In their boldest action yet, al-Qaeda linked Sunni Arab extremists seized portions of the large Sunni Arab cities of Fallujah and Ramadi last Monday. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sent in his security forces. Later, Sunni Arab tribal elements opposed to the extremists joined government forces outside both cities, especially Ramadi, but other [...]]]>
In their boldest action yet, al-Qaeda linked Sunni Arab extremists seized portions of the large Sunni Arab cities of Fallujah and Ramadi last Monday. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sent in his security forces. Later, Sunni Arab tribal elements opposed to the extremists joined government forces outside both cities, especially Ramadi, but other tribesmen reportedly have been helping the militants in Fallujah. Efforts to restore order to date have been disappointing.
A few observers have likened the alliance of some tribal elements with Maliki against the militants to the landmark deal between American forces and Iraqi insurgents in 2006-2008. Yet, this new arrangement could mean little over the long haul since Maliki continued cracking down on Sunni Arabs right up to this blow-up.
Indeed, Maliki’s troubled relations with Iraq’s Sunni Arabs appear to have played a role in triggering these events. On Dec. 30 government forces moved to dismantle a large camp of protestors along the key road outside Ramadi that had existed for a year. It was one of many protests in various cities and towns across the largely Sunni Arab al-Anbar Governate. Such demonstrations against the Maliki government’s treatment of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs (emboldened by the largely Sunni Arab rebellion in neighboring Syria) underscore how much anger has built up in response to Maliki’s various actions against this important community.
Prior to the crackdown on the camp, on Dec. 30 Maliki arrested a Sunni Arab member of parliament, Ahmad al-Alwani (who had supported the protests), at his home in Ramadi. The all too familiar charge reportedly was “terrorism.” The arrest turned violent as Alwani’s guards tried to protect him, with security forces killing five guards along with Alwani’s brother.
Alwani’s was only the latest of a long series of arrests, firings, and even assassinations of a number of senior Sunni Arab figures spanning several years. Thus, Maliki’s call today for the Fallujah tribes to “expel” extremists from that city to avoid needless bloodshed while the Iraqi army pauses before an assault may have little effect. Many residents have left, but militants still hold important positions there.
This daring challenge comes mainly from the Syrian-based Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). ISIL hopes to link its holdings in Eastern Syria with corresponding areas of control in Iraq’s majority Sunni Arab northwest. Back in September, ISIL bombed four key bridges linking important Iraqi border towns with urban centers closer to Baghdad to hobble the government’s ability to respond effectively to ISIL’s rising activity in areas close to Syria. In late November, ISIL fighters paraded through a main square of Ramadi to rally support.
On Dec. 26 nearly 20 Iraqi soldiers were killed in al-Anbar by suicide bombers, including the commander of Iraq’s 7th Division. Four more soldiers died on the 29th in a militant attack on their barracks 20 miles northwest of Baghdad. A large group of Sunni Arab gunmen stormed three police stations in and around Fallujah and Ramadi on Jan. 1 freeing prisoners and seizing weapons and ammunition. Meanwhile, a backdrop of near continuous urban bombings against Shi’a and government targets continues in northern Iraq and Baghdad, with three targeting Christians on Christmas Day.
Recognizing that the situation in Iraq was heating up noticeably, Washington expedited the delivery of 75 air-to-surface “Helfire” missiles to the Iraqi air force in December as well as drones. The government put these munitions to use quickly: several of the missiles reportedly have been used against ISIL positions since late last week.
Beyond sending such aid, however, Washington has chosen to keep some distance from the crisis in Iraq. After all, Maliki has held the US at arm’s length since 2010, ignoring US entreaties to follow the American lead in reaching out to an Iraqi Sunni Arab community seeking to bury the hatchet with Baghdad and help battle al-Qaeda. Shoving aside the notion of putting US “boots on the ground,” Secretary of State John Kerry said on Jan. 5: “We will help them…but this fight, in the end, they will have to win.” Nonetheless, concerned about this fresh al-Qaeda challenge, the US has been making calls to relevant Iraqi Sunni leaders and tribal sheikhs to do some jawboning
ISIL militants have been in control of portions of both Fallujah and Ramadi since Dec. 30. In both towns, there has been fighting between ISIL fighters on the one hand and government forces as well as Sunni Arab tribesmen opposing ISIL militants on the other. In Fallujah, however, ISIL has held the center and south of the city with much of the rest of it in the hands of tribesmen who oppose the entry of government forces. Yesterday, this forced government forces to withdraw to the edges of Fallujah, according to Hadi Razeij, al-Anbar’s police chief. Anbar Military Command chief General Rasheed Fleih admitted that it could take several days to oust ISIL from its holdings in the embattled cities.
It is not surprising that Iraqi government forces are having difficulty restoring order. The army does not possess the same level of training, firepower, tactical savvy, or intelligence mustered by US forces during the American fight with Sunni Arab insurgents beginning over ten years ago. Yet, even US forces struggled to crush the insurgency (including fierce militant resistance in Fallujah), finally accepting a deal with a majority of the insurgents who sought to end the bloody struggle in what has been known as the Sunni Arab “Awakening.”
Many ordinary Iraqis are de facto participants. Quite a few angry Sunni Arabs have approved of attacks against Maliki’s government specifically and Iraqi Shi’a more generally. Likewise, many Shi’a have supported Maliki’s tough stance toward Sunni Arabs. Nonetheless, influential Shi’a clerics, many Sunni Arab tribal leaders, and their followers have shunned the violence emanating from both sides, but without much effect. So millions of war weary Iraqis — Shi’a, Sunni Arab, and Christian — are caught in the middle, many of them victims of violence. It comes as no surprise that the number of Iraqi refugees entering Jordan recently has spiked.
