Sunnis are main victims of jihadists’ atrocities
TIKRIT, Iraq: The Islamic State is being crushed, its fighters are in retreat, and the caliphate it sought to build in the image of a bygone glory is crumbling.
The biggest losers, however, are not the militants, who will fulfil their dreams of death or slink into the desert to regroup, but the millions of ordinary Sunnis whose lives have been ravaged by the militants’ murderous rampage.
No religious or ethnic group was left unscathed by the Islamic State’s sweep through Iraq and Syria. Shiites, Kurds, Christians and the tiny Yazidi minority have all been victims of a campaign of atrocities, and they now are fighting and dying in the battles to defeat the militants.
But the vast majority of the territory overrun by the Islamic State was historically populated by Sunni Arabs, adherents of the branch of Islam that the group claims to champion and whose interests the militants profess to represent. The vast majority of the 4.2 million Iraqis who have been displaced from their homes by the Islamic State’s war are Sunnis. And as the offensives get underway to capture Mosul, Iraq’s biggest Sunni city, and Raqqa, the group’s self-proclaimed capital in Syria, more Sunni towns and villages are being demolished, and more Sunni livelihoods are being destroyed.
Most Sunnis played no part in the militants’ rise. All are paying a heavy price for the sake of those who did, accelerating and deepening a reversal in the fortunes of the majority sect of Islam that had ruled the region for most of the past 1,400 years.
“ISIS was a tsunami that swept away the Sunnis,” said Sheik Ghazi Mohammed Hamoud, a Sunni tribal leader in the northwestern Iraqi town of Rabia, which was briefly overrun by the Islamic State in 2014 and is now under Kurdish control. “We lost everything. Our homes, our businesses, our lives.”
Across the border in Syria, where the war against the Islamic State is entangled with the complicated conflict between rebels and the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Sunnis are also bearing the brunt of the violence and dislocation. Sunni towns and neighbourhoods are being levelled by Syrian and Russian airstrikes. The effort to crush the mostly Sunni rebellion relies heavily on Shiite fighters from Iran, Lebanon and Iraq. Sunnis comprise the vast majority of the 5 million refugees scattered around the region and in Europe, according to the United Nations and the governments of the countries that are hosting them.
The dangers are clear, analysts and Iraqis say. Sunnis are at risk of becoming a dispossessed and resentful underclass in lands they once ruled, creating fertile conditions for a repeat of the cycle of marginalization and radicalisation that gave rise to the Islamic State in the first place.
“It’s not just taking territory; you have to govern it properly, otherwise we’re just going to have a long-term Islamic State insurgency,” said Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria who is now with the Washingtonbased Middle East Institute. “If the new rulers don’t have local support, the Islamic State will always be able to recruit people, especially if the water isn’t turned on, the schools aren’t open and the electricity is off.”
Aid workers and diplomats say that is a worst-case scenario that need not come to pass if the war ends with reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconciliation. In Iraq, where the biggest gains against the militants have been made, the prospect that they soon may be defeated holds the promise of a moment of hope and opportunity, for Sunnis as much as for the Shiites and Kurds leading the fight - a chance to reset relations and find a new accommodation with neighbours.
The nature of the accommodation is in question, however. The obstacles are immense, resources are scarce, and the prospects for real reconciliation still seem remote.
A journey through many of the towns and villages in Iraq that have been liberated from Islamic State control, most of them well over a year ago, reveals the enormous scale of the challenge. From the Syrian border in the west to the Iranian border in the east, there are wrecked villages, half-empty towns and people whose lives have been torn apart, perhaps irrevocably.
Although the territory seized by the Islamic State is mostly Sunni, the fighters wresting it back are overwhelmingly Shiite or Kurd. In some places, liberators with no previous ties to the communities they have freed remain behind after the battles have been won, filling the security vacuum, guarding against a return of the militants and also redrawing the map in ways that could unleash future disputes over land, power and politics.
One such place is Rabia, a Sunni town on the Syrian border that was seized by the Islamic State in August 2014 and was recaptured two months later by Kurdish peshmerga units. A town once governed by the central government in Baghdad is now administered by the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan.
Two years on, the Sunni residents are mostly just relieved that they are safe and that they were spared the prolonged battles that occurred in places such as Fallujah and Ramadi, where whole neighbourhoods were flattened. Young men from the biggest local tribe, the Shammar, have formed a militia that helps the Kurdish forces control the town and flies the yellow-sun Kurdish flag at its checkpoints.
“When we were occupied by ISIS, the Kurds helped us, so now we have to stand with them to repay them for their sacrifice,” said Mohammed Khudeir, a leader of the Shammar Battalion. — Washington Post/ Mustafa Salim and Zakaria Zakaria contributed to this report.