Informed Comment

Thousands of Sadrists Demonstrate in Kirkuk

AFP reports that nearly 2000 members of the Army of the Mahdi, the militia headed by young Shiite radical Muqtada al-Sadr, demonstrated in Kirkuk on Saturday. The demonstration coincided with a general strike by the city’s approximately 300,000 Turkmen residents. Even the police stayed home.

Ibrahim Khayyat at al-Hayat provides further details. Muqtada’s representative in Kirkuk, Abdul Fattah al-Musawi, said, “The goal of putting 18 companies, or 1750 men (and 180 women), on parade, was to reinforce the unity of Muslim Iraqis with non-Muslim Iraqis. “Kirkuk,” he said, “is for all its inhabitants, not just for a particular group.”

The parade lasted for about two hours. The Shiites of Kirkuk and of the surrounding area joined in, raising the Iraqi flag (the Kurds have their own provincial flag), and pictures of Muqtada and of his father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (who was assassinated by Saddam in 1999).

Jalal Jawhar of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said that there was no objection to the demonstration, since it was part of democracy, but that it had to remain peaceful. He also considered that “the goal of parading troops was to demonstrate the power of Muqtada’s supporters and to underline their presence.”

One of the issues that has derailed the passage of a fundamental law or interim constitution by the Interim Govering Council is Kurdish demands. The Kurdish parties insist on a very loose federalism, Swiss style, and they also want Kirkuk added to a consolidated Kurdish province. Kirkuk has never been a majority Kurdish city, since the Turkmen predominated there, and since the 1990s Saddam expelled thousands of Kurds and brought in Arab residents. The city is said to be one third, Turkmen, one third Arab and one third Kurdish. Ethnic violence broke out in January in the wake of a public Kurdish call for the city to be added to the Kurdish province. There are many petroleum wellheads around Kirkuk, and the Kurds want control of them. They want, as in Canada, for the provincial government to control petroleum in its province.

The Kurdish demands on Kirkuk are absolutely unacceptable to the Sunni Arabs and Turkmen. A loose federalism has long been rejected by the Shiite al-Da`wa Party. As far back as 1996, al-Da`wa broke with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress in large part because he had acquiesced to the Kurdish demands for loose federalism. Likewise, the Sadrists want a strong central government.

One question I have is about the ethnicity of Muqtada’s supporters in Kirkuk. I’ve been told that perhaps a majority of the Turkmen are Shiites, and that they have in recent decades given up their unorthodox folk religion for orthodox Twelver Shiism, and that many followed Sadiq al-Sadr. Among the hundreds of thousands of Arabs relocated north by Saddam were, in addition, lots of Shiites. It would be interesting to know if the Army of the Mahdi militia in Kirkuk is mixed ethnically, with both Turkmen and Arabs.

Al-Musawi’s statement about reinforcing ties with non-Muslims is also bizarre, and one wonders if the Sadrists are trying to put together a Shiite-Chaldean alliance against the Kurds in the north. If you combined the 600,000 Iraqi Christians, many of whom are in Ninevah province, with the 600,000 Turkmen or so, and added to them all the Arabs relocated to the north by Saddam, it would be a non-trivial alliance against the 4 million or so Iraqi Kurds.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Sistani’s Representative in Karbala Rejects Referendum on Provincial Council>

ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP: Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala’i, the representative in Karbala of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rejected the suggestion by another cleric that the provincial council appointed by CPA official John Berry be submitted to a referendum. He said that an appointed council is by its nature illegitimate, and called on its members to resign.

Shaikh Husain al-Sadr, who is influential in the Kazimiyah suburb of Baghdad, had agreed with Perry that having a referendum was the best path forward. Shaikh Husain’s representative tried to convince Berry to reduce the number of women on the council from 11 to 5.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Vigilanteism in Basra

Scheherezade Faramarzi of AP reports on the Shiite militias of Basra and the way they are imposing both law and order, and a puritan style of life on the population (though sometimes they do some kidnapping or coercion of their own).

The militias pose a long-term problem for Iraqi security, since they violate the state’s monopoly on the use of force. And they are depriving persons of rights they have under the law (e.g. to own and operate a video store that purveys a little flesh). They are coercing women into wearing scarves or veils, and it is difficult to see how women’s rights can make any progress in Basra under these circumstances.

The question is whether Basra is in an exceptional situation, or whether it is a harbinger of the future of Iraq.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

What a Document Looks like

Jonathan Schanzer, writing in the Weekly Standard, notes that I had asked Bill Safire for even a single “document” that shows that Saddam Hussein’s government cooperated with al-Qaeda before September 11. He suggests that we might substitute for such a document his interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who he says served in Saddam’s secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and who is now “in a Kurdish jail.”

No, Jonathan. That isn’t a document. That is a single-sourced account from a prisoner (assuming he exists and assuming he actually was mukhabarat) who wants to get out of jail and has every reason to tell people what they want to hear. Or for all I know the Kurds have paid or coerced him to say these things, since they want US help against their Islamists.

A document has the following characteristics. It originates close to the time of the event it describes. Typically it is written on paper with ink. It has all the hallmarks of authenticity. So, for instance, a memo from an Iraqi intelligence officer dated January 5, 2000, discussing cooperation with al-Qaeda, written down in black ink and by an officer we actually know was really serving at that time, on paper of the sort used by the Baath government, with all the bureaucratic form of a Baath document–that would be a document. Since the US now has thousands of documents from the Iraqi secret police, if such a document existed we would not be speculating about it–it would have been splashed on the front pages of all the newspapers of the world. It likely does not exist.

Single-source allegations by shadowy Iraqi ex-officers were among the fallacies that pulled us into the war to begin with. And, no, the way to confirm al-Shamari’s story is not to find yet another stooge who has been coerced or paid to say the same things. It is to provide the sort of evidence that would stand up in court. I’m a historian. I go by evidence. If I’m wrong, and the evidence surfaces to prove it, I will gladly change my views. Al-Shamari, about whom we know nothing, is useless for that purpose.

In good journalism, by the way, you don’t go to print with a single uncorroborated source.

Mr. Schanzer does himself no favors with regard to credibility by associating himself with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which was a major source of disinformation about Iraq before the war, and which should by all rights have lost all credibility by now.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

6 US Soldiers wounded in 24 hours

Wire services quoted by al-Jazeerah report that guerrillas wounded three US soldiers with rocket-propelled grenade fire Thursday night near Tikrit.

On Friday morning, guerrillas in Tikrit lightly wounded another two US troops in a bom blast. A third soldier was seriously wounded in an attack on his convoy in Khallis, northeast of Baghdad.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off