A History of the Middle East (65 page)

That said, despite appearances, the clergy’s ascendancy in Iraq bore significant differences to that in neighbouring Iran. Unlike Ayatollah Khomeini and his theory of the
velayat al-faqih
, or sovereignty of a single religious jurisprudent, Iraq’s leading clerics did not aspire to create a theocracy, still less to run one, but rather to advise the ruling authorities. The leading religious party, Dawa, espoused the notion of
velayat al-umma
, or popular sovereignty, in which the people served as God’s vice-regents and held legislative and executive power. ‘Islamic theory rejects aristocratic regimes and proposes a form of government which contains all the positive aspects of the democratic system,’ wrote their leading ideologue Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr in the 1970s before Saddam tortured him to death.

Foremost amongst Iraq’s Shia clerics was Grand Ayatollah Sistani. He made an unlikely Iraqi liberator. Born 800 miles away in the Iranian shrine city of Marshad in 1930, he first visited Iraq aged thirty and was something of a recluse. And yet for over a year his
fatwas
, written in a pinched hand, flummoxed and ultimately unseated Bremer, carrying far more weight than the latter’s edicts heavy with legalese. Though cloistered in his Najaf office, he was the dynamo that drove Iraq’s transition to democracy. He gave elections a religious stamp of approval, declared voting an Islamic duty, and as spiritual leader of Iraq’s largest community, kept Iraq’s 15
million Shias from open revolt against US forces on the understanding that the US would stage free and fair elections and hand power to their victors.

To this end he galvanized demonstrations in numbers rarely seen in the Middle East except at funerals. Launched in January 2004 from the Basra mosque where Shia rebels had launched their 1991 revolt, the protestors marched north, gathering numbers as they moved up the Tigris. By the time they reached Baghdad, Bremer had begun to backtrack on his ambition to govern Iraq. In March 2004, he handed back the first ministry to Iraqi rule, and as he ended a visit to the health ministry officials unfurled a large black banner from its rooftop, proclaiming ‘Hussein’s Revolution’. Bremer furtively left Baghdad in June 2004, handing over to an unelected Interim Iraqi Government and a US ambassador. Despite mounting violence, Sistani continued to champion Iraq’s first parliamentary elections, set for January 2005, turning his office into an election machine. He authorized a single Shia list, dispensed millions of dollars in campaign funds, and used the 2,500 mosques which followed his
fatwas
to broadcast voting instructions to the faithful. Defying the threat of massacres by Sunni rebels seeking to enforce a boycott and thwart a Shia victory, Shias turned out to vote in their millions.

Sistani did face challenges to his reformist creed. Muqtada Sadr was the young scion of Iraq’s most prominent clerical family, with a reputation for siding with the Shia poor and dispossessed. Impatient with Sistani’s constitutional approach, Sadr called for a popular revolution against both the US occupation and the mercantile elites allied with Sistani. After failing to spark a popular uprising in November 2003 with a creed steeped in millenarianism, he opted for military means. He assembled a 60,000-strong armed force, drawn largely from the lower, and predominantly Shia, ranks of Saddam’s disbanded infantry. He named it the Mahdi’s Army after the twelfth Imam of the Shiites, who according to Shia tradition would return as the Messiah, and made rapid gains. In March 2004 his forces swept through seven southern provinces, and overran
police stations and a Coalition base from Basra to Kirkuk, procuring much-needed arms in the process. They also wrested control of Iraq’s lucrative Shia shrine-cities, Karbala and Najaf, from Sistani’s clerics. Though rapidly pushed back elsewhere in Iraq, they only abandoned Najaf after US-led forces, with Sistani’s tacit assent, stormed the shrine in August 2004.

Amid growing intra-Shia rancour, forces professing loyalty to Sistani repeatedly clashed with Sadr’s as they vied for control of Shia towns. Only loosely controlled by the clerics, the military wings repeatedly resorted to gangsterism. After heavy fighting for control of Basra in spring 2008, US–Iraqi forces attacked Sadr’s heartland in Baghdad, Sadr City. Sadr disbanded his forces and fled to Iran to study religious jurisprudence in Qom, determined to renew his claim to political and religious Shia leadership at a later date.

