5. Iraq
While the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq is responsible for much of the chaos and slaughter that followed, the events that preceded and followed it are also implicated. Pseudo-anti-imperialists who blame everything on the US/UK invasion fail to recognise local and regional factors contributing to the crisis, particularly Iranian jihadi imperialism. Their blanket opposition to Western ‘humanitarian’ military interventions, absolutely justified in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, would have allowed the ISIS genocide of Yazidis to proceed unhindered. Support or opposition should depend not on subjective factors but on the objective circumstances and the outcome of the intervention.
Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party
Saddam Hussein joined the Baath Party as a young man in 1956. The Arab Baath (Renaissance) Socialist Party was founded in the early 1940s by three French-educated Syrian intellectuals: Michel Aflaq, a Christian; Salah al-Din Bitar, a Sunni Muslim; and Zaki al-Arsuzi, an Alawite. A self-professed revolutionary party combining pan-Arab nationalism with a dedication to socialism, the Baath Party developed a serious following only in Syria and Iraq, despite its goal of encompassing the entire Arab world (Human Rights Watch 1990, 11). Communists, whose immediate objective was a democratic revolution, had a far stronger mass following in Iraq during this period.
Iraq had gained formal independence under King Faisal I in 1932, but British control continued. In July 1958, the monarchy was toppled by a military coup, establishing the republic which would eventually install General Abd al-Karim Qasim as prime minister. It was a potentially revolutionary situation:
The streets filled with jubilant Iraqis. Communists rallied tens of thousands of new members to support the new republic. Nine months later, on April 17, 1959, the communists gathered a million citizens and marched again in Baghdad … Marchers called for peace and for the army to hand power over to civilians … A local paper reported: ‘All categories of people: the soldier, worker, peasant, wage-earner, intellectual, student, civil servant, merchants … Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians and others, who flocked from every corner of Iraq. … The procession was rained with flowers, sweets and bouquets from balconies along both sides of the streets.’ (Thompson 2013, 178–79)
Communism had ‘arrived in Basra on British steamers from India, in books and magazines, and in the mouths of Indian soldiers, servants and employees of British firms’, while Islamic socialist ideas had floated around the Arab world since the turn of the century (Thompson 2013, 183). Yusuf Salman Yusuf – a Christian Arab who was born in Baghdad in 1901, moved with his parents to Basra in 1908, and worked at an ice factory and then at the port from the age of fifteen – was attracted by these ideas. In 1927 he established a communist circle that grew to sixty members by the early 1930s; he was present at a meeting in the capital in 1934, where the communists formed the Committee against Imperialism and Exploitation, issuing ‘a manifesto proclaiming workers … as the true basis of the nation. Their demands: cancellation of foreign debt and nationalization of oil, railways and banks. In 1935 the group became the ICP [Iraqi Communist Party] and published its first newspaper. A hammer and sickle with the slogan “Workers of the World Unite” adorned the masthead’ (Thompson 2013, 185). Under the pseudonym ‘Comrade Fahd’, Yusuf built the ICP into a mass party. With a truly mixed and largely working-class leadership of Christians, Jews, Shiites, Sunni Arabs and a Sunni Kurd, they established the League Against Zionism, and in a booklet outlined their two-stage revolution, concentrating on the first stage, which was to establish a democratic regime in Iraq (the second stage was to establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’). Disturbed by the growing influence of the communists, the government subjected them to fierce repression, arresting and condemning Fahd and other leaders to death in 1947. The uproar with which the verdict was met led to their sentence being commuted to penal servitude; but in 1949 the Soviet Union’s recognition of Israel created a pretext for the Iraqi state to accuse them falsely of Zionism and hang them (Thompson 2013, 189–98).
The ICP survived, however, and played a major role in shaping Qasim’s secular social justice policies after he came to power. Qasim ‘redistributed the land of royalist elites to 35,000 families, raised taxes on the landed rich, reduced housing rents and bread prices, issued labor regulations to improve workers’ conditions, and built homes and schools for 10,000 families living in the slums around Baghdad’; but in late 1959 he openly turned against the ICP, ordering the arrest of hundreds of communists, shutting down their public branches, demobilising their popular militias, and removing communists from control of the peasant unions and the press (Thompson 2013, 202–3).
In 1959, Saddam Hussein was involved in an unsuccessful Baathist attempt to assassinate Qasim, after which Saddam fled the country, but in February 1963 Qasim was overthrown in a second Baathist coup and executed, along with his aides and thousands of communists. The Baathists installed Abd al-Salam Arif as president, but he ousted them from power in November of the same year, leaving the party in crisis. At this point, one of the original Baathist founders, Michel Aflaq, intervened in the organisation of the party, establishing a new leadership that put Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein in key positions. Although jailed for two years after another failed coup in 1964, Saddam escaped and became deputy secretary general of the Baath party in 1966, when he was just twenty-nine (Sassoon 2012, 30).1 In July 1968, the Baathists prevailed upon the military to withdraw support from Arif’s brother, who had succeeded him as prime minister; after he was forced to resign and sent into exile, the Baath Party took power. By this time, there was an unbridgeable rift between the Iraqi and Syrian Baath Parties, and nationalism had replaced Pan-Arabism. R. Stephen Humphreys (1999, 121) outlines some of the ways in which the Baathist party leaders represented a significant change from Iraq’s former political establishment:
Indeed, there are striking similarities between Saddam and Stalin. Even before he became president in 1979, Saddam began to concentrate power in his own hands. And afterwards, aside from being president, Saddam was ‘simultaneously the chairman of the RCC, secretary general of the Ba’th Party, prime minister, and commander in chief of the armed forces. Like his elaborate security apparatus, which had a systematic overlap in responsibilities in order to diffuse power, Iraq’s bureaucracy had multiple organizational layers … In essence, all major – and sometimes minor – issues percolated upwards to the presidential diwan and the president himself for a final decision’ (Sassoon 2012, 227; 234). The Baath Party was similarly centralised, with all major decisions being taken by the Party Secretariat, and, ‘in order to ensure that the party permeated and controlled every facet of life in Iraq, its members occupied most of the important positions in the country’ (Sassoon 2012, 35).
The party had its own secret police, the mukhabarat, and a ‘People’s Militia’, which reportedly numbered about 175,000 on the eve of the Iran-Iraq war and expanded to about 750,000 during the war. ‘Civilian informers play a key role in surveillance. According to almost unanimous testimony, Iraq under the Baath Party has become a nation of informers. Party members are said to be required to inform on family, friends and acquaintances, including other party members’ (Human Rights Watch 1990, 14). Loyalty was assured by liberal use of the death penalty; for example, any retired military or police personnel – which included the entire adult male population, since military service was mandatory – would be sentenced to death if they worked for any group or party other than the Baath Party, as would any former member of the Baath Party. Like Stalin, Saddam discovered plots against himself everywhere and executed officials suspected of them either secretly or after show trials involving torture to extract false confessions. The message was clear: dissent of any kind would not be tolerated. This was supplemented by an all-encompassing personality cult, which made it mandatory to have a picture of Saddam in every household, and made an insult to him punishable by life imprisonment or death (Human Rights Watch 1990, 15–20).
The Special Security Organization (SSO or Amn al-Khass) was the most powerful state security agency from 1980 onwards: ‘It had a say in any significant promotion or demotion within the system … documents indicate that it was involved in appointments of doctors in hospitals and of scientists in universities, property allocation, religious activities, archaeological digs, and even “Arabization” of Latin words’ (Sassoon 2012, 109). A major part of its responsibilities was gathering information. The regime considered itself to have an extensive range of enemies: ‘One of the Ba’th Party documents identifies at least eight opposition movements inside the country, among them the Communist Party, the two Kurdish parties (the Kurdish Democratic Party [KDP] and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK]), the Da’wa Party, the Muslim Brothers, any movement that had “a religious cover,” groups that had split from the Ba’th Party, and any movements that pretended to be “nationalistic”’ (Sassoon 2012, 113–14).
Like the Iranian secret services, the Iraqi secret services pursued ‘enemies of the state’ abroad and attempted – often successfully – to assassinate them in places as varied as Kuwait, Beirut, Cairo, London, Aden, Vienna, Berlin, Dubai, Sweden, Italy, Pakistan, Thailand, Khartoum and Lausanne (Human Rights Watch 1990, 23–25). The unelected Revolutionary Command Council could override decisions of the judiciary and the National Assembly, which was elected under strictly controlled conditions. The media were gradually brought completely under the control of the Baath Party; ‘Failure to conform has brought imprisonment and torture, frequently ending in death, for hundreds of Iraqi writers and intellectuals’ (Human Rights Watch 1990, 39–40).
The Baath Party proclaimed itself ‘a socialist revolutionary party which considers socialism as a decisive necessity for liberating the Arab nation’, but unlike Stalinist Russia ‘there was no centralized economy, no forced industrialization, and no massive, state-run attempt to mould peasants into industrial workers’; nationalisation and land reform went along with encouragement of the private sector (Sassoon 2012, 236–37). Between 1972 and 1975, all oil companies were nationalised, and the quadrupling of oil prices after the 1973 October War allowed the regime to use the revenue to provide free healthcare and education, to expand the country’s infrastructure, to organise large construction projects, and to invest in heavy industry. Per capita income rose from 97 Iraqi dinars in 1968 to about 825 Iraqi dinars by the end of the 1970s, while GDP increased more than fourfold, with the huge public expenditure stimulating private investment (Sassoon 2012, 238–39).
Although Saddam identified as a Muslim, he opposed officials attending mosques or praying during working hours in case it put pressure on others to do the same, and he told his cabinet that he had been completely oblivious to the differences between Sunni and Shi’i until he was exiled in Egypt; the preponderance of Sunnis among the political elite appears to be due to their Tikriti clan association with Saddam. While the regime was certainly hostile to the Shia Islamist Dawa Party, it was equally hostile to Wahhabism, which was prohibited as ‘a deviation from the real Islam’ (cit. Sassoon 2012, 261). In the 1990s, after the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam launched a faith campaign, building new mosques, repairing old ones, urging Iraqis to observe the Quran in his speeches, and adding the inscription ‘Allahu Akbar’ to the Iraqi flag (Sassoon 2012, 261; 265). Yet his hostility to Islamism remained. When relations between the IRI and Saudi Arabia warmed considerably after Khatami became president in 1997, with numerous meetings and Prince Abdullah praising ‘the immortal achievements credited to the Muslim people of Iran and their invaluable contributions’ (Cordesman 2001), a memo from the Iraqi regime warned that this might herald a future relationship between the Dawa Party and Wahhabists. ‘Even throughout the 1990s, anyone showing an inclination toward Wahhabism was considered an enemy of the state’; as late as ‘early September 2001, the minister of awqaf [charitable endowments] and religious affairs held a meeting attended by academics, religious leaders, and representatives from the different security organizations to discuss Wahhabism – how to fight it and how to show that its teachings had nothing to do with real Islam’ (Sassoon 2012, 261).
Saddam was convinced that enabling women to access economic, social and legal rights was vital to the growth of Iraqi society; in a speech given to the General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW) in 1971, he said,
We are all – in the Party and the Government, and in the social organisations – expected to encourage the recruitment of more women to the schools, government departments, the organisations of production, industry, agriculture, arts, culture, information and all other kinds of institutions and services. We are called upon to struggle tirelessly against all the material and psychological obstacles which stand in our way along this path. (Hussein 2009)
As a result, there was a significant increase throughout the 1970s in the number of girls attending primary and secondary schools, and the university attendance of women grew from about 9,000 in 1970 to more than 28,000 by 1979; there was a drive to combat illiteracy, which affected around 70 per cent of women, and there were significant achievements in the provision of healthcare to women (Sassoon 2012, 253). However, this began to change with the Iran-Iraq war.
