'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Fear (and a glimmer of hope) in Iraq?

Monday's attack against the Baghdad headquarters of the (Shiite) Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which killed 13 SCIRI members, was only the latest in a long string of acts of extremely deadly, specifically anti-Shiite, violence in Iraq which seem intended to try to stir up a desire for Shiite revenge against the Sunnis and thus to a total breakdown of trust between members of the two groups.

So far, that plan seems not to have completely succeeded. For example, on Monday, Al-Hayat reported that the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars was holding meetings with some of the Shiite members of Ayatollah Sistani's big "Unified Iraqi Alliance" electoral list.

In that report, the AMS was also said to be offering to urge its followers to participate in the voting-- provided a firm deadline could be established for the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq...

This latter condition is, it seems to me, unlikely to be met by the Americans any time prior to the January 30 polls. However, it is quite possible that the Shiites in the UIA list with whom the AMS has been talking might be ready to promise the AMS that, after winning, they will certainly stress the need for an early timetable for American withdrawal.

I was very interested to read that report in Monday's Hayat, and wonder why it didn't get picked up anywhere else. [I'll put my translation of the relevant excerpt further down in this post.] Many others did, of course, pick up the the report that the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party affiliated with Adnan Pachachi had decided to pull out of the elections.

But to me, the report about the AMS signals that there is still some possibility for Shiite-Sunni coordination in Iraq, despite all the many efforts that have been made to stir up tensions between the two groups.

Monday's attack against SCIRI seemed intended to kill SCIRI head Abdel-Aziz Hakim. He escaped alive. But a massive precursor attack, in Najaf in August 2003, killed his brother Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim along with around 100 of his supporters. Other very suspicious large-scale attacks against Iraqi Shiites have included large bombs at mosques in both Najaf and Kerbala and the killing a couple of months ago of 49 Shiite police recruits.

Who is masterminding these attacks?

So far, the evidence seems very sketchy and inconclusive. The Sunni, Palestinian-Jordanian extremist Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi has been blamed for many of them, and certainly the level of his anti-election rhetoric, plus the record of his other acts of violence, makes it very plausible that he is responsible for some of the anti-Shiite violence. (This, in view of the fact that it's the Shiites who are the most ardent supporters of the election process, and the group that stands to gain the most from its successful completion.)

Now, however, a spokesman for Muqtada Sadr called Abu Zarr al-Kanani has accused the Americans of bringing former Saddam-era intelligence operatives back into the "new" Iraqi secret services and allowing-- or perhaps even encouraging-- them to resume the ghastly Saddamist practice of assassinating Shiite leaders. (Sadr himself, I note, has been accused of involvement in the April 2003 killing of Ayatollah Abdel-Majid al-Khoi.)

Anyway, this is what Al-Hayat's Basel Muhammed is reporting from Baghdad in Wednesday's paper:

Baghdad, Basel Muhammad, December 28, 2004:

... Abu Zarr al-Kanani, the official spokesman for the "Mahdi Army", the military wing of the Sadrist current in Baghdad, accused the new Iraqi secret-police services of playing a role in the the operations of assassinating Shiite leaders. He said to al-Hayat that the return of some of the leaders of the former Iraqi secret-police services into the security services once again had allowed for the crystallization of this role.
Kanani added, "The American secret services absolutely do not want to see an Islamic government, whether Shiite or Sunni, taking over the premiership in Iraq, and that has led them to take up a direct part in assassinating Shiite and Muslim leaders." He continued, "We in the Sadrist stream are aware of this goal and precautionary measures have been taken to protect the life of the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr and to assure his wellbeing."
Additionally, sources in the Islamic Daawa (Call) Party, which is SCIRI's essential partner in the Unified Iraqi Alliance electoral list revealed that the Shiite leaders had recently learned of the existence of a targeted list for killing the most prominent personalities on this (UIA) list, and it includes Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim [head of SCIRI] and Ibrahim Ja'fari [head of the Daawa Party] and Hadi al-Amery [head of the Badr Brigades, affiliated with SCIRI], and Abdel-Karim al-Anezi, a member of the politburo of the Daawa Party-- Iraq Organization, and Hussein al-Shahristani; all this without defining the party that is planning to carry out these killings.

And here, while we're about it, is the report from Monday's Al-Hayat about the AMS's positions:

Baghdad, Al-Hayat, December 27, 2004:

... At the same time that news reports were emerging about Washington's attempt to impose a "quota" of Sunnis on the parliament, something that the Independent Higher Commission for the Elections refused, the Association of Muslim Scholars revealed its readiness to "persuade" Sunni groups and individuals to participate in the elections in return for the fixing of a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation forces, pointing to the fact that "even the UN is not persuaded about [the advisability of?] these elections", in their current form....
Abdel-Salam al-Kubaisi, a member of the AMS, stressed in a discussion with al-Hayat that the association is holding meetings with Shiite figures, some of whom are participants in the "Unified Iraqi Alliance" list put together by Sistani, with the goal of crystallizing a unified position toward the elections, "that will serve the interests of all." And Kubaisi said that, "the UN itself is not convinced by these elections and it is giving their results very little importance," adding that the elections will be "American."

(The Iraqi Press Monitor folks are taking the week off, so I'm even more motivated to do some of my own translations here.)

Finally, I just want to note that, laudable though it might perhaps be at some level for American officials to start worrying about trying to fine-tune the results of next month's elections, still, the fundamental fact remains that it really should be none of their business, whatsoever. As if it wasn't bad enough that they locked into place all the ground-rules for the voting in the first place-- now, they want to suddenly leap back in and try to fiddle with (gerrymander) the results??

It looks as though either, (a) they've only just, at this late date, realized that the elections are much more likely to bring into power a leadership opposed to their own longterm "plans" for Iraq than they are to return their own former Baathist puppet Allawi to power, and that "protecting the Sunnis' interests" might be a good pretext for gerrymandering the results; or (b) that they don't feel they can "trust" the Shiites of the UIA to treat the Sunnis well after a presumed UIA victory.

(b) is the more charitable interpretation there. Personally, for a number of reasons, I currently incline toward (a). But either way, I think that at this point everyone who is not Iraqi should just butt completely out of the whole discussion about trying to improve the "modalities" of these elections.