Because world public opinion is now focused on Iraq, every act of violence, especially against American troops and the new Iraqi authority, makes the news bulletins across the globe.
Nevertheless, for a society that has just emerged from three decades of violence, including two civil wars and four foreign wars, Iraq is a remarkably quiet place. One reason for this relative calm is that most Iraqis, tired of decades of despotism and war, have little stomach for further violence. Another reason is the success of religious and tribal elders and leaders to keep their respective constituencies under some control.
And yet the current calm remains fragile. Three sources of tension threaten Iraq’s peace in the months to come.
The first represents the remnants of the fallen regime. Saddam Hussein had set up five parallel security services that employed a total of 20,000 hard-core cadres. Two of those worked under Qusai, Saddam’s second son. Some of the recent operations conducted against US troops in and around Baghdad bear their imprint. It is unlikely that the so-called Fedayeen Saddam, led by the ex-dictator’s eldest son Uday, has survived on any scale. This was never a serious enterprise, consisting mostly of middle-aged, beer-bellied opportunists trained for parades in front of television cameras. Some officers of the disbanded Presidential Guard could also provide logistical support, including safe havens.
The hard-core Saddamites know that, if captured by their Iraqi enemies, they could face death. Their message of despair may well find an echo among the estimated 8,000-man officers’ corps of the regular army, which was disbanded by the American interim administrator L. Paul Bremer last month. There are other potential losers from the change of regime, including some 30,000 senior Baath Party members and a further 20,000 cadres of various front organizations and associations linked with the regime. The members of a dozen or so terrorist organizations financed and sheltered by Iraq for years could also join the desperadoes. Al-Qaeda may also have used the postwar confusion to expand its presence in Iraq.
Mafia-style crime syndicates linked to the fallen regime represent the second potential source of violence in Iraq. A syndicate headed by Barzan Abdul-Ghaffar, one of Saddam’s cousins, controlled the bulk of Iraq’s food imports, worth some $2.5 billion a year, for example. Izzat Al-Duri, Saddam’s No. 2 in the Revolutionary Command Council, headed a syndicate that controlled imports from France and Germany, Iraq’s two biggest trading partners. Some syndicates had thousands of members including scores of toughs trained to terrorize the souks. Their overall leader was Taha Al-Jizrawi, Saddam’s Vice President.
To deal with the two sources of violence mentioned above the coalition needs a mixture of classical counterinsurgency and crime-busting skills that cannot be provided by the US and British army units present in Iraq.
To deal with the third potential source of violence, the coalition would need political, social and cultural skills that it has not yet deployed in Iraq. This third source of potential violence consists of tension within the various ethnic and religious communities. Because each ethnic and/or religious community is in a majority in its neck of the wood, the multiethnic capital, Baghdad, being the exception, there is little danger of sectarian wars. But intracommunity violence cannot be ruled out. After all, the two main Kurdish groups did fight several mini wars between themselves in the 1990s. In Mosul and Kirkuk, the possibility of violence pitting Kurds against Turcomans, and both of them against Yazidis, and Assyro-Chaldaens cannot be ruled out. Even the Shiite community, accounting for 60 percent of the population, is not immune to internecine feuds. The struggle over the control of the key religious centers of Najaf and Karbala is already pitting three prominent Shiite religious clans against one another.
Is violence in Iraq inevitable? Not at all. Provided the coalition deploys the physical and moral forces necessary and helps Iraqis develop their own government, including an army and a police force as quickly as possible, there is no reason why the bloody chapter opened on July 14, 1958 could not come to a close.
Arab News Opinion 18 July 2003
