“Shiite Maoism”
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0831/p01s02-woiq.html
Christian Science Monitor - August 31, 2006
Firefights mark further splintering in Iraq
This week’s fighting in Diwaniyah between rebels and Iraqi forces
highlights the growing power of militias in the country.
By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
CAIRO – Two days this week of fierce firefights between a Shiite
militia and government forces in a usually calm town south of Baghdad
left at least 80 dead and an unknown number wounded.
While the top US commander in Iraq said the battle came as a
“surprise,” it underscores a proliferation of militia groups
throughout the country that is making central government control in
many places merely notional, many Iraqis and foreign experts say.
The fight in Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, between militiamen
loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and local forces led by the
country’s most powerful Shiite parties, demonstrates the growing
atomization in Iraq’s war. Local politicians, gangsters, and would-be
warlords are emerging around the country and taking up arms in
service of local ambitions that frequently have little to do with
Iraq’s sectarian war.
The battle in Diwaniyah, which ended Tuesday when the US Air Force
dropped a 500-lb. bomb on what it called a militia position, started
just three days after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki led a peace
conference among tribal leaders designed mostly to undercut Sunni-
Shiite sectarian tensions. But, as Diwaniyah demonstrates, sectarian
fighting is far from the central government’s only security challenge.
“When you say ‘civil war’ it makes it sound like there are two sides
fighting in Iraq,” says Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle
Eastern history at the University of Michigan. “There aren’t two
sides - there are lots of sides.”
In much of the Shiite south, local leaders increasingly seek to carve
out their own fiefdoms and the economic opportunities they generate.
In Sunni provinces, insurgents continue to feed Iraq’s sectarian war,
as demonstrated by the Sunni mortar attack on a Shiite neighborhood
in the town of Khan Beni Saad, north of Baghdad, that drove 30 Shiite
families from their homes. And in the contested northern town of
Kirkuk, militiamen loyal to the autonomous Kurdish government
continue to seek to create “facts on the ground” to press their
claims to the oil-rich city.
The most disturbing recent development for the central government may
well be the increasing radicalization and splintering among followers
of what many Iraqis refer to as the “Sadr stream.”
While Mr. Sadr is generally acknowledged as the head of this movement
and its Mahdi Army, it looks increasingly as if centralized command
and control within the organization is breaking down. That appears to
be causing a great deal of confusion and alarm within the Iraqi
government.
Sadr’s father was Mohammed Sadek al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam
Hussein’s regime in 1999. The elder Sadr advocated a militant version
of Shiism, and appealed specifically to Iraq’s dispossessed Shiite
poor with a rhetoric that was equal parts salvation and a call for
Iraq’s traditional underclass to rise up.
Now, original followers of Moqtada’s father are seeking to “out-
militant” the younger Sadr on a local basis, jockeying for prestige
and control, argues Mr. Cole.
“The Sadr movement has spread like lightning through almost all of
the southern provinces” since Iraq’s elections in January 2005, when
followers of less militant Shiite Islamist groups like the SCIRI won
power in many of these provinces.
“So there’s a big disjunction between who has power in the south and
the mind-set of the people. Now the Sadrists have so much popular
support, but they’re locked out of local government and patronage.
“It’s essentially a class war. The Sadr guys are pressing … for a
kind of Shiite Maoism. SCIRI represents what’s left of the Shiite
middle classes,” Cole says.
Mahdi Army members in Sadr City, the poor Shiite neighborhood on
Baghdad’s northeastern edge that serves as Sadr’s stronghold, claimed
that the fighting was not at Sadr’s behest, but also said that some
of their ranks went south to participate in the fighting there.
They claimed anger at the recent arrest of a local Shiite preacher
who had called for attacks on US forces, and said they felt they had
no choice but to fight. “We’re the ones resisting the occupiers and
the officials who serve them,” said one, asking that his name not be
used. “We’re the ones fighting for our people and protecting them.
The government is failing.”
Nevertheless, Cole and others see economic issues as driving much of
the conflict in the south. The deterioration of basic services in the
past few years, joblessness estimated at around 60 percent, and
rising inflation have left militias squabbling over a shrinking
economic pie.
Dominic Asquith, the new British ambassador to Iraq, said that
economic stagnation was a crucial component of the collapse of
security in Basra in an article he contributed to Al-Sharq al-Awsat
newspaper Monday.
“Basra … until not long ago enjoyed a stable security climate.
However, one of the reasons for the unrest is that there has been no
perceptible improvement in the quality and extent of the services,”
he wrote. “This has made the Basra residents restless, and led to a
band of criminals exploiting such restlessness in order to undermine
the stability of the city and provoke sedition.”
Even in peaceful regions, Iraqi government control is eroding. In
Iraqi Kurdistan, local Kurdish officials allow members of the
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) - a group fighting for an independent
Kurdish state inside Turkey that the State Department has labeled a
terrorist group - are allowed to live and infiltrate into Turkey,
even though Prime Minister Maliki wants good relations with Ankara
and has promised to shut the group down.
Turkey has continued to complain that little has been done against
the group, and a week ago, Turkish planes attacked what it alleged
were rebel positions inside Iraqi Kurdistan.