Party Vibe

Crumbling Iraq

DER SPIEGEL 30/2005 – July 25, 2005
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,366834,00.html

Is the Country Heading for Civil War?

By Georg Mascolo and Bernhard Zand

From the outside, it seems like chaotic violence. But it’s worse than that. In Iraq, Sunni Muslim suicide commandos are launching bloodbaths among the Shiites, gradually edging the country toward civil war. Instead of becoming a democratic beacon for the entire region, Iraq is on the verge of disintegrating.

Violence in Iraq seems only to be getting worse. Here, the scene after the devestating tanker blast 10 days ago.
Some 80 suicide bombers, or about one a day, have lost their lives since April. They may believe that they are bound for paradise, but their last path on earth is full of treachery and deceit.

A young man was standing in front of Baghdad’s old city airport trying to stir up a group of his unemployed contemporaries. “You’re such fools,” he said. “The guards are standing over there at the entrance, collecting their bribes — and you stand around out here in the sun and don’t even know that you’re being duped.”

The man waited quietly until the agitated crowd had pushed its way into a narrow passageway between three-foot concrete barriers at the entrance of an Iraqi police recruiting office. Then he strolled over to the crowd, forced his way through the barriers and detonated his belt of explosives. 25 people died.

A tanker truck stolen from the oil ministry had already been parked directly in front of the local mosque for some time. It was supposed to explode a few days later in the center of the city of Mussayib, half an hour’s drive south of Baghdad — but not until after 8 p.m., after the day’s heat finally subsided. By then, shops in the bazaar would be opening for business and the faithful would be gathering for evening prayers. The assassin climbed under the truck and blew himself up. 98 dead.

The man who was loitering, trance-like, in front of a cemetery in New Baghdad, was wearing a vest packed with explosives. His vest pockets were filled with broken ball bearings. Police officers discovered the man and arrested him before he could do any damage. The suicide bomber had been waiting for a funeral procession carrying the coffins of children killed three days earlier in a suicide attack. The man, a Libyan, was pumped full of sedatives and surrendered to police without resistance.

Daily pattern of murder

The daily pattern of murder in Iraq is spinning out of control; the death toll is becoming unbearable. Iraqi cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani ruled that the indiscriminate slaughtering of politicians and religious dignitaries, children and the elderly has assumed the dimensions of “mass extermination,” and that Iraq is headed in the direction of what he called “genocide.”

The elderly leader of Iraq’s Shiites has consistently urged his fellow Shiites to remain calm and is not given to exaggeration. Indeed, he has good reason to issue his dramatic appeal: Thousands of Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police officers have already met violent deaths in the first half of this year. Nevertheless, Iraq’s Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, says that there is no discernible pattern to the omnipresence of death, no grand plan behind the indiscriminate terror.

But his claim ignores the obvious: The victims of the suicide attacks are almost exclusively Shiites, who represent the majority, or about 60 percent, of the Iraqi population.

The masterminds of terror, especially al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are Sunnis. Their goal is to instigate civil war, which would lead to the complete collapse of this ethnically and religiously divided country.

This civil war, which has in fact been underway for some time, isn’t just frightening the citizens of Baghdad, whose lives have become a living hell as a result. It’s also alarming the American president, who sees it as a threat to his legacy. The disintegration of Iraq after a long, bloody civil war would be precisely the opposite of the peaceful, democratic and prosperous development US President George W. Bush had planned to bestow upon Iraq and the rest of the region with his military intervention.

Quarreling Muslim factions

For this reason the US government, whose 139,000-strong occupation force is far too small to be able to guarantee security and order, is avoiding any reference to a religious war or even a clash between quarreling Muslim factions.

The open street fighting that dragged the Lebanese capital of Beirut to the brink of disaster 30 years ago hasn’t erupted in Baghdad yet. But the writing on the wall is unmistakable: the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, which claims new lives every day, is beginning to erupt in sections of this city of five million where the two groups have coexisted peacefully — until now.

