Descent into darkness
BAGHDAD is ill-equipped to cope with its sectarian nightmare.
IF you want to begin to understand the madness of Iraq today, all you need to do is observe closely the military checkpoints throughout the capital, Baghdad.
Given the number of people killed by bombings here, it’s understandable that every car is checked.
The routine is that once a car is stopped a soldier with a little black machine walks slowly along the side.
The machine — known as the ADE 651 but nicknamed “the magic wand” by Iraqis — has a silver antenna.
If it detects explosives near the car it will shake. It is the last line of defence for civilians against bombs.
But the tragedy is that the machine is a complete fraud — the soldier may just as well be carrying a pencil.
James McCormick, the man who sold these machines to Iraq and other countries for $100 million, is in a jail in Britain for fraud.
General Jihad al-Jabiri, chief of Iraq’s bomb squad, is also in jail over the fraud.
British police said McCormick had shown “a complete disregard for the safety of those that used and relied upon the device for their own security and protection”.
At the time of his conviction the BBC spoke to Haneen Alwan, an Iraqi woman who needed 59 operations after she was injured in a bomb blast — she was two months pregnant and lost her child.
“When people passed through checkpoints using these devices, they thought they would be safe, but they are useless,” she said.
“The man who sold them has no conscience. He is morally bankrupt. How could he sell them just for money and destroy other people’s lives?”
Next time you hear more people have died in a bombing in Iraq there’s a high chance the bomber drove past one of these machines.
“We know they don’t work,” said my driver as we waited at a checkpoint on Sunday for a soldier to walk carefully along our car with one of these machines.
Then why use them?
The driver laughed: “We have an old saying in Iraq: The bad that you know is better than the good that you don’t know, because the good that you don’t know may end up being worse than the bad you do know.”
It all sounded very Donald Rumsfeld, but the situation raises an important question: how can an army trained by the US be exposing civilians to explosives by using a machine everyone knows is useless?
Some days four or five bombs go off in Baghdad, and each time I stop at a checkpoint for this “pencil treatment” I wonder: if the Iraqi army can’t make a decision to end this farce how can it possibly organise itself to repel an attack by Islamic extremists?
In Iraq today, while this last line of defence is a fraud, the raging hatreds are real.
Put simply, extremist Sunnis and Shi’ites believe the other is not practising “true Islam”.
These hatreds are ancient and probably will go on for hundreds more years.
But the long Battle for Islam flares — as it is doing in Iraq — when extremists have the conditions to wage jihad.
If the moderates on both sides — the majority in Iraq — have a political accommodation, they can quell most of the extremists.
Since the Sunni-Shia war ended in Iraq in 2008 the two groups have lived, mostly, in harmony.
But Iraq is erupting now because the moderate Sunnis are enraged by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
They appear to have given the nod to their extremist brothers, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, to bring down Maliki.
This week the International Crisis Group noted: “How could large portions of Iraq be conquered, thousands of security forces routed, the capital endangered and foreign intervention required due to an insurgency whose numbers pale in the face of one of the largest security apparatus in the world?”
The ICG provided a good answer: “The insurgents pushed against a house of cards, a state structure weakened by accumulated Sunni grievances, suppressed by what is experienced locally as an ‘occupation’ army of Shi’ites influenced by Iran next door.”
Indeed, Maliki has been a disaster for Iraq — he is a divisive, hardline Shi’ite. He has been elected three times by playing to the ancient hatreds of Shi’ites against Sunnis and Kurds.
So divisive has his government been that the highest Shia authority in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani, has said Iraq now needs an “effective” government.
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it decided — disastrously — that all Sunnis were not to be trusted as they may be loyal to Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime.
The US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, launched a “de-Baathification” drive: thousands of public servants, soldiers and police were sacked, some losing their pensions.
They were bad enemies to make; many kept their weapons.
Fired with rage, they formed militias with one aim: to bring down the US-backed Shia regime that had ruined their livelihoods.
So began, in 2006, the appalling three-year Sunni-Shia war.
But then the US compounded its mistake of de-Baathification by backing for PM none other than Maliki — a key figure in Bremer’s purge of Sunnis and a leader in the Shia war against Sunnis. A more divisive figure would have been difficult to find.
While Bremer began the purge, Maliki finished it — even though Sunnis make up 37 per cent of the country’s 32.5 million people.
This anger has created a fertile ground for ISIS, undoubtedly the most vicious terrorist group in the world today.
It is worth remembering that the powerful Sunni tribes in northern Iraq forced out ISIS several years ago when it went by the name of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. ISIS has been allowed back into Iraq because Sunnis want to force out Maliki.
The Prime Minister is vulnerable because he refused to listen to legitimate complaints from Sunni and Shia moderates.
ISIS has already achieved one aim — to place pressure on Maliki’s regime, which now appears doomed.
The question for the moderate Sunnis turning a blind eye to ISIS’s savagery is that once Maliki goes, will they be able to force out ISIS again?
The rebadged ISIS is better trained, better resourced and infinitely more savage than its forerunner, al-Qai’da in Iraq.
It may have been useful in applying pressure on Maliki, but ISIS has become Frankenstein’s monster — it has a lethal arsenal and a terrifying bloodlust.
By rampaging against terrified Iraqi soldiers, it has already seized control of vast parts of Iraq. And this week, having taken control of the Iraq- Syria border, it has created a corridor through which to move fighters and weapons and achieved the first step in its ultimate aim: an Islamic caliphate.
It now controls adjoining parts of Syria and Iraq — but for ISIS this is caliphate lite.
Under their definition of al-Sham, or Greater Syria, it also has designs on parts of Jordan, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon.
ISIS is totally unconcerned about what the world thinks of it.
Many terrorist groups try to market themselves as “resistance groups” or “freedom fighters” but ISIS wants the world to know it is slaughtering people.
It boasts about such acts in its “annual report”, which it uses to recruit jihadists.
The Sunni-Shia tensions in Iraq are ever-present — all it takes is for someone to throw petrol on to that fire.
Maliki’s ongoing brutal treatment of peaceful Sunni protests has been that petrol. The cycle of brutality in this endless Sunni-Shia war keeps turning.
Just as Sunnis in the north, led by ISIS, are brutally exerting their power, in Baghdad mainly Shia militias have re-emerged.
In Karkh, a Sunni neighbourhood, Shia militiamen drive around touting weapons. “It’s a threat message,” says one Iraqi.
Last week 10 Sunnis in Baghdad were abducted and found dead the next day. In another incident, a prominent Sunni sheik who had urged peaceful protests against the government was taken from his mosque and killed.
Sunnis in Baghdad are fearful of the Shia militia checkpoints that have returned. For example, anyone with the name Omar — a name used only by Sunnis — is instantly identifiable.
Oil industry executive Saad Abdul Wahab has a son called Omar who needs to fly to Turkey for an operation. Once the operation is over, Wahab will rent an apartment in Turkey for his son rather than risk him returning in the current climate.
Sunni teacher Jamal al-Rawi tries to get home before dark — a self-imposed curfew. I spoke to him as night was falling and his nervous wife kept texting: come home now.
Rawi, like many others, is feeling the rising sectarian heat. “If you get pulled over now and have the name Omar, then 100 per cent you will be killed,” he says.
Rawi’s family has experienced the brutality of Shia militias — they killed his brother in 2006 and his sister in 2010. “My sister was not affiliated to any party, was an excellent student but was Sunni,” he says.
Rawi says that under Maliki the Shia militias have been integrated into the army. He says his sister was abducted by an army captain with three militiamen. Witnesses took details of the vehicle and there was a trial “but the judicial system let them off”.
“Even the universities are ethnic-cleansing,” says Rawi. “Baghdad University is mostly run now by lecturers from the Dawa Party” — the party of Maliki.
It’s clear from people in Baghdad — including moderate Shi’ites — that Maliki’s purging of Sunnis has created hatred. ISIS has harnessed that hatred; for many Sunnis, ISIS is playing a useful role.
Moderate Sunnis say because of ISIS, leaders such as Barack Obama, David Cameron and Sistani realise Maliki must go.
They argue that once ISIS has helped remove Maliki, it will be forced out of Iraq, just as its forerunner was in 2008.
As in all wars, civilians are paying the price.
Baghdad student Abdullah Zulal, 18, last week sat his final exams. He needed to travel from his home in al-Doura — which is a Sunni neighbourhood — to al-Bayaa — which is Shia. After the exam he walked into the street and was kidnapped by Shia militiamen Next day he was found dead, riddled with bullets.
Two weeks ago as many as 80 Sunnis were shopping at a vegetable market in Babil province. Shia militia abducted them and they have not been heard of since.
The Iraqi media is covering some of these atrocities, but not all. The Shia media is playing things down, not wanting to create a thirst for revenge.
But news is travelling, causing fear among all of a new descent into the heart of darkness.
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