THE ROVING
EYE The recipe for civil
war By
Pepe Escobar
Najaf was bombed in August. Samarra
was bombed in September. Sadr City was bombed in
October. Fallujah was bombed in November. Mosul may be
bombed in December. And Kirkuk may be bombed in January.
This is the calendar in the runup to
the Iraqi elections set for January 30 next year. Then
there will be another set of questions. Will the Iraqi
elections be stolen? Will votes "disappear"? Instead of
Florida or Ohio, will there be demands for recounts in
Fallujah and Samarra? Like Ukrainians in Kiev, will Sunnis
in Baghdad take to the streets contesting the results
of their elections? Will interim premier Iyad Allawi - with
a little help from his Washington friends - prevail?
The mini civil wars
Fallujah plus elections amounts to civil war. This tragic
equation may come to life in Iraq in early 2005.
The official American rationale for the Fallujah offensive
was to "stabilize" the country before the
elections. This strategy may have paved the way to civil
war. Ample evidence suggests that the majority of Sunnis - up
to 30% of the population - will boycott the elections and
denounce them as illegitimate, while Shi'ites, for the
first time in Iraq, will be in power.
Baghdad sources tell Asia Times Online an American
assault on Mosul - a city of 1 million - is inevitable. Allawi does
not control even a kebab stand in multi-ethnic Mosul.
The west bank of the Tigris is under total control of
the resistance. The east bank is controlled by both
Kurdish political parties and their peshmergas
(paramilitaries). And the Turkoman minority controls a
few sectors inside the city. There's a mini civil war
already going on. Mosul is already the Iraqi Sarajevo.
A key pointer to this mini civil war was the
assassination on Monday of Sheikh Faidh Muhammad Amin
al-Faidhi, at his home, by three masked gunmen. Sheikh
al-Faidhi, a Sunni, was widely respected by the Shi'ites
and the Kurds in Mosul. He was an influential member of
the powerful Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), which
has forcefully condemned the Fallujah massacre and
called for an election boycott.
His brother,
Mohammed Bashar al-Faidhi, a spokesman for the AMS in
Baghdad, believes he was killed by the Israeli Mossad,
along with "some Iraqi elements", meaning Allawi's
agents. This observation, according to our sources in
Baghdad, mirrors two widespread convictions among
Sunnis: that the American-Allawi logic is "either you
vote in our elections or we will kill you"; and that
Israel is actively fomenting civil war inside Iraq.
When the assassination of
Sheikh al-Faidhi is compounded with the Fallujah offensive
and the American invasion of the Abu Hanifa mosque in
Baghdad last Friday - the symbolic birthplace of the Iraqi
resistance in April 2003 - then one understands why Sunni anger
has reached boiling point.
And Kirkuk is even
worse Az-Zaman, a
London-based Arabic-language newspaper, recently detailed what's happening
in Kirkuk. Haweeja is the main Arab neighborhood in
Kirkuk. More than 100 Haweeja tribal leaders and
clerics have declared it off-limits to the Americans, and
are taking all matters - from security to rebuilding - in their own
hands. They have also vowed to take care of any
infiltrating "armed groups". The problem is these "armed
groups" are none other than Kurdish peshmerga,
who swarm all over the city. The Kurds are extremely
incensed. No wonder: Kirkuk, apart from being oil rich,
is the Kurdish Jerusalem.
Meanwhile,
in Fallujah, it's not over yet. Sources in Baghdad close
to the resistance swear the mujahideen still control
at least half of the city - the whole southern part plus
the alleyways. The Americans, desperate to impose some
measure of control, have launched another massive
offensive in the south of Baghdad, in the so-called
"triangle of death", while at the same time they cannot
even control the treacherous highway sector running from
Baghdad airport straight to the Green Zone.
Thousands of Fallujah refugee families
are living in dire conditions in makeshift shelters
around the city. Those not lucky enough to have relatives
in Baghdad are camping in places like the University
of Baghdad campus. Nobody has received any aid
from Allawi's government and its Ministry of Health -
no medicine, no doctors, although there has been
a rhetorical promise. Baghdad is filled with
refugees telling horror stories of fear under the
relentless American bombing, of being sprayed with what they
claim was poisonous gas, of snipers killing women and children
or anyone trying to cross the Euphrates river, of no
water, no electricity and no food. No Sunni in his right
mind believes in the "reconstruction" of Fallujah: they point
to the example of Sadr City - bombed in October and still
in ruins. The Iraqi Red Crescent says all their relief
teams are still blocked from entering Fallujah, while
the Americans say the refugees will have to wait at
least two more weeks before they can go back to their
city in ruins.
This catalogue of woes, in the
minds of Sunni Iraqis, means that Iraq has been turned
by the Americans into a failed state, with Allawi's
"government" a fiction with no authority whatsoever,
except his recourse to American firepower.
The Sharm-el-Sheikh show Not a single
Arab government condemned the Fallujah massacre. This
week's international conference in Sharm-el-Sheikh in
Egypt in fact normalized the Fallujah massacre and
legitimized the election calendar.
Arab
League secretary general Amir Mussa called for "a ceasefire
in Fallujah and other hot spots". Nobody paid attention.
