Iraq’s New Order Evolves
One day in late February 2010, a few weeks before the March 7 elections in Iraq, I drove south from Baghdad to Iskandariya to see my friend Hazim, a jovial NGO worker, whom I had met on a trip to the town a year earlier. Iskandariya, a majority-Shiite town straddling the key road leading south to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, had been hammered especially hard by the violence of Iraq’s civil war: pilgrims headed to Karbala were often ambushed on the road through town, and the area had seen fierce battles between Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army.
Hazim recalled the worst phases of the civil war: “People couldn’t go out of their houses. When Al Qaeda was strong, Shiites couldn’t go out on the street. Then the Shiites got strong, and Sunnis couldn’t go out on the street.” But all that was now in the past. Iraqi and American forces had arrested members of armed groups in the town during Operation Fard al-Qanun (Rule of Law), the Iraqi name for what Americans called the surge. “The state is strong here now,” Hazim told me. “The government is strong. You can’t even fire a shot in the air now; the police will come in two minutes.”
A year earlier Ali Zahawi, Iskandariya’s chief of police, made an interesting observation to me. “Iskandariya is a small Iraq,” he said. “It connects south to north. It went through very hard times: Al Qaeda was the first phase; then militias who did the same thing as Al Qaeda, killing and displacement; and the third stage was operation Imposing Law [The Surge].” Now he warned of a fourth stage in the battle. Al Qaeda and Mahdi Army men, he said, were falsely implicating their enemies to the courts and getting them arrested.
There were still active militias in Iraq, and the level of violence would be unacceptable almost anywhere else on earth. But the fears frequently voiced by foreign analysts and reporters—that the civil war was merely in abeyance, and that sectarian fury could break out again at any moment after a series of deadly attacks or an unfavorable election result—were overblown. The threat of civil war no longer seemed to loom; the country was decidedly not “unraveling,” as many continued to suggest. Armed militias had not been eliminated, but they had been emasculated: they carried out assassinations with silenced pistols and magnetic car bombs, but they were no match for the Iraqi Security Forces, which had shed their reputation as sectarian death squads and appeared to have earned the support of much of the public. Apart from the occasional suicide bombing, Iraqi civilians were no longer targeted at random—and even the more spectacular attacks had little to no strategic impact.
As worldwide attention returned to Iraq in the run-up to the March 7 elections, a new chorus of concerns emerged. Many worried that the corrupt maneuvering of some Shiite parties—which banned prominent nationalist and secularist candidates under the thin pretense of de-Baathification—would lead to a Sunni boycott and then renewed sectarian violence and war. But just as the dismantling of the Sunni Awakening groups in 2009 failed to produce the disaster many analysts predicted, the results of the elections seemed unlikely to stoke the embers of a new insurgency.
The continued sectarian exhortations of Iraqi politicians were met with cynicism by the public, whose support for religious parties had diminished considerably. Iraqis were still “sectarian” to a degree: most Shiites preferred the company of Shiites and Sunnis the company of Sunnis. The vitriol and hatred of the war had faded, but a legacy of bitterness and suspicion remained. Gone was the fear of the other—and it was this fear that led to the rise of the militias and sectarian religious parties.
A year later, during my travels in Iraq that February—in the capital and, more important, in the surrounding provinces of Diyala, Babil, and Salahuddin—I found Sunnis and Shiites alike talking of the civil war as if it were a painful memory from the distant past. Just as the residents of Northern Ireland refer obliquely to “the Troubles,” Iraqis spoke of “the Events” or “the Sectarianism”—as in, “My brother was killed in the Sectarianism.” Uneducated Iraqis might even say, “When the Sunni and Shiite happened.”
The looming election—signposted in the foreign media as a critical “turning point” liable to wreck the fragile gains of the previous two years—seemed to be of little interest to most Iraqis, who were disenchanted with the pitiful performance of their political leaders and the tired rhetoric of sectarian religious parties.
