Archive for Shia Sunni conflict

Sectarianism and a New Allawi

Posted by: Ion | March 17th, 2007 · 1:49 PM

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has been making a notable comeback of late, with his call for a substantial reorganization of government. Allawi’s plan is to abolish the sectarian power-sharing arrangement, declare martial law in Iraq for two years, crush the militias and stabilize the country by replacing American troops with forces from the Arab League.

The idea of starting over again cannot be welcomed by the United States and while many of these proposals are unwise, the motive behind the plan is important. Allawi’s central contention is that a fundamentally sectarian government established on ethno-religious terms, is fundamentally incapable of ending a sectarian war. He has a point.

If the state concedes that the “correct” ethnicity, is the precondition for power in the central government, it cannot logically delegitimize ethnicity as a qualification for power among the populace. In essence, an ethnic government fighting with ethnic militias, is just as much a civil war as the terrorist fight between the Sunni and Shia insurgents.

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Running the Persian Frontier for Blood and Money

Posted by: Ion | February 24th, 2007 · 11:56 AM

Across the southern borders of Iraq, Iran exports munitions to Shia insurgents in a bold bid to break apart her long hated, long coveted neighbor state. But to the North, the Kurds are engaged in their own reciprocal smuggling enterprise against Iran. This effort is acutely felt in the unstable, West Iranian province of Kordestan. Bordering Kurdish Iraq, a flourishing traffic in weapons, guerillas, Western goods and gasoline is jumping the border through the treacherous mountain passes into the theocracy.

Little of this ever makes headlines as there is an unofficial Iranian news blackout present in Kordestan. Little information leaves its borders and foreign travel within them is highly restricted. However, as a result of the high degree of autonomous stability the Kurds have achieved in Northern Iraq, a vast hidden game of contraband and ethnopolitical insurgency is playing out across this frontier, everyday. Either for profit, or in the service of Pejak to liberate the Kurds.

AsiaTimes has an excellent piece about this secret struggle, caught somewhere between commerce and nationalism. A few excerpts:

With the region kept underdeveloped, smuggling provides a lucrative source of income. The [Iraqi] Kurds’ unmatched knowledge of the bandit-infested mountain passes connecting Iran with Iraq allows them to feed their neighbor’s thirst for gasoline while bringing in Western electrical goods, weapons and alcohol.

[…]

“You have to get used to sleeping in the snow at night when bringing in a shipment,” said Umar, a driver who uses his truck to bring goods into Iraq. “We know where the checkpoints are and carry the goods by hand across mountain paths before depositing them again on the other side of the checkpoint and bringing the empty truck to carry them the rest of the way.”

[…]

Many of the politically active Kurds are forced to lie low or flee across the border to Iraq. There, they can pick up military training and political indoctrination at a camp run by Pejak - the Party of Free Life in Kurdistan - on the inaccessible Mount Qandil. Pejak subscribes to the teachings of now-imprisoned Abdullah Ocalan, the former leader of Turkey’s banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Pejak’s cadres are mostly educated male and female activists, and it emerged as a force in northern Iraq as a result of the collapse of the Iraqi state. Ever since then, reports have emerged linking US and Israeli covert operations with these anti-Tehran groups.

Many in Iran’s government are certain the United States is assisting in these smuggling operations:

On January 16, a commentary by Aref Mohammadzadeh in the conservative daily Jomhuri-ye Eslami accused Washington of “devising a strategy against the Islamic Republic similar to the one which had led to the collapse of the Soviet Union” and which aims at “fomenting and strengthening separatist movements and tribalist groups”.

“One of the duties of these [recruited] individuals is to make connections inside Iran in order to recruit other people, and also to be in contact with Western authorities, organizations and institutions and present false and fabricated reports on the situation of ethnic groups in Iran,” the commentary said.

An interesting statement, given that an inversion of the geography, precisely describes Iran’s present actions in Iraq.

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Embarkation to an Abyss: Aristotle in Samarra

Posted by: Ion | February 20th, 2007 · 2:43 PM

Christopher Hitchens published a noteworthy piece in Slate today. While he was primarily concerned in adding mass to the Shia and Sunni conflict within Islam, he had this to say about the unintended consequences of the Sunni bombing of the revered Shiite Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra:

…the extreme forces of Sunni Wahhabism and the takfir school that form the hard core of al-Qaida may have been brilliant in the short term in their declaration of war against Shiism. They have certainly made Iraqi life very nearly unlivable and helped to wreck the prospects of a federal democracy there. But there is evidence that even Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri told their late brother Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to rein it in a bit. Delicious though it is to send heretics to hell, they murmured, the long-term cost of inter-Islamic bloodshed might be a trifle high. It is too late for that afterthought now; the war is on in earnest. After the savage demolition of the golden dome in Samarra, only a very few Shiite demagogues tried to blame the atrocity on the Jews. They knew very well who had done this terrible thing, and they acted, and continue to act, accordingly.

full piece>>>

By itself this is an astute observation, for it was Samarra, that broke open the fray into the wider fratricide. And it was Samarra, perhaps more than anything else, that drew Iran into the maelstrom. In retrospect, Samarra may represent the beginning of peripeteia. Which in classical Greek tragedy is the rapid descent into unintended consequences, which follows a slight error or flaw in seemingly sound designs or men.

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