Rohan Pearce
Even given Iraq's history of suffering in recent times — brutal repression under Saddam Hussein, combined with 13 years of merciless economic strangulation by Hussein's former Western allies and finally a brutal war of conquest and occupation — the August 31 stampede on Baghdad's Al Aaimma bridge holds a particular horror. The tragedy was triggered by a rumour that a suicide bomber was going to attack a Shiite procession that was heading to the Kadhimiya mosque. At least 1000 people are believed to have died — some were crushed to death beneath the feet of crowd, others drowned in the Tigris River when they dived off the bridge.
Given that there is increasing talk in the Western media of civil war between Iraq's Shiite Arab majority and its Sunni Arab minority, and that an earlier mortar attack on the crowd had taken place (responsibility for the attack was taken by a group that posted a message on a website associated with al Qaeda), sectarian violence may have been expected to result.
The September 1 London Daily Mirror commented: "The incidents raises the spectre of civil war erupting in Iraq with tensions already running high among rival religious and ethnic communities before a vote on the new constitution."
But the opposite happened: "As pilgrims tumbled off the bridge, scores of young Sunni men from Adhamiya leapt into the river to save them", reported September 4 New York Times.
From the tragedy emerged a Sunni hero — Uthman al Ubaidi, a 19-year-old man who dived into the Tigris and saved the lives of six Shiites who had gone into the water, before drowning while trying to rescue a seventh. According to a September 6 Reuters report, portraits of Ubaidi now sit outside both Sunni and Shia mosques in the districts near the site of the tragedy.
Sunni clerics called for donations of blood to help ease a shortage in the tragedy's aftermath. Residents of Fallujah, a predominantly Sunni city notorious for putting up fierce armed resistance to the US occupation (usually treated by the corporate media as cut from the same cloth as terrorist attacks on mosques), gave more than 1800 bottles of blood, according to the United Nations' IRIN news service.
"Some Iraqis used the disaster as a reminder that for all the divisive politics of recent weeks, most Iraqis still do not define themselves first and foremost by sect", the New York Times explained.
There is an assumption among most well-meaning supporters of the US-led occupation of Iraq (that is, not the war's planners or Halliburton's executives) that, regardless of "errors" that may have been made by the US-led invasion forces, Iraq is better off with the presence of occupation troops than without it.
Media myths
This assumption is stoked by the corporate media, which typically presents the violence in Iraq with little or no real context. Common criminality, sectarian violence, and attacks on US forces by Iraqi nationalists are thrown together, giving Iraq reportage a backdrop of seemingly meaningless and rootless "terrorist" violence. The consistent theme that has emerged is that Iraq is on the brink of civil war, with the Shiites on one side and a Sunni-based insurgency on the other, and that only the occupation prevents members of the two Muslim sects from slitting each others' throats.
That there have been horrific attacks — typically associated with groups proclaiming allegiance to the al Qaeda network of Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden (a follower of the Wahhabi strand of Sunni Islam that is dominant in Saudi Arabia) — on the Shiite majority that have fired sectarian tensions is undeniable. Yet, so far, the fundamental political fault line in Iraq has remained the attitude towards the US-led occupation, not religious or ethnic differences.
According to an Associated Press report, for example, on August 25 there were a string of armed skirmishes between followers of Shiite anti-occupation cleric Moqtada al Sadr and the Badr Brigade, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI, one of the main Shiite parties in Washington's puppet Iraqi administration).
AP reported: "In Baghdad, SCIRI members torched a building belonging to al-Sadr's movement in the Nahrawan suburb. In retaliation, al-Sadr followers set fire to an office of SCIRI's Badr Brigade militia in Baghdad's heavily Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City. Clashes were also under way in Amarah, where al-Sadr's militiamen attacked the headquarters of the Badr group with mortars."
The fighting began when Sadr's followers attempted to reopen his movement's office in the southern city of Najaf on August 24.
Similarly, in the southern majority Shiite city of Basra, death squads linked to groups in the Iraqi government have been used to kill critics of the government and political rivals of groups like SCIRI. Alongside government-linked death squads, Iraqi soldiers and police used by the occupation forces to repress the occupation's opponents have been another source of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence.
