[R-G] The Reawakened Specter of Iraqi Civil War

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero041709.html

The Reawakened Specter of Iraqi Civil War

Michael Wahid Hanna

April 17, 2009

(Michael Wahid Hanna is program officer for international affairs at  
the Century Foundation in New York. He conducted research in Iraq in  
2006 and 2008.)

April has already been a cruel month in Iraq. A spate of bombings  
aimed at Shi‘i civilians in Baghdad has raised fears that the grim  
sectarian logic that led the capital to civil war in 2005-2007 will  
reassert itself. On April 6, a string of six car bombs killed at least  
37 people; the next day, shortly after President Barack Obama landed  
in Baghdad, another car bomb killed eight; and on the morrow, still  
another bomb blew up close to the historic Shi‘i shrine in Kadhimiyya  
just northwest of the capital’s central districts, taking an  
additional seven civilian lives. Worryingly for Iraqis, the bombings  
occurred following gun battles between the security forces of Prime  
Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shi‘i-led government and Sunni Arab  
militiamen, fueling rumors that the disgruntled militiamen have  
spearheaded the violent campaign.

The crackdown by Iraqi security forces on the Sunni Arab militiamen,  
known as the Awakenings (sahwat) in Arabic and referred to as the Sons  
of Iraq by the US military, pitted two ostensible US allies against  
one another. Together with arrests of other prominent militia leaders  
and the concrete timeline for the drawdown of US troops, the  
confrontations have raised questions as to whether some among these  
armed Sunni Arab factions are ready to return to insurgency in  
response to their treatment by Maliki’s government. The fate of the  
sahwat is but one aspect of a larger struggle over the nature of the  
Iraqi state and its component parts -- a struggle in which the United  
States is increasingly relegated to a subsidiary role. This latest  
phase of the intra-Iraqi wrangling that dates back almost to the fall  
of Saddam Hussein’s regime, could tip the country back into sectarian  
civil war and complicate Obama’s efforts to extricate the US military  
from Iraq.

The Awakenings

The Awakening movement arose prior to the 2007 “surge” of US troops  
and the adoption in Washington of an alternative strategy focused on  
counterinsurgency. The factors leading to the improvement of the  
security situation have been the subject of considerable political  
controversy; it is universally acknowledged, however, that the  
Awakening movement was a crucial factor in the reduction of violence  
in areas previously inhabited or even controlled by the Sunni Arab  
insurgency. Previous efforts at outreach to tribal leaders, with whom  
the various insurgent groups were increasingly intertwined from the  
summer of 2003 onward, had been ad hoc and failed to produce lasting  
cooperation or a blueprint for future action. The first organized and  
sustained tactical alliances between US forces and Sunni Arab tribal  
leaders arose in 2006 in Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar province,  
under the leadership of Col. Sean MacFarland.

It is difficult at this juncture to catalog precisely the types of  
impetus for the sea change in attitudes among Sunni Arab tribal  
leaders and former insurgents represented by the Awakening movement.  
Many analysts have understood the shift in their strategic calculus as  
a response to the brutality and arrogance of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, 
[1] and that group’s efforts to assert its control over rival  
insurgents and tribal leaders in its areas of operation.[2]  
Additionally, by 2007 the sectarian civil war had eclipsed the anti-US  
insurgency and become the lens through which many Sunni Arabs  
perceived their long-term interests. The tactical US alliances with  
local forces were replicated throughout al-Anbar province and were  
later formalized and extended to other areas of the country, including  
Baghdad and “mixed” provinces, such as Diyala, Ninewa and Kirkuk,  
where no sectarian or ethnic group constitutes a large majority. The  
Awakenings eventually came to number over 100,000 militiamen. While  
the sahwat remained overwhelmingly Sunni Arab, US forces had some  
success in recruiting Shi‘i tribal forces into similar arrangements in  
the north and south of the country as well.

These alliances arose on a bilateral basis, without input from the  
Iraqi government, and were established outside the formal structures  
of the nascent post-Saddam Iraqi state. The arrangements were viewed  
warily by the Shi‘i Islamist and Kurdish political parties that held  
sway in the Green Zone after 2005 and even by the more established  
Sunni-identified parties. As such, US support was not indefinitely  
sustainable, and the military sought an alternate long-term solution  
that required the integration of these militiamen into the Iraqi  
security forces. The mutual suspicion between the Iraqi government and  
the sahwat complicated this approach. Brig. Gen. Nasir al-Hiti,  
commander of the Muthanna Brigade in Abu Ghraib, described members of  
the sahwat as “like cancer” and went on to say that the Iraqi  
government “must remove them.”[3] Others in the government have  
publicly acknowledged the important role of the sahwat in tamping down  
violence but have intimated that the process of integration risks  
infiltration of the security services by hostile elements. In this  
vein, national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Ruba‘i warned, “Once we  
get al-Qaeda in our security services, then we are doomed.”[4] Despite  
the Maliki government’s assumption of responsibility for the payment  
of the militiamen and its repeated assurances that some portion of the  
sahwat will be integrated, most have not been.[5]

