"Anatomy of a Civil War" (Iraq) by Nir Rosen -- this is a MUST READ!

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Sat Nov-25-06 01:59 PM
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"Anatomy of a Civil War" (Iraq) by Nir Rosen -- this is a MUST READ!

Anatomy of a Civil War -- Iraq’s descent into chaos

Nir Rosen

(excerpt)

After the 2003 invasion, the country’s majority Shia, radicalized by three decades of persecution and poverty under Saddam and suspicious of the American occupiers, responded quickly to the clerics’ incitements. Followers of Muqtada al Sadr capitalized on his father’s network of mosques and clerics to seize control of Shia Baghdad and much of the southern part of Iraq. They occupied hospitals, Baath Party headquarters, and government warehouses and gave themselves state power. The same pattern repeated itself in much of Iraq.

When Baghdad fell, on April 9, 2003, and widespread violence erupted, the primary victims were Iraq’s Sunnis. For Shias, this was justice. “It is the beginning of the separation,” one Shia cleric told me with a smile in the spring of 2003. Saddam had used Sunni Islam to legitimize his power, building one large Sunni mosque in each Shia city in the south; these mosques were seized by Shias immediately after the regime collapsed. During the 1990s Saddam also used the donations that Shia pilgrims make to the shrines they visit—totaling millions of dollars a month—to finance his Faith Campaign, which spread Sunni practices in Iraq and even declared official tolerance of Wahhabis for the first time, perhaps because of their deep hatred of Shias. Wahhabism is an austere form of Sunni Islam, dominant in Saudi Arabia, that rejects all other interpretations and views Shias as apostates. Wahhabis had traveled up from Arabia in centuries past and sacked Shia shrines. Now Shias were terrified of a Wahhabi threat. They feared that Wahhabis would poison the food distributed to pilgrims. According to a cleric in Najaf, Sheikh Heidar al Mimar, “There were no Sunnis in Najaf before the 1991 intifada, but Saddam brought Wahhabis to the Shia provinces in order to control the Shia. These Wahhabis were very bad with us, and all Shia were afraid of them.” Again and again I heard Iraq’s Shias refer to all Sunnis as Wahhabis.

The Shia wave that swept Iraq in the wake of the American attack overthrew the Sunni-led order imposed on Iraq for centuries—by the Ottomans and by the British. The uprising was guided largely by Shia leaders who under Saddam had been pushed underground or into exile and whose sectarian identity had been strengthened as a result.

On April 7 Ayatollah Sayyid Kadhim al Haeri, a cleric from Karbala who had been in exile in Iran since 1973, sent a letter to Najaf appointing Muqtada as his deputy and representative in Iraq. Haeri also urged Iraqis to kill all Baathists to prevent them from taking over again. On April 18, in the southern city of Kut, Abdel Aziz al Hakim, brother of the Shia opposition leader Muhammad Bakr al Hakim and leader of the 10,000-strong Iran-supported Badr Brigade militia, proclaimed that Iraq’s majority Shia hoped for an Islamic government. That same day, Muqtada’s deputy for Baghdad warned that Shias would not accept a democracy that would obstruct their sovereignty.

(end excerpt)

(Originally published in the November/December 2006 issue of Boston Review)

This is a very long, but VERY informative and eye-opening piece. Imho, it is absolutely essential reading if one wants to have a clear understanding of the sectarian and political conflict going on now in Iraq, and its roots in past and recent history. Nir Rosen (who speaks Arabic) is reporting from on the ground in Iraq, with local informants and first hand experience of events as they unfolded.

I cannot urge strongly enough that this article is really, truly a must-read!

sw