On August 18, mourners in a Baghdad funeral procession for three dead brothers threw rocks at US troops in protest. The brothers were killed during a raid by US and puppet Iraqi soldiers in the city's Amiriya district. The US military claimed it killed three "terrorists". However, a Reuters report quoted a friend of the dead men as saying: "They call everybody terrorists but they just commit terrorist acts whenever they want."
"The bodies of Khalil, Khalid and Jamal Hussein, filmed by a neighbour, lay sprawled in their home, that of the crippled Khalil lying in the bathroom next to his wheelchair", Reuters reported. "US troops hope Iraqi security forces will eventually take over the fight against guerrillas and enable them to go home. However, passions aroused by incidents such as that at the Hussein home pose questions over their ability to win hearts and minds."
New constitution
Instead of preventing inter-sect violence between adherents of Iraq's different strands of Islam, the US-led occupation is inflaming it. Tension between Shiite and Sunni groups is likely to be heightened by the new constitution, drawn up under the auspices of the US in a process dominated by pro-occupation groups, each seeking to grab the largest portion of power in the "new Iraq".
The draft constitution, which will be voted on in October, describes the country as a "democratic, federal, representative republic". A September 2 report by Herbert Docena for Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) noted that "during the course of the negotiations over the constitution, SCIRI's [leader Abdul Aziz] al Hakim strongly pushed for the creation of a southern Shiite sub-state with nine of Iraq's 18 provinces.
"The draft constitution would allow this sub-state to determine oil policy in its territory, earn a substantial portion of revenues from existing oil fields, and rake up to 100% of revenues in oil fields that are yet to be developed. The United States' stance towards the question of federalism may have a lot to do with the assurance that the ones who may end up ruling over Iraq's oil reserves — the Kurds in the north and the Shiite parties in the south — are people who have gone on record as favoring their privatization.
"Contrary to the impression purveyed by the media, federalism is opposed by a clear majority of Iraqis — by a majority of Sunnis and by a majority of Shiites alike. According to a July 2005 survey conducted by the International Republican Institute, the US government-funded entity tasked to build the machinery of pro-free market Iraqi political parties, 69% of Iraqis from across the country want the constitution to establish 'a strong central government' and only 22% want it to give 'significant powers to regional governments. Even in Shia-majority areas in the south, only 25% want federalism while 66% reject it."
The constitution is potential recipe for sectarian conflict, with the push for a semi-autonomous "Shia nation", an artificial construction with no real historical basis.
Most Iraqis oppose the continuing US-led occupation of their country. The political groups in the puppet government all ostensibly support an independent Iraq, to which end the constitutional process has supposedly been heading. Yet according to a FPIF study released in August, "the US operates out of approximately 106 locations across the country. In May 2005, plans for concentrating US troops into four massive bases positioned geographically in the north, south, east and west were reported and the most recent spending bill in Congress for the Iraq War contained [US]$236 million for building permanent facilities."
It's a sign that Washington has no intention of letting go of control of the country in any real sense.
Docena argues that "Iraq's will probably be the only constitution in the world which enshrines 'fighting terrorism' as one of the state's objectives. Given how 'terrorism' in Iraqi discourse has been used by pro-occupation Iraqis and US officials to refer to the resistance movement, the clause could be invoked to legally justify continuing military offensives against political forces that refuse to come to terms with the occupation and the political process it has bred."
Far from ending armed resistance to their presence, the repressive operations of the US-led occupation forces have engendered more resistance. For example, suicide bombings have increased from 20 in 2003 to more than 50 in the first five months of 2005, according to FPIF.
The tragedy on the Al Aaimma bridge appears to have been merely a terrible accident — to an extent. However, it would not have occurred if Baghdad didn't remain a war zone.
While sectarian violence in the aftermath of the tragedy has so far been minor compared to some of the mosque bombings in the recent past, the chance for large-scale intra-Iraqi conflict will remain as long as the US occupation regime remains. No-one can give a guarantee that Iraq won't fall victim to religious conflict, but the occupation is only increasing this possibility.
From Green Left Weekly, September 14, 2005.
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