Read Online The Rise of Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn - Free Book Online Page B

is not the end of the matter. Beneficiaries of this largesse have been “threatened with investigation and exposure if they step out of line,” said one Iraqi observer. Even those who had not been awarded contracts knew that they were vulnerable to being targeted by anticorruption bodies. “Maliki uses files on his enemies like J. Edgar Hoover,” the observer said. The government cannot reform the system because it would be striking at the very mechanism by which it rules. State institutions for combating corruption have been systematically defanged, marginalized, or intimidated. Why has the corruption in Iraq been so bad? The simple answer that Iraqis give is that “UN sanctions destroyed Iraqi society in the 1990s and the Americans destroyed the Iraqi state after 2003.” Under Maliki’s Shia-dominated government, patronage based on party, family, or community determines who gets a job, contributing furtherto the political and economic marginalization of Iraq’s Sunni population that began after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
    It is evident that ISIS has been able to exploit the growing sense of alienation and persecution among the Sunni in Iraq. “Belittled, demonized, and increasingly subject to a central government crackdown, the popular movement is slowly mutating into an armed struggle,” reports the International Crisis Group. “Many Sunni Arabs have concluded that their only realistic option is a violent conflict increasingly framed in confessional terms.” In other words, they see their best chance of surviving and even winning the struggle for power in Iraq is to fight as Sunnis against Shia hegemony.
    The Shia-dominated government might have gotten away with its confrontational approach before 2011. But when the predominant theme of the Arab Spring uprising in Syria took the form of a revolt by the Sunni majority backed by Saudi Arabia and the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf and Turkey, the sectarian balance of power in the region began to change.
    Previously, the Iraqi Sunni had been resentful but largely resigned to the Shia-Kurdish domination of Iraq established in 2003. They were fearful of a renewedonslaught by Shia militias and Shia-controlled security forces, which had driven the Sunni out of much of Baghdad in the sectarian civil war of 2006 and 2007.
    A US embassy cable in September 2007 said: “More than half of all Baghdad neighborhoods now contain a clear Shia majority. Sunnis have largely fled to outlying areas or have been concentrated into small enclaves surrounded by Shia neighborhoods.” To a great extent, this remains true today.
    The shifting power dynamic along sectarian lines, most evident in the wake of the events of June 2014, also spurred fearful reactions from Iraq’s Shia community. “The Shia in Iraq see what is happening not as the Sunni reacting justifiably against the government oppressing them but as an attempt to re-establish the old Sunni-dominated-type government,” said one observer in the capital. On both the Shia and Sunni sides tensions had accumulated to the extent that a full-scale and bloody sectarian confrontation was inevitable.
    The surge of young Shia men into militias in the summer of 2014 was touched off by an appeal of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the revered Shia cleric, for people to sign up. “The street is boiling,” said one observer. Some 1,000 volunteers left Kerbala for the frontline city of Samarra, the site of the al-Askari mosque, one of theholiest Shia shrines in a city where the majority of the population is Sunni.
    This polarization between the two religious groups was only intensified by the hot and cold war between the US and Russia. Proxies were at play here with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, backed by the US, facing off against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, supported by Russia. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose government has backed the Shia-led Iraqi state, pledged support for Maliki against the Sunni uprising,