RAMADI, Iraq-Exploiting sectarian tensions, Sunni militants gain foothold in Iraq’s West.
Iraq’s sectarian divide came into sharp focus once again last month, as a raid on a Sunni protest camp in the western city of Ramadi brought relations between the country’s Shia-dominated government and its once powerful Sunni minority to a nadir.
The December 30, 2013 assault on the year old protest encampment in Ramadi, capital of the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar, sparked a revolt by Anbar’s Sunnis, who seized control of Ramadi as well as the city of Fallujah.
The protest encampment had been part of a broader Sunni protest movement that sprang up in late 2012 in response to the perceived marginalization of Iraq’s Sunni minority, who dominated the country during Saddam Hussein’s rule, but were forced to accept a new Shia-led political order following the 2003 United States invasion by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia-dominated government.
The forcible dispersal of the Sunni protest camp by security forces from Maliki’s administration, which Iraq’s Sunnis view as a symbol of the Shia political domination ushered in by the U.S. invasion, enraged Sunnis in Ramadi and across the country and precipitated a violent reaction from militant Sunni Islamists. In a bid to quell the unrest, Maliki agreed to withdraw the army from urban areas of Anbar Province, creating a vacuum that was filled by anti-government Sunni tribes and Sunni extremist groups, which took control of Ramadi and Fallujah in early January.
The uprising by Anbar’s Sunnis has evolved into a three-way power struggle in Ramadi, where anti-government Sunni tribes, militant Sunni Islamists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Maliki’s security forces are fighting one another for control of Anbar’s capital. Local Sunni tribes have taken up arms against the extremists from ISIS, which advocates an austere brand of Sunni Islam, while both the extremists and the tribes are battling Iraq’s Shia-dominated security forces.
As of early January, Ramadi’s tribes appear to have prized most of the city’s neighborhoods from ISIS’s grip, with Sunni tribesman opposed to both the ISIS and Maliki’s Shia-led administration now controlling most of Anbar’s capital.
While the ISIS has encountered resistance from the local populace in Ramadi, it appears to have been largely embraced by tribesman in Fallujah, whose Sunni tribes have lined up behind their coreligionists in ISIS, facilitating the extremists groups’ takeover of the city. Fallujah is now largely under the control of the ISIS and the Sunni tribes with which it has aligned.
Iraq’s security has deteriorated sharply over the last year, as the chaos and sectarian tensions emanating from the civil war in neighboring Syria, where rebels drawn largely from the country’s Sunni majority are fighting a regime dominated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam, have increasingly spilled over the border into Iraq, home to a Sunni minority that deeply distrusts its Shia government.
The sectarian tensions unleashed by Syria’s civil war have been made even more acute by the actions of Maliki’s government, which prosecuted the country’s highest ranking Sunni official, Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, in 2012 and raided a separate Sunni protest camp last April, killing more than 50 people in an attack that enraged Iraq’s Sunni community.
Hashemi’s prosecution and the April raid on the Sunni protest camp in Hawija sparked a new wave of deadly violence that swept over the country last year, Iraq’s deadliest since 2008. The violence, which claimed the lives of more 7,800 Iraqi’s last year, shows no signs of abating, as 759 people were killed in terrorism and other violence in December. With the takeover of Fallujah by ISIS, a group known for its propensity for indiscriminate violence, Iraq’s bloodshed could possibly metastasize into a full-blown sectarian civil war.
– Eric Erdahl
Sources: BBC, BBC, UN Iraq, Washington Post
Photo: The NY Post