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Middle East
THE ROVING
EYE The Sunni-Shi'ite power
play By Pepe Escobar
Iraqis
are not fighting one another - at least not yet: they are
fighting the occupying power, although with different
strategies. After Fallujah, this situation is about to
change.
For the average Iraqi,
Sunni or Shi'ite - and Americans underestimate Iraqi
national pride at their peril - there's no question:
the current Sunni resistance morally prevails, because
they are Iraqis fighting an invader/occupier. This
means the US occupation in essence lost even before it
began. Defining the resistance as "anti-Iraqi forces" - as
the Pentagon does - is nonsense: they are a
legitimate popular resistance movement, while the US-trained
Iraqi police are largely identified for what they are
- collaborationists doing the dirty work of
Iraqification, the Mesopotamian version of failed Vietnamization.
Hundreds of these US-trained forces ran away before the
battle even started in Fallujah. No wonder: they were
resistance moles. And most of Mosul's police also
defected.
The resistance is now spread out
all over the Sunni heartland - contradicting US marine
talk that the assault on Fallujah "broke the back of
the resistance". Added proof that the resistance
is indigenous is that of more than 1,000 men between
the ages of 15 and 55 who the Pentagon says were
captured in Fallujah - there's no independent confirmation; only
15 have been confirmed as "foreign fighters", according
to General George Casey, the top US ground commander.
And these "foreigners" are mostly Saudis, Jordanians or
Syrians, described by Iraqis themselves as "our Arab
brothers", members of the large Arab nation. The real
"foreign fighters" in Iraq are the Americans.
Anger in Sunni-dominated Baghdad has reached a
fever pitch, as an Iraqi physician told a radio station
he has examined bodies of people who seem to have died
of banned chemical weapons: the bodies are swollen,
are yellowish and have no smell. Asia Times Online sources
in Baghdad say that people in Fallujah believe the
Americans may have used chemical weapons in the bombing
of Jolan, ash-Shuhada and al-Jubayl neighborhoods. They
also say the neighborhoods were showered with cluster
bombs.
The political war The
Sunni Iraqi resistance is battling a political war. For
the mujahideen, the stakes are clear: under the
current US-imposed situation, the Shi'ites will be in
power after elections scheduled for January. Saif al-Deen
al-Baghdadi, a hardcore Sunni Salafi and top member
of the resistance in Mosul, has qualified the Iyad
Allawi government as representing "the fundamentalist
right wing of the White House and not the
Iraqi people". Apart from the "clash of fundamentalisms"
implicit in this observation, the fact is that for the
resistance, softcore or hardcore, the Shi'ites are being
propelled to power by an alliance of fundamentalists -
Washington plus US-backed Allawi.
The Shi'ites
are not doing enough to calm Sunni anger. When Shi'ite
leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani spoke out against
the Fallujah offensive, it was too late. In fact, the
one who spoke was Sistani's top man in Karbala, Ahmad
al-Safi al-Najafi, who told thousands at the Imam
Hussein Mosque that Sistani viewed the assault on
Fallujah as he viewed the assault on Najaf: he favored a
peaceful solution, he called for the withdrawal of
"foreign forces" (the Americans) and he condemned the
death of innocent civilians.
The Sunni-Shi'ite divide is not
monolithic. The powerful Sunni Association of Muslim
Scholars (AMS) - founded after the fall of Saddam
Hussein - is closely coordinating with the
lumpenproletariat
-based movement of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr.
But events in Fallujah have set
the political landscape on fire - with the AMS urging
all Iraqis to boycott the January elections. At the
lavish golden-and-marble Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad -
built by Saddam and previously called "Mother of all
Battles" - the AMS managed to rally 47 political parties,
not only Sunni Islamist but eight Shi'ite parties,
one Christian, the Iraqi Turkmen Front and the
Communist Party. Their joint communique condemns the elections
as "imposed by the US-backed interim government
and rejected by a clear majority of political and
religious powers"; stresses that "the US raids against
Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, Mosul, Baghdad and more
recently Fallujah represent an obstacle to the
political participation in the occupied country"; and
qualifies the attack on Fallujah as "genocide". The whole
idea comes from Sheikh Jawad al-Khalissi, a Shi'ite, who is
a descendent of one of the leaders of the 1920 revolt
against the British colonial power. In Iraq, history
does repeat itself in many ways.
The AMS is
making it very clear to all Sunni Iraqis - and to all
Iraqis for that matter - that Fallujah had nothing to do
with "stabilizing" the country before elections, as the
Pentagon and Allawi have claimed. And support for the
AMS is increasing fast, especially after the Americans
arrested seven of its leading members. On a parallel
front, the Americans also arrested seven aides to Sheikh
al-Hasani, the leader of a splinter group of Muqtada's
movement. The popular response was swift: this past
Wednesday more than 3,000 people demonstrated in front
of the Green Zone in Baghdad demanding their release.
To boycott or not to boycott? What is
Muqtada up to? Hashim al-Musawi, one of his top aides,
told a crowd in front of Kufa's mosque this week that
they will also boycott the elections because in Fallujah
the Americans "violated all human values enshrined in
the Geneva Convention". This may be a diversionary
tactic. Asia Times Online contacts in Baghdad confirm
that Muqtada is frantically negotiating with Sistani:
the crucial point is how many parliament seats Muqtada
will get if he joins a united list of all major Shi'ite
parties in the January elections. The Grand Ayatollah is
putting all his efforts to consolidate this list. And he
is adamantly in favor of conducting the elections on
schedule.
The key question is how extensive a
Sunni boycott would be. If the absolute majority of
Sunnis - up to 30% of the population - don't vote, plus
some Shi'ite factions, the elections have no legitimacy.
The Kurds are also extremely nervous. With a boycott,
most of the 275 seats will be Shi'ite: the Kurds would
get around 30 - with no Sunni Arab allies to counteract
what many in Baghdad are already defining as the tyranny
of a Shi'ite majority.
As for Prime Minister Allawi, his Iraqi
National Accord is a mixed bag of Sunni and Shi'ite
ex-Ba'athists. Allawi does not want to be part of the
Sistani list. This may be a blessing in disguise for
Iraqis, because in this case Allawi may not even be
elected to parliament: his little party has scant
popular legitimacy. And his "political capital" after
Fallujah is zero: not only did he authorize the
massacre, but he installed martial law, muzzled the
press and exacerbated the inherent contradiction of his
position - how to behave as a strong leader when you
depend on an occupying army.
It's important to
note that not a single party - and especially the
Shi'ite parties - represented in Allawi's "cabinet"
condemned Fallujah. Their collective game is to blame
the whole disaster on Allawi alone. But that may not be
enough to placate Sunni anger.
At the moment,
with fighting in Fallujah still raging, and the
resistance hitting all over the heartland, this is how
Sunni Iraq is reading what the Americans say: If you
fight us, we will kill you. And if you don't participate
in our elections, you go to jail. No wonder the
resistance keeps growing.
To stay or to go?
Imagine a Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government
next January having to face a widespread Sunni guerrilla
movement with only a ragged bunch of
guerrilla-infiltrated Iraqi security forces. Who're you
gonna call? The marines?
The Sistani-blessed
government may ask the Americans to go. The Bush II
administration will obviously say no. The
Sistani-blessed government may launch selected raids
against the resistance: not likely to break its back.
Moreover, in the eyes of most Iraqis, the
Sistani-blessed government cannot even afford to not ask
the Americans to pack up and go. Sistani knows Shi'ites
are anti-occupation: nobody will tolerate a
Sistani-blessed government "protected" by an occupying
army. Not to mention this would prove the point now
stressed by the Sunni resistance: the Shi'ites are
allied with American "fundamentalists".
This
leaves an ominous prospect in place: an Iraqi Shi'ite,
Sistani-blessed government fighting a widespread Sunni
guerrilla resistance in a bloody civil war.
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