The Sunni Counter-attack

As Saddam’s Sunni hierarchy tumbled under the combined assault of Bremer’s decrees and Shia supremacists, angry protests erupted led by the newly unemployed. For the most part, they closely mirrored Iraq’s sectarian divide. Heavy-handed US responses, particularly in Fallujah, where US forces opened fire on demonstrators to lethal effect, fuelled the anger. Without a Sistani figure to harness dissent, Sunni opposition in central and northern Iraq fragmented into loosely coordinated cells of former soldiers, under the command of Saddam’s generals, particularly those of the Republican Guard. Their targets were the newly ascendant Shia leadership, US forces, and the foreign mercenaries and Iraqis they employed.

An influx of
jihadi
groups, who trickled in from Afghanistan before the invasion and flooded from across the region and beyond soon afterwards, fuelled animosities. Hosted in Sunni areas, they made common cause – or in the words of US commanders ‘a
marriage of convenience’ – with ex-Baathist cells. From their rear bases along the upper Euphrates and Tigris valleys, especially in the western province of Anbar, they conducted a wave of suicide bombings in Iraq’s major cities. Initially focusing on foreign targets – the Jordanian Embassy and the Baghdad headquarters of the UN and Red Cross were amongst the first targets – they increasingly targeted Shia civilians.

The brutality of US counter-insurgency methods and the siege and subsequent storming of Anbar’s main towns, Fallujah and Ramadi, only accentuated sympathies for the
jihadis
, further cementing the alliance with the local population. In contrast to Arab nationalism,
jihadi
ideology thrived on repression. ‘
Jihadi
violence is like a virus,’ noted an exiled ideologue. ‘The more you bomb it, the more it spreads.’

Despite, or perhaps because of, Saddam’s capture in December 2003, the revolt flourished.
Jihadi
cells were ever more in the commanding seat. The following month rebels dispatched their first platoon-sized Special Forces – operating under such names as ‘
Jihadi
Earthquake Brigades’, challenging US forces’ hold on provincial capitals. In October 2006, an umbrella group of
jihadi
organizations in Mesopotamia declared an independent Islamic state covering Arab Sunni provinces across Iraq. US forces had some success co-opting Iraqi Sunnis by reviving military units Bremer had disbanded, but
jihadi
groups retained remarkable staying power. Six years on, they continued to jolt central government with a series of huge bombings against government offices.

Iraq’s Civil War and Shia Victory

Iraq does not split neatly into Sunni and Shia parts. Iraqi tribes straddle the sectarian divide and most count tribesmen from both. In the north, a substantial minority of Iraq’s Kurds are Shia; in the south a quarter of Basra is Sunni, and Baghdad is a communal patchwork. Or was.

Bremer’s handover of formal control to Iraqis launched the communal race for control of Iraq. Shias fought with the demographic muscle of the ballot box, Sunnis with arms. At their peak, an average of six suicide bombings a day struck Baghdad, sometimes targeting Shias in their market places, other times their shrines. Guided by Sistani, Shias displayed remarkable restraint. But Shias were increasingly traumatized: rumours of a suicide bomber loose amongst pilgrims on a bridge linking Baghdad’s two principal shrines precipitated a stampede in which nearly 1,000 people died – the single worst toll in post-invasion Iraq. As the bloodshed swelled, people on both sides looked to armed groups to safeguard their economic, legal and physical well-being.

The
jihadis
’ destruction of Samarra’s gold-topped Imam al-Asqari Shia shrine in February 2007 marked the tipping point. In its wake, Shia militants attacked over a hundred Sunni mosques and killed a dozen Sunni imams. Death squads armed with electric drills toured heterogeneous but predominantly Shia suburbs and satellite towns of Baghdad, torturing Sunnis to death. The predominantly Shia security forces – drafted by the Iraqi government under US supervision and commanded by a Shia interior minister and his appointees – exacerbated the terror. Sunni fighters, who had fared well against US troops, were increasingly on the defensive. Three-quarters of the 3,000 cadavers arriving in Baghdad morgues every month in 2007 were Sunni.

The revenge killings triggered a Sunni flight, emptying whole neighbourhoods of their non-Shia populations. As they fled, US forces erected concrete blast-walls and checkpoints, splitting the capital into cantons of separate sects and quarantined confessions. Baghdad’s hotchpotch grew increasingly monochrome, with the east bank of the Tigris – Rusafa – almost entirely rid of its Sunnis. Similar scenes repeated themselves in other hitherto mixed parts of Iraq. By 2007 over two million mainly Sunni Iraqis had fled north or abroad: an average of 100,000 people per month. Many were middle class. In their absence sectarian warlords and tribal sheiks held ever greater sway.