The Iran-Iraq War
Saddam Hussein’s downfall began with the return of Khomeini to Iran in February 1979. The Baathists had had problems with the shah; for example, in 1969 the shah unilaterally abrogated Iran’s 1937 treaty with Iraq, which had fixed the frontier between the two countries at the low-water mark on the eastern edge of the Shatt al-Arab (the waterway through which the Tigris and Euphrates flow into the Persian Gulf), thus giving Iraq control over the entire waterway except near the Iranian towns of Abadan and Khorramshahr, where the frontier was at the median deepwater line; he also began providing military support to the Kurdish separatists in Iraq. With the Shatt al-Arab being Iraq’s main outlet to the sea, and the loss of Kurdistan (where a substantial portion of Iraq’s oil is located) threatening the country with disintegration, the Baathists had no option but to negotiate with their much bigger and more powerful neighbour; this resulted in the Algiers Agreement of 1975, which fixed the border at the median over the length of the Shatt al-Arab, while the shah agreed not to interfere in Kurdistan (Karsh 2002, 7–8). This was a loss for Iraq, but at least it was possible to negotiate with the shah. Hoping for a good relationship with the new rulers in Tehran, the Iraqi regime offered its friendship: ‘The Iranian prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, was invited to visit Baghdad, Iraq offered its good offices in case Iran decided to join the non-aligned movement, and … shortly after his ascendancy to the presidency, Saddam Hussein reiterated Iraq’s desire to establish relations of friendship and co-operation with Iran, based on mutual non-interference in internal affairs’ (Karsh 2002, 13).
However, as the constitution of the Islamic Republic made clear, ‘Khomeini wanted to export the Iranian revolution, and Iraq, with its large Shia population, was the obvious first destination. In the fall of 1979, the Iranian radio began openly inciting Iraqi Shias to rebellion. Terrorist attacks on senior figures of the Iraqi regime in April 1980 were attributed to an outlawed pro-Iranian Shia organization called the al-Dawa party, which received direct support from Tehran’ (Human Rights Watch 1990, 7). The IRI also resumed support for the Iraqi Kurds. Sadeq Khalkhali (Khomeini’s executioner) stated: ‘We have taken the path of true Islam, and our aim in defeating Saddam Hussein lies in the fact that we consider him the main obstacle to the advance of Islam in the region’; Iran withdrew its ambassador and diplomatic staff from Iraq in March and April 1980 (Karsh 2002, 13–14). Having earlier been pragmatic enough to negotiate with the shah rather than enter into a military confrontation with a country whose territory was three times the size of Iraq and whose population in 1980 was likewise three times larger (39 million and 13 million in Iran and Iraq respectively),
Saddam was gradually driven to the conclusion that the only way to deflect the Iranian threat was to exploit Iran’s temporary weakness following the revolution and to raise the stakes for both sides by resorting to overt, state-sponsored armed force. On 7 September 1980 Iraq accused Iran of shelling Iraqi border towns from territories which, according to the Algiers Agreement, belonged to Iraq, and demanded the immediate evacuation of Iranian forces from these areas. Soon afterwards Iraq moved to ‘liberate’ these disputed territories and, on 10 September, announced that the mission had been accomplished. For his part, the Iranian acting Chief-of-Staff announced on 14 September that his country no longer abided by the 1975 Algiers Agreement on the land borders. Saddam responded three days later by abrogating the agreement. (Karsh 2002, 14)
On September 23, after having failed to destroy the Iranian air force by bombing airfields the previous day, Iraqi forces invaded Iran. The main thrust of the invasion in the southern province of Khuzestan aimed at gaining control over the Shatt al-Arab and capturing the strategic towns of Khorramshahr and Abadan, while supportive operations were carried out in the central and northern fronts. By October 24, after a bloody conflict in which about 7,000 had been killed or seriously injured on each side, Iraqi forces captured Khorramshahr. According to historian Efraim Karsh,
Saddam’s initial strategy … avoided targets of civilian and economic value in favour of attacks almost exclusively on military targets. Only after the Iranians struck non-military targets did the Iraqis respond in kind. Nor did Saddam’s territorial aims go beyond the Shatt al-Arab and a small portion of the southern region of Khuzestan … Saddam hoped that a quick, limited, yet decisive campaign would convince Iran’s revolutionary regime to desist from its attempts to overthrow him. (Karsh 2002, 27–29)
Instead of negotiating a settlement, as Saddam requested, the IRI counterattacked, targeting Basra and two oil terminals near the port of Fao with its navy, while the air force targeted ‘oil facilities, dams, petrochemical plants and the nuclear reactor near Baghdad. By 1 October, Baghdad itself had been subjected to eight air raids. Iraq retaliated with a series of strikes against Iranian targets and the two sides became interlocked in widespread strategic exchanges’ (Karsh 2002, 29). There was a stalemate for around eight months, after which Iran gained the initiative. Mobilising the IRGC and recruiting large numbers of child soldiers to the Basij, the IRI succeeded in driving Iraqi forces out of most of Iran, recapturing Khorramshahr along with a substantial amount of Iraqi military equipment and twelve thousand Iraqi troops in May 1982. Saddam announced on June 20 that he would withdraw his remaining troops from Iran within ten days, hoping that the war was over. Instead, on the very next day after Saddam’s peace proposal, Khomeini announced that an Iranian invasion of Iraq was imminent, and in July a large-scale offensive was launched on Basra using around 100,000 fighters, including human wave attacks using Basiji as minesweepers. In response, the Iraqi forces used gas for the first time; while this was only non-lethal tear gas, its success would encourage them to use more-lethal chemical weapons, and much more widely, during the rest of the war (Karsh 2002, 36–37; Dunn 2009).
However, the factors which had earlier favoured the Iranian forces (defence of one’s homeland and better knowledge of the terrain) now favoured the Iraqis, and the invasion was repulsed. ‘Even many Kurds and Shia saw the war as their own: some 250,000 Kurds joined the Salah al-Din forces, a militia that helped the army in keeping the Iranians out of Iraqi Kurdistan; battalions with a majority of Shi’i soldiers mounted a similar defence in the southeast’ (Jabar 1992). Neither side was in a position to defeat the other comprehensively, and the war dragged on for six more years, with each side bombing the other’s cities, and an estimated million lives lost in total.
Iraq was financially supported by the Gulf countries, especially Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while the Soviet Union, the Eastern European countries, China and France were its main arms suppliers; the Netherlands provided a small amount of financial support to Iran, while North Korea, South Korea, Libya, Pakistan, Portugal, Syria and Sweden provided arms. However, many countries, including Brazil, China, West Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey supplied arms to both sides, while Iran was also being armed clandestinely by Israel and the US, and by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries via North Korea. The United States, which had broken off diplomatic relations with Iraq after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, normalised relations in 1982 and provided Iraq with financial and military aid. Only after the Iran-Contra affair was exposed and a US tanker was hit by an Iranian mine did the US take the initiative to pass UN Security Council Resolution 598 in July 1987, calling for an end to the conflict, and take action against Iran when it failed to comply. On July 17, 1988 President Khamenei finally sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar accepting Resolution 598; three days later Khomeini accepted it under protest; and on August 8 the UN Security Council convened and declared a ceasefire effective from dawn on August 20 (Karsh 2002 58–61, 79–81; Dunn 2009). Saddam’s decision to invade Iran and Khomeini’s decision to continue the war for six years after Iraqi troops had been expelled resulted in massive death and destruction in both countries, and continued to have a devastating impact on Iraqi civilians even after the end of the war.
Fallout from the Iran-Iraq War
In the build-up to and during the war, Saddam expelled Shia Iraqis of Iranian descent and their families, regarding them as a fifth column of Iran; an estimated 250,000 people were affected (Jabar 1992). The war was an even greater catastrophe for the Kurds of Iraq. Their demand for independence or autonomy predated the Baathist regime and continued throughout. In 1970, the Baathist regime conceded them a far-greater measure of self-rule than Kurds in Syria, Iran or Turkey enjoyed; but the fourteen thousand square miles of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region was only half of what they claimed, and although it included the rich agricultural region producing half of Iraq’s food, it excluded the oil wealth that lay below the fringes of the region. In 1974, Mullah Mustafa Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) launched a revolt, supported by the shah in neighbouring Iran as well as by Israel and the US; but when the shah signed the Algiers Agreement in 1975, he withdrew his support and the rebellion collapsed. After the KDP fled to Iran, tens of thousands of Barzani tribespeople were evicted from their homes and relocated to barren sites in the desert. Later, at least a quarter of a million Kurds on the borders with Iran and Turkey were also forcibly relocated to settlements in army-controlled areas of Iraqi Kurdistan; until 1987, they were paid a nominal cash compensation but were forbidden to return to their homes (Human Rights Watch 1993).
When the war began and troops were moved to the front, the Kurdish Peshmerga (military forces) emerged again. In 1983, Iranian forces in alliance with the KDP, now led by Barzani’s son Masoud, captured the border town of Haj Omran. In retaliation, Iraqi troops abducted between five and eight thousand males from the relocated Barzani tribals, and they were never seen again. At this time, the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani was in alliance with Saddam, but by 1986 it, too, concluded a formal political and military agreement with Tehran (Human Rights Watch 1993). The joint Kurdish-Iranian insurgency was so effective that in early 1987, Saddam launched counterinsurgency operations, appointing his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid as overseer. In February 1988, as Joost Hiltermann (2016) recounts,
the regime launched what it called the Heroic Anfal Operation, a six-month-long campaign in eight numbered stages designed to cover all of rural Kurdistan. Each stage was preceded by the extensive use of chemical weapons against Kurdish strongholds: this drove people out of the countryside and into the arms of the Iraqi military, which dispatched them in convoys to execution sites in the south. It’s estimated that between eighty and one hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, died this way.
In a separate operation, as part of the war, the Iraqi regime attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with poison gas in March 1988 after it was captured by a combination of Iranian and Kurdish forces. The attack killed thousands of civilians, while leaving the fighters, who had protective clothing, mostly unscathed … After Halabja, as chemical clouds wafted down in selective locations during the Anfal campaign, the merest rumour or hint of a gas attack would be enough to send people running, just as the army intended.
On September 6, 1988, by which time the Iran-Iraq War had ended, the Iraqi regime made a declaration of victory over the insurgency and announced a general amnesty for all Kurds. However, Kurdish populations continued to be relocated to barren camps, and survivors were not allowed to return to their villages (Human Rights Watch 1993). One is again reminded of Stalin, and in particular his treatment of ethnic minorities, especially Muslims, during World War II. In a judgement celebrated by survivors, in December 2005 a court in The Hague ruled that the mass killings of Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s was an act of genocide (BBC News 2005b).
Women’s rights suffered a setback during the war. In an attempt to appease religious groups in Iraq and compensate for Iran’s much-larger population, one year into the war, the RCC decided to provide interest-free loans to any man below the age of twenty-two who got married; if he was a student, he and his wife would get free accommodation in the university. A second law enacted in 1987 offered financial rewards to families who produced a fourth child after the law came into effect; and to those who already had four children, bonuses would be paid for future births. These measures ensured that more women would stay at home to look after their children, and women also lost jobs when soldiers returned after the end of the war. Worst of all, in 1990 the tribal practice of honour killings was legitimised (Sassoon 2012, 254–55).
War expenses, combined with a sharp drop in oil prices (from an average high of around $32 per barrel in 1981 to an average low of $12 to $14 in late 1988), depleted Iraq’s foreign exchange reserves by 1983, forcing the country to borrow heavily, mainly from Gulf countries. A wide-ranging privatisation programme saw state-owned farms and factories being sold to private owners, and foreign investment being invited even into oil fields. Austerity measures were carried out, including the halting of all educational scholarships unless they were paid for by foreign governments (Sassoon 2012, 239–40). Trade unions were already dominated by the party, but additional measures were imposed to ensure they did not oppose privatisations: ‘Labor Law no. 71 of 1987 dissolved the labor unions and confirmed that workers in the public sector would become members of the civil service’, even while it ‘guaranteed every worker the right to earn a wage that was adequate to meet his or her essential needs and those of his or her family and confirmed the rights of working hours and retirement’ (Sassoon 2012, 250). The end of the war solved none of the economic problems. On one side, Saddam had to limit austerity measures and rebuild the country in order to portray the outcome as a victory; on the other, over the course of the war Iraq ‘had accumulated a foreign debt of some $80 billion – roughly twice the size of its Gross National Product. This debt was extremely disturbing, since repayment arrears and the consequent reluctance of foreign companies and governments to extend further credits meant that the reconstruction of Iraq from the destruction wrought by the war would have to be shelved’ (Karsh 2002, 89).