Five times in the last four weeks, for example, ordinary people, who had nothing at all to do with building a new Iraq, were killed as they walked along the road to the airport in Baghdad’s Amariya neighborhood. They were killed for revenge, escalating animosities between the two religious groups. First, a Sunni fruit vendor was kidnapped. Then a Shiite pharmacist was shot, followed by the shooting of a Sunni who managed an ice cream parlor. Finally, two Shiite street vendors disappeared; their bodies were found days later, dumped onto a pile of garbage.

“Never before have I ended the school year feeling so discouraged,” says elementary school teacher Mohammed Salih, 30. “Even my pupils are starting to curse one another for being Sunnis or Shiites. The seeds of evil have been sown, and they are germinating with each passing day.”

“It looks like a civil war,” says Ayham al-Samarrai, who arrived in Washington for talks last week. Al-Samarrai, who had been Minister of Electricity in the transitional government that was replaced in April, has many friends in the Bush administration. He is considered to be one of the few Iraqis with reliable connections to individual groups of insurgents. Their main goal, says Samarrai, is to force the Shiite government legitimated by the elections to relinquish some of its influence.

In a formal letter, the key Islamic Jihad groups nominated Samarrai to be their middleman for conveying their demands to the occupation forces. The Zarqawi-led group, “al-Qaida in Iraq,” is excluded explicitly.

The declared objective of the governments in Baghdad and Washington is to detach Zarqawi from his support infrastructure of former Saddam sympathizers, unemployed soldiers, Arab nationalists, frustrated tribal leaders and common criminals. Washington’s terrorism experts believe that if disappointed Iraqis (Americans call them POI, or “pissed-off Iraqis”) can be placated, the chances of achieving some measure of peace in the country would be far less dismal than they are now. Until now, Zarqawi’s fighters have shown little interest in capturing the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Indeed, the terrorists, many of whom come from other countries, are perceived as invaders. Is it possible to split the insurgency? Perhaps, but time seems to be on the side of the terrorists and their plan to plunge the country into utter chaos.

Utilities disruptions

Last week, when the temperature in Baghdad soared over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), the city experienced something that was even a rarity in the months following the war: the simultaneous collapse of its three most important supply systems.

An attack on the central oil pipeline north of Baghdad interrupted the power supply and caused gasoline and diesel fuel shortages. The extreme heat aggravated a water shortage that had already lasted for weeks — the brackish liquid now dripping from Baghdad’s faucets has become undrinkable. To make matters worse, the power supply to the Iraqi capital was reduced to four hours of electricity, portioned out to customers in small installments throughout the day.

The administration of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari is bearing the brunt of Iraqis’ frustrations. Since it came into power in April, Jaafari’s government has been unable to improve basic services or improve the catastrophic security situation in the country.

US military officials have been complaining for months that the Iraqi police force and military are not even remotely capable of establishing peace in the country. And now the opinion is official. In a report released on Thursday, July 21, the Pentagon conceded that half of Iraq’s 93,800 police officers have barely mastered basic training and are completely unqualified for regular duty.

The other half, as well as two-thirds of the 78,800 new troops in the Iraqi armed forces, are only “partially deployable” — only in conjunction with US troops, according to the Pentagon brief. That leaves the country with about 26,000 of its own troops to conduct an independent fight against terror — a force that exceeds Washington’s current estimate of 20,000 insurgents in Iraq by just 6,000 men. Only three out of a total of 107 army and police battalions, the report continues, are truly capable of “planning, executing and maintaining independent operations.”

Armed pre-schoolers

This lack of experience has become all too apparent to US military trainers at the country’s three main training camps, where recruits are given to shouting “Iraq! Iraq! Iraq!” with the same enthusiasm as they once shouted “Saddam! Saddam! Saddam!” Even after completing the training, Iraqi security forces don’t come close to meeting US standards. Indeed, American GIs derisively refer to their new brothers-in-arms as “armed pre-schoolers.”

Ever since an Iraqi unit forgot to take away a prisoner after a raid near Baghdad, and after it was discovered that guards at road blocks are fond of taking naps, American minders have been deployed everywhere. For the Americans, some of the Iraqis’ most annoying habits include doing their shopping while on patrol and consuming psychotropic drugs to calm their nerves before reporting to duty.

