Massacre ‘ threatens all Iraqi people’
ISIL photos: If reports of mass murder are accurate, it would be a slaughter of extraordinary proportions
SKIRKUK, Iraq unni ultra- fundamentalists boasted Sunday that they had murdered 1,700 Iraqi security forces this weekend in Tikrit, only 80 kilometres down the road from this oil- rich ethnically diverse city of Kurds, Turkmen and Sunni, Shiite and Christian Arabs.
There were conflicting opinions about the veracity of dozens of photographs of mostly young men apparently being summarily executed by gunmen from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL).
The ghastly photos that have been posted online have revolted Kurds, who mostly live in their own autonomous region in the northeast of the country, and hardened their resolve to hold on to Kirkuk, which their Peshmerga forces took control of last Wednesday before the extremists could seize the city when it was abandoned by panicked Iraqi troops.
“It’s really serious,” said Ala Talabani, who is a Kurdish representative from Kirkuk in the Iraqi parliament. “We have to consider this unlike any other issue in Iraq.
“There were always terrorist attacks here and there since the collapse of the regime in 2003. But this is different. It is really threatening all the Iraqi communities, the political process, the democratic process and what we have achieved so far in creating government and democratic elections. It is threatening all Iraqi people,” he said.
“The filthy Shiite bastards are killed in the hundreds” was among the captions that have appeared online with photos of the massacre, according to a translation by the New York Times.
The black- clad insurgents had been fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad’s army until last week, when they swarmed over the unguarded Iraqi border, quickly capturing Iraq’s secondlargest city, Mosul, after the Iraqi army refused to fight. Soon after that the insurgents had an equally easy time taking control of Tikrit. They are now gathering between Tikrit and Baghdad, preparing for an assault on the Iraqi capital, where Shiite
What they are planning to do is turn back Iraq to a very distant past. ... They are very bad. They are rejected by everyone.
ASO MAMAND
LEADER OF THE PATRIOTIC UNION OF KURDISTAN
militias have been recruiting thousands of new members and quickly arming them.
Just a few hours earlier, Talabani described an atmosphere of chaos and fear in Baghdad as the capital’s seven million Sunni and Shiite residents wondered whether a bloody sectarian war was about to engulf them.
Along their rapid journey south toward Baghdad the insurgents are known to have captured several thousand Iraqi soldiers in and near Tikrit, which lies halfway between Kirkuk and Baghdad. Those soldiers who had papers identifying them as Sunnis were released unharmed, according to reports in the Iraqi media, while those who were Shiites were detained.
ISIL’s goal is to establish a caliphate, or Islamic state, that would follow such an extreme form of Shariah law that the group has been denounced by al- Qaida.
“We believe in God now in a real Islamic way, not like them,” said Aso Mamand, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Kirkuk, by far the most powerful political party in the city, which has a Kurdish majority. “They are Islamic extremists, so wherever they are, they will hurt that area.
“What they are planning to do is turn back Iraq to a very distant past, to go to the time of the caliphate. They are very bad. They are rejected by everyone,” said Mamand.
If the images put on social media on Sunday by ISIL were an accurate depiction of what happened near Saddam Hussein’s former palace by the Tigris River, it would be a slaughter of extraordinary proportions, even for this deeply troubled part of the world. In circulating the photos, the intent of the ISIL insurgents was clearly to terrify Iraq’s Shiite majority into believing that a genocidal reign of terror had begun against them.
I know the spot where some of the bodies from this weekend’s purported mass murder were apparently brought after the victims were shot in an open field, having slept on the ground outside the palace alongside U. S. marines after they captured Saddam Hussein’s hometown in what was the last battle of the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The massive stone mansion had scores of chandeliers, fantastic hand- woven tapestries and toilets made entirely of gold. It was built into a steep bank leading down to a turn in the river where some of the bloodied corpses of those executed appeared to have been thrown in.
Other videos that have appeared online in recent days purport to show ISIL insurgents decapitating Iraqi soldiers and police and committing other atrocities in Mosul.
Such displays filled Rizgar Haji Hama with disgust. The leader of Kurdish non- governmental organizations in Kirkuk, which have been caring for some of the 800,000 refugees, said: “We do not differentiate between Sunnis and Shiites. Many of our people do not even know that there is a difference.”
