Iraq splitting apart

Diary
Patrick Cockburn
London Review of Books

Iraq is splitting into three different parts. Everywhere there are fault lines opening up between Sunni, Shia and Kurd. In the days immediately following the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1300 bodies, mostly Sunni, were found in and around Baghdad. The Shia-controlled Interior Ministry, whose police commandos operate as death squads, asked the Health Ministry to release lower figures. A friend of mine, a normally pacific man living in a middle-class Sunni district in west Baghdad, rang me. ‘I am not leaving my home,’ he said. ‘The police commandos arrested 15 people from here last night including the local baker. I am sitting here in my house with a Kalashnikov and 60 bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’

It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in early March. Several days later a group of children playing football in a field noticed a powerful stench. Police opened up a pit which contained the bodies of 27 men, probably all Sunni, stripped to their underpants; they had all been tortured and then shot in the head. Two and a half years ago, when the first suicide bomb targeting the Shias killed 85 people outside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, there was no Shia retaliation. They were held back by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the hope of gaining power through legal elections. Since the Samarra bomb this restraint has definitively ended: the Shia militias and death squads slaughter Sunnis in tit-for-tat killings every time a Shia is killed.

Iraqis often deceive themselves about the depth of the sectarian divisions in their country. They say, rightly, that there are many intermarriages between Sunni and Shia and claim the sectarian divide is less extreme than it is in Belfast, where Roman Catholic and Protestant seldom marry. But such marriages are most common among the educated middle class in Baghdad and, in any case, they have become less common since 2003, when sectarian differences widened after Sunnis rebelled against the occupation and the Shia community did not. My Shia and Kurdish friends, who see themselves as wholly non-sectarian, sincerely believe that the three-year-old Sunni rebellion is the work of a few jobless Baathist officials making common cause with Islamic fanatics imported from Saudi Arabia. ‘They are not real Iraqis,’ they say. They refuse to accept that the guerrillas are supported by most of the five-million-strong Sunni community, despite the evidence of opinion polls. The Sunnis and the Kurds, for their part, see the Shia leaders as puppets manipulated by Iranian intelligence. They will not take on board that the 15 or 16 million Shias, who make up 60 per cent of the population, will not give up their bid for power after centuries of marginalisation. Kurdish hostility to Arabs is equally underestimated by both Shia and Sunni. While I was in Arbil, the Kurdish capital, two Sunni friends emailed to say they planned to drive from Baghdad to see me. They didn’t realise that they were as likely to spend the night in jail as in a hotel, because Kurds regard all Arabs visiting from the rest of Iraq with deep suspicion.

The differences between Shia and Kurd explain why Iraq still doesn’t have a new government three months after last December’s elections. The current government is the one that took office in January 2005; based on a Kurdish-Shia alliance, it’s headed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shia Dawa Party. Over the past year, Kurdish leaders have come to detest him and are refusing to agree to a new government with him at its head. They were enraged when he made a surprise visit to Turkey in early March in order (they feared) to enlist Turkish support in his bid to rob them of their quasi-independence within Iraq. Above all, the Kurdish leaders fear that Jaafari is manoeuvring to avoid implementing an agreement under which they would gain permanent control of the oil province of Kirkuk, which they captured at the start of the war.

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