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| By eKurd.net |
Iraq has long been a religious, ethnic and
ideological mosaic difficult to rule as a united entity, and Saddam Hussein's
removal did little to change that.
In 1919, there were no Iraqi people. History,
religion and geography pulled the people apart, not together.
Basra looked south, towards India and the Gulf, Baghdad
had strong links with Persia [Iran], and Mosul had closer ties with Syria.
And the current war in Syria, Iraq’s next-door
neighbor, has helped reignite the Sunnite-led insurgency in northern and
western Iraq, especially in Mosul and the Anbar Province.
Gunmen yesterday killed two soldiers, injured
another and kidnapped three more in
Anbar after seven protesters were shot dead and 60 others injured by army gunfire
in Fallujah.
The attacks on soldiers
came as mourners buried the Sunnite protesters felled a day earlier.
The army said the
protesters were trying to cut off an international highway linking Iraq with
neighboring Jordan and Syria.
The tit for tat killings
in Anbar Province, which makes up roughly one-third of Iraq's territory, are the first since
mass protests against the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki began five weeks ago in Baghdad and western Iraq.
A demonstration followed
the burials during which protesters shouted: “Listen Maliki, we are free
people” and “Take your lesson from Bashar,” a reference to Syria’s embattled
President Bashar al-Assad.
The protesters accuse Maliki
of being “Iran’s man in Iraq” and his government of discriminating against
Sunnite Arabs, saying they are treated as second-class citizens.
Their leaders’ demands
range from Maliki's removal to the release of hundreds of women detainees
and the suspension of an anti-terrorism law that Sunnites believe has been
abused by authorities to target their sect unfairly.
The Sunnite protests broke
out in December after Finance Minister Rafei el-Essawi's bodyguards and staff
were detained on terrorism charges. Sunni leaders saw the arrests as part of a
sustained crackdown on their sect by Iraq's Shiite leadership.
In December 2011, another
crisis erupted after Maliki sought the arrest of Sunnite Vice-President Tariq
el-Hashemi, accused by the prime minister of running death squads. He fled the
country and was later sentenced to death in absentia.
Complicating the attempts
to ease Sunnite protests, the government -- made up of Shiite, Sunnite and
Kurdish blocs -- is also caught in a standoff over oil with autonomous
Kurdistan in the north.
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| Abdelghani Ali Yehya |
Abdelghani
Ali Yehya, a Kurdish political analyst and prominent writer who heads the
Journalists Union of Kurdistan, says today’s Iraq has already “splintered
in three, but out of sight.”
In
his think piece for the leading Saudi daily Asharq
Alawsat, he begins by quoting from a memo written by Iraq’s King Faisal, the first
(1921- 1933) monarch in the country’s modern era.
The
1925 memo was addressed to a commission mandated by the League of Nations to look
into a dispute over the Mosul region between Turkey and the British
protectorate of Iraq.
"Heartbrokenly,” King Faisal wrote, “I can
say there is no Iraqi people yet, but only deluded human groups void of any
national idea. Iraq is one of those countries lacking the fabric of social life
– namely intellectual, denominational and religious unity."
Yehya says King Faisal was right. Since its
inception in 1921, the Iraqi state has not ceased being challenged.
In August 1933, for
example, it had to brutally repress a revolt in Dohuk Province
by the Assyrian Christians of
northern Iraq.
The 1935–1936
Iraqi Shiite revolts in the mid-Euphrates region against the Sunnite
dominated authority of the Kingdom of Iraq followed.
Parallel revolts also
broke out that year in chiefly-Kurdish northern Iraq.
In October 1935, the Iraqi
government crushed yet another revolt by the Yazidi
Kurds of Jabal Sinjar.
The Yazidis of Jabal
Sinjar constituted the majority of Iraq’s Yazidi population -- the second
largest non-Muslim minority within the kingdom, and the largest heterodox
Kurdish group in the province of Mosul.
In 1939, the region of
Jabal Sinjar was once again put under military control, together with the Shekhan
District.
Yehya says persecution of Iraq’s minorities precipitated the schism
between its Arab and ethnic Kurdish components.
It came in the wake of the Kurds’ 1991 uprisings, which culminated in the
West’s establishment of no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq and the Kurds’
creation of the Kurdish Autonomous Republic in an area of Iraqi Kurdistan.
As the years passed, the Kurds could no longer remain
under the authority of a central government, thus fulfilling the first two-way
partition of Iraq, says Yehta.
The three-way breakup started after the 2003 fall of
Saddam’s Sunnite-led Baathist regime and its replacement by a chiefly Shiite
administration.
The ethnic and sectarian cleansing of Kurds,
Christians, Shiites and Yazidis by extremist Sunnite factions started that same
year.
Some Shiite militias in turn began cleansing Sunnites
in Baghdad and the southern provinces. Thousands of Iraq’s Arab Sunnites were
driven to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Kurdistan and elsewhere.
Mutual cleansing by the two sides, Yehya explains, eventually
carved Iraq’s exclusively Arab Sunnite region.
The idea of dividing Iraq in three gained significant
momentum over the past 10 years, specially after then Sen. Joe Biden – the incumbent
U.S. vice president – embraced it in 2006.
Biden's so-called
soft-partition plan -- a variation of the blueprint dividing up Bosnia in 1995
-- called for dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions, held together
by a central government.
There would be a loose
Kurdistan, a loose Shia-stan and a loose Sunni-stan, all under a big, if weak,
Iraq umbrella.
"The
idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving
each ethno-religious group -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab -- room to run
its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common
interests," Biden and Leslie H. Gelb wrote in their opinion piece for The New York Times on May 1, 2006.
"We could drive this in place with irresistible sweeteners for the Sunnis
to join in, a plan designed by the military for withdrawing and redeploying
American forces, and a regional nonaggression pact."
Yehya
says much as past Iraqi governments cracked down on Kurds, Maliki has now taken
the foolhardy step of closing the Jordanian-Iraqi crossing at Trebil in order
to strangle Anbar economically.
Adding
to the three-way partition fuel are the pro-Maliki demonstrations in the Shiite
provinces.
“If
Iraqi Kurdistan is semi-independent and the Sunnite Triangle is fenced in and
shut out, it means the three-way breakup has become a fait accompli,” writes
Yehya.
“It
also means partition in the minds has translated into partition on the ground. Either
an Iraqi Gorbachev comes next to institutionalize the breakup smoothly or we
enter into an unpleasant cycle of creative chaos, catastrophes, killings and
bloodshed.”
