After Minority Rule, Iraq’s Sunnis Refuse Minority Role

Another example of how Cheney-Rumsfeld created a powder keg with no end or resolution insight. This, of course, in addition of the tens of thousands killed, maimed, displaces.. Not to mention the millions of dollars that were just blown in the wind.

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By Yaroslav Trofimov

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A minority that dominated or ruled Iraq for centuries until the U.S. invasion brought Shiites to power 12 years ago, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs aren’t just refusing to accept their loss of status. They also, by and large, reject the basic demographic reality on which any feasible power-sharing deal could be built.

Such a deal is indispensable to eradicate Islamic State, also known as ISIS. The group seized most of Iraq’s Sunni belt last summer, riding a wave of discontent with the Shiite-dominated central government in Baghdad. Despite recent advances by Shiite militias and government forces on Tikrit, most of that Sunni belt—including Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul—remains under Islamic State’s sway.

“ISIS is a problem, but it is a symptom of a bigger problem between Sunnis and Shiites,” said Robert Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington who served as a U.S. diplomat in Iraq between 2003 and 2010, and then as American ambassador to Syria. “If there is no reconciliation, you will never control Islamic State. Wherever the Sunnis are, the Islamic State will be there.”

Nobody knows for sure how Iraq’s population is divided between its three main components: the Arab Shiites, the Arab Sunnis, and the predominantly Sunni Kurds, who control an autonomous region in the north. The political implications of this question have repeatedly scuttled plans to hold a census after Saddam’s downfall.

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The dominance of Iraq’s Sunni elites goes back to the Ottoman Empire, in which what is now Iraq was a borderland abutting the rival Shiite empire in Iran. The privileged role of Sunni Arabs was strengthened by the British colonial powers and, with the Sunni preponderance in the officer class, continued through the history of independent Iraq. By empowering the Shiite majority for the first time, the 2003 U.S. invasion upended what many Sunnis have come to see as Iraq’s natural order—and sparked violent resistance to the new Baghdad authorities that continues until now.

“When the Americans came, they put the Shiites in power and the Sunnis in prison,” said Mehdi al-Sumeidaie, the imam of Baghdad’s Sunni Umm al-Tuboul mosque who was jailed together with Islamic State’s current leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in the U.S.-run Camp Bucca detention facility in south Iraq.

The pursuit of a Shiite sectarian agenda by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki following the U.S. withdrawal in 2011 was a key reason why Islamic State, also known under its Arabic acronym Daesh, managed to sweep through Sunni areas of the country last summer, encountering little resistance.

More..

http://www.wsj.com/articles/iraqs-sunnis-dont-accept-minority-role-1428571127