In Shuwafa, a Shiite village alongside a canal west of Iskandariya, I met a schoolteacher named Akil, who had led a Shiite Awakening group that battled Al Qaeda after the ethnic cleansing of the village in 2006. He and his men had laid down their weapons the year before—after a portion of their salaries had been siphoned off by official corruption—but he said the security situation had improved dramatically. “The Awakening is over,” he told me. “The Iraqi army is here, with two Hummers, so we feel safe. And nearby there is an army base.” Akil had returned to teaching biology to children.
Like many Iraqis, Akil seemed indifferent to the approaching elections. “People don’t like the religious parties anymore,” he said. Many believed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, head of the religious Shiite Dawa Party, had transcended his sectarian affiliation. “He is not considered to be from a religious party anymore,” Akil said.
Reconstruction proceeded haltingly in Shuwafa: fifty families of the hundreds who had fled to Karbala to escape Al Qaeda had returned, but few had the funds to rebuild their homes or repair their farms. In the nearby village of Malha, where well-fed sheep were grazing on dark green grass around the rubble of destroyed houses, the situation was much the same. Only two homes were being rebuilt, and the majority of the village’s residents had not yet returned. Those who came back survived by working in a local Shiite Awakening group—earning only two hundred dollars a month, barely enough to replace a single one of the hundreds of sheep that had been killed or stolen by Sunni insurgents when they fled. The lives of Iraq’s millions of internal refugees remained bleak, and the country’s humanitarian crisis was grave. But the restoration of some semblance of security had bolstered the authority of the state and the prime minister. “The Awakening, the Americans, the Iraqi army, and the tribes made it safer here,” one man in Malha told me. “Everybody here is with Maliki.”
In the town of Shat al-Taji, northwest of Baghdad, I drove past orange groves, palm trees, and boys in school uniforms walking home on the side of the road alongside schoolgirls wearing pink backpacks and holding hands. The majority-Sunni town, which stretches along the Tigris River, had been the site of brutal conflict in the civil war. I walked along the banks with Abu Taisir, a small man with a pistol tucked into the side of his trousers who was the deputy head of the local Awakening group. “Al Qaeda used to behead people and dump them in the river right there,” he said, pointing over the tall reeds to a spot on the shore.
Abu Taisir took me to meet Abdulrahman Ismail, a Shiite neighbor who was displaced from Shat al-Taji in October 2006 but had since returned home. After a series of death threats—and the murder of four of his cousins, who were beheaded and tossed in the river—”we feared for our children and went to Kut,” Ismail said. But after security improved in the town, he continued, the Awakening men contacted the displaced Shiite families to tell them it was safe to return. Ismail found that his home had been taken over by an Al Qaeda man who was later killed; his family’s belongings and livestock had been stolen. “We feel safe now,” he said, “but we still feel a little scared.”
Abu Taisir’s outfit had arrested eighty-five Al Qaeda suspects, he told me; ten of his men had been killed in the fighting. Abu Taisir himself had been shot twice, most recently in November. Some of the Al Qaeda men were still in town, he said, but they hadn’t been arrested because nobody would testify against them. “They have roots here like us,” Abu Taisir said. Both men agreed that there was a new balance of power in the town—the remnants of the insurgency were overwhelmed by the Awakening men and the Iraqi Security Forces. “Now if we call the police, they come,” Abu Taisir said.
He had commanded 360 men, but only eighty-two were offered jobs in the government, and low-ranking ones at that. Many felt betrayed. “We’re fighters,” he said. “We brought peace to this area, we fought Al Qaeda. Now we are janitors?”
The failure to integrate the Awakening men into government security forces had been widespread, and many feared the consequences of the continuing disenfranchisement of Iraq’s Sunnis. But they had been disenfranchised since 2003, in part thanks to their own miscalculations. Iraq’s new order was dominated by Shiites, and that was not easily undone: the government was soundly in Shiite hands; the only question with regard to the upcoming elections, then, was whether it would remain in Maliki’s comparatively reliable hands or pass into those of his more divisive and inflammatory Shiite rivals. At the time of my visit to Shat al-Taji, the de-Baathification committee had just banned the leading Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, from the elections. Outside observers worried that excluding him could agitate Sunnis, but his removal was met with barely a whimper; even other Sunni politicians failed to unite to support him. “People here are upset about Saleh al-Mutlaq,” Abu Taisir said, “but they saw from