The most obvious way around this dilemma was to lean on the Gulf countries again, for a moratorium on wartime loans, additional funds, and adherence to oil quotas, so that prices would recover. But instead of acceding to his requests, Kuwait and the UAE continued to exceed the quotas imposed by OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), putting a downward pressure on oil prices. Saddam was particularly frustrated and humiliated by the refusal of Kuwait, a major creditor, to respond to his desperate appeals. On July 16, 1990,
the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, delivered a memorandum to the
Secretary-General of the Arab League for distribution to the League’s members. In this he accused Kuwait both of deliberately causing a glut in the oil market (allegedly costing Iraq some $89 billion between 1981 and 1990), and of directly robbing Iraq by setting up oil installations in the southern section of the Iraqi al-Rumaila oil-field and extracting oil from it ... Aziz demanded the raising of oil prices to over $25 a barrel; the cessation of Kuwaiti ‘theft’ of Iraqi oil; a complete moratorium on Iraq’s wartime loans; and the formation of ‘an Arab plan similar to the Marshall Plan to compensate Iraq for some of the losses during the war’. (Karsh 2002, 91)
The Rumaila oilfield is mainly in Iraq, but its southern tip extends across the border into Kuwait. It provides around 60 per cent of Iraq’s oil output, but during the war with Iran, Iraq’s drilling operations declined while Kuwait’s increased. The Kuwaitis did have the technology to drill across the border, but there is no conclusive evidence as to whether they did so or not. Of course they denied this charge, while refusing to accede to any of the other Iraqi demands. Having threatened that if negotiations failed, he would take ‘effective action’, Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2, rapidly establishing Iraqi control over it. The Kuwaiti and US delegations to the UN immediately requested a Security Council meeting, which passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and demanding the withdrawal of Iraqi troops. The next day the Arab League had a meeting, which likewise demanded a withdrawal (with a few dissenters), but called for a solution from within the League and warned against outside intervention. UNSC Resolution 661 on August 6 placed economic sanctions on Iraq and was soon followed by Resolution 665, authorising a naval blockade that prevented the export of oil, on which the entire Iraqi economy was dependent. On August 23, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry sent a proposal to the US that Iraq would withdraw from Kuwait and allow foreigners to leave the country if in return UN sanctions were lifted, Iraq gained access to the Persian Gulf through the Kuwaiti islands of Bubiyan and Warbah which it had been trying to lease from Kuwait, and Iraq gained full control of the Rumaila oil field (Royce 1990).
The Bush Sr. administration rejected the proposal and instead continued with its military build-up in the Gulf, collecting money for it (including major contributions from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) and pledges of military forces from thirty-three countries, including a large contingent from Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. On November 29, the Security Council passed Resolution 678 authorising military action against Iraq if it had not vacated Kuwait by January 15, 1991 (Council on Foreign Relations 2011). In order to obtain the support of the American public for the war against Iraq, the government of Kuwait paid several law and lobby firms to sell it to them. Hill & Knowlton, run by Craig Fuller, a close friend and advisor of President Bush, masterminded the campaign as representative of ‘Citizens for a Free Kuwait’ and was paid $11.9 million for doing so. Its research arm, the Wirthlin Group, conducted daily opinion polls to ‘identify the themes and slogans that would be most effective in promoting support for US military action’; they found that the story which had most impact was one about Iraqi soldiers removing scores of babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the hospital floor – a story later found to be completely fabricated (Stauber and Rampton 1995). When Saddam failed to leave Kuwait by the January 15 deadline, the US and its allied forces began their assault. On February 27, allied troops entered Kuwait City, and on March 2, the UNSC passed a resolution establishing the terms of the ceasefire.
Ruthless control over journalists by the US as well as hindrance by Saddam Hussein prevented serious estimates of the Iraqi casualties at the time. More than ten years later, BBC News (2003) cited estimates of 60,000 to 200,000 soldiers and 100,000 to 200,000 civilians killed. Many of the soldiers (mostly peasant conscripts who were antagonistic to Saddam) were massacred from the air on the Mutla ‘Highway of Death’ on February 26 as they retreated from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660 (Chediac 2004). Apart from immediate civilian casualties as a result of airstrikes, future deaths were ensured by the destruction of grain and other food warehouses and of a dairy factory (which was particularly devastating given the concurrent sanctions and embargo), as well as of water-treatment facilities, including drinking water installations, and virtually the entire electrical system – which in turn exacerbated food shortages through causing a lack of refrigeration and the impairment of agricultural irrigation, crippling the surviving water-purification and sewage-treatment facilities, and causing the deterioration of vaccines and medicines requiring refrigeration. ‘A UNICEF representative noted in late May the “vicious cycle” of “poor hygiene, contaminated water and poor diet,” which he said left about 100,000 Iraqi children under one year of age vulnerable to diarrhea and dehydration’ (Human Rights Watch 1991). Apart from electrical power plants, vital sectors of the economy were also destroyed, such as ‘oil refineries, oil-pumping stations, industrial units, railway lines, airports, petrochemical plants, steel and cement plants, and so on’ (Chalabi 2002, 150).
This destruction, combined with the sanctions, which continued until 2003, was to have a devastating impact on Iraqi civilians, especially children. A survey comparing the economy in 1991, one year after the imposition of sanctions, with the situation in 1996 argued that ‘the main effect of sanctions has come through the complete closing off of oil exports and the barring of access to the international capital markets’, which ‘caused the abrupt ending of revenues from oil exports and also cut Iraq off from other sources of finance, such as foreign borrowing’ (Gazdar and Hussain 2002, 33; 37). In an economy that had relied on oil revenues to fund the import of essential commodities, this led to the collapse of imports of food and medicines, rendering the UN’s exemption of these commodities from the sanctions regime irrelevant. ‘Before the sanctions, Iraq’s imports per person were close to the average of those countries ranked as “high middle income” in the World Bank’s World Development Tables. By 1996, they had declined to about a third of the level for the poorest countries in the world’; moreover, as the government tried to plug the resulting fiscal deficit by reducing expenditures and issuing money, the exchange rate, which had been around four Iraqi dinars per dollar prior to the invasion of Kuwait, dropped to 3,000 dinars per dollar in 1996 (Gazdar and Hussain 2002, 38, 39).
As Harris Gazdar and Athar Hussain (2002) write, ‘All the evidence suggests that the government … preserved employment levels in the public sector at the expense of the purchasing power of public-sector salaries, by not adjusting them with the rise in prices ... By 1996 public sector workers were commonly earning US$3–5 per month, compared to their pre-sanctions salaries of US$150–200.’ By contrast with the public sector, where wages fell but employment was maintained, private sector employment declined sharply as production was hit by the steep fall in purchasing power. ‘For the unemployed or those earning low wages, the most common means of gaining additional income was to find self-employment or casual labor’, with child labour increasing (Gazdar and Hussain 2002, 41; 43). The other solution was to return to agriculture, the only sector where incomes were maintained; while in 1987 only 12 per cent had been engaged in agriculture, by 1996 this had shot up to 40 per cent. ‘In the context of this dramatic collapse of private incomes in 1990–1 and their continuing decline since then, the state ration system proved to be a crucial source of sustenance. Early assessments of the humanitarian impact of sanctions identified the importance of the state ration as the main factor in preventing the onset of large-scale hunger and starvation in Iraq,’ and its importance as a lifeline increased as time went on (Gazdar and Hussain 2002, 48). Even so, UNICEF surveys found that in government-controlled central and southern areas, under-five child mortality rates increased from 56 per thousand during 1984–89, to 91.5 during 1989–94, and 130.6 during 1994–99 (Graham-Brown 2002, 283).
In 1991, UNSC Resolutions 706 and 712 had allowed Iraq to sell $1.6 billion worth of oil every six months under UN supervision, with 30 per cent of the proceeds to go to a Compensation Fund for other parties damaged during the war, further appropriations for UN expenses in Iraq including the Special Commission dealing with weapons of mass destruction, and the rest for humanitarian relief. Saddam had refused to accept this. In 1995, probably in response to pressure for lifting sanctions completely as evidence of civilian suffering mounted, Resolution 986 was adopted, raising the amount to $2.2 billion worth of oil and accepting some of Saddam’s objections to the original resolution. This was finally accepted by Saddam in May 1996 (Graham-Brown 2002, 268–70) and implemented in March and April of 1997. However, the extra amount was used mainly for food and medicines; the Sanctions Committee had placed numerous obstacles to the use of funds in the telecommunications, electricity, water and sanitation sectors, making it difficult to repair damaged infrastructure (Graham-Brown 2002, 284).
The revelation that, as Barton Gellman wrote for the Washington Post in 1991, ‘preliminary planning for the bombing campaign began before Iraq even invaded Kuwait last August 2’, along with the deliberate destruction of infrastructure and the persistence of sanctions long after Iraqi forces had withdrawn from Kuwait, make it clear that the real purpose of the war, as one US Air Force planner admitted, was ‘to let people know, “…We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.”’ In other words, civilians were deliberately targeted in the belief that this would induce them to overthrow Saddam, and this continued throughout Bill Clinton’s two terms as president. The strategy was not only foolish but also criminal, and the central role played by the UNSC in implementing it puts a huge question mark over that institution’s commitment to human rights. An assessment by economist Abbas Alnasrawi (2002, 347) of the long-term consequences of the sanctions regime concludes:
Some ten years later, and after well over a million Iraqi deaths, the sanctions are still in place, performing their grisly task of what has been described as silent slaughter … In addition to death, the sanctions regime has led to poverty, underdevelopment, stunted growth, social disintegration and the unprecedented emigration of huge numbers of professionals and skilled workers. […]
It is true, of course, that the government of Iraq has exhibited callous indifference to the plight of its own people, but this indifference cannot justify the UNSC’s own violation of the human rights of an entire population … In effect, the UNSC has given itself the liberty to impose collective punishment on an entire population simply for the decisions of its leader.
It is important to keep in mind that, in the case of Iraq, the destructive impact of the sanctions regime has been intensified because of the war damage to the infrastructure, and that it has disproportionately affected children. As is well known, hundreds of thousands of children have died because of the sanctions. Such a tragic loss of life constitutes an outright violation of the most fundamental human right – the right to life.
When George Bush Sr. ordered an end to the military assault on Iraq at the end of February 1991, he called on the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam. In response, the Kurds in the north and the Arabs in the south rose up against the Baath regime in March 1991. ‘For two brief weeks, the uprisings were phenomenally successful. Government administration in the towns was overthrown and local army garrisons were left in disarray. Yet by the end of the month the rebellions had been crushed and the rebels scattered, fleeing across the nearest borders or into Iraq’s southern marshes. Those who could not flee did not survive summary executions’ (Jabar 1992). US forces did nothing as tens of thousands were slaughtered by Saddam’s forces in the south; indeed, there are allegations that the Bush Sr. administration colluded in the slaughter by ordering that huge caches of arms and ammunition captured from Iraqi forces should not be turned over to the rebels (Lando 2007). But would the uprisings have been successful if US forces had thrown their weight behind them?
During the war with Iran, the opposition to Saddam had been severely damaged by popular support for his patriotic posture of defending the homeland. They were also ‘cut off from the major urban centres – Baghdad, Basra and Mosul – that contain almost half of the Iraqi population’, and their organizational structures in the cities were largely destroyed. ‘The Kurds and the Communists retained bases in the northern mountains, with some ties to small towns and to the Kurdish cities of Suleimaniya and Erbil. The Islamists’ only organized bases were in Iran’ (Jabar 1992).
