As Iraqis Protest against State, Tribes Make a Comebackhttps://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2029221/iraqis-protest-against-state-tribes-make-comeback
As Iraqis Protest against State, Tribes Make a Comeback
Iraq's tribes have once again become one of the most powerful actors in the rural and oil-rich south. (AFP)
Iraqi protesters have clashed with police and torched government offices, a premier has resigned and precious blood spilt. As modern institutions collapse, a centuries-old force is making a comeback: Iraq's tribes.
With their own hierarchies, moral and justice codes, not to mention huge arms caches, tribes have once again become among the most powerful actors in Iraq's rural and oil-rich south.
They have a history of revolt, turning against the British colonizing forces in a major boost to the 1920 uprising that led to the country's independence.
A century later, revolution has hit Iraq again.
Baghdad and the Shiite-majority region have been rocked by two months of the worst unrest since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
Anti-regime protesters have burned state headquarters and party offices in outrage at corruption, poor public services and Iran's perceived political interference.
It has been the perfect storm in which Iraq's tribes could reassert their leadership, said Phillip Smyth of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In recent years, many Shiites had "become more urbanized and have loosened up their identity when it comes to being tribal," he said.
Youth, which make up 60 percent of Iraq's 40 million people, were particularly prone to look outward and shed their tribal identities.
"But the reason the tribes have a lot more strength now is that you have a very weak central government and an outside power -- the Iranians -- that is viewed as being complicit with this government," Smyth told AFP.
"These guys are looking at this and saying, let's revert back to sources of power that we know," he added.
Trusting the tribes
Nasiriyah in southern Iraq is a prime example.
Authorities dispatched commander Jamil al-Shammary late last month to snuff out widespread rallies in the city.
But tribal fighters then came out in force, cutting off roads to prevent troops from reaching Nasiriyah.
They negotiated a halt to the bloodshed, which had already cost 97 lives since protests erupted in October.
"It was the tribes that found a solution to the crisis while the politicians did nothing," said Qaysar al-Husseinawi, a leading figure in Nasiriyah's Husseinat tribe.
Their role did not stop there: the clans are also seeking justice for around 100 families pursuing legal cases against Shammary, himself a member of a powerful tribe.
Shammary's clan has excommunicated him over the crackdown.
Tribal tradition dictates that "blood money" must be paid to the victims' families -- otherwise they have the right to seek equally violent vengeance.
Tribal law
Influential clan structures have so far intervened to end bloodshed but if they choose to take up arms, many in the south expect full-blown conflict.
One police officer told AFP he'd rather desert than fight them.
"The state could never protect its own men against tribal law," he said.
Indeed, tribal tradition often trumps state law in Iraq, with accused criminals being released after tribal talks and even marital disputes resolved by mediators.
The tribes blend modern life and centuries-old tradition, with sheikhs juggling two iPhones while ordering wave after wave of sugary tea be served to their guests.
In the southernmost province of Basra, armed tribe members have often shut the streets outside national or even international oil companies to demand well-paid jobs there.
"The social bargain of any tribe is that the sheikh is a river to his people," providing them with work, justice and stability, said Nicholas Heras of the Center for a New American Security, a think-tank in Washington.
So naturally, the widespread upheaval in recent weeks over unemployment and poor services touched tribes, too.
"Tribal anger is directed at leaders in Baghdad that are viewed as having not kept their part of the social bargain," Heras told AFP.
'Bridges burned'
The British colonizing forces had a tribal revolt on their hands in the early 1900s after they arrested a tribal sheikh over a tax issue.
Nearly a century later, tribal support for the anti-government movement can also be linked to a push-back against central government authority in distant Baghdad.
But resolving the dispute won't be so simple.
"A lot of bridges have been burned," said Smyth.
"If you have people fundamentally angry at how institutions are corrupt, mismanaged and just bad, you won't just get bought off with a job," he added.
The government may seek to appease tribes with offers of more jobs or services, but there is no guarantee they could keep their support for long.
"You can never buy tribal groupings," said Smyth, pointing to their often shifting tactical allegiances.
A Saddam Hussein mural is seen in Baghdad in 1991. (Getty Images)
People in Iraq often wonder dejectedly: What if Saddam Hussein were alive and ruling the country today? Many will reply with fantastical answers, but Saddam’s era would have responded: Iraq is isolated, either by siege or by a war that he launched or was being waged against him.
Many people cast doubt on whether actual change has been achieved in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003. The invasion ousted the Baath version of Iraq and Saddam was executed in December 2006, leaving questions to pile up over the years with no one having any answers.
After a quarter century, Iraq is accumulating questions. It casts them aside and forges ahead without addressing them. At best, it reviews itself and returns to that moment in April 2003 when the US launched its invasion. Or it asks new questions about the 2005 civil war, the armed alternatives that emerged in 2007, how ISIS swept through the country in 2014, or the wave of protests that erupted in 2019. It also asks new questions about Iran’s influence in the country that has persisted for decades.
The questions are many and none of the Iraqis have answered them.
A US marine wraps the American flag around the head of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad. (Reuters file)
Saddam and the alternative
The September 11, 2001, attacks shook the United States and the entire world. They struck fear in Baghdad. Saddam had that year claimed that he had written a book, “The Fortified Castle”, about an Iraqi soldier who is captured by Iran. He manages to escape and return to Iraq to “fortify the castle”.
The terrifying Saddam and the terrified Iraqis have long spun tales about escaping to and from Iraq. It is a journey between the question and the non-answers. That year, when Baghdad was accused of being complicit in the 9/11 attacks, Saddam’s son Uday was “elected” member of the Baath party’s leadership council. The move sparked debate about possible change in Iraq. Bashar al-Assad had a year earlier inherited the presidency of Syria and its Baath party from his father Hafez.
The US invaded Iraq two years later and a new Iraq was born. Twenty-five years later, the country is still not fully grown up. Twenty-one years ago, on April 9, 2003, a US marine wrapped the head of a Saddam statue in Baghdad with an American flag. The Iraqis asked: why didn’t you leave us this iconic image, but instead of an American flag, used an Iraqi one?
Baghdad’s question and Washington’s answer
As the Iraqis observe the developments unfold in Syris with the ouster of Bashar from power, they can’t help but ask how this rapid “change” could have been possible without US tanks and weapons. Why are the Syrians insisting on celebrating “freedom” every day? They are also astonished at the Syrians who scramble to greet Abu Mohammed al-Golani, who has not yet managed to put this image behind him and fully assume his original identity of Ahmed al-Sharaa. The Iraqis wonder how the Syrians are managing this transition so far without a bloodbath.
They ask these questions because the Iraqis view and judge the world based on their own memories. They keep asking questions and await answers from others instead of themselves.
The Iraqis recall how in August 2003, after four months of US occupation, that the Jordanian embassy and United Nations offices were attacked, leaving several staff dead, including head of the UN mission Sergio de Mello. The Americans arrested Ali Hassan al-Majid, or “chemical Ali”, Saddam’s cousin, and 125 people were killed in a bombing in al-Najaf, including Shiite cleric Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim.
During that bloody month, the Iraqis asked questions about security, forgetting about Saddam’s alternative, democracy and the promised western model. Later, the facts would answer that the question of security was a means to escape questions about transitional justice.
Sergio de Mello (r) and Paul Bremmer (second right) attend the inaugural meeting of the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad on July 13, 2003. (Getty Images)
The question of civil war
Paul Bremer, the American ruler of Iraq, once escorted four opposition figures to Saddam’s prison cell. They flooded him with questions. Adnan al-Pachachi, a veteran diplomat, asked: “Why did you invade Kuwait?” Adel Abdul Mahdi, a former prime minister, asked: “Why did you kill the Kurds in the Anfal massacre?” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a former national security adviser, asked: “Why did you kill your Baath comrades?” Ahmed al-Halabi simply insulted the former president. Saddam recoiled and then just smiled.
Saddam’s opponents left the prison cell with answers that should have helped them in running the transitional justice administration, but they failed.
The following year, Washington appointed Ayad Allawi to head the interim Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) that had limited jurisdiction so that it could be free to wage two fierce battles: one in Najaf against the “Mahdi Army”, headed by Moqtada al-Sadr, and the other against armed groups comprised of “resistance fighters” and “extremists” in Fallujah.
The opposition in the IGC got to work that was already prepared by the Americans. They outlined the distribution of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds in the country, with historic questions about the majority and minority, and the “oppressed” now assuming rule after the ouster of the “oppressors”.
On the ground, the Ghazaliya neighborhood in western Baghdad with its Shiite and Sunni residents was in store for a bloodbath. On a winter night in 2005, an entire family was massacred and an enfant strangled to death. Soon after, lines drawing the Shiite and Sunni sections of the neighborhood emerged. The popular market became the tense border between the two halves. Two new rival “enemies” traded attacks, claiming several lives.
In Baghdad’s Green Zone, the IGC drew up a draft of the transitional rule. In January 2005, 8 million Iraqis voted for the establishment of a National Assembly.
Meanwhile, different “armies” kept on emerging in Baghdad. The media was filled with the death tolls of bloody relentless sectarian attacks. Checkpoints manned by masked gunmen popped up across the capital.
Those days seemed to answer the question of “who was the alternative to Saddam.” No one needed a concrete answer because the developments spoke for themselves.
Nouri al-Maliki came to power as prime minister in 2006. He famously declared: “I am the state of law” - in both the figurative and literal sense. Iraqis believed he had answers about the “state” and “law”, dismissing the very pointed “I” in his “manifesto”.
Nouri al-Maliki. (Getty Images)
The Maliki question
The American admired Maliki. Then Vice President Dick Cheney had repeatedly declared that he was committed to the establishment of a stable Iraq. Before that however, he had dispatched James Steele - who was once complicit in running dirty wars in El Salvador in the mid-1980s - to Baghdad to confront the “Sunni rebellion”. Steele set up the Shiite “death squads”. Steele was the man in the shadows behind Ahmed Kazim, then interior minister undersecretary, and behind him stood the new warlords.
In 2006, the political process was shaken by the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra. Questions were asked about the “need” to draw up new maps. Shiite high authority Ali al-Sistani said in February 2007 that the Sunnis were not involved in the attack. In July 2013, Maliki denied an American accusation that Tehran was behind it.
In those days, Maliki’s ego was growing ever bigger, and Steele’s death squads were rapidly growing greater in numbers.
The Iran and ISIS questions
Maliki tried to save himself as one city after another fell into the hands of ISIS. On June 9, 2014, as ISIS was waging battles in Mosul, Maliki met with senior Sunni tribal elders based on advice he had not heeded earlier and which could have averted the current disaster.
It was said that he made reluctant pledges to them and a third of Iraq later fell in ISIS’ hands. Sistani later issued a fatwa for “jihad” against the group, which later turned out not be aimed at saving the premier.
Maliki left the scene and Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, took over. Successive prime ministers would know from then on what it is like to be shackled by Tehran’s pressure as IRGC officials made regular visits to their offices.
Soleimani reaped what Steele sowed. By 2017, armed factions were the dominant force in Iraq. Running in their orbit were other factions that took turns in “rebelling” against the government or agreeing with its choices.
Today, and after 14 years, Iran has consolidated what can be described as the “resistance playground” in Iraq that is teeming with armed factions and massive budgets.
Protesters in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square in October 2019. (AFP)
The October question
The Iraqis were unable to answer the ISIS question and the armed factions claimed “victory” against the group. Many ignored Sistani’s “answer” about whether the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) was there to protect Iraq or just its Shiites.
Exhausted Iraqis asked: “What next?”
Next came Adel Abdul Mahdi’s government in October 2018. It was weighed down by unanswered questions and a year later, thousands of youths took to the streets to protest the state of affairs in Iraq, specifically the dominance of armed groups.
They were met with live bullets. Many were abducted and others were silenced. Abdul Mehdi acquitted the killers, saying instead that a “fifth column” had carried out the bloody crackdown on protesters.
After he left office, some Iraqi politicians were brave enough to tell the truth, dismissing former PM’s acquittal and pinning blame on the factions.
Sistani called for PMF members to quit their partisan affiliations. His demand was left unheeded. Mustafa al-Qadhimi became prime minister in May 2020. He left office months later, also failing in resolving the issue of the PMF and armed factions.
By 2022, everyone had left the scene, but Iran remained, claiming the Iraqi crown for itself, controlling everything from its finances to its weapons.
Question about post-Assad Syria
On December 8, Syria’s Bashar fled the country. Everyone in Iraq is asking what happens next. The whole system in Iraq is at a loss: Do we wait for how Tehran will deal with Ahmed al-Sharaa, or do we ask Abu Mohammed al-Golani about his memories in Iraq?
The Iraqi people’s memories are what’s ruling the country, more so than the constitution, political parties and civil society because they are burdened with questions they don’t want to answer.
And yet they ask: What if we weren’t part of the “Axis of Resistance”? Iraq’s history would reply that it has long been part of axes, or either awaiting a war or taking part in them.
