Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq

Utter the name “Iraq” today and a whole host of unpalatable spectres will be summoned in the mind of the listener; Iraq is synonymous with war, with sectarian bloodshed, with devastation, with insurgency and violence. A brief overview of the media shows that writing and commentary about Iraq almost inevitably follows the same patterns and formulas, the result of which, according to writer and activist Ali Issa, is that “people actually living in Iraq – their communities, dreams, and victories, big and small – are again and again made invisible.”

It is precisely this invisibility, this silencing of ordinary Iraqis, that Issa intends to challenge through the publication of his new book. Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq is a chronicle of the various battles, big and small, being waged by Iraqi activists and campaigners against corruption, injustice and political tyranny, wherever it may be found. Written as a collection of reports and interviews conducted by the author with various leaders of Iraqi opposition and grassroots movements, the book centres around the key events of 2011, and in particular the popular protests and sit ins held across the country, most notably in Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi and Falluja.

Inspired by events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya during this period, many Iraqi activist groups felt galvanised to organise their own “Iraqi Spring”, hopeful that the winds of change sweeping the region might usher in some welcome changes in their own war-torn land. But unlike the other countries of the Arab world, the media failed to turn its lens on Iraq, and the protesters struggled to gain the support and attention they needed to succeed. Against All Odds offers a snapshot of those days and months, and of the people and movements behind them, in an attempt to finally voice the grievances of the Iraqi people in an intelligible and visible way.

Most of all, the collection of interviews and reportages is aimed not only to document the ins and outs of Iraq’s political grassroots, but also to undermine common stereotypes about the sectarian fragmentation of both the country and its people. For this reason, Issa takes great pains to stress “the explicitly national character of this movement… which was set against a system of identity politics that continues to dominate discourses on Iraq”. A national character that brings together Iraqis of all colours and stripes to fight as one in the name of justice and democracy.

The problem with this narrative is that, just as those it seeks to undermine, it is simply too one-dimensional to hold up to scrutiny. While the vision of a unified and robust Iraqi grassroots movement cutting across ethnic, sectarian, political and religious divides might be a wonderful myth to propagate, the beautiful simplicity of such a myth only serves to reinforce the divisions and fractures it seeks to transcend. To deny the political reality of sectarianism in Iraq, and all it entails, is to fail to grasp the inner workings of the country’s political machinations, and to be unable to understand the logic of either the current ruling classes or of violent politico-ideological groups such as Islamic State and the various Shia militias.

This is not to say we should recourse to a primordial narrative about the age-old origins of sectarianism in Iraq; but we should be prepared to acknowledge the way in which this modern form of identity politics has come to define the very terrain of the debate in an increasing number of countries. While pro-democracy, anti-sectarian grassroots movements certainly do exist, Issa has vastly overstated both their power and their salience in contemporary Iraq. The figures alone speak for themselves: around 300 people attended the sit in in Mosul, several dozen attended protests in other cities, a few hundred in Baghdad: hardly what could be called a popular revolution. Moreover, such movements are invariably rooted in Iraq’s educated middle class (which is demographically majority Sunni – indeed, most of the 2011 protests took place in Sunni-majority cities, which itself speaks to the political salience of identity politics as a mobilising force), and as such are couched in the Western terms of “democracy”, “justice” and “liberalism” – terms that most ordinary Iraqis cannot even begin to understand, let alone relate to. The reality is that politics in Iraq has entered a new era, and no popular movement will succeed as long as it continues to mouth the political slogans of the previous era; there is a need for a new political language in Iraq, and in the rest of the Arab world.

Against All Odds should certainly be praised for shining a light on the little-known struggles of Iraqi grassroots movements, and to give a voice to all those protesters who have been silenced by successive waves of government crackdowns and sectarian violence. But Issa cannot claim that the people in his book represent the “ordinary Iraqi” when they represent a small sliver of the educated middle classes or mobilised working class. The state of politics in Iraq today is such that the ordinary Iraqi is not to be found in the street with a placard shouting slogans, but in the back alleyways and side streets of the city, keeping their head down to avoid being noticed and trying to make ends meet in increasingly difficult conditions. The ordinary Iraqi still has some way to go before they will take back their streets from the various powers and forces that play war games with their lives; but when they do, they will have finally regained their voice.

In this book, Ali Issa has produced a timely chronicle of how a small section of Iraqi society had the courage to stand up and speak for themselves; now it is time for the rest of Iraq to follow their example.

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