Iraqi government moves risks re-sparking sectarian civil war

Submitted by martin on 30 March, 2009 - 8:39 Author: Martin Thomas
Sahwa

A whole neighbourhood in Baghdad, Fadhil, is under siege by Iraqi government and US troops.


On this see also Michael Wahid Hanna's article "The Reawakened Spectre of Iraqi Civil War" in Middle East Report Online
Behind the siege lies a conflict which could re-spark the muffled sectarian civil war which raged in Iraq from early 2006 to autumn 2007.

On Saturday 29 March Iraqi and US forces arrested Adil Mashadani, the leader in the Fadhil neighbourhood of the Sunni Sahwa or Awakening Councils movement, on charges of sectarian terrorism. His supporters took to the streets in gun battles.

The Awakening Councils are groups from the Sunni-supremacist "resistance" of 2003-6 whom the US, after dogged negotiations, managed to detach from Al Qaeda and transfer to the US payroll. The more realistic of the Sunni sectarians had realised that Shia-majority government in Iraq was a fact they could not overthrow, and decided to go for the best safeguards they could against Shia sectarianism by alliance with the US.

On 1 October 2008 some 100,000 Awakening Councils members were transferred from the US to the Iraqi government payroll. The Iraqi government's promise is that some of the Awakening Councils people will get jobs in the Iraqi army, and others will be trained for and found non-military government jobs. According to the New York Times, only about 5000 have got jobs so far.

You would guess that the Americans would be leaning hard on the Maliki government to ensure that some carrots to the Awakening Councils people went together with the stick of the arrest of Mashadani. But maybe not; or maybe the carrots will not be sufficient. Whether or not Mashadani was guilty of sectarian terrorism, it is utterly predictable that Sunni activists will see as sectarian aggression a move against him by a Shia-dominated government, many of its members linked to Shia-sectarian militias.

The relative stabilisation in Iraq, and consolidation of the government, that began early in 2008, is fragile because it is based more on accumulated war-weariness than on any democratic reconciliation.

Solid self-determination for Iraq is possible only on the basis of democracy and democratic reconciliation, which in turn is possible only with a secular state.

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