A delegation of the Iraqi opposition - including
Muzhar al-Duleimi, the head of the non-government
organization League of Defending Iraqis' Rights, and Qassim
Abdel Sattar, a member of Fallujah's council - circulated
a statement before the conference demanding that
the elections be postponed until the country was
relatively secure. Once again, nobody paid attention - except for
the Egyptians and the Jordanians. So far, 47 Sunni,
Shi'ite, Turkoman and Christian parties have declared
they will boycott the elections. There are 156
registered Iraqi political parties.
The
interior ministers of Iraq's neighbors meet in Tehran next
week. They meet again in early January in Amman to review
the situation prior to the elections. Sharm-el-Sheikh
made sure there's no timetable for the end of the
occupation - only a vague reference to UN Security Council
Resolution 1546, which states that the mandate of the
occupying forces runs out "upon completion of the
political process" when an elected government hopefully
will take power by the end of 2005.
The
players Assuming there will
be elections on January 30 - incidentally the first day
of the annual hajjthat takes millions of Muslims to Saudi
Arabia - this is how the main players stand at the
moment.
Iyad Allawi ,
the US-appointed Iraqi prime minister (without
a parliament), leader of the Iraqi National Accord,
widely known in Baghdad as "Saddam without a moustache" and
now as "the butcher of Fallujah", comes from a
wealthy Shi'ite merchant family. A former Ba'ath Party
member and former US Central Intelligence Agency asset, he
has inexorably alienated the Sunnis from the
political calendar - while contributing to massive popular support
for the resistance. Our sources confirm there's graffiti
all over the Sunni triangle spelling, in Arabic, "Death
to Allawi and his puppet government". His credibility in
Iraq is low. But as he is America's man, he won't go
quietly.
Ahmad Chalabi ,
Allawi's distant cousin, leader of the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), convicted fraudster in Jordan, the Pentagon
man and privileged - then disgraced - American source of
"intelligence", is trying hard to stage a comeback. His
credibility may be lower than his cousin's, but Chalabi
comes from Shi'ite old money and still knows how to oil
his connections. He is working to forge an alliance with
Shi'ite religious parties and may bribe his way to a key
post - maybe even a ministry.
Ghazi
al-Yawar , currently the
Iraqi president - a ceremonial, ineffective post - still is
not affiliated to any party. But he's a very influential
Sunni tribal leader in Mosul, also a civil engineer
and businessman, educated in the US. He has very good
ties with Washington - which explains his post as president.
But he was very forceful in condemning the Fallujah
massacre - and Sunnis noticed it. He could well become one of the
leaders of the moderate Sunni minority in the next
government.
Masoud Barzani, a
Sunni and leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party
(KDP), was a former peshmerga - and for many Sunni
Arabs that is unforgivable. He still maintains a
peshmerga militia of at least 15,000. Barzani
is the Kurdish counter to Jalal Talabani. He was a
member of the Iraqi Governing Council - also thanks to his
Washington connections - and one of his aides is now a
vice president. Talabani, also a Sunni, is the leader of
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and a law
graduate from Baghdad University. His party is a
splinter from the KDP. He was a huge lobbyist for the
invasion and occupation. He was also a member of the
governing council, also keeping his own peshmerga
militia. Both Barzani and Talabani will have some say
depending on what kind of political alliances they will
be able to forge. But the fact is Sunni Arabs and
Shi'ites alike view the Kurds as coming from another
planet.
Muqtada al-Sadr cleverly
swayed his lumpen proletariat-based movement from angry
opposition to the occupation to political participation.
The young Shi'ite cleric may not have the requisite
religious credentials, but that doesn't matter when your
father was the revered Ayatollah Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr,
assassinated by Saddam Hussein's secret police. The
urban, angry, young, unemployed Shi'ites will vote
massively for his senior cadres. Muqtada himself will
not contest a seat. At the moment he is negotiating his
participation in the united Shi'ite party list
forcefully pushed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is the leader
of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (SCIRI), the second-largest Shi'ite political
party. The SCIRI, basically exiled in Iran, was a
powerful opposition voice against Saddam. Abdul Aziz's
brother was the widely-respected Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr
al-Hakim, killed in a car bomb in Najaf in August 2003:
the ayatollah might have become the leader of a new
Iraq. The SCIRI is extremely organized. It had its own
militia, the Badr Brigades, which are now a part of the
Iraqi security forces - thus targets to the Sunni resistance.
The big problem is that the SCIRI flourished in
exile in Iran for too long - which for many Sunni Arabs
means their members are Iranian agents. In the next
government, the moderate Shi'ite Dawa party will
certainly be more powerful than the SCIRI.
The
strongest candidate to be the new Iraqi prime minister
is undoubtedly Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the head of the Dawa
party, which was the key opposition party to Saddam. He
is from Karbala and studied medicine in Mosul. Dawa is
very strong in southern Iraq and may now be the largest
political party in the country. It will be the key party
in the Shi'ite united list pushed by Sistani. Al-Jaafari
was a member of the Iraqi Governing Council set up by
the Americans. Currently a vice president, al-Jaafari is
arguably the most popular politician in Iraq at the
moment.
Assuming in January al-Jaafari is
elected the new prime minister in a Shi'ite government
controlled by the Dawa and SCIRI parties, at least three
nagging questions will persist. Will the elections
prevent or incite civil war? Which city will the US bomb
in February? And will the occupation be over by December
2005?
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