When the civil war’s dust settled in 2008 the result was a striking change in Baghdad’s demography. A Colombia University survey revealed that of the capital’s five million people, only a few hundred thousand were Sunni. Countrywide, the proportion of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs fell from 20 to 12 per cent of the population. Washington claimed credit for the decline of the Sunni insurgency, attributing it to its increased troop ‘surge’, beginning in summer 2007. More accurately, the Shia counter-attack had shattered Sunni resistance. Many Sunni fighters jumped at the US offer to register for a Sons of Iraq programme, which allowed them to keep their guns and earn cash nominally fighting al-Qaeda, and salvage a little honour from the jaws of defeat. Having previously fought ballots with bullets, Sunni Arabs begrudgingly ended their boycott and insurgency, and accepted political integration into the post-Saddam Iraq. By 2009, the death-toll had dropped from a few thousand to a few dozen per month.

The costs of Shia victory were huge. Seven years on, 5 per cent of Iraq’s 27 million people had been killed, wounded or uprooted. Twice as many Americans had been killed as had died on 9/11, and the estimated cost – according to a US Congressional report – topped $4 trillion. For all the talk of reconstruction, the only cranes on Baghdad’s horizon pre-dated the war and were stationary. Oil production remained below pre-war levels. And power and water cuts in the oil-rich state were the norm.

The Region-wide Rise of Popular Movements

The colonial powers that carved countries out of the Ottoman Middle East had predicted that over time they would gain weight as independent states, acquire national identities and win the ensuing loyalty of their subjects in return. Eighty years on, they were struggling to keep afloat. People increasingly identified and expressed a sense of belonging to pre-existing tribal or other bonds, not their nation. Hybrid populations fractured according to ethnicity or sect.
Marriage between sects, once common, waned. Walls divided cities, mapping sectarian or ethnic boundaries.

Centrifugal forces were most striking in the once unified state of Iraq. Kurds turned their safe haven into a virtual protectorate, with their own flag, language and parliament; Shia factions campaigned for a nine-province autonomous zone in the south; and Sunni groups declared their own emirates. The same forces unravelling Iraq spilled into neighbouring states, tearing at their seams. Lebanon’s 1990 Taif agreement, which ended the civil war and promised an abrogation of confessional politics, remained ink on paper.

Young Lebanese – more than their parents – grew up first and foremost Maronites, Shiites, Sunnis or Druze. Jewish irredentist parties in Israel campaigned to rid their state of many of its Arabs. Moments of crisis, such as the 2006 war with Israel, amplified Lebanon’s communalism. Berber movements in Algeria and Morocco struggled against the ruling ideology of Arabism and clamoured for minority rights and recognition of their tongue, Tamazight, as an official language. Even Saudis began defining themselves not by their kingdom but by their region – the Hejaz coastal strip in the west, the Shia Hasa region in the east, and the tribal rump in the middle.

A key cause of the draw of transnational ideologies and the erosion of belief in a nation state was the failure of Arab regimes to meet the needs of their people. Mismanagement, inequalities, corruption and state violence eroded their credibility. Saddled with rapidly growing populations and archaic economies, they struggled to maintain patronage mechanisms and provide jobs. In many Arab states, oil exports cushioned the authorities from addressing the malaise as long as prices remained high. But when prices fell (for instance from $145 a barrel in July 2008 to $35 five months later) and the global economy slumped, governments were forced to slash subsidies. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad failed to deliver promises to lift 14 million of his country’s 70 million-strong population out of poverty, and faced mass urban opposition in 2009 when he stood for re-election. Syria struggled to deal with the loss of Gulf largesse, free Iraqi oil and Lebanese resources. Economic crisis in
Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest state, sparked provincial revolts, as oil production levels almost halved in a decade across the region. Mounting corruption and human rights abuses further undermined confidence in the state’s provision of law and order.

Overburdened central governments increasingly surrendered their roles as ultimate welfare provider, social safety net, judicial arbiter and protector to clan, confessional and ethnic movements. Tribal sheikhs and ayatollahs filled the vacuum left by ineffective heads of state. Local leaders derived further strength by rallying with kin or co-believers beyond national boundaries, creating supranational or transnational identities which further weakened the state.