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Quagmire in northern Iraq
deepens
By Ian Urbina
In
northern Iraq, just 18 kilometers from the border with
Iran, there is a new military camp under construction,
but it is neither Kurds, Turks, nor US troops who are
digging in. So far, 200 soldiers from the Badr Brigade
have arrived, and these Iranian-backed Shi'ite forces
have pitched enough tents for five times their present
number. These men are only the most recent variable
added to an already over-complicated scene.
Some
of the new arrivals say that they are there to help
overthrow Saddam Hussein. Others among their ranks tell
the press that they intend to support the Kurds in
resisting the Turks if the northern neighbor attempts to
cross the border. Both may be true. But these Shi'ite
soldiers are certainly also there to establish a
forceful presence in case of a power vacuum that could
ensue during and after the war. Ostensibly, they would
act on behalf of the 60 percent of Iraq's population
that is Shi'ite, rather than Sunni.
Whether the
Brigade is better characterized as a group of Iranian
proxies than as a group of Iraqi opposition fighters is
not altogether clear. Most of their military equipment
is Iranian-issued. They speak Farsi during exercises and
they drive the beige Nissan Patrols used by the Iranian
military. Yet many of the men are Iraqi Shi'ites who
fled to Iran during the 1990s to escape Saddam's
repression.
The Badr Brigade is also the
military arm of an organization called the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which
happens to have been headquartered in Tehran for the
past 20 years.
At the helm of the Supreme
Council is one man who some predict could be politically
pivotal in the postwar scene. Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr
al-Hakim is not an external implant. His family name
carries considerable recognition inside southern Iraq.
His father is the former grand ayatollah of Iraq's
Shi'ites who was famous for issuing a fatwah
against Saddam's Ba'ath Party. Five of Hakim's brothers,
and 50 of his other relatives, have been killed by the
Iraqi regime. Hakim endured prison and torture before he
escaped the country. All of this certainly helps his
standing inside Iraq.
But Hakim fled in 1980 and
some doubt that he still has sufficient support inside
the country to be a player. Many secular Iraqi Shi'ites
are also skeptical of the Supreme Council, fearing that
it has ambitions of installing a theocratic model like
that in Iran. Whatever their agenda, one thing is
certain: the Shi'ites of the Supreme Council and the
Badr Brigade represent the only opposition group other
than the Kurds with armed backers on the ground inside
Iraq. For that reason alone they can hardly be
dismissed.
The Supreme Council and the Badr
Brigade will also tap into a deep vein of frustration
among Iraqi Shi'ites who have suffered years of brutal
repression. The Sunnis of the country have always held
the upper hand, at least as far back as the Ottomans and
the British thereafter, both of whom chose to exert
their power through the minority Sunni. Saddam's Ba'ath
Party is also Sunni-based, and he has hardly treated the
Shi'ites much better than his predecessors, even after
many Iraqi Shi'ites fought alongside Iraqi Sunnis in the
eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
The
Shi'ites are also distrustful of the United States after
the 1991 betrayal in which Washington encouraged them to
rebel against Saddam, but refused to provide air support
when Baghdad's royal guards began rolling over the rebel
forces. As part of the ceasefire arrangements, General
Norman Schwarzkopf, who headed the first Gulf War,
acceded to the Iraqi military's request that their
pilots be allowed to operate helicopters. The Iraqi
military later used these helicopters to attack and kill
Shi'ites.
Those were bloody days for the
Shi'ites. When Saddam's tanks rolled into Shi'ite
territories they were painted with the slogan "From
today, there will be no Shi'ites left in Iraq."
Eventually, with the northern (Kurdish area) and
southern (Shi'ite area) no-fly zones established, Saddam
pulled his men back from the north. But he continued on
a campaign of terror in the south, causing the
disappearance of more than 100 Shiite clerics in a
matter of months.
Politically, this is not a new
arrival for the Supreme Council within the Iraqi
opposition scene. Since the beginning, the group has
been a fixture within one of the main Iraqi opposition
umbrella organizations, the Iraqi National Congress. The
Supreme Council holds about one-third of the 65 seats on
an opposition steering committee that is expected to
guide the transition, and six seats on the leadership
committee.
For its part, the administration of
US President George W Bush is none too thrilled with the
presence of the Badr Brigade in northern Iraq. When
asked about the group, State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher remarked this week, "We're against any
Iranian presence in northern Iraq or any group that
reflects Iranian presence in northern Iraq."
But
if the Turkey-Iraq-Iran-US tensions weren't complicated
enough in relation to the Badr Brigade's presence in
northern Iraq, there is also an internal Kurdish divide
over the group. Many of the Kurds of the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls the northern Iraqi
border with Iran, hold good relations with the Brigade.
The other major Kurdish faction, the Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP), which is based more toward the
northwestern corner, controlling the corridor to Turkey,
sees the Brigade as a mortal foe.
In the past,
these two rival Kurdish factions have battled each
other. One reason for the difference of opinion
concerning the Brigade is that in 1996, when the KDP
invited Saddam's forces up into the north to slaughter
the rival faction, it was Iran that provided refuge to
the PUK. These actions, not to mention the loyalties and
enmities they instill, are not quickly forgotten.
All this could seriously mire any US forces in
what is already a dangerously deep quagmire, both during
and after the war.
Ian Urbina is an
editor at the Middle East
Report and is based at the Middle East Research and
Information Project (MERIP), a foreign-policy
think-tank.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
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