For the first time, Sunni Muslim sheiks are publicly exhorting followers to strike with force against ethnic Kurds and Shi'ites, an escalation in rhetoric that could exacerbate the communal violence that already is shaking Iraq's ethnic communities. ''The Americans aren't the problem; we're living under an occupation of Kurds and Shi'ites," Sattar Abdulhalik Adburahman, a Sunni leader from the northern city of Kirkuk, told a gathering of tribal leaders last week, to deafening applause. ''It's time to fight back."
Such calls for violence are being voiced against the backdrop of an alarming rise in tit-for-tat ethnic and sectarian killings. According to several Iraqi leaders, Shi'ite death squads routinely kill Sunnis suspected of ties to the Ba'ath Party or insurgency. Bands of Sunnis target Shi'ites in retaliation, Sunni political leaders like Adnan Pachachi said, suggesting that significant organizations, rather than small splintered cells of vigilantes, are driving the killing.
Sectarian killings are increasingly dominating the action on the ground in Iraq. Of course, the mainstream press isn't covering it that way. The risk of civil war has been present from the beginning. The Bush Administration's grandiose scheme to bring Democracy to Iraq has simply not produced an outcome other than sectarian violence. Since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, I have been concerned that the risk of withdrawal from Iraq has been the likelihood of civil war. Now it appears the US presense may not prevent it anyway.
Complete Article
Boston.com
The Boston Globe
Fractured Iraq sees a Sunni call to arms
By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff | March 27, 2005
BAGHDAD -- For the first time, Sunni Muslim sheiks are publicly exhorting followers to strike with force against ethnic Kurds and Shi'ites, an escalation in rhetoric that could exacerbate the communal violence that already is shaking Iraq's ethnic communities.
''The Americans aren't the problem; we're living under an occupation of Kurds and Shi'ites," Sattar Abdulhalik Adburahman, a Sunni leader from the northern city of Kirkuk, told a gathering of tribal leaders last week, to deafening applause. ''It's time to fight back."
Such calls for violence are being voiced against the backdrop of an alarming rise in tit-for-tat ethnic and sectarian killings.
According to several Iraqi leaders, Shi'ite death squads routinely kill Sunnis suspected of ties to the Ba'ath Party or insurgency. Bands of Sunnis target Shi'ites in retaliation, Sunni political leaders like Adnan Pachachi said, suggesting that significant organizations, rather than small splintered cells of vigilantes, are driving the killing.
Increasingly, terms like ''insurgency" and ''anti-Iraqi forces" favored by American officials here fail to fully describe much of the violence. Iraqi politicians say the worst violence is being carried out by Sunni fighters against Shi'ites and Kurds -- both civilians and those who work for security forces backed by the Iraqi government.
Sunnis have now started referring to an almost exclusively Sunni resistance front they call ''patriotic Arabs," who are retaliating against the Shi'ite-Kurd coalition that has driven the once dominant Sunni clique to the nation's political margins.
''There have been a lot of assassinations of people who were suspected of working for the previous regime. This has led to counter-assassinations," said Pachachi, whose secular, multiethnic platform opposed to sectarian violence failed to kindle a popular following in the Jan. 30 election. Now Pachachi is trying to position himself as a unifying figure for Sunni groups that feel excluded from the political process.
Last week, the Sunni sheiks openly called on tribal leaders to lend political and logistical support to Sunni fighters locked in what they see as a necessary fight for their survival as a minority in Iraq. Kurds and Shi'ites who together make up about 80 percent of Iraq's population, fear that such sectarian talk -- and action -- could explode into a pattern of ethnic carnage that could rend the Iraqi state.
''In hot areas, our dignity is humiliated every day," Sheik Amash Awad al-Obeidi, leader of 17,000 tribesmen in Ramadi, told the Sunni gathering, exhorting his fellow chiefs to concentrate on action, not endless political meetings. ''We are sinking in blood. Enough words."
Mistrust runs high among the three major groups -- Shi'ites, Kurds, and Sunnis -- each of them claiming higher-than-possible population figures.
Sunni sheiks claim that Iran sent millions of people across the border posing as Iraqi Shi'ites to pad the vote totals of Shi'ite Islamic parties during the recent election. Kurds accuse Sunnis in the north of voter fraud designed to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Kurds eager to undo decades of ''ethnic cleansing" under Saddam Hussein, and return to their homes in volatile places like the contested city of Kirkuk.
The Sunnis stand accused by both Kurds and Shi'ites of fomenting violence in their areas and then boycotting the elections so they could misrepresent the share of votes they claim they would have won.
All told, the bubbling rhetoric makes for rising tension that worries secular nationalists like Pachachi, who estimates that thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the spiral of sectarian assassinations.
''These things can become very indiscriminate," he said. ''The worst thing that can happen to this country is to have communal conflict between the various sects. We have to avoid that at all costs."
Most of the ethnic violence has been concentrated in three places: the area south of Baghdad known as the ''Triangle of Death," where killings mostly target Shi'ites; Kirkuk, the oil city split among Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen, and where Kurds control security and Arabs accuse them of a reign of terror; and Mosul, a northern city divided between Kurds and Arabs, where the bodies of murdered Arabs and Kurds turn up in public places with alarming regularity.
Dozens of community leaders have been slain in Mosul and Kirkuk. Kurds are particularly sensitive to accusations of ethnic repression because they were victims of Hussein's Anfal campaign in 1988, which killed at least 100,000 Kurds and displaced hundreds of thousands more.
Throughout the 1980s, the Ba'ath Party also systematically drove Kurds from Kirkuk in order to tip the city's ethnic balance in favor of Arabs. Kurds now will only support an Iraqi government that promises to reverse the ''ethnic cleansing" of Kirkuk -- an explosive issue for many Arabs.
''The Kurds are asking for Kirkuk. Later on they will start asking for Baghdad," said Sheik Abu D'ham, a Sunni tribal leader from Kirkuk who fears assassination if his full name is published. ''It was Saddam Hussein who gave the Kurds too much, more than they deserved."
Sooner rather than later, he said, the city's Arabs would rise up. ''The last remedy is burning," he said. ''There will be fighting."
The Sunnis gathered in Baghdad last week from such war-torn cities as Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Samarra to voice a heady blend of anti-American anger, ethnic rage, and support for the insurgency. Twice during the meeting, emissaries of Shi'ite leaders tried to speak, and both times they were shouted down.
''You are from a Shi'ite family. Why do you insert yourself into our affairs?" the man at the podium, Sheik Mohammed Mahmoud al-Mudaris, an official in the Iraqi Islamic Party, told one Shi'ite who tried to address the gathering.
''Fine, have it your way, Sunnis against Shi'ites," the Shi'ite man said as he stormed out of the conference hall. ''That's exactly what the Jews want."
Sunnis also fear that when Shi'ite political parties take over the government, they will purge from the security forces many Sunnis who are sympathetic to the tribes and to the resistance -- a move they warn will only further anger Sunnis.
Shi'ite leaders like Adil Abdel-Mahdi, a top official in the most powerful Shi'ite political party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, have encouraged such worries with promises to rout infiltrators from the Iraqi police and military.
''Whenever we find a corrupt person or a dangerous one we will remove him. That has not been done enough," Abdel-Mahdi said.
The roiling Sunni-Shi'ite divide could draw in millions of people. All the major cities in Iraq, from Basra in the south, to Baghdad, and to Mosul in the north, have sizeable Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish populations. It also plays out against the backdrop of a growing Sunni-Shi'ite schism throughout the Arab world.
Since the fall of Hussein's government opened the way for the Shi'ite majority to enter Iraqi politics, Shi'ites throughout the Arab world have agitated for more rights, particularly in nations like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
In the past two years, Shi'ite leaders in Iraq have openly attacked Sunni-led governments that cozied up to Hussein's regime and now keep silent about the constant waves of terrorist attacks in Iraq. Jordan and Iraq even withdrew their respective ambassadors last week after it was reported that the suicide bomber who killed 125 Shi'ites in Iraq in February was a Jordanian.
''Why should we be killed, in Mosul, in Baghdad, and everywhere, and nobody in the Arab world says a word?" Jalaluddin al-Saghir, the Shi'ite imam of Boratha mosque in Baghdad, demanded at Friday prayers.
After the service, a group of Shi'ite men discussed the prospects of wider ethnic war in Iraq.
''We lived together peacefully for so many years, but now the conflict has started," said Ali al-Dabagh, a 40-year-old engineer. ''We have wise leadership on both sides. They are trying to calm things down, and hopefully it will not go out of control."
Next to him, Jalal A'ati Sahaib, 44, a taxi driver, blamed the internecine killings on outsiders. But then he said: ''One day the opposite side will quit. They will tire of the killing. They will realize how much patience we have."
Added Dabagh: ''Hopefully this will not lead to a civil war."
Globe correspondent Shamil Aziz contributed reporting from Baghdad. Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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