In 1991, all the Shia Islamist parties belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), including the Dawa party, took a pro-Iranian position. This was not shared by the majority of Shi’is, who were not sympathetic to radical Islamism. And although the Iraqi Shia Islamists living in Iran were only one element of the forces that seized cities in the south, they acted as if they were the decision makers, with SCIRI leader al-Hakim saying that all Iraqi armed forces should follow their orders, and that no ideas except Islamic ones should be disseminated. ‘According to Muwaffaq al-Ruba‘i, a Da‘wa Party leader based in London, those who returned to the south bearing posters of al-Hakim and Khomeini achieved only the abortion of the intifada’ (Jabar 1992).
The uprising in the north was more successful, with Masoud Barzani of the KDP winning over Salah al-Din forces and many soldiers, including high-ranking officers; the Peshmerga would withdraw once a town had been seized, leaving it to the locally selected administration, and refrain from revenge killings except in the case of security servicemen and top Baath officials. Although here too Saddam massacred some twenty thousand Kurds, in April a no-fly zone was imposed over the north, and the UN later took over the administration of aid (Jabar 1992).
The Bush Sr. administration failed to offer any support for the uprisings; as then–secretary of state James Baker described it, they feared a ‘Lebanonization of Iraq’, that Iranian-backed Shias would assume power in Baghdad, or that more US soldiers would lose their lives in ‘another Vietnam’ (cit. Zenko 2016). Twelve years later, prodded on by the same neocons, George W. Bush rushed in where his father had feared to tread, despite the fact that this time there was no ongoing uprising.
The brutal, totalitarian character of Saddam’s regime is undeniable, but the US use of his invasion of Kuwait as a ‘humanitarian’ pretext to kill over a million Iraqis, including hundreds of thousands of children, was a crime which anti-imperialists quite rightly opposed.
Regime Change by Foreign Powers
As we saw in Chapter 1, in July 2016, the Chilcot Report confirmed officially that evidence for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction had been fabricated, and by then it was abundantly clear that it was the US/UK invasion that had brought Al Qaeda into Iraq, not Saddam. However, humanitarian arguments for the invasion, put forward by some liberals and a few socialists, notably Christopher Hitchens, do need to be considered briefly. In the introduction to a collection of these arguments, Thomas Cushman (2005, 2) takes the position that ‘the war can be seen as morally justifiable … Coming to the rescue and aid of a people who had been subjected to decades of brutality and crimes against humanity is entirely consistent with the basic liberal principle of solidarity with the oppressed and the fundamental humanitarian principle of rescue.’ One can agree that coming to the aid of a people subjected to decades of brutality is consistent with solidarity with the oppressed, but is this what happened during and after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq?
It is hard to square this rosy view of what US/UK forces were doing with what was actually going on: ‘The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell “like grapes” from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say – and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mahndesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right’ (Fisk 2003a). Most victims died at once; sixty-one died after being brought to the Hillah hospital, which received over two hundred of the wounded (Fisk 2003a). Can killing civilians be described as coming to their aid?
After the bombings, the ambushes and assaults, the news readers’ voices lighten as they reach the humanitarian aid slot in the story running order. The images of bloodied limbs and bombed buildings are replaced by jostling crowds being roughly corralled by British troops distributing bottles of water. This is the battle for hearts and minds, we are repeatedly told … [W]hose heart and mind are won by such images of angry desperation? Certainly not the Iraqis, bewildered by the invader who has deprived them of the water in the first place. (Bunting 2003)
Is it morally justifiable to destroy people’s access to water and then dole out ‘enough to last one person a couple of hours’ (Bunting 2003)? Then there was the vandalisation of the Iraq Museum and its archaeological treasures dating back millennia (Steele 2003), and the murder of journalists reporting on civilian casualties (Fisk 2003b). It strains the imagination to think of all this as ‘solidarity with the oppressed’, and it is just a minuscule sample of the death and destruction meted out by the occupation forces in Iraq.
The criticisms Cushman and other contributors to the volume make of the UN’s failure to stop the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda are valid, and they would be relevant if the US had intervened in Iraq during the Anfal campaign or the uprisings of 1991 in order to halt or avert massacres; but there was no such justification in 2003. Most importantly, what these so-called humanitarian interventionists failed to do was to listen to the voices of democracy activists within Iraq. That the invasion would victimise Iraqi civilians was obvious to them. Take, for example, trade unionist Hadi Saleh and the Workers’ Democratic Trade Union Movement (WDTUM) he helped to form, an underground organisation made up of intellectuals, liberals, communists, women, youth and student advocates. Hunted by the regime, Saleh himself escaped abroad, but WDTUM activists continued to organise in Iraq, at great risk to themselves. ‘In early 2003 WDTUM activists marched against the planned military invasion of Iraq. In Britain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Canada and the USA, WDTUM militants who had long fought for regime-change from below spoke out against the invasion, conscious that the victims would be once again Iraqi workers and innocent civilians’ (Muhsin and Johnson 2006, 25; 27). Women’s organisations too opposed the invasion, anticipating that it would empower the Islamists (Susskind 2007). To pretend that you are trying to ‘rescue’ people who are desperately trying to prevent your intervention is a particularly vile form of hypocrisy.2
As post-invasion Iraq descended into chaos and bloodshed, with Shia and Sunni Islamists free to gain a foothold there, the neoconservatives who had orchestrated the invasion chose Paul Bremer (who was clueless about the Middle East and knew no Arabic) to sort out the mess as proconsul of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Appointed in May 2003 for fourteen months, Bremer carried out three policies (with the backing of his bosses) which catapulted Iraq into civil war. On just his fifth day in Iraq, he issued the ‘De-Baathification of Iraqi Society’ order, banning hundreds of thousands of Baath Party members – many of whom had joined the party for pragmatic reasons and had played no part in Saddam’s atrocities – from public sector employment, thereby condemning them and their families to penury; a week later, a second order disbanded the Iraqi army, creating a huge number of embittered and unemployed veterans (Swidey 2016). With these two orders, Bremer sacked literally everyone who had any experience running the country or ensuring its security. The third policy was the imposition of ethnosectarian quotas on the government he set up before leaving, increasing the power of Shi’is and Kurds and discriminating against Sunnis. As a critic puts it, referring to an article Bremer wrote in 2007,
Time and again, he refers to ‘the formerly ruling Sunnis,’ ‘rank-and-file Sunnis,’ ‘the old Sunni regime,’ ‘responsible Sunnis.’ This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves – at least, not until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys. […]
Despite Bremer’s assertions, Saddam Hussein’s regime was not a Sunni regime; it was a dictatorship with many complex alliances with Iraqi society, including some with Shiites. If anything, the old tyranny was a Tikriti regime, led by relatives and clansmen from Hussein’s hometown. … Local Sunni movements that were not pro-Hussein were repressed just as harshly as the Shiites.
Many Iraqis saw the Americans as new colonists, intent on dividing and conquering Iraq. That was precisely Bremer’s approach. When he succumbed slightly to Iraqi demands for democracy and created [the] Interim Governing Council, its members were selected by sectarian and ethnic quotas. Even the Communist Party member of the council was chosen not because he was secular but because he was a Shiite. (Rosen 2007)
The first prime minister appointed to the Interim Governing Council (IGC) was Ayad Allawi, a former Baathist who had broken with Saddam in the 1970s and survived an attempt on his life. Exiled in Britain, his close ties to the Blair government discredited him with many Iraqis, but as a secular Shi’i he gained respect for fighting Sunni and Shia militants equally (Freeman 2010). Ibrahim al-Jafari, who served as prime minister from April 2005 to May 2006, was very different. A member of the Shia Islamist Dawa Party, he had spent almost a decade in Iran and established a strong relationship with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) before moving to London in 1989 as a Dawa Party spokesman (Institute for the Study of War 2010).
During Jafari’s period in power, members of the Badr Organization – the military wing of the SCIRI, which in 2007 changed its name to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq – flooded into the police and commando units under the Interior Ministry, which was headed by Bayan Jabr, a member of the organisation. There were reports of Shia death squads run by them, and a scandal when one of many secret prisons was discovered in which Sunnis, picked up illegally, were subjected to the same kind of torture used by Saddam’s regime (Wong and Burns 2005). Created, trained and armed by the IRGC in 1982, the Badr Organization fought alongside Iran in the Iran-Iraq War and remained headquartered in Iran until 2003. Under instructions from Tehran, from 2005 its death squads carried out a wave of assassinations of former Baathists and Iraqi veterans of the Iran-Iraq War. Captured IRGC documents showed that it was paying the salaries of up to 11,740 members of the Badr Organization (Musings on Iraq 2015). At the same time,
wary of Iran, but seeing little alternative to the turban-wearing clerics of SCIRI and Badr, US and British occupation authorities put the party’s officials into top positions … They were viewed by the United States and Britain as natural allies in the struggle against remnants of the Baath Party and the burgeoning Sunni resistance … Virtually en masse, Badr officers were recruited to the fledgeling Iraqi police and army that were being assembled by the United States. (Dreyfuss 2008)
The leader of Badr, Hadi al-Ameri, admitted being funded by the IRI at the same time that the organisation was using equipment and vehicles supplied by the United States (Lasseter 2005): a de facto alliance between the US and the IRI, even while Bush Jr. denounced Iran as being part of an ‘axis of evil’. No wonder, as Patrick Cockburn (2015, xv) notes, ‘Iraqis have always said cynically that when it comes to Iraq, “the Iranians and the Americans shout at each other over the table, but shake hands under it”’. In fact, according to Ryan Crocker, who was deputy chief at the American Embassy in Kabul in 2002, Iran was assisting the US in its attacks on the Taliban after 9/11, and the US even consulted Qassem Soleimani, head of the international jihadi Quds Force of the IRGC, about invading Iraq. Although relations were soured by Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech, their alliance was revived after Saddam was toppled, with Crocker allowing Soleimani to vet every Shi’i member of the Iraqi Governing Council. By this time Soleimani was calling the shots, using Shi’i militias under his control to detonate ‘explosively formed projectiles (EFPs)’ targeting the Americans in Iraq; sheltering Al Qaeda fighters in Iran, including those who planned and executed the bombing of three residential compounds in Riyadh in 2003, killing thirty-five people including nine Americans; encouraging the Assad regime to facilitate the movement of Sunni extremists through Syria to fight against the US in Iraq; controlling Iraqi Shi’i and Kurdish leaders whom he met in Tehran, Baghdad or Erbil; and sometimes attacking American forces, while at others negotiating with them (Filkins 2013).
After an Islamist constitution drafted under the chairmanship of a SCIRI activist was passed in 2005, Jafari was replaced by an equally hardline Dawa Party Islamist, Nouri al-Maliki. As Saad N. Jawad and Sawsan I. al-Assaf describe,
The Iraqi identity was totally erased from the dictionary of the occupiers. The socio-political division of Iraq was further exacerbated by other decisions built on the understanding that the Shiites and Kurds were oppressed and marginalized. Eventually they were given further power and preference … Thus instead of building a state with equal rights and responsibilities to all citizens, the Sunni Arabs were marginalized and left under the mercy of the ruling Shiite and Kurdish parties. (Jawad and al-Assaf, 2013)
Maliki disarmed Sunni militias in Baghdad while giving a free hand to Shi’i militias to carry out an ethnic cleansing drive. Consequently, ‘Baghdad went from some 45% Sunni in 2003 to only 25% Sunni by the end of 2007. Al-Maliki’s sectarianism led to the transformation of Baghdad into a largely Shiite city’ (Cole 2014).
