Iraq’s Sunni leadership meets in Erbil to plot against Maliki
Iraq’s Sunni Arab leaders have converged on the Kurdish city of Erbil, holding court in marble hotel lobbies like an opposition in exile as they plot their campaign to take down Nouri al-Maliki’s government and improve their hand in the country’s ever-shifting political game. Tribal sheikhs in long robes and suited politicians puff on cigarettes and speak in hushed tones, huddling in groups on separate couches to hammer out a vision for a post-Maliki order and debate how to keep up the pressure on Baghdad.
“I’ll be clear because I know what you want to hear. We are headed toward three regions: Sunni, Kurdish and Shia,” says Ali Hatem al-Suleimani, a prominent tribal sheikh from Iraq’s western Anbar province. Yet the plans of Sunni opposed to Baghdad’s Shia-dominated government are far from clear. Priorities differ between provinces, and between politicians and militants. Internal divisions have made it hard for Sunni to coalesce as a movement and stand up to Mr Maliki’s Shia-dominated government. Since the US occupation in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein and his ruling Ba'ath party, Iraq has been mired in a sectarian power struggle between the disempowered Sunni minority and the Shia majority. The semi-autonomous northern Kurdistan region has been hosting Sunni leaders in their shared bid to challenge Mr Maliki’s government and call for decentralisation. Even more have set up shop in Erbil in the wake of the lightning offensive three weeks ago, led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant(known as Isis), who have seized swaths of Sunni territory and threaten to tear the country apart. Despite its success, Isis does not control the majority of fighters on the ground. Sunni leaders say the jihadi group acted as a “trigger” for an uprising by tribesmen, former Ba'athist officers and many other disaffected Sunni who felt repressed and marginalised by the government. Sunni leaders say they will not confront the jihadi group until they get concessions from Baghdad. “Do you want us to raise our flag next to their black banner and demand attention? Then they’ll fight us,” says Abdel Rizzaq al-Shammar, a bespectacled, grey-bearded sheikh. “We won’t do that until we get support from the government and the outside world.” The Sunni tribes joined US forces to crush Isis’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, in the 2008 “Awakening” movement and insist they can do so again if they choose to. But the Sunni demands are myriad – while some focus on decentralisation, others call for a technocratic ‘salvation government’ to run new elections. Many say the real priority is changing ‘de-Baathification’ and antiterrorism laws used to sideline and imprison hundreds of thousands of Sunni. One of the roots of their disaffection – and Iraq’s crisis – may be within the list of demands Mr Suleimani enumerates to a crowd of journalists. “Number one,” he says, raising a finger. “We are not a minority.” After decades of power within the ruling Ba'ath party, critics say the Sunni still do not play politics like a minority. “They haven’t been able to adjust to their new inferior status, seeking overly ambitious demands while unable to coalesce around a single leader,” says Ramzy Mardini, an analyst at the Washington-based Atlantic council. At an empty villa in Erbil, Atheel al-Nujaifi is setting up a new governorate office for oil-rich Nineveh province, after being forced to flee the Isis takeover of Mosul, 88km away. He wants the Sunni to create their own military force and regional constitution, like the Kurds. “The Sunni can stop Isis . . . There are 2,000 Isis militants in Mosul. If you just consider the former army officers in Mosul, there are 48,000 that left or were removed from service since 2003,” he says. Yet his vision differs from that of Mr Shammar and Mr Suleimani, who want a single Sunni region. Mr Nujaifi prefers regions defined along provincial lines. In such a federal system, Nineveh alone, with 11 per cent of the population, would have a right to 11 per cent of the country’s oil revenues. Few of the Sunni leaders in Erbil seem to factor in the insurgents who have lost trust in a political leadership they say has failed. Abu Abd al-Naami, a tribal and militant leader speaking by phone from a rebel position outside Baghdad: “They sit comfortably in hotels and dare speak for us? They are liars trying to ride the wave of our uprising.” His General Tribal Revolutionaries group, which he says speaks for all Iraqi insurgents, does not even agree with the politicians’ goal of federalism. The rebels want Iraq to stay together, he says. Their hope is that an assault on Baghdad will bring down Mr Maliki’s government – and give them a role in creating a new one. “Any region established now will be over our dead bodies,” he says. “Except for the Kurds.” Mr Naami adds that Iraqi rebels formed a “National Council” to prepare a new leadership, apparently without noticing that the opposition in neighbouring Syria set up a similar, failed, body two years ago. Iraq’s Sunni rebels could be just as doomed as the three-year Sunni-led uprising in Syria: deprived of cohesion and drained by ascendant Islamist forces. In Iraq’s complicated political game, they cannot be assured of allies, as the Kurds have struck last-minute deals with Mr Maliki in the past. Sunni Arabs risk being used “like pawns in the great game between Erbil and Baghdad”, Mr Mardini warns. “Iraq’s sectarian politics is like a game of musical chairs,” he says. “When the music stops, the Sunni are usually the ones left without a chair.”