The Missing Context: 'Islamic State' Sectarianism is Not Coincidental
02 November 2014
By Ramzy Baroud
Consider this comical scene described by Peter Van
Buren, a former US diplomat, who was deployed to Iraq
on a 12-month assignment in 2009-10:
Van Buren led two Department of State teams assigned
with the abstract mission of the "reconstruction" of
Iraq, which was destroyed in the US-led wars and
sanctions. He describes the reconstruction of Iraq as
such:
"In practise, that meant paying for schools that would
never be completed, setting up pastry shops on streets
without water or electricity, and conducting endless
propaganda events on Washington-generated themes of
the week (‘small business,' ‘women's empowerment,'
‘democracy building.')"
As for the comical scene: "We even organised awkward
soccer matches, where American taxpayer money was used
to coerce reluctant Sunni teams into facing off
against hesitant Shiite ones in hopes that, somehow,
the chaos created by the American invasion could be
ameliorated on the playing field."
Of course, there is nothing funny about it when seen
in context. The entire American nation-building
experiment was in fact a political swindle engulfed by
many horrifying episodes, starting with the dissolving
of the country's army, entire official institutions
and the construction of an alternative political class
that was essentially sectarian.
Take the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), which was
founded in July 2003 as an example. The actual ruler
of Iraq was the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),
headed first by General Jay Garner, then by Paul
Bremer, who, effectively was the governor of Iraq. The
figureheads of the IGC were mostly a conglomerate of
pro-US Iraqi individuals with a sinister sectarian
past.
This is particularly important, for when Bremer began
mutilating Iraqi society as dictated to him from
Washington, the IGC was the first real sign of the
American vision for Iraq with a sectarian identity.
The council was made of 13 Shias, five Sunnis, five
Kurds, a Turkmen and an Assyrian.
One would not dwell on the sectarian formation of the
US-ruled Iraq if such vulgar sectarianism were
embedded in the collective psyche of Iraqi society.
But, perhaps surprisingly, this is not the case.
Fanar Haddad, author of Sectarianism in Iraq:
Antagonistic Visions of Unity, like other perceptive
historians, doesn't buy into the "ancient hatred" line
between Sunnis and Shia. "The roots of sectarian
conflict aren't that deep in Iraq," he said in a
recent interview.
Between the establishment of the modern Iraqi state in
1921 and for over 80 years, "the default setting (In
Iraq) was coexistence." Haddad argues that "Post-2003
Iraq ..identity politics have been the norm rather
than an anomaly because they're part of the system by
design."
That "design" was not put in place arbitrarily. The
conventional wisdom was that the US army is better
seen as a "liberator" than an invader, where the Shia
community was supposedly being liberated from an
oppressive Sunni minority. By doing so, the
"liberated" Shia majority were armed and empowered to
fight the "Sunni insurgency" throughout the country.
The "Sunni" discourse, laden with such terminology as
the "Sunni Triangle" and "Sunni insurgents" and such,
was a defining component of the American media and
government perception of the war. In fact, there was
no insurgency per se, but an organic Iraqi resistance
to the US-led invasion.
The design had in fact served its purposes, but not
for long. Iraqis turned against one another, as US
troops mostly watched the chaotic scene from behind
the well-fortified Green Zone. When it turned out that
the US public still found the price of occupation too
costly to bear, the US redeployed out of Iraq, leaving
behind a broken society. By then, there were no more
Shia vs. Sunni awkward football matches, but rather an
atrocious conflict that had claimed too many innocent
lives to even be able count.
True, the Americans didn't create Iraqi sectarianism.
The latter always brewed beneath the surface. However,
sectarianism and other manifestations of identity
politics in Iraq were always overpowered by a dominant
sense of Iraqi nationalism, which was violently
destroyed and ripped apart by US firepower starting
March 2003. But what the American truly founded in
Iraq was Sunni militancy, a concept that has until
recently been alien to the Middle East.
Being the majority among Muslim societies as a whole,
Sunnis rarely identified as such. Generally,
minorities tend to ascribe to various group
memberships as a form of self-preservation. Majorities
feel no such need. Al-Qaeda for example, seldom made
such references to being a Sunni group, and its
targeting of Shia and others was not part of its
original mission. Even its violent references to other
groups were made in specific political contexts: they
referred to the "Crusaders" when they mentioned US
military presence in the region, and to Jews, in
reference to Israel. The group used terror to achieve
what was essentially political objectives.
But even al-Qaeda identity began changing after the US
invasion of Iraq. One could make the argument that the
link between the original al-Qaeda and current group
known as the Islamic State (IS) is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The Jordanian-born militant was the founder of al-Tawhid
wa al-Jihad group, and didn't join al-Qaeda officially
until 2004. A merger had then taken place, resulting
in the creation of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)
While Zarqawi's move to Iraq had originally targeted
the US occupation, the nature of his mission was
quickly redefined by the extremely violent sectarian
nature of the conflict. He declared "war" on the Shia
in 2005, and was killed a few months later at the
height of the civil war.
Zarqawi was so violent in his sectarian war to the
extent that al-Qaeda leaders were allegedly irritated
with him. The core al-Qaeda leadership which imposed
itself as the guardians of the Muslim ummah (nation)
could have been wary that a sectarian war would
fundamentally change the nature of the conflict - a
direction they deemed dangerous.
If these dialectics ever existed, they are no longer
relevant today. The Syrian civil war was the perfect
landscape for sectarian movements to operate, and, in
fact, evolve. By then, AQI had merged with the
Mujahideen Shura Council resulting in the Islamic
State of Iraq (ISI), then the Levant (ISIL), which
eventually declared a Sunni-centred Caliphate on land
it occupied in Syria and, more recently in Iraq. It
now simply calls itself the Islamic State (IS).
Sunni militancy (as in groups operating on the central
premise of being Sunni) is a particularly unique
concept in history. What makes IS an essential
sectarian phenomenon with extremely violent
consequences is that it was born into an exceptionally
sectarian environment, and could only operate within
the existing rules.
To destroy sectarian identities prevalent in the
Middle East region today, the rules would have to be
redesigned, not by Paul Bremer type figures, but
through the creation of new political horizons, where
fledgling democracies are permitted to operate in safe
environments, and where national identities are
reanimated to meet the common priorities of the Arab
peoples.
While the US-led coalition can indeed inflict much
damage on IS and eventually claim some sort of
victory, they will ultimately exasperate the sectarian
tension that will spill over to other Middle Eastern
nations.
- Ramzy Baroud is a PhD scholar in People's History
at the University of Exeter. He is the Managing Editor
of Middle East Eye. Baroud is an
internationally-syndicated columnist, a media
consultant, an author and the founder of
PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father
Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto
Press, London).