One can only wonder whether there was an element of déjà vu involved in this week’s urgent dispatch of armaments by the United States to the Iraqi military as the latter prepared to re-conquer Fallujah.
After all, it was 10 years ago that four American contractors working for Blackwater were ambushed by one of the many armed groups resisting the US occupation, and their charred corpses were subsequently suspended from a bridge across the Euphrates. This grotesque display led to some of the most vicious battles of the Iraq war, and it was several months before Fallujah could be retaken.
The names Anbar and Ramadi — the western governorate that encompasses about one-third of Iraq, and its capital city — may also ring a bell. The province was insurgency central until the occupying army coerced, cajoled and bribed tribal leaders into what was dubbed the Sunni Awakening, which made it much harder for the outfit known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq to use the area as a base for its operations. That modus vivendi was falling apart even before the US completed its military withdrawal, with the successor regime of Nuri Al-Maliki reluctant to cultivate the tribal sheikhs it viewed as sectarian adversaries, just as it diverged more broadly from American recipes for relative Shiite-Sunni harmony.
Resentments have consequently been building up, and the attack by government forces on a Sunni protest camp in Ramadi — not for the first time, mind you — brought matters to a head. It also offered an opportunity to the reincarnation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, now known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which stepped into the breach and occupied large parts of Fallujah and relatively smaller segments of Ramadi.
Al-Maliki responded by threatening military action unless local forces drove out what is invariably referred to as an Al-Qaeda affiliate. It appears, though, that many of the tribal sheikhs are as wary of Baghdad’s army as they are of the militants aiming at a caliphate encompassing Iraq, Syria and possibly even Lebanon. It is widely believed that during the initial Iraq conflict, Syria’s President Bashar Assad facilitated the influx of militants into the war zone. It is possible, of course, that he merely turned a blind eye to the phenomenon. The point, however, is that the Iraq-Syria border hasn’t become particularly less porous in the interim, and ISIS has long been active on the Syrian side. It has lately encountered a few road bumps, though, with even salafist elements in the Syrian opposition choosing to combat it in rebel-held areas of the country. Internationally, though, its leading role in the Syrian conflict has prompted some rethinking, with the likes of Ryan Crocker — a former US ambassador to Damascus, Baghdad, Kabul and Islamabad — suggesting that Assad should not be written out of the picture, and vociferous local opponents of the Syrian president admitting that, given a choice between ISIS and Assad, they would opt for the latter.
During the Iraq war, it was claimed more than once that Al-Qaeda had been more or less eliminated from the country — without, not surprisingly, any mention of the fact that its very genesis in Iraq was a direct consequence of US intervention. That claim was at the very least a gross exaggeration.
It could reasonably be argued that ISIS and its predecessor organization were only whimsically offshoots of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s outfit, given that neither Abu Musab Al- Zarqawi nor Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi were inclined to strictly follow instructions, but that is somewhat besides the point in view of the broad ideological convergence. Notwithstanding the strategic and tactical differences, the obscurantist goal is generally the same.
It is certainly interesting to note, meanwhile, that publication of the results of Britain’s Chilcot inquiry is being thwarted by American insistence that details of communications between Tony Blair and George W. Bush cannot be publicized — even though (or more likely, precisely because) they are likely to reveal that the gruesome twosome opted for regime change without adequately considering its unpalatable consequences, not just in Iraq but in the entire region.
It was a long time ago, or so it seems, that the American determination to invade Iraq spurred warnings of what it would mean for the “Arab street.” That street remained fairly quiet for a while. And when it erupted, it did so in a manner that threw Washington off-balance. The crucial venue, it has turned out since, is not the street but the battlefield, where the Islamist equivalents of the ideologically driven American neocons are now determined to have their way.
Hopefully, in this case too, their ambitions will ultimately be thwarted. As before, though, it may take a while. And it may entail a rearrangement of the boundaries that, in the wake of a war that was launched a century ago, were designed for colonial ease rather than in an attempt to reflect the nationalistic aspirations of the resulting states.
