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Iraq is splitting into
three different parts. Everywhere there are fault
lines opening up between Sunni, Shia and Kurd. In
the days immediately following the attack on the
Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1300
bodies, mostly Sunni, were found in and around
Baghdad. The Shia-controlled Interior Ministry,
whose police commandos operate as death squads,
asked the Health Ministry to release lower figures.
A friend of mine, a normally pacific man living in a
middle-class Sunni district in west Baghdad, rang
me. ‘I am not leaving my home,’ he said. ‘The police
commandos arrested 15 people from here last night
including the local baker. I am sitting here in my
house with a Kalashnikov and 60 bullets and if they
come for me I am going to open fire.’
It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny
that a civil war is going on, given that so many
bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely
because of their religious allegiance – are being
discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the
markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in early
March. Several days later a group of children
playing football in a field noticed a powerful
stench. Police opened up a pit which contained the
bodies of 27 men, probably all Sunni, stripped to
their underpants; they had all been tortured and
then shot in the head. Two and a half years ago,
when the first suicide bomb targeting the Shias
killed 85 people outside the shrine of Imam Ali in
Najaf, there was no Shia retaliation. They were held
back by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the hope
of gaining power through legal elections. Since the
Samarra bomb this restraint has definitively ended:
the Shia militias and death squads slaughter Sunnis
in tit-for-tat killings every time a Shia is killed.
Iraqis often deceive themselves about the depth of
the sectarian divisions in their country. They say,
rightly, that there are many intermarriages between
Sunni and Shia and claim the sectarian divide is
less extreme than it is in Belfast, where Roman
Catholic and Protestant seldom marry. But such
marriages are most common among the educated middle
class in Baghdad and, in any case, they have become
less common since 2003, when sectarian differences
widened after Sunnis rebelled against the occupation
and the Shia community did not. My Shia and Kurdish
friends, who see themselves as wholly non-sectarian,
sincerely believe that the three-year-old Sunni
rebellion is the work of a few jobless Baathist
officials making common cause with Islamic fanatics
imported from Saudi Arabia. ‘They are not real
Iraqis,’ they say. They refuse to accept that the
guerrillas are supported by most of the
five-million-strong Sunni community, despite the
evidence of opinion polls. The Sunnis and the Kurds,
for their part, see the Shia leaders as puppets
manipulated by Iranian intelligence. They will not
take on board that the 15 or 16 million Shias, who
make up 60 per cent of the population, will not give
up their bid for power after centuries of
marginalisation. Kurdish hostility to Arabs is
equally underestimated by both Shia and Sunni. While
I was in Arbil, the Kurdish capital, two Sunni
friends emailed to say they planned to drive from
Baghdad to see me. They didn’t realise that they
were as likely to spend the night in jail as in a
hotel, because Kurds regard all Arabs visiting from
the rest of Iraq with deep suspicion.
The differences between Shia and Kurd explain why
Iraq still doesn’t have a new government three
months after last December’s elections. The current
government is the one that took office in January
2005; based on a Kurdish-Shia alliance, it’s headed
by Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shia Dawa Party. Over
the past year, Kurdish leaders have come to detest
him and are refusing to agree to a new government
with him at its head. They were enraged when he made
a surprise visit to Turkey in early March in order
(they feared) to enlist Turkish support in his bid
to rob them of their quasi-independence within Iraq.
Above all, the Kurdish leaders fear that Jaafari is
manoeuvring to avoid implementing an agreement under
which they would gain permanent control of the oil
province of Kirkuk, which they captured at the start
of the war.
Kirkuk, beneath which lie ten billion barrels of oil
reserves, is a prize well worth fighting for. It is
also, even by Iraqi standards, a depressing and
dangerous city. It sits on the plain 150 miles north
of Baghdad, overlooked by a citadel whose ancient
houses were wrecked by Saddam Hussein after the
failed Kurdish uprising of 1991. There are heaps of
rubbish everywhere. Despite the oil reserves, there
are mile-long queues of vehicles waiting to get
petrol. Shops are small and mean. In the centre of
the city a cluster of dilapidated market stalls sell
fruit and bread. ‘Kirkuk is a ruin, it is the most
ruined city in Iraq,’ a Kurdish official said, with
bitter pride, as we drove through the city. Over the
past fifty years the Kurds have been systematically
expelled from Kirkuk. After 1991, a full-scale
programme of ethnic cleansing began: between 120,000
and 200,000 Kurds and Turkomans were forced from
their homes by Saddam. Almost all the small towns
and villages in the province were bulldozed to
reduce the Kurdish population and to prevent the
buildings being used by guerrillas. The Iraqi
constitution, along with the Shia-Kurdish agreement,
promised to remove Arab settlers and return Kurds to
Kirkuk. Grim place though it is, undisputed
possession of the province and its oilfields is
vital to the Kurds if they are to get close to
self-determination.
