Iraq’s insurgency waged by convenient bedfellows
BAGHDAD — The protests that sprouted last year in the Sunni Arab village of Karmah were a peaceful sort, tribal leader Laurence Hardan recalled, with residents “wearing dishdashas and carrying the Quran” in opposition to the Shiite Muslim-led Iraqi government.
It is a very different scene in Karmah now, Hardan said. Under siege by Iraqi security forces, the village is guarded all around by a latticework of Sunni militias — tribal fighters, neoBaathists, ex-army officers and militants from the powerful al-Qaida offshoot, the Islamic State.
“You name the group, and they’re here,” Hardan said with pride, speaking by phone from the village 50 miles west of Baghdad. “We are using any means to defend ourselves.”
As anger at Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government has deepened, the armed Sunni opposition has grown more diverse and unified than Iraqi and U.S. officials often acknowledge.
The militant group Islamic State has grabbed territory and headlines — its leader declaring a caliphate and demanding fealty from the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims — while support for the insurgency has come from a broad base of Iraqi Sunnis who for years have demanded greater rights from al-Maliki’s administration.
Experts say that not all Sunnis subscribe to the brutality and bombast of the group, which until recently was known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL. But even in cosmopolitan Baghdad, still firmly in government hands, middle-class Sunnis often refer to the militants who have seized chunks of northern and western Iraq as “rebels” and “protesters,” lending a quiet legitimacy to the violence.
Al-Maliki on Wednesday unsuccessfully tried a familiar tactic, extending a general amnesty to tribes fighting his government in the hope of peeling Sunni moderates away from the hardcore militants. ISIL “is only one component of many,” said Ramzy Mardini, a former State Department official who is an analyst at the Atlantic Council. “It’s the most active of all the other groups, but it certainly doesn’t outnumber them.”
Apart from opposing alMaliki, the groups have little in common, and many believe they will eventually turn on one another.
By declaring a caliphate last week — and himself the caliph, or spiritual leader, of all Muslims worldwide — Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the mysterious Islamic State leader, might create opposition from rival groups. But some experts believe that al-Baghdadi’s group is too strong for others, and that their main enemy still is al-Maliki’s government.
But until then the insurgents’ diversity poses a serious dilemma for U.S. officials, who say the Iraqi army cannot regain muchof its lost territory without wooing some Sunni groups to its side. President Barack Obama is weighing airstrikes, but experts say that such action risks generating more sympathy for the extremists among Sunnis.
Experts say that it will require much more than al-Maliki’s removal or a coalition government to quiet the insurgency.
“There is no singular solution to this problem.” Mardini said.