From the Los Angeles Times
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Shiite-Kurd Goals Stymie U.S.
The alliance America
helped build appears set to create a religious, federal state, opposite
of the secular, united Iraq that Washington seeks.
By Borzou Daragahi and Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writers
January 22, 2006
BAGHDAD — They are the orphans
of Iraqi history, grown up and remaking the country's political and
social order. But the formidable alliance between the long-marginalized
Shiite Muslims and Kurds, a union nurtured by Washington, now threatens
to undermine U.S. goals in the new Iraq.
The aim of U.S. policymakers has been a united Iraqi state with secular
leanings in which the Kurds, who have been strong American allies,
would promote a government aligned with the West. Instead, the Kurds
appear poised to accept alliances that guarantee them a secular state
in Kurdistan in exchange for their acceptance of a more religious order
in the rest of Iraq.
"This was one of the great flaws in the
American strategy," said a former diplomat who is close to the Kurds.
"They thought that because the Kurds are American allies that they
would share their vision of Iraq as a whole, whereas anybody who
understood it would see [that] the Kurds wanted out of Iraq and to be
left alone."
Although the Shiite-Kurd alliance is replete with
ideological contradictions and conflicting aims, they are held together
by mutual interests — and the power that comes with dominating
contemporary Iraq's political structure. Together, the two won 181
seats in the new parliament: 128 for the Shiites and 53 for the Kurds.
The total, however, rises to more than 184 if two smaller parities, one
Kurdish and one Shiite, are counted — giving them the two-thirds
majority needed to form a government.
The new
lineup, which will rule for the next four years, offers other
challenges to the U.S. goal of keeping Iraq united. Negotiations are
underway to choose a prime minister and form the government, a process
expected to take at least six weeks. U.S. officials are involved in the
discussions and strongly urging the Shiites and Kurds to give Sunni
Muslim Arabs a share of power.
But neither the Shiites nor
the Kurds trust the Sunnis enough to want to make them real players in
the new government, diplomats say, and it is unlikely they will get any
key ministries, especially those controlling the security services.
But without Sunnis in powerful positions in security, it is unlikely
that the new government will be able to stem the insurgency.
"There isn't going to be any deal between the insurgents and Bayan
Jabr," a Western diplomat in Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said of Iraq's controversial interior minister, a Shiite.
Both Shiites and Kurds defend their right, guaranteed in the
constitution, to maintain local defense forces for semiautonomous
regions, such as Kurdistan, or the Shiite-dominated provinces in the
south. But it is only a matter of time before Sunnis create a defense
force for western Iraq.
"When it comes to saying where the
border is between one region and another, what happens if the Sunnis
send their defense forces and the Shiites send theirs?" asked a Western
diplomat in Baghdad.
Some analysts still say the
Kurdish-Shiite partnership could break, forcing a new configuration of
Iraqi politics more palatable to American interests. "The devil is in
the details," one Western official said, speaking on condition of
anonymity.
The official noted that it had taken almost three
months to form a transitional government last year, and that was to
last just nine months. "This will be much harder," the official said.
The alliance of Shiites and Kurds has its roots in Iraqi history and in
a shared antipathy for longtime dictator Saddam Hussein. But the
partnership thrived more recently because of shared interests: Each
wants to be free to run the part of country where its group is
dominant.
Abdelaziz Hakim, the Shiite ayatollah who leads the
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, stands for the kind of
religious state that makes the generally secular Kurds uncomfortable.
But the Kurdish parliament welcomed him in December for a speech that
appeared calculated to cement ties between the groups.
"We have
struggled together to topple the regime of dictatorship and
sectarianism and to ensure that our Iraq remains safe and free," Hakim
told the Kurdish legislators in the northern city of Irbil, to what
witnesses described as thunderous applause. "The religious authorities
have always defended Iraqis."
Hakim was evoking the powerful
memory of his father, the Grand Ayatollah Sayed Muhsin Hakim. In 1963,
when Iraq's newly ascendant Sunni Arab nationalists were consolidating
their power and intensifying a campaign against autonomy-seeking Kurds,
the elder Hakim issued an unprecedented fatwa that forbade
Shiites in the army from killing Kurds.
"The faithful were forced to make a decision," said Mohammed Hadi
Asadi, head of the Horizons Center for Iraqi Studies and Research, a
government-funded institute close to Hakim's camp. "They could either
desert the army or fire their weapons into the air."
Sporadic
contact continued throughout the 1970s, but the collaboration really
took root in the 1980s, when the Shiites and Kurds fleeing Hussein set
up camp in neighboring Iran, then at war with Iraq, and began plotting
against the dictator.
The younger Hakim, then a leader of the
Badr Brigade militia, was among the first to visit the Kurdish village
of Halabja after Hussein sprayed the town with chemical weapons in
1988, killing up to 5,000 people. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the
U.S. established a semiautonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, and
Hakim's militia set up bases there
The two communities share
an interest in creating a federal system with a weak center. "The Kurds
basically had two ways to go: They could go with … the seculars or they
could go with the Shiite route," said the former diplomat who is close
to the Kurds. Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani "took the position that
their interests were more aligned with the Shiite religious groups."
Although Shiites are hardly uniform in their political views, they
appear ready to put aside their differences, at least temporarily, in
order to exercise power. With that in mind, firebrand cleric Muqtada
Sadr, who despises the vision of a federal Iraq, has thrown in his lot
with the new order, bolstering the Shiite bargaining position and
numbers in parliament.
U.S. officials had privately hoped the
Sadr camp would break away from moderate Islamists such as Hakim, and
thereby diminish the size of the main Shiite slate, the United Iraqi
Alliance.
In contrast to the warm ties between the house of
Hakim and the Kurds, Sadr and his followers have had stormy relations
with other Shiite parties, accusing them of betraying the elder Grand
Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, whose assassination is widely believed
to have been carried out by Hussein's security forces.
But
the younger Sadr was coaxed into the larger Shiite fold in part because
of the lure of being in the government and controlling job-rich
ministries, such as health and transportation.
"They found new
opportunities in the government and made good accomplishments in Iraqi
society," said Humam Hamoodi, a Shiite lawmaker. "Being near authority
made them more practical in their political tastes. Once you get a
taste of power, it's hard to let it go."
But with Sadr and the Kurds onboard, it is far from clear what will be
left for Sunnis.
A big concern will be how to accommodate the Sunni Arabs of the Iraqi
Accordance Front, led by the Iraqi Islamic Party, that won 44 seats in
the new parliament. The party's ties to the Hakim clan go back to 1958,
when the Communist-leaning Arab nationalist government cracked down on
Islamists. The elder Hakim, who died in 1970, gave Sunnis sanctuary in
Najaf.
Whereas Sunni Arabs generally accepted Hussein's rule
— which favored them — Islamists such as the Iraqi Islamic Party and
Adnan Dulaimi, former head of the Sunni Waqf endowment, generally
resisted, refusing to praise the president or his secular government
during sermons and willing to risk jail for their beliefs.
"Dulaimi, in particular, has a very honorable history when it comes to
the Saddam rule," said one Iraqi official close to the Shiites. "These
people don't have blood on their hands."
Power-sharing is
another matter, however. Officials close to the Shiite parties were at
a loss to name a single ministry post they could give to a Sunni
because all are already spoken for by factions within their own slate
or by Kurds.
Not surprisingly, that is unlikely to satisfy the group that ruled Iraq
for the last 80 years.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