Civilian foreign investors, for whose support the Iraqi government campaigned at conferences in Munich and Amman, Jordan, last week, have generally avoided Iraq. Many of the businessmen who attended the events complained that the precarious security situation is making orderly reconstruction an impossibility.

Egyptian telephone magnate Naguib Sawiris has experienced first-hand what can happen to foreign entrepreneurs serious about investing in post-war Iraq. In 2003, the US civilian administration awarded his company the license for the first wireless network in central Iraq. Iraqna (“Our Iraq”), which covers Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, already boasts a million customers and has managed to earn $63 million in revenues in the first quarter of this year alone.

But many Iraqna customers complain about quality problems in the network caused by American forces’ frequent use of jamming transmitters during military operations. The insurgents revile the company as being pro-American while simultaneously accusing the Iraqi government of facilitating communications for terrorists.

“Working in Iraq is extremely difficult,” says Sawiris. “There are no foreign experts who’ll go to Iraq voluntarily, and reliable local subcontractors are nonexistent.” The company currently employs only 400 technicians and administrators in Iraq, with another 1,200 employees working as bodyguards and equipment security guards.

The conviction that they are fighting a weak government, a helpless police force and an overextended occupation army serves as constant motivation for the insurgents. But the “tree of Iraqi freedom” is being watered with blood, warned Prime Minister Jaafari, in an effort to prepare Iraqis for the cycles of violence that are expected to continue in the coming months, partly in response the parliament’s plan to adopt a new constitution in August, as well as plans to hold a referendum in October and elect a new government in December.

The tactics of violent insurgents in Iraq now are focused entirely on the war of religious divisons, says political scientist Nabil Mohammed of the University of Baghdad. And their strategy seems to be bearing fruit. In addition to suicide bombings, Basra, Baghdad and the areas with mixed populations south and northeast of the capital are now plagued by targeted attacks on Sunni and Shiite clerics and politicians, with retaliation often occurring within hours.

On Haifa Street in Baghdad in early July, a gang of killers shot and killed Sheikh Kamal al-Din al-Ghureifi, one of the highest-ranking representatives of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. That same afternoon, assailants forced their way into a Sunni mosque in the same district and kidnapped Sunni cleric Amr al-Tikriti.

“The war between religious divisions has begun”

In his sermon on the following Friday, Imam Jalal al-Din al-Saghir called for restraint, saying that “the war between religious divisions has begun. Their goal is to force the Shiites into a civil war. If this catastrophe occurs, everything will be lost.”

On the other hand, Chudeir al-Chusai, a member of parliament from the largest Shiite party, has already called for vigilantism: “We are on the edge of a precipice that could swallow us all. We have the right to defend ourselves.”

Meanwhile, even Sunnis are complaining about the targeted attacks on members of their own faith. They charge that the Shiite militia’s Badr Brigades, which should have been disbanded long ago, in fact form the core of the government’s own security apparatus.

According to Britain’s Observer, there is evidence that government security forces have committed “gruesome acts of violence.” The mutilated corpses of Sunnis arrested on charges of terrorism have been returned to their families bearing the characteristic wounds of extreme torture. The newspaper reported that units of the so-called Wolf Brigade, an elite force controlled by the Interior Ministry, maintain secret torture centers where prisoners are subjected to slave-like conditions reminiscent of the practices of Saddam’s sadistic commandos. “Yes, these things happen,” government spokesman Leith Kubba frankly admits. British and American officials also have found evidence of the torture practices of Iraqi units.

Independent Kurdish state

However, Major General Mohammed Qureishi, the legendary commander of the Wolf Brigade, maintains close personal ties to Prime Minister Jaafari, who praises Qureishi as a “true hero in the fight against terror.”

Faced with the pressure of presenting a new constitution by mid-August, politicians of all stripes are doing their utmost to avert civil war. But in doing so they place their own lives in danger. Mijbil Issa and Dhamin Hussein al-Obeidi, two of the 25 Sunni leaders who agreed to join the constitutional convention, were murdered last Tuesday.