If we are looking for a ‘smoking gun’ that implicates US imperialism in the genesis and spread of ISIS, this is it. In post-invasion Iraq, the US (1) opened up Iraq to Al Qaeda, which had rigorously been excluded by Saddam Hussein; (2) sacked every Baathist and the entire army, and allowed death squads to target officials and veterans, thus creating a massive embittered cadre with intimate knowledge of Iraq; and (3) installed in power Iran-backed Shia Islamists, who proceeded to persecute, ethnically cleanse and kill Sunnis indiscriminately. Documents discovered after Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, aka Haji Bakr, was killed in 2014 confirmed what had been suspected for some time: that former Baathists like Haji Bakr had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda in Iraq against their common bitter enemies, the Americans and Shia Islamists. Imprisonment in Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib from 2006 to 2008 enabled Haji Bakr and other officers to establish a large network of contacts before they shifted their attention to Syria in 2012 with the intention of returning to Iraq in a stronger position (Reuter 2015).
The absence of religious language or books – even a Quran – among the documents recovered after Haji Bakr’s death confirms his identity as a secular Baathist. How plausible, then, is it that ‘Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir and later “caliph,” the official leader of the Islamic State’? (Reuter 2015). Could a secular Baathist possibly have the authority to appoint the leader of an Islamist group? An independent investigation into the life of Sheikh Ibrahim, as the future ‘caliph’ was known before he became famous, found that he took up arms against the US occupation and was arrested in 2004 and incarcerated in Camp Bucca, where he was impressed by members of Al Qaeda and joined the group after being released; he reportedly also met Haji Bakr and other Baathists (Hashem 2015). After Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by an airstrike in 2006, the Islamic State in Iraq was created, with Abu Omar al-Baghdadi as its emir and Abu Hamza al-Mohajer as his deputy and minister of war; but both were killed by a joint US-Iraqi operation in April 2010, and the top spot was vacant again. ‘Haji Bakr backed Sheikh Ibrahim to be the next emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq. But bin Laden wanted a different man – Haji Iman – to be the successor. This made Haji Bakr’s task difficult; he had to convince the key players that the man he supported was the best choice. Eventually, he succeeded, and nine members of the Shura Council voted for Sheikh Ibrahim,’ who was descended from the Quraysh (the same tribe as the prophet Muhammed) and subsequently chose the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (Hashem 2015).
A fourth way in which the US occupation contributed to the rise of AQI was by its clampdown on the democratic mass organisations which opposed it. For example, on May 16, 2003, a national preparatory committee attempting to form a ‘proper base for a free and democratic trade unionism’ convened a meeting in the main office of the Transport Union in Baghdad, in which ‘400 trade unionists known for their opposition to the Saddam regime crammed in, including leading members in the WDTUM … The meeting formed the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) … Hadi [Saleh] was elected a member of the executive committee and given the task of consolidating its external relations’ (Muhsin and Johnson 2006, 28). IFTU campaigned for a new labour law based on International Labour Organization (ILO) principles and opposed the privatisation of the oil industry, whereas Bremer retained Saddam’s 1987 anti-union law and was intent on pushing through privatisation and foreign ownership of the oil industry. Consequently, on December 6, 2003, ‘dozens of soldiers and armoured vehicles surrounded the IFTU headquarters. The troops stormed the building … ransacked the offices, destroyed documents, smashed windows, smeared the banner carrying the name of the IFTU with black paint and even tore down union banners that condemned terrorism. The raid ended with the arrest of eight IFTU leaders’ (Muhsin and Johnson 2006, 45). Although the leaders were released without charge the following day and union militants reclaimed their building eight months later, these actions display hostility to democratic unionism: a hostility shared by Al Qaeda, which in January 2005 abducted, tortured and killed Hadi Saleh (Muhsin and Johnson 2006, 65).
Arguing against the post-invasion position of some sections of the left, who had cheered on the Al Qaeda–Baathist terrorist campaign against the US occupation as the ‘Iraqi resistance to US imperialism’, anarchist Wayne Price (2005) pointed out:
The jihadis, theocrats, semi-ex-Ba’athists, and Sunni supremacists are a pro-capitalist enemy of the Iraqi working class. They would settle a heavy yoke on the Iraqi workers and peasants. The same is true of the leaders of the opportunist wing of the Iraqi movement, those who use the structure of the occupation to set up their own state, so they think. While their followers (just as the ranks of the armed resistance) seek to expel the U.S. forces, these opportunist leaders also seek to set up a theocratic, capitalist, state, with a revised relationship to U.S. imperialism. While we should defend any Iraqis against the occupation, both groups of leaders, of would-be new rulers, should be politically opposed as enemies of the working class.
The Islamist Takeover of Iraq
Four years after the invasion, the US occupation had led to a complete breakdown of Iraqi society, with Al Qaeda suicide bombers, Shia death squads and criminal gangs taking over the streets. As concrete barriers sprung up everywhere, Iraqis had to construct mental maps of where they could or could not go: Sunnis were compelled to stay away from a number of places, including ‘certain hospitals, the Baghdad city morgue, the Ministry of the Interior, even petrol stations, for fear of the Shia militias’ (Beaumont 2007a). As Peter Beaumont argued, Iraq met all the conditions of a failed state: ‘A failed state is one that can no longer provide security and social requirements for its citizens; that has descended into factionalism and warlordism; that cannot guarantee the integrity of its own borders, and lacks the ability to sustain itself. All of which perfectly describes large areas of today’s Iraq. Four million of its people have been displaced, with no indication that this is slowing’ (Beaumont 2007a). The consequence of the US/UK ‘democratization’ process had,
with bitter irony, been to concentrate power in the hands of those Shia parties whose supporters have been behind the worst of the violence. … Billions of dollars were allocated for reconstruction, but in the end, you have to ask, what has been achieved? I look around searching for the grand projects: new hospitals, electricity grids, modern new universities. And I come away baffled by the waste and maladministration. But it is in terms of human rights that the Bush-Blair experiment in Iraq has failed most completely. How many people have died is the subject of rancorous debate – but 150,000 is a low estimate in a range that some research [by The Lancet] has claimed could top 655,000. You see the bodies dumped on the streets, on rubbish dumps, in canals and in sewers – sometimes beheaded, at other times bearing the marks of torture. (Beaumont 2007b)
It was not just Sunni men who were the victims of state-sponsored violence. ‘In spring 2003, as the smoke began to clear from the US invasion of Iraq, a wave of kidnappings, abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults and killings gripped the country. The targets were women’ (Susskind 2007). In the words of the director of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), Yanar Mohammed: ‘We used to have a government that was almost secular. It had one dictator. Now we have almost 60 dictators – Islamists who think of women as forces of evil’ (Susskind 2007). One of the first acts of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) assembled by Paul Bremer was to replace International Women’s Day with a celebration of the birthday of the daughter of Prophet Mohammed. On December 29, 2003, it resolved to replace Iraq’s 1959 family law – the most progressive in the region, with divorce proceedings heard only in civil courts, women divorcees having equal rights to custody of their children, women’s income recognised as independent from their husbands’, restrictions on child marriage, and women and men having equal inheritance rights – with Sharia law and religious courts, which would result in a loss of all these rights, impose compulsory hijab and legalise domestic violence. Iraqi women took to the streets in protest, and with women’s organisations and Congress members in the US joining in, Bremer was forced to withhold ratification of the resolution (Susskind 2007). However, as Yifat Susskind (2007) writes,
Under Bremer, the US refused to honor a series of demands by women’s organizations, including calls to create a women’s ministry; appoint women to the drafting committee of Iraq’s interim constitution; guarantee that 40 percent of US appointees to Iraq’s new government were women; pass laws codifying women’s rights and criminalizing domestic violence; and uphold UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which mandates that women be included at all levels of decision-making in situations of peacemaking and post-war reconstruction.
Indeed, rather than support progressive and democratically minded Iraqis, including members of the women’s movement, the US threw its weight behind Iraq’s Shia Islamists.
The occupation presided over the passing of an Islamist constitution that legalised discrimination and violence against women and girls. Meanwhile, the US military did nothing as Islamist militias unleashed an orgy of violence against women. ‘Punishment committees’ manned by SCIRI’s Badr Organization and Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army made it impossible for women to leave their homes safely. ‘By early 2005, two facts were clearly established. First, the US was arming and training Islamist militias in Iraq. Second, these same militias were using gender-based violence to impose a theocracy’ (Susskind 2007). Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Sistani, usually seen as a ‘moderate’, issued an edict that women must wear hijab, and another that lesbians and gays be killed (Susskind 2007). Human rights group Iraqi LGBT–UK waged a campaign that ultimately prevailed upon Sistani to withdraw from his website the fatwa to murder gay men, but he did not issue a contrary fatwa, nor rescind the directive to punish lesbians. As Ali Hili, head of LGBT–UK, notes, Sistani is ‘the spiritual leader of all Shia Muslims in Iraq and around the world’, as well as of the SCIRI and Badr. In a statement on behalf of LGBT–UK, he said,
Badr agents have a network of informers who, among other things, target alleged ‘immoral behaviour’. They kill gays, unveiled women, prostitutes, people who sell or drink alcohol, and those who listen to western music and wear western fashions … Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married. Badr will typically give them a month to change their ways. If they don’t change their behaviour, or if they fail to show evidence that they plan to get married, they will be arrested, disappear and eventually be found dead. The bodies are usually discovered with their hands bound behind their back, blindfolds over their eyes, and a bullet wound in the back of the head. (Iraqi LGBT 2006)
It would not be fair to blame Sistani for all the anti-gay violence of the Badr corps, which was also practised by their Iranian sponsors, but a gay activist in Iraq reported that the killings had indeed accelerated after Sistani’s fatwa and complained that the US occupation forces did nothing to protect the victims (Ireland 2006). A later report named two other Shia militias – Asaib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous) and Jaish al-Mahdi (the Mahdi Army) as responsible for homophobic ‘pogroms’ (OWFI et al. 2014, 2; 5). In June 2014, the former attacked a group of four men and boys, killing two boys aged 15–17 years, beheading them and throwing their heads in the garbage; in July they attacked a brothel, killing thirty-four – all as part of a cleansing drive against ‘sexual deviance’ (OWFI et al. 2014, 7). All of these militias were linked to the state.
Commenting on the direct involvement of the Iraqi state in the abuse of women and girls after the US withdrawal in 2011, a human rights activist said, ‘What’s happening to women shows that no one is safe’ (HRW 2014a). Nothing could illustrate this more vividly than the arbitrary arrest, torture and execution of women (both Shia and Sunni), so reminiscent of the treatment of women in the IRI. The Human Rights Watch (2014a) report found that
security forces carry out illegal arrests and other due process violations against women at every stage of the justice system, including threats and beatings. Israa Salah (not her real name), for example, entered her interview with Human Rights Watch in Iraq’s death row facility in Baghdad’s Kadhimiyya neighbourhood on crutches. She said nine days of beatings, electric shocks with an instrument known as ‘the donkey,’ and falaqa (when the victim is hung upside down and beaten on their feet) in March 2012 had left her permanently disabled. A split nose, back scars, and burns on her breast were consistent with her alleged abuse. Israa was executed in September 2013, seven months after we met her, despite lower court rulings that dismissed charges against her because a medical report documented she was tortured into confessing to a crime.
The report also finds that women are subjected to threats of, or actual, sexual assault (sometimes in front of husbands, brothers, and children.) Some detainees reported a lack of adequate protection for female prisoners from attacks by male prison guards, including those from adjoining male prisons. Two women reported that sexual assault by prison guards resulted in pregnancy. Women and officials reported that the likelihood of a woman being subject to sexual assault is far higher during arrest and interrogation, prior to a woman’s confinement in prison. ‘We expect that they’ve been raped by police on the way to the prison,’ Um Aqil, an employee at a women’s prison facility told Human Rights Watch.
For example, Fatima Hussein (not her real name), a journalist accused of involvement in the murder of a parliamentarian’s brother and of being married to an Al-Qaeda member, described physical and sexual torture in early 2012 at the hands of one particular interrogator in Tikrit, Colonel Ghazi. She described Ghazi tying her blindfolded to a column and electrocuting her with an electric baton, hitting her feet and back with [a] cable, kicking her, pulling her hair, tying her naked to a column and extinguishing cigarettes on her body, and later handcuffing her to a bed, forcing her to give him oral sex, and raping her three times. ‘There was blood all over me. He would relax, have a cigarette, and put it out on my buttock, and then started again,’ she said.
Women who spoke with Human Rights Watch, who all explicitly denied involvement in alleged crimes, also described being pushed towards confessions by interrogators threatening to hurt loved ones. Fatima described Ghazi passing her the phone, with her daughter at the end of the line, before threatening: ‘I’ll do to your daughter what I did to you.’
The US/UK occupation replaced Saddam’s torture with its own equally barbaric techniques (Conrad 2005), then handed over power to IRI-sponsored Shia Islamists, who also used torture and added the elements of sectarian cleansing and misogyny. There was competition and conflict between the Badr Organization and Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, but when the latter was facing sustained assaults and huge losses from joint US-Badr forces in 2007, Sadr declared a ceasefire, moved to Iran, and considerably toned down his anti-Iranian Iraqi nationalist rhetoric (Dreyfuss 2008).
The pattern of state-sponsored – as distinct from oppositional – violence in the ‘new’ Iraq suggests the formation of an extreme right-wing Shia Islamist state, which contributed to the spread of ISIS by its persecution of Sunnis. The fate of the Sunni tribal Sahwa or Awakening Councils illustrates this dynamic. In 2006, US forces were finding that Shia militias alone could not beat back Al Qaeda. At the same time, Sunni tribes, who had started by supporting the insurgency against the occupation, were getting disgusted with the Al Qaeda brand of radical Islam. Sam Collyns (2010) spoke to Sheikh Jabbar, a tribal leader:
‘First of all we started seeing bodies filling the streets. Then they managed to capture five of my people and slaughtered them. Then they killed my brother’. … For Sheikh Jabbar, desperate times required desperate measures, and this was the moment he triggered what would become the Awakening, a military counter-offensive in which he and his supporters joined forces with their former enemies, the Americans, to confront al-Qaeda. In late 2006, he arranged a meeting with Col John Tien of the US army in which he asked for weapons and ammunition for his men to take on al-Qaeda.
There are other accounts of the genesis of the tribal Sahwa movements, some tracing it back to 2005, but in broad outline the story remains the same: an alliance between tribal councils and US forces to chase Al Qaeda out of predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq. Myriam Benraad (2011) recounts the surprising success of the Sahwa movement:
In the backdrop of the 2007 U.S. ‘surge,’ the Sahwa quickly took ground, with many tribal figures and imams rallying their ranks and setting up other councils (Majalis al-Sahwa) in al-Anbar localities and beyond. The movement, moreover, enjoyed the additional mobilization all across the country of thousands of Sunni Arab fighters, mostly former insurgents – also referred to by the coalition as ‘Concerned Local Citizens’ or ‘Sons of Iraq’ (Abna al-Iraq). In less than a year, the Sahwa had become a major armed force comprising over 80,000 members. Tribes were provided arms and significant financial resources to fight al-Qaeda and delegated important authority prerogatives in their areas to reestablish order … By mid-2007, insurgent hotbeds such as Ramadi and Fallujah had been cleansed and relatively pacified, to the surprise of the most skeptical.
The US forces paid the tribal fighters a salary of around $300 and promised that they would be absorbed into the regular Iraqi security forces. However, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had no intention of honouring this promise. Very few were incorporated into the regular forces; only a minority were given public sector employment, mostly in temporary or menial jobs; the majority were disarmed and left unemployed; and some were arrested and detained by the Iraqi government (Benraad 2011). Worst of all, after Iranian ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi warned the US against arming Sunnis, the Badr Corps carried out a wave of assassinations of Awakening leaders (Dreyfuss 2008). Simultaneously facing massive retaliatory attacks by the Islamic State in Iraq, large numbers defected to Al Qaeda/ISI, who undertook to pay them. For them, it was a matter of survival (Benraad 2011).
There was sufficient dissatisfaction with Maliki’s government for the electorate to give candidates of Allawi’s secular Iraqiya bloc ninety-one seats in parliament in the 2010 elections: far short of an absolute majority, but two more than the eighty-nine seats won by Maliki’s State of Law coalition. The results were widely celebrated by secular Iraqis, like 23-year-old university student Mohammed Hassan, who said, ‘We want to be proud of being Iraqis when we travel outside Iraq and not be asked if [we] are Shiite or Sunni. This is a blow to those who think in terms of sect’ (Fadel and DeYoung 2010). However, Maliki rejected the results and the IRI swung into action, brokering a deal between Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr with the blessings of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, while Ahmadinejad persuaded Bashar al-Assad – who had broken off relations with Maliki fifteen months previously, when the latter accused him of harbouring terrorists who destroyed four ministries in Baghdad in a devastating bombing campaign – to support Maliki (Chulov 2010). The IRGC’s Qassem Soleimani played a key role in putting together the government that emerged months after the 2010 elections:
In the months before, according to several Iraqi and Western officials, Suleimani invited senior Shiite and Kurdish leaders to meet with him in Tehran and Qom, and extracted from them a promise to support Maliki, his preferred candidate. The deal had a complex array of enticements. Maliki and Assad disliked each other; Suleimani brought them together by forging an agreement to build a lucrative oil pipeline from Iraq to the Syrian border. In order to bring the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in line, Suleimani agreed to place his men in the Iraqi service ministries. … Suleimani exerts leverage over Iraqi politics by paying officials, by subsidizing newspapers and television stations, and, when necessary, by intimidation. Few are immune to his enticements. ‘I have yet to see one Shia political party not taking money from Qassem Suleimani,’ [a] former senior Iraqi official told me. ‘He’s the most powerful man in Iraq, without question.’ (Filkins 2013)
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Soleimani and the IRI completely outwitted the US, first by letting it take the brunt of the insurgency – indeed, contributing to it – and then, when the US withdrew in 2011, by grabbing the prize they had coveted since 1979: Iraq.
Although the constitution said that the coalition winning the majority in the elections should have the first chance to form the government, a pliant judiciary allowed Maliki’s post-election coalition this privilege. He subsequently moved to consolidate power in his own hands, gaining control over the military, the courts and key ministries, including the interior ministry with its bloated intelligence apparatus. The head of the independent commission that had overseen relatively free and fair elections was arrested on corruption charges, Deputy Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, was arrested on charges of plotting a coup in 2006 and 2007, and Iraqiya leaders were threatened (Yaphe 2012). Deprived of power, the Iraqiya bloc fragmented, as individuals within it tried to salvage some semblance of political influence by making compromises with the government (ICG 2013, 10), but this did not provide immunity from persecution.
In December 2012, when security forces stormed the residence of Rafi al-Issawi, Iraq’s (Sunni) finance minister, arresting several of his security guards and staff members on charges of terrorism, peaceful protests broke out in Issawi’s hometown of Falluja. ‘Within days, they had spread to Ramadi, where thousands reportedly poured into the streets, blocking the highway linking Baghdad to Syria and Jordan, then to adjacent, predominantly Sunni provinces of Ninewa, Salah al-Din, Kirkuk and Diyala, as well as Baghdad’s Sunni neighbourhoods’ (ICG 2013, 1). The protests began by demanding the release of female prisoners but ended up with a much broader set of demands, including the abolition of anti-terror laws, house raids, and widespread corruption (GICJ 2013).
Instead of acceding to the demands, or even entering into negotiations, the government attacked, arrested and detained hundreds of protesters. Police gunfire in Fallujah in January 2013 left nine demonstrators dead, leading a resident of Baghdad’s Adhamiya neighbourhood to comment, ‘The US occupier left and enabled a new authority, Maliki, to kill, imprison our people and take our women away’ (ICG 2013, 2). The outbreak of the war in Syria, and Iran’s use of Iraq to send Assad both material aid, including weapons, and Iraqi Shi’i fighters, sharpened the antagonism, prompting one protester from Anbar Province to say, ‘We [Sunnis] are not opposing the government only, but an alliance that extends from Teheran to Damascus’ (ICG 2013, 13, n.57). Former Baath Party members also participated in the protests, finding in them a place where they could express their sense of injustice; former members of the insurgency participated too, prime among them the Naqshbandi Army, named after a Sufi sect in order to distinguish themselves from the Salafis. Although their leader was a former Baathist, the organisation explained: ‘We do not belong to the Baath Party. The only thing connecting us to the Baath is Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, who is our Supreme Commander in his personal capacity, not as Baath Party leader. We only follow the principles of our religion according to the teachings of the Naqshbandi. We seek to liberate the country from the U.S. and Iran and defend its unity and sovereignty’ (ICG 2013, 22–23).
The confrontation between the government and peaceful protesters came to a head in Hawija, Kirkuk, where on April 19, 2013 around four thousand demonstrators were surrounded by army troops, blocking all access to food, water and medical aid. At around 5:00 a.m. on April 23, the troops stormed the camp, shooting indiscriminately, using live ammunition, tanks and helicopters, as well as boiling water, and killing at least fifty demonstrators (including children), injuring around 150, and arresting more than four hundred (GICJ 2013). As the International Crisis Group reported (2013, i), the assault on Hawija ‘sparked a wave of violence exceeding anything witnessed for five years’, adding: ‘Belittled, demonised and increasingly subject to a central government crackdown, the popular movement is slowly mutating into an armed struggle.’
This is the backdrop against which ISIS, recently formed by ISI in Syria, returned to Iraq, its triumphant onslaught greatly facilitated by Maliki’s sectarianism and subordination to the IRI.
Between ISIS and Iranian Imperialism
The fall of Mosul to ISIS in July 2014 illustrates how Maliki’s regime had continued, rather than reversed, the destruction of Iraq wrought by the US occupation. The ISIS assault on Mosul began with multiple suicide bombings backed up by mortar fire in early June, and as Patrick Cockburn (2015, 14–15) reported, ‘defeat became irreversible on July 9, when three top Iraqi generals … climbed into a helicopter and fled to Kurdistan’. This was a huge army, into which the US had sunk billions of dollars, collapsing ignominiously before a much smaller number of terrorists. How did it happen?
Asked about the military’s cause of defeat, one recently retired Iraqi general was emphatic: ‘Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!’ It started, he said, when the Americans told the Iraqi army to outsource food and other supplies around 2005. A battalion commander was paid for a unit of 600 soldiers, but had only 200 men under arms and pocketed the difference, which meant enormous profits. The army became a money-making machine for senior officers and often an extortion racket for ordinary soldiers who manned the checkpoints. On top of this, well-trained Sunni officers were sidelined. (Cockburn 2015, 64–65)
A corrupt and sectarian army was one reason for the defeat; equally important were popular perceptions of the regime as a puppet of Iranian imperialism. Cockburn (2015, 15–16) recounts the testimony of a private soldier serving in the Iraqi army, Abbas Sadam, who had recently been transferred to Mosul:
The fighting started not long after he got there. But on the morning of June 10 his commanding officer told the men to stop shooting, hand over their rifles to the insurgents, take off their uniforms and get out of the city. Before they could obey, their barracks were invaded by a crowd of civilians. ‘They threw stones at us,’ Abbas recalled, and shouted: ‘We don’t want you in our city! You are Maliki’s sons! … You are the army of Iran!’ The crowd’s attack revealed that the fall of Mosul was the result of a popular uprising as well as a military assault. The Iraqi army was detested as a foreign occupying force of Shia soldiers, regarded in Mosul as creatures of an Iranian puppet regime led by Maliki.
This perception of Maliki’s government as an Iranian Quisling regime recurs again and again, and was reinforced in the eyes of Sunnis by the treatment they received. When Mosul was bombed in September 2014 by the Iraqi air force, killing and injuring civilians, a Sunni woman wrote, ‘I have just heard from a relative who visited us to check on us after that terrible night. He says that because of this bombardment, youngsters are joining ISIS in tens if not in hundreds because this increases hatred toward the government, which doesn’t care about us as Sunnis being killed’ (Cockburn 2015, xvii–xviii). Those who joined or collaborated with ISIS in the belief that it promised liberation from foreign occupation were soon disillusioned, but in the meantime, ISIS successes bred disillusionment with Maliki’s leadership among Shi’is. His State of Law coalition had won ninety-two seats in the elections of April 2014, the largest number scored by any party or coalition, and he wanted a third term as prime minister, but not everyone agreed; indeed, as the crisis dragged on, even Sistani began dropping hints that Maliki should quit (al-Salhy and Otten 2014; Middle East Monitor 2014).
At the end of June, as the Iraqi army and Iran-sponsored militias failed to halt the advance of ISIS, Iraq’s ambassador to the US, Lukman Faily, requested American airstrikes. ‘We desperately need United States assistance to turn the tide,’ he said. ‘We believe that immediate and increased military assistance, including targeted airstrikes, are crucial to defeat this growing threat’ (cit. Capaccio 2014). The Obama administration agreed but stated that the situation required more than military intervention, thus adding its voice to those of Iraqis calling for Maliki to step aside. In September, Maliki eventually stepped down to allow Haidar al-Abadi to become prime minister. A member of the same Islamic Dawa Party as Maliki, but having spent his exile in Britain rather than Iran and Syria, Abadi was seen as a moderate within the party and as more willing to listen to the grievances of minorities (Madi 2014).
In early August, ISIS attacked the Kurdistan region, defeating the Peshmerga and taking Sinjar after heavy fighting. The majority of inhabitants, who belonged to the Yazidi faith, were regarded by ISIS as infidels, and although tens of thousands fled, up to 200,000 were stranded on a mountain with little food or water, threatened by ISIS with genocide (Salih 2014). With the UN Children’s Fund estimating that 25,000 children were among those on the besieged mountain, and that dozens had already died, foreign minister Falah Mustafa of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) told foreign diplomats and international organisation representatives in Irbil: ‘It is now time for the international community to step forward, urgently, and provide the KRG with humanitarian assistance and military support – particularly air support’ (Goodenough 2014). In a CNN interview, Mustafa said that the Kurdish forces were largely up against ISIS on their own: ‘This is something that is way beyond the capacity of the Iraqi air forces … We need the United States and NATO to interfere’ (Goodenough 2014).
These are the circumstances in which the United States, having withdrawn from Iraq at the end of 2011, stepped back in. Antiwar groups like Code Pink and Veterans for Peace in the US, and the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) in Britain, immediately organised protests against military intervention, warning that it could only make matters worse (Popular Resistance 2014a, 2014b; RT 2014b). There is an element of truth in this argument: bombing ISIS, if it entailed killing Sunni civilians, could indeed make matters worse in a sectarian war. However, it is also necessary to consider the alternative. Almost exactly two years later, the UN published a report confirming that ISIS was committing genocide against Yazidis (Reuters 2016). The anti-interventionists were in effect demanding that the genocide be allowed to continue, since the KRG and the Iraqi government had declared themselves helpless to halt it. The Genocide Convention, which asks the international community to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, required an intervention at that point. A position that took into account the human rights of all Iraqi civilians would have supported a military intervention which rescued Yazidis without killing civilians of other ethnoreligious groups.
Militarily, the intervention was somewhat successful; by the end of 2015, ISIS had lost 14 per cent of the territory it had controlled, including Sinjar, Tikrit, the Beiji refinery complex, the transit route connecting Mosul to Raqqa, and Ramadi (Alami 2015). However, the broader aim of encouraging a more inclusive government in Baghdad while avoiding a disintegration of Iraq remained elusive. After Sinjar was liberated from ISIS in November 2015 by a combination of Peshmerga fighters affiliated to the KDP, PKK-affiliated units including a Yazidi force trained by the PKK, and a unit that was briefly affiliated with the government in Baghdad, there were disputes over whether Sinjar should be administered from Baghdad or become part of Kurdistan’s territory assisted directly by the US (Salih 2015). Subsequently, there were disturbing reports of Kurdish and Yazidi forces subjecting Arab communities to collective punishment by razing whole villages to the ground and expelling their inhabitants (Amnesty International 2016b), and reports that Kurdish authorities were refusing to allow Arabs displaced by the fighting to return to their homes in areas, previously under the government in Baghdad, that the KRG was seeking to incorporate into Kurdistan – either by destroying their homes or by giving them to Kurdish families. Kurdish officials justified these policies by claiming that most Arabs supported ISIS, but Kurdish neighbours testified that inhabitants of three destroyed homes were not linked to ISIS. One of the displaced Arabs, Thaer Hamdi, said, ‘All my savings, all my life’s work, went into my house … My son doesn’t even speak Arabic. He speaks Kurdish. He sings Kurdish songs. As a teacher in Makhmour I taught in Kurdish. We are not extremists. We are poor, decent people who want to live peacefully with others’ (HRW 2015).3
In August 2014, Sunni tribal leaders offered to share with the US military information concerning hostages, ISIS supply routes, and recruitment efforts – on condition, however, that the US deal directly with them rather than the Iraqi government. ‘The US needs to work hand in hand with the Sunnis that have on-the-ground intel[ligence] and that are being targeted by ISIS,’ said a spokesman, but at that point, the Obama administration refused because it was pressing for the creation of an inclusive government (Pecquet 2014). By December 2015, however, as Sunni tribal leaders renewed their lobbying, arguing ‘that Iranian influence runs deep in Baghdad and that Abadi’s hands are tied,’ they were heard with much more sympathy by lawmakers of both parties (Pecquet 2015). US pressure on the Iraqi government to rein in Iran-backed Shia militias and to incorporate Sunni fighters in battles for predominantly Sunni areas paid off in the liberation of Ramadi from ISIS, which was achieved by the Iraqi army backed by US airstrikes (McLeary 2015). This was a boost to the morale of the Iraqi army (Economist 2016), even while it provoked bitter complaints from the Iran-backed militias (Press TV 2016a).
It was clear by then that the Dawa Party was deeply split. Ali Mamouri (2015) summarised the division: ‘Abadi’s bloc wants to preserve close relations with the United States, keep some distance between Baghdad and Tehran, avoid hostile relations with Saudi Arabia and bring about national reconciliation, including good relations with the Kurds and Sunnis.’ Maliki’s bloc, on the other hand, ‘has explicitly aligned itself with Iran, is hostile toward Saudi Arabia and the United States to the extent of suggesting Abadi approach Russia and is unwaveringly pro-Shiite, including backing for Shiite militias’. Sistani supported Abadi, while Maliki moved decisively into the camp of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This alignment was revealed when Abadi and Sistani condemned the mass killings of Sunnis, and the terrorist attacks on Sunni mosques and businesses in Diyala Province, by Iran-backed Shia militias after an ISIS suicide bombing of a cafe popular with Shi’i militia members in Muqdadiyah (HRW 2016a, Rudaw 2016a, DPA 2016). Tension between the two factions of Dawa surfaced in a joint statement by the Iran-backed Hezbollah Brigades, Badr Organization and League of the Righteous, all part of the Popular Mobilization Units, calling on the government ‘not to seek help from US forces’; a spokesman for Abadi responded in an interview that ‘the stance of the Iraqi government vis-à-vis US troops and the international coalition lies in the framework of communication and coordination in the war against terrorism,’ while Abadi later made it clear that this did not include clearance for US ground troops (Saadoun 2015).
At bottom, this was – and still is – not a fight between Shi’is and Sunnis but between secular Iraqi nationalists and jihadi Iranian imperialism, with Maliki’s faction and the IRGC-linked Shia militias widely perceived as agents of a Quisling regime (Chulov 2016). Seen from this point of view, as Ibrahim al-Marashi (2016) argues,
the role played by national Iraqi forces in the fall of Ramadi also has implications for the creation of an inclusive sense of Iraqiness. A debate has ensued since the summer of 2014 as to whether one can claim that the Iraqi nation still exists. Iraqi nationalism persists if one were to watch the Iraqi-state sponsored Al-Iraqiyya TV station, which features almost continuous coverage of the war front, along with images of the Iraqi military in action with nationalist songs playing in the background … With the fall of Ramadi, the Iraqi military, which is featured prominently on this channel, can now also claim that it represents the national aspirations of Iraq.
In January 2016, Abadi approved of the appointment of forty thousand Sunni fighters to the Popular Mobilization Units (Hashd al-Shaabi), which were once almost exclusively Shi’i (Saadoun 2016a). However, Abadi’s control over Iran-controlled Shia militias and state security forces remained extremely limited even in Baghdad, where abductions and disappearances still occurred (Saleh 2016). In the battle to reclaim Fallujah from ISIS, he promised to investigate violations to his instructions to protect civilians and to hold back the Shia militias from the final assault (BBC News 2016), and fears of a massacre led him to halt the assault on Fallujah temporarily (Vice News 2016). Yet when it finally took place, concern was expressed by the provincial council and in parliament at credible reports that hundreds of Sunni civilians had been detained and tortured – in some cases to death – by Shi’i militias. Disappearances and mass killings of civilians were reported, and a Shi’i militia commander spoke of local civilians in terms that would justify genocide: Human Rights Watch reported viewing a video ‘in which a commander tells a room filled with fighters that Fallujah had been a bastion of terrorism since 2004 and that no civilians or true Muslims were left inside the city. The video bore the logo of Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas, one of the brigades within the Leagues of the Righteous militia’ (HRW 2016b). This was at a time when civilians remaining in Fallujah – including at least twenty thousand children – were being held as human shields by ISIS. Other Iran-backed militias involved in the atrocities were the Badr Organization and Kataib Hezbollah. Underscoring the priority Tehran attached to its militias’ participation in the Fallujah operation, Qassem Soleimani visited the militia fighters at the end of May, and although ‘the US was pledging air support only to the Iraqi army and on condition that the Iran-backed militias stay out of the city’, it was unable to exclude the militias altogether (De Luce and Johnson 2016).
In August 2016, meetings were reported between the Shia National Alliance and Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei to ensure that Maliki would return to power at the parliamentary elections in 2018, denying Abadi a second term (Naser 2016). At around the same time, a ‘Reform Bloc’ formed within Maliki’s State of Law Coalition started gunning for members of Abadi’s cabinet. A source from the State of Law Coalition said to Al-Monitor that ‘Abadi’s key ministries w[ould] be gradually brought down, which would hamstring his Cabinet, reduce his chances for a second term and thus pave the way for the nomination of his rival’ (Mamouri 2016b). Khamenei also praised Maliki’s role in Iraq, despite never doing the same for Abadi; it seemed that Khamenei was pushing for Maliki’s nomination for the 2018 election (Mamouri 2016b).
In this context, there is symbolic significance in the fact that the battle for Mosul, which had been lost to ISIS as a consequence of Maliki’s sectarianism, was initiated by Abadi in October 2016. Despite initial insistence by the Iran-affiliated Hashd al-Shaabi that they would spearhead the assault on Mosul, Abadi managed to extract an agreement that the operation would be conducted mainly by the Iraqi army and the Kurdish Peshmerga with US coalition air support, while the Hashd al-Shaabi would play a supporting role, cutting off ISIS to the west in the direction of Syria, and refrain from entering Mosul. A possible obstacle to the sectarian abuse of Sunnis in Mosul were the Turkish-trained Nineveh Guards, composed of locals who knew the city and could be trusted not to carry out reprisals against the residents (Al Jazeera 2016g), and the Sunni Liwa Salahaddin battalion of the Hashd al-Shaabi, led by Yazan al-Jabouri (Samaha 2016). As the fighting progressed, amid heartwarming stories of civilians overjoyed at their liberation were disturbing reports that thousands of men and boys had been subjected to arbitrary detention, many ill-treated, and some forcibly disappeared or executed (Wille 2016). A catastrophic escalation in civilian casualties was also reported in the battle for western Mosul (HRW 2017b).
Abadi’s declaration of victory over ISIS in a devastated Mosul on July 9, 2017 (Arango and Gordon 2017) could be seen as an attempt to claim authority as prime minister; but that authority was challenged a few days later, when one regiment of the Hashd al-Shaabi wore what appeared to be the uniform of the IRGC at the victory parade in Baghdad. This was widely perceived as a gesture of defiance from the Iran-controlled militia: a reminder that Khamenei would like Abadi to be replaced by a more subservient prime minister who, unlike Abadi, would not object to a full Iranian takeover of the country or to Iraqi Shia militias being dispatched to fight for Assad in Syria (Saadoun 2017).
Abadi was not the only Shi’i political leader trying to escape the embrace of Iran’s jihadi imperialism. On July 24, 2017, ISCI (Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, formerly SCIRI) leader Ammar al-Hakim split from his party to found the National Wisdom Movement, taking many members and assets of his old party with him; it is notable that ‘National’ replaced ‘Islamic’ in the name of the party, that there were eight Iraqi flags behind him as he announced the new party, and that its founding declaration announced it would be open to anyone from the diverse Iraqi ethnosectarian population who chose to join (Kadhim 2017). At around the same time, Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shi’i leader with a large urban working-class base, visited Saudi Arabia and had cordial talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; during the visit, the Saudi regime agreed to provide Iraq with $10 million in reconstruction aid and to award Sadrist officials with special visas for the upcoming Hajj (the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca). Sadr followed this up with a visit to the UAE, where he met Sheikh Ahmed al-Kubaisi, an Iraqi Sunni cleric living in the UAE, to discuss the future of Iraq and the Middle East, agreeing on the need for unity among Arabs and Muslims across sectarian divisions (Malik 2017; Cafiero 2017). Both visits could be seen as attempts to challenge Iranian control over Iraq.
The Struggle for National Liberation
and a Democratic Revolution Continues
Although hardly reported in the rest of the world, on February 25, 2011 the ‘Iraqi Day of Rage’, a weekly Friday protest inspired by the Arab uprisings began in several Iraqi cities. At that time, unsurprisingly, the foremost demand of the protestors was the departure of the US forces who had occupied Iraq for over eight years; but less obviously, this was combined with protests against ‘a clear Iranian influence on the Maliki-led coalition government, [making] Maliki’s regime especially glaring in its lack of legitimacy’ (Issa 2015, 7; 20). As Uday al-Zaidi, brother of Muntazer al-Zaidi (who threw shoes at Bush), put it, this was a struggle ‘for freedom and for booting out our two occupations, the US and Iranian’ (Issa 2015, 23).
The US occupation ended when US forces withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011, but, more than four years later, the struggle against the Iranian occupation still continued. The huge Iraqi flag displayed by demonstrators in Baghdad protesting against corruption, poor services and power cuts in January 2011 showed, in spite of political fractures, ‘a resilient commitment to the Iraqi state’ (Natali 2016). Shi’i leaders, especially Ayatollah Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr, were prominent in the struggle for independence and sovereignty. For example, Sistani’s spokesperson, Sayyid Ahmad al-Safi, said in 2015, ‘We are proud of our country, our identity, our independence and our sovereignty. While we welcome any help offered today from our brothers and friends in our fight against terrorism and thank them for it, it doesn’t mean that we would ignore our identity and independence in any way’ (Mamouri 2016a). As Al-Monitor columnist Ali Mamouri reports, in an interview in December of 2013, Muqtada al-Sadr had criticised Iran’s role in Iraq, calling Qassem Soleimani ‘the most powerful man in Iraq, who implements an Iranian agenda in the country’ (Mamouri 2016a).
In an interview in February 2016, Sadr’s spokesperson, Sheikh Salah al-Obeidi, stated that ‘Muqtada al-Sadr does not want Iranians to speak on behalf of Iraqi Shiites’, adding: ‘Muqtada al-Sadr has repeatedly said that we are with Iran, as a neighbouring country that we respect, but we categorically reject any Iranian interference in the Iraqi internal affairs’ (Mamouri 2016a). Criticisms of Iran’s role in Iraq centred on its support for corrupt Shi’i officials; as one of the protest leaders, Ahmad Abdul Hussein, wrote in a Facebook post, ‘Iran’s insistence on embracing corrupt thugs and thieves, desperately defending them, assisting them during crises and covering up for their disastrous corruption and failure will drive Iraqis to hate Iran, in case it continues to sponsor these thugs’ (Mamouri 2016a).
The dispute was sharpest with respect to the presence of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in Iraq. Some Shia militias raised the Iranian flag in his support, while others objected strongly:
A number of activists in the province of Basra organized a protest against the raising of the Iranian flag in their province, fighting back by hoisting the Iraqi flag. Asked to comment on the appearance of the Iranian flag in Iraqi cities, an Iraqi parliamentarian for the Sadrist movement, whose followers chanted slogans against Soleimani in Baghdad during the demonstrations against the Iraqi government, told Al-Monitor, ‘In Iraq, only the Iraqi flag that represents the Iraqi state should be raised. Iraq is a sovereign country, and no other flag should be raised.’
[…] Blogger Saadallah al-Majid, an opponent of Soleimani’s presence in Iraq, told Al-Monitor, ‘Iraq has turned into an Iranian province, as Iran is dominating the political and security scene in Iraq … The raising of the Iranian flag in Iraq as well as Soleimani’s presence in the country are intended to convey the message to the world that Iraq is under the control of Iran.’ (Saadoun 2016b)
The intention of the IRI, and the Iraqi Shia militias collaborating with it, to convert Iraq into a Shia Islamic state ruled by the supreme leader of Iran is visible in the fact that the leadership of Iraq’s 80,000- to 100,000-strong Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces) is in the hands of Iran’s IRGC (Bruce 2016). The boast by Hojjat al-Eslam Ali Saidi, the supreme leader’s representative in the IRGC – that ‘The Islamic Republic’s borders … are now transferred to the farthest points in the Middle East. Today, the strategic depth of Iran stretches to Mediterranean coasts and Bab al-Mandab Strait [southwest of Yemen]’ (ShahidSaless 2015) – projects a distinctly imperialist vision, albeit on a regional rather than a global scale.
The Islamist character of Iranian imperialism is particularly dangerous for women. In 2013, placards at a demonstration in Samarra read: ‘Obama, if you cannot hear us, Can you Not See Us?’; ‘Iraqis Did not Vote for an Iranian Dictatorship’; ‘Wake Up, this is an Iraqi Revolution Not a Sectarian One!’; and ‘Women Rights in Democratic Iraq Are Non-Existent!’ (Iraqi Spring 2013). On March 8, 2014, women, men and girls demonstrating in Baghdad called International Women’s Day a ‘day of mourning’ in protest against a new draft Jafari Personal Status Law modelled on Iran’s law and put forward by Maliki’s government, which attacked women’s inheritance rights and their parental and other rights upon divorce, made it easier for men to have multiple wives, and allowed girls to be married off from the age of nine and raped by much older husbands (HRW 2014b): a huge leap backwards from the existing secular law. The protests managed to get it withdrawn, but Shia Islamist parties proposed a similar bill in November 2017 (Sattar 2017). In August 2016, six cafes in Basra employing young women were bombed; flyers were found nearby calling for the women workers to be sent back to their homes and accusing the cafes of turning into ‘homes for demons and the practice of adultery and sodomy’ in language reminiscent of Al Qaeda and ISIS, although neither was present in Basra. The leaflets were associated with the Hashd al-Shaabi, who were distributing pictures of Khomeini in the streets of Basra and banning the sale of alcohol and modern hairstyles for men (Taher 2016).
On April 25, 2011, the chants against Maliki at a sit-in in Mosul were for the first time interspersed with the key slogan of the Arab uprisings: al-Shaab Yureed Isqat al-Nizam (the people want the downfall of the regime) (Issa 2015, 17). As Ali Issa (2015, 20) notes: ‘The demands for political freedoms, transparency, an end to corruption, and due process rather than the arbitrary force exercised by police are similar to the demands of other pro-democracy movements in the Arab world.’ One of the most hated aspects of ‘the regime’ was the system of ethnosectarian quotas introduced by Paul Bremer, and enthusiastically supported by Iranian officials because it gave them a means of control over Iraq so long as they could dominate the Shia parties. Falah Alwan, president of the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions in Iraq, pointed out that the quota system not only exacerbated ethnosectarian conflicts but also resulted in incompetence, misgovernance and massive corruption, as ministries were given to politicians according to their ethnicity rather than their competence and integrity. Instead, he felt, ‘putting out a societal understanding of “unity” based on an objective class analysis is a serious political goal’ (cit. Issa 2015, 53).
A huge popular protest movement demanding ‘the formation of a government without consideration of the sectarian quota system, reducing the number of ministries and positions in the government, fighting financial and administrative corruption in the country and calling for the provision of services and reform in the judiciary’ was disappointed in February 2016 when Abadi failed to deliver the promised reforms due to opposition in parliament, especially from his own party (Sattar 2016). Then Muqtada al-Sadr jumped on the bandwagon, vastly increasing the size of the protests and putting more pressure on the Abadi government, but also leading to a split in the original movement. The Moustamerroun (We Will not Back Down) faction welcomed cooperation with Sadr, while Madaniyoun, the peaceful Civil Society Movement, split away, seeing Sadr – who had been in government, was associated with a militia, and was an Islamist – as part of the problem, not of the solution. In their launch statement, Madaniyoun stated, among other things:
Shortly afterwards, Abadi finally appointed qualified persons who did not belong to any party or political bloc to fill vacant ministerial positions in his cabinet, including Ann Nafaa Awsei as minister of construction, housing and public municipalities. However, unidentified gunmen attacked Awsei’s home shortly afterwards; along with the murder of officials exposing corruption, this suggested that eliminating the corrupt quota system would not be easy (al-Jaffal 2016).
Sections of the clergy, too, have challenged Islamism and sectarianism. An initiative by the ayatollahs of the holy city of Najaf included a welcome to a delegation of women from religious minorities (Melkite and Orthodox Christians, Sunni Muslims, and members of smaller minorities like Yazidis and Mandaeans) into the Imam Ali Shrine; Jawad al-Khoei, a senior lecturer at the seminary in Najaf and follower of Sistani, discussing a papal visit to Najaf; another follower of Sistani in Lebanon giving sermons in Beirut’s churches; and the building of the al-Balaghi Interfaith Academy in Najaf where the teaching staff were to be mainly non-Muslim. Khoei explained, ‘We want Yazidis to teach the Yazidi faith, Sabaeans to teach about Sabeans, and Christians to teach about Christianity … The ayatollahs are resolute in their determination to see equal rights for all, regardless of sect … If the people elect a Christian as leader, he should lead’ (N. P. and Erasmus 2015).
Perhaps the biggest victories have been registered by the trade union movement. Hashmeya Muhsin al-Saadawi, president of the Electrical Utility Workers’ Union in Iraq and the first female vice president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers in Basra, recounted how despite both the ‘terrible Labor Law 150 of 1987’, which had outlawed unions in the public sector, and the US occupation with its own anti-union agenda, the General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq had launched a campaign to pass a labour law that incorporated international labour standards (Issa 2015, 39–41). This finally came to fruition in late 2015, when a labour law covering employees in both the public and private sectors, and guaranteeing all the rights in the Core ILO Conventions (freedom of association, the right to unionise and bargain collectively, abolition of forced labour and child labour, freedom from discrimination in employment and occupation) was passed (US Labor Against the War 2015). Women workers and unionists played a major role in drafting the law, ensuring that in addition to ruling out discrimination, it prohibits sexual harassment at work, requires employers to provide onsite childcare, and increases paid maternity leave to fourteen weeks, with the option of unpaid leave for up to a year (Connell 2016).
The ability of Iraqi civil society to continue struggling for national liberation, democracy and social justice despite decades of a brutal dictatorship, sanctions, occupation, war, and communal violence is an admirable example of courage, resilience and creativity which deserves unstinted solidarity.