and religious affiliations. Iraqis were forced to vote on religious and ethnic divides not for political parties and ideas. Incompetence on the US side or a plan to complete the destruction of Iraq and wipe it off the map?

The only solution for Iraq has to be found in the restoration of international law by bringing the clock back to March 20, 2003 and judging the perpetrators of the supreme international crime. Operation Iraqi Freedom has already exported enough freedom and democracy; nobody feels the need for more imperial adventures. What now appears impossible may be the only way out if we don’t want to assist to a bloodbath that could last years and millions of human lives. Of course bringing the clock back to March 20, 2003 is a dream. But the alternative is a never-ending nightmare millions of people have already been living on their own skin. Much worse indeed!