Civil War? Sectarian Tension and Occupation in Iraq

“It will take Iraqis something like a quarter of a century to rebuild their country, to heal their wounds, to reform their society, to bring about some sort of national reconciliation, democracy and tolerance of each other. But that process will not begin until the US occupation of Iraq ends.”
- Wamid Omar Nadhmi, Baghdad University


Word on the street is that Iraq is headed toward civil war. Every day we hear about it from the mainstream media, telling us that the sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims are turning bloodier and bloodier by the day. Fears jumped when the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra, a Shia holy site, was bombed on February 24th and reprisals began against Sunnis. Over 50 Sunni mosques were damaged and three Imams (religious leaders) were killed following the initial attack. The question now is whether or not this is just the beginning of a larger conflict that has the potential of engulfing the entire nation.

The problem is that we are hearing our information from a very dubious source: the corporate media. It is not to say that everything we are hearing is wrong, but we must ask ourselves both what aren’t we hearing, and why aren’t we hearing it? Most news that comes into the US from Iraq is very removed from the sentiment on the street. Correspondents for the main papers and TV stations do their jobs from inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, far from the explosions and gunfire they report on. They rely on military press conferences and Iraqi aides to bring them information and interviews from outside the walls, and then they turn it into a story, allowing them to analyze the events from their own perspective (remember: if it bleeds, it leads!).

So after the attack on the Al Askari Mosque we saw widespread violence. But what we didn’t see was that the violence ended just as quickly as it began, and was promptly replaced by acts of solidarity. Shia leaders told their followers not to commit acts of revenge, acts which were immediately followed by a show of determination to unite in the face of tragedy. Thousands of Sunni joined the Shia demonstrations to call for an end to the violence, despite the Iraqi security forces’ attempts to seal off Sunni areas.

Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani issued a statement following the Al Askari attack: “We call upon believers to express their protest ... through peaceful means. The extent of their sorrow and shock should not drag them into taking actions that serve the enemies who have been working to lead Iraq into sectarian strife.”

Who are these enemies Sistani speaks of? Of course there are the “foreign terrorists” seeking to destabilize the country, possibly by igniting civil war, in hopes of driving out both the occupying forces and the newly formed government in order to form an Islamic state. Or so I’ve heard. Okay, who else? What would the United $tates and its partners in crime be able to gain from constant violence and our continued belief of sectarian tension just on the brink of civil war?

First of all, the last thing the U$ wants is a united resistance. So far it has been able to calm, to a certain degree, the unrest amongst Shia militants, while it’s had a much tougher time dealing with the Sunni resistance. Muqtada al-Sadr, an influential Shia cleric, led two uprisings against the occupation forces in March and August of 2004. After the recent mosque bombing he sent his al-Mahdi Army to guard both Shia and Sunni mosques to prevent against further attacks. This sign of solidarity is frightening to a government that relies on divide-and-conquer tactics to keep its head above water.

Independent journalist Dahr Jamail has said that “one theme most Iraqis seem to agree on, whether Shiite or Sunni, religious leaders or ordinary people, is that the foreign power in Iraq must depart, leaving Iraqis to sort out their sectarian and ethnic differences.” When the war was just beginning back in 2003 there were daily protests against the occupation, and the two Muslim factions were united in demanding the withdrawal of U$ troops. Since then the U$ has been very successful in weakening that link, but it has not broken. “The one who will accept the division of our country,” says Redah Jawad Taki of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, “will agree that our country stays under the occupation.”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that those who bombed the Al Askari Mosque “have only one motive: to create a violent sedition between the Sunnis and the Shiites in order to derail the Iraqi rising democracy from its path.” Hmm, interesting. Just last year, British SAS (Special Air Service, i.e.- special forces) soldiers were the ones caught traveling in a car full of bombs and remote detonators. They were also decked out in traditional Arab attire, equipped with bushy black wigs. Muqtada al-Sadr and other Muslim leaders accused the soldiers of planning to increase sectarian tensions by bombing mosques and posing as Iraqis. Do these claims have merit? Well, the British military broke the suspected saboteurs out of an Iraqi prison before they could be tried, so I suppose we’ll never know.

But Imam Mu’ayad al-Adhami of the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad does recognize foreign influence as a cause of the rising sectarian tensions. “The Americans are using divide and conquer to try to split the Muslims of Iraq. But Iraqi society is Muslim first and tribal second,” he says. “That means Sunni and Shia are relatives, often in the same family with so many links and intermarriages. This is our society and anyone trying to divide us is blind to these facts.”

There is one thing that the Bush administration really wants to do, and that is to stay in Iraq for geopolitical reasons. So, what’s keeping us there? The majority of Americans say we shouldn’t have invaded in the first place. The claims by the U$ that Iraq was an immediate threat due to its possession of WMDs turned out to be a lie. Its claims to liberate the Iraqi people are extremely transparent, and on the other side is death and destruction caused by Coalition Forces. These facts are well-known, and with a rising body count of U$ soldiers, many Americans are asking why we’re still there.

It doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s best interest, not in ours because our brothers and sisters are dying over there and not in theirs because they’re dying over there. How many times have you heard, “If we pull out now there will be a civil war!” Why don’t we hear about Sunni and Shia uniting in the streets? Why do we only hear of the violence between extremist elements of both groups? Could it be that the only excuse the Bush administration has got left is that the occupation is preventing civil war? The British used this same excuse during their occupation of Iraq (the first one). In 1920 an uprising began, and when challenged on the continued presence of troops in Iraq, Prime Minister David Lloyd George told parliament that if the British left there would be a civil war. British control over Iraq (through occupation and later puppet governments) lasted until 1958.

I cannot say that there is no tension between the Sunni and Shia Muslims, nor that a civil war is not a possible outcome. But a civil war resulting if we withdraw our troops in not certain, despite what we may continuously hear. If there is anything keeping us in Iraq it is the fear being driven into our minds that if we leave the country it will erupt and the blood will be on our hands.

Wamid Omar Nadhmi, a senior political scientist at Baghdad University says, “This civil war is only in the brain of the American decision-maker, and perhaps he himself is aware that there is no civil strife between Shia and Sunnis, but [attempts] to use it as a pretext. The Americans are actually saying, ‘Let us stay in your country, let us kill you, Iraqis, because we don’t like you to kill each other.’”

So, let’s consider this: We have fucked up Iraq. Violence isn’t going to come to the country because it’s already there, and we brought it. There is no way we can help to resolve it, except by leaving. And the blood is on our hands.