Iraq’s Tikrit shows the path to reconciliation
Community comes together to heal sectarian divisions and bring peace to a city once held by Daesh
Local officials made a big deal about the opening of every little shop, posting those moments on social media
Darkness descends upon the massacre memorial at the water’s edge, where gutted concrete buildings — the remains of a Saddam Hussein palace — are smeared with graffiti that evokes loss and calls for revenge.
The Tigris River flows wide and silent here, as it did on that June day in 2014 when it was stained with the blood and floating corpses of Iraqis, victims of the single most deadly event in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003.
Even by the high atrocity standards of Daesh, the slaughter of some 1,700 people in the Camp Speicher massacre reached a new level. It was designed, filmed, and broadcast both to shock and terrorise Iraqi security forces — which duly disintegrated as Daesh militants swept across northern Iraq that summer — and to hammer a permanent sectarian wedge in the country.
But instead of Tikrit being consumed by an escalating, vengeful blood feud, something very different has taken root here: Peace, for tens of thousands of Sunnis returning to their homes; and relative justice, for Shias families from southern Iraq whose sons were killed by the extremists.
A systematic effort by Iraqi officials and bridge-building “facilitators” that pulled in key Sunni tribes and Shia leaders — aided by circumstances specific to Tikrit, and supported for months by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington — managed to defuse explosive demands for revenge.
The lessons learned here could apply to the aftermath of the battle now under way for Mosul, the last Daesh stronghold in Iraq. Those who devised the successful Tikrit model note that every case is different; that Mosul is 10 times bigger and with many more actors; and that a far more complex post-Daesh balancing act will be required if Mosul’s once vibrant sectarian mosaic is ever to be restored.
Still, there is much to glean about the power of dialogue and new views of accountability from Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, where the sun-bleached plastic flowers, graffiti, and fading portraits of victims attest to the scale of the carnage — and the scale of the challenge.
“When we started, all the signs were bad.… We thought it was a lost cause,” says Omar Tariq Al Shindah, Tikrit’s mayor. Forcing Daesh out in April 2015 took multiple attempts and finally a month of fighting by the largely Shia Iraqi Army, more numerous unofficial Shia militias, and smaller Sunni units. As the battle commenced, photographs emerged on social media that appeared to show the revenge torture, beheading, and abuse of Daesh suspects and captives by the advancing forces. “The big challenge was that people came looking for revenge. It’s not an easy crime – it’s huge, with more than 1,700 dead,” says Shindah, using a common figure for the Camp Speicher death toll. The root problem was an overwhelming sense of collective blame, by one group against another — long the common ingredient of Iraq’s sectarian wars.
“Unfortunately all the people of the south believed that all the people of Tikrit were responsible for what happened at Speicher. But that was not true,” he says.
So how to reconcile these two sides after such a crime? And how then to convince tens of thousands of families that they could return home safely, and be protected by the new, mostly Shia forces in control?
A key step in the reconciliation process was stepping beyond the immediate focus on the tribal identities of the killers and victims. Months before Daesh was pushed out of Tikrit, USIP and two Iraqi partner NGOs organised a “Speicher Intervention Team” to find ways to prevent further bloodletting.
USIP helped found the Network of Iraqi Facilitators (NIF) in 2004, and the SANAD for Peacebuilding nongovernmental organisation. Together they have engaged in conflict resolution, from Mahmoudiya south of Baghdad, where they once worked with the US Army in 2007 to mediate a reconciliation deal between 31 Sunni and Shia leaders, to Nineveh province in the north, where Christian and Shabak religious minorities were feuding, according to USIP.
Tikrit’s Sunni leaders provided evidence to show that they, too, had been victims of Daesh, which had targeted many Sunni officials, members of the security forces, and tribal figures.
At the same time, the Sunnis gave examples to show they were not antiShia. The result was that, in front of more than 30 satellite TV channels, Tikriti tribal leaders denounced the Speicher massacre, blamed Daesh and vowed to help Iraqi security forces identify and capture individual culprits within their own tribes, and help identify mass graves.
Local officials made a big deal about the opening of every little shop, posting those moments on social media as further signs of normalcy. The mayor still has a photo on his cell phone of the day he turned on the city water supply.
So far, 95 per cent of Tikritis have returned to the city, and property prices are up — a rare statistic in Iraq, where the post-Daesh world is often far more grim.
“The people at this time had one important message: To return to life, to make Tikrit return again,” said a city officials, adding that seeing the market still active after midnight gives a degree of satisfaction, because “inside ourselves we are very happy.”
So if Tikrit can contain the legacy of the Speicher massacre, will the challenges in Mosul be that much greater? In a word, say these peacemakers: Absolutely. — Christian Science Monitor