In fact, the Iraqi government has undertaken periodic raids upon the  
offices and homes of militia leaders, arresting several. The  
government’s targeting of the councils is part of a gradual process  
that began in 2008. The most conspicuous crackdown prior to April’s  
occurred in the restive “mixed” province of Diyala, where numerous  
sahwa leaders were detained in the course an August 2008 military  
operation. The March 28, 2009 arrest of ‘Adil al-Mashhadani, chief of  
a militia in the heavily Sunni Arab district of Fadhl in Baghdad, was  
notable for the scope of the operation employed to detain him and for  
the violent resistance it provoked. The Iraqi government justified the  
arrest on the basis of a December 2008 arrest warrant that implicated  
al-Mashhadani in terrorist activity related to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The political context of this latest crackdown offers important clues  
to the motivations and mindset of Maliki and his government. To defang  
his Shi‘i rivals in the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, Maliki employed  
carrot-and-stick tactics. In the spring and summer of 2008, Maliki  
ordered a series of military actions that targeted Jaysh al-Mahdi, the  
Sadrist militia, including the March offensive in Basra, the April-May  
assault on Sadr City, the Baghdad stronghold of the Sadrists, and a  
June operation in Maysan province. These operations resulted in the  
detention of scores of Sadrist fighters and leaders, and weakened the  
military capacity of Jaysh al-Mahdi. Yet following the January 2009  
provincial elections, which saw the Sadrists achieve respectable  
results throughout the south, the prime minister’s electoral list is  
now in negotiations with them over the makeup of provincial  
coalitions. Maliki’s approach to the Sadrists could provide a rough  
sketch of the government’s plan for extending its writ and corralling  
the Awakenings. With Sadrists engaged in alliance politics and  
simultaneously pleading for the release of their party colleagues who  
remain in jail, Maliki appears confident that his security apparatus  
is able to bend the will of his political adversaries to reshape the  
country’s political dynamics.

This episode follows the near completion of the transfer of the sahwat  
to Iraqi government oversight and control (save for 10,000 militiamen  
in Salah al-Din province) and the government is now responsible for  
the monthly payments of the militiamen. It indicates that Maliki is  
bent on asserting authority over these groups, with no tolerance for  
open dissent over government treatment. Maliki’s actions in Baghdad  
appear to be part of a strategy to cement the fragmentation and  
political weakness of the councils in “mixed” areas of the country;  
they also appear to be premised on the government’s belief that the  
lack of centralized coordination among the sahwat and the fragmented  
state of Sunni Arab politics will allow an assertion of political  
control through force without triggering widespread reversion to  
insurgency.

The lack of a broad top-down structure spanning the various provinces  
and the multiplicity of local actors have likely created a sense of  
confidence that the patchwork set of agreements struck with the US  
military has hampered the groups’ ability to respond in a collective  
fashion and deterred widespread reprisals by disenfranchised  
militiamen. The acquiescence of these groups and the lack of sharp  
reaction to similar repression in Diyala have likely been interpreted  
by the government as a sign that the sahwat are exhausted by the years  
of insurgency, as well as the violent conflict with al-Qaeda in  
Mesopotamia, which has increasingly set its sights on the Sunni Arab  
militias. The biometric and census data gathered by the US military as  
a precondition for getting on the US payroll could also provide the  
Iraqi government with a tool to use against the erstwhile rebels  
should US forces share the information. The data “provides a useful  
enemies list to the government of Iraq, if they chose to use it,”  
commented Colin Kahl, now a deputy assistant secretary at Obama’s  
Pentagon, in the summer of 2008.[6]

At the same time, the government has tempered the clear sectarian  
overtones of the crackdown and advanced the nationalist gambit it used  
to such effect in the January provincial elections. It has done this  
through wide-ranging political discussions with Sunni Arab political  
parties it considers more palatable, such as the Iraqi National  
Project List led by Salih al-Mutlaq, and by courting leaders from the  
Anbar Awakening, the original sahwa that soon spawned imitators across  
the country. (Of course, the Anbaris, hailing from the large province  
west of Baghdad that is home to Falluja and Ramadi, were also some of  
the original insurgents.) Broadly speaking, the Anbar groups are  
perceived in a different light than those in “mixed” areas of the  
country due to their reliance on tribal structures, the overwhelmingly  
Sunni Arab population of the province and the political power they  
have accrued through provincial elections. Additionally, being  
enmeshed in the machinery of provincial governance will endow the  
winners among the Anbaris with the ability to placate their tribal and  
other allies through the provision of public-sector employment and the  
awarding of government contracts. The willingness of Maliki to  
consider political alliances with these groups has established the  
limited terms of reference for future engagement and has sent a  
message to all other branches of the Awakenings that, without a strong  
political grounding on the government’s terms, they have no future in  
Iraq.