Under the new constitution, the fate of Kirkuk will
be decided by 31 December 2007. If Kirkuk joins the
Kurdish region, the Kurds will have first rights to
new oil discoveries. Saddam had not only denied them
a share in oil revenues: any Kurd found working in
the oil industry was sacked. ‘Of the 9000 employees
working for the Northern Oil Company in 2003, only
18 were Kurds, and they were mostly servants,’ said
Rezgar Ali Hamajan, the chief of Kirkuk’s provincial
council. Now the Kurds are intent on having their
own oil. Given that the need to share oil income is
almost the only thing holding Iraq together, the
secession of Kirkuk to join the Kurdish Regional
Government could be the decisive moment in the
dissolution of the country.
Inhabited by Kurds, Turkomans and Arabs, Kirkuk is a
good if unnerving place in which to observe the
growing hatred between Iraq’s ethnic communities.
The Kurds won five out of nine parliamentary seats
in the parliamentary election in December. ‘Security
is not as bad as in Baghdad,’ said Rezgar Ali, a
chain-smoking former land surveyor who was for years
a Peshmerga commander in the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK), while admitting that this is not
saying a great deal. He complained that the media
exaggerate the violence in the city. ‘One day a rich
Kurdish lady was kidnapped,’ he said. ‘They claimed
she was a female Kurdish leader. In fact it was just
an ordinary kidnapping.’ He conceded that many Arab
police officers were probably collaborating with the
insurgents and that several Arab police chiefs had
been arrested. Like many Kurdish officials in Kirkuk,
he wears a pistol in his belt and has a
submachine-gun always close to hand. Whatever
happens, he said, the Kurds ‘won’t leave Kirkuk.
Even if we had only two thousand Peshmerga we would
not leave here.’
But one recent development has shocked even Rezgar
Ali. In the centre of Kirkuk there is a building
that seems quite imposing compared to the ramshackle
houses all around: this is the Republican Hospital.
It is here that most of the casualties from gun
battles, bombings and assassinations are taken. In
2005, some 1500 people were killed or injured in
Kirkuk province. Large numbers of those taken to the
hospital died, and there turned out to be an
extraordinary reason for this. Some time earlier,
the hospital had recruited an enthusiastic young
doctor called Louay, who was always willing to help.
What the other doctors didn’t know was that Louay,
an Arab, was a member of an insurgent cell of the
Ansar al-Sunna group. He used his position to make
sure that soldiers, policemen and government
officials died of their injuries. A police inquiry
found Dr Louay guilty of killing 43 patients. He
doesn’t seem to have found this very difficult. Many
of the injured were bleeding when they reached the
hospital and, according to Colonel Yadgar Shukir
Abdullah Jaff, a senior policeman, ‘Louay would
inject patients he wanted to kill with a high dose
of a medicine that made them bleed more.’
Given that Iraqi hospitals are invariably
short-staffed and there is little time for
autopsies, Dr Louay might have been able to carry on
his killings indefinitely. But earlier this year
Kurdish security in Sulaimaniyah arrested the leader
of his cell. Abu Muhijiz, whose real name is Malla
Yassin, confessed that Louay was a member of his
group and detailed the grisly work that he had
carried out.
In Kirkuk, the most effective military and police
units are Kurdish. The same is true in Mosul, the
mainly Sunni city on the Tigris further to the west.
Nominally, there are 12,000 police in Mosul
province, drawn mainly from the Jabour tribe. But
according to Saadi Pire, the former PUK leader in
Mosul, ‘they are policemen only by day and
terrorists at night.’ The Sunni in Mosul, for their
part, see what the US claims is a war against
insurgents as an American-Kurdish attack on their
community.
Across Iraq, the community-based allegiances of
members of army and police units are sapping the
power of the state. As sectarian and ethnic war
escalates, people want militiamen from their own
community defending their street, regardless of
whether or not they belong in theory to the army or
the police. In Sunni areas, the only people well
enough armed to organise a defence are the
resistance fighters, and the fear of Shia death
squads swells their ranks. In Shia areas, sectarian
bombings and shootings lead to greater reliance on
the Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Meanwhile, the number of American casualties has
decreased to about one a day, compared to two or
three a day last year. The insurgents believe that
the Americans are going to leave whatever happens,
as support for the war diminishes in the US, and
that attacks against US troops are therefore less
urgent. But in the Sunni heartlands north of
Baghdad, resistance is as strong as it has ever
been. On 21 March, a hundred fighters armed with
automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade-launchers
and mortars captured a police headquarters and
stormed a jail in Muqdadiyah, sixty miles north of
Baghdad. By the time they withdrew they had killed
19 policemen, freed 33 prisoners and captured enough
radio equipment to make the rest of the police
network insecure. Provincial authorities claim the
Muqdadiyah police chief was a resistance
double-agent.
