Are Iraq's divisions truly irreconcilable? Should the Kurds finally get their own state? Would that include Kurdish inhabited areas of Turkey, Iran and Syria? https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-were-never-brothers-iraqs-divisions-may-be-irreconcilable-1490559099 OPINION COMMENTARY ‘We Were Never Brothers’: Iraq’s Divisions May Be Irreconcilable Liberating Mosul won’t bring the country together, and the Kurds want complete separation. Iraqi Kurds celebrate the Noruz spring festival in Akra, 500 kilometers north of Baghdad, March 20. Iraqi Kurds celebrate the Noruz spring festival in Akra, 500 kilometers north of Baghdad, March 20. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES By AZIZ AHMAD March 26, 2017 4:11 p.m. ET 108 COMMENTS Erbil, Iraq ‘I swear by God we are not brothers,” the Sunni Arab sheik shouted from the audience in response to a conservative Shiite lawmaker’s plea for brotherhood. The occasion was a conference last summer at the American University of Kurdistan, in Duhok. It was the two men’s first encounter since the fall of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, to Islamic State in June 2014. Conference organizers had hoped for reconciliation, but there was little sign of it. “We were never brothers,” the sheik said. “We’ve always been afraid of each other.” His candor drew nods from the Sunni men seated in front rows. The speakers and audience members condemned one another as failures and exchanged blame for the army’s flight, for embracing Islamic State, and for perpetrating massacres. Sectarian distrust—a problem that has plagued Iraq for much of its modern history and has been amplified since Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003—was laid bare that day. A country that should have been brought together under the adversity of Islamic State’s rampage seemed to be further apart than ever, with divisions extending far beyond Mosul. Almost a year later, a fragile coalition of Kurdish, Arab and American forces is slowly advancing in Islamic State’s primary stronghold in Mosul. But retaking the city will not unify Iraq. The current Shiite-led political discourse in Baghdad is synonymous with the denial of rights to minorities, including Kurds. Conversely, in Mosul a Sunni Arab majority marginalizes minorities, who in turn accuse Sunnis of supporting ISIS. Sinjar, west of Mosul, is a case in point. When I visited last year I saw no sign of peaceful coexistence. The local security chief, a Yazidi, told me that Sunni Arabs from his village, Kojo, had joined ISIS’s brutal terror against the Yazidis, a religious minority. Men from the al-Metuta tribe helped kill “hundreds,” he said, including 68 members of his own family. “Of course I remember them,” he said. “Those Arab men had a hand in the honor of our women. It’s not possible to live together again.” In meetings with Iraqi officials and community leaders, I’ve seen how Islamic State’s campaign has aggravated animosity across tribal, ethnic and religious lines. Without a political track to address tensions between Sunnis and Shiites or Kurds and Arabs, the day-after scenario remains perilous. Addressing the problems begins by restoring trust. For Mosul, Baghdad is already on the wrong foot. The offensive against ISIS includes a coalition of Shiite militias, despite strong protests from Mosul’s predominantly Sunni provincial council. The new formula must tackle minorities’ fears of marginalization by granting local autonomy, including to Christians persecuted by ISIS militants, and by implementing laws already in place to give Sunnis a stake and isolate extremists. We Kurds can help. We make up a third of the province’s population. For over a year, our Peshmerga fighters were poised for an assault on Mosul, but our persistent calls for a political agreement were ignored. An agreement during the military campaign is still necessary to prevent intercommunal conflict. Such an agreement should outline a path toward governance and offer more than a Shiite-centric alternative. In parallel, there must be an effort to demobilize Shiite militias formed in the aftermath of the war by engaging the Iraqi Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for a religious decree. It should also call for the groups’ withdrawal from areas liberated by the Peshmerga. Baghdad should not impose solutions. It should instead lead talks with Turkey and Iran to defuse regional tensions that intersect in Mosul. Iraq’s problem with Turkey can be solved by ending Baghdad’s payments to the anti-Ankara Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as PKK, in Sinjar and demanding the group’s withdrawal, in line with calls from local officials and the provincial council. More broadly, once the fight is over, there needs to be a political reckoning by Kurds and Arabs about how the Iraqi state can go forward. It’s too late to salvage the post-2003 project; the country has segregated itself into armed enclaves. The Kurdish people suffered a litany of abuses, including genocide, under successive Sunni regimes. More recently, despite a shared history, the Shiite-led government reneged on promises for partnership and revenue sharing. It suspended Kurdistan’s budget and prevents us still from buying weapons. Given that experience, Kurdish loyalty to an Iraqi identity remains nonexistent. For us, complete separation is the only alternative. Our pursuit of independence is about charting a better course from Iraq’s conceptual failure. The path forward should begin from a simple truth: Iraq has already fallen apart, and the country will be better off realigned on the parties’ own terms. A central goal for the U.S. should be to empower the Kurdistan Region. We are a stable, longstanding U.S. ally amid a sea of unrest. We’ve proved to be a valuable partner in the war on terrorism and share common values and a commitment to democracy. The advance on Mosul represents the turn of a chapter that transcends Iraq’s three-year war. It represents a moment of reckoning and an opportunity to consolidate the Kurdistan Region on terms that will de-escalate conflict and safeguard its peoples. Mr. Ahmad is an assistant to the chancellor of the Kurdistan Region Security Council. Appeared in the Mar. 27, 2017, print edition.
There's nothing BUT division in that regional crap pot. Religion, spurring local hatred for thousands of years.
Well don't shoot the messenger: they're different to us and we shouldn't make the mistake of believing they're like us because they're most certainly not! It's that very belief that has caused so much grief in the middle eastern region. Why does the arrogant West always think it knows what's best for everyone else on the effing planet?
