Iraq’s Night is Long

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/17/iraqs-night-is-long/

"Iraq’s night is long
Dawn breaks only to the murdered,
Praying half a prayer and never finishing a greeting to anyone.”
Mahmoud Darwish, Athar al-Farasha (tr. Sinan Antoon).

Iraq’s Night is Long
by VIJAY PRASHAD
June 17, 2014

Northern Iraq, between the Kurdish zone and Baghdad, convulsed before the blitzkrieg of three formations — the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the Iraqi Islamic Army (manned by former Ba’athists) and elements of the former Mujahedin Shura Council. Like the Mongols, ISIS – the main force – runs across the landscape unchecked. It did not take long for Iraqi army soldiers to throw off their uniforms and join the caravans of Iraqis fleeing north and south from along the Tigris River cities of Mosul and Tikrit as well as from the western city of Tal Afar – along the road that links Iraq to Syria. Those Iraqi soldiers captured by the ISIS and their confederates had a perilous time. ISIS soldiers divided them up by their sectarian denominations. Before their own video cameras, ISIS troops slaughtered the Shia soldiers – 1700 by their own admission – and then posted the video on-line. Sunni soldiers were forced, on pain of death, to recite their fealty to the eternal Islamic State. The UN Human Rights chief, Navi Pillay, has already said that these killings constitute a war crime.

ISIS is the leading force in this new adventure, but it is not alone. Next to it is the Iraqi Islamic Army, led by Saddam Hussein’s former deputy Izzat al-Dori Ibrahim, and the Muslim Ulema Association. What unites these three forces – al-Qaeda extremists, Ba’athists and decamped Iraqi military personnel – is despair at Iraqi premier Nouri al-Maliki’s sectarianism and the failures of the Iraqi state to draw in the largely Sunni towns that run up the River Tigris from Baghdad. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, said in February that Iraq “is ruled by wolves, thirsty for blood, souls that are eager for wealth, leaving their nation in suffering, in fear, in water puddles, in dark nights, lightened only by moonlight or a candle, swamped by assassinations based on differences or after ridiculous disagreements.” He left for Iran, fed up with the politics and violence in his land. This despair is what gave ISIS the opportunity to build its bases in northern Iraq.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the rise of ISIS is not related to the Iraq War of 2003, but to the western inaction in Syria. But ISIS was born in 2004, first as al-Qaeda in Iraq under the leadership of the bloodthirsty Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then two years later it was reborn as Islamic State of Iraq. Slow growth in the small towns of northern Iraq amidst former Iraqi military men and hardened Ba’athists helped the Islamic State grow despite the US destruction of the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, and the Sunni Awakening movement of 2005. As interest in the Sunni Awakening waned in Washington and Baghdad, its fighters joined the Islamic State. These are veterans of the insurgency against the US-UK occupation of Iraq. They had nothing to do with Syria.

When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, it was the Islamic State in Iraq under its dynamic leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – as al-Akhbar’s Radwan Mortada found – that helped set up the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. Over the course of 2012 and 2013, ISIS and al-Nusra began to fall out, as the latter felt that it had authority over Syria and wanted Syrians to be doing the bulk of the fighting in that country. The Islamic State expanded its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, increasing its fighters with imports from across the world. By early 2014, there might have been as many as a hundred thousand fighters who were willing to fight under the colors of ISIS. Most are not jihadis, as I found, but disgruntled veterans of the Sunni Awakening and its type of outfits. ISIS provided the best vehicle for their frustrations.