Iraq lurches back to gang warfare

Submitted by martin on 7 April, 2008 - 8:12 Author: Martin Thomas
Sadr

The relative stability and quiet in Iraq since September 2007 has been very, very relative. And now it could unravel in a very ugly way.

Iraqi army forces, backed up by US and British forces, attacked the Sadr militia (Mahdi Army) in Basra in late March. The attack was a fiasco.

Over 1000 Iraqi soldiers, including senior officers, deserted. Nouri al-Maliki's Baghdad government made good the losses by recruiting more people from the militias of the main Shia-Islamist government parties, Dawa and ISCI/SCIRI. Thus it made it clear that the attack was a factional one by the leaders of one group of militias against another.

It also antagonised the Sunni "Awakening Council" militias, laboriously nurtured by the Americans to turn them against the Al-Qaeda "ultras", but now aggrieved that the Maliki government will not give them army wages.

Eventually Maliki had to back down, announcing a ceasefire - which had been negotiated in the Iranian city of Qom by a leader of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

Sadr came out of the conflict with little military damage and with political gains. He called a demonstration for 9 April against the US occupation which could have been even bigger than the one-million strong protest he organised on 9 April 2007. He has cancelled the demonstration, saying (reasonably) that he fears that the Iraqi army might attack it, but that only confirms what Patrick Cockburn writes in his new book about Sadr. "US emissaries and Iraqi politicians [have] underestimated him. So far from being the 'firebrand cleric' as the Western media often described him, he [has] often proved astute and cautious".

Maliki and the Americans have followed up, however, on 6 April, by attacking the Mahdi Army in its stronghold, the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad; blockading vehicle traffic into or out of Sadr City for two weeks; and threatening to ban Sadr's movement from the provincial elections, scheduled for October.

Basra is not the strongest area for the Mahdi Army. ISCI/SCIRI and another Shia-Islamist group, Fadhila, are generally reported to be the strongest groups there. Basra is where, in March 2005, a student strike pushed the Mahdi Army into making an official apology after they attacked a group of students on a picnic (because the women at the picnic were not veiled), and killed one of the students.

If the Iraqi army had to back down in Basra, there is no chance that they can defeat the Mahdi Army in its bastion. Exactly what the aims of Maliki, and the Americans, are now, I can't tell. US commander David Petraeus seems convinced he needs caution in dealing with Sadr: reporting to the US Congress on 8 April, he praised Sadr's recent call on his fighters to "stand down", and emphasised the importance of Sadr's ceasefire.

Even so, there must be a very high chance that the whole operation will backfire drastically, undermining the Maliki government, and rekindling open conflict between militias.

In the big reassessment which the US government did on Iraq, at the end of 2006, resulting in the "surge" from early 2007, the Sadr movement was identified as an even bigger obstacle to establishing stable administration in Iraq than the Sunni-supremacist gangs.

At that time the Sadrists were in the Baghdad government. They had provided the decisive votes to get Maliki elected as prime minister in April 2006.

The US government assessments thus suggested a drastic tilt of US policy in Iraq, to try to beat down both Shia and Sunni Islamist "ultras" at the same time, rather than "betting on the Shia". The US government's final decisions on the "surge" seem, however, to have been compromises designed to make possible some "muddling through".

Remembering early 2004, when the US previously, briefly, tried to confront both Sadr and the Sunni "ultras", and had to retreat ignominiously, in 2007 the US commanders in Iraq decided on a much more cautious line. They achieved a stand-off with Sadr.

The Sadrists resigned from the Maliki government in April 2007 and called their first mass demonstration; but they stressed that they were not calling for the immediate withdrawal of US troops, and from August 2007 they called an official ceasefire. The US authorities virtually welcomed the Sadrists' mass demonstration, praising it as a fine example of free speech.

All that, plus the USA's success, after years of negotiation, in detaching some Sunni militias and turning them against the Al Qaeda "ultras", laid the basis for the steady decline in violent deaths in Iraq after September 2007.

Decline only to the level of the horrific, from the level of outright simmering civil war; but decline. Stabilisation of Iraq only as a relatively stable patchwork of control by local sectarian militias; but stabilisation.

Since September 2007 there has been little improvement in the supply of electricity, clean water, or jobs in Iraq; but oil exports have increased, the proportion of people expressing confidence in the Baghdad government has increased from 39% (August 2007) to 49% (February 2008), the minority saying that the US forces are doing a good job has risen from 18% to 32%, and the proportion saying that they want US troops out now has fallen from 47% to 38%.

Maliki and the Americans decided that the Iraqi army had solidified enough that they could go on the offensive against Sadr. According to some accounts, Maliki's motive was to strengthen the position of his coalition parties, ISCI/SCIRI and Dawa, against Sadr for the provincial elections due in October. If so, the operation has so far backfired, and it is hard to see how it can do anything but backfire.

There is also, in the conflict, an element of the more upper-class, returning-exile-based parties moving against the more popular, lower-orders variants of Shia clerical-fascism.

Dawa is the direct descendant of the little study groups formed by conservative clerics in 1958-63 in what then seemed a desperate attempt to reverse a popular surge in Iraq to secular, social-reformist politics. ISCI/SCIRI was founded in Iran, under Iranian government sponsorship - it was meant to be an umbrella group for all the Shia-Islamist currents in Iraq, but that didn't work out - and its militia, the Badr Corps, was formed and trained in Iran.

Though there are no reports of the Sadrists deploying social (rather than religious and nationalist) agitation, they are an indigenous movement of the Shia urban poor, with a strong Iraqi-nationalist tone.

During the fighting in Basra, Ben Lando of Iraqi Oil Report spoke on the phone to Hassan Jumaa, leader of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions. In his comments to Lando, Hassan Jumaa pointedly avoided taking sides in the conflict, and instead limited himself to wishing for its speedy end and reporting the grievances of oil workers trapped at work by the battles and unable to get home.

Naftana, a group in Britain supporting the IFOU, has published a statement denouncing Maliki's offensive, and implicitly favouring the Sadrists; but the statement includes no direct quotations from IFOU leaders, and has not been published on the English-language website which Naftana maintains for IFOU.

The Worker-communist Party of Iraq, through its offshoot the Iraqi Freedom Congress, has argued that the Iraqi workers' movement should set itself against both militia groups.

"Under the guise of National Guard and police forces, Badr militias of the Islamic Supreme Counciland Dawa Party militias played a significant role in these bloody events... They are justifying their heinous crimes by saying that they are combatting outlaws, meaning the Mahdi Army.

"The Mahdi Army, in return, issued threats to a large number of shop owners, warning them of the consequences of opening their shops in Shula, Thawra and Husseinieh districts of Baghdad. They also issued threats to school administrations that they would face the worst of fates if they allowed students to go to school. Ironically, they called these actions 'civil disobedience'..." (IFC statement 26 March).

It calls on Iraqis to join independent non-sectarian militias ("Safety Force") "to deter the gangs".

It is indeed only by the Iraqi workers' movement gaining the strength to lead a decisive social force, able to defend itself militarily, that both the US/UK occupation and the sectarian militias can be defeated.

Links:

More on the Sadr movement

Naftana statement

Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions

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