I'm "against" the arrogant west. I'm against ANY government that aligns itself with leaders who are tyrants, despots, or any other lower form of human life, simply out of national self interest. It doesn't matter if they, the mentioned, "like" us in the deal or not. Screw them.
You're obviously an idealist. If you ask any Iraqi today if their life was better under Saddam than it is now, I'll wager they'll answer in the affirmative.
We did right to clip Saddam's expansionist wings, otherwise I shudder to think what the region would be like now, and how it had arrived at it. He would either be dictator of all he surveys, or the entire region would be like Iraq and Syria are today, namely the world's biggest bomb-site.
Iran kept Iraq well in Check. Saddam would have continued to be Saddam.... Emperor of all Iraq. It's time we washed our hands free of the ME. Israel included. Put up a sign, open a parking lot.
Here's more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/splits-within-iraqs-three-communities-reshape-its-politics-1492075801 WORLD MIDDLE EAST CROSSROADS Splits Within Iraq’s Three Communities Reshape Its Politics The groups’ internal rivalries could divide the country further, or bring the groups closer together Iraqi counterterrorism forces advance toward the al-Abar neighborhood of Mosul on Wednesday. By Yaroslav Trofimov April 13, 2017 5:30 a.m. ET 16 COMMENTS MOSUL, Iraq—Conventional wisdom holds that Iraq is a nation starkly divided among its three main components: Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. Yet, another dynamic is gaining importance. Each of these three groups—as well as the smaller communities such as the Yazidis and Christians—is also beset by deepening internal rivalries. These political cleavages could further destabilize the country. They also could bring it closer together, creating a new environment where political agendas trump the hard allegiances of sect and ethnicity. “We now have splits within the Shiites, within the Sunnis, and within the Kurds. For an average citizen, this is not necessarily a bad thing,” said Sajad Jiyad, managing director of the Al-Bayan Center for Planning and Studies, a Baghdad think tank. “It would help change the sectarian discourse and alignment that has been prevalent until last year.” The issue of how Iraq’s political life develops after the ouster of Islamic State from its stronghold of Mosul is of critical importance to the rest of the Middle East. Several of Iraq’s neighbors and allies have been drawn into the country’s sectarian and ethnic conflicts that have reverberated far beyond its borders since the 2003 U.S. invasion. One milestone looming is parliamentary elections scheduled for April 2018 that also will determine the fate of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. The fragmentation of the political scene makes it difficult to a form a strong government able to implement overdue changes. But at the same time, it could render the country more stable by preventing another sectarian overreach by the Shiite majority—or a long-mulled secession by the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq. I Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi with Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani, in Erbil, the Kurdish regional capital in March. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES Among Iraq’s Shiite community, the political rivalries run straight through the biggest Shiite party, Dawa, to which both Mr. Abadi and his main rival, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, belong. Mr. Abadi has deftly used the Mosul campaign to strike an unlikely alliance with Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani and to position himself as a war leader. Mr. Maliki, meanwhile, has reached out to Mr. Barzani’s rivals in Kurdistan and to the Sunni speaker of parliament as he successfully pushed through no-confidence motions against the ministers of defense (a Sunni) and finance (a Kurd) last year. A third Shiite force, led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, engineered massive protests last year as it claimed to represent the will of the people while implicitly supporting Mr. Abadi. One of Mr. Maliki’s prominent allies, Shiite lawmaker Salah Abdul Razaq, said the time has come to unite representatives of Iraq’s three main population groups behind a single political project and leadership. “The nature of Iraq now requires that we move from ethnic and sectarian conflict to political competition inside parliament,” he said. “We call for a political majority which covers a group of political blocs from all the components, with the Sunnis and the Shiites and the Kurds.” Regardless of whether Mr. Maliki, with his history of marginalizing Sunnis and Kurds, could lead such a project, few consider the emergence of a pan-Iraqi political movement likely—at least not before elections. “In elections, Kurds will vote for the Kurds, Sunnis will vote for the Sunnis, and Shiites will vote for the Shiites. Not a single Kurd will vote for an Arab, not a single Sunni will vote for a Shiite, and not a single Shiite will vote for a Sunni,” said Fuad Hussein, chief of staff of Kurdistan President Barzani. “But after elections, an alliance is a possibility.” Mr. Barzani—whose term expired in 2015—has been facing a major political challenge within Kurdistan itself. His party, which controls the regional capital Erbil, has physically prevented the region’s parliament from naming a successor, essentially shuttering the legislature. For now, that intra-Kurdish conflict combined with the global oil slump has muted the prospect of Kurdistan’s independence from Iraq. “We are on the threshold of another civil war here in the Kurdistan region,” warned Yousif Sadiq, speaker of Kurdistan’s parliament who hasn’t been able to enter Erbil since 2015. “What we are doing in the Kurdistan region, especially by the region’s dominant authorities, is the reverse of building a state.” With most of Iraq’s Sunni areas devastated by war against Islamic State, the country’s Sunni Arab political scene is even more fragmented. Turkey recently tried to bring these Sunni politicians together by sponsoring their meeting in Ankara. That, however, doesn’t help with a more fundamental problem: Many Sunni Arabs blame their own community’s traditional leaders for allowing Islamic State, also known as ISIS, to overrun their hometowns in the summer of 2014. “Nobody represents us. When ISIS came to Iraq and destroyed the city, all these politicians abandoned us and fled to Erbil. We don’t support any of them anymore,” said shopkeeper Ghazi Mohammed whose grocery faces the ruins of Mosul’s al-Salam hospital, the site of a major battle between Islamic State and Iraqi troops. Homaid Jasem, a real-estate agent in a Mosul neighborhood that Islamic State had renamed after its founder Abu Musab al Zarqawi, agreed. “When I will vote, I will vote for the new and the young ones,” he said. “The politicians that we had did nothing for us.”
