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The Current Violence in Iraq: The Roots and the Anatomy |
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Tuesday, 18 April 2006 |
Four months after the last election, which resulted in the election of a four-year permanent parliament that was supposed to bring a new executive to start the urgent job of tackling the now very desperate situation in the country. The parliament itself has convened only once for the swearing in of its members. Today, after exactly four months there is still no government, which is leaving the country in a dangerous vacuum and fueling an already very lethal violence and threatening its development into a full blown civil war. Violence is an extremely complicated topic and the violence that is currently clenching Iraq following its invasion and occupation by the Americans in March 2003 is even more complicated, a reasonable discussion of it is impossible to cover in the limited space of one letter. Today, I am talking about the roots of the current violence in Iraq and the various groups which make up the physical structure of this phenomenon to be followed up in few days time by a second piece on the methods and objectives of this unholy alliance.
Violence refers to acts of aggression and abuse that causes injury to an individual or to a group of people by physical, chemical or other injurious agents. Violence falls into two forms, random, which includes small-scale violence and coordinated violence, which are actions, carried out by unsanctioned violent groups. Violence is a deviant behavior that results from a lack of mother child bonding, repression of sexuality, punishment and abuse of children. Violence is a phenomenon of the last ten thousand years; it was not present in pre-and early post-domestication humanity. Violence has been a characteristic of man since he became "civilized", our hunter-gatherer ancestors were peaceful and non-violent. Mesopotamia has been from the days of Sumer a very turbulent land. The Sumerian civilization lasted about a thousand years and saw its centers move from one city to another a result of internal conflicts and attacks by outsiders who were lured by its aptitude and wealth. It was finally extinguished and the centers of civilization moved to the west and for almost 4,000 years this land became the battleground for outsiders, but it regained a lot of its glory with the rise of Islam and reached during the days of the Abbasids what was called the golden age, but the golden age was not all gold, there has been conflicts and great turbulence like the sunni-shi'ite schism, a conflict which is still reverberating. The golden age itself was trampled under the feet of hordes of Mongols who ransacked Baghdad in 1254 and went into a week of frenzied killing and looting and burning and left the city smoldering in heaps of death and destruction and turned the place once again into a battleground for foreign powers until the arrival of the Ottoman Empire which ruled this land as part of its foreign dominions to the end of the first World War when Iraq came under a British mandate as part of their deal with the French on the allocation of the assets of the defeated Empire when another very turbulent century started in this country.
Britain invaded Iraq at the beginning of the First World War which they justified as a necessity to protect their oil interests in neighboring Iran and their access to the gulf’s shipping lanes leading to India. Many Iraqis welcomed the British in the beginning with open hands who vowed to end five centuries of ottoman rule which has grown very corrupt and economically stifling.
“Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators” proclaimed General Stanley Maude the commander of the British forces as his troops marched into Baghdad in 1917.
The British never intended to leave Iraq, oil was figuring very significantly in their strategic planning and Iraq already smelled of a lot of oil, they were able to acquire from the League of Nations a mandate to administer it. Britain’s stay in Iraq was not a picnic, it was marred by nationalist fervor, ethnic uprisings, tribal conflicts which finally led to kicking them out of the country at the hands of Brigadier Qassem who led a group of middle ranking middle class group of officers in a military coup against them and the Hashemite monarchy which they were backing during the early hours of 14th July 1958 the coup was associated with an incredible brutality during which most of the members of the royal family and many of their supporters were murdered with their corpses dragged in the streets by a very jubilant mob. But the fall of the monarchy did not bring stability or progress; Qassem relied on the Communists who clashed viciously with the nationalists, which resulted in a great loss of life and very serious polarization of the country. Amongst the nationalists was the budding Ba’ath party who succeeded on the 8th of February 1963 in toppling Qassem, who was executed after a summary trial. After gaining power the Ba'athists unleashed an unprecedented reign of terror against the Communist and their allies, a blood bath very reminiscent of the Mongols few centuries earlier.
Now a Youngman who was trained during his stay in Cairo, had reorganized the party according to his personal and tribal principles arranged a bloodless transfer of power from the hands of the second Aref on the 17th of July 1968. His name was Saddam Hussein and who gathered all power in his hands and ruled unchallenged for 35 years until he was finally deposed when the Americans invaded the country in 2003. Saddam's years in power were brutal and extremely violent. A great deal has been said about Saddam's rule and I am not going to go into that history now, I am going to talk about the daily murders of innocent men and women and children, the throat cutting and beheadings and the indiscriminate destruction of sacred property and religious institutions which are perpetrated by some Iraqis and their Arab and non-Arab brothers
The current violence in Iraq is an extremely complex phenomenon; it is not like anything that has previously happened in this land the earlier ones had clear-cut structures, methods and objectives. The structure of the various groups which make up the body of the current bloodshed is often very hard to distinguish and define, their methods and their objectives are as diverse as the diversity of the Iraqi society itself and what is going to happen in the future is even more difficult to predict. The current violence is the work of at least four different groups which are separate entities each with its own sponsors, its connections its own organization and methods, but there are often tactical but transient alliances amongst some of them. The backbone of the violence which the Americans lump under one heading, the insurgency is naïve, a very mistaken approach and a great simplification the backbone of this violence are four distinguishable entities two with very clear backing and objectives, another two which are patchworks of stifling loyalties and alliances.
The first is the Zarqawi group, this is an offshoot of the Bin Laden's Al Qaeda the international terror organization which is carrying on an all out war against the Christian west that it accuses of engaging in a new crusade against Islam. This war is very vicious with no rules of engagement and no moral or ethical restraints, which has already claimed the lives of thousands of people all around the world and the destruction of major assets in America in Spain in Britain and some other countries. The Al Qaeda is reminiscent of the assains [the hashashins] the secret society that was founded and flourished in northwestern Iran during the 11th century by Hassn Sabah [1040-1124] [the old man of the mountains] which gained a lot of power and strength but was finally destroyed by the Mongols in 1256. The Zarqawi group is intent on creating as much chaos and destruction to prevent the Americans from achieving their goals in Iraq and zarqawi has already engineered some really terrible atrocities, Zarqawi poses the most serious dangers and his organization is the most lethal and poses the thorniest threats to this country, its security and its future.
There are as I have already mentioned three more groups with varying sizes connections and lethality. The second group is composed of various militias, which belong mainly to the Shiite parties that are engaged in very serious violence themselves. The third group are the remnants of the previous regime and are themselves two parts, the remains of the previous ba'ath party under the titular head of its previous sub chairman which is financed by money the stole and embezzled when they were in power, a number of rag tag collection of individuals who belonged to the various security organizations who are conducting a freelance terror for personal gains relying on the knowledge and information they have picked up when the old regime collapsed. The last group is a collection of small units each one is made of a small number of Iraqi nationals of various ethnicities and religion who are active all over the country but they lack a unified leadership, their aim is to dislodge the invaders and free their country from the foreign occupation.
I am going to stop now and will try to finish this essay next week when I will be elaborating on some of the points I raised today especially those regarding the anatomy the methods and the objectives of the current violence. This piece has already exceeded the length of a regular hanoudiletter, but I want to stress again that the most serious member and most difficult to deal with of this unholy assortment is Zarqawi and his group. Meanwhile the violence is escalating and claiming dozens of deaths every day with an unimaginable level of destruction while the politicians are still haggling over who is going to be the next prime minister. All of this is deepening the crisis into which our country has been plunged in and threatens the escalation of the current violence into an all out civil war, or encourage a military takeover opening the way to a new Saddam style dictatorship.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Amman/Jordan
Friday, April 14, 2006
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