If this situation can be brought under control, at least beyond areas close to the border that could remain under ISIL influence, there might be a positive result. If enough Sunni Arab tribes and other elements react negatively to this ISIL power play, Maliki could get a second chance to allow them to join the political process in Baghdad. Yet, given the dismal track record of Maliki and his Shi’a cronies, there is only an outside chance that a more sensible political course will now be adopted — one that also could enable the government to use such allies to improve its effort to reduce the suicide bombing campaign that has long battered Shi’a especially.
First, however, Maliki must convincingly defeat ISIL in the current fighting — and without running amok in a way that results in unacceptably high Sunni Arab civilian casualties and great destruction. In his message today, Maliki called on Iraqi troops not to attack residential areas in Fallujah, but since this almost certainly will occur, the statement probably was merely to distance himself from the inevitable.
]]>by Wayne White
With a long history of misguided, damaging American intervention and meddling in the Middle East, the reported CIA effort to target the al-Nusra Front in Syria by helping Iraqi anti-terrorism units to attack its roots in Iraq seems to be the former and possibly destined to be the [...]]]>
by Wayne White
With a long history of misguided, damaging American intervention and meddling in the Middle East, the reported CIA effort to target the al-Nusra Front in Syria by helping Iraqi anti-terrorism units to attack its roots in Iraq seems to be the former and possibly destined to be the latter.
The Sunni Arab politics of Iraq, already complicated by the 2003 American invasion, have been further harmed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s unremitting hostility toward Iraq’s Sunni Arab community. He and his Shi’a cronies bitterly opposed the American deal with Sunni Arab insurgents back in late 2006 through 2008, and attempted to undermine the arrangement while US-Sunni Arab Awakening efforts to take down much of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) were in progress.
In the years since, Maliki has been rather consistent in his exclusion of the bulk of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs from the Baghdad political mainstream. He has driven away many of those who have sought or secured office using the machinery of so-called “de-Ba’thification” and has even purged, assassinated or arrested large numbers of former Awakening cadres as well as various other key Sunni Arabs, often on trumped up charges of terrorism (or no formal charges at all — frequently employing his own extrajudicial security forces or Iraq’s mainly Shi’a Anti-Terrorism Service, which answers directly to him).
In this context, it is hardly surprising that a robust measure of Sunni Arab extremism flourishes in Iraq (apparently more now than back in 2008 when most Sunni Arabs were, by contrast, relatively more war-weary and eager for some sort of enduring engagement with the government in Baghdad). Resentment over Maliki’s disinterest in anything that would re-integrate Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority into much of the country’s core activities has done a lot to sustain a drumfire of AQI bombings inside Iraq and, since late 2011, sent gaggles of Islamic fighters from Iraq’s Sunni Arab northwest into the raging battle for Syria.
Al-Nusra probably is to a large extent an arm of AQI, as the US alleges, but also could be the recipient of many Iraqi fighters simply enraged over the plight of Sunni Arabs in their own country more generally. Additionally, there are quite a few historic tribal and family connections that extend far beyond the Syrian-Iraqi border, making events in Syria that much more palpably personal for quite a few Sunni Arabs inside Iraq.
So al-Nusra most likely is more than an organization; a phenomenon welling up from the profound resentment among many Sunni Arabs toward hostile political orders in both countries. If so, that’s not something that can be surgically extracted. Unfortunately, there always is the possibility that somewhere down the road a frustrated Washington (after Baghdad inevitably fails to address al-Nusra, just as it has been unable to deal a crippling blow to AQI) might think drones offer such a capability. If, however, they ever were employed over Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, the anger currently aimed primarily at the Maliki government and the Assad regime would become far more focused on the US.
Al-Nusra clearly is an unwelcome and dangerous player on the opposition side amidst the fighting in Syria. Yet, the sheer length, brutality, mass destruction, horrific casualties and more than a million refugees generated by the violence so far, predictably have rendered more extreme certain elements of the opposition. The seeming rise in regime-like rebel atrocities most likely is linked to some extent to the duration of the carnage.
The US already has become unpopular in broad Syrian opposition and popular circles for not providing desperately needed military assistance. At first, this frustration centered upon frantic requests for a US/NATO no fly zone over Syria. Since hope for that evaporated, attention shifted to arms and ammunition needed by rebels to take on regime-armored vehicles and air power. Some oppositionists in Syria may understand why the US remains wary of providing surface to air missiles that could very well fall into the hands of international terrorist groups, but anti-tank rockets are less of a concern in that respect. Yet, Washington decided not to send any arms whatsoever to opposition fighters — even vetted ones — late last summer and once again recently.
The US designation of al-Nusra as a terrorist group does not appear to have reduced that group’s high military profile as the tip of the opposition’s combat spear against the forces of the Assad regime. And involving the US in a campaign against al-Nusra’s support base in Iraq now could easily be perceived more broadly as being anti-Sunni Arab. After all, many of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs might ask pointedly why the US has chosen not to take a stronger stand against Maliki’s ongoing persecution of and human rights violations against Iraq’s Sunni Arab community — concerns that extend far beyond AQI and its supporters.
Iraq essentially remains in a state of sectarian conflict with Maliki playing the leading role as provocateur. The opposition effort to take down the Assad regime in Syria also has become, in large measure, a sectarian conflict.
By doing little to cross Maliki about his mistreatment of Sunni Arabs, going after al-Nusra in Iraq and providing meager support to the Syrian opposition, Washington potentially is setting itself up to be viewed — at least by Sunni Arab participants in these struggles — as anti-Sunni Arab across much of the greater Arab al-Jazira region as well as the northern Levant. The US faces enough grievances in the region as it is. Why add more to the list?
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