August 26, 2014

History Cheat Sheet: Iraq

Recently, I was asked to answer a question along the lines of "WTF Iraq?"  The question was prompted by the surprising military takeover of a large amount of the country, including important cities like Mosul.  While to some of us it might seem like Iraq came into being when the US invaded it in 2003, the terrible conflict going on there right now is, like pretty much everything else in the world, bound up in centuries of religious, ethnic, and cultural factors, which means that even the minutiae of this situation is the most important thing in the world to someone.  This post is my (long) answer to this question.  Hopefully it will help one or two of us feel like we can wrap our heads around this region the tiniest bit better than we could yesterday.

Ruins of the ancient city of Hatra Source

First off, let’s address something incredibly important. The difference between Sunnis and Shiites in the region is one of the major causes of its seemingly endless unrest. Most of us, if we’re being honest, couldn’t explain the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam if we tried, so let’s pause here at the beginning to make some sense of it. The split happened in 632, right after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, and was essentially a disagreement over who should replace him. The majority of his followers believed that they should choose the next Caliph – the spiritual leader of Islam as well as the head of the Islamic Empire. A few, however, believed that the line of succession should follow Muhammad’s family line, and go to his son-in-law, Ali. This group which, not surprisingly, included Ali, called themselves the Shia, and a schism was born. The Sunnis won out, and a new caliph was chosen, but with decades of violence, and the murder of two caliphs, as the result. Ali was eventually chosen as the fourth caliph, but this led to a war in which Ali himself was killed. His son, Hussein, became a martyr for the Shiite cause when he and 72 family members went into battle against the caliph’s much larger army and, again not surprisingly, were all killed. Since then, Hussein’s spiritual significance has been transferred to the Shiite leaders, or Imams. This is one of the biggest sticking points between Sunnis and Shiites, as no leader in Sunni Islam has the same kind of spiritual importance as Shiite Imams. Some Sunnis make the argument that Shiites attribute to their Imams the kind of divine qualities which should be reserved exclusively for God. This is important when we get to the Twelfth Imam, also known as the Hidden Imam, who is for most Shiites a kind of messiah. The Twelfth Imam disappeared in an event now called The Occultation, and so-called Twelver Shiites believe that God took him so that he can return at the end of the world. Although Shiites are a minority – they only make up about 15% of Muslims worldwide – they are the majority in Iraq.

Now that I’ve just jammed 2000 years of history into a paragraph, let’s get back to Iraq.  Click through to go with me.





Its name was, until pretty recently, Mesopotamia. If that sounds familiar, it's because it was an important place for us humans as a species – it's considered one of the "cradles of civilization.”. It was a place of sophistication and learning at a time when Europe was little more than some rudimentary groupings. It’s hard to overstate how much more civilized Baghdad was than, say, London in this time. It remained this way for hundreds of years until 1258, when the Mongols arrived and, as Mongols will do, sacked it. After that, Baghdad became not much more than a provincial town in the Mongol empire.
A Persian fresco painting depicts Safavid warfare.  Image source

In 1508, the Safavids of the Persian empire, who were Shiites, took over and made the conversion of the region to Shiite Islam their pet political project. Although they were only in power a few decades, by the time the Ottoman Turks arrived on the scene in 1533 they had created a Shiite majority in what is now Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

Mesopotamia remained a part of the Ottoman Empire for the next 400 years, but that did not always mean stability. This part of the Middle East has always been attractive to competing regional powers, and as Iraq has learned, if you aren’t one, you’re probably about to be invaded by one. In the course of Ottoman rule, it was often a site of clashes as rival powers fought for autonomy from the Ottomans, and the Ottomans in turn suppressed them.
Map of the Middle East, with Mesopotamia shaded in green.  Image source

During World War I, the British created the Mesopotamian expeditionary force to invade Iraq. By the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire was disbanded and the British occupied most of the country. If you were in Baghdad at this time, and had heard Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points, you might have been excited by the prospect of all of the self-determination you were about to get. However, you’re about to be disappointed to learn that those principles don’t really apply to you. Instead, the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate to govern Mesopotamia, which was renamed Iraq. The general idea behind this was that Britain would set up a functioning country and then turn it over to the Iraqis to carry on themselves independently. Sound familiar?

At this moment, we should point out that it may well have been possible to prevent or at least alleviate some of the problems we see in Iraq today by having even a little bit of consideration for the situation in the region. Many people in Iraq, then and now, believe that the best outcome for the country would be to divide it into three separate states: a distinct state each for Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Instead, however, the British created the State of Iraq without consideration for these political, cultural, and religious differences.

The British mandate of Iraq was, any way you look at it, pretty much imperialism by another name. They instituted a monarchy, headed by the new King Faisal of Iraq, a Hashemite Sunni from what is now Saudi Arabia, but a British High Commissioner was appointed to basically run the civilian government. Consistently, they the British showed preference to Sunnis and regional, rural sheiks, ignoring the growth of a young, urban, Shiite, nationalist movement. In 1927, when oil fields were discovered, they were administered by the Iraqi Petroleum Company – a British company. The Kingdom of Iraq remained under these conditions until 1958, when it was overthrown by the military. This began a series of revolutions and coups which left us, unfortunately, with Saddam Hussein. Hussein came out of the Ba’ath Party, a socialist, nationalist, pan-Arab party which while being primarily secular, favored Sunni leadership.

Saddam Hussein pretty much immediately led the country into the Iran-Iraq war, which destroyed all of that nice prosperity left by his predecessor. The war lasted eight years, and although Iraq won, the country emerged exhausted, indebted, and with an increasingly emboldened Kurdish minority in the north. Hussein’s brutal response to the Kurdish rebellion included the use of chemical weapons, and killed an estimated 100 000 – 200 000 Kurdish civilians. Amazingly enough, this was not what brought the US into the area for the Gulf War. Instead, Hussein then went on to annex Kuwait, which was a big mistake since Kuwait was an American ally, and we have to get our oil from somewhere. After six weeks of bombardment from the air, Hussein admitted defeat and backed off Kuwait. At this time, the United Nations implemented sanctions which would keep the Iraqi people in poverty for the next decade.


A US marine walks past a decapitated statue of Saddam Hussein.  Image source

This brings us finally to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the country that you and I know today. The removal and execution of Saddam Hussein brought new government and elections, but it doesn’t seem to have brought much in the way of peace. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, who was a Shia dissident during Hussein’s reign, was certainly more representative of the country’s Shiite majority, but has been accused of undue harshness against Sunnis since taking office. In fact, his treatment of the Sunni minority is likely one of the major factors in the rise of the terrorist group ISIS, which now presents a serious threat to the state of Iraq as we know it. Perhaps no amount of elections is going to change the fact that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq are not ready to just get over it. As for the Kurds, that’s for next time.

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