THE
ROVING EYE Fear and loathing in militia
hell By Pepe Escobar
The Arab League sent a 10-man delegation
to Baghdad this past weekend to try to drum up
support for a "national reconciliation" conference
in Iraq - to be held after the referendum on the
draft constitution Saturday. The welcoming
committee included highway guerrillas armed to the
teeth. Although no Arab League members were shot,
two (Shi'ite) Interior Ministry commandos
protecting them were killed and six wounded.
Ibrahim Jaafari's Shi'ite-Kurd government
rejected the Arab
League's
intervention. President Jalal Talabani said it was
"better than nothing", but it was too little, too
late. For both Shi'ites and Kurds, what counts is
that the Sunni-dominated Arab League did nothing
to try to curb Saddam Hussein's worst excesses,
and did nothing to help during the post-Saddam
era.
This dialogue of the deaf offers the
context in Baghdad ahead of the popular referendum
on the draft constitution. Just to help the
process along, a curfew and a four-day national
holiday have been declared, starting on Thursday,
in which all borders, airports and ports will
officially be closed.
Sunnis can scuttle
the constitution by recording two-thirds
majorities in three of Iraq's 18 provinces. If the
constitution is passed, elections will be held in
December to elect a government. If it fails, the
elections will install another interim
administration to draft a new charter.
Blame Iran Meanwhile, the new
Anglo-American occupation mantra is to blame Iran.
First the Pentagon blamed Iran for shipping shaped
charges to Sunni Arab guerrillas in northern Iraq
- as if Tehran's Shi'ite leaders would ever be
willing to give a helping hand to al-Qaeda in
Iraq.
The accusation was completely
absurd, but it was not altogether dropped. The
British came up with a slight variation: Iran is
shipping shaped charges to Shi'ite splinter groups
in the southern city of Basra so they can attack
British troops.
It also does not make
sense. Tehran historically supports the Badr
Brigades - the paramilitary wing of the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, trained by
Iran's Revolutionary Guards. The Badr Brigades
don't see eye-to-eye with the Mahdi Army, Muqtada
al Sadr's Shi'ite, Iraqi nationalist militia.
Basically, for the ghetto Arab Shi'ites of
the Mahdi, the Badr are "Persians". So there's no
point in Tehran arming Sadrists or splinter
Sadrists. Just to remind anyone that economic
benefit is what this is really all about, Jaafari
made a point of stressing late last week that
"Iraq will continue to expand its relations with
Iran". This includes, on a practical level, 1,500
Iranian pilgrims a day now allowed to go to the
holy cities of Najaf and Karbala (during Saddam's
regime it used to be no more than 6,000 a month).
This will generate billions of dollars of income
to the Iraqi government.
Controlling
day and night Two-and-a-half years into
the occupation, Baghdad - which during the
Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s was one of the world's
cleanest cities - remains an archipelago of
rubble, garbage and fetid lakes. Writing for the
Saudi-financed al-Sharq al-Awsat, Maad Fayyad, a
London-based Arab journalist, captured the mood,
"I wonder - did the Mongols descend on it only
yesterday, led by the captain of catastrophe and
devotee of death, Hulagu Khan, such that [Baghdad]
was transformed into debris?"
The law of
the jungle rules - coupled with the collapse of
social life. Baghdad is inundated with messages
telling people not to congregate anywhere,
otherwise they become targets for suicide bombing.
Any foreign visitor is a target for kidnapping.
Every government official is a prisoner in his or
her own office.
To compound the misery,
what Sunnis see, apart from the disgraceful state
of Baghdad, is the Pentagon relentlessly
destroying Sunni Arab infrastructure elsewhere -
like in Fallujah on November 2004 and Tal Afar
last month. Buildings, bridges, sewage system,
telephone network, it's all gone.
Jaafari's government controls little else
than the Green Zone. Five Baghdad neighborhoods -
Ghaziliya, Amiraya, Yarmouk, Doura and Shurta -
are controlled by the resistance. People in
Baghdad tend to refer to the "resistance" as a
whole - not distinguishing between the myriad
groups (except for al-Qaeda in Iraq).
The
takeover of the majority of the city is a work in
progress. This means in practice hooded characters
loaded with Kalashnikovs, hand grenades and rocket
launchers telling people to stay out of trouble -
ie, holed up at home. In a variation of American
black ghetto folklore - the "man" controls the
day, we control the night - the resistance in
these areas controls day and night. There's
nothing Jaafari's government, holed up in the
Green Zone, can do about it.
The
resistance of course does not control Sadr City -
the giant Shi'ite slum. They don't need to.
There's a gentlemen's agreement between Muqtada -
and his Mahdi Army - and influential Sunni bodies
such as the Association of Muslim Scholars, which
is respected by the resistance. Jaafari's
government is in fact doing something. The
government may not control the day or the night:
militias do. But some militias - such as the Badr
Brigades, responding to Interior Minister Bayan
Jabor - are part of the government. Bewildered,
desperate citizens are caught in the crossfire
because everybody - militias, police, the army,
different strands of the resistance - wears the
same uniform.
Militia hell
Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Salafi jihadis
target "apostate" Shi'ites indiscriminately -
except, according to a recent communique - those
who are not collaborating with the occupation.
Their car bombings and suicide bombings, be it in
Hilla, Balad or Baghdad, killing scores of women
and children, are usually blamed by the locals on
Saudis, Jordanians and Palestinians, never on
Iraqis. The Salafi jihadis are financed by sheikhs
in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and most of their
suicide bombers are Saudis.
The different
strands of the nationalist, Iraqi resistance -
disguised as police - attack above all the Jaafari
government, which means basically Shi'ite
officials, Shi'ite police officers, Shi'ite
members or aspiring members of the Iraqi Defense
Forces. On the other side of the fence, as secular
Sunnis see it, the Badr Brigades terrorize
secular, urban Shi'ites, while its death squads -
formed by individuals who claim to be working for
the Interior Ministry - exterminate secular, Iraqi
nationalist Sunnis. No one has a monopoly on
death, but these "Interior Ministry" types seem to
be responsible as far as the ritual of bodies
being routinely discovered is concerned. It could
be five Sunnis this past Monday, or 36 Sunnis
kidnapped last August in Baghdad, 16 of them
coming from the same street in a southern Baghdad
suburb.
So this is the visible legacy of
the occupation on the eve of a popular vote on a
constitution few have even seen: the former
capital of the caliphate and Oriental legend, the
former proud metropolis of the Arab world, turned
into an uninhabitable, lawless pit. When militia
hell compounds the social breakdown, a failed
state is unlikely to be rescued by a constitution.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.)
