The new crisis in Iraq

The northern Iraqi city of Tikrit, hometown of Saddam Hussein and until recently a stronghold of fighters allied with the Islamic State (ISIS), currently lies in ruins. The month-long battle waged between ISIS forces and the Iraqi army, aided by Iranian-backed Shia militias, may have resulted in expelling the terrorist group from the city, but at a heavy price. Much of this once-thriving metropolis has been destroyed; the images of burnt-out buildings and deserted streets paying testament to the terrible loss of life and history in the fight to regain control. Most harrowing of all are the emerging details of the massacre at Camp Speicher, as Iraqi forensic teams are finally able to gain access to the mass graves containing the remains of more than 1,700 young Shia soldiers – executed last summer by ISIS forces in an unprecedented act of sectarian bloodshed.

Despite the army’s military victory in Tikrit – one that Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi now aspires to replicate in Anbar province – the enduring legacy of the battle against ISIS is not one to immediately celebrate. If anything, the government’s reliance on Iranian backing and mobilisation of Shia militias has merely served to cement sectarian cleavages in a country already stretched to breaking point. Unfortunately, however, Baghdad did not have a choice.

The example of Tikrit, where the Iraqi army would have been unable to dislodge ISIS forces without the assistance of Iran and the Iranian-backed Shia paramilitary groups, is but a microcosm of the situation in the country as a whole. Iraq is torn between the influence and interests of Iran on the one hand, and those of America and its Gulf allies on the other (reflected – albeit not entirely – by the interests of Shia and Sunni political blocs in the country respectively). While there has been much speculation on the potential disintegration of the Iraqi state into its constituent sectarian and ethnic enclaves of Sunni, Shia and Kurd, the current situation on the ground suggests a more complex and potentially more frightening scenario – the dissolution of political, economic and military power into the hands of sectarian-fueled and doctrinally-driven militias across the spectrum of the country’s diverse population.

“The army in the battle for Tikrit was over-ridden by the militias,” says Dr Faleh Jabar, a specialist in the sociology of religion and the founder of the Iraq Studies Institute. “The army doesn’t have rocket launchers, only the militias have these,” he adds. To reinforce this sense of government failure, Dr Jabar informs me that the road to Tikrit is currently paved with checkpoints manned by different militias and army factions – including Badr Corps, Hezbollah, the People’s Militia, and the Iranian army. The proliferation of such flags is a testament to the splintering of power in Iraq, and the rapidly increasing hegemony of such militia groups.

“The problem in Iraq is not ISIS now. The problem is the militias.”

While the current bêtes noirs of the international media (spearheaded mostly by the US and its Arab allies) are the Iranian-backed Shia militias who have thus far been able to operate almost with impunity, there is also a danger of a potential Sunni backlash if these militias stray too far into Sunni-dominated lands such as in Anbar province, which is why the government is planning on adopting the rather risky strategy of arming Sunni tribes there. In this, Baghdad is hoping that it will be able to manipulate the sentiments and actions of militias on both sides of the sectarian divide, and use them together to fight off ISIS. The problem with this strategy is twofold. First, it assumes that the government will be able to maintain control and authority over the militias; and second, once the problem of ISIS has been eliminated, these militias will remain, more powerful than ever and strengthened by new weapons, training and alliances provided to them by the Iraqi army.

While the government under Nouri Al-Maliki may have succeeded to a some small extent in mobilising militias for their own purposes (such as Al-Maliki’s manipulation of the Al-Haq Brigades against Muqtada Al-Sadr in 2008), much of this success in the past has been dependent on intervention from Iran (it was Tehran who prompted the split between Al-Haq and the Mehdi Army in the first place in response to Muqtada’s unfavourable comments about Iranian influence in Iraq). Similarly, the mobilisation of Sunni forces in Iraq has hitherto been dependent on funding and direction from the wider Arab region, in particular the Gulf monarchies, who have capitalised on the power vacuum left by de-Ba’thification to indoctrinate Sunni Iraqis into their own politicised brand of Islamist expansionism. ISIS, in many ways, was a symptom of this unhappy alliance between Wahhabi ideology and Ba’thist political disenfranchisement.

But the problem in Iraq lies deeper still. The success of the militias, beyond the current financial and military support they receive from Iran and elsewhere, can be traced back to the failure of any vision of a democratic and inclusive Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. As Dr Jabar puts it, “there was no political language” in the Iraq of Saddam; and thus there was no political language to replace Ba’thism once its edifice was toppled. The legacy of Saddam Hussein’s rule is deeply embedded in Iraqi society, to the extent to which the country’s political vision is unable to function without him, even 13 years after his removal from power.

Iraq today bears little resemblance to the rose-tinted vision propagated by many Iraqis in the diaspora; men and women who remember Baghdad during its heyday of progress and enlightenment. The country is nothing but a shell of its former self, hollowed out by successive wars, sanctions and sectarian violence whose aftershocks continue to ripple through the wider Arab world. Now, it seems the Iraqi government is beginning to lose the tentative grip it had on order, overrun and out manoeuvred by sectarian militias and regional powers. If the Iraq of today is a shadow of the Iraq of the past, the Iraq of the future will be wholly unrecognisable; a lawless wasteland governed by violent gangs of militias and thugs more akin to the drugs cartels of Mexico than a functioning state. It has become something of a truism that the removal of Saddam Hussein created a thousand smaller Saddams; perhaps it will also transpire that the vanquishing of ISIS will create a thousand smaller ISIS, all pitted against one another in a perpetual battle for land and power.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.