In a recent appearance on al-Jazeera explaining the government’s  
position on the arrest of al-Mashhadani, Defense Ministry spokesman  
Maj. Gen. Muhammad al-‘Askari differentiated among the sahwat and  
posited that the Anbar branch is a reaction to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia  
and a model of those groups intent on national reconciliation. By  
contrast, al-‘Askari described the “other branch…in Baghdad, Diyala,  
Ninewa” as harboring an ulterior motive -- the desire to take  
advantage of incorporation into the security apparatus in order to  
assist those still intent upon carrying out guerrilla operations.  
Similarly, Iraqi Vice President ‘Adil ‘Abd al-Mahdi, a member of the  
Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), noted that the groups in Anbar  
“allowed us to expel al-Qaeda out of al-Anbar, and for that reason  
they received the support of the government and the Iraqi people.” He  
went on to distinguish between the “original sahwat” and those groups  
that “claim to be part of the forces of the sahwat but wait for the  
appropriate time to launch their attacks.”[7]

Maliki’s Aspirations

Ned Parker, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Baghdad, has  
described the prime minister’s calculated repression of Sunni Arabs  
among the Awakenings who are former insurgent leaders and noted that  
Maliki has also sought to curb the influence of his most powerful  
Shi‘i rivals, ISCI, through the establishment of independent bases of  
support throughout the south. The picture that emerges is that of a  
highly sectarian leader with aspirations for centralized leadership  
that have required small steps toward cross-sectarianism and  
corresponding moves against his co-religionists.[8] By moving against  
some Sunni groups while negotiating with others, Maliki has further  
consolidated his grip on power, but left himself open to criticism  
from Shi‘i Islamists who are more doctrinaire. Concerned with their  
own diminished status and the possibility of government action  
targeting their members, these Shi‘i players have actively sought to  
hinder cross-sectarian politics and have distorted Maliki’s limited  
efforts at coopting Sunni Arab political actors. This is a crucial  
point, as Maliki’s nationalist posturing has yet to provide him with a  
truly cross-sectarian voting constituency and his electoral base  
remains overwhelmingly centered within the Shi‘i communities of Iraq.

Since the provincial elections, al-Maliki has openly discussed the  
possibility of allowing the re-entry of select Baathists into the  
political process.[9] He has also made public overtures to al-Mutlaq  
to explore the formation of provincial coalitions.[10] Both of these  
steps were greeted with suspicion by the Sadrists and ISCI, which  
remains Maliki’s primary Shi‘i rival for dominance in Baghdad and the  
southern provinces even after its electoral setbacks in January.  
Writing at his website historiae.org, the analyst Reidar Visser notes  
that following the elections, ISCI “is employing its favorite weapon,  
anti-Baathism, to try to recover some of the ground it lost.” In a  
defensive reaction, Maliki was forced to express his vociferous  
opposition to any and all discussions regarding the rehabilitation of  
the Baath, and his office released an official statement that  
emphasized that the “disbanded Baath party” could not legally  
participate in the political process.[11] He has more recently  
described those who support the party’s participation in the political  
life of Iraq as “delusional and ignorant.”[12] Thus the sequence of  
events suggests that the crackdown and the accusation that al- 
Mashhadani was engaged in Baathist political activity served the  
additional purpose of shielding the government from more strident  
criticism among other Shi‘i politicians and quelling any doubts that  
might have arisen among the Shi‘i populace.

None of the foregoing is meant to downplay Maliki’s continuing  
sectarian concerns regarding the Awakening Councils and the potential  
dangers of this overall course. The unwillingness of Maliki’s  
government to integrate sizable numbers from these groups into the  
security forces or provide them with reasonable civilian employment  
continues to cast a shadow over the general downturn in violence since  
mid-2007.

With the dramatic decline in the price of oil and the slashing of the  
budget for 2009, the prospects for integrating significant numbers of  
the sahwat into the security forces or otherwise accommodating them  
look bleak. To date, while the actual numbers are contested and public  
pronouncements by the government have varied, recent estimates suggest  
that only 5,000 of these individuals have been formally inducted into  
the security forces.[13] Furthermore, the outbreak of hostilities  
following al-Mashhadani’s arrest is still seen by many Sunnis in  
sectarian terms. A stepped-up and more comprehensive campaign against  
the sahwat could still trigger a broader sense of Sunni Arab grievance  
and a series of uncoordinated reactions that would catalyze a larger  
outbreak of destabilizing sectarian violence.