Once mostly communists, the Kurds now “take the middle way,” Hama said. “It is the same with Islam. We do not believe in cutting off heads and hands.”
Working in secret, European diplomats drew up the borders that have defined the Middle East’s nations for nearly a century — but now civil war, sectarian bloodshed and leadership failures threaten to rip that map apart.
In the decades since independence, Arab governments have held these constructs together, in part by imposing an autocratic hand, despite the sometimes combustible mix of peoples within their borders. But recent history — particularly the three years of Arab Spring turmoil — has unleashed old allegiances and hatreds that run deep and cross borders. The animosity between Shiites and Sunnis, the rival branches of Islam, may be deepest of all.
The unrest is redefining Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya — nations born after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Already quasistates are forming.
For the al- Qaida breakaway group that overran parts of Iraq this week, the border between that country and Syria, where it is also fighting, may as well not even be there. The group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, wants to establish a Shariah- ruled mini- state bridging both countries, in effect uniting a Sunni heartland across the centre of the Middle East.
Other potential de facto states are easy to see on the horizon: a Kurdish one in northern Iraq, and perhaps another in northeast Syria. A rump Syrian state based around Damascus, neighbouring cities and the Mediterranean coast, the heartland of President Bashar Assad’s minority Alawite sect. A Shiite- dominated Iraq truncated to Baghdad and points south.
Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics, sees an ongoing, violent process to reshape government systems that have been unable to address sectarian and ethnic differences and provide for their publics.
“The current order is in tatters,” he said. “More and more
More and more and more people are coming to realize that the system as it is organized, as it is structured, is imploding.
FAWAZ GERGES LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS PROFESSOR
and more people are coming to realize that the system as it is organized, as it is structured, is imploding.”
The new frontiers, backed solely by force of arms, may never be formally recognized — it’s not easy to create a new country — but given the weakness of central authority that may not make much of a difference.
The ISIL’s campaign is helped by Sunni discontent with Assad’s Alawite- dominated Syrian government and the Shiite- led government in Iraq, two states whose borders were drawn by Britain and France after the First World War.
The militants’ capture of Iraq’s cities of Mosul and Tikrit makes their dream of a new Islamic state look more realistic. It already controlled a swath of eastern Syria along the Euphrates River, with a spottier presence extending further west nearly to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. In Raqqa, the biggest city it holds in Syria, it imposes taxes, rebuilds bridges and enforces the law — its strict version of Shariah.
Historically, Raqqa and Mosul and the surrounding areas that make up Northern Mesopotamia — a region known as the Jazira — have had more in common with each other than they did with distant Southern Mesopotamia centred on Baghdad and Basra. The desert wadi routes that the ISIL uses to smuggle its weapons, fighters and money back and forth across the border are the same trade routes established five millennia ago when the first cities arose in the Upper Tigris and Euphrates valleys.
And the ISIL is not the only group with ambitions.
Iraq’s Kurds, who run an autonomous region in northern Iraq, seized control of the city of Kirkuk, ostensibly to defend it from the militant group’s advance.
But they may not want to leave.
The ethnically mixed city historically holds a revered status among Kurds and they claim it as their own. Holding it will only further stoke the longtime hopes among many Kurds of declaring outright independence.
Syria’s Kurds, meanwhile, have taken advantage of the turmoil of that country’s civil war — now in its fourth year — to take control of the pocket of northeast Syria where they predominate.
The contours and regimes of the Mideast are rooted in the 1916 Sykes- Picot accord, named after the two British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges- Picot, who negotiated it in complete secrecy.
Under the deal, London and Paris carved up the Ottoman Empire’s Middle Eastern lands into spheres of influence. A series of later treaties after the end of the First World War set the final boundaries, eventually creating Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and a British mandate in Palestine that paved the way for the creation of Israel. The lines were drawn according to British and French interests with little regard to realities on the ground.
Despite the foreign- drawn lines, the countries that resulted were relatively stable for the next century. In part, that’s due to the grip of autocratic regimes. But also, people developed true identities as Jordanians, Iraqis, Lebanese or Syrians — even if at the same time they considered the borders illegitimate colonial creations.