Solidarity within each community – Kurdish, Shia and
Sunni – is strong. But none is monolithic. Iraqis in
general are highly cynical about the honesty and
competence of their own leaders. The four to five
million Kurds have a strong sense of national
identity and are well organised. Nevertheless, on 16
March thousands of Kurds marching in Halabja to
commemorate the deaths of the 5000 people killed in
the 1988 poison gas attack on the town burned down
their own brand-new monument. It was a curious,
circular building outside the city boundaries which
housed a museum; from the distance it looked like a
strange mosque. Opened by Colin Powell in 2003, it
contained lifesize wax models intended to represent
the dead and dying, and photographs of the dead. For
two years, Kurdish officials had taken foreign
officials to the monument as a symbol of Kurdish
suffering under Saddam. People in Halabja, however,
had watched the visitors with growing rage. Few of
them travelled one mile further, into the town
itself, to see the sufferings of the present-day
inhabitants – for whom little had been done since
1988. Funds sent from abroad to help the survivors
of Saddam Hussein’s most famous atrocity never
seemed to arrive.
I reached Halabja after the riot had subsided. The
guards at the monument were still looking shaken.
The building itself had been gutted by fire: long
strips of plastic hung from one of the ceilings and
several small fires were still burning. Kana Tewfiq,
one of the Peshmerga guards, who’d been hit in the
spine by a stone thrown from the crowd, said that
protesters had taken ‘gasoline and oil from the
museum generator to get the fire going’. A second
group of Peshmerga had arrived and fired into the
crowd, killing a 17-year-old demonstrator and
wounding half a dozen others. Shako Mohammed, the
PUK leader and government representative in the
Halabja region, came with a couple of carloads of
bodyguards to survey the damage. He said he had
begged people not to demonstrate while he took their
demands to the PUK government in Sulaimaniyah. He
suspected that the crowd had been infiltrated by
members of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, which
once controlled the region.
In the local hospital, a 29-year-old man called
Othman Ali Gaffur was lying in a bed with a bullet
through his leg. His injuries looked serious: he was
missing part of his left hand and had only one eye.
But these turned out to be the result of ordnance
detonating when he was playing with it as a child.
Othman worked as a journalist on the magazine put
out by the handicapped people’s association in
Halabja, to which five thousand people belong. He
said the first aim of the demonstration had been to
keep government officials away. ‘They were always
promising us help but the help never came. There are
no roads, no streets here, only mud. They only took
people to see the monument to the dead and never to
see the living. That’s why it became a target.’
Another man, Omar Ali, said he was against violence,
but ‘if we don’t do something they won’t listen.’
At this point several Peshmerga entered the ward and
told me to leave. I refused to go, and they seemed
divided on what to do. When I did leave they
surrounded the car and said I should stay where I
was while they rang their headquarters. When they
finally got through, they were told to let me go.
Later the PUK claimed that Islamic fundamentalists
and shadowy pro-Iranian groups had fomented the
riots. The next day in Kirkuk, a senior PUK official
admitted that this was nonsense. ‘What happened in
Halabja could happen anywhere in Iraq because people
look at what has happened to them and don’t think
their leaders are any good.’
Iraq is divided and the insurgency is strong, but
the real reason for the collapse of Iraq is the
weakness of the state. Ali Allawi, the finance
minister, told me that corruption had reached
Nigerian levels and that the government is just a
parasitic entity living on oil revenues. It’s not
merely that a percentage of spending disappears into
official pockets: entire budgets vanish. The US and
Britain are trying to push Iyad Allawi forward as a
sort of super-minister in charge of security. But
while he was prime minister in 2004-5, the whole
$1.3 billion defence procurement budget disappeared.
Millions more were spent on a contract to protect
the vital Kirkuk-Baiji oil pipeline but the money
was embezzled. The few men hired to guard the
pipeline usually turned out to be the same men who
were blowing it up. Ali Allawi says the insurgency
is largely financed by oil smuggling, and 40 to 50
per cent of the vast profits go to the resistance.
The moment when Iraq could be held together as a
truly unified state has probably passed. But a weak
Iraq suits many inside and outside the country and
it will still remain a name on the map. American
power is steadily ebbing and the British forces are
largely confined to their camps around Basra. A
‘national unity government’ may be established but
it will not be national, will certainly be disunited
and may govern very little. ‘The government could
end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone,’ one
minister said. The army and police are already split
along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Iranians have
been the main winners in the struggle for the
country. The US has turned out to be militarily and
politically weaker than anybody expected. The real
question now is whether Iraq will break up with or
without an all-out civil war.
Most probably war is coming, but it will not be
fought in all parts of Iraq. It will essentially be
a battle for Baghdad between Sunni and Shia Arabs.
‘The army will disintegrate in the first moments of
the fighting,’ a Kurdish leader told me. ‘The
soldiers obey whatever orders they receive from
their own communities.’ The parts of the country
with a homogeneous population, whether Shia, Sunni
or Kurdish, may well stay quiet. But in greater
Baghdad, sectarian cleansing is already taking
place. The place bears an ever closer resemblance to
Beirut thirty years ago. The Shia Arabs have the
advantage because they are the majority in the
capital, but the Sunni should be able to cling on to
their strongholds in the west and south of the city.
The new balance of power in Iraq may be decided not
by negotiations, but by militiamen fighting street
by street.
Patrick Cockburn has been reporting from Iraq since
1978. The Occupation: War, Resistance and Daily Life
in Iraq will be published in October.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/
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