The Stakes

Understanding this backdrop is particularly important because the  
ability of the United States and its military forces to affect the  
trajectory of political accommodation and reconciliation has  
diminished. Some commentators have rightly pointed out that these  
actions have placed US troops at odds with their former Sunni allies. 
[14] Recalling the discussion surrounding the negotiations of the US- 
Iraqi status of forces agreement, Col. Peter Mansoor, Gen. David  
Petraeus’ executive officer, worried that the agreement “would put US  
forces into a position where they could not intervene to stop the  
government of Iraq from attacking the Sons of Iraq. If the Iraqi  
Security Forces needed help once engaged against the Sons of Iraq, US  
forces could be drawn into the fight against the very people who  
helped us turn the war around.”[15] At the same time, the direct  
involvement of US forces in support of the arrest of al-Mashhadani  
highlights the Maliki government’s continued reliance on the US  
military for logistics and air support and still represents the most  
potent form of leverage that US policymakers could exploit, should  
they wish to halt the spiral before it acquires momentum.

While the Obama administration remains solicitous of the stability of  
the Maliki government, US support for Iraqi military operations cannot  
be unconditional if the stated strategic goal of withdrawal is not to  
be compromised. Many of the Maliki government’s operations would not  
be feasible without US support or, if they were undertaken without  
such support, could only be successful at a much higher cost in  
casualties and reputation. If the US military simply enforces the  
decisions made by Maliki to consolidate his power against perceived  
enemies, the premier will merely be emboldened to take bigger and  
bigger risks. In instances such as the al-Mashhadani arrest, when US  
forces are deployed to rein in specific militia leaders, their  
cooperation risks making a mockery of Maliki’s repeated assurances of  
integration into the security forces or other public-sector employment.

It is entirely possible that al-Mashhadani is fully guilty of the  
charges against him -- this would hardly be surprising given the  
background and history of the sahwat and many of their individual  
members. Targeting the worst of this lot is understandable, and  
perhaps desirable, from the perspective of the US and its Iraqi allies  
in the Green Zone, and when limited in scope is unlikely to spark  
Sunni Arab outrage that would provoke a reversion to full-scale  
insurgency. But the United States remains at risk of being enlisted as  
a proxy as the Shi‘i-dominated government dictates terms of surrender  
in an unfinished sectarian civil war. Litigating the rights and wrongs  
of the civil war through wholesale repression of the sahwat would  
constitute a form of victor’s justice -- with no regard for the  
excesses and abuses carried out under government aegis or with  
government connivance. And it would increase the chances, already too  
high, that Iraqi civilians will be exposed to another and perhaps even  
bloodier round of internecine fighting.

Endnotes

[1] See, for instance, David Kilcullen, “Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt,”  
Small Wars Journal, August 29, 2007.

[2] See, for instance, John A. McCary, “The Anbar Awakening: An  
Alliance of Incentives,” Washington Quarterly (January 2009).

[3] New York Times, August 21, 2008.

[4] BBC News, February 4, 2008.

[5] The government has vowed on numerous occasions to integrate 20  
percent of the militiamen into the Iraqi security forces. ‘Ali al- 
Dabbagh, the prime minister’s official spokesman, explicitly stated  
that the remaining 80 percent of the fighters will be given public- 
sector employment. Aswat al-‘Iraq, April 14, 2009. [Arabic]

[6] Noah Shachtman, “Could Iris Scans Stop a New Iraq Insurgency?”  
Wired, August 26, 2008.

[7] Al-Zaman (Baghdad), April 14, 2009. [Arabic]

[8] Ned Parker, “Machiavelli in Mesopotamia: Nouri al-Maliki Builds  
the Body Politic,” World Policy Journal (Spring 2009).

[9] Guardian, March 7, 2009.

[10]Anthony Shadid, “New Alliances In Iraq Cross Sectarian Lines,”  
Washington Post, March 20, 2009.

[11] See the official statement from Office of the Prime Minister,  
March 19, 2009, available online at http://www.pmo.iq/index/ 
03-866.htm. [Arabic]

[12] Aswat al-‘Iraq, April 12, 2009. [Arabic]

[13] Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2009.

[14] Gareth Porter, “Al-Maliki Draws US Troops Into Crackdown on  
Sunnis,” Inter Press Service, April 1, 2009.

[15] Quoted by journalist Thomas E. Ricks at his blog on the Foreign  
Policy website: http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/31/iraq_the_unraveling_ii 
.