Despite lawmakers’ efforts, the former realm of Saddam, who disgraced himself in a televised court hearing last week with his shrill complaints, threatens to break into pieces. Politicians in the comparatively peaceful provinces in the north and south of the country are increasingly pushing for secession, and even some Sunnis in central Iraq — once staunch opponents of a breakup of Iraq — are beginning to take to the idea.

Jalal Talabani believes the simple fact that he, as a Kurd, was elected president, speaks for Iraq’s indivisibility. But Saedi Barsandji, one of the closest advisors to Talabani’s rival, Masud Barzani, disagrees: “Whatever the official Kurdish position may be, our historic goal is an independent, sovereign Kurdish state.”

Barzani is currently a member of the Iraqi National Congress and heads the Kurdish delegation to the constitutional convention. Last Wednesday, he presented the group with a map that can only further aggravate ethnic conflict in Iraq. The map documents territorial claims extending hundreds of kilometers south of the current Kurdish Autonomous Region, all the way to the city of Jassan, about 100 kilometers southeast of Baghdad.

The leaders of Kurdish northern Iraq have repressed virtually everything Arabic, as well as any other indications of the region’s Iraqi identity. And now, say the non-Kurdish inhabitants of northern Iraqi oil center Kirkuk, they are also trying to drive out the city’s Arab population. Their claims are not unfounded: Kurdish leaders are insisting on the repatriation of 300,000 Kurds that Saddam had expelled from the Kirkuk region.

“No more centralist system”

The Kurdish representatives in Iraq’s government managed to insert strong provisions into Iraq’s interim constitution to guarantee the autonomy the region gained in 1991. Under Article 61, a two-thirds majority in only 3 of Iraq’s 18 provinces would be sufficient to reject a final constitution. But this clause, originally included as a concession to the Kurdish provinces of Arbil, Suleimaniya and Dahuk, is now being used as a political weapon in predominantly Shiite southern Iraq and in the Sunni triangle.

“We want to do away with the centralist system that ties the entire country to the capital,” says Bakr al-Yassin, chairman of the governing council in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Using Iraqi Kurdistan as his model, Yassin wants to establish a southern Iraqi autonomous region that would consist of the provinces of Basra, Dhi Qar and Maysan — an area that includes most of Iraq’s oil reserves. His most important ally is Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon’s former protégé, whose family hails from Nasiriyah.

Both Yassin and Chalabi are considered secular Shiites. The principal beneficiaries of their plan for an autonomous region, however, would be the religious Shiite parties and their militias, which already control southern Iraq and maintain excellent relations with neighboring, Shiite-dominated Iran. Until now, the leaders of these parties have vehemently supported a uniform, centralized state extending “from the Turkish to the Kuwaiti border.” But they are beginning to soften on their position. Both Grand Ayatollah Sistani and his younger rival, Muqtada al-Sadr, have declared that it should be up to the people to decide whether the south should become autonomous.

But Article 61 doesn’t just pave the way to autonomy for the Kurds and Shiites. Fassal al-Ka’oud, governor of the volatile al-Anbar Province, believes that the constitutional loophole also applies to other groups. Last May, he and his counterparts from Mossul and Tikrit, Saddam’s home town, came together in a largely unnoticed meeting to discuss their options. Although their three provinces are ethnically and religiously less homogeneous than the country’s north and south, they could probably muster a qualified Sunni majority that would satisfy the requirements of Article 61.

Kurdistan, Shiistan, Sunnistan? In a fracturing Iraq, what would happen to Baghdad, with its five million inhabitants, where none of the three groups constitutes a clear majority?

Wayne White, a former leading expert on Iraq at the US State Department who now works for a Washington think tank, points out that Baghdad follow the miserable precedent set by Beirut. If authorities aren’t able to improve life for Iraqis and isolate terror soon, a battle for control of the capital could result — possibly with mass expulsions.

And who will ultimately gain the upper hand? “There’s no winner at this point,” says White.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan