Shiites told: Leave home or be killed

[SlowwHand]

But it's all Israel's fault. Or Bush and Blair's fault. Or...the people of the region are actually to blame.

Sunnis force evictions as Iraq tensions grow


By Ellen Knickmeyer

Updated: 4:21 a.m. ET March 1, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Salim Rashid, 34, a Shiite laborer in an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab village 20 miles north of Baghdad, received his eviction notice Friday from a man at the door with a rocket launcher.

"It's 6 p.m.," Rashid recounted the masked man saying then, as retaliatory violence between Shiites and Sunnis exploded across wide swaths of central Iraq. "We want you out of here by 8 p.m. tomorrow. If we find you here, we will kill you."


Walking, hitchhiking and hiring cars, the Rashid clan and many of the 25 other families evicted from the town of Mishada had made their way by Tuesday to a youth center in Baghdad's heavily Shiite neighborhood of Shoula. There, other people forced from their homes were already sharing space on donated mattresses.

With sectarian violence rampant since last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, the families have become symbols of an emerging trend in Iraq: the expulsion of Shiites from Sunni towns.

New, deadly attacks -- many of them apparently retaliatory sectarian assaults -- surged Tuesday, with 66 people killed, according to Iraqi police. The decision to lift a curfew in Baghdad on Monday appeared to have opened the way for a resumption of intense bombings, including explosions at three Shiite mosques that killed at least 19 people. Some of Tuesday's other victims included 23 people killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad as they waited in line to buy kerosene; five Iraqi soldiers killed in a car bombing in the capital's Zayona district; and one U.S. soldier killed by small-arms fire west of the capital, authorities and news agencies said.

Sectarian warfare
Attacks on Shiite and Sunni holy sites had been rare in Iraq until last Wednesday, when bombers blew the gold-plated top off the shrine in Samarra, a heavily Sunni city about 65 miles north of Baghdad. The attack unleashed what many people here vowed would never happen: sectarian warfare in Iraq.

"One of those men told me, 'You started this, by burning our mosques and killing our people,' " said Rashid's grown nephew, kneeling with other men from the displaced families. Around them, black-shrouded women drank tea and children napped or played.

At least 58 dislodged Shiite families have come to Shoula since late last week, said Raad al-Husseini, a cleric who is helping the families settle in.

Husseini credited the organization of Moqtada al-Sadr, an outspoken Shiite cleric and growing political force in Iraq -- along with the people of the neighborhood -- for coming to the refugees' aid with blankets, clothing, and pots of stew and rice.

Husseini did not know the total number of displaced people in Shoula, but Rashid, the laborer, said about 200 had left his town.

Many of the newcomers have settled with relatives or even strangers. Rashid said others had decided to keep walking past Shoula, to some of the nearly homogeneous Shiite towns of the south, finding safety among people of their own sects.

In one room at the youth center, volunteers folded up a Ping-Pong table and swept a floor for the newest refugee family, that of Rahim Abood Sahan, 60. They arrived after a three-day trek -- walking by day, and taking shelter in strangers' homes at night -- from the village of Haswah, south of Baghdad.

Like Rashid, Sahan set out from his home when men he didn't recognize knocked on his door with a message: Get out in two days or you will all be killed.

The only possession that Sahan brought with him was draped over his forearm: his gray suit jacket.

When Sahan's family made it to Baghdad on Tuesday, they received word from other neighbors who had made the trip by car that at least one other Shiite family who ignored the warning had been killed, Sahan said.

Packing up and moving out
Fearing the same fate, nine Shiite families in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, were packing up Tuesday afternoon.

"Armed men left a threatening letter at my doorstep," said Hussein Mohammed Ali, loading his pickup truck.

Fallujah city officials had promised that police officers would patrol near the targeted families' houses. But the families "insisted on leaving, fearing their children would be killed when they went to school," said Khalaf Daham, deputy director of Fallujah's city council.

Sunni sheiks in Fallujah also had promised to safeguard their Shiite neighbors, said Ibrahim Awwad, the chief sheik of the Sunni Albu Issa tribe. "But they had doubts about our ability to protect them, and decided to leave," Awwad said.

Other Washington Post staff members contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

I don't care who is in favor of what over there, this is not acceptable behavior.

[Fake Boris]

The link with Israel and Bush... was... brilliant, unheard of irony!

[Guynemer]

Saddam Hussein was a brutal, evil, dangerous monster of a man.

But removing him is only a net good if what replaces him is better for Iraq and the world. At this point, the outlook is not good.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

They should split the country into three.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Sloww but what would you do

I don't care who is in favor of what over there, this is not acceptable behavior.

sure it is not acceptable, but than where is the built up legal/security structure to deal with such threats?

and he can be lucky he got an eviction notice, in the old Bosnian war he would have been 6 ft underground already (and hard to doubt many like him arent already)

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
They should split the country into three.

You tell Ankara why that's a good idea.

[Arrian]

What Guyemer said.

"The one benefit of getting fatter is that your boobs get bigger" -- a lady friend of mine

Yeah, but droopier too.

-Arrian

[Last Conformist]

I suppose that's what pushup bras are for.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

You tell Ankara why that's a good idea.

i'll tell them to shut up or they wont get let into the Club of 25.

[MrFun]

Re: Shiites told: Leave home or be killed

Originally posted by SlowwHand
But it's all Israel's fault. Or Bush and Blair's fault. Or...the people of the region are actually to blame.




I don't care who is in favor of what over there, this is not acceptable behavior.

If only it were as simplistic as you put it -- that it's only one side/group's fault for EVERYTHING that is going wrong in Iraq.

There are different groups of people who can share the blame for what is going on in Iraq -- the Bush administration is only one.

[SlowwHand]

The Bush administration doesn't have jack to do with it.
Read some history, teacher. Focus on Syria as a start, and branch out. Go back thousands of years. Were they merely practicing for the day Bush would FINALLy be born and grow up and be elected?
How prophetic! I'm impressed.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
The Bush administration doesn't have jack to do with it.
Read some history, teacher. Focus on Syria as a start, and branch out. Go back thousands of years. Were they merely practicing for the day Bush would FINALLy be born and grow up and be elected?
How prophetic! I'm impressed.

First of all, Iraq's borders has no historical connection before World War I -- Great Britain and France drew Iraq's arbitrary border.


Second of all, the Bush administration dove right into Iraq while being ignorant about the history of the Middle East -- their actions magnified the problems in the Middle East that have existed long before the Bush administration ****ed things up even more.

[Arrian]

Bush has nothing to do with the fact that Sunnis and Shiites hate each other. That's clearly so. So evident, as a matter of fact, that nobody would suggest otherwise, Sloww.

-Arrian

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Arrian
Bush has nothing to do with the fact that Sunnis and Shiites hate each other. That's clearly so. So evident, as a matter of fact, that nobody would suggest otherwise, Sloww.

-Arrian

Exactly, Arrian -- Sloww must be slow today, if he felt the need to point out to me the obvious fact that this religious problem goes back more than a thousand years.

[SlowwHand]

This is comparatively recent history.

By steps the Ottoman Turks assumed control of what is now Iraq during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. They organized their new possession into three provinces or vilayets. These were based on the cities of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra and were dominated by a series of mamluk pashas. The Ottoman acquisition of Iraq was designed to check the growing power of the Safavid shahs in Persia. The Safavids had converted to Shi'a Islam and were perceived as a grave danger to the Sunni orthodoxy of the Ottoman Empire. The mamluks served as a kind of marcher lord, protecting the empire from the heresy of the Persians. Although these pashas held the title of vali (governor) from the Ottoman sultan, in practice their rule was largely left up to them. Istanbul is certainly far from Baghdad and the local ruler was always sure to keep the sultan's Janissary guard under tight scrutiny. Like all march principalities, Iraq, in its three provinces, was fragmented, with control in decidedly decentralized hands. If we then add in the machinations of a series of petty quasi-independent Kurdish kingdoms in the north to the depredations of the Arab tribal confederations in the south, we have the makings of a thoroughly fragmented arrangement.
War did not help the situation. For over 150 years the Ottomans battled the Safavids across the plains of Iraq. The Shi'a took Baghdad in 1509 only to lose it again in 1534 to Sultan Suleiman I. In 1623 the Safavid were triumphant again, but once more lost their prize 1638. These conflicts drew various portions of Iraq closer to the Persian sphere. The presence of several highly important Shi'a holy sites, e.g. Najaf and Karbala, within the Ottoman empire also drew a constant stream of Persian holy men and teachers to Iraq. The Ja'fari method of Islamic jurisprudence present in these areas was not recognized by Ottoman authorities and further distanced this portion of Iraq from central authority. Couple this divergence of interests with the Arab tribes almost physiological dislike for authority and it is not surprising that many tribesmen switched to that version of the faith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Ottoman 'reconquest' of Iraq in the early part of the nineteenth century eliminated much of the parochial mamluk rule, but could not stop what was by then the inexorable decline of the empire nor suppress the seemingly centrifugal force of ethnic and religious division in that region. At the end World War I the British put the 'sick man of Europe' finally to bed and took the three provinces of Iraq via armistice in 1918. Iraq became a mandate of the League of Nations and was given over to British control as the 'State of Iraq.' In typical fashion, the British began yet another experiment in state-building in an effort to control the refractory populations of the river land.

The British method was to install a Hashemite monarch over the country, preferring somewhat understandable Sunni rule to the apparent superstitious fanaticism of the Shi'a peoples. The Kurds were weaned away from Turkish rule by veiled and ultimately illusory references to future autonomy in the British rhetoric. The British also imposed internal territorial divisions with scant regard to demographics. Rebellion was in the offing.

In 1920 the arrest of a son of a high-profile Shi'a cleric resulted in that same cleric issuing a fatwa, which in to some ears called for an uprising. Rebellion among the Shi'a swelled quickly, engulfing the mid-Euphrates lands. The paucity of British garrisons in that area allowed for rebel successes. These advances emboldened others, to include the Kurds in the north who took the opportunity to seize a number of cities. Once again much of Iraq balked at a single national government that could not possibly represent their diverse interests. The British suppressed the rebellion with terrific force of arms much to relief of the largely Sunni government in Baghdad.

The British Mandate ended in 1932. Rule was left in the hands of the Hashemite monarch, King Faisal I. An accomplished leader, Faisal was keenly aware of the fragility of his position. Many regarded him as an outsider and royal support was never firm in any quarter, including the Sunni. This discontent with a single central government manifested itself again in 1933. Iraq's small Assyrian community had sought autonomy through the League of Nations, but had failed to gain much support for their request. An Assyrian plan to establish their own separate power center in northern Iraq drew government reaction in the form of a massacre of hundreds of Assyrians by the Iraqi Army. Tribal dissatisfaction continued as well, but did not achieve dangerous proportions due to a lack of unity among the doggedly individualistic tribal sheiks. The internecine conflict did, however, galvanize the notion that force was essential to Iraq's political survival.

This idea bore fruit in 1936 when elements of the Iraqi Army marched on Baghdad to depose the government and install new ministers on behalf of the king. Though the new government included more Shi'a representation than previous administrations, it was a system clearly controlled by the military. Intrigue and suspicion came to typify Iraqi politics as the army became more entrenched in government affairs. Various assassinations produced cleavages within the army itself and at times seemed to threaten civil war, but control eventually settled in the hands of several senior Sunni military officers. All shared a pan-Arabic vision of the region. Their ideas continually downplayed the notion of 'Iraq' as a separate country in favor of creating a single polity to encompass all Arabs. Their ideas and leadership also furthered the belief that an authoritarian system of government was the only kind that could adequately discipline society into harmony.

From this time on the Iraqi military leadership would intervene to depose ministers who were not to their liking and even directed their attention at times against royal officials. British intervention in 1941, for a time, halted the near continuous cycle of coup d'etats. Political officials retook the reigns of government, but could not maintain Iraqi integrity without the ever-present specter of force. In 1945 resistance to government authority solidified in Kurdistan over the rejection of various Kurdish demands to Baghdad. The Kurdish armed revolt was successful at the outset, but collapsed in the face of Iraqi army. The defeated Kurdish leadership was forced into exile.

Bitter wrangling hampered Iraqi politics until 1958 when a group known as the 'Free Officers' deposed the Hashemite monarchy and declared Iraq a republic. The king was executed in the gardens of the al-Rihab Palace. The previous system, which had been based on veiled military control, was now replaced by one in which military authority was overt and absolute. Yet real stability was still denied the Iraqi people. Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qassem, the head of the Free Officers, tried to present himself as all things to all people, but could not garner real support for his policies. His cursory control of Iraq only lived as the result of repeated use of government force against such rival factions as the Kurds and the burgeoning Iraqi Communist Party. The war in Kurdistan, in fact, placed serious burdens on the army and prevented Qassem from taking any real action in Kuwait, which he wanted under Iraqi control. Qassem's withdrawal from the Arab League and his general isolation from the greater Arab world eroded his popularity among many pan-Arab members of the military establishment.

The end for Qassem came in 1963. Ba'athist elements within the state and in the armed forces orchestrated a power grab that, after intense fighting, secured Baghdad and saw Qassem shot before a hastily assembled Ba'athist tribunal. His replacement in government was General Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr and the new public face of Iraqi politics was the notorious Ba'ath Party which sought to forge a specious alliance between force and ill-defined strains of Arab socialism and nationalism. Though it aped after ideological appeal, the Party over time came to rely solely on its former strength, the one that had carried it into authority.

Though driven from power shortly thereafter the Ba'ath reasserted control after the Six Day War in 1967. The new government was heavily influenced by army officers and was disproportionately composed of Sunni Arabs from the northwest of the country. As one of their first orders of business the Ba'ath dispatched the secretary-general of the party, Saddam Hussein, to find a solution to the persistent Kurdish war. Displays of Kurdish strength such as the attack on the Kirkuk oil fields convinced the Ba'ath that military action was impractical so the Ba'ath brokered a political deal with the Kurds and then took to playing rival Kurdish factions against each other. The deal did, however, guarantee the Kurds extensive rights far in excess of anything they had enjoyed previously.

On the diplomatic front, relations between Iraq and Iran were souring. The Ba'athist claims to pan-Arabism seemed to threaten Iran vis-à-vis the heavily Arabic Iranian province of Khuzestan. Border disputes and disagreements over the Shatt al-Arab came back to the fore. More pivotal, however, were the domestic ramifications of those diplomatic foibles. The regime in Baghdad became concerned about the loyalty of the Shi'a population of Iraq given their close ties to their co-religionists in Iran. The secular nature of the Ba'athist regime had made the Shi'a nervous as to the course of their country and prominent Shi'a leaders refused to condemn Iran in its disputes with Iraq. Government harassment of the Shi'a began soon thereafter. Though officially a campaign against Iranian influence in Iraq, the Shi'a saw the government reprisals as a concerted effort against their faith. Further government actions against Islam in general even garnered the antipathy of Sunni clerics which then briefly threatened the secular government with a more ecumenical religious uprising. But attacks against the Shi'a remained more pronounced. This deepened the feeling that the Ba'athist government was antithetical to the Shi'a community of Iraq.

By 1972 government relations with the Kurds had once again broken down. A confluence of geopolitical events, including the 1973 War and worsening relations between Iraq and Iran, made the Kurds once again feel strong enough to challenge government control. The war, which began in full force in 1974, witnessed the Iraqi army occupying many key towns, but was generally unable to uproot Kurdish rebels from their mountain strongholds. To make matters worse the war raised negative feelings in Shi'a Iraq. The Ba'ath responded to this threat by executing five Shi'a leaders.

The war in Kurdistan was brought to a close through diplomatic relations between Iraq and Iran. The Kurds had been largely dependent upon Iranian support for their prosecution of the war. The deal between Iraq and Iran, achieved through the efforts of Saddam Hussein, gave concessions to the Iranians in the Shatt al-Arab in return for the cessation of military aid to the Kurds. The Kurds surrendered and plunged into factionalism soon after.

The closing of the war in Kurdistan and the restoration of stability with Iran allowed Iraq a time of relative prosperity. Oil wealth allowed the government to invest heavily in infrastructure and in social services. Relations with the West improved as Iraq nudged its way into the global economic milieu. In stark contrast to previous decades many began viewing Iraq as an example to the rest of the Arabic world. Life, for a change, seemed good. Repression of Shi'a dissidents continued, but was overshadowed by the apparent success of the Ba'athist regime. This wealth, unknown to many outside of Iraq, also allowed the Ba'ath leadership, most notably Bakr and Hussein, to develop a state-funded patrimonial system that would, over time, enfeeble the regime.

In 1979 Bakr stepped down and gave Iraq over to Hussein. Dissension of any type within Iraq was systematically eliminated. Hussein accused members of his own party of colluding with Syria in some sort of 'plot' to overthrow the Iraqi government. Perhaps 500 members of the party were executed to show the danger of opposing Saddam's regime in any way.

Hussein further sought to consolidate his rule by creating a myth of Iraqi identity through the distortion of history and a very public campaign of nationalist fiction. Lacking any real internal cohesiveness, Hussein sought to raise a real 'Iraq' from a rump of speculative historical interpretation. If some believed, many did not. Unrest continued in Shi'a neighborhoods, inducing Hussein to order mass arrests and to make membership in certain Shi'a political parties punishable by death. Hussein went so far as to execute the highly respected Shi'a ayatollah, Baqir al-Sadr. Deportations among the Shi'a population were common as well.

Still in many ways the regime appeared healthy and powerful. Kurdistan was generally under control and Hussein was making a play to be the acknowledged leader of the Arab world. This facet along with his mistreatment of his Shi'a populace drew him into conflict with Iran. Hussein launched the Iran-Iraq War with the intention of fighting a limited war which would generate support for Saddam's claim to Arab leadership and perhaps allow Saddam to gain control of the all-important Shatt al-Arab. Neither came true.

The incursion of Iraq into what seemed to be a weak Iran bolstered the cause of the Islamic revolution. The call to defend the revolution created a new outward source of political legitimacy for the revolutionary leaders and Iran took to her defense with unforeseen gusto. The war lasted far longer than Hussein had hoped. From being a limited war of aggression, the war metamorphosed into a struggle for the very survival of Iraq. Eventually the lines stabilized along the Iraqi frontier. Hussein ordered the use of chemical weapons to stymie the tide of Iranian revolutionaries.

Iran, to break the stalemate, once again courted favor among Iraq's Kurdish population, exploiting Iraq's internal dissent to nullify Hussein's material advantages. This Kurdish collusion with Iranian offensives garnered Hussein's wrath. Once it became clear that Iran's military limitations precluded another serious assault, Hussein turned on Kurdistan with a horrific vigor. Men suspected of guerilla activity were killed ruthlessly and villages demolished. All in all perhaps 60,000 Kurds died in the campaign. In the Kurdish autonomous region nearly 80 percent of all towns were eradicated. The Kurds for the moment were cowed, but far from broken.

In the Shi'a portion of Iraq the average Iraqi suffered the war much as the rest of the country, but the central government remained highly suspicious of the Shi'a leadership. This unease was reinforced by actions like the formation of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) in 1982. Sponsored by Iran, this organization continues to labor behind the scenes for the foundation of an Islamic theocracy a la Iran in the Mesopotamian river basin.

By 1988 Hussein had declared victory in the Iran-Iraq war, albeit a pyrrhic one. The war had cost over 250,000 dead, had aggravated the divisions in Iraqi society, and, most poignantly, had left the regime hopelessly in debt. After several failed financial schemes Hussein decided, once more, to gamble on adventuresome foreign war in order to heal his country's woes. The invasion of Kuwait, like the Iran-Iraq war, proved to be a spectacular failure. Instead of gaining the international communities' acquiescence, Hussein's high-handed policy earned him a swift and devastating invasion from the U.S.-led coalition. Though many clamored for Hussein's removal, the U.S. decision was to leave him in office, seeing the resultant power vacuum as more dangerous than the status quo. Still Saddam's control of the country waned as a result of the invasion. Rebellions throughout the Kurdish and Shi'a zones of the country reduced Hussein's effective power to a triangle formed by the cities of Tikrit, Ramadi and Baghdad (even some of Baghdad was suspect).

The rest of the story is better known. In 2003 after repeated violations of 16 UN Security Council Resolutions, a new coalition of nations, spearheaded by the U.S. and the U.K. invaded and deposed Hussein's regime. The resulting search for WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) proved less than impressive, but nevertheless the U.S. and the U.K. found themselves in the midst of a program of nation building the likes of which have not been seen since the Marshall Plan.

A hydra-like insurgency has since blossomed in the wreckage of Iraq. As the U.S. primarily seeks to build a democratic future for Iraq, Sunni insurgents under the apparent leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi seek to spawn civil war between them and the Shi'a. Thus far Shi'a restraint, despite the incessant bombing, has been remarkable. On October 15th, 2005 the Iraqi constitution was approved, though Sunni participation in the ratification was minimal. The constitution itself reflects the sectarian tensions that inhere within the Iraqi political climate. The document explicitly recognizes that Iraq is a "multiethnic, multi-religious and multi-sect country." It also provides for impressive local power under the guise of a loose federalism. Even now the Kurds run commercials on American television in what might be an ad campaign to garner support for a possible secession of Kurdistan from the fledging democratic Iraq. The Kurdish initial desire for the constitution reserved them the right to secede altogether.

Shi'a participation in the new democracy has been more straightforward, but is also a product of their 60% hold on the electorate. Democracy intimately serves their purposes as a sect and does not necessarily reflect any greater unity within Iraq itself.

In the end the visions of placid elections are buried in the wider perspective by internecine violence that seems to shiver Iraq along lines well ingrained in her society. The belief, of late, is that democracy can remake men in its own image and that previous matters bear little on the fate of countries. The history of Iraq casts a dubious light on the great experiment. In its short existence Iraq has been a nation irreconcilable to itself. In outlook, faith, and allegiances the people have little in common save their shared geography. This is usually insufficient cause to save men from their centuries-old divisiveness.

Now that the demographics of democracy look to propel the Shi'a into power it becomes increasingly probable that Iraq will fall under the shadow of her Shi'a patron, Iran. Kurdish interests will continue apart from the politics of Baghdad. The Shi'a have neither the will nor the power to prevent the Kurds from escaping the pull of Baghdad's weak gravity. The Sunni, formerly the privileged of Iraq, will find their lot in life much diminished. Without hope of real power via democracy the Sunni may decide with greater force that sedition suits them more closely. To control this militant and intractable faction the Shi'a will, in time, come to resort to the same violence that once held them in check. Force in Iraqi politics will remain paramount though the sword rests in new hands.

Lovely.