Channeling Sunni Rage Into Iraqi Political Clout

Channeling Sunni Rage Into Iraqi Political Clout
By SAM DAGHER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: December 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/world/middleeast/20sunnis.html?_r=1&ref=global-home


KIRKUK, Iraq — Sheik Abdul-Rahman Munshid al-Assi has been making up for the time he lost in an American prison, aggressively diving into Iraqi politics after being held nearly a year on charges of aiding the insurgency.

After his release last year, he formed the Arab Political Council to represent Sunni Arabs in Kirkuk. He recruited Sunni candidates to run in the coming national elections. He is forging a political bloc with Arab nationalists, other tribal leaders and former members of Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath Party as a counterweight to Kurds in the province.

At first glance, the fact that a vehement opponent of the Shiite-led government in Baghdad and Kurdish leaders next door is embracing democratic politics may seem to be a purely positive sign. After all, much of the American security effort of the past few years has been to channel Sunnis into just such a course.

But for Sheik Abdul-Rahman the political action is far from a concession. Rather, it is an attempt to tap into the simmering rage he says is still rampant among Sunni Arabs in Iraq. And he and many of his peers are far from becoming fully reformed democrats: he has yet to renounce the insurgency, though he denies directly supporting it, and warns that more violence could come.

“Sunni Arabs are still not reconciled to the fact that they lost power in Iraq,” said the trim 57-year-old sheik in an interview at his home in Kirkuk. “This will never leave their mind, even if they are engaged in the political process.”

The Sunni Arabs’ sense of disillusionment and disenfranchisement was one of the factors in the political impasse that stalled Iraq’s new elections for months before intense pressure from the United States, United Nations and Turkey recently forced Iraqi leaders into an 11th-hour deal. The distrust remains one of the biggest obstacles to political progress and security; one senior American diplomat who recently departed Iraq said that it was what kept “the embers of the insurgency” burning. And the hostility fuels longer-term fears, too, that Iraq could fall back into sectarian war after American troops leave.

The grievances between Sunni Arabs and Kurds, who have aggressively pursued territorial claims, have grown particularly tense.

Barham Salih, the current prime minister of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, said the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq still needed to come to terms with the idea that it could not rule Iraq alone, as it did under Mr. Hussein, and must instead share power with Shiites, Kurds and other groups. He said Kurds would never again accept “second citizen” status in Iraq.

“If Iraq cannot come to terms with these realities, then Iraq is condemned to this perpetual cycle of violence, no doubt,” said Mr. Salih, who previously held the post of deputy prime minister in the central government, in an interview in the Kurdish region’s capital, Erbil.

The national elections, now scheduled for March, are supposed to enfranchise Sunnis, who largely boycotted the last vote in 2005. Instead, the unending jockeying over the election rules has fueled anger and resentment, exposing ethnic and sectarian divisions, particularly in an arc of disputed territory in northern Iraq, from Mosul to Kirkuk.

The dispute among Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens and other minority groups over the oil city of Kirkuk and a resource-rich area of northern Iraq remains a stark obstacle to long-term stability. In fact, it was the issue of Kirkuk and who should be counted as a true Kirkuki that initially held up a proposed election law. Then it was representation for Iraq’s refugees and whether more seats in the future Parliament should be allocated to Kurdish provinces in what appeared to be at the expense of predominantly Sunni Arab provinces.

Sheik Abdul-Rahman immediately jumped into the dispute. He denounced the election law as a Zionist conspiracy to partition Iraq into “artificial statelets” and called for another Sunni Arab election boycott.

“It is our obligation to boycott elections that do not guarantee the rights of those provinces that have seen their rights stolen in favor of the Kurdistan coalition,” he said in a statement at the end of November.

His cousin, Sheik Ghassan Mizher al-Assi, was more blunt. “War between Arabs and Kurds is a given,” he said. The election disputes have largely undone efforts by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to reach out to Sunnis, particularly in Kirkuk. Mr. Maliki met Sheik Ghassan and another of his cousins in October to lobby for support for the election law. But still both men criticize their uncle, another tribal leader, for presenting Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, with a tribal cloak. The gesture was supposed to symbolize the tribe’s unwavering allegiance to the central government.

Here in bucolic Arab villages between Kirkuk and the former insurgent stronghold of Hawija to the west, crisscrossed with strategic oil pipelines and other infrastructure, the sources of the Sunnis’ anger are abundant.

They include Kurdish historical claims to Kirkuk, a four-year drought that has crippled local agriculture and a lack of jobs.

The overriding issue, however, is a loss of power and prestige for Sunni Arabs.

Sheik Abdul-Rahman and his cousins belong to the Obeid, one of Iraq’s main tribal confederations. Such tribes were the backbone of Mr. Hussein’s government. After the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Obeid and the Kirkuk region provided sanctuary to fugitives like Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, an ally of Mr. Hussein, and manpower to the insurgency. So many Obeidis were arrested that the former American prison, Camp Bucca, had a separate section for them.

Sheik Abdul-Rahman and his cousins say they, like many other Sunni Arabs, are still engaged in a fight for their existence, way of life and what they view as their fair share of power in the new Iraq. He said that his entry into politics was one tool in this struggle, and that he believed that the insurgency — or what he called the “honest resistance,” as opposed to the brutality of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — is still needed to fend off a Kurdish threat.

Others in the tribe say the insurgency remains necessary because they still feel marginalized and vilified by the Kurds and the Shiite-led government in Baghdad for their ties to the previous regime.

“If true reconciliation were to happen, then the resistance should stop fighting and enter the political process to make its demands,” said Ahmed al-Majid, who was released from the American-run Camp Bucca last year after being imprisoned 16 months for leading an insurgent group in the Hawija area.

Most residents of the villages between Kirkuk and Hawija say they feel they are now living in a large prison. Sand berms, fences and watchtowers ring the villages while Iraqi Army checkpoints provide limited access. All these measures are meant to secure the crucial oil pipelines that traverse the area.

“If you were in the security forces during the previous regime, then you are a Saddamist and a terrorist,” said Shaalan al-Obeidi, a resident of the village of Riyadh who is now jobless.

Given such bleak prospects, many of the Obeid tribal leaders say they have no authority or motivation to tell their kinsmen to abandon the insurgency.

“Frankly, we have the same doubts as our people,” said Sheik Burhan Mizher al-Assi, another cousin of Sheik Abdul-Rahman and a member of the Kirkuk provincial council.