Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Özeti
➡ Abu Ghraib in Baghdad who “after 30
years as a school teacher is out of a job
and a pension. They just sent him a message
written on a scrap of paper saying
“Go home”. He is penniless. If he was
younger he would get a gun.”
Many Shia express sympathy for cases
like this, but they add that Sunni in
Anbar, Salahudin, Nineveh and Sunni
districts of Baghdad are frequently
unemployed because they used to have
plum jobs under Saddam Hussein as
army, police or intelligence officers. In
the 1980s it was said that 80 per cent of
army officers were Sunni and 20 per cent
Shia, while the proportions were the
reverse in the lower ranks. A retired Shia
general says “it is hypocritical of Sunni to
demand back security jobs that they only
held in the past because of sectarian bias
in their favour.”
The Sunni demonstrations, now entering
their third month, raise a question
crucial to the future of Iraq: how far
will the Sunni, once dominant, accept a
lower status? Members of the government
fear the real agenda of the Sunni is
not reform but regime change, a counterrevolution
reversing the post-Saddam
Hussein political settlement. “Shia leaders
believe they have been elected, are
legitimate and any change should come
through an election,” said one senior official.
“If there should be any attempt to
take power from them by force, they will
fight.”
There is no doubt that in 2003, with the
fall of Saddam Hussein and again in the
sectarian civil war of 2006-8, the Sunni
of Iraq suffered historic defeats. Baghdad
became a largely Shia city with few mixed
districts and remains so to this day.
“More than half of all Baghdad neighbourhoods
now contain a clear Shia
majority,” reads a US embassy cable on
the changed sectarian balance in the capital
dating from the end of 2007 and published
by Wikileaks. “Sunni have largely
fled to outlying areas or have been concentrated
into small enclaves surrounded
by Shia neighbourhoods.” A sub-heading
in the cable about these enclaves reads
“islands of stability in a sea of fear”. This
generally remains the situation to this
day. Shia and Sunni do not necessarily
hate each other, but they do fear each
other and that fear will take long to dissipate.
Much of Iraq has been cantonised into
Sunni, Shia and Kurdish areas in a way
that was not true before 2003. In places,
burnt out Sunni mosques, or mosques
taken over by Shia, underline the extent
of Sunni defeat. Abdul-Karim Ali, a real
estate broker, says Sunni may want to
return, but they are frightened by
rumours of action against them, even
when these are not true. “I was just with
a Sunni family in Doura, who want me to
sell a good house in Bayaa in another part
of Baghdad, where they used to live, but
they think it is now too dangerous for
them to go there even to visit.”
Sunni hopes and Shia fears are being
heightened by the struggle for power in
Syria with the Sunni majority there likely
to emerge the winners. This emboldens
the Sunni of Iraq who no longer feel isolated
and sense that they benefit from a
region-wide Sunni counter-attack against
the Shia led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and
Turkey. “Extreme Sunni and Shia both
feel a sense of power,” says Dr Atiyyah,
“The Sunni say we have the whole Arab
world behind us. The Shia leadership
says we are the majority in Iraq.” He fears
these beliefs are a recipe for mutual
destruction. A strong sign that the civil
war in Syria is spreading into western
Iraq came this week when 48 unarmed
Syrian soldiers and nine Iraqi guards
were killed probably by al-Qa’ida in an
ambush on Iraqi territory to which they
had fled.
Al-Qa’ida in Iraq is using the protests
to issue a call for Sunni to take up
arms against the government. There has
been an increase in suicide bomb attacks
on Shia targets and harassment of
government forces, mostly in areas where
al-Qa’ida has traditionally been strong
north of Baghad, There is no doubt these
attacks fuel sectarian animosities, particularly
as the government suspects Sunni
politicians and religious leaders of giving
a green light to these actions as a form of
leverage against the state. “There are
those who will close their eyes to what al-
Qa’ida is doing,” says a leading politician.
“Maybe al-Sahwa, the Sons of Iraq [the
government paid Sunni militia], will not
be so interested in fighting al-Qa’ida.”
At the heart of the problem of creating an
acceptable consensus and balance of
power between Shia, Sunni and Kurd in
Iraq is that they have all been traumatised
by atrocities inflicted on them by
other Iraqi communities in the recent
past. In the case of the Shia and Sunni the
memory of the sectarian slaughter of
2006-7 is still fresh and it takes little to
revive past terrors. For instance, in the
largely Shia Jihad district of south-west
Baghdad in recent days menacing notes
have been turning up at Sunni homes.
They read “the zero hour has come. So
leave along with you families... you are
the enemy.” They are signed by the
Mukhtar army, a newly formed Shia sectarian
group though their spokesman
denies the flyers come from them. Even
so, many Sunni residents are panicking,
packing up and fleeing to Sunni enclaves
in other parts of the city.
It is easy to see why they go. Before
2006 Jihad was a mixed middle class
neighbourhood. I had driver called
Bassim Abdul Rahman, a Sunni who had
built a house for himself there with a sitting
room and two bedrooms in 2001. “I
didn’t complete it because I didn’t have
enough money,” he says. “But we were so
happy to have our own home.” In the
summer of 2006 Shia militiamen of the
Mehdi Army took over Jihad, and Bassim
fled with his wife and three children to
Syria. When he came back three months
later he found that a Shia family was
occupying his house and neighbours told
him to leave immediately or the militiamen
would kill him. He and his family
were forced to squat in a single damp
room in his brother-in-law’s house in a
Sunni district.
He tried to work as a taxi driver but most
of Baghdad was too dangerous for him to
drive in. In his old neighbourhood he was
denounced as “being a high ranking officer
in the former intelligence service.” He
discovered that all his possessions had
been looted. Desperate, he sold his car
and his wife’s jewellery and used the
money to try to get to Sweden illegally via
Malaysia using a Lithuanian passport.
His plan failed and he returned miserably
to Baghdad. He is driving a taxi again,
but the streets of Baghdad are so full of
yellow taxis, and traffic is so bad, that he
cannot earn more than $25 on a good
day.
Iraq has many people with similarly
ruined lives. Many Sunni have seen their
lives torn apart by occupation and sectarian
violence over the last decade and are
fearful of it happening again. Another
Sunni friend has done better and has a
middle ranking post in a ministry where
he says most jobs are going to members
of the ruling Dawa party of Mr Maliki.
“They run it like a tribe,” he says. “Every
appointee is one of their relatives.” He
speaks fearfully of civil war but adds that
“if the Sunni could just get jobs and pensions
all this fury would ebb away.” ●
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