IN OCTOBER 2017, when the ISIS caliphate disappeared, the Sunni world was deeply divided. It had nevertheless faced off as a bloc against Shiism during the Arab Spring of the year 2011, as the repression of the Bahrain uprising, beginning on March 14, demonstrated. Carried out by armed forces and police from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), it was a preemptive move against an expansionist Teheran.
Later that year, however, all the important Sunni states bordering on Syria threw their weight behind the massively Sunni rebellion against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite propped up by Iran and Russia. An axis lining up Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Cairo, Amman, and Ankara had joined with the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to found the Friends of Syria. This international consensus for supporting the opposition included Washington and Brussels (as capital of the European Union).
The group first met in Tunis in February 2012, and in December the representatives of 114 nations gathered again in Marrakesh. But by the time of the sixth and final meeting in Doha on June 22, 2013, their number had dwindled to eleven. Meanwhile, an Islamist movement had gradually taken over the rebellion in Syria. Some brigades had even turned jihadist. The competition sharpened between armed rebel groups supported by Qatar and Turkey and others backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s drive for leadership of the uprisings ran into opposition ranging from secularist democrats to the military. Both sides also had their respective godfathers and sponsors, with Doha and Ankara contending against Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
Ostracizing Qatar
With the writing on the wall for Egyptian President Morsi, on June 28, 2013 the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, announced his abdication. This happened in the week following the last conference on Syria. Thirty-three-year-old Crown Prince Tamim, the emir’s favorite son from his media-savvy third wife Sheikha Muza, took his place. In giving up power at the age of sixty-one, the father took responsibility for the ambitious but failed policy that had aimed to make the Muslim Brotherhood the beneficiaries of the Arab Spring. He had expected in return the Brotherhood would help him oppose Saudi Arabia for hegemony over the Sunni world.
By maneuvering the succession in this way, sheikh Hamad Al Thani pushed aside Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim, the country’s richest man and architect of the Al Jazeera network, the prime media mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood. This let the ex-emir pin some of the blame for the strategic failure of backing them on bin Jassim and, to some extent, take the dynasty off the hook. In any event, two days later in Cairo, a giant demonstration escorted by army helicopters flying overhead marched against President Morsi. On July 3, a proclamation came that complete power was vested in General el-Sisi, who enjoyed the support of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Despite the change in Qatar’s leadership, the Sunni bloc’s fracturing deepened during the next four years, aggravated by the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and their opponents. In Libya, Doha (shoulder to shoulder with Ankara) supported the Fajr Libya Islamists in Tripoli, the similarly inclined radical Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani who owned an influential television network modeled on Al Jazeera, and the ex-jihadist Abdelhakim Belhaj. Forming the opposing camp, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo took sides with Marshal Haftar in Cyrenaica and Zintan’s militias in Tripolitania. The latter had Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in their custody, who announced in December 2017 that he intended to run for president of the Republic.
Meanwhile, in Tunisia, Doha and Ankara supported Ennahda while Nidaa Tounes had Abu Dhabi and Egypt in its corner. In Yemen, from March 2015 Qatar was part of the international coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against the Houthis that had taken over Sanaʽa. However, Qatar also pursued its own agenda by keeping open a communications channel with the Houthis in hopes of negotiating a solution to the crisis. Simultaneously, Qatar maintained a privileged relationship with the al-Islah party, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The group’s religious charities and humanitarian organizations moved into the country to set up assets that would give Qatar opportunities to wield its soft power.
The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House in January 2017 shut down the engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood begun by his predecessor Barack Obama. It also changed the course of Washington’s Iran policy, calling into question the Vienna Agreement of July 14, 2015 (also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) for limiting Teheran’s nuclear program in return for lifting the economic sanctions. On his first foreign trip, the forty-fifth president of the United States on May 21–22, 2017 made Riyadh his first stop. There he elevated the fight against terrorism to the top of the agenda, targeting Iran and its allies Hezbollah and Hamas as well as the Sunni ensemble of ISIS and al-Qaeda.
This verbal replica of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” would be bolstered by a reshuffling in the American administration when two veterans of that war, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, became secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively. But this time the call to arms had a different motive. In 2001, Saudi Arabia had been the object of grave suspicions and deep mistrust because fifteen of the nineteen kamikaze attackers on 9/11 had been Saudis. The neoconservative pipe dream had been to raise up a democratic Shiite Iraqi republic as the principal surrogate of the United States in the region, thus punishing the House of Saud by substituting Baghdad as a hydrocarbon swing producer. This time, Saudi Arabia was promoted to prime vector of the new American anti-terrorist axis.
From now on, the failure of this project, followed by the Iran-Russia success in the Syrian civil war, gave the Saudi monarchy, headed de facto by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, pride of place in the American strategy. This full absolution of any Saudi involvement in (or at least acquiescence to) the “blessed double raid” on New York and Washington was affirmed dramatically in Riyadh’s royal palace when President Trump, King Salman, and Marshal el-Sisi inaugurated the Global Center for Fighting Extremist Ideology, known in Arabic as Iʿtidal or “moderation.” The three had themselves photographed joining hands over a mysterious glowing orb, surrounded by Sunni leaders. It looked for all the world like the United States was subcontracting the mission to the monarchy in this region and ratifying the latter’s designated enmities.
On May 24, two days after the anti-terrorist summit in Riyadh, which Emir Tamim had attended as a minor participant, the strain between Qatar on the one hand and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Egypt on the other intensified. The official Qatar News Agency quoted the Emir as calling Iran a “stabilizing power in the region” that “could not be ignored,” and that would be “imprudent to confront.” His opponents had a propaganda field day with these words, over Doha’s protestations that the news agency’s website had been hacked (they blamed first Moscow and then Abu Dhabi) and that this was “fake news.”
The argument driving this sudden escalation in tensions had its origin in a ransom paid by Qatar in mid-April for the release of twenty-six hostages, including royalty. The hostages had been captured in southern Iraq by a local branch of Hezbollah during a great bustard hunt, an activity much prized by members of the Bedouin aristocracy partial to falconry. The New York Times reported that Qatar paid fifty million U.S. dollars to the Organization for the Liberation of Shām (formerly the Al-Nusra Front) and its Salafist allies in Ahrar al-Shām. This came on top of the astronomical sums handed over to the Shiite abductors and various intermediaries.
The injection of roughly a billion U.S. dollars into the war in Levant, benefiting the extremists in both camps, played into the Saudi and Emirati accusations of Doha as “financing terrorism.” The kidnappers were said to have extorted this prodigious sum to bribe the Al-Nusra Front commanding the jihadist groups that were besieging two Shiite villages, al-Fu’ah and Kefriya, in Idlib province to secure the evacuation of their residents. That, in return, would have allowed the transfer to this “deconfliction zone” of the population of two rebel Sunni villages near Damascus encircled by militias linked to the Assad regime. These villages, Mayada and al-Zabadani, situated in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, were bargaining chips for lifting the siege of the two Shiite villages.
The enormity of the sums involved—and the quality of the hostages—suggested contacts within the highest echelons of Iran, Hezbollah’s mentor. The Qataris argued that they paid the ransom to the Iraqi government, which, in fact, kept about one-third of the money. (Robert Worth reconstructed the peculiar circumstances under which this happened in his detailed investigation published in the March 14, 2018 issue of the New York Times magazine.) But the bulk of the funds promoted a kind of ethnic-sectarian cleansing in Syria that benefited the Assad regime and its allies. It included securing the Damascus vicinity by clearing it of the insurgent Sunni populations. Doha, by saving its elite hostages, had handed its adversaries the ideal opportunity as well as resources for going on the attack.
This tactical error also let the “Saudi bloc,” formed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt, paint Qatar simultaneously as paymaster of Sunni terrorism and Teheran’s accomplice. All this transpired as the international coalition’s offensive against the ISIS caliphate in Mosul was in full swing. On June 5–6, these four bloc states cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and threw a suffocating ground, sea, and air blockade around it. In effect, this maneuver diluted the unity of the GCC because Kuwait maintained contacts with Qatar, offering to serve as mediator in the crisis. But as a council member, it had also joined Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in praising the proclamation by Marshal el-Sisi in July 2013. The sultan of Oman (whose adherence to Ibadism had always distanced him from Sunni solidarities) similarly lifted the embargo against Qatar at its ports and airports.
Both states worried that if Doha could be brought to heel, they might be next in line for similar treatment. They might wind up mere vassals of the Saudi giant, just as Bahrain had when the Saudis had stifled its Shia revolt in Manama on March 14, 2011. The GCC may have been created in 1981 for preventing the spread of Iran’s Islamic revolution to the Arabian Peninsula, but de facto it was a body in which the small, coastal Gulf states were dominated by their overbearing Saudi neighbor. It diminished their sovereignty after their independence had been championed, first by the British, then by the West in general. Their motive: keep Riyadh from controlling too big a share of the global hydrocarbon market.
Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar had reacted to this state of affairs in 1995 by overthrowing his father for being subservient to Saudi Arabia. He then made distancing himself from the kingdom his policy. He succeeded thanks to the exponential growth of state revenues during his reign from extraction and exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Qatar’s GNP multiplied from eighteen to 210 billion U.S. dollars (for 2.6 million inhabitants, of which three hundred thousand were citizens) during Al Thani’s two decades on the throne until his abdication in favor of his son Tamim in June 2013.
While Saudi Arabia’s gerontocracy stagnated, Qatar put its windfall riches to work in an across-the-board modernization. It advocated for the sociological transformation of the Middle East, moved into the channels of Arab soft power then still in their infancy, and furnished a dynamic model as an alternative to calcified Saudi Arabia. In 1996, the year after he took the throne, Emir Al Thani created the Al Jazeera network. It became the ultimate media vector for this “irritant” monarchy, as Claire Talon detailed in her book Al Jazeera (2011). The network grew into the permanent sounding board for broadsides and attacks against Saudi Arabia by every opponent, earning Qatar the recall of the Saudi ambassador between 2002 and 2008. Qatar once again became the focal point of the 2017 crisis because of the crucial role it had played in the Arab uprisings since 2011, as well as its widespread promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It was no coincidence that shutting down Al Jazeera was at the top of Riyadh’s list of thirteen demands for lifting the blockade. It also called for reducing the level of diplomatic ties with Iran, as well as breaking with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Al-Nusra Front (later renamed the Organization for Liberating the Shām) and Hezbollah. Further, Riyadh wanted a Turkish military base in Qatar where some dozens of soldiers were moving in closed. Ankara’s parliament had ratified building the base in June 2015, an element in the two states aligning their policies in support of the Syrian rebels and of the Muslim Brothers globally. Since the blockade’s onset, Turkey’s Erdoğan had sided with Qatar. He actually increased the number of his troops at the controversial base (it would reach three thousand by March 2018). He exported massive amounts of foodstuffs to replace (in addition to those coming from Iran) the imports that Qatar had previously obtained either directly from or shipped through Saudi Arabia. Finally, in an ultimate jab at its opponents, on August 24, Doha announced that it would accredit an ambassador to Teheran.
With the breakup of the Sunni bloc starting in the spring of 2017, bringing to a head the splintering that the Arab uprisings in 2011 had catalyzed but which had older roots, Qatar and Turkey moved closer to Iran. This came as a surprise, because the two allies supported the Muslim Brotherhood against the Assad regime, which Iran was backing. This improbable Sunni-Shiite trio was born in reaction to Saudi Arabia and its partners, thereby sabotaging the seemingly cohesive Sunni bloc facing off against its Shiite opponents. However, beyond the twists and turns of the Levantine war, an ideological convergence had existed from early on between Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Both had at their core a pious middle class, and both were determined to set up a politico-religious regime. Both Teheran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah welcomed the creation of Hamas in December 1987 despite it being a Sunni organization.
In 1984, Iran issued a postage stamp “in memory of Sayyid Qutb’s martyrdom,” which depicted the radical Egyptian Muslim Brother, author of Signposts, behind bars against a red background, before he was hanged by the Nasser regime. This was the color often used during this era for glorifying the many shahids (“martyrs”) in the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself translated several of Qutb’s works from Arabic into Persian. And Fathi Shaqaqi, founder of the (Sunni) Palestinian Islamic Jihad dedicated his manifesto to the “two imams of the twentieth century,” namely Khomeini and Banna. While Salafism condemns Shiism as heresy, with Shiism returning the favor by putting the Salafists down as takfiri (a Muslim who accuses another Muslim of impiety), the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic of Iran did not quarrel before the Syrian civil war. In fact, while he was making the rounds in Paris on June 29, 2017 during the Saudi-Qatar crisis, Iran’s minister of foreign affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif described the Brotherhood to me in highly complimentary terms. He characterized it as a very important political current, perfectly qualified to exercise power. This was like a slap in the face of his Saudi adversaries, no doubt only sharpening the contradiction in the Sunni world.
The accusations against Qatar echoed in tweets sent by President Donald Trump upon his return from the Middle East on June 9, 2017. The most telling of these stated: “@realDonaldTrump: So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding…extremism and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism.” An official White House statement later that day was even more to the point: “The nation of Qatar unfortunately has been financing terrorism, and at a very high level.”
High officials in the American administration tried to walk this back. The Pentagon was quick to reiterate its “gratitude to the Qataris for their long-term support of [our] presence and their enduring engagement in the region’s security.” Little wonder, since Qatar let CentCom (the American command for the zone) operate the Al Udeid Air Base to the southwest of Doha. At the time, it had a complement of eleven thousand American troops and a hundred airplanes that flew strikes against ISIS positions in Mosul. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (he would be replaced by Mike Pompeo in the spring of 2018), who knew and appreciated the leadership in Doha from his days as CEO of Exxon Mobil, called on the parties to settle their differences peacefully.
This massive pressure on Qatar was a central element in Saudi Arabia’s strategic reorientation engineered by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. With ambitious reforms, he sought to bring the kingdom out of its slowly dying rentier economy, thus ensuring its long-term revival. The price of oil had dropped 70 percent between 2014 and 2016, the period that had seen eighty-year-old Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud succeed his half-brother Abdullah to the throne. The decline translated into a one hundred billion U.S. dollar budget gap that took about 15 percent of the kingdom’s monetary reserves to plug. At that pace, observers predicted the treasury would run out of money by 2020.
This stark forecast would be revised, thanks to the rebound in the price of crude to a range between fifty and seventy U.S. dollars per barrel in 2017. This turnaround was just one of the effects of an agreement among two of the world’s major oil producers, sealed on October 5, 2017 with the first visit to Moscow by a Saudi monarch since Saudi Arabia’s founding in 1932. It underscored the high stakes of such an accord, never mind that the two governments each had been strongly committed to opposing sides in Syria. However, in the medium term, the increased exploitation of shale gas and oil deposits at a very competitive cost, especially in the United States, posed them both a major threat. Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman understood that failing to diversify Saudi Arabia’s economy and, by extension, profoundly transform society, would mean the end of the Saudi model.
Saudi Arabia had evolved into a tribal and rentier regime that determined both the allocation of resources and succession to power. This dates from the time that the sovereign Abdulaziz Ibn Saud made the “Quincy Pact” with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 14, 1945. In practice, the hydrocarbon income is distributed based according to a secret algorithm, but payments to the dynasty’s various branches are generally thought to equal 20 percent of the total (equal to two million of every ten million barrels per day).
The sums vary in proportion to how close a branch is to the one headed by the reigning monarch. Of top precedence are the dynasty branches belonging to the monarch’s brothers, then those belonging to his half-brothers by his father’s other wives, their male children and their descendants, and so on down the line. At the top of this family tree perch “Their Royal Highnesses,” princes descended in the male line from Ibn Saud. They alone are allowed to compete for succession to the throne. In 2007, under King Abdullah, they formed an Allegiance Council charged with determining the succession by consensus. However, this body was rendered deadlocked by the powerful competing clans.
The patriarch of the House of Saud and most of his forty-five sons had multiple wives, thus fathering an abundance of descendants. Added to this are the marriage alliances made to increase the family’s numbers, helping it maintain its sway over the commoners and safeguard the family’s outsized share of the oil revenues. However, the resulting exponential growth in the number of beneficiaries reduces per capita payments, unless the price of crude rises at the same pace. In Bedouin tradition, men died young due to the hardships of life in the desert marked by nonstop fighting. Back then, begetting many sons was a necessity for the tribe’s survival. The succession to head it passed by lateral transmission, because the children were often minors when the father died.
The Saudi dynasty today continues to follow a broadly based polygamy model. It gave precedence to solidarity among brothers coming from diverse mothers over the power of a single individual to see his own offspring follow him on the throne. To do otherwise would have weakened family cohesion, putting at risk its global hegemony over the whole of society. The brothers of King Saud (who ruled from 1953 to 1964), the first to have inherited the throne from the patriarch Abdulaziz, forced him to abdicate when he tried to pass the monarchy on to his descendants.
When Salman was crowned in January 2015, this system had become so decrepit that fixing it was urgent. In purely biological terms, the problem stemmed from the royal family’s sedentary lifestyle in the luxurious palaces and access to the most costly geriatric health practices paid for by their fabulous black gold riches. They had prolonged life expectancy considerably, and as such had remained in power into their eighties. The Bedouins in the old days, by contrast, had died in the prime of life. This rigid succession mechanism stymied innovation and competition, which had caused the regime to seize up. It just managed to coast along on a tide of oil income without having to confront reality.
As we saw, this stagnancy provided openings for Qatar to challenge Saudi leadership with multiple initiatives and provocations. Dubai had similarly taken advantage of Saudi Arabia’s torpor by innovating goods and services that the neighboring giant hydrocarbon producers could not provide. This meant that Riyadh, but also Teheran and Baghdad for different reasons, were hobbled by the same lack of public and private freedoms. In Saudi Arabia, this gave rise to a culture of corruption benefiting many leading members of the ruling family. It was socially feasible as long as the abundant income held up, but when it started to dry up, the entire system went into crisis mode. Income was decimated by the drop in the price of crude combined with the enormous, irresponsible population growth made possible by the petroleum cash cow. In 2004, in my book The War for Muslim Minds, I summarized the dilemma faced by the Saudi power:
Caught between a need for absolute unity and the urgency to modernize its system of succession. At risk was the dynasty’s dominion over its country and its control of oil wealth. This dilemma of succession did not make the family stronger when renegotiating the terms of its alliance with Wahhabites, an alliance on which it based its title to govern legitimately…(p. 187)
The Ritz Carlton Revolution
It was left to Mohammad bin Salman to unravel the Gordian knot of the tribal-rentier system. He cut through it in one blow. On November 4, 2017, empowered as president of an anti-corruption commission formed that same day, he ordered some two hundred dignitaries rounded up and confined in the Riyadh Ritz Carlton. They included eleven Highnesses, both current and former ministers, and businessmen. This act of force, which effectively had the thirty-one-year-old crown prince acting as the absolute sovereign, but under his father’s benevolent tutelage, had several causes and some major consequences. Two stages preceded it: the end of lateral succession among the sons of Ibn Saud, followed by the institution of a de facto hereditary monarchy.
In fact, as Ibn Saud’s youngest surviving son, seventy-year-old Mukrin was King Salman’s heir apparent for a mere three months before he was shunted aside in April 2015. Minister of the Interior Mohammad bin Nayef replaced him, promoted from his status as second crown prince, which Mohammad bin Salman assumed in his stead. The latter had held the defense portfolio since January, and had been placed in charge of the March offensive against the Houthis in Yemen. For the first time, it was exclusively the generation of the Ibn Saud’s—the founding monarch—grandchildren that was in line for the throne. It was an infinitely larger cohort than that of his children, and, because it included cousins between whom the ties were weak, it was less cohesive than that of brothers. At this kinship level, the tribal system could no longer accommodate the consensual, laterally transmitted dynasty, whose spectrum would be far too large. It called for a new mode of absolute monarchical power.
Against this background, the tensions between the first and second crown princes became common knowledge. On June 21, 2017, Mohammad bin Nayef was relieved of his duties and placed under house arrest. His cousin Mohammad bin Salman, the king’s son, strengthened by the ostentatious reconciliation with the United States during President Trump’s visit the preceding month, replaced him. Thus, King Salman in two years had utterly transformed the dynastic institution and established a hereditary succession by paternity. It stopped the decay of the Saudi regime and eased a shake-up of the decision-making structure in an authoritarian direction, while speeding it up for greater efficiency. It was intended to prepare society to gradually free itself, on the economic level, from the exclusive and moribund dependence on oil income, and, on the political level, from legitimization by the Wahhabite religious establishment. Still, this transition aroused plenty of frustrations within the royal family, all the more so since the cashiered Mohammad bin Nayef, age fifty-eight, had a powerful support network.
Mohammad bin Salman now proceeded to consolidate his power in two stages. Both occurred consecutively in the same emblematic place: the Ritz Carlton Hotel, a grandiose, neoclassical palace on the edge of Riyadh’s diplomatic quarter. On October 24, addressing more than 3,800 international economic leaders assembled before him, the crown prince, in his capacity as president of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), rolled out a Future Investment Initiative designed to attract foreign investments. He capped his address by announcing that Saudi Aramco, the world’s number one oil company, would soon list part of its share capital on the stock exchange. He went on to paint in glowing colors a future-oriented kingdom in tune with new technologies wrapped in a drone-equipped city of the future called Neom. It would be located in the northwest corner of the country, on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Aqaba across from Egypt’s Sinai, adjoining Jordan and near Israel. To win Western hearts and minds in his audience, on the stage he conferred Saudi nationality on a (female) robot named Sophia, which (or perhaps who) then addressed the meeting.
And in an interview with President Trump’s favorite television network, Fox News, the crown prince frankly admitted for the first time that the kingdom had to “return to what we were before 1979.” This pivotal year pegs the first time that “extremist ideas” began to spread. He went on to say that in a country “where 79 percent of the population is under thirty years old, we are not going to lose another thirty years because of them,” but “will stamp them out very quickly” for the sake of “leading a normal life where everyone gets along with each other.”
In a subsequent interview with the The Atlantic magazine of April 2, 2018, Mohammad bin Salman would elaborate that it was this fateful year (eight years before he was born) “which exploded everything. The Iranian revolution created a regime based on an ideology of pure evil…and in the Sunni world extremists were trying to copy it. We had the attack on [the Mosque of] Mecca.” In the same breath, he denied that Wahhabism was a doctrine and praised Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab as one of the peninsula’s great minds. He pointed out that the West, when it was fighting communism, had encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood. He also noted that an American president (Ronald Reagan) in the 1980s had called the jihadists in Afghanistan “freedom fighters.” Still, he conceded that “people in Saudi Arabia had financed terrorist groups” but this would no longer be tolerated. “We have a lot of people in jail now, not only for financing terrorists, but even for supporting them.”
Beyond this princely tip of the hat to the religious establishment, bin Salman would nonetheless clip its wings with the royal decree of September 2017, which on June 24, 2018—following the month of Ramadan—would allow women to drive. Reading between the lines, these comments marked an initiative to end the transactional relationship between the dynasty and the ulemas. Until then, the dynasty had shored up its legitimacy with the ulemas’ blessings in return for establishing the highly visible, dreaded religious police (“Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice”). In the same breath, he also signaled a break with a radical sphere of influence inspired by Salafist clerics who, as I was told in Riyadh by the secretary general of the Muslim World League, “are forbidden from rebelling against the Muslim prince (la yajouz al khorouj ʿala wali al amr).”
In the first stage of the “Ritz Carlton” revolution in late October 2017, the crown prince sought to establish a new political legitimacy for the ruling power by mobilizing young people with promises of the jobs that foreign investment would bring. It could not have been a clearer shake-up of the rentier state. In reemphasizing the break with “extremism” proclaimed by King Salman and President Trump in May 2017, the crown prince simultaneously relativized the monarchy’s religious veneer, making it simply a formality. The second stage consolidated the first by affirming his authority to seize the assets of his competitors within the Saud family. He offered up its members as “corrupt” in a move to appeal to the up-and-coming generation that he aimed to make his main base of support.
The Future Investment Initiative exhibits had barely been removed when the Ritz Carlton’s regular guests were relodged in other Riyadh hotels so it could be turned into an exclusive detention and interrogation center. Nearly two hundred individuals, including eleven princes of royal blood rounded up throughout the country, would be sequestered there. The most prominent detainee was the legendary Al-Waleed bin Talal, Ibn Saud’s grandson, Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest man according to Forbes magazine’s listing in March 2017, which also listed him as the fiftieth-richest individual in the world. Bin Talal’s estimated assets totaled 18.7 billion U.S. dollars, and his holdings included shares in the who’s who of world businesses. Yet he was considered a “liberal” like the crown prince when it came to morality: he was for women’s emancipation.
But at stake in this second stage of the Ritz Carlton Revolution was purging the economy and reinforcing the leadership, not changing customs. Another powerful captive was the son of the deceased sovereign, Mutaib bin Abdullah, former head of the National Guard. The National Guard’s members were the monarchy’s Praetorians, and it was one of the key elements in the national security apparatus. Prince Mutaib also oversaw the priority target of the investigation, the foundation that managed the fortune of Abdullah’s children. The members of the previous king’s entourage, many of whom had intrigued against his successor now occupying the throne, were prime targets of the dragnet. Prince Mutaib, incidentally the owner of the luxury Hotel Crillon in Paris, would be the first prominent figure released from the Ritz Carlton on November 21. Bloomberg reported that he wrote a check for one billion U.S. dollars in exchange for his freedom (a total of one hundred billion U.S. dollars would be turned over to the government coffers). One detainee died; the palace denied rumors of torture. Without any judicial proceedings to speak of, the charges against the arrestees included wrongful amassing of wealth facilitated by diversion of oil income.
As I write these words, much remains obscure about what transpired at the Ritz Carlton in November 2017 and the sums paid by those held in return for their release. But one thing is clear: the “anti-corruption” operation showed beyond any doubt that going forward Saudi Arabia would have one absolute authority, with no room for baronies. While visiting the kingdom in February–March, I did not observe any expression of sympathy or compassion for the accused royals and businessmen—in the eyes of the young people, they were symbols of an old regime that had diverted wealth from them. Still, the task now will be fulfilling the promises to match aspirations, a gigantic challenge in a society that remains profoundly conservative.
Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, after interviewing Prince Mohammad bin Salman in November 2017, crowned him the surprise inheritor of the Arab revolutions. Only in Saudi Arabia’s case, he wrote, was it a top-down revolution and therefore more likely to succeed than the bottom-up uprisings of 2011. It remains to be seen if the crown prince can expand his base of support beyond the educated youth and the globalized middle classes to mobilize the broader, deeper forces whose absence was one of the principal reasons for the failure of the Arab Spring.
Sunni Debacle and Co-Management of Shiism in Iraq
The fall of Mosul on July 9, 2017 destroyed the ISIS state infrastructure in Iraq, but it also left Sunnism in Mesopotamia at a loss. The jihadists had wreaked huge damage, blowing up numerous buildings including the famous al-Nuri mosque where they had proclaimed their caliphate. Such depredations combined with massive bombardments by the international coalition had transformed the western bank of the Tigris river into a vast heap of ruins. All that remained of the mosque’s famous leaning minaret, nicknamed al-Hadba (“hunchback”), was a pathetic stub rising from a pile of rubble. Standing out from the Arabic graffiti that covered it was one that said it all in English: “Fuck ISIS.”
Another ruin was recognizable from many propaganda videos as the building from whose roof men condemned for being sodomites by ISIS sharia courts had been thrown. Elsewhere, at the entrance to the Maidan old town, stretched the public square where the French-Algerian Rachid Kassim, also known as l’Oranais de Roanne, and an accomplice had cut the throats of two orange-clad Shiites. As they did it, the horrific Oranais, former social worker and rapper, spouted hip-hop threats at François Hollande about bringing similar terrors to French streets. A few weeks later, he would direct death threats at me.
The major roads had been cleared, but no one ventured among the ruins jammed with automobile carcasses and their buried corpses, where posted notices warned against mines and booby-traps. All that was left standing of the Convent of the Clock of the Dominican Fathers was its steeple. From here, Father Najeeb Michael had loaded hundreds of historic manuscripts into his car to rescue them from jihadists who would have burned them. He told the story in Saving Books and Men (Grasset, 2017). During my visit on April 21–22, 2018, this landscape of desolation reminded me of the appalling images of Berlin in ruins that Roberto Rossellini’s 1948 film Germany Year Zero opens with.
Beyond the erasure of ISIS, the ruination of Mosul in effect collectively punished a Sunni community rightly or wrongly suspected of having collaborated with ISIS. At the very least, the Sunnis were alleged to have facilitated the jihadists taking over the city and the surrounding Nineveh plain during their lightning offensive in the summer of 2014. The motive: resentment against the discriminatory policies pursued by the Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Numerous witness statements, including ones by the traumatized members of Christian minorities that had fled for their lives, testified to the abuses visited on them by members of the Sunni majority.
Mosul was an especially conservative city, where I never saw a single woman without the veil, not even on the university campus on the relatively undamaged east bank of the river. This was nine months after the caliphate’s fall! No foreigner or any non-Sunni—save the Iraqi soldiers and Shiite militiamen from the “Popular Mobilization” units that controlled the checkpoints—at that time would risk spending the night for fear of hostile action by jihadis. Their infrastructure had been wrecked, but a good number of the fighters had melted into the population. They did so especially among the hundreds of thousands of residents displaced because their homes had been destroyed, who were now living in horrid conditions in refugee camps outside the city.
During my visit, I was asked to give a lecture in Arabic at the already-rebuilt law faculty. (It had been destroyed by ISIS in reprisal for impious law having been taught there, contravening the divine sharia that alone had legitimacy under the caliphate.) In the session following the lecture, several local participants questioned the resilience of the jihadist ideas beyond the military defeat. But the majority, out of the blue and not mincing words—with conspiracy theories at the ready—blamed the West for having created the terrorist organization, thus holding them responsible for the calamity that had consumed the city. These comments blended with a strong hostility toward the (Shiite) central power in Baghdad, which the speakers accused of abandoning Mosul to its fate.
Iraqi Sunnism, which ISIS had appropriated, was undeniably under a dark cloud now that the jihadists had been defeated. Even its supporters on the Saudi Arabian peninsula seemed to be stepping back, at least for the moment. They had financed recurring Sunni insurrections since 2003 against the Iraqi state apparatus stigmatized for being controlled by Shiites and influenced from within by Iran. The defeat of ISIS was followed by the political bankruptcy of the sect that the terrorist organization had wrongfully commandeered. It contributed to weakening Sunnism throughout the region. Added to this was the rout of the Syrian rebels after the loyalist army and its Russian ally had retaken the Damascus suburbs of Ghouta in early April 2018 (more on this below).
Washington and Riyadh both in effect fell back on Iraq as the principal frontline for containing Iranian expansion. But this line no longer passed through support for a discredited Sunni community whose name had been ruined thanks to the receptivity of some of its members to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s caliphate. It was within the Shiite denomination, henceforth in charge institutionally, that the confrontation would now play out between the United States, its Saudi bloc allies, and Israel on one side, against Iran and its Russian partner on the other. This was a complex antagonism, seeing that it involved, in addition to diverse Kurdish forces, Turkey and the European Union as intermediaries. As we will see, the interests of the adherents to each bloc did not always align perfectly—as in the case of Moscow and Teheran.
The taking of Mosul by the Islamic State on June 10, 2014 had been followed almost immediately by a surge of ISIS forces, supported by Sunni tribal irregulars, toward Baghdad. It elicited a response that, looking back, appears to have reconstituted the contemporary Iraqi state. It consisted of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on June 13 issuing a fatwa calling for a “popular mobilization” (hashad sha ‘bi) by way of “armed jihad” (al-jihad al-kifahi) against the hordes approaching from the north. His spokesman read the fatwa during Friday prayers at Karbala, the burial place of Imam Husayn ibn Ali. It read in part: “Citizens capable of bearing arms and of fighting the terrorists in defense of their country, their people, and their holy places must volunteer and join the security forces to achieve the sacred goal.” It added that casualties would be rewarded with shahid (martyr) status.
This pivotal proclamation registered on several levels. First, in Islamic terms it opposed the legitimacy of a Shiite jihad to the one waged by ISIS. The Egyptian Sunni Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi was not mistaken when he had the International Federation of Muslim Scholars that he led denounce it from Doha the next day. He condemned the declaration as a “sectarian fatwa calling on Iraqis to take up arms against each other.” He warned against “declarations capable of leading to a destructive civil war that would rip apart the social and tribal fabric.”
Denying that the offensive on Baghdad was led by ISIS, al-Qaradawi treated it as “a revolution against injustice and exclusion by all Sunni who aspire to freedom and refuse to live in humiliation.” The communiqué refrained from criticizing al-Baghdadi’s organization and swept all anti-Shiite violence under the rug. It confined itself to ratifying the resentment of the Sunni population alienated by discriminatory measures, which al-Qaradawi blamed on Prime Minister al-Maliki as justification for attacking him. However, as the offensive rolled on, the jihadists kept killing Shiites. On June12, they captured some 1,700 recruits on the Camp Speicher military base near Tikrit, most of whom they massacred on the spot. They documented this atrocity with an ISIS propaganda video containing unbearable images, with a commentary titled, “Message to the whole world, and especially to the Rafidha [heretics] dogs.”
On a second level, Ayatollah al-Sistani’s fatwa set up a somewhat ambiguous situation: effectively, his “Popular Mobilization” called for all citizens to assemble, without mentioning a specific sect and without using an explicitly Shiite vocabulary. It could just as easily evoke a “homeland in danger” alert the moment that an entity claiming to be legitimate—the Islamic State in this case—sought to destroy and replace a duly constituted Iraq. And manning the “popular mobilization units” that would take arms against ISIS were Christians, Yazidis, Sabians, and even Sunni.
Nevertheless, the fighters were overwhelmingly Shiites. Hence their flags bore distinctive marks and images, sacred portraits of Imam Husayn ibn Ali, of his sainted mother Fatima, and of personages from the line of the Twelve Imams. Commanded by the Qods force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, a good number of units formed the tip of the spear of Teheran’s military presence on Iraqi soil. But they also had to contend with a regular Iraqi army and, especially, counterterrorist units trained by the United States, with vectors of influence at least partly from Washington.
On a broader level, the Popular Mobilization embodied the startled awakening of a new Iraq confronted with the mortal peril posed by ISIS. Its first victim would be Prime Minister al-Maliki. Ayatollah al-Sistani pushed him out with a declaration dated July 25, 2014 calling on Iraq’s leader to show a “spirit of national responsibility” and stop serving parochial interests. Al-Sistani’s declaration laid blame for the Mosul disaster where it belonged: first, there was the corruption in the Iraqi armed forces, overequipped by the United States, but many of whose officers drew their pay without doing their duty.
As prime minister, al-Maliki had alienated the Sunni population so much that it went over to ISIS in response. Led by disaffected Baathist mukhabarat (intelligence officers) trained under Saddam, the military arm of the Islamic State had even been able to conduct highly mobile operations mixing conventional and unconventional warfare. That let them inflict a major defeat on the regular troops stationed in Mosul, which had outnumbered them ten to one. All the Iraqis’ late-model American equipment had then fallen into jihadi hands. On August 11, 2014, Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite politician also from the Daʿwa party, became prime minister. Consequently, he got the credit for reconquering Mosul in July 2017 and eradicating the major ISIS strongholds.
But even this process, based on a patriotic revival jumpstarted by the fatwa of June 13, 2014, still built the new national identity on stigmatizing the Sunni. After the caliphate’s fall in July 2017, the streets of Baghdad were placarded with vast numbers of photos of young fighters (overwhelmingly Shiite) killed at the front fighting ISIS. Mixed among them were portraits of Iran’s Supreme Leader Khameini or the Ayatollah al-Sistani. I saw nothing of the kind, by contrast, in Sunni Mosul when I visited in late April 2018. This ambiguous martyrology, expanded to the massacred Camp Speicher recruits with a stamp in their honor, created the new legitimacy for political discourse after ISIS’s military defeat.
With the start of campaigning for the legislative elections of May 2018, the images of the martyrs were papered over with masses of giant posters for the seven thousand candidates running for a well-paying spot in the 329-member Council of Representatives. “They substituted the photos of thieves for those of the heroes,” went the cynical local joke. The campaign challenge in any case was to build a viable political system on the sacrifice of those who had given their lives in the fight against ISIS. But translating the balance of power that grew out of the Popular Mobilization movement would be left up to the future representatives.
However, in its narrowest sense, Popular Mobilization offered the groups most favorable to Teheran a chance to advance their pawns by capitalizing on the electoral dividends that came with having taken part in the fighting. And it let them measure themselves against their opponents that were closest to Washington. In fact, Iraq presented a paradox, being detached from the heightened American-Iranian antagonism peaking with the Trump presidency. These two enemies, both of which had invested considerably in efforts to revitalize the Shiite community, actually collaborated here after a fashion.
As Luluwa al-Rachid, one of the finest experts on Iraq, wrote in her article “Iraq after the Islamic State” (Notes de l’IFRI, July 2017), “On Iraq territory the two competing outside powers more or less seemed to have agreed on a duopoly…in dividing up security tasks and zones of influence.” Thus, the United States, beginning in 2003 with its invasion of Iraq, had set up, equipped, and trained the special forces of the Anti-Terrorism Service. By the time of the counteroffensive against ISIS after the summer of 2014, it fielded a force of roughly ten thousand seasoned fighters. Reporting to the prime minister, these forces bore the brunt of the combat that defeated the jihadists in 2017.
In effect, they fulfilled the role of a patriotic national army. By contrast, the Popular Mobilization militias were ten times larger. While they were nominally under the authority of the prime minister, in the field they obeyed numerous commanders representing opposing, perpetually renewed factions of the Shiite politico-religious spectrum. Its gradations ranged from groups that were most aligned with Iran to ones linked to the Americans. Its components also differed, ranging from opportunistic groupings of impoverished young people ready for a fight to established militias knitted together by ideology and paramilitary training. Finally, they centered on the oldest Shiite Islamist force, the Daʿwa party, as well as the major families of the Great Ayatollahs and the marjʿiyya—the spiritual authority guiding the community under the direction of Ayatollah al-Sistani in Najaf. The challenge posed by the parliamentary elections of May 2018 was in refereeing between these tendencies. Their various representatives were candidates on competing lists, and building the majority coalition that would emerge from the polling booths to govern the country—now again the frontline state par excellence between Iran and the United States—would be their task.
Since 2005, the Daʿwa party has given Iraq its three prime ministers—Ibrahim al-Jaafari (2005–2006), Nouri al-Maliki (2006–2014), and Haider al-Abadi (2014–2018)—making it the womb and the nursery of the country’s current leaders. Daʿwa was founded in the late 1950s under the aegis of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr to oppose the secularization of society at the time, particularly the emergence of a powerful communist movement. Many Daʿwa leaders were the offspring of ulemas and its rank and file came from the impoverished suburbs crammed with migrants from the country’s rural south attracted by promises and illusions of taking their share of the oil revenues.
Strongly influenced by Muslim Brotherhood doctrine, Daʿwa back then acted like a global Islamist party, without a Shiite axe to grind. It prioritized the fights against secularism and socialism. In its ranks, it could count a number of technocrats from the pious middle classes but also from among the clerics. When the Baath regime came on the scene, persecution of the party intensified and many of its cadres were executed. It had to go to ground, as did the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood during the Nasser era. When Daʿwa came out in support of Khomeini, it was hounded all the more vigorously.
The regime assassinated Baqir al-Sadr on April 9, 1980, causing the other leaders to flee to Teheran. Later that year in September, Saddam Hussein started the eight years’ war against Iran, and on November 17, 1982, Iran created a Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq from among the party’s exiles and prisoners of war. It was led by the head of another great line of ayatollahs, Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim. Brought to heel in this way, Daʿwa went through a transformation that saw it gradually distance itself from the neighboring state. Its cadres left for Damascus, then London and Washington at the end of that decade.
Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 made the Baʾathist regime Washington’s enemy number one, where before it had been an ally of the West in containing Iranian expansion. This would favor Daʿwa’s evolution toward a nationalism that left room for accommodation with the United States and the non-Islamist opponents that started the Iraqi National Congress in 1992. It was during the 1990s that the party transitioned to promoting representative democracy in a push to move beyond sectarianism. But organizing a consensus among the different factions whose leaders had gravitated into Daʿwa’s orbit over the years became a primary challenge. That they fluctuated between the Teheran and Washington poles of attraction only added to the difficulty.
The two main tendencies within Daʿwa revolved around the major lineages of Iraqi ayatollahs, the Sadr and the Hakim. The former counts in its ranks Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Daʿwa’s authority figure. But even more prominent was his cousin Mohammad Sadiq, the revered grand ayatollah who rose up against the regime of Saddam Hussein, only to be killed on his orders on February 19, 1999. He had a son, Muqtada al-Sadr, founder in 2004 of the Mahdi Army, a cluster of Shiite militias that opened a second front against the American occupier already battling the Sunni uprising (see above p. 93 on these events).
Hunted by the United States forces, Muqtada al-Sadr, born in 1973 in a Baathist Iraq cut off from the world, left to complete his education at Qom in Iran between 2007 and 2011. In 2012, he renounced all violence and organized his partisans in “peace brigades.” They guarded the Shiite holy places threatened by Sunni jihadists, then joined the Popular Mobilization against ISIS in 2014. Very well established in Sadr City, a poor suburb of Baghdad, and in the country’s south, Muqtada al-Sadr benefited from the immense auras of the ayatollahs Mohammad Sadiq and Muhammad Baqir. He stayed in step with the increasing strength and aspirations of a small but growing Shiite middle class. In March 2016, he organized a sit-in outside the capital’s Green Zone, the protected grounds where the administrative offices and homes of the leaders were located, in a protest against corruption.
In July 2017, Muqtada al-Sadr paid a visit to the Saudi and Emirati crown princes Mohammad bin Salman and Mohammad bin Zayed. These repositionings earned him criticism from Iran but allowed him to build up a nationalist popularity in a country exhausted by wars. The population wanted to live in peace and prosperity, and this spirit manifested itself in the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the rallies he organized. Al-Sadr’s inclusiveness went so far as putting up a joint slate for the 2018 elections with the Iraqi Communist Party, only yesterday an object of hatred (Saʾiroun—“On the march”).
I interviewed one of these won-over leftist intellectuals, a writer and poet, on April 18 in Baghdad. To my question of whether he was worried about such a pact rapidly turning into that of the wolf with the sheep, he replied that Muqtada’s thinking had changed. My host thought that al-Sadr, confronting the failed Islamist project, was convinced of the necessity of building a “civil” state (madani) run by a government of technocrats. This alone would be capable of eradicating corruption and making Iraq a regional crossroads at peace with all its neighbors, Sunni and Shiite, rather than a battlefield by proxy between them.
Like the inheritor of the Sadr line and his incongruous evolution, the Hakims also went through changes that revealed the political adaptability of Iraqi Shiism, as well as a certain unpredictability in its ranks. Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim had been one of the chief agents of influence of the Khomeinist regime during Iran’s confrontation with its neighbor Iraq. Al-Hakim had directed the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq set up by Teheran in 1982, then led the Badr Brigade (named after the first battle the Prophet won in 624 against the infidels). This fighting unit had been recruited, as we saw above, from among the Iraqi Shiite prisoners of war to fight against Saddam’s forces. Reentering his country in May 2003, the day after the American invasion, al-Hakim declared himself ready to compromise with the occupier. This got him assassinated the following August in the holy city of Najaf in a suicide attack ordered by al-Zarqawi.
Al-Hakim’s brother Abdul Aziz succeeded him, briefly presiding in December 2003 over the Governmental Council under American supervision. Then the Badr Brigade took over the Ministry of the Interior, leading to numerous complaints of abuses against the Sunni by the death squads it spawned. A change of name to Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq let the organization move closer to the United States, sealed with a visit by its leader to the White House of George W. Bush on December 4, 2006. But Abdul Aziz al-Hakim fell ill with cancer the following year to which he succumbed in August 2009, exactly six years after his brother’s death. His demise laid bare divisions inside his followers, some of whom continued to cultivate a close relationship with Teheran.
In 2010, during the legislative elections, the Badr Brigade split off from the Supreme Council, changing its name to “Badr Organization” under the leadership of Hadi al-Amiri, a Council of Representatives member since 2014 and very close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. After the fatwa for the Popular Mobilization against ISIS by Ayatollah al-Sistani on June 13, 2014, the Badr Organization became one of the most active in its ranks. It fought fierce battles to chase the Sunni population from the town of Jurf al-Sakhar, located close to Baghdad on the road to Najaf and Karbala. From here, the Sunni had prepared the attacks against Shiite pilgrims. The Brigade also took part in combat on the approach to Mosul but was held back from the city by coalition forces due to its execrable reputation for sectarian excesses.
With Badr on a different tack, the Supreme Council named Ammar al-Hakim, the son of Abdul Aziz, as its leader. Two years younger than Muqtada al-Sadr, al-Hakim was handicapped by his relative youth as well as the lack of his rival’s charisma. But he, too, evolved toward adopting a “modern” discourse and emancipating himself from referencing political Islam. Leaving the Supreme Council in December 2017, al-Hakim took with him the majority of its thirty-one representatives and the infrastructure to form the “National Wisdom Movement” (Tayyar al-Hikma al-Watani). The word “Hikma” has the same root as Hakim—which signifies “wise”—and appears in verse 269 of the second Koranic sura, The Cow: “And he who is brought wisdom, is brought much Good.” In the Shiite interpretation of Islam’s Holy Scriptures, the Twelve Imams and their successors, the ayatollahs, are the sole repositories of this wisdom.
Calling for moderation, patriotism, emancipation of women, fostering youth, and consolidation of the state, Ammar al-Hakim signaled a move beyond sectarianism. On April 15, 2018, he told me that he hoped to play a pivotal role in a coalition majority after the following month’s election. Two days later, we were watching a procession of his party members on an avenue in the middle-class district of Karrada. It had started at the trendy café-bookshop Ridha al-Alwan, a contributor to an intellectual renaissance in what had been, before the regional and civil wars, one of the most well-read Arab countries. I was struck by how worldly the marchers looked. Wearing t-shirts and the teal caps of the movement, several women among them sported bleach-blonde hairdos—in total contrast to the processions trailed by scores of chadors, the signature look of political Shiism’s street demonstrations. According to Ammar al-Hakim, “No Iraqi Shiite political group is hostile toward Iran, with which we have kinship ties: but the real problem is knowing if Iran is our father, our big brother—or are we merely cousins?”
This question came vividly to my mind again when the results of the legislative elections were announced on May19: Muqtada al-Sadr’s “On the March” list came in first with fifty-four seats, ahead of the “Alliance of Conquest”—the “Badrists,” led by Hadi al-Amiri and close to Teheran—with forty-seven seats. The “Victory Coalition” of outgoing Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, with a total forty-two seats, brought up the rear. Behind this leading trio, thirty-three other lists divided the remainder of the parliamentary seats among them. It made for very difficult negotiations and also facilitated interventions from abroad.
Muqtada al-Sadr’s fairly clear success testified to a nationalist revival. He scored despite the shifts and his anti-American activist past. Though he had stayed in Iran in the holy city of Qom for three years to finish his education, ultimately, al-Sadr distanced himself from Teheran by visiting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates countries. He stood up forcefully to the corrupt elites and then allied himself with the communists in the election. His victory, first of all, relativized the interference of religion in politics. It also attuned a militant Shiite movement and flock further to democratic logics which previously had been alien to them.
Al-Sadr’s victory also marked a quest for neutrality by Iraq, which had to balance the components of its sectarian and ethnic demographics, and did not want to see itself torn apart once more by civil wars stoked by its neighbors. The country, exhausted after thirty-eight years of uninterrupted strife, simply wanted to turn the page. Finally, al-Sadr’s electoral success bore witness to voters’ receptivity to rhetoric in the fight against corruption—for example, disparaging as “thieves” the elites that divided among themselves the spoils of a drained society and diverted oil revenues to their own benefit. The poor performance of lists led by former prime ministers witnessed to this disillusionment, as did the low voter participation rate of 44.5 percent, with nearly two-thirds of Baghdad voters abstaining.
In Washington, news of the election results were received cautiously. Muqtada al-Sadr still had a hellish reputation there, even if some think tanks commented favorably on his evolution. Teheran also responded with some bewilderment, having seen its positions in Syria subjected to massive Israeli bombardments ten days earlier (see below). Hence, Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Qods Force of the Revolutionary Guards, was urgently dispatched to Baghdad in the wake of the election. His mission: to keep a governing coalition from being formed that would act against the interests